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

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

>Join Jocko Underground<Check out “Modern Submission Grappling: A No-Gi Jiu-Jitsu Manual”” by the incredibly skilled Miha PerhavecSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 451 with Carrie Helton and me, Jock Willing. Good evening, Carrie. Good evening. Is war an art or a science? This question has been debated amongst military professionals and academics alike for centuries. And there's good cause for debate. On the one side, the science of war is evident. The use of empirically tested strategies, tactics, and techniques are required for success.

planning based on detailed analytics and systematic lessons learned allow for the execution of methodologies that are backed by historical evidence. The science of war is real, but so is the art of war. Great military leaders do not solely rely on data analytics and proven methods. Instead, they use their own experience. And judgment, they apply their own imagination to create innovative approaches in order to solve complex problems. Solutions are applied that allow their forces

to outmaneuver the enemy. So solid arguments can be made for both cases. But in my estimation, after decades of studying, training for, or fighting in wars, war is actually both. both an art and a science. A student must understand both the art and the science of war in order to be truly proficient. And it is the science that must come first.

In order to break the rules, a warrior must first know the rules. In order to utilize the freedom granted by creativity and imagination, you first must master the fundamental discipline of combat. The same is true. for the incredible skill of jiu-jitsu, which I have also had the good fortune to study train and fight in for decades.

With both these fields, the science must come first. In war, is it impossible to create an unexpected attack if you don't understand what is expected? You cannot deceive the enemy if you do not understand what it is he anticipates. And you cannot foil an attack with an innovative defense.

if you do not foresee the attack in the first place in order to create fundamental frameworks must be understood. The same is true in jiu-jitsu. While creativity and innovation is treasured, they cannot exist without a solid comprehension of the fundamental concepts, positions, and progressions that are the building blocks of jiu-jitsu. Only when these essentials of the science of jiu-jitsu are not. understood, can the art of jiu-jitsu be unleashed? And that is an excerpt of the foreword that I wrote for the book called Modern Submission

Grappling, a no-gee jiu-jitsu manual that was written by my training partner, coach, and friend, Miha, pet habits. And the book captures and explains the fundamental frameworks that I talked about in the forward the disciplines of grappling so that we can develop our freedom and it's an honor to have him here with us tonight to share his jiu jitsu journey and his knowledge with us meha welcome thank you thanks for having me yeah thanks for all mine yeah well you sent me a twitter message that i found recently in 2016 letting me know that you are coming to san diego and you wanted to train and i don't even think I don't know if I saw it or did I reply to it no I don't think so I

probably didn't see it I didn't but I found it I was looking for something else the other day and I found this old because I didn't meet you until 20 21 yeah in real life too maybe so it's just a little follow-up you did some follow-up you basically just showed up at your door right on well let's before we get into the book which is outstanding and I think it's going to help a lot of people at every level of jiu jiu-jitsu let's start with a year old gig because clearly your name's not American. And I guess it's weird to say American names.

Is that such a thing? I mean, because we're all from all over the place. Kerry Hilton. Is that American name? Yeah. Even though it's grounded in what? Sounds a little ironic. It's grounded in a freaking head shake over there.

It's granted you don't know. Well, my father's side, yeah, I had no idea. But my mother's maiden name is Strohmeyer, and that's obviously German. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess Well, we know you're not from America We know that much So you're born in Slovenia

Yeah So growing up in Slovenia Slovenia is a lot of people And we were joking about this before we hit play I'm like a lot of people might think Slovenia They might hear Slovenia and think Oh isn't that by Jersey or is that Is that west of Michigan

Like people are just not going to know So Slovenia Population 2.1 million It's ethnic 83% percent, Slovenes. Is that what you call yourselves? Yes, Slovenians, Slovenians, both work. Then it's got some Serbs, some Croats, some Bosniaks,

and then, you know, some others. And it's in between Italy, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and the Adriatic Sea. How far from the ocean did you go up? How far from the Adriatic Sea? Probably like 150 miles, I would say. Did you go there? Yeah, yeah.

We have a really tiny piece of coastline, but Croatia is super nearby and they have plenty. So in the summer, when June hits all of Central Europe basically just goes down to Croatia, their seaside is pretty top-notch, honestly. I've seen pictures of it, and it does look pretty top-notch. 1918, the state of Slovene's Croats and Serb merged with Serbia and became part of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. That's the name of the country? Yeah.

It was called it the kingdom of these groups. Yeah, it actually switched. I think the order of it switched. But yeah, that was basically up until I think the first World War. I would have to brush up on my history a little bit. For a long part, we were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And then kind of seceded to become this kingdom. And then after World War II, Yugoslavia.

You guys were, Yugoslavia got occupied and partitioned by the Axis powers. Yeah. Tito, communist, took over. And that was kind of a, you know, they were doing basically a war. I mean, a war against the Nazis and the, and you were telling me your, so your great-grandfather was killed by the partisans, which were the communists that actually won the war. Yeah. And he got executed by his, which he was a part of them.

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

And they just built a new house, basically. So the guy who was in one of his comrades kind of had a liking to that. house. So they accused him of being a traitor, a collaborator. And then they took him to this hillside, shot him in the back of, in the back of the head from what I hear. So every November 1st is kind of remembrance day. And my family would go up to that part of that random hill and just pay our respects and stuff. And yeah, that kind of stuff did happen a lot. On my other side, for example, my grandmother, she's one of 13 kids. And if I remember correctly, she had one brother who was fighting with the partisans. and the other was fighting with the other side,

which was more the right-wing collaborators who were basically collaborating with the Nazis. So it was, yeah, it was a strange time, I guess. Yeah, it's interesting because I've fought in a counterinsurgency and I've always looked at different counterinsurgencies and insurgencies, and I'm going to have to dive into that one. We'll have to do a podcast about that one, because it's definitely a pretty interesting one

that they were able to drive out the Nazis and they were getting a lot of ally support. So it's kind of a foreshattering of some of the modern counterinsurgencies that took place. Nazis get driven out, 1945, obviously they get beat. And then from 1945 to 1980, you got this communist republic, basically, until Tito dies. Yeah. It was technically more socialist.

And a lot of people say that, hey, is Slovenia part of the Soviet Union and stuff? And I always say, no, actually, Tito and Stalin tried to. kill each other multiple times. They had a big beef from, that's a funny way to put it, from 1948 onwards, I think. And Yugoslavia was actually a part of the unaligned movement. So I think Egypt, I want to say India, Indonesia were countries that basically didn't pick sides during the Cold War. They tried to do their own thing. And yeah, it was slightly milder communism. A lot of people actually look back at it kind of fondly to that time, the older people. And then, like the others, mostly like the Catholics.

They're not such fans. But Tito, because of his background, he was, I think he had parts of everything, parts Croatian, part Serbian, part Slovenian. He was holding the country together. And then once he died, all hell broke loose, basically. Yeah, and that's when you get by the 90s, you get different groups declaring independence from the Yugoslavia. And you end up with the Slovenian, what do you guys call this war?

Independence War But it was like it was I think it was a couple of days It was two weeks or something A couple of people did die And obviously we gotta pay respects to them But we got off very very lightly yeah Yeah June 27th 1991 to July 7th

So yeah pretty pretty short war And 19 Slovenians killed 182 wounded The JNA which is the the Yugoslavs people people's army had 44 killed 146 wounded but that's pretty amazing to have a war end that quick yeah normally those you know you just get into these escalations where it's an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for and you end up with you know the israelian-palestinian conflict over or the just like last forever so to have this thing end that quickly is pretty quick pretty amazing again i think i'm going to have to look into that region a little bit and study those wars because i haven't done too

much of it. So that was in 1991. Also in 1991, Miha was born. Yeah. So when you were born, were you born after the war, before the war? After. Yeah, like a half a year later. My mom was actually pregnant with me while it was going on. There was actually one crazy moment that she described. So where in my home, we have this view of the very last bit of the Alps, right? Just mountains. And on the edge of it, there's actually a ski resort that you can see. and on top of that ski resort is a radio communication tower. And she said that she saw basically a fighter jet bomb that tower. Wow.

That was probably pretty scary during that war. But yeah, I was born after in Slovenia. And what did your mom and dad do? My mom is still an accountant and she's worked at the same firm all her life. And my dad used to be a salesman in a printing factory. and then he became the CEO of a small printing factory, and now he's retired, yeah. That was my first job as well when I was 15.

I worked in the printing factory. 6 a.m. start time, basically just loading paper into machines. Good times. And you start, how did you get introduced? You started with judo, right? Yeah. How did you find judo? So first I did a little bit of tennis, a little bit of soccer,

wasn't that good either. and then I think a family friend of ours did judo so my dad took me to the police station in my hometown and the town I was born in kran and it's the fourth largest city in slovenia with a whopping population of 50,000 people so at the police station there was a judo club and yeah i remember getting there and the guard the guy at the reception would buzzes in we would go up to the second floor and there was a little dojo there and I met my coach coach there and basically a small group of kids just started training that. And how old? You're 10 years old at this one? I think I was 10 years old at the time. And do they issue you a ghee? I's one way or the other we procured the geese somehow. Yeah,

I think they gave it they gave it to me or something. Because you there was no like hey just train a little bit without a key. No. That's not really a thing with judo. No, not really. No, we we started with the ghee right away. Yeah. I kind of got into no ghee a little bit just from the fact that I would train with other seals. And it was, I wasn't going to be like, hey, wear a ghee. I would just be like, yeah, I would just wear your t-shirt. Yeah. I spent a lot of time training with a t-shirt and cammy pants.

And then occasionally I'd be like, oh, yeah, wear your camouflage top. Yeah. But that was kind of weird too because it has buttons on it. It was just, but I kind of always had a little bit of no-gey experience just from training with T-shirt, camy pants, which is kind of weird, too, because it was kind of weird, but I was just, kind of a hype uniform to be honest with you it's sort of like an action movie um so are you into it is it addictive do is it like hit you with the bug like jiu jitsu hits people with a bug yeah did you get submitted did you get choked not for a long time so i didn't see my first submission

until um six 15 16 they didn't they didn't show submissions right away just a lot of throws a lot of drills and then a lot of games because you're a kid but I remember progressing through all the belts so white white and yellow yellow yellow yellow and orange orange orange and green green blue brown black yeah no purple belt and judo there's no purple belt no um so yeah i just did jiu jitzsche those kids belts no they're a little bit different actually so in jujitsu is gray now it's white white and gray gray gray and black white and yellow yellow yellow and black and then I think it's orange same thing with orange and then it's blue after orange I'm pretty sure the kids belts did not exist before like when I started

juda's here there was no kids belts there was no different colored kids belts we didn't have that least I didn't know about it at all even though I had kids and it kind of came around so we must have jacked that somehow at some point from judo so you're doing all just takedowns Yeah, mostly takedowns and pins on the ground. So they just didn't show too many submissions. I remember the first time I learned an arm bar. I was like, this is freaking amazing. So I can throw people and I can break their arms.

How old were you when you submitted someone for the first time? I think probably around that time, like 15 years old. Yeah. So that's like five years of training. Yeah, yeah. And judo is compared to jih Tzu, it's honestly like pretty boring because there's a lot of drilling, just a lot of entries, a lot of Uchikomi. is what it's called.

And then Nagakomi is just practicing throws over and over. And yeah, it was, it wasn't a while until we started doing submissions. And then those are also limited because it's different in the sense that if you, if you're in a judo competition, especially now that they've changed a lot of the rules, you fail a throw. People will typically turtle up because all you need to do is wait for 10 seconds and the ref will stand you up. So really you're limited to like a clock choke, which is very rare in Jiu-Jitsu.

You can do some art. You can pull out some arm bars and then some triangle chokes that we don't really do in Jiu Jetsu too much. That's all you're going to be able to pull out. And you got to pull them out in 10 seconds? In 10 seconds. Yeah, it's pretty difficult. Yeah. Is that a new rule?

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

And then other schools, other judo offshoots in schools, they focused more on. the ground, Kosin judo, for example. If you look at some old pictures and stuff, you'll see them doing hillhooks, you'll see them doing X card and stuff like that. There's a whole offshoot of judo that that kept doing that. But yours was more not like that.

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

the Slovenian national team. About 14, 15, I think those are some of my happiest childhood memories would be doing camps. And I don't want to steal anyone's valor. I wasn't a part of the national team, like competing. The best I ever did competition-wise was I got second in the national championship as a junior and third as a cadet. But some of those people went on to win Olympic gold medals. So I was just fortunate enough to train with them and do some pretty crazy camps.

There were mostly two. One was at the seaside and I remember so it would be like 6 a.m. wake up, go for a run. Then eat the least healthy breakfast you could possibly eat like bread, butter and jam, fuel up. And then the next class would be like a two hour session with, I don't know, there was probably 200 people there. Just a huge gymnasium full of mats. And then go take a nap, eat something and then a two, three hour session after that for a week. remember my my wrists and my neck being so scratched from from just the abrasion of the ghee that they would constantly feel like they're on fire and honestly that's those are some of my best childhood memories is just going through that so I used to train when I

started jujitsu for real I trained with this guy Fabio Santos that's where Dean was that's where I was and we would do these drills where you're just like you'd stand there on other opposite into the mats and you run across throw the dude and then get to the end of the line and you just rotate through like that and do that for you know like 20 minutes but you'd get thrown i don't know 20 times right yeah and even that kind of sucks you know like let's be honest you're getting hucked and you know i'm sure our breakfalls weren't up to like judo level of breakfalls but man it's punishing just getting tossed like that all the freaking day i had back issues for sure i had kind of like sciatica back pain because i did that a lot of that

And then also I was sitting in school for a lot of the time on those like wooden, the least ergonomic chair you could possibly design. I think Satan designed them honestly. Just like the worst possible posture. So that didn't feel too good. And yeah, I remember doing a camp with the, there's one team that got probably, I want to estimate like three Olympic gold medals and a couple of silvers and a bronze under one coach. His name is Marianne Fabian. And he had this at the start, it was like a little dojo, Japanese style dojo on top of a hill. And I remember the first time I went there, it was in the middle of winter.

It was snowing outside. And this guy opens up the doors. So we were running and warming up. But ironically, I couldn't feel my toes. It was just so cold. There was a lot of that mental toughness thing. There were whispers that the guy trained in North Korea and stuff like that. So I remember one time me and a teammate, we got.

dropped up there. There was a house. There was probably 100 years old. I think someone who lived there passed away recently and they just had it on that property. In the living area, it wasn't really cleaned out or anything. They just threw tatamis on the mat. And we brought a sleeping bag and they just said, yeah, this is where you're staying for a week. And then same thing. At 6 a.m. At 6 a.m., they would wake us up and do drills in the parking lot. I don't know if this was on purpose, but it was kind of like asphalt and then gravel on top of it. And they had us doing, you know, those wheelbarrow drills and stuff like that. I think it was all like mental toughness building.

And then go up, run into the forest, jump across logs and stuff like that, very rocky four type exercises. And I think that was actually successful because a lot of those, especially the women who are training there, it feels to me like they got their personality erased and all their desires and everything. thing just to replace with just being a machine just like this there's no there's no stopping them yeah did you did you have the goal of like making the olympic team or anything like that to be honest at that time i was just i was just kind of happy to be there i honestly i didn't have that many goals i just wanted to be the best i can be but i didn't i didn't aim that high it wasn't until jiu jizzo where at white belt i started competing and i was like oh damn like i'm i'm a lot better than these guys i can i can do something

With judo, I was just like, man, there's so many people, everyone's so tough. I just want to do the best that I can. So when was your introduction to the jiu-jitsu? Yeah, when I was 18, after I got my black belt in judo, I made a really difficult decision to quit because obviously I put a lot of time into it. But at one time at training, I caught myself looking at the clock and I was like, when is this going to end? And I was like, this isn't good.

And it was a combination of two things. One was the place where I was training was lacking my size of training partners, and there just weren't that many of them. And then the second thing was... Were you too big or too small? I was... Or just unlucky. Yeah, I was a little bit too big at the time. I think there was a lot of younger people, and just a number of people there wasn't that big.

So the other thing was judo changed the rules a lot from where you could do double legs, you could do drop techniques, you could do a little bit more stuff on the ground. and really it's because they wanted grandmas on NBC every four years to understand what's going on at the Olympics, right, for it to be less complicated. So I really wanted to find out if I can actually fight, right? And I decided that the best thing to do would be to try some MMA. How popular was MMA? It was in Slovenia at this time. It was pretty popular. It kind of had a couple of waves of popularity in Slovenia.

The first one was, I think, Jacques-Ré. You remember Jacques-Ré, so I think he fought in Slovenia. There was a promoter who put on some big fights there. And then I came in a little bit after that. There was a Slovenian MMA league that was starting at the time. Basically, I went on Google and I searched for the teams in my hometown, and there were two. One of them was kind of like a Macdojo place, honestly. So I was like, no, let's not do that one.

So I found one and I message the coach and I was like, hey, I want to train this. I sent them a message. I can be really good. I'm a black pot in judo. I know all the jiu-jitsu guys and stuff like that. So I get to training and it's in this community fitness center in the back. I think they had like a little basketball court and we had to put down puzzle mats every single time. And it was a really rack tag group of people.

I remember actually the first time I did MMA sparring. I brought gloves that had gel in them, not foam. You know, like those crappy, crappy MMA gloves. And we did stand-up sparring, and I went with kind of like the math enforcer guy, who was actually a really good boxer. And he hit me so hard that I just saw everything turned green for a little bit. And the next day, I actually had the high school final exams in my school. Thankfully, it was history, which I'm good at.

So I still did well. But I remember just coming home. I was planning to study. I just went to sleep. I was like I probably got a mild concussion going on. But that team did, I think it had three classes a week at the time, two were MMA, and one was Jiu-Jitsu. And the first Jiu-Jitsu class was the coach, who was a blue belt, showing a Delahiva sweep that he just learned. So yeah, it was not the most structured for beginners, but I really started to enjoy it. I was like, this is actually what I wanted judo to be. Yeah. So was it possible for you to like give?

focused on jiu-jitsu or was there enough access to it not i couldn't really get too focused on it i think the schedule expanded a little bit but my focus was split at the time between competing in m-ma and jiu-suitz i would basically compete in whatever was coming up so for the first three years i was training maybe three four times a week and then doing some like weightlifting on my own but yeah i was competing in both so what was your first what did you what did you compete in first jihitsu or m m m-m-a I think it was actually jujitsu. And I competed at the same time in MMA that had a rule where there were no strikes to the head, which I don't count as MMA.

That's some weird jiu-jitsu. But yeah, I had both my first jujitsu match tournament and my first MMA fight were kind of crazy stories for the jujitsu match. It was in Serbia, it was in Belgrade. And I was competing in white belt. I didn't actually know. I think now, if you're here in America and you're like a black bolt in judo or a wrestler, you have to go start at Blue Belt. So I signed up as a white belt and they call my name and then they call the other guy and he's Serbian and there were a couple hundred people in the

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

And what about your first MMA match? So my first MMA match was actually supposed to be also some kind of weird hybrid rules where you can only strike to the head when you're on the ground. And I was like, hey, that actually suits me pretty well. And it was supposed to be after a grappling tournament. So we go to some middle of nowhere place in Croatia, like three hours away. And it's not the best organized tournament. So the grappling part is going on for like eight hours.

I competed in that. That was my first Nogi competition. I won that. But the entire time I see this guy who's not doing grappling, he has a broken nose. You know, like how boxers have the broken nose. He's got like connected to, just like the meanest looking guy. He's just like mean mugging me the entire day. And I'm like, what is what is going on?

Why is this guy doing this? So they call my name to go to the podium to pick up my medal. So they say, first place, Mika Perjavitz. Next fight, Matt number one, MMA, MHA Per Chavez, versus. So I have a shin pad on and I have one glove on and no time to wrap my hands. And as a by the way, the promoter explains that actually it's just MMA. It's punches to the head and everything. So I didn't actually wrap my hands.

I just threw shin pads on. And we also had helmets. So that actually... Headgear or helmet? Head gear. Yeah, sorry. So we start fighting. and guess who my first opponent is.

The dude. The dude. So the second punch that I threw, I hit it from the side like this, and I broke this bone right under my thumb. And then I was, he hit me with some better shots, nothing that would like rock me or anything. And I was taking him down consistently, but he would get guillotine on me,

and the headgear would turn. So it would be kind of like suffocating me and keeping me in there. So I lost the decision. That was the only amateur MMA fight that I lost. And then I went to the side and the organizer comes up to me and he's like, your next fight is going to be in 10 minutes. I'm like, bro. So, yeah, I just put a wrap on on my hand and I arm triangle choked that guy in a couple of minutes.

And then I remember going home, we stopped on the way, got some food. Then my hand started throbbing. And I knew at that point that if it's throbbing like that, it's broken. So, yeah, I got a cat. for a little while from then on. And what were you doing like as far as the other track of life as a normal human? Or was MMA now, were you trying to be a pro MMA fighter or were you trying to actually be a normal human too? So I've always had this strategy. I don't know how good it is, but I've always kind of hedged my bets a little bit.

And I was doing that with school. So in that period in that period of my life, my parents were supporting me a lot as long as I was doing my schoolwork. So I was a pretty good student in like elementary school. I had straight fives, which is like A's. It goes from one to five in Slovenia. And then for high school, I went to this private Catholic school. They had us learning Latin and stuff. So it was like, it was pretty, it was very serious as far as the teaching goes. So I had taught by nuns and?

No, not really, except for some of the religious classes. but honestly they taught us a lot about other religions too. It was actually kind of cool to learn and have a better perspective of the world. And it also turned me into an atheist for a while, just being a part of the Catholic school. Now I would say I'm more agnostic at this point. But I was doing that and then I think at the time when I started MMA in Jiu-Jitsu, I was basically studying in college. I was doing international relations.

I picked that just because it was kind of difficult. to get into that program. So I liked that part, that it was kind of competitive. And I've always done well with social studies, like history, languages and stuff like that. So I was like, if I have to pick something, I'll do this now. But I remember in high school when people would ask, what do you want to do for work, for a living? My answer was actually, the thing that I'm going to do doesn't exist yet. And it's not, I read it somewhere.

I didn't come up with it. It's not that profound. But it actually turned out to be absolutely true. true because what I do currently did not exist at that point. Yeah. So that's what I was doing, basically studying in school, just trying to pass everything. So do you go to college when you get done? Is that how your program works in Slovenia?

It's a university. So you basically live at home and you just drive there. And then what age does that last until? So that was a four year program. So I was doing that until I was 23. Okay. 2013 when I was a blue belt I realized that the level of competition and my training partners they weren't as competitive as I was because I had the ambitions to be after I did my

MMA like 12 fights I won 11 of them after that loss and I had to make a decision do I want to go pro MMA which I'm going to get sent to the shadow realm at least once or twice or do I want because I really wanted to do something with my mind later in life. So that was kind of precious to me. And around that time, I was starting to see the jiu-jitsu is becoming a little bit more professional. And maybe in a couple of years, it's going to become something that you can actually do. And this is like 2013, 2014. So did you kind of foresee all like the CTE kind of brain trauma? Yeah, yeah. I was I was kind of aware of it that that's a possibility, even just from training hard. And yeah, I basically decided to pursue.

I think that's going to make Jiu Jiu Jitsu way more popular. I think that is making Jiu Jitsu way more popular. Because if you're a parent right now, I mean, I know people that played football, American football, and loved American football, and they won't let their kids play. They won't let their sons play American football because, like, the CTE and the brain damage.

And, you know, if you were a dad in 1975 and you wanted your kid to know how to fight, you'd bring them down to a boxing gym. then maybe if it was 1985, you bring them to a kickboxing gym. Now you might be a little bit hesitant to do that. You might be hesitant to have your kids sparring boxing or sparring Muay Thai, but you can have them do that jiu-jitsu all day. So I think jiu-jitsu is going to become more and more popular.

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

Like Tom, you know, Thomas Traval is? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like speak, because I know you were in Poland. Like, I would spar with that guy. And a bunch of other guys, yawn. Like, dude, those guys were. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. He did camps out here. Wow. He's, what a, what if, I mean, awesome guys. Yeah. But, like, to be sparring with those guys. And I think by that time we had moved to using big gloves.

And a lot of times I would be, sometimes I would be the grappling part, you know. So we'd have like a striker do the striking and then a wrestler would get in there to get the takedown. And then I'd kind of be, but still we're hitting each other on the ground and all that stuff. So I took some blows from them boys. Not to mention, I don't know how many rounds of MMA sparring I did with Dean Lister. and Brandon Vera, I mean, back in the day, and we did it with little gloves. Like, that's what we did.

And I took, you know, I took a lot of shots to the head. And it wasn't until, yeah, probably when Yon and those guys and Thomas Travolta, we started using big gloves more. Part of it was like, bro, you have Thomas DeVall or Yon freaking hit you in the head with small gloves. It said that, that shit up real quick, boy. Yeah, I think it still ended up working out for you because you are about as sharp as these knives here.

Yeah, I think it's definitely a risk, you know. And Jiu-Jitsu has a lot of the components that you would look for in MMA as far as like mental toughness goes. And, hey, if you want to get bonked on the head a couple of times, it will happen too. You know, like you'll get kind of, I don't know, like you'll hit the mat here and there. So, yeah, that was a decision I made.

And 2013-14, that was around the time when guys like Keenan were coming on the scene and showing that there is a path toward professionalism. So at that time, I was looking for a way to train with better people, and I found that my school has this program. It was called Erasmus. European Union organizes it to promote diversity and merging of cultures and stuff like that. Basically, it's a subsidized party for people.

People go drink and socialize, you know, in different places. And I remember going to my coordinator, he had a list of European cities and I was like, no one wants to go to Warsaw, Poland, right? Everyone wants to go to the coastal Spanish cities. Send me to Warsaw, please. And he was like, all right, cool, you got it. So I went over there and there was a gym that I knew. So the gym that I was a part of was Alliance.

And I knew that the Alliance in Warsaw has a couple of guys who have already done ADCC. Kamiluminski is one of the guys. I think that a couple of times. And the coach, his name is Radek Turek. he's a yeah he's he's i remember that guy yeah he was uh he was really good and his gym so he's a PE teacher or was at the time so in the school where he thought he got them to give him a room that just had puzzle mats on the floor and uh basically he would teach school all day and then teach jiu jizzo and it was some really really good people i was getting my butt kicked quite a bit

which was exactly what i was looking for at that at that point in time and also he was pretty ahead on leg locks. So 2015, 16 is when the Danahard that squad kind of blew up leg locks for everyone to see. And obviously Dean was doing them before and people knew about them. Those guys had a lot as well. And then even Wormgard, for example, when Kenan started debuting that in about a week, we were learning that from Radix. He's kind of a socially a little bit peculiar guy, but as far as like knowledge goes, that was really, really good training. So for a year there, I was most mostly ignoring a lot of the partying, training twice a day. And my grades went up because the standard dropped a lot for everyone to do well.

And yeah, my grades went way up. And that was where I finished that my bachelor's degree, basically. Didn't you get your ankle broke or something in Poland? Yeah. What happened with that? So the classic mistake? Wasn't it the classic crossing of your feet? Someone made it for me, actually.

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

so he just hips in and there's just a loud pop and i see the the the ref is holding his head he's like mouth open and i opened my mouth to scream but i realized that that would be a verbal tap just about just when the sound was about to come out and i i kind of gritted my teeth i pulled the leg out and i just got my my hand up the collar and I bow and arrow the living hell out of his guy. And then because I was kind of broke at the time and I really wanted to go to Abu Dhabi. And because I was that in the finals of that. It was the first, the first round. So I had three more two, I think two more matches.

It might have been the second round. Did you pull guard or something? Yeah. I taped my ankle. I could still walk. So I was like probably a sprain. Turns out broken fibula. But it's not a weight bearing bone.

So I taped my ankle. and in the next match, the guy's passing my guard. He's actually a really good black belt now, a friend of mine. He goes past the guard. He falls into a reverse triangle with the broken leg on top safe. So I squeezed that and he taps. So I win that match, and I'm like, this is wild. And then the next match was six minutes,

and I just couldn't do much to the guy, but I lost on points. I think he had another match after that, so it would have been hard to win. But it was honestly a pretty good experience in hindsight because it's a good story that I got out of it. And I also learned that in those situations, if I have to fight with a broken bone, I can totally do it. And I learned a lot about the mental toughness that I can call upon if I absolutely have to. And then after I remember just being at home with a cast, so I would just mix Greek yogurt protein powder. And I got a pull-up bar. I got freaking jacked.

It was huge after that, yeah. And so what happened after what did you do after you got done in Poland? After Poland, I went back home to Slovenia for a little bit, and I kind of did a little bit of a gap here. I think it wasn't a full year, but I was basically trying to come up with a game plan of what I'm going to do next because that ended. And that was like a little bit subsidized, I think.

So I was doing some weightlifting during the day. I did a couple of jobs during the day as well, and then I would go train. And I started to write a journal during the day because what I noticed was happening was a pattern of me not feeling good about the situation that I'm in as far as like training goes and where I'm at. And then going to training, getting some endorphins and then feeling fine and going to bed and just repeating the cycle. So I started to write down the journal and I was like, I have to do something to break this pattern and go somewhere else. So I was looking for master's programs, again, to kind of use school as an excuse to go somewhere else. And I was looking at English-speaking countries, and I found Ireland.

So before going there, because I knew I was going to need some money, I met this guy online at some tournaments who ran this company called Yoga for BGJ, his name is Sebastian. And he said, bro, just come out to Norway. Norway has the highest standard of living in Europe. And he said, I'll get you a job at like a cafe or something. You can make decent money. And you can also train here. There's a team called Frontline Norway. Really good team.

Eduardo Teta Rios, he's the coach. They're really, really welcoming. They have a pretty cool school in a bunker, like a literal, I think it's like a nuclear bunker in a basement. So that was the primary goal, as always. I would do jiu-jitsu first and then everything else kind of. like a second. I went there and basically pretended that I knew how to cook to get a couple of jobs there, which thankfully I really like cooking so I could pass it off. But got some really good training in, lived at the gym for a little while. And then as I was there, this guy Sebastian,

he showed me how his website works and the platform that it's built on. It's a subscription website where people basically sign up to do yoga videos for Jiu-Jitsu. And I'm not involved with the company anymore. I haven't done it in a little while, but the product was solid. I've always been super inflexible. So it helped me a lot. I think it has a lot of merit. So he showed me that I remember being there and trying to figure out how this thing works.

He gave me the log-ins. He was like, I need some help. You might be able to help me out. And for two days, I was looking at it. It didn't make any sense. I just couldn't figure out how the structure works or anything. And then on the third day, it kind of clicked. So I started to help with him after.

that and basically make some money with that which was much better suited for what I was doing which was school and jiu-jitsu and I could make a little bit of money on the side but at that time I was also already in a relationship with my wife so we both moved to Dublin she went ahead of ahead of me and as you probably know Dublin is kind of like the Silicon Valley of Europe yeah I've been over there working with companies and it's it's pretty awesome actually Like they changed their tax laws and squared everything away. And if you want to look at the right way to do that kind of thing, go look at Dublin in Ireland. And they just made things very, made the environment very good for business.

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

But Ireland did the opposite. And it works. Yeah, it definitely works really well. The only downside is that the housing market was very saturated because a lot of people were moving there. So Emma found us an apartment that was probably twice as big as this room. I was in my room at home. We have like a two-bedroom, and I was like, this room.

plus the bathroom, plus the little hallway in between, is bigger than that apartment. And it was in a bad part of town. I saw just across the street, I saw a couple of arrests made where there was a drug dealer outside, letting people into the drug house. So, yeah, not the best place to live, but it was, you know, there's a certain point in your life. I feel like where you really have to put your head down and grind. Some would say that's like basically all your life. Probably, I would agree with that.

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

merit of feminist theories when it comes to terrorism, but I didn't want to do it. And then I just remember working on my newsletter and a guy in the class, he went on this rant of how useless this was to read. And I was like, my man, I wish I read it too. So I could I could chime in a little bit. But There was a lot of stuff like that. So I was working on newsletters and stuff like that during that time. Were the newsletters for BJJ for yoga? For yoga for BJ at the time, yeah. And then I would get on a bus.

It would take an hour and 30 minutes to get through the entire city all the way south to East Coast Jiu Jiu Jitsu Academy. That's the best Jiu Jiu Jitsu Academy in Ireland, one of the best in Europe. Darrell O'Connell is the coach there, and it was just super good training. So I would be training with those guys with some really solid sessions. And then I would make my journey back like 45 minutes up to my apartment.

And that was like a pretty... So were you training every day? Yeah, every day. So you're spending like three hours a day transiting? Yeah, I spent a lot of time on the bus, but I could turn on a hotspot, do some of my work, read some stuff on there. Yeah, that was a fun time. period and how unfun it was. And then the next year, the next year we moved into like a proper apartment, got a car

and everything. But actually something really important happened then. In 2006, that was 2016. I remember finishing my master's thesis. And I realized that for the first time in my adult life, I can read a book that I want to read. So I got two books. One is this one, extreme ownership.

The other one was Turning Pro by Stephen Pressfield. Okay. And I don't know what was guiding my hand through Amazon at that time, but I think I selected some really good books at the time. And that was also when I heard John, I think Ferris and Rogan. And I think I found this podcast when it was on episode three or four. And I was like, this is exactly what I want to listen to, because not only did I want to hear more about what you were doing

and leadership in general, but especially those episodes where you were going over the, like, I don't know, I don't have any example, like Band of Brothers, for example, or those old school Vietnam War books. As far as entertainment goes, that's what I want to consume, like history, war, and knowledge out of that, yeah. So probably out of, I don't know which episode is this on, like 450 or something. Yeah, this is 451. Yeah, I would say I probably listen to like 350 episodes of this, yeah. And when you have that much of something in your brain, it reprograms you to a degree. And I would say that it was like a positive direction. Well, that's good to hear.

Like, what impacted that actually have on your decision-making process for life? I would say just having a better understanding of how to become even more disciplined and how to... One of the key components, I think, is just like how precious time is. I know you talk a lot about how you found that when you lost your friends in the war and how to honor them, you make sure that every moment that you use, you use it in a wise way. I think that was one of the key things. And then right now I have, I basically am involved in a company that has a lot of employees, so, I mean, for a jiu-jitsu company.

So leadership is obviously really important. But at the time, it was more like the personal development and growth. And I think one of the most important things that you can get from this podcast specifically is some of the things that are in between, like scenarios, how to interact with people and just like how to be as humble as possible, which I'm still very much working on. So then you get your master's degree. You, what's your next move? What do you do? So the next move is. What do you go and take ownership of in the world?

Yeah, nothing really, my suitcase. So after that, my wife and I basically embarked on a two-year journey around the world where we were just traveling basically all the time. So the reason behind that was my parents, they took me and my sister to a bunch of different places during our childhood. So my parents are very middle class. They've never upgraded their lifestyle, their house, their cars. They spent all of their extra income the right amount on traveling. Right. So I think before I ever moved here or traveled through America myself, I've already been to like at least 15 states. We went to America three separate times just as tourists. I've been to every continent with my parents except for Antarctica, basically. So we traveled a lot. And I always wanted to see the world and go to a lot of different jiu-jitsu schools. Again, the traveling was an excuse to do jih Tjitsu with a lot of people. Because I imagine. that my wife and are going to have kids and then traveling is not as fun with

your kids until they're a certain age. So basically we started in in Miami, spent a week training there at fight sports, then we went to Costa Rica, then we went to San Diego. That's where I met Kenan for the first time and Sebastian from Yoga for BJJ introduced me to Kenan and Kenan had a company called Keenan online subscription website for Jiu-Jitsu videos. So I started to help him out as well. And it did really well. So we had a relationship where I could pay for the entire trip

by basically being a digital nomad and working on my computer. So when we were here, that's when I trained at us with him a little bit. And then we went all across America before getting on a plane and flying to New Zealand. That was a stop as well. When you met Kenan, did you guys have like an immediate kind of bro-out kinship? Yeah, I wouldn't say bro-out, but we definitely, Kenan's kind of like, he's an interesting guy.

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

like on year seven, six, something like that. Do you remember the stuff he was doing with Echo back in the day? I remember. It was actually, it was some really good stuff, some really funny stuff. The one where he went to Shangji's house, which might be Echo's house or something. Yeah, that was some really funny stuff. Yeah. It's because that's kind of like adjacent to that, right?

Because I was friends with Echo. Like Echo is one of my main training partners back then to like even, well, I guess no, at that time we were doing the podcast. I don't know. Are those, were those Keenan things predating the podcast? I would believe. I think they were. Yeah.

I think so. They were. So, you know, Echo and I were friends, but like, he was more kind of in the scene of things, you know, than I was. I was not, you know. I was kind of, I was doing more like what Keenan was doing, which was hiding from people and just training. Yeah. So then it's New Zealand. Yeah.

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

And when I saw Hawaii, I was like, we need to come back here. And we got back to Hawaii, did Oahu, Hawaii, Maui, and the Big Island for a couple of days. And then we flew to Japan for almost two months. And that was really, really cool. The highlight there was for sure getting invited to train with the Manari in a pro wrestling academy, like a huge building that's just dedicated to pro wrestling. And it was actually some really good, some really good people training there. And then back to Europe again and then back back to New York.

And on the previous trip there, that was when I basically had another split in the path to see like where I'm going to go because John had actually pulled me and Craig Jones aside. asked us if we were if we would become a part of the team because he's looking for more international people I think he probably just wanted Craig but he just I was like I was yeah I was just like the side when you first show up like yeah what's it like the very first time you went to yeah DDS or so you go to HENzo school and you roll in there and you say hey what time of the because I guess I guess you've competed at that point if people is your name out there enough where you can

roll in and kind of, because if people that are listening that don't know Jiu-Jitsu, you can't just roll in and be like, hey, where's the pro team? Because I want to train with them. Yeah. I mean, you can, but at that point, I've traveled so much with Jiu-Zitza that I had kind of gotten a standard operating procedures for what to do to have the highest chance of having a good reception. And all of that's what I want to know. All of the Daner Desquot guys were incredibly welcoming to me and they were all, they were all super, super cool. I've never had a bad experience. honestly in any gym. So the first thing you do is you show up, you show respect to everyone and like whatever hierarchy they have at the moment, you pay attention to that. And then you shut

the hell up and you train super hard without injuring anyone and doing the very best that you can and you show up to every training session. With that recipe, there is not really an option for you to not have a good, a good impact on the academy. And then if there's, What mistakes can you make? What mistakes have you seen people make? Just like, let's say after training, everyone already knows each other. They're like one of the best things after training is, you know, like how you talk after class with people in like a circle. If you just come in there, like, crash that and like start telling your people, start telling people your life story or someone's rolling that's like a star in Jiu-Jitsu and you interrupt their role to take a picture.

rhythm or something like that. Those are all bad ideas. Or yeah, just coming in, mean-mugging everyone from the side without shaking everyone's hand. Things like that, you know. So just be cool. Just basically, basically be cool. And if you, if you train hard, then if, even if you, if you're not beating people, if you train hard, then you're a safe training partner, people will want to roll with you. So that, that I think is kind of, kind of the key. Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. Getting into level 12, matches with people that you've never met before is just look man it's just just you know like don't do that you know just don't do that because you you don't know where like you show up to my gym and you're like hey I want to train with you and you try and kill me well you don't know that we

know what's going on in my world you don't know what's happening and now you're having a death match with me it's just like hey bro you want we'll have death matches you and I have had a countless death matches at this juncture in time but but But yeah, just be respectful and don't be an idiot, I think, when you show up to one of these, when you show up to someone's gym. And I don't think it's even just jitza. It's any kind of situation. You know, just roll up and build some trust, build a relationship before you go into that. Like, I don't know, in business, let's say you get hired by a company and you're, if you come in and you're, like, really sharing your thoughts and ideas. I know a better way to do this, guys. Yeah, exactly. Hey, guys, I know a better way to this. Yeah. It might be a good idea to first learn how they do things, you know. Yeah. So. So it applies in all aspects. Yeah.

If you know the way Broadway, broadly you'll see it in all things. Okay, so now you and Craig Jones get asked to become the international representatives of DDS. Yeah. And it's probably because Craig. Yeah. I think John said they were trying to do like a documentary or something for Netflix with that, where that would be good.

And I mean, what a bad idea to invite Craig Jones to the Benderler Squad in hindsight. But at the same time, Kenan flew to New York to train, and we went up to J.T. Taurus's Academy to do a session. And we actually took a train ride back into the city, and he basically popped a question. He was like, I'm going to open a gym in San Diego. And I can do it on my own, but it probably won't be as good as if you're involved as well. So he invited me to come do that with him. and I basically had to decide again. And on one hand, it was the potential glory of becoming a really good competitor.

And on the other side was like a slightly safer path with the business of building a big academy. And again, I kind of hedged my bets. It's not, I don't think I'll have regrets. I may, but I went with that option because at that time, I had traveled with my wife for two years straight. And that means that you're together 24-7, basically, when you go to the toilet. That's the only time when you're not together. So I had realized that since we had not killed each other, that we may be highly compatible. So I wanted to make sure that financially we have resources when we get to the next stage of our life.

So after that, I went back home, took care of some visa stuff, got back to America. And then we actually did the, Kenan was not quite ready to open the academy. So we did a camp before ADCC 2019. And then we both got a massive eye infection. And at that time, he also got into a spat with Gordon Ryan a little bit. So at that point, the decision was already made, and it was like super clear that we're going to open Legion.

So what year was that? It was 2019. So we started... Did you do ADCC that year? No, I wasn't... I didn't qualify. I was just there for the camp and to pick up the eye infection. So you open Legion in 2019.

Yeah. You call Legion American Jiu-Jitsu. Yeah. Is that Keenan driving that? I mean, Keenan is definitely the driving force behind that. And he could go in depth on it. Yeah. I saw some of his posts.

about it. He was going in depth on it. It's pretty, it's very interesting stuff. It is very interesting, yeah. And obviously the Brazilians absolutely love it that we call ourselves Legion American Jiu Jitsu. But really what it comes down to is just it's the main thing is it's just a cultural difference and how we run the academy is very different from how I've seen Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies around during my travels and everything. And it's just the main thing is with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies, they're very hierarchical. So, there's one person in the top, Marcelo de Galvao, Pereira, Susa, whatever, the guys at the top. And then everyone has to call him master.

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

That actually kind of makes me cringe if someone comes in from another academy and calls me like professor or whatever. So that's the main thing. Cultural differences, differences in how. we do business. And then as far as, like, for example, Kenan, a lot of the stuff that he developed on the mats, lapel guard and other moves, that's pretty much all him. That's like an American American thing as well and other instructors that we have as well. So we also make sure to do ghi, no-gi year-round. And no-gi also, you could, you would have some issues tracing it back

in its current form all the way back to Brazil. And jiu-setsu has evolved a lot through the world. And I mean, you have to give Brazilian's credit where it's due. Personally, I think the biggest positive influence that they've contributed to Jiu-Jitsu was the precursor of the IBJF. I forget the name. I would kind of butcher the pronunciation. The rules of that were giving points to mount back control, the heaviest point. So that kind of formed Jiu-Zitsu in a way where people started looking for the back a lot more.

and it transitioned away from the judo style, which was more like side pins and stuff like that. But yeah, that's the main thing people ask all the time. It's just a cultural difference. Yeah, and people always ask me where should I go train? Or, you know, I live in such and such a town. And I was going to, I was telling Google, first of all, Google and find what's close to your work or close to your house

because proximity matters. And if you have to drive 48 minutes to train and 48 minutes to get home, there's going to be a lot of days where you're not going to be able to make it. You know, like you just don't have an extra hour and a half to be driving in your car and so you can't make it. So proximity kind of rules and and then go to a couple different gyms because there's some people that want a traditional martial arts setting where you're bowing before you get on the mat and they want to have they want to bow to their sensei and that's cool. And Roger that. Go do that. And some people want something that's more like what you're talking about.

Some people want like super chill and there's jihitoo academies that are just. just like you might as well be going in there and I don't know what's a super chill sport what's a super chill sport where like people are just going in I mean never even like some of them are like a cigar joint you know like you're just going in there you have to smoke weed yeah yeah so you got everything I'd say surfing maybe it's like a kind of chill sport yeah yeah yeah there's definitely um there's definitely places jiu jitzu academies that are super chill like hey we don't care what you wear you don't have to wear and there's some place where you got to wear matching ghee you got to wear the ghee from that academy and again if that's what you're

looking for go get it if you're looking for something that's on the other end of the spectrum cool go get it there's one thing that's beautiful about jiu jitza right now is there's so many different options and what's what's interesting is like both those schools both those types of schools they both produce champions you know they both will have people that excel So yeah, you got to kind of find what you're looking for. But you guys open and it's, what is it, 2019 when you open? Yeah. So I think we got the Keys August, July.

We opened on November 1st. Yeah, those, I think we got, like we pre-sold 100 memberships. So we started with 100 people. And then nothing bad happened in the coming months. And everything was great. And we just had a linear growth. and life was beautiful. Did you guys shut completely down for COVID?

Did you guys paper the walls like most gyms did? Or what'd you do? Paper the windows? A little bit of both. Yeah. At first, we locked, we basically closed down. And that was honestly like in hindsight when I look at it. I think Kenan and I would both kind of agree that we made a mistake there.

We were both vocal without knowing, you know. We kind of couldn't know that COVID might have been a bioweapon. There was some way or the other escape. the lab and you know that there's some odd things behind the whole situation we were more like hey this this is like a serious thing we have to like read a little bit too much of the media and we basically decided to to lock down pretty pretty early on around the time when tom hanks got covid which was a big turning point in the world and nba shut down i think it was like mid-march so for a couple months we closed down and then we realized like hey this is there's some weird stuff going

on with this and maybe if the liquor stores and the dispensaries are still open, maybe places where you can get healthier by working out should still be open as well. And a lot of our members were asking to train. So yeah, we put some stuff on our windows. But honestly, in our location, no one was really bothering us too much. So yeah, in hindsight, I definitely learned a big lesson there, which was stay quiet until you know what's going on. And now from then on,

anything that's like political and stuff like that, I don't voice my opinions publicly anymore. Yeah. Unless, I think there might come a point with something where it's going to be worth talking about it, but yeah, that was definitely a mistake. Oh, did you, were you like talking about it a bunch? Not a lot, but I definitely expressed my opinion

at the time based on the information that it's like, probably better to close down for, you know, whatever, flattened the curve or whatever was the line. But yeah, not since then. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of, I think a lot of people learned a lot of lessons around that whole thing. Yeah, it was very strange to watch, that's for sure. Okay, so now you get back open.

You got your black belt in 2021? Yeah. From Keenan? From Keenan, yeah. I think, yeah, I'm definitely his first black belt. And then I think Sloan is the second. Damn. Yeah. At that time we were still doing some ghee and then after we transitioned more to no ghee.

And we also, so with Keynon as far as like business goes, we had that Keynon Online website. And then he is known for his lapel guard. So we did a separate course, the lapel encyclopedia, which was like, I think, eight hours of instruction when it launched. And then we updated it several times. And that did really well. It was basically. how we got our capital to start Legion without getting like a Sugar Daddy or an investor. So that's how we got started and we transitioned that into a company that did Jiu-Jitsu X that did videos for other people as well. But like in 2022, we had some headwind going against some really some really good competition in that space. So we kind of realized that that's, that's not going to work super well. And at that point, I, transitioned from doing like a lot of digital stuff for for that company to looking at Legion which was doing really well kind of not because of our efforts but despite our

efforts we were just kind of like you know this we had the classes we did things in the way that we thought was good but not really putting a lot of thought and effort into it so at that point I took a month where all I did besides training was looking at what is the best thing that we can do to grow a legion more and faster and make it better for people. And I realized that the free trial system that everyone's doing might not be the best idea. And that just that everyone's doing it because everyone is doing it. And we decided to do this five-week beginner course, which is not a new concept. Actually, in the gym in Ireland, they were doing the beginner courses. I was teaching some of them actually. But it was new in the sense that we didn't really

allow people to go do our classes unless they did the beginner course first kind of like a boot camp in the military i guess you guys don't get a rifle and a tank and a helicopter and be like hey figure this out so the course basically starts in they start in waves they have different start dates and then we get a group of people together start them on day one with a highly proprietary we tweaked curriculum that starts from the beginning and then at the end they are fully capable of rolling safely and then we have a bunch of things that we that we add so um there's five judo for jutsu classes that i teach myself still uniform videos of the curriculum access to the weight area and like a bunch of other things so that people have the best like starting point and uh just right now we're actually

doing our 50th course so we've been doing that consistently for two years now. And that's been, sometimes I ask myself what would happen if we didn't do that because we would kind of be like every other Jiu-Solini Academy. So that's been working out super because all of our students that graduate from that, they go into the next courses and they have this basic knowledge, plus the instructors in the other classes, they don't have to go to a new person and explain how to shrimp or how to fall or how to what the mount is. They all come in. with that knowledge. So it's pretty efficient. And I like to basically explain it as the Legion, for example, the Roman Legion, one of the best fighting units of all time. And they fought all kinds of different

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

And it's a really rewarding process, plus we have a good team to work with so they can get people as good as possible as quickly as possible. That's kind of good. If someone shows up there and they've been like, hey, I've been training for six months, I'm still a white belt.

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

But when I make sure to come to the last. How many times a week is it? It's two times a week plus the third class is the judo class. So the five judo classes are there so that we can teach the ground positions and still have a lot of take down skills because that's how people get. confident. Plus, let's say someone does the five-week course and they're like, I don't want to, the jiu-jitsu is not for me or whatever. If they get jumped in the parking lot right after the course, they have a much better chance of defending themselves. So that's why it's in there as well.

So yeah. So if I show up and I've, do you test me? Do you like, hey, let's roll? Typically, no. We'll like believe people. But then if we, if the coaches will be kind of paying attention to how you're rolling and maybe suggest like going and doing the course what if i'm super fired up and i want to train five six seven days a week um you'll still have to do the beginner course first um and like if you're super fired up let's say at week three or four we might give you a pass to go into the other classes but we have like there's an example there's one guy what if i wrestled uh you still have to do the the course actually like sometimes i will if i'm in the right mood i will roll with people like that. The other time I had a situation at OpenMath where there was a one of our members was like,

hey, I've got this guy here. He's a friend of mine. He wrestled before. He did a little bit of jiu-jitsu. And I've been telling him to sign up, but he doesn't want to. So he said kind of, you know, like tell him some things that will convince him. And I look at the clock and it's four minutes, 20 to go. And I look at him and I say, hey, instead of me selling you on a membership or whatever, let's roll and if I tap you eight times in four minutes you sign up and he looked at me he looked at the time and he was like he shook my hand yeah it took two minutes two minutes and 20 seconds yeah I was just like basically just like going as fast as possible not as hard as possible just like I realized that he was shooting single legs so it was like three kymuras and a couple of footlocks and

stuff like that but sometimes for wrestlers for marines for people that are a little bit more gung That is actually a really good approach. You have to have a hands-on approach and explain that there's something they can gain. But we have a guy who he wrestled before. He did CrossFit. Like I've seen videos of him, clean and jerking, like hundreds of pounds. And he came in and did the beginner course, and then he went into the other programs. A little bit more Nogi focused now.

Got his blue belt in six months because he went to a tournament and he, I think he submitted. to purple belts. So we were like for the sake of all the white belts, you should do this. But he was a good example of someone who still benefited from doing the course. And it's also good if you want. I've seen a lot of people go super hard and then kind of burn out or get injured. So sometimes it's better to hold people back a little bit. And then when they understand how everything works, unleash them to go twice or a day or whatever. So is this, did this lead into you writing the book? It definitely helped. What was the genesis of the book then? So one was just wanting to encapsulate everything in a similar way that we're done with the beginner course for Nogi.

The other was a little bit of hubris, honestly, because I was looking at all the books that exist right now, and I didn't see anything that I liked too much. A couple of books that have been very well received in our quality but a little bit outdated. So I was a little bit like if not me then who's going to write this. And also I think I've listened to you talk about writing a book before and it was kind of like it was a little bit dismissive in a good way of how everyone has an idea. Everyone wants to do something but no one really does it. And I think you recommend writing a thousand words a day. Yeah, I went 500 words a day at this start. Because one book that I like a lot is atomic habits.

It says make the habit like as easy as possible. So I did that and the first month was just useless. I discarded everything. It just sucked. And at first I wanted to write a book about Gigi Jiu-Jitsu. Then I wanted to write a book about transitioning from Ghi to Nogi to be a little bit more specific. And then I started writing that. And at some point, it kind of like dawned on me that this book would be better off as a manual,

as a general manual that goes over all of all of Nogi. And the key thing was what not to include. Because this book could be an encyclopedia. It could be a shelf of books, you know, if I try to include everything. So that was the main challenge there. And yeah, it kind of, this guy, Stephen Pressfield, who wrote those books. I've been listening to them again. he kind of speaks a little bit.

It's a little bit metaphysical. He speaks about the muse and how like the muse will come in and tell you what it needs to be. That's basically what happened with the book. The main thing was he has this concept of resistance and using resistance as a guiding force. And whatever you don't want to do, whatever seems hard is probably the thing that you have to do. So once I realized that this is going to be really difficult because I didn't want to write the book and not do research. Because let's say I put in an anaconda choke. Maybe the way I do the anaconda choke works for me,

but like what is the universally most accepted way of doing it based on like high level people? And what was the best for everyone? So I had to do research of like matches and instructionals to make sure that every technique was solid. And then there's some things like passing, for example. I have my passing style. The body lock pass is not a part of it. So I have to do enough research to make sure that I include the right thing for body lock passing, despite not doing it too much myself. So, yeah, it took a lot of research.

And then the writing part was actually reasonably easy once I had a list of what I wanted to include. And then the thing that made it difficult for the first book were the pictures, because we took thousands of pictures and then editing them down to a couple of hundreds still, putting them in the right places and so on. that took extra time. All right. Well, let's get into the book a little bit, man. Surprisingly, very entertaining book.

That was, you know, you got a pretty dry sense of humor anyways, but this shit's funny. Yeah. All right, I'm going to go to the book here. To the untrained eye,

Jiu-T can look like just some dudes rolling around on the floor, but it's one of the most complex and expansive sports in existence. Chess, for example, has a finite number of 10 to the 40th starting positions. The total number of possible game sequences

10 to the 120th. Those are such large numbers that they are almost meaningless because we're not equipped to think on that scale. With chess, we're talking about a board with a limited number of pieces that can move in specific ways.

In Jiu-Jitsu, also sometimes called human chess, the number of possible moves dwarfs those of the popular board game. After all, we are operating in a 3D space, making important decisions quickly. Additionally, our bodies come with different proportions, weights, and abilities. One of the best things about Jiu-Jitsu

is that even people who have been involved for the sport for decades can always find new things to learn and explore. Did you get that from me? I don't think so. Maybe. I went on a big, well, it was on the underground podcast. I started talking about finite games

versus infinite games and how those two different games are played. And I use the example of chess, 64 squares you know pieces on number certain number of pieces or 16 pieces on each side they can only move certain ways and then of course I went like jujitsu

and then of course I went to like the world right and so it's finite games which by the way that's not my idea either that's a thing finite games versus infinite games and I would have to go back and listen to the podcast that I did because I can't remember right now but that's a school of thought yeah so

it is a completely true school of thought yeah I think it's one of It could be possible that, like I said, I've listened to a lot of your stuff. It could be embedded in there. Typically, the way, even if you jacked it from me, I jacked it from someone else. So I'm not like making accusations here. But I was like, oh, yeah, hell, yeah. That's legit.

The way I like to explain, the way I use chess a lot is when I'm explaining the beginner course to people, for example. I say that if you know how to play chess, but I don't, I have to, we have to put down the board. And then you have to tell me what the pieces are, how they can move. And then you have to tell me. what the end game is, like how to get to checkmate. And then if we start just playing there, you don't have any fun.

I don't have any fun. I don't know what's going on. And eventually I'll get good at it, but not super fast. What you should probably do is put scenarios on the board. Like, hey, in this situation, what would you do with the rook? Where would you move it? And yeah, just human chess is, I think it's one of the best metaphors for jiu-s because that's one of the funnest things about it.

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

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

Fast forward a little bit. This structure can be used by beginners to build a mind map of common positions, techniques, and patterns that will lead to faster improvement of their no-gi jiu-jitsu. For intermediate practitioners, this book has information that will help organize existing knowledge and identified gaps that have to be filled. For advanced practitioners or black belts, this guide will provide an opportunity to think about teaching jiu-jitsu in a more organized way. And then you also make this note, which is fast-forward a little bit, remember that all the techniques

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

full Nogi video manual, which is going to clock in around 11 hours of content. So every chapter has about an hour. And obviously because I'm speaking, I can include a lot more. So in some cases, I didn't show defenses or certain things that I like to do personally. So that's all in the Nogi video manual, which is on that same website. Echo, yeah, that's going to be, it's going to be very helpful. Echo and I, this whole thing reminds me. Echo and I, when we, at Eschelonfront, we do this thing called the muster,

and we do like an intro, when the muster's over, we do. intro to jiu-jitsu and echo and i kind of have this little methodology where we kind of just because these people have never done jiu-jitsu before like zero and so we'll kind of and we do the same structure like okay you're both standing we get the fight to the ground once we're on the ground here's the things that can happen and we kind of just break it down like okay you're in the guard you're in the half guard you're across side you're in the mount and now you got their back and we kind of just show these different positions but it's a good methodical way to introduce this stuff going back to the book here one of the most popularized side effects of Jiu-Jitsu is an ego death.

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

I definitely, unfortunately, I saw this in the SEAL teams. I introduced hundreds of SEALs to Jiu-Jitsu. And there was a little bit of the bell curve. You know, there's some people that were like just in 100%. Some people are like,

yeah, it's cool. You know, I'll put it in the list of things that seems cool. And, you know, when you're a SEAL, there's a long list of things that seem cool. Shooting, jumping, diving, rock climbing, hunting, archery. Like, there's a whole bunch of things.

And it kind of, for, I realized this more recently that, like, there's a certain group of people on one end of the bell curve that they're going to be immediately obsessed with Jiu-J-J-T, and there's people on the other end that are going to never, they're going to avoid J-J-J-2 at all costs. But there is a group of people in the middle of that are kind of like, seems cool, kind of like it, you know. But the people on the far end of avoided.

Yeah, that's some serious mental gymnastics. Back to the book, back in 2010 when I walked into a community fitness center to learn MMA, my ego is flanked and assaulted. After all, with a fresh black belt and judo, the rank of master, what could a collective of white and blue belts do to me? The answer is to choke me from my back brutally and repeatedly. That's the way it goes down. You get into break falls, and then, you know, you talk about judo, takedowns, wrestling

takedowns and and explain those things and kind of what's important about them. And you talk about one of the things that's different about jujitsu. Look, in judo, you've got ip-on where if you get thrown, it's game over. If you get thrown on your back, it's game over. If you get pinned on your back, it's game over. In wrestling. How long do you have to hold someone on their back in wrestling, in judo to? It used to be 25 seconds.

Now it's 20 seconds unless you've scored a wazard. which is a half point, and then you have to hold them for less time, but I don't know exactly how much. So it's pretty quick. It's pretty quick. It's hard to get out of, yeah. So in judo, your back's on the ground, you're done.

In wrestling, you have three seconds, by the way, of your back being on the ground and you're done. In boxing or kickboxing, if you're backs on the ground, it means you just got knocked out and you're done. And you explain all the stuff in the book. And then you say this, when you compete in jiu-jitsu, you can instantly collapse like a jenga tower

and no one bats and I, often they expect it. Go ahead, lie down. Not only are you not losing, you could very well be on your way to winning. How is this possible? Well, there's the obvious reason, the rules. Unlike judo or wrestling, you're allowed to. But why are you allowed to? You're allowed to because the guard can be so dangerous when played properly.

It is both a defensive and offensive tool. The best guard players use layers of guard, angles, elevations and off balances to present an impenetrable barrier. Once the right moment comes, they can look for submissions of all kinds, sweeps that bring them to the top, shortcuts that bring them straight to the back. Alternatively, they can stall and let the passer get tired before making their move. The guard is the biggest technological advancement that the fighting world has seen in recent years.

The speed at which these techniques are advancing is staggering. Over the last 20 years, entire guard systems have been added or thoroughly refined. Just in the last decade, the widespread adoption of leg locks started a gold rush accelerating the development of new attacks. This can be a hard pill to swallow, but you can get very far in jiu-jitsu without ever investing in your takedown skills. Even with a recommended, well-rounded approach, it is critical to learn how to play guard because everyone ends up on their back. Even if your entire goal in life is to, quote, just stand up, and understanding of the guard is still crucial. So this is why, and I would, you know, this is I give a lot of this credit to Brazilian Jiu-Grisi of the Guard, of working from the bottom and being on the bottom and using that to win fights.

And this is something that I have had an argument 10,000 times with people that, you know, self-de-funds, you know, why would you want to be on your back? You don't want to be on your back. You don't want to be on your back. and if you don't know how to do if you don't know how to fight from your back you're going to be stuck on your back that's why you learn the guard

that's why you learn jiu jitsu because then you can utilize it the guard and the techniques of your guard to get away from someone get back to your feet and run away so at a minimum you need to understand how to do that and that is part of the thing that you explained in the book

I have to go into this here single leg X. Mimors, because we're talking about the guard here. You say single leg X or Ashi Garami. Which one is it? Both of these names describe the same position, and they both have their proponents advocating

for using one name or the other. So if you're a jiu-jitsu player, you're going to find this interesting. The single-led Xers will say something like, ugh, more Ashi-Salami. This has been called SLX forever, single leg X forever, since Marcelo Garcia has been wrecking people with it at 80ccs of the early 2000s. We've got X-Guard, and if you go from that to just one leg, it's single-leg X. Donahurst cringe for having a Japanese name for everything.

The Ashi Garamis will say something like, these uneducated peasants don't know that this leg entanglement has been used in Japanese dojos when the only color option for photos was still black and white. Single leg X has nothing to do with X guard. It's not even a guard. It's a leg entanglement. Sorry for trying to have a unified naming system for Jiu-Jitsu. Moderates, like the author of this book, will say something like, while the name Ashi Garami predates single-leg X and is more scalable, we can't deny that single-leg X is the predominant way to describe this guard for better or worse.

However, we can limit the use of single-leg X to the supine guard and use Ashi Garami to describe leg entanglements when both people are seated and exchanging leg locks. This is the only approach that can appease both groups and bring peace to this divided world. Yeah, lay down your A case, put down your oozy's. Let's just, let's be chill about it. And there's all kinds of like little things like that in the book that make it a lot of fun to read. The reason why I did that is because inherently a manual is going to be pretty dry, right? So I've read this book five times, which is about four times more than I would like to.

But it's really important to, it was really important for me to do repeatedly and in different ways because I wanted to see how long will someone who's not the author read this thing concurrently, right? And I realized that the best thing I can do is throw in a little bit of humor just to make sure that everyone is paying attention still. You know, it kind of like brings their attention back up. Because I wanted people to be able to consume it in different ways. One is cover to cover. That's fine. The other is to have it on your coffee table, open it up.

Today, a training I got wrecked from whatever position. Go to the table of contents, find that position, read it, and then put it back. And you can kind of jump around. But yeah, I think humor is important. The other thing I noticed in the book, too, is the images aren't bordered color background images. is they, the background's been removed. So the images of the people practicing the technique are jumping off the page,

you can actually see what's going on with the two figures interacting, which is super cool. What you do in those white background? Yeah, you know the studio that we have at Lidgen. Yeah, it's basically completely white. I don't think a lot of them, I didn't even remove the background.

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

Kerry chiming in. Because Echo Charles wasn't here. Yeah. You know, we were talking, I was telling you guys before we kick this thing off, this would have been the one of the seven podcast we've done where, you know,

Echo Charles might have added something. He's not here. He might have to write another book. He's on vacation in Hawaii. Damn. Fast forward a little bit. Passing the guard. I'm just hitting some highlights of the sections here.

This chapter will have a little bit of theory and strategy followed by a lot of weapons that we can use to enter this war on our terms. Before the defenses or an ambush are established, you'll learn a combination of tools that will work against open guards as well as approaches to specific guards for when we are unable to outright prevent them.

Certain guards like closed guard have a very simple user manual. Others come with an option exerting vicious pressure on the bottom player by negating their positions. And I, I actually, I wanted to read this little section here. An ode to pressure passing. I already didn't know who was going to be that. When you use a nice chain of distance passing attempts to defeat your opponent's guard, for example,

or tornado attempt to a near leg drag to a quick knee slice cut finish, you achieve the objective. You have a pin and you're competing, and if you're competing, three points for the pass as well. However, your opponent is not maximally demoralized. His spirit is not particularly drained. He may brush off your beautiful technique as a fluke. He may still be motivated to fight back, recover guard, and perhaps turn the tide.

Now let's compare this to pressure passing. Let's say you fight your way into a strong top half guard with a solid pin. You get a vicious cross face that's making it almost impossible for your opponent to breathe. He definitely cannot turn and you recover, he definitely cannot turn into you to recover guard. You have a strong underhook, a good base, and you're getting heavy on his chest. chest, taking your time, calmly breathing through your nose, you're slowly inching your leg out from the grasp of his legs, your opponent pinches your ankle with his thighs, holding on for dear life, gasping for error. You're in no hurry. You know that not only are you passing,

you're controlling and you're cooking him. At the end, you may not even have to add the finishing touch to remove the leg because he just wants the pain and discomfort to stop. As you can see, his soul leave his body toward the ceiling of the academy or gym, or gymnasium. You pass. This is very true. Greg Train passed my guard today. And he, because I had just been reading this yesterday,

and Greg Train is like super tight passer. And he gets, he takes your guard one millimeter at a time. And it takes him four minutes and 50 seconds of the round. But it, damn, it sucks. Yeah. One of the biggest things,

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

It's just like feel their body relaxing. And we're like, okay, this is a wrap that we're done. Next chapter is chapter five, front headlock and turtle. Here's your comments here. one of my main training partners at Legion is a gentleman named Sloan climber. His nickname is Caveman. And if you've ever gazed your eyes upon Sloan, you probably understand why Sloan and I have an interesting dynamic when we roll.

The dynamic goes as follows. If he gets me in front headlock, I lose. Mostly he gets me to front headlock from a standing position or when I play seated guard. I stopped shooting wrestling takedowns on him in 2022 because I was just making it too easy. The first way in which I can lose is a one-handed game. guillotine, the co-watcher that he specializes in, a cowcatcher, sorry, the cowcatcher that he specializes in. Sometimes it's an arm-in guillotine or even anaconda choke.

If you've ever watched a YouTube video of a Finnish guy crushing stuff with the pneumatic press, that's about what I'm experiencing several times per week. The second way in which I can lose normally occurs when my ego gets bruised from tapping and I stop caring about my head potentially getting detached from my upper tertio. Sometimes I escape, but then my massage therapist has to get involved. and I can't really check my blind spots when I drive my car for about a week. Yeah, Sloan is a freaking,

I was talking to him and Paige, his girlfriend, fiance, and we were just kind of like talking about head and squeezing. And I was, you know, saying that sometimes I know he's, he's like, yeah, you know, sometimes I'm thinking, damn, you know, like, is Jock gonna tap to this thing? And I was like, yes, you must be also thinking,

like, do I want to permanently injured this dude right now. Like, hey, he's not tapping. It's kind of on him to tap. Do I, do I just go ahead and break his freaking neck right now? Because that's what if he's been doing this thing lately where I don't know if he's done it to you, but he kind of gets his, he kind of goes underneath your head with his armpit from top position and then like grabs your lap and just starts torquing your whole.

Like my whole spine has been cracked. Yeah. My head, my whole, probably the top upper two thirds of my spine were all sore. Yeah. He also does this thing that I haven't really seen too many people do. The south north, choke. Yeah. It's crazy. So you get north-south on him and then he chokes you from the bottom. Yeah. He did that to me the other day. I was like, oh, I'm going to stop doing Jiu-Jitsu. Yes. I've rolled with everybody pretty much. And Sloan is like right up there with, as far as like squeeze goes and front headlock, I don't think too many people compare, you know.

Bro, I got a guillotine on him today and like had a little bit of half guard. a little bit like he like he was terrible and I was cranking as hard as I can and we got done he's like I'm like leaving he's like yeah man and like I tried everything like just trying to rip his head off his body he's and he's like yeah dude no that was good man that was uncomfortable I'm like cool bro cool I'm to go kill myself I actually laughed he goes yeah it was uncomfortable I was uncomfortable I go, oh yeah, sure. We're all uncomfortable. Don't patronize me, bro.

I would never tap, but discomfort was there. Yeah, you made me uncomfortable. Good job. Side control in North South. Our friends down in Brazil refer to side control as sem kilos, which means 100 kilograms in Portuguese. That's because this position should feel like something really heavy got rolled on top of your chest.

Now, 100 kilograms is a 220 pounds, so it's not even an absurd amount of weight to expect from an opponent. It can get worse. However, the name carries a meaning. Side control should feel heavy. Good position, good opposition, perhaps your coach or resident Matt enforcer will feel twice as heavy as they actually are. That's why defense starting with guard retention is so important. If that fails, the secondary line of defense will fall on frames and hip-scaping ability.

So a little bit of side control activity being heavy. You know Megaton? Yeah. I always thought that was going to like one of the best nicknames because Megaton is not a big guy. Yeah. And everyone said when you roll with him, there's a reason why his nickname is Megaton. He's probably what, 155, 165 maybe? Yeah, I would say 155 probably, yeah.

The stories I would hear about Megaton was just like, yeah, if he gets a cross-out. He's the first guy who competed as a coral belt in the adult division. Oh, that's right. Which is pretty wild. Yeah. Mackenzie turns out, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Got to give it up to the Brazilians.

They don't like us for the American Jujitsu, but I'll admit their nicknames are topnot. Like you know Buccecha? Yeah. That means fat cheeks because he used to be a little bit chubby. And now it's just like this heavyweight monster. So yeah, they have really creative nicknames. Gotta give it to him.

There's some cartoon character in Brazil whose name is Peta Pano, which means cloth foot. And there's a guy who looks like that cartoon character. Marcio Cruz. Yeah, yeah. Then Dean fought him. And I was reading some old, like, translated thing when Dean was competing in Brazil. And it was translated into English.

I didn't, it was translated in English, but it was translated, like, literally. And it said, like, the American is caught in his, in the cloth foot. And I'm trying to make sense of it. I'm like, what is this? Like, how is he got his foot if he's caught in a choke? And finally figured out, oh, the cloth foot. Got it. Yeah.

They're good with them. damn nicknames um you go into the mount and again you got i'm obviously i'm not going over all the detail of the of the positions that you go through but they're useful they're useful i like doing a little mental priming you know taking a look at like before actually was feeling this today i went to train i was like thinking about various things in the book when i showed up to open mat you know like get a little bit of that thought process going uh mount position Fast forward a little bit. Oh no, you no longer see the lights on the ceiling. His sweat-soaked rash guard is just a half an inch away from his chest as it starts to move closer to your face. Panic is

starting to set in. Next thing you know, you're struggling to breathe. Your nose and mouth are covered in a sweat-drenched polyester cloth. If your opponent whispered, where are the documents? You would think you're under advanced interrogation. But this is a gym. You're just being sweat-boarded by one of your friends. You committed no crimes or active terrorism. You simply made the mistake of becoming subjected to the worst part of the dominant grappling position. And you do have a note that says you've committed no crimes or active terrorism. The footnote is that we know of. Yeah. Yeah, the mount is, I've talked about this with one of our instructors, Andrews Bernosquez. He's a geese master. I talked to him about the hierarchy of position.

typically it's like mount and then back right the back is at the top of the hierarchy of positions but we were talking about how we both actually prefer the mount if if i had to choose like i'd say i'm going with someone that's that's better than me and i can start in the best position if i wanted to mount would be my my selection and there's different degrees of mount i was just talking about this yesterday when i was teaching class there's the mount where you're like sitting on someone it's not that tough to escape but mount where you have one head uh trapped together with one arm trapped together with their head that's brutal and then if you have two arms trapped double underhooks that's that's just hellacious yeah we call that snow angel snowing snow angel like dean calls it dope when he gets both

of those under there you know speaking of waterboarding freaking dean lister and i would do it to him but he did it to me more would like literally be mounted on me and and have like me in double Snow Angel or Snow Angel or whatever weird position. And he would be directing the sweat off of his chin, like into my ear. Bro. This is the most freaking savage,

hostile asshole thing to do. So humiliating. I've heard him talk talking to you. Oh yeah, yeah. Like while he's doing something else. Yeah, no, we'll talk smack for sure. And look, and I get payback on him. But yeah, he just, he has better control from that position.

And so he can like get really specific with the freaking sweat drops, literally aiming for my freaking earhole. You know how much it sucks to be like a grown man that's been training jiu-jitsu for 30 years and just have another dude just controlling you to the point where he can. to aim the sweat off of his chin or off of his nose into your ear. Dude, that's just, I bet there's a bunch of people that were fired up for jiu-jitsu until I just said that with that. Yeah. But it's good that you revealed your weakness because now next open mat, I'm coming in waterloaded. Like I'm, and I'm going to put that sweet sweat thing on my face just so it sweats more.

The funny thing is, I will show no, you echo can, like, I will show no reaction. Like, he'll be doing that and I'll just show no reaction at all. I'll just sit there and you know that's you got to give up something you got to give up like a temptation of you know an arm lock and and and then you got to hope that he's going to go for it because a lot of times he'll be like I'm not taking your arm he's like I'm not taking your arm sir he called when he's whenever he's freaking fired up he calls me sir like he'll be like no sir I cannot do that I have to stay here sir I have to make sure that this protocol gets completed sir i need to make sure that you are prepared mentally it's freaking what a freaking

freaking jerk yeah but um i'm trying to think of the the thing i will get i will when i get like in a good if if i have the upper hand for a day because that's usually what happens you know dean will beat me up five days in a row the six day i'll get the upper hand for whatever reason and when i get the upper hand, I just, I just like, grind, like, just smash and just torture him that way. I'm not as accurate with the sweat drops either. I think the longer it goes, like the older you guys are, the bigger upper hand you're going to have because of how much healthier your lifestyle is. Yeah, well, no, that's, that's, that is, I look forward to every year that passes because I,

you better, better against team. Every birthday is just a celebration of your power ranking going up. The only problem with that is the same thing happening with like my kids, you know, where I'm like, you know, my kids are just, they're also celebrating each birthday. They're like, you're getting old, old man. And they freaking go hard in the paint too. Damn, trying to rip my legs off. What, you know, it all comes out in the wash. Yeah, it's crazy how much that impacts like that.

When, when, if I can get Dean tired, you know, then I'll, then I'll have. have a chance when he's fresh as actually the one of the worst things in the world is if he's fresh and dry like no sweat is just it's one of the worst it's one of the worst like six minutes or eight minutes because takes me about eight minutes to start sweating takes me eight minutes but when he's dry and i'm dry god it's freaking awful that's one of the only things i've noticed about getting older is i used to not warm up i would literally like like oh what's time to train we're gonna go and just go and now I do around to get I want to break a sweat because I feel so freaking it feels so gnarly to not break a sweat yeah I don't know how I used

to do that for so many years I mean I'm I noticed that before we do like a J flow class at the academy I have to show up like 20 minutes 30 minutes earlier and do some mobility just get my my body ready around the warm up round is good but sometimes it's not good enough if you have you're going to be snapped down and stuff Yeah if I was doing stand-up No that's different If we're gonna roll cool You know I'm good with a five-minute warm-up

Round if I'm going to like We're gonna start standing I'm gonna be deep into swim I'm gonna be like three rounds four rounds deep You know like a 20 minute of warm up Before that activity is going down Damn that's just freaking Narly that dry

That's another thing is people like Oh yeah Dean with the ghee Like whatever No dude Dean Dean train with a ghee forever. And it's worse because now he's like gripping and there's no slippage. It's freaking awful. The geese like harder.

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

Like medium heavy, heavy weight. Typically you don't have that much of that. But in like feather weight and so on, you have a lot of that double guard pulling. And then you have to get really good at the inversions and berimbolos and so on, which is. it's totally expected because one of the best things about jujitsu is that it's undergoing this constant evolution where hey if you have an idea of a guard

that's going to work come on test it tested in training with good training partners go to a competition and test it and if it survives the test it's valid other people will start doing it immediately because everyone wants it's kind of like an arms race and that's one of the best things about jiu-jitsu and one of the things that makes it so effective

against other martial arts in a one-on-one fair fight scenario is that constant evolution. But it just goes in direction sometimes for some people just like personally you don't like that much. My example would be that like featherweight division from even blue belt up now, purple brown especially. You're just going to get a double guard pull and then there's going to be a play for advantages. Someone's going to invert and then there's going to be a counter to an inversion that's countered with another thing and that's going to result in something.

But yeah, and the ghee, I think, is just like honestly harder to master. So we just, I would just abandon it than the easier thing, which is still plenty hard. But just the thing that's hard, personally, I enjoy more, which is like stand-up, like wrestling, judo. And I mentioned Justin Flores, J-Foe earlier. It's crazy to me how much I learned about judo from him just doing those training sessions. Because I was a black belt before, but I had like mostly tricks that I was good at. and some big throws. But yeah, there's so much to incorporate into Nogi, I feel, still,

when it comes to Nogi judo especially. That's kind of like a frontier that's very exciting. Yeah, when I watch J-Flo's like Instagram and see clips of what he's doing and how he's doing it, it's such good three-four setups going on. And this is something I always explained to people is like, you've got to do two, three, four things to get reaction that you want you can't do one thing and generally speaking it's hard to just do two things

you can get lucky sometimes and do two things and it works but you got to set things up things got to happen um and you can see that he's got like whole freaking series of movements that all cause reactions and and they're not they're not uh voluntary reactions it's like if i do this to you and you don't defend it you're going to fall so you have to do this other thing which i'm ready for you to do and if you And if you don't defend that, you're going to fall. And by the way, if you do defend it, I've got another thing. And you can just get a quarter second or a tenth of a second or a hundredth of a second head three times, four times in row. And then your head.

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

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

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

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

Yeah, for sure. It's definitely fun. Actually, we spoke about the beginner course earlier. We purposefully do the beginner course in the ghee. And there's two reasons to it. One is that, like you said, self-defense. San Diego, everyone's rocking around in shorts and T-shirts or no T-shirts. And there's not that much to grab.

But if you go, we've done, with Kenan, we've done this a couple of times. We actually rolled in street clothes. And you can choke someone with a hoodie very easily, very similar to how you would do it with a ghee. But the other more important reason is having the geon, especially in the early going, slows everything now. So when you're doing the sparring, you're spending more time in those positions that you have to recognize. Like at first, you just have to recognize the position. The best thing you can do as a beginner, I feel like, it's like, say, let's say you get to your back, you're looking for half guard, you're looking for close guard, just recognizing them,

knowing what to do, half guard, get that leg through, lock their leg up, get an underhook and so on. That is like a key thing. And then we say, we typically tell people, like, now you have, you can either go the fundamentals curriculum route or you can do Nogi fundamentals because it's kind of like, if I have a ribby steak at home and a New York strip, I like both a lot. On some days I'll have one, and some days I'll have the other, but why would you limit yourself to one? And even to this day, like you said, we do a lot of Nogi, but every now and then, it's actually

super fun to pop in in the ghee and just do a couple of rounds with that as well. Just at the current time, if you're competing at a high level, it's, I actually admire the people who can do both, who do seasons, and then there'll be top, top level at both. because it's getting so difficult. You have to split your focus a little bit, and you kind of just have to pick the one that you like. Have you ever seen that choke? I think Henner Gracie's wife,

showing this choke, it's like a self-defense choke where the person's got a T-shirt on, and you roll the T-shirt up on their back, you pull it up on their back, and I just thought that was an awesome little move. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting one. Because if you're in San Diego, if you're in a T-shirt, you can still get choked

with a straight-up, Gie, cross-collar choke using someone's T-shirts. shirts don't rip us as easily as you would think. Yeah, it's, yeah, we did some, during COVID, actually, the month when we were closed, Keenan and I did some live streams where we were fighting in street clothes. One move that we developed, developed, discovered actually, that's crazy is how someone has a hoodie on, you grab both sleeves at the end, kind of like a spider guard grip. And then let's say that you're playing guard, which for soft defense, probably not the best idea. But with these grips, what happens? In the ghee, they kind of stay where they are.

Because hoodies are so stretchy, you'll actually end up being knuckle to knuckle still holding the grip. So we were kind of playing around. Kina got this grip on me. Wait, knuckle to knuckle with their knuckles? Yeah, because the sleeve will pull past the hand, right? So you'll be knuckle to knuckle. And then if you're on bottom, there's not much defense for the person on top. You can start up kicking them effectively. I'm super excited in the UFC every now and then there's like a good upkick. It's kind of cool to see. But the only defense there would be to remove the hoodie. Basically, you slink out of it and you get out of it. But yeah, there's some, there's some funny, fun stuff in there. Fast forward a little bit. Getting into back control. Anyone that has studied combat in any form

from historical large-scale battles to one-on-one fights will know that outflanking the opponent and getting behind them is a great way to go about it. In grappling context, getting on your opponent's back is highly effective because of how asymmetrical the position is. Our bodies have evolved to be effective in movements that have us facing forward until we start evolving another set of eyes on the back of our heads and our joints become omnidirectional. We will continue to have trouble defending chokes from the back. So, got to pay attention to that.

Get your priorities straight. one of my training partners wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. It features lessons and principles that he and his colleague learned during their stint as Navy SEAL operators and later leaders, both in the military and the business world. All of the laws of combat highlighted in the bestseller applied to Jiu-Jitsu, but the one called Prioritized and Excute might as well have been designed for thinking about defending the back. Because our opponent has such a compromised spot with full control over our lower and upper body, we need to arc. I need to achieve several things to escape the back. We need to clear the hooks, get the back to the ground, break the seatbelt, create distance from them, avoid them out while not getting submitted in the process.

If we fail to prioritize moves properly, it's very easy to get submitted. Priority, don't get strangled to escape the back. We need to get rid of the hooks. But if you reach down with your hands, your neck gets exposed and your toast. So what an incredible concept you have there. Yeah. I steal from the best. Yeah, I got asked, I was talking about, or no, someone come up and asked me about, hey, you know, you say that the four laws of combat apply to Jiu-Jitsu.

And I get cover and move because you've got to set up one thing and hit them from somewhere else. I get simple because you've got to have the good solid fundamentals. I get prioritized next week is what I just read there. And they're like, but how does, how does decentralized command fit into Jiu-Jitsu? You got any guesses, Miha? actually out of all of those four that would be the one that I would have to think about it a little bit more I've got the answer for you yeah so the answer is just like if you're my squad leader I want you to be able to make maneuvers out on the battlefield without me having to tell you what to do without you having to come back

and check with me so in jiu jitzu you want to get good enough that you don't have to think about the movements that you're making you want your you want your arm to move to escape the the triangle without having to tell your arm to move. And so you have to train and put trust in your limbs that you don't have to worry about it. And so it becomes a decentralized command where you, I mean, I get done rolling sometimes. I don't even remember what happened.

It's just all decentralized command. My body's operating in a zone without my, without me commanding it what to do. Sometimes I can go to the extreme work and become bad, just like freaking real life leadership. So, yeah, all the principles apply. I just remember that was actually my answer as well. I think the same thing.

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

the wrong thing. But yeah, you just have to make peace with the fact that when you're going to be in that firefight, like your body is just going to be doing things. So that's where you have to derive a lot of confidence from your training. Yeah, this is going to say, you have to, just like in combat, just like in a leadership position, I have to make sure that we've trained to the point where, Meehan knows if he gets flanked, he's going to do this, he doesn't need to come ask me.

That's my goal. I know that if we're training and my foot goes in a certain position on you, before I think about it, I've got to already be swinging my other foot inside, whatever, peeling it away. I got to do those things without thinking about them, because if I got to think about them, it's going to be too late. That's why we train. Fast forward to the submission section.

What is the submission? Submission is the ultimate goal of jihitsu, both in the ghee and without submission grappling is the best grappling. In wrestling, you're not allowed to go for a submission. God, I wish they just would unify everything together, and there's just one freaking thing. Oh, that'd be so awesome. In judo, you're allowed, but you're not allowed to spend any reasonable

a lot of time working towards a submission before you get stood up by the referee. In jiu-jitsu, we use wrestling and judo throws as just the starting point in a hunt for the tap. We want to secure a choker joint lock and force our opponent to tap out, aka, submit. The tap-out is the ultimate escape in every submission. provided that it is applied in training or competition.

Getting out of a submission by tapping out is not guaranteed on the streets. In the gym, cranking on a submission after someone taps out is a good way to guarantee yourself a bad time. The trust that originates from knowing that our training partners will respect the tap helps us train safely and at a higher intensity.

This is crucial as it keeps jiu-jitsu evolving and grounded in reality. And it goes even one step beyond that, where if you have a really good training partner and they have you in a spot where you're going to get hurt it might not even be a submission it might just be like a transition but even like a good training partner oh you got a big ego today or I got a big ego and miha catches my arm he's like oh well if jaco's got a big ego today he's just never going to be able to train again because I'm about to come here to him and

wreck his shoulder it's like no you're like hey dude okay cool um and you let go because you're a cool dude and you want to be able to train with me tomorrow yeah i'm like a pretty stubborn guy but sometimes i'll find myself in that situation i'll be like why am i why am i being addicted this guy because i'm putting him in a position now where he has to decide to to pop my my my joint or not you know like it's kind of it's not really a nice thing to do to a friend yeah uh we have the benefit of not having strikes and head trauma to worry about so practice can be pretty intense the objective is jih Tjit and that is you You know, Rogan says this all the time.

He's like, that's what makes jiu-jitsu so awesome, is you and me can train at, basically at 100%. I mean, I'm training at 100% with you until it's time to break your arm or until it's time for you to break my arm, and it's like, you stop. And that's what makes it so awesome. The objective of jihitsu is to launch someone into the ground

and find a way to break or choke them into submission. Despite that, we need to strive to keep good care of training partners. One of the best ways to do that is to apply, submissions with care and control, especially when going against smaller or less experienced training partners. I know when I trained with Dean all the time back in the day when he was competing, one of the things that we would do is like if he got me in an arm lock or he got me in a

foot lock or heel hook or whatever, he would hold it and it would give me time to like work through escapes that neither one of us knew. It was like, oh, what if I moved over here? Oh, what if I moved over there? And that's also improving his ability to hold someone and see what weaknesses their word of the submission. So doing that can be very helpful as well. And speaking of leg locks, you've got a section in here on leg locks. If you liken leglock technique development to the development of leg locks,

then you should know that the Manhattan Project unfolded over the last few years. not by physicists in a secret compound in the desert, but by a dedicated man and a group of athletes in a blue basement in the middle of Manhattan. No atoms were splitting as a result, but they did split a lot of ankle and knee ligaments. That's for sure. Leglock use exploded in gyms and competition arenas around the world

with an arms race unfolding during which athletes rushed to catch up on the newest technology to not get their legs broken. The biggest advance in the understanding of the mechanics and submissions came in the form of systemized leg entanglements and a particularly devastating and feared set of submissions heel hooks. As mentioned, heel hooks have had a complete renaissance since about 2013 and have become a mainstay in submission grappling. Just like with all grappling techniques, it's likely that someone tried to bend someone's leg in a painful way thousands of years ago, perhaps in about of pancreation in ancient Greece. As far as modern martial arts

concerned, they were first documented on a big stage in the 1990s in Japan with the legend Yuki Nakai using one at about 1993. They were using other bouts in Japan, often with what could be considered efficient, inefficient mechanics by today's standards. This changed when the American grappling star Dean Lister began using them to great effect throughout his career. He scored no less than nine heel hooks throughout his several 80-cc runs. His now famous saying, why ignore 50?

50% of the human body caught the attention of John Donahur, who is responsible for making heel hooks a mandatory tool in the kit of any high-level grappler. The Donaheer Death Squad, which he started once he shifted his attention from coaching MMA stars Chris Weidman and George St. Pierre used heel hooks to great success. His athletes went on an absolute tear, mostly of ACLs and ankle ligaments belonging to their opponents and this piqued the interest of any aspiring or even established no-gee grappler. Eddie Cummings, Gary Tonin, and Gordon Ryan and other athletes used heel hooks to great success as if they were sponsored by an orthopedic surgeon organization. As a result, grapplers from around

the world began intensely studying and copying the system and the defense to these formidable leglocks. You were talking about Yuki Nakai. if you go watch Shamrock versus Hoace Gracie and Shamrock sits back on his leg and Hoys Gracie, this is 1993, does like picture perfect defense. It's pretty surprising and pretty awesome that even back then he knew what was up.

It's pretty impressive. Do you recall that? I don't actually recall that. I would have to go look at it. I watch the fight, but I don't remember that moment. If you go watch it, if you go watch it, you'll go, oh, yeah, jaco was right. Like he, what did he do?

Basically. He was the foot off and kind of like, no, he defended even before that. Like, you could see Ken Shamrock sits back, starts to sit back, and hoist grabs his head and sits right up on him and ends up in top position. But it's the kind of thing we were talking about where he was decentralized command. Like he, someone had tried that enough to him that you could see. Just boom. It was like an instinct. It was very impressive to think that even in 1993, he had enough familiar.

If you go watch it, you're like, oh, yeah, this guy is defending it the way anyone today, any high-level glapaloo today would defend that. And it's very impressive to see. And Ken Shamrock was freaking no joke on those like heel hook submissions because, you know, he's coming from Japan and pancreation and all that. And they did a lot of those were being utilized back then. Yeah, with leg locks, the development is super interesting. And that was one of my primary reasons for first going to Warsaw because I knew that those guys were good. I actually finished some MMA fights as a white bolt with a heel hook. I remember we brought in this guy who won the ADCC trials.

He was a Finnish guy. And he showed us some heel hooks that by modern standards are not the greatest. But I was like, this is awesome. I've always liked the approach of it's kind of like a guerrilla tactic or it used to be now it's very much conventional but it used to be a guerrilla thing like I'm going to just attack your legs

I'm going to do something that's quote unquote dastardly but I'm going to win because that's what we want to do so when I was training in Warsaw I remember just taking pops every second second training that's how I learned but I was also 22 so I healed pretty rapidly I don't take that approach anymore but that was what attracted me to

the Dynaker guys as well because I was like this seems the math is pretty simple here either you leg locked the guy or you get a leg locked and I want to do things with my legs for a while. So yeah, that was super interesting and the speed at which everything developed and how quickly people caught up and then at the time when I was there the last time this was now five years ago or even more I remember them saying like John kind of said just to the to like the inner group. He was like, look, we're actually going to not really use leg locks as much anymore because other people have them as well. So we're going to let them attack the legs themselves and then just be so much better at them that we get counters to go to the back. So the counters actually became the techniques.

And then I'm sure that was the last I know of it. And honestly, I use a lot of the leg locks that I use, especially the outside heel hook, which I like, those are mainly what I learned back in those days. but just performed so many times that it's still my best attack. So I'm sure they moved like that further along. But yeah, those counters are kind of the key now. Because one of the things that I try to do with this chapter is really explain the leg entanglements and kind of demystified the heel hooks

because there's so much going on. And in the first part, we go into the theory of all the ashi-garamis, which is actually, I would imagine confusing when you read it for the first time. But that's kind of the point because you have to understand what exists out there. And then I try to make it simpler by explaining, like, look, you have outside heel hooks. You have inside heel hooks. And then when it comes to inside heel hooks, you have them from the saddle, 411 Honeyhole position. That position has way too many names.

We need like a conference where all the black belts come together and we're like, we're going to call it this. But that and then you have 50-50, right? And then you have variations of the 50-50. Backside 50-50. You have 80-20 scenarios. else. And those are pretty much it. And then from there, it's really about what are the breaking mechanics for each of those and how do you deconstruct the braking mechanics in the opposite way. I think I mentioned that in the book and I tried to say this as much as possible.

If you want to get better at Jiu-Jitsu, like let's say you're a beginner, the best thing you can do is just be more focused than everyone else are training. Because I know, because this sometimes happens even to me, but I'm sure it happens to a lot of people. The instructor is explaining something and people kind of trail off in their mind. They don't really pay attention. So being focused on what the instructor is telling you and then being focused on how you're performing it, that you're practicing it deliberately is huge. And then on top of that, you just reverse engineer everything that's being done to you as well. Because that's how you can learn defense to a lot of attacks is you literally just try to deconstruct it.

So with the heel hook, typically, you get control of the hip, you get control of the hip, you get control of the knee and then you get the bite on the heel. So if I'm defending a heel hook that I haven't seen before, if I immediately start hiding my heel first, prioritize and execute, get the control off of my hip, and then remove my knee from past the knee line, I've just performed maybe a defense that no one's shown me. And in jiu-jitsu, we talked about like all the different permutations

that you have of all the different moves. It's impossible, even if you have the best coach, even if you train twice a day, that you're going to see a solution to every single problem that you're going to face. Some things are just going to be weird. Like today, when you had me in that, jocco tapped me with a half of a triangle today, which I've been doing grappling for like over 20 years. It never happened before.

I really don't remember it. So I was being a little bit careless going for an overender pass. I got stuck in a half a triangle. The other foot was kind of like a butterfly hook still. And I was holding it on purpose so that he, he wouldn't be able to close the triangle. But he pulled my head down. I was too deep.

And then I guess lifting every day for 30 years kind of kicked in as well. And I just I just had to tap out. But when I was going through the solutions for that, they were different than most. And they didn't work. But they were different from what most triangle solutions would be at that point. You didn't stack me, which was weird. I honestly, I couldn't as much as I wanted to. You did a little bit in each time.

I kind of extended my hips a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, the thing that made that work was it was like insanely deep. Yeah. Like it was an insanely like your arm was so far across your neck. And then I had just a great like gable grip on top. And I was like, hmm, this seems like it could be a really bad position for you to be in right now. Yeah.

It was on one side of my neck was still not super closed off. But I was getting like literally choked. And then I had a little bit of like, a little bit of snot from my nose go in between into my airway and I had to tap. But yeah, when I defend triangles, one of the things that most people actually kind of dismiss

is a triangle is occurring because you have one arm in, one arm out. I like to call it the Superman, like flying through the air. So that's because that's why you're getting triangle. And what you can do is you can either pull that arm out and posture up and get out, which is kind of difficult to do. The other thing that people don't do enough is punch the other arm in.

So typically, let's say you had a more conventional triangle, I may have had an easier job escaping it because what I do typically is get the other hand in in the gap that's still there, kind of flail my upper arms to be, I mean my shoulders to be as wide as possible. Get a grip kind of like, you know, that jack that you used to fix a tire, expand the arms, and then at the same time get the top of my head. on the bottom of your chin stacking. And the idea is you think I'm uncomfortable, like watch how uncomfortable you're going to be right now.

And then like slowly work that open and then get the arm in and now you're in clothes guard, which is which is better. Boy, you wanted to get a triangle me off for the rest of that round, didn't you? Yeah, I like to do that. I like to do that. On you, on you, it won't, it won't work. But I like to do that against colored belts.

There's two things to do to protect your ego if you get tapped by a lower belt. One is you let them tap you two more times. Because if they say, hey, I tapped Mika once, that's believable. If they say I tapped Maha four times, no one's going to believe that. So that's one option. The other option is that I like to do personally is just go for the exact same submission. Because if I tap you with whatever after you tapped me, I died first.

So it's kind of, it doesn't count. Like it's not one one. It is one, but it isn't. You know what I mean? But if I get the same submission back, then it's like, I could have done this to you whenever I wanted. So that's what I do it. but it was a it was not a it was not going to work. You know what's interesting too is so I've got this thing that I talk about when it comes

to jiu-too is let's say the number I always use is 10. There's 10 things that you have to do correct to make a move work. And I can teach you like five of them. And the other five you have to learn for yourself. You have to try it. You have to, you know, where does it feel like to put the pressure? Because when I explained to you, hey, you need to put the pressure. here, that's, I can only explain it so well, you have to actually do it. So I can explain

five things to you. The other five you got to figure out on your own. But actually a little bit more detailed explanation is that different moves have a different number of components that need to be correct. And I always use the example of a straight arm lock. A straight arm lock is pretty easy to teach. There's not that many components that you have to do as far as finishing it. Like, look, you keep the thumb pointed away from your chest. You squeeze your knees together. and you lift your hips and you can kind of teach that to someone in in 10 minutes like in 10 minutes someone can learn and finish trying to teach someone to finish a straight footlock is going to be more difficult and now when you start getting into like a heel hook scenario there are a lot more components that you have to pay attention to especially when you get down the more advanced chain look of a simple heel hook if you don't know any heel hooks and I know and I teach carry a heel hook You'll be able to finish it. Like, yeah, it's not that complicated.

But once you start putting in the defensive elements, and now there's a bunch of little things that have to happen before you can get that thing. And also when you know those 14 or 18 components that have to be in place to make a heel hook work, well, now I can negate three of them. If I'm defending, now I can negate three of them. That gives me another second to negate two more. And if I get half of them negated, well, now I'm out.

So that's what I was thinking about when you were talking about, hey, it's the knee line, it's where my ankle is. It's like all these little components that you have to get right. And that's what I think is good about the book is it starts to break down some of these components where you go, okay, I know what I need to do here. And if I'm aware of them, I can survive them or I can apply them more correctly. Yeah. I think jih Tjitsu is at this like interesting intersection of engineering and art.

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

Like music, I once, like 10 years ago, I sang in my car and was like, shut the hell up, dude. Like, this is horrible. They never sing again. Like, I don't play any instruments, drawing, not super good. I guess writing could be one thing, but jiu-jitsu requires so much artistic expression. And it's also the funest one that I think that's something that's super fun. but you do have to get past a certain point

before you can really start expressing yourself with your own stuff. Yeah, I know I told you this before. I was thinking of what the forward was going to be to this book. I had a couple different things that I was going to put in. It just ended up being too long. But one of the things I was going to talk about is Jimmy Page, the guitarist from Led Zeppelin,

who if you watch him during Led Zeppelin, it's almost hard to comprehend how he's making these noises with his guitar, right? But the guy was a studio musician for decades where like since he was like a teenager, which is you go in, they tell you exactly what to play and you play exactly what they tell you to play. And you become a mechanic. You know, you become a person that's doing mechanical moves and you just follow the protocol that is in place. And that is, he was so highly disciplined and so highly technical that once he was let out into the free world. And, you know, Led Zeppelin's around.

It's like, yo, what is happening? So it's the same thing with Jiu-Jitsu. And listen, there's going to be different people that have, you know, more artistic minds in Jiu-Jitsu and people that have less. There's people that are champions that really aren't very creative at all. They're just really good at these fundamental moves. They're strong. They're athletic.

They're not going to win with a surprise move that no one's seen before. Other people very radically artistic. they kind of understand the fundamentals for a little while and then they're just off in their own world. Dean's definitely like that. I mean, if you think about what Dean was doing like with leg locks, he had a understanding that was, it was like a quantum leap ahead of everyone else. And I remember, this was a few years ago now, but it was after John Donner and the Donner Death Squad was just full core.

and it was kind of after they peaked and the split up it kind of happened and it was I asked Dean I was like hey have you seen anything that you don't know or when did you start seeing things that you didn't know

and he was like I was like I forget what it was but he was like oh it was about nine months ago he saw something and was like oh I didn't know and have you ever talked to Dean about Jiu Jitsu or like sat down and gone through moves with him yeah a couple of times

we were on the mats I would honestly pick his brain I was like, hey, what do you think about this? Yeah. It's weird, because he knows about moves that he, that he, I always give the example of, uh, Dars Chokes. He never does Dars Chokes. He doesn't really like Dars Chokes.

I was in a class with him one time and somebody asked him about Dars Chokes and he showed 39 freaking details on the offense, on the defense. And I was like, how does this dude know this much about a move that he doesn't use? So, yeah, he's got that, that vibe. of just super creativity. And there's a bunch of people like that now in jiu-jitsu that they're making stuff up. I mean, look at the stuff that Keenan made up out of thin air.

I was going to say he's like a good example of that. I mean, he's a genuine jiu-jitsu genius. I think in general his IQ is like super high. But to come up like I've never, I've come up with like three moves of my own. You know? I'm the same. I got like four moves. I think I'm one better thing.

I've just been squeezing people for a long time. in the right ways to be decent at it. And isn't it weird when they come up with something and it seems so obvious? And yet you've been doing jiu-jitsu for 30 years and you're like, oh, I've never done. Dean was teaching a self-defense class a couple months ago and he showed some defense to the guillotine

to like a standing guillotine. And I was like, but I've been doing this for 30 years and I didn't think of this dumb-ass move that you just showed. Like, it's crazy. Yeah. Art science. that's what I ended up going with in the in the in the forward but all these ideas were in my head because it's true and if you don't know the fundamentals and if you don't have the

framework too a lot of learning is about context and this is one thing that's very the better you get at jiu jihitsu the quicker you on board new moves because when you're teaching someone whatever when they're a beginner there's no framework for them to put that thing into it's like a brand new seed that has to be planted and grown once you have context and you're just putting this into the matrix with everything else you can just pick up new moves there's times when you got a good student that you're teaching and you teach them something and they go use in a tournament like that day yeah that's awesome but that's someone that has some experience and they already have a good framework to put the moves on and that's what

i think is going to be very helpful about this book is giving people this really solid and and pretty intricate framework that then they can just use to post moves on to and apply the the art to the science. You know, it just gave me an idea because I refer to this like a sort of a mind map. What I'll do before this book even comes out, I'll actually make a mind map that follows the structure of the book and put it on the website with those videos because I think that's useful because you, for example, guard, seated guard and then it has offshoot's, seated guard, supine guard, it has different offshoot.

That is, that's how I like to view it and having that blank to start, you go to class, regardless of how good your instructor is or the kind of environment that you have, you can go and take those moves and put them in the right spots on that mind map. I think that could be, it could be useful. Very beneficial. Leglock safety here, going back to the book. Leglocks, especially heel hooks, get a bad rap as dangerous techniques. This leads to some avoiding them because of fear simply, never engaging in sparring or competition where heel hooks are allowed as a strategy, but will make you less complete grappler. I started training heel hooks because of how scary they are. When they started to get popular, I was a blue

belt and even as a relatively immature grappler, I realized that avoiding them will not be a strategy I can use. I deduced that since I'm terrified of getting my legs twisted and mangled, I should learn these techniques early and use them against my opponents first. Start practicing them with a trusted training partner, with a trusted training partner, preferably someone that is versed enough to tell you when to tap. If you are versed in leg locks, reserve cranking on them for competition. In training, you should be locking the submission up, for example, control the leg and capture the heel for a heel hook and then look your training partners in the eyes. This is one of the few times in Jiu-Jitsu when you can make eye contact. If they are completely obvious to the danger they're in, let

the go of the submission, move on to something else, perhaps get on top and pass their guard. After the round, you can explain how you save them a trip to their favorite orthopedic surgeon. This method of training is sometimes called catch and release. And I wish I would have caught this. we maybe we can add it now. There's another thing about leg lock safety and heel hook safety. Arm lock, when someone gets an arm lock on you, it hurts. When someone gets a straight ankle lock on you, it hurts.

When someone gets a straight knee bar on you, it starts to hurt. The thing that, one of the things that makes people consider heel hooks dangerous is they actually do not hurt. They actually don't hurt. They don't hurt. And so there's no, you don't go, oh, no, this is hurting.

I better tap now. they just don't hurt and then they go pop. And so that's why you really need to be careful with them. Because I actually, I hurt one of my buddies doing a heel hook. This was like, I was a blue belt. But I put a heel hook on one of my buddies and, you know, we had been training. And I trained. He didn't really train.

And so I armed locked him up. He was tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping, tapping. And I get a heel hook on him and he's not tapping. And I'm like, start cranking a little bit. but he's not tapping and it popped. And I didn't even crank it hard, but it popped. And I was like, uh, that's not good. And it wasn't his ego because I already tapped him out nine times.

And what it was. And that's when I realized, oh, these things don't really hurt that much. And so you got to be careful with that. Yeah, we like to teach Sloan, for example. He does a lot of the Nogi classes. He, we typically put in the curriculum for beginners, heel hooks as well. because it's important for people to know the positions and then also know kind of like when it's going to end. And I think it's actually better to do it that way than to have kind of like an avoidance.

They don't get mentioned. And then someone's going to go on YouTube. They're going to see a highlight. They're going to maybe try it on their buddy at their roommate or whatever. And then come try it in training. So I think it's kind of like maybe gun safety where I think it's really beneficial to do a little bit of training. just do you understand the normal stuff you know like keep your finger off the trigger don't point it at anything you don't want to shoot and so on so yeah that especially how big they are now in no gear at all

levels i don't really like to see them banished to the upper belts it doesn't make as much sense anymore i think to do that yeah i'm a full supporter of heel hooks as long as people understand them another thing is sometimes i think people if they aren't well verse they see heel hooks as a solution to the game as opposed to part of the game and for me heel hooks like that you're going to meet someone that doesn't that's going to be very good at getting out of heel hooks and if you don't know how to pass their guard it's not going to work and you're stuck so you it's part of the game it's not a game changer oh yeah you'll get a big dopamine hit if you specialize in heel hooks and you get better than most people you'll be tapping you'll be tapping you'll be tapping people that are better than you.

That's how I got started in heel hooks because I realized I did a couple of competitions open. I was a blue-purple-belt, and I would tap black belts with them, and I was like, this is awesome. But luckily I had the type of mentorship, as far as coaches go, where they were telling me to not just do legless.

There's actually a really funny... There's a clip of me doing a kneebar. Have you seen that one where it's kind of like a quick sit-back? It's on my Instagram somewhere. Every now and then it goes viral because the guy pulls the Lejiva, he doesn't have good grips, and then I basically just like super quickly sit into Ani Bar, and it goes viral every now and then a page will post it.

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

But you really, really have to have the coaching to tell you, hey, you need to develop all of this. Like for example, in the book, every area that's in there is something that I would recommend people develop at the same pace. not focus on one, even though you're going to get a reward. Because in the long run, you'll kind of prevent yourself from having solid fundamentals if you just go for leg locks. Plus someone, you're going to run into someone who's better, and they're just going to smash you. Because the thing, especially if you're going from bottom, if you put so much effort into heel hooks, you're going to have to take some training away from somewhere else.

And typically what we see is it's from stand-up. So you're going to pull guard. You're going to be on bottom. And then the other counter to leg locks besides sticking the back is just a vicious smashing, just getting into like a leg weave position and just smashing people. So yeah, it's not going to work out super well. Yeah. And it's good what you were pointing out about Donna Her like obviously.

It's real obvious now. But for a little while it wasn't that obvious. It's like, oh, these guys don't just do leg locks or just do heel hooks at all. Like freaking Gordon is badass all over the damn mad. And Dean's the same way. Like Dean was very good. I mean, he was exceptional at everything. But he was like, you, like, dude's putting his foot out there.

He's going to rip it off. So, yeah, you've got to be well-rounded for sure. Getting into a conclusion here, you can only fight the way you practice. That's Musashi quote. You've got some notes in here. Find a good academy. And we've talked about how to fight a good academy on this. Yeah, for sure.

It's easier now than it ever has been. But like I said, there's different vibes, by the way. There's different vibes. There's different types of schools. Maybe you just want to, maybe you want to compete. Maybe you don't. Maybe you want to do ghee. Maybe you want to do no-gi, but you got to find the right place.

I would mention one thing on that is the whole proximity of the academy to you. I think Jiu-Jitsu near me is the most searched keyword by people when they're looking for J-Jitsu. I had to do a little bit of research on that. And Jiu-Sitza near me is a continuum, right? Let's say you have, I don't know, you want to play basketball. There's a YMCA next to your apartment that has basketball, but also, I don't know, Kobe Bryant, RIP has his own Mamba Academy 20 minutes away. Now, two minutes versus 20 minutes. The decision is like, are you going to go for quality?

Are you going to go for proximity? And look, like the main thing, again, with doing jiu-jitsu is you're not going to get better if you don't go to classes. So you have to build the habit of going to jiu-suitzoo. That's going to be a lot easier if you find something that's either near to your work or to your house. So there is a question to be asked there. But you really want to think about the quality and like seeing, like you said, different people are attracted to different things. You want to find that. Yeah. You got to put it in the calculus. You know, put it in the calculus. Like two minutes, bro, that's hard to walk away. It's hard. It's hard. Even if it's like, you know, the high school

coach is like teaching the basketball there and you're like cool i'm going to go learn from him but i can train for an extra 40 minutes a day or i can go to the mom academy now listen let's face it if if you got like exceptional training it's going to be worth that so but you got to put it into the calculus you know usually it's something you know like you got to put in the calculus if you're if you're going to a place like what you said this kind of struck me when you said you were looking at the clock to see when your judo practice was going to be over if that's how you're feeling at your academy that's probably not a great sign you want to be like excited to go there and you know when your wife's like hey what time you'd be home from training today and you're like

well I'll try and be home by such and such a time but there ain't no guarantees because not only I'm going to just keep doing rounds but then when I'm done doing rounds like we're going to be hanging out because I just that's what we're doing yeah so that's um you got to put in the calculus finding a good academy and and I always say try a couple different academies you know because you've got to find the one that you're looking for. Also, um, just,

just go in there with an open mind. You know, I don't think Jiu-Jitsu should be a religion. Uh, and I've said since the beginning of this podcast, like your instructor's not a god. It's a person. So don't,

don't, just watch out if it gets a little crazy. Like we're not, we're not trying to get you into a cult here. We want you to learn a cool way to work out and train and stuff. We don't want you joining, um, if washing your instructor's laundry is,

requirement for the purple belt maybe switch again yeah hey unless you're um a person that can't afford the tuition right because sometimes people get breaks because they're in there cleaning the mats and and you know like that's the way it is okay well there's something to put in the calculus but you shouldn't yeah you shouldn't be um pledging allegiance just be careful that kind of thing uh practice on your own if you're truly committed to the progress just showing up to class even the top of line academy will not be enough regarding practice methods. A fierce debate exists in the jiu-jitsu community. It is those who believe in technique repetitions, also known as drilling,

versus those who believe the ecological approach, which relies on games and situational training. In my personal opinion, a combination of both is optimal. Explain the ecological approach, because this is kind of a rage right now. Yeah, it's super, super popular at the moment. So there's a couple of people that are proponents of it, And I think they make really good points as to the merits of it. So it would be the main thing about the ecological approach to my understanding.

I don't want anyone in the comments to go nuts at me here, but is to teach through constraint-based games. Right? So you and those games with pretty much every academy that's any good, there's some specific sparring. But this goes beyond that. So it's like a little bit more specific because specific sparring will be, all right, we're doing around.

we're starting from mount if you get to a submission the back or if the person escapes the round is over restart there but yeah you can go deeper you can be in a position just like hey the objective is fight for the underhook whoever wins the underhook here wins and I think there's a lot of merit to it but it does I do get a little bit of a vibe from the ecological people kind of like the vegans of jiu jih Tzu where it's like if someone's into the ecological approach you'll know when they tell you they'll tell you for sure so I don't want to

I don't want to diss them too much because I think this is, look, I'm all for talking about methodologies in Jiu-Jitsu. And a lot of the coaches at my academy, they are actively studying the stuff and they're incorporating it into the lesson. So it's definitely really good. But maybe because I'm coming from a judo background where it's too much drilling, I see some merit to it. I think certain things you have to perform first a couple of times.

You can take anything. If you take it to an extreme, it can become a negative. One of the things you got in here is skipping warmups, warmups and technique. Then mindlessly going to war, inspiring has got to be the worst way to practice as it does not include the vital component problem solving. I'm super hypocritical here. This is, well, no, I felt like this was actually directed at me. I took this personally. Because as you know, I'd just love to roll.

If you've put in more than 10 years, let's say you get the opportunity to do that. Yeah. Do you think that's, like I know you say that jokingly, but is there, how much merit is there to that? I think there's some, right? Like you've, the warm-ups, after you've done more than 10 years of jiu-jitsu, you probably understand how your body works, which you need to warm up.

And if you know the two rounds of going kind of easier and then you can ramp it up is what you need, that's probably solid. As far as the technique portion, it's definitely good to still participate, especially if you're learning from some good people. But it kind of depends. Are you doing jiu-jitsu?

to prepare for a competition and get it a lot better, or are you doing it because it's your favorite hobby in the entire world and you want to get a little bit of fun in? In that case, I think you're fine just doing that. But also it helps if you bring some kind of intent to the training. I try to do this. It's like I'm maybe trying to play a different guard, and I'll try to use this guard a little bit more.

If I end up on top, I'll try to use this type of passing. And from the dominant positions, I'm looking at maybe one submission that I'm trying to do, so I have some intent coming in. But yeah, it's definitely, I'm always impressed when I see higher level people go participate in someone else's class. Yeah, I kind of use time as an excuse sometimes, but definitely, definitely worth it as well. My recommendation is do it all, you know, do the drilling, do the training, put them together. Yeah.

Jiu-jitsu is, to paraphrase, 10th planet black belt Joe Rogan, high-level problem-solving with dire physical. Consequences. Jack. Think about this stuff on and off the mat, staying focused and thinking about ways to improve will help you progress faster than others. You can repeat movements in your mind when you're in a boring work meeting. When your boss is talking about the TPS reports, you can identify patterns in your training that present the biggest room for improvement. That is pretty impressive how thinking about Jiu Jitsu can make you better at. Enjoy the journey. Don't feel pressured to rush towards mastery in Jiu Jitsu. Everyone I know who's achieved the highest echelons of the sport agrees that there is no finish line. You're always learning new things as the evolution of the sport is rapid.

The best black belts of the 1990s would have a terrible time against the purple belts of the 2020s. Yep, most of them. What do you think about Roger Gracie though? Hodger Gracie. He's not 1990s. He's 20. Yeah, I guess if you went back to 1990s. I think Kenan got into a little bit of controversy at one point where,

he said that a purple belt would beat Hickson or something like that. And honestly, like, I haven't, Hickson is one of those guys. Like, obviously I know him. Obviously, I respect him. I know what he's done and so on. But I haven't really studied him that much. I just wasn't in that era where I would get a lot of his stuff. So I don't know how much of the mythology to believe.

But what I have experienced are top level, purple belts at highly competitive academies who live in the back of the academy they have nothing else to do and maybe they're also from like a poor socioeconomic background where this is their chance and i know how good those guys are and it it would be and i know that they got that good because of the level of training that they have right now so i think plus they have like barren bolos they have all kinds of techniques that just didn't exist back then so I think that would probably be accurate honestly um did keenan ever trained with hickson I don't think so I trained with hickson yeah I'm gonna say that I believe keenan is wrong oh yeah um I had not felt anyone that felt like hickson interesting um yeah he he was a

different and I mean he's obviously not in his prime anymore he he was a different kind of human yeah um felt like Oh Weird like drowning scenario where no movement is doing anything No none of my movements are doing anything No progress of any kind

Only only only falling in drowning deeper Hickson was Hickson There's a reason that Hickson has the aura that he has Yeah he's not he's not normal and and I think you know when you have people there's people that are going to be naturally gifted at certain things and and they're they're mutants and he's one of those people and then he happened to grow up in the Gracie family you know what I mean? Yeah it's like wait how do you oh you're one of those people that's a mutant who has this physical capability and this mind-body connection and like a.

deep understanding because there's some level of understanding the way the body works the way the movements work and having a really deep understanding of that and you have all those things and then you grow up in the Gracie family

so yeah my experience would be I would be very impressed with anyone yeah like a purple belt yeah and I know hey and all you purple belts out there props the thing I do think obviously like you have first-hand experience and I so many people have said that Hickson is different that like I wouldn't I would negate

that I would wish I had the opportunity to roll with him on his prime that would be an awesome experience but the purple belts the best purple belts of today some of them you could put in the black belt division of today and they would win matches so that's yeah I can only speak to that but yeah it's just is it true you think that Hicks the they put Hoysen to the UFC instead of Hexon because he would have made it look too easy. I heard that, that they put Hoyson

because he was a little bit lighter, a little bit, yeah, less intimidating. Hoise, you know, Hoyce was smaller and, and I think it was probably a little bit of, and Hoyce was just on Rogan's podcast, and he kind of talked about this, and I figured exactly what he said,

but part of it was also, in my opinion, would be like, hey, look, if anyone happens to beat Hoyt Hoise, we were going to bring out Hickson. Yeah. Okay, I got Hickson. Then it's like, you know, we'll watch what happens. Yeah.

Even like Hickson was, he was on the podcast, so it was maybe like a year ago or something like that. And we were just playing around afterwards. And, you know, he's got some pretty significant physical ailments right now. But like, you know how when you train with someone that you don't know? And as soon as you lock up with them, you kind of, you can, you could make a really good prediction of what's happening. Yeah.

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

um, some understanding, some connection. Really. That's what it is. And actually, let's face it, he calls it invisible jiu-jitsu. He talks about invisible jih Tzu. He has some connection to the whole thing that's different. Yeah.

How crazy it is, and most people that don't do jiu-jitsu, can understand that within 10 seconds of gripping up with someone, you can kind of know. And let's say it's stand-up. I get an underhook on you and you do something, 10 seconds. I have a really good estimate of how good that person is. And I don't know how that works, like how that information gets transmitted.

But even in matches, I've had situations where I was like, I gripped up with someone and I was like, oh, okay. Or I was like, oh, damn. Okay. You know? Yeah, that's wild. But yeah, you can see that even in training. You lock up horns with someone and you kind of know.

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

is going crazy. And Hickson's like unfazed. Yeah. Oh, this dude that's a black belt, he's unfazed. Like, he looks the same. It's pretty freaking crazy. It's impressive when you can handle anyone at any time. The one person that I felt like that was Gordon because I did quite a bit of training

with him and I just like never got close to a submission. One time he let me extend his arm and kind of like an arm bar and it didn't work. Couldn't make it happen. So yeah, it's crazy how, yeah, you do build an aura from just like doing that to so many people because it's really difficult. And a lot of these guys, like the highest level guys, they'll do seminars and then roll with everyone. I try to do that when I teach seminars just to like give people more of a more value as well.

And being able to handle anyone on every day is like super difficult because if you do it long enough, you'll have a bad day, you know. Yeah, Gordon looks very unfazed when he does jujitsu. Yeah. I mean, he looks very unfazed. He looks very just like he has. has a deep, deep understanding and connection to the game. You say don't quit.

And then I'm going to close out the book here. And you say, in my book, which I thought was funny. You say, in my book, meaning like the proverbial, hey, in my book, where you say, in my book, you can't go to the grave without a few scars to show for a life well-lived. but more importantly, if you stick with Jiu-Jitsu long enough, it will show you who you are, who you really are. Through dealing with arm bars and cross-faces and heavy mounts, you will subconsciously learn many things beyond the physical movements.

Lessons you wouldn't expect to learn in a padded, sweaty room filled with strangers and your best friends alike. See you on the mats. So that's how you wrap it up. And I was thinking when I saw that, you know, when I read that, you will learn many things beyond the physical movements. And that is certainly true. I know I've talked a lot about them, about the things you learn from jih Tzu beyond the physical movements. Maybe that's your next book.

Yep. Jiu-Jitsu will help you with everything. Yeah. I've been thinking about what to write about next because this, writing this whole book was definitely like the, I was trying to compare it to my master's thesis when I wrote that. And I think that was, I thought they were going to be comparable, but I realized that this is probably, the master's thesis was a fifth of this.

And it was a lot more difficult, but I mean, you've had so many people on here that have, to make that look like a Post-it note. So I don't want to be like some kind of like, no-it-all author. You know, like, it's not even hot yet, my first book. But I realized that, that I really enjoy that sucks.

of writing it where you know you have halfway to go, but you kind of enjoy how much it sucks and how much more there is to do that grind or like going against resistance, as I mentioned earlier. But yeah, I was thinking about what to write about next. One thing that I want to write about at some point are the concepts of jiu-jitsu because there are concepts as far as like what you can learn

from jiu-jitsu that goes beyond the mats. And then there's also concepts that can help you with everything that's in this book. This is a position-based book. So you go based on a position. So what are the concepts that you can apply to any position? Just to give you like two examples. One is, and most people don't know this until someone tells them,

use all of your limbs at all times. Very hard for some white belts to understand, especially in the early going. Like one arm won't be doing anything. At all times in Jiu-Jitsu, you should be doing something with all of your limbs. And then your head as well, because especially if you have a thick neck,

that's like a fifth limb. All right. So that's one thing. The other, for example, is... That's actually a stage of progression. Like,

a person that uses their arms and their legs go limp is a different person than someone that's using their arms. And while they're using their arms, they're also using their legs to get out, like of the mount, right? Even the basic, like, when you first learn the mount escape,

it's like, do this with your arms, then do this with your legs, then do this with your body. Someone that's good is doing all those things at the same time. And that's like a step change in how you're playing the game. Yeah, let's say you're escaping the back. Someone has a body triangle on you.

You'll have to do so many things at the same time. So first have, obviously, you're controlling the choking arm. You're thinking about what the other one is doing because typically when you have one kind of under the chin, you can swap it with the other. And then with the lower body, you have to use your legs and your feet. like arms to disensemble the body triangle

and you have to do everything in the same time so there's a lot of it's actually really fun to another example of decentralized command by the way like I've got one squad moving forward I've got the other squad moving to the flank and this is what we're doing on Jiujitsu you got your arms doing one you got one arm doing one thing one arm doing something else and your leg is doing

another thing and your other leg should be doing something else either supporting the other one or what so there's a lot of things that have to be happening and this is also one of the biggest benefits of Jiu-Jitsu beyond on, like just being able to defend yourself or whatever, is that you are so in the state of no mind. You're so in the flow. When you're engaged at that level, you can't think about anything else. And we all have this piece of silicon and metal in our pocket where teams of engineers that are the most highly compensated people on the planet, they're using SIOP level technology

to addict you to not be present in the moment and just be scrolling through it. So I think everyone that that goes on the mats and starts doing jiu-jitsu, when someone's choking you, you can't think about your taxes, your relationships, your boss, the war in insert place here, you can't think about any of it.

So that gives you like a little reprieve from that craziness. And especially the way things are going with like AI and all that stuff. I think it's just going to get crazier. So doing something primal where you can go to the mats and you just hang out

to get that sense of community of a tribe. That's why I think in a Jiu-Jitsu Academy, the vibe is so important. It's hard to put a finger on what it is, but if you're an academy owner, you have to create it so that people enjoy being there. So yeah, that's, I think, one of the biggest benefits that comes from that engagement. And the other example of a concept that I would give is, for example, if we're in a scramble and I want to prevent you from standing up, I need to grab your feet and make sure that you don't put them on the ground. It's impossible for you to stand up if you can't put at least one foot on the ground. And that can be from the guard. That can be from a scramble. That can be from a from a takedown.

So yeah, that's where I think there's there's room to write something. Something new. Yeah, conceptual jiu-jitsu. I know that's something that Dean was always very focused on. Everything to him would be like, he would be teaching a class and he'd tell me like, hey, here's the thing going on over here. like this four corners principle he had all kinds of little 50 calp he had all kinds of little principles that he would talk about a lot i might actually have to talk to him no he would be he would be great for that because he that's the way he thinks um so is that get us up to speed it's kind of what we're doing i think so yeah um so where can people find you you got legion san diego dot com that's for the academy yep uh the book no gee manual dot com yeah as people heard i've i've i've had

some experience-making websites so I made that one you can get all the info even a free chapter I would recommend just grabbing the book but you can get a free chapter if you don't trust that it's good after us talking for hours here about it and that's where the videos are going to be so two different kinds of videos the demos and then the full no-ghi video manual where you can actually see me teach and I'm also I noticed that I've been building this at the moment and I noticed that the video manual course software thing also has the option to create a community. So for those people that get the Nogi video manual, you'll have the option to ask questions

about it as well and get some extra insight. Instagram, Legion underscore AJJ and you're on Instagram as well at Miha JJ. We're training. We're getting after it. We're going to need some fuel. Some jaco fuel. Some jaco fuel. Kerry come in.

Kerry, welcome aboard. Jock Fuel, official sponsor of the Craig Jones Invitational. Indeed. There's going to be some broken activity. Mihal, what's your protocol? What's your Jock Fuel protocol? Well, today we trained, and I had the trifecta after training. Hydrate, milk, and then doing the podcast, I go.

I'm highly caffeinated today. Yeah, I've been ever since you came out with the drinks, Which honestly, I think it's kind of funny because in those first podcasts, I think there was a question where I think Tim Ferriss asked you if you ever do caffeine. And you said something like, I might be completely getting this wrong, but something like, yeah, when I would drive through the desert in a Humvee, I would have a Red Bull or something. And now you have like one of the fastest growing energy companies, which is kind of funny. But yeah, I've been buying these for the academy for a couple years now and we consume a lot of them. In my office, actually, I have a corner because I got lazy throwing all of the cans away. I have a corner tower of empty cans that's like three wide going all the way up to the ceiling.

So yeah, definitely a fan of it because caffeine is cool. I typically, what I typically do in the morning, I wait an hour to 90 minutes before I have some caffeine. So typically get some water, electrolytes, like maybe the powder, and then put some creatine in there just so I don't forget. During the day, drink that, drink some more water, then get some caffeine in. I'm a big coffee guy, a coffee snob. So I try to do two portions, like 200 milligrams of caffeine. I don't really want to go beyond that. So coffee, and then when I get to the academy, typically before training, do a go.

but never really after afternoon because then I can sleep and yeah I've been smashing the RTD mokes for a while now have you tried the coffee or TD milk yeah I have yeah actually I actually like it so I don't typically drink that one because I I like my coffee you know from like the in the black yeah you're doing some kind of like coffee snob scenario yeah I used to do like the pour overs but I got a machine now that does it's very important to do the bloom first. If you don't do the bloom, you get a really bad coffee. So the bloom, the bloom is where you put the ground coffee in and then you pour just a little bit of water over it. You wait 30 seconds. It lets the coffee bloom and then you pour the rest over. So I used to do that by hand,

but then I did the math of how much time that takes me every day. And then I did the math of how much the machine costs. It does that already. So I just bought that. So that's how I get my, That's how I get my coffee and it has to be single origin. It has to be from Costa Rico or like a place like that. Yeah, that's typically the coffee. But it tastes super good. If I was the type of person who would go to Starbucks and get like, I don't know, like whatever cold brew or something, it tastes. No, it tastes really good.

People like coffee, even coffee snobs dig that milk. So, yeah, JoccoFuel. Jocofuel.com. Check it out. How's that hydrate situation at your house now? Have you like stabilized the consumption? Yeah, we're like when we first started getting the bottles of hydrate, my whole family was just going ham.

And it was, you know, like everyone drinking, because everyone, quite frankly, everyone in the family's getting after it. I mean, everyone's training in jiu-jitsu. Everyone's lifting. Everyone's working out. Everyone's like sauna activities. So everyone's, so, you know, we got a lot of people in the family. So if everyone's drinking like three, four of these things a day,

that's like 15 to 20 hydrates getting drank a day and I had to put the kibosh on my family be like yo like use the powder because we have hydrate powder yeah if you're at home and you're going to be at home just what we're doing right I'm doing right now is I'm saving the bottles and just putting them in the wall putting them filling with water put him in the fridge and then pull out the powder because bro you know like the world's not made of money you know what I'm saying so if you got a family that's consuming like two cases of high hydrated day. That's a little out of control. Get them on the powder. But yes, we got it, we got it contained. Right. The scenario contained. The full palate.

Yeah. I mean, you might, you know, ran to my daughter. She's training. She trains in the morning at Victory. She trains at lunch at Legion. She trains at night at Victory. She works out in between those things. She'll drink four or five these things herself a day.

And I get a text from her at 8 o'clock at night. Can you turn on the sauna? Like, oh, you're going to come home in sauna. What are you going to do when you need that? She's going to have a hydrate on the way when she's walking up in the sauna, gets done, have another one. Freaking losing her mind. Yeah, I do. Put me bankruptcy over here.

I had to put the kibosh on myself. I'm limited to two now, two a day. Yeah. After the gym, I usually smash one, like, you know, because I do the sauna after the gym. So I got to get that hydrate when I get home. And then in the afternoon, you kind of want that something tasty. Yeah. See, what's getting the fruit punch one?

Yeah. The fruit punch one is so. good tasting that that's like a post dinner what are the you're European what do do they drink they have like a special wine that they drink that's sweet at night when they get done with the meal it's like see that's what my hydrate is for me right that's my high class you know I forget what the things called I'm not into into alcohol yeah it's they've been really popular at the the gym especially in the in the summer you have to you have to get electrolytes and I think a lot of people know that now

Yeah. And the electrolytes that we put in there is perfect. And, and, you know, look, doing the, doing the no artificial sweetener is such a big deal. It's, it's a game changer. So I got interviewed the other day by like an industry magazine or an industry website. And they're like, well, don't you think you're going

into a saturated market with these problems? I was like, no, we have a monopoly. We have a monopoly on these markets because we make products that no one else is making anything close to. So I'm not worried about it at all. We have a monopoly and people, especially because more people are reading ingredients now. Read the ingredients and get yourself some jocco fuel.

By the way, pretty soon you're able to get jocco fuel in Walmart, mid-August. So we want to get this stuff into as many people's hands as possible. Give them a healthy option. One of the best ways to do that is going to the biggest retail in the world. So going to Walmart, get some. We got hydrate. We got greens.

We got milk. We got joint warfare. Crill oil, super krill. Check it out. Go to joccofuel.com or go to Wawa, go to Walmart, go to vitamin shop, GnC, military commissaries, Afees, Hannaford's, Dashdores, Wakefern, ShopRite, H-EB, Meyer, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness, Shields, and, of course, small gyms, jujitsu gyms. Like Miha.

Hey, if you're a jujitsu gym owner, you want to supply your people with the goods so they can keep training and keep getting after it. If you're a CrossFit gym, if you're a powerlifting gym, if you're a global gym doesn't matter email jf sales at joccofuel.com and if you go to one of those gyms and you don't own it but you go there let them know you want to get the goods that's what we're doing also if you're training jihitsu you need some clothing to train jihitsu in origin usa.com american made goods what are you wearing um you got some origin shorts on over there yeah i was telling you earlier complete truth this summer i have three pairs of these shorts i don't know what they're

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

because I could do all of the things that I can do in my, like, I don't know what they're called, like joggers slacks. I just wear black joggers in the winter when it's kind of colder. So they had the same range of motion. For me, it's really important. If I need to do squats and jeans, I can do them. If I need to get into a fight, I can get into a fight the same way. It doesn't happen.

But yeah, then I forgot that pair of jeans. in Slovenia and then I bought another black pair so now I have to but yeah really quality that black denim's legit the black that stuff is what's weird about that is the thread itself is dyed so it doesn't really fade it's like normal jeans if they were normal denim black that means the denim is dyed black but these are like dyed to the core the black denim to the core yeah to the core I also you know what I also bought the wool shirt oh yeah the sweatshirt That's also super nice. Very, very comfortable.

Yeah, those, we really did some good stuff with that wool. So anyways, that's where we got. By the way, the new RTX. Did you get the new? You don't have it. I don't have it. Yeah, it's called burr. But this stuff is like, we, it's like silk weight.

It's just perfect. Just perfect workout gear. It's also perfect like just wearing around whatever you're doing because it's just light, like silk weight. So it's a base. Slayer, wicking, quick try, and all that stuff. So originusa.com, stuff made in America. Even the Slovenians want stuff that's made in America when they live in America, right?

Yeah, for sure. Vouching for it right here. Yeah. I'm all about that. I think manufacturing, like even in Europe, it has to return to America and Europe. It can't all be going to China, I think, in other places. So check it out origin, USA.com. built by freedom that's what we're doing also we have a law enforcement first responder training camp

august 27 through the 31st in main get up there and check that out get the skills you need to keep yourself safe out on the streets we also have a store jaco store look at you come in what do you got jacco store.com that's where we can get our discipline equals freedom gear or get some gear or good gear or get after a gear that's where you can represent on the path miha do you have a favorite Like, not Jocco store origin anything, but a rash guard that you train in that makes you feel just a little bit of an edge when you put it on when you go to train. I like, I have a couple of origin rash cards. I like them a lot.

But I would say the quality of the stuff from the Jocco store, in 2019, when we didn't have maths at Legion yet, we came to victory for a couple of classes. I don't, you weren't there. I would definitely remember. But ECHO was there and Dean was there as well. And Echo gave me two t-shirts. One of them is back to the book. That one's kind of my favorite.

Big book guy. But those t-shirts, so five years ago, washed a million times, they're the same as they were. Why did Echo give you t-shirts? Because you're friends with Keenan. Yeah, I think so. And he just kind of brought you into the fold.

Yeah, yeah. Very nice guy. Yeah, yeah. I wish it was here. No, it's cool that echo. No, no, no. No, no. None taking me out.

Yeah. The reason I ask is, you know, we've talked about this before on the podcast. You put something with that discipline equals freedom on it with the X flag on it. And you put that on, something changes a little bit, maybe go a little harder in that session, maybe go a little harder in training. But in any case, that's where you get it, jaco store.com. We've also got the shirt locker subscription situation, new shirt every month from Jocko

Store, from the mind of Echo Charles. Pretty cool designs. And now I've gotten so many now that I've got shirts that I've got shirts that I training in shirts that I go to the gym in and I've got like my going through the protocol process yeah like my my my the nice shirts that I when you dress up that's one thing that's sick about San Diego and California in general like oh we're taking you the best restaurant town darling let me put on my nice t-shirt check out jocco store.com also you need steak primal beef.com Colorado craft beef.com you need rib eyes how

How many ribbyes did you cook when you were, you weren't you cooking ribbys? Yeah. Was that your primary deal? Yeah. In Norway, I got, I got this gig at this really nice restaurant and I basically brought this somewhat enhanced TV in there to the head chef. And he was like, he gave me a chance, legendary guy. But when he hired me, he gave me a chef's jacket and I didn't actually know how to put

it on because I was never, never a chef or a cook. But they put me outside in the grilling station, which had like this. breathtaking view of all of Oslo and I was just slinging ribbis probably did like I don't know 500 to a thousand of them so now one of my superpowers is just like seeing when a ribbi is done you know and when it's when it's proper but yeah definitely like the best cut of beef maybe you know piccania is also really good pecania piccania is kind of like uh ironically a Brazilian cut it's got that um it's something cap you know it has that like one layer of fat on top of it.

Yeah, fat cap. I'm going to have to look into this. Yeah, it's very, very good meat. Yeah. Because you can get the rib eye. You can get the rib, the rib eye cap, which is just that piece. That if I'm not careful, my freaking children will steal off of my steak. Yeah.

Like, that's actually, dude, like, that's good. I mean, that's impressive that they know that. Yeah. I typically get adults, you know, freaking savages. I typically get like a riby roast or something. cut them myself. It's typically a little bit, a little bit cheaper than just buying ribis that are pre-cut. But yeah,

that's one of my favorite fuel sources. Well, if you need steak, go to Coloradocrafbeef.com or primalbeef.com and get some freaking outstanding steak. Also, subscribe to the podcast, also jaco underground.com. Also, YouTube channel. We got we got this YouTube channel. We got the

clips channel now because ECHLA Charles got busy. We have the Jaco Fuel YouTube channel. We have Origin USA, YouTube channel. Do you guys have a Legion YouTube channel? Yeah, we do. We mostly post shorts on it, but we're going to put some long-form content. What is it, Legion A-JJ? Legion at Legion-A-J-J-J-J-J-I think.

Cool. So check that out. Psychological Warfare, Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books! We've written some books. Obviously, modern submission grappling, a no-gi-jiu-jitsu manual by Miha. Check that one out. It's available right now.

So go order it. We'll put a link in the show notes. indeed I always say that but echo doesn't do any of it because we don't really have show notes it's not hard do you know what I'm talking about some would say it's very easy actually like with the time stamps

yeah yeah yeah yeah but but all you need to do is put a link in there that says here's the book so we'll put the link in the show notes do you think we can do that you see this bro you're writing it down consider it down bro maybe maybe echo doesn't really need a job anymore. Create and show notes of everything. So check out that book.

I've written a bunch of books too. I'd say right now you said you know you don't want to sound like an expert because you've written one book. I think one book, you're a blue book. I think when your first book gets published, you're a blue belt. That's my opinion. And then probably two books, no, three books, purple belt, five books. brown belt 10 books black belt yeah i've actually written two books um one i wrote while this one was

being published but it's not i literally self-published it just for the gym just for the beginners it's a a little bit similar to that one 70 pages shorter 16 main techniques that everyone has to know the idea is for the people that are like a little bit too intimidated to start you know there's a a gap like where you're ready to go something has to happen or do you have to hear it on a podcast for the end of time or someone has to shove you you feel a little bit intimidated so something has to happen and a lot of it is just intimidation so i wanted to um put uh put a little bit of like a perspective on that yeah so that one is not it's not really for sale it's just for it's just at the academy i might put it on amazon at some point but i'll probably refine it a little bit it's

just essential jiu-jitsu skills. I'm just giving it out to people who come to the academy. Sure. Well, there you go. So does that book and a half? Does that mean you want your purple belt? No, I'll just take a stripe on the blue. You got a stripe on the publisher on the right, on the author of blue belt.

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I can't believe my wife, I can't believe my husband, I can't believe my kid, all those things, they're leadership problems. That's what they are. So if you have leadership problems in your workplace, go to eschlamfront.com. We have a consultancy.

We'll come and help you square those problems away. If you have leadership issues that you want to work on as an individual, go to extreme ownership.com. It's an online training platform where you can learn how to interact with your boss, how to interact with your peers, how to interact with your subordinates, how to interact with your spouse, how to interact with your kids, how to interact with your nephew, how to interact with your mother-in-law, right? Because that causes problems with people.

That's part of your family. What are you doing? Well, she acts this way. Okay, cool. How do you interact with her? Go to Extreme Ownership.com and figure that out. Just like Jiu-Jitsu is a skill, leadership is a skill.

Human interaction is a skill. Learn how to do it. Go to Extreme Ownership.com. And if you want to help service members active and retire, you want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization.

It is changing people. lives and I know this because I've seen it I've seen it and it's unbelievable what she is doing for our veterans so if you want to help you want to donate you want to get involved go to America's mighty warriors.org also don't forget about heroes and horses dot org Micah think up there in the mountains in the wilds taking our veterans out there where they can lose themselves and find themselves so check that out and also Jimmy May. He's got an awesome organization beyond the brotherhood.org helping seals transition into the civilian sector and bring productivity and expertise into the civilian world. And if you want to connect

with us on the interwebs, you can go to legion san diego.com. You can go to nogee manual.com. You can go to Instagram, even though as miha warned there's the highest compensated engineers in the world that are trying to get you just to freaking waste your entire life scrolling. That being said, Miha's on there. He's at Miha, JJ, and Legion is Legion at Legion underscore AJJ. I'm there as well, also participating in the downfall of the world. I'm at Jocko Willink. Kerry's there doing his part to destroy your life.

He's at Kerry Helton. I've also got a website jaco.com. so check any of those things out if you want to just waste a bunch of your time when you should be training so that's what we're doing. Kerry, you got any questions from this whole gig?

I do have one question. As a freaking white belt? White belt, two year white belt you are? Well, I mean, I get to shoot you guys a lot, you know,

shooting video you guys. So you're learning by, you know? I'm just saying I get to see some cool stuff, you know, which is pretty rad. What's your belt level in photography, in video right now? Video, I'm probably a solid,

I would say I'm a solid purple belt, you know? I think that would be fair black all day. You think so? Full on black belt. Yeah. Well, he's, you know, he's gone into so many, like he's, he's, he's, if you ask me, he's been a black belt and video, he's cruising in some other belts and some other, you

know, like the judo's of videography and some of these other things now, too, or a video production rather. You know what's fired up as I was talking to the other. He says, he goes, we can do anything. Yeah. He's like, hey, we can do anything, which is pretty wild. Like, we can make anything. in terms of video.

Like anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. I mean, you want to have, like, anything we can come up with, we can do it. We can do that. So I guess that is black belt scenario.

Oh, he's 100% black belt. No doubt. Yeah. Props to Echo Charles. Speaking of video, though, I was looking through some footage of yours, Miha hit me up the other day. He was like, hey,

do you have some clips from this training session? I was like, yeah, bro, I got you. So I was shooting him some of those clips. This was, it was a little while back, but it was a, you know, know some clips of you guys and it's to promote the book yeah yeah yeah so i was looking through some of these clips though and i saw miha hitting some trips and i was curious when like judo dude yeah was that all from judo or did that come in during the mma stuff too no that's that's that's

pretty much all for for judo look like wrestling has some trips too dude he did it's freaking you you did a little fricking judeo little jeffle a little foot sweep on me today yeah i was just like okay that you're just like circling in the right direction. I was still like focused on the triangle kind of to get something that's going to lead to a triangle. But I was like that's actually this is the PTSD, bro. PTSD. Trips, there's nothing like judo for trips. And there's so many different kinds.

I actually like to say that a foot sweep feels better than a submission when it's performed properly because. See what he's doing right now? See what he's doing? That thing I got on you. I was like, oh, yeah. That felt even better than every good triangle. You caught me. Yeah.

Not that kind of trip, to be honest. That was like a little bit between a trip and a foot sweep. A foot sweep, I'm talking when you like kind of like initiate a movement and then you extend the movement so that the person is horizontal to the mat without you knowing. So you're like, they're horizontal and you're like, how did this happen? I'm talking that where it surprises you and it surprises the other person. And those are like the cleanest foot sweeps and those feel better than a submission. There's also some ways to kind of like force certain foot sweeps.

I think the one today was like somewhere in between. So no, you're still up on the scorecards. But yeah, that's all that's all from judo. And then you have trips like Ochigari, coachigari. And then there's the Osotogadi, which is honestly my favorite takedown throw. Also I think it's like I teach it a lot when I teach like law enforcement people and like military people because it's very effective. If you have to grab someone, throw them to the ground.

It's super good. And you can either, if you have grips, you can pull up right before the person hits the mat, you pull away a little bit. Or if you want to send them to hell, you know, you can also push in and throw someone super hard. You did that podcast on Kimura, based on the book I gave you. And he was notorious for concussing people with Osoto Gares. It's like just that throw. So yeah, you have various things, but they're all from judo pretty much.

Right on. Thanks, bro. Is that your only question? Well, that was the one I was most curious about. I went skiing with Meeha. And you grow up skiing in Slovenia. It's kind of one of those things. They could see that ski thing.

So my sister is like a savage skier. And she's like, she lives in Montana. She just skis all time. And she's a badass skier. and so miha shows up and we're going to go skiing together it's the first day of going skiing and i go hey like how good are you at skiing he goes you know i'm pretty good i grew up in you're in you know europe and i go okay cool so he's i'm just like okay so he's just ready to rock and roll so i haven't been this is i think it was like i hadn't been skiing in a bed either but you know

when you're with my sister she's just she's going and so i'm uh we go and it just so happens there's we're in big sky montana and there's this tram there's a tram at big sky montana and for whatever reason the tram was empty the weather conditions were terrible there was no visibility dumping snow and but my sister you know she's just like oh yeah no line so this is the best so we go we start doing tram laps and like the and i just assumed that miha was kind of uh for lack of a better word, like a black belt in skiing, like a high level black belt, I guess, because my sister is like a high level black belt and skiing.

And so we start skiing these laps and we're doing these gullies and crons and just really steep, chaotic things. And I'm following my sister and Miha's following me, but I'm not watching him because I'm not, you know, I'm not, you know, just like skiing. And finally we do like, four of these laps and he's not saying anything he's not saying anything but but i'm like assuming that he's just hanging right and everything's cool and finally like the fourth lap i like look up at him

and i and look he obviously grew up skiing and he's a very good skier but he hadn't skied in a long time and he was hanging on by a freaking threat and he'd been just just freaking manning up and just being like yeah let's do another one i'm like for some reason i'm not like as intimidated by skiing as I should have been and like on one of those runs I think on the second run I fell like right on the steepest part kind of like rocks were to one side and then like I was like man what are we gonna do here like if I slide down I'm probably going into the rocks it was like it was extremely steep to the point where I couldn't really like kick my my snowshoes I mean the skiing

shoes into the into the mountain enough to go higher up to grab my my And then eventually I put it on and got on there. But yeah, I don't know why. I'm just like easily peer pressure. But if you were like, hey, let's go serve jaws, I'd be like, I don't know, dude. I'm like staying here. I'm going to watch you guys for skiing. I don't know.

I'm not, I'm not that intimidated by the, but the ski conditions like the snow was pretty good. Yeah, the snow was good. Visibility is bad. Also my sister has a good way of like level 12 positive peer pressure. like, hey, let's just go get one more. Like, super excited. And so there's no one's going to be like, well, no. Like, she's calling you out, you know, basically.

For sure. That was a good time. I enjoyed that a lot. Yeah. And then we were good. That was cool because we'd ski and just train. Just get training in like. It was freaking for mayhem up there.

Yeah. We mentioned kind of traveling. There was like a couple of places where I trained that were like exceptionally cool, like in the jungle in Costa Rica, but also Jocco's mountain garage. It's pretty sick. That's like not. Not a huge match face. We were having death matches too.

You know when you completely do not want to train? Well, that's what every day that we were there, neither one of us wanted to train. It was like, get off the mountain exhausted. And just be like, 20 minutes? Like, yep, okay. That's a different kind of beat too. And then just death match.

Yeah, getting off the mountain beat. Quads all fired up. Like, yeah. Right on. Good times. So no more questions, Kerry? Negative, sir. Miha.

Any closing statements? No, I think we covered at all. Yeah, it's like I said during the, during the podcast, like I've listened to a lot of these. And before we started, I wanted to be, I wanted to not think about the caliber of person that's set in this chair before, you know, like medal of honors and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's been a huge, huge pleasure to be, to be invited and hopefully entertaining to some degree. Right, all, man. Well, thanks for joining us. And thanks for all the training over the years and the death matches over the past few years.

and appreciate it. Thanks for writing the book. I think a book's really going to help out a lot of people at all levels. I think it's going to hopefully, you know, I always get someone that'll say like, you know, it was on podcast such and such. You did this or you had Hickson on or you had, you know, they'll name something. And it was like, that was finally it. And I went and started training.

So if you're out there, hopefully this will push you over the edge. And of course, thanks to all the men and women around the world in uniform right now, We get to pursue our dreams here. We get to train because you put your dreams on hold. You put your dreams on hold. And in some cases, you sacrifice your dreams for our freedoms. And we thank you all for your service. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers,

correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all other first responders. You sacrifice also to keep us safe here at home. And we thank you as well. And everyone else out there, I say you listen to Miha's advice. Find a good Jiu-Jitsu Academy. Go start training there. Practice on your own. Think about Jiu-Jitsu.

Think about how it applies on the mats and think about how it applies to your life as well. Enjoy the journey because it doesn't end. So you might as well enjoy it. And of course, don't quit. And that's all we've got for tonight. and we will see you on the mats. Until next time, this is Miha and Carrie and Jocko.

Out.