Martial arts, Aliveness and Modern Police Jiu Jitsu Training: Adam Treanor | EP 40

Adam Treanor is one of the most passionate and knowledgeable voices at the intersection of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and law enforcement. Adam is 25-year veteran of Southern California law enforcement, serving as both a police officer and deputy sheriff. In this conversation, Adam and I get into the training gap that has cost lives and dollars, why a BJJ blue belt may be the most important credential a police officer can earn, and how departments like Orange County Sheriff are finally making it happen.

Contacts for interviewee:

Orange County Sheriff Regional Training Academy (Tustin)

https://sac.edu/division/hst/cja/academy_building

Topic Links:

Renato Magno

https://www.streetsportsbjj.com/renato-magno

Magda Institute / Cass Magda

https://mijkd.com/school/who-is-cass-magda/

Dan Inosanto

https://inosanto.com/

Steve Copping

https://hwchronicle.com/5628/news/former-ju-jitsu-coach-had-a%C2%80%C2%98profound-impacta%C2%80%C2%99-on-past-students/

Eric Paulson

https://erikpaulson.com/

Chris Haueter

https://www.combatbase.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqEyBrWtVrgl-VQ4vWIOpBu63RV1O_5Lg5jQFKtRM2EmpZAZm6T

Yori Nakamura

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorinaga_Nakamura

Machado Brothers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_family

Gracie family

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracie_family

Bob Wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wall

Marietta PD (Georgia) — 18-month BJJ study

https://www.santamonica.gov/media/CMO/PSROC/MARIETTA_PD_BJJ_DATA.pdf

Kosen Judo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosen_judo

Geoff Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Thompson_(writer)

Lee Morrison

https://urbancombatives.com/the-founder/

Fabio Santos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A1bio_Santos_(grappler)

Marc Denny — Dog Brothers

https://dogbrothers.com/guro-marc-crafty-dog-denny/

Robert Drysdale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Drysdale

Justin Flores (J-Flo)

https://jfloacademy.com/

Kenny Bond

https://www.streetsportssimivalley.com/sssvbjjcoaches

Music “Disambiguation” by Robel Borja https://open.spotify.com/artist/7j0DUZ79z4edeLkU2H1UoJ?si=eISl0YfaQ-

This episode was directed and presented by Dave Meyer, editor & coproducer by Ryan Turner, producer & marketing Robbie Lockie, music kindly provided by Robel Borja.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The street is different. It's a high consequence profession, and a murder suspect pulling away from a pat down and fight starting is different than training in an academy, but there are things that happen all the time. We deal with people that resist arrests and we deal with people that are straight out assaulted during arrests. The goal of policing is to be able to take someone effectively into custody. All our non-compliant arrests end up being on the ground. I always describe jujitsu as the single most defining and powerful factor in my ability to deal with rapidly evolving circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Welcome to the Angels Warrior Lab. I'm BJJ Corobelt and Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian jiu-jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life. What you're about to hear is an interview I recorded with my good friend Adam Trainer. Adam is a law enforcement professional with 25 years on the job in Southern California as both a police officer and a deputy sheriff with assignments in patrol, custody, investigations, and training. The last four years of his career, he was supervisor in ACT, Arrest and Control Techniques, at the Orange County Sheriff Regional Training Academy. Adam is a fourth degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under Professor Hanato Magno. He was also a full instructor under Cass Magda in the Magda Institute system of Jiu Kundo, Filipino, and Southeast Asian martial arts. Adam and I go back more than 40 years. The first part of the interview, we talk about his entry into martial arts and what led him to becoming a peace officer. And then we talk about policing and get into his ideas on the importance of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a tool that all law enforcement officers should have to keep themselves and suspects safer. He has been the leading voice for over 30 years trying to get law enforcement agencies to train officers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And finally, this is starting to happen. And the results are amazing in terms of fewer altercations, lives saved, and tax dollars saved as well. So please sit back and enjoy my interview with my good friend, Adam Trainer. Adam, thank you for making it up here for this interview. No, thanks for having me. This is a fun trip up here. I appreciate you driving all the way to Northern California from Los Angeles. We've been talking about this for a few weeks. So we've been friends for a long time. You come from a martial arts family, which I think was very interesting. Your dad, of course, is a friend and a martial arts student of mine, a black belt in multiple styles. Your brother, national karate champion, your other brother, Taekwondo, I think. Just curious, what was it like for you growing up in this martial arts household? And specifically, where everyone's doing a different martial arts.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

I think it was a good thing, and I think it gave me a lot of opportunity. I had a when I was younger, I had more of the exposure to the traditional background through my dad, who was one of your students and one of Steve Copping's students. And so early on it was more traditional judo, San Fernando Valley Judo Club, that I did when I was younger, and then some exposure to like traditional karate systems. But I think the best gift that I got from my father is he showed the immediate benefits that people do martial arts for, the confidence and self-defense. But I think I got a good perspective of the totality for it. Because at one point I'm a big believer, especially in the modern kind of generation, the MMA generation, that we have to remember that martial arts at one point has to be about more than fighting. The technical ability to how to defend yourself with a variety of systems, not just one system, gets handled, I think, within your own personal attributes and ability pretty quickly. And so I've benefited from it from a large perspective. I'm glad that he was pushing that in my life as opposed to like not to denigrate other traditional sports, but it was an individual activity that had a lot of challenges and that you can do your whole life and has a host of benefits beyond self-defense. I think that's an important thing to remember. It gets forgotten too much today, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

When you say an individual activity, you mean not a team sport, like you're on your own, your fate is in your own hands.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

For sure. And as we can see here, it's not only an individual sport, but there's kind of a primal aspect. When you lose in a jujitsu match, if it's not by points as many of them are today, you lose by a submission, an arm locker, there's a big checking of the ego for people to step out and do that. I think everybody should have some level of competition in their background. I think it's a good thing, and not for everybody, they don't have to do it, but I think there's something to be benefited from stepping on the mat with an unknown opponent. Sometimes as soon as you hit the ground, the person that you thought in your head was going to be bigger and badder than they were turned out not to be, and then sometimes you get surprised by somebody's ability. So it's kind of a unique thing, and like I said, it's not to denigrate other sports, but combat sports, and that's judo, folk style wrestling, tie boxing, savat, boxing, jujitsu, all these different things, sambo, there's a different dynamic to it in that you're replicating techniques that are used to injure or control somebody. And so it's a totally different thing. And I think that's a good healthy check of the ego. Part of jujitsu, I think, is to learn to I think Carlos Gracie Jr. always says that it's not winning or losing, it's you either win or you learn. And and that's a good thing about the martial arts. So it just turned out to be an activity that I enjoyed, and we all did different systems, but everybody kind of spread out. Both my brothers did folk style wrestling in high school, which I think is a great combat sport. I went to a high school that didn't have a folk style wrestling team, but my dad did judo and other arts and then ended up being a student of you, and Steve Copping, who I had tremendous respect for as a martial artist, amazing martial artist. And I think we'll probably talk about that particular era and and the fact that in my opinion there was a lot of special people around men too before the wave of jiu-jitsu hit. But I think they kind of did more traditional things, and I ended up doing styles that would probably be categorized as more modern or eclectic kind of systems.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

So let's talk about that. Your martial arts background. I know you started as a kid, your dad took you to judo, maybe you were a little smaller kid. What took you up to the point that you met Brazilian jiu-jitsu?

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Okay, so as I got older, I got some exposure to the style of jiu-jitsu that's probably was most prominent in the United States, like the Dons and Rue guys, the small circle guys, you trained with Jack Seki, Steve Copping. I think we were talking about how do we really classify those things? Were they Japanese, were they American? They're kind of this new a wave of jiu-jitsu that was in the United States. Wall EJ. Yeah. And so, and a lot of good people, you and Copping were examples of that. But uh when I was probably 17 or 18 years old, I met Sifu Cass Magda, one of Dan Asano's full instructors. He had just opened a school in the San Fernando Valley, and I would say at that age is when the training became much more serious. And that curriculum was typical of what we call the JKD group down, and there's people that came from that, not only Cass Magda, Chris Kent, Eric Paulson was originally from that group. Our friend Chris Howder was from that type of group. A lot of these people were some of the first proponents of jujitsu when I came came across it. Burt Richardson. Bert Richardson, another legendary guy from that particular group. There was kind of a core systemized thing to this, which is the Bruce Lee curriculum, the John Fon JKD kind of kickboxing system, which I would describe as kind of like a street kickboxing system. The Southeast Asian martial arts, Filipino martial arts, Kali and Escrima was a big part of the curriculum. Dan Ansano is kind of this prolific researcher of martial arts, also a black belt in jiu-jitsu, but a continuous student up into this day, great example for all of us. But each person in that JKD group, because of the philosophy of it, kind of had their own freedom to be influenced by different things within those ranges of striking, the ability to not be taken down or take someone down and grappling, or to emphasize the weapon stuff over the empty hand stuff. So I started training with Cass Magda. I think when I was at the Magda Institute, it was all that curriculum I described, but I would describe it as, especially the first four or five years I was there, it was a lot of aliveness-based contact training. There was a lot of sparring. And that's kind of like a we'll probably talk about that when it comes to police training and other things, but that term aliveness is a very important one in martial arts to have functional abilities. So and about what year was this when you were with the 1989 or so. I was just at the end of high school or leaving high school, and he had his first core group of students there. I ended up training under him as one of his instructors, private students. I taught a lot of the classes there over the next decade. Got a lot of great training and a lot to this day how I view martial arts. The JKD group was kind of one of the first forms of MMA before there was MMA, and had a lot of good things about viewing martial arts in a functional aspect. Efficiency is everything that scores. Bruce Lee used to always say, I'm less afraid of the guy who knows a thousand techniques than the guy who's practiced one or ten techniques a thousand times. And that simplicity was really pushed there. And a lot of pressure testing stuff. A little bit different than the modern ways we do, but that aliveness kind of training methodology, which I think is so important, it continues in to this day and all in a bunch of different forms of martial arts, and I think is really important for people to do at some point. And so I was an instructor from him. I ended up getting a black belt degree and instructorship in that c curriculum. And it was about this time when I think what my dad described as these guys do a different style of jujitsu where the grappling is really emphasized. Horian Gracie and the Gracie Challenge had been going on. Cass had trained with Horian and Hoyce in the past, so I kind of knew of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. And it was my dad bringing in this information that, hey, I met these guys, the Machados, and they are the cousins, the first cousins of the Gracie's. And so I ended up walking into that school to do some additional training. I knew grappling was important. I saw the functional ability of it. And I thought from a JKD perspective, that's something that needs to be researched and trained. I had some exposure to grappling from judo in the past, but and there's some great Nawaza guys, which is grappling and judo for sure. But this was obviously a little bit different. Shudo through Yuri Nakamura, I think. He had influenced a lot of the JKD guys, more specifically Paulson, who went on to becoming somebody where high-level expert in grappling and both jiu-jitsu and catch wrestling and his CSW system. So I had a little experience in that as far as like some finishes and footlocks and stuff, but not much grappling experience. And then walked into that studio.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

And I'm just gonna say I knew you at the time and I knew you were training with Cass Magda and super high respect for the weaponry and your kind of just serious fighting prowess. I felt that I had good fighting skills too, but it came from a very jujitsu basis from my whole life. But I remember even early in the grappling, your footlocks. You were a dangerous footlocker constantly.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

I did take a liking to those and got a lot of help from Rick Williams, who had a great I saw you interviewed him recently. I had a lot of respect for Rick, both in his profession and the time he took when I used to sit and wait in the day class for John Machado to start teaching the class, and he was teaching his privates after a graveyard shift, like you told me. He would always come over and help out. I think at the time it was one of the only finishes I knew at the beginning. But I call it among my friends that 1967 straight foot luck, just straight ahead like that. I went with my dad one time just to do some private training with you and Steve at the Harvard dojo. Right. And uh yeah, very early on, and this was uh kind of a unique time in Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, I tell some of the guys at work, like one of the first classes in that 92 around area, I came in there, there'd be four or five white belts on the mat. You were probably a uh purple belt there. I remember Fernando Vasconzuelos, who ended up becoming an incredible champion. It looked like he had just graduated eighth grade. He was very kid and a dangerous kid at that. That one time when I took a class, it was Jean-Jacques, John, Carlos, and Hagen all there one night. It was like four black belts. This was a time that I would say that there was a lot of style separation, big time. And I remember having trained there for five or six months, two judo black belts came in, and Jean-Jacques said, Hey, I want you to go roll with those guys. And uh the success in that, in engaging with those guys or being able to spar with these guys that came from what I had believed was like a very good grappling system. And uh, I mean, no su the judo rule set for Niwazu is much different, and there's jujitsu kind of opens up a kind of whole thing. And I remember Jean-Jacques smiling and see this is how you know it can work. And uh just a that's when I kind of walked away from it, going like, okay, what my dad was describing is this is a different type of grappling. This is a style where they have taken the grappling to a surgical level.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

That was what made me take off my black belt and start again. It wasn't that what we were doing wasn't good. We were all good fighters, but this was just this area was taken to a different level.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah. The example you give is an important one because coming from these other Japanese American, these new styles of jujitsu that were in the United States, these common ones before the the style that came from Brazil came here, you were obviously much more adept at grappling than I had exposure to because I think we were having a conversation when we were talking about what police officers should do or what standard we should look for police officers today. And I had asked you what would be your assessment pre-Brazilian jujitsu of your nawaza or grappling skills in a self-defense situation against someone who is a non-grappler on the street. And I think you assured me like that was pretty good back then. Yes, yeah. And I use that story as an example in this area because now, unlike when we first started, the availability of academies for jiu-jitsu in the United States is huge. It's huge. And it is common knowledge. And now you can go into an academy today in jujitsu, and if it's been there for a significant period of time, you may walk out on an advanced class where there's 15, 17, 18 black belts on the mat, and then a host of other people. And that's a really an explosion that happened after that, with uh much credit to Horian Gracie and Hoyce and these people who showed the effectiveness of it, and that it is a universal every person art that so we're gonna put a pin in the fact that the you're much more likely now out in the world to encounter someone who has some Brazilian jiu-jitsu and grappling skills.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

For sure. That's relevant to policing. But we'll talk about that when we talk about policing. But back then, it wasn't so common.

SPEAKER_00 14:54

It wasn't, and I have great respect for folk-style wrestling, I have great respect for judo and these other types of jujitsu systems, and uh they were certainly a functional thing, but I think using that example from that Bob Wall Academy that they had is So you're referring to what was their original academy that the Machado brothers had, that was their first physical academy, not a garage, that was in the San Fernando Valley.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Bob Wall, who was the actor and the bad guy in Enter the Dragon, had become a real estate developer, he was a karate black belt. And we met him through Chuck Norris, and he had a real estate development and he gave the Machados space. I think, or I think Caesar Gracie mentioned that he was involved in that too. So that's the academy you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yes. My first training with him was at that academy. And uh you were the most experienced there. There was Doug from LA, he was an LAPD canine handler that came from another, maybe the Gracies or something like that, that had come over there.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

I remember there was always a police car in the parking lot in the shade with the window down that came from the police in there.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Yeah, for sure. So I'm grateful you talk about the humility required in martial arts. I was grateful that you and my dad were willing to say this system has some value. And especially for you guys, because you came from another jujitsu system. Coming from MI and the stuff that we were training, I think, because a lot of guys from Magda went on to the Cass went on to continue training in jujitsu and be a promoter of jujitsu. The JKD group kind of pushed it out there and stuff. But these early American jiu-jitsu uh stylists in the United States, for me, it was easy to say, hey, there's a hole in my grappling, I'm gonna go to these guys for doing the grappling. To guys to come from judo or Sambo or wrestling, I remember, you couldn't do this today, like I said, but I remember early on having guys that were collegiate wrestlers come in and literally they would walk into triangles at arm bars. They had no concept of the defense, leave one hand in, you could just bring your foot back and slap a triangle on them. Kind of what I was used to in in training with police officers who didn't have a grappling background. You probably couldn't do that today because the language has changed. But it was a great sense of humility that you and my father said, like, hey, there's value here, we're gonna begin again as a student. Some people can't do that, they turn and walk the other way. And uh that's what I still try to do to this day. And I tell guys that be a lifelong student in jiu-jitsu, and if a blue belt or purple belt can show me things that I don't know, I have my own, as we all do, kind of personal style of jujitsu, and there's holes in my game, and there's times where when I was a brown belt, my guard retention was more like a blue belt or my defense in this one area. So we always have to remain a student, so I'm glad you guys did, and that's how I got walked into it with some people that were already in, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

You came from a martial arts, you got in your blood for sure. So now policing. How did you get involved in law enforcement? And at what point did you try to bring your martial arts training into law enforcement?

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Well, I was already training, and it was some students at the MI, some LAPD officers at the end. At the Magda that Magda Institute. Yeah. A couple of my siblings are academics, that wasn't really my route. And my dad describes me as the impatient one. So I met these guys that worked for LAPD, and they kind of approached it that you know there was a possibility of a good career, and there's all these challenges, and I've done it for 26 years. It's certainly an honorable and difficult profession, but an important one that somebody needs to do. But from the martial arts side, I was very lucky because I think by the time I hit the academy, which was around 90 1998, I had been training with Cass for about 10 years, and I I had been a blue belt for years. I think I got my purple belt like right right after, somewhere around 98 or 99. And so as someone going back to like the power of it in policing, as somebody who didn't come from an athletic background, didn't come from wrestling in high school, wasn't a big weightlifter and stuff like that. I always describe it, jujitsu, as it was the single most defining and powerful factor in my ability to deal with rapidly evolving circumstances. And that goes back to that aliveness training and the Pavlovian thing that happens. The street is different, it's a high consequence profession, and a murder suspect pulling away from a pat down and a fight starting is different than training in an academy. But the power of jujitsu is that I could put you or somebody else in that situation, and the reaction, it's completely ingrained in you as far as pinning and using controlling force. And so at the end of the various things that happen in police work, and I'm just one example of every officer that's worked in Southern California eventually has these things happen some of the times very quickly on the first or second day. But there are things that happen all the time. We deal with people that are comply with arrests, we deal with people that resist arrests, and we deal with people that are straight out assaultive during arrests. And those are a lower percentage, but when people have a lot to lose and are engaging in criminal activity and have been in and out of prison, and some of those guys can be difficult for sure.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

Yeah, I remember talking to Rick Williams, who was also uh police officer.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

I think he was LAPD, yeah. He worked in Gardena and which is not absent of a lot of challenges when it comes to street crime and gangs and everything.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

He worked in a very fast-paced area. And he was mentioning you pull someone over for something, could be just a traffic violation or just could be you want to talk to them, and you don't know if they could be like a two-striker, right? There's somebody who, if you they let you arrest them, they're going to prison for the rest of their life. And so they're going to basically they see it as their life is on the line. And you can't tell the difference, and you just have to be ready to deal with it because they might also be someone who's just a person you're talking to.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yeah, and so I can tell you from especially throughout my career and especially when I was involved in training, I have watched unfortunately video after video of policemen being murdered in the line of duty. And with firearms, uh sometimes stabbing, sometimes just the suspect physically assaulting them. But I think the general public doesn't understand is some of these incidents that result in a police officer being murdered start with things that are pretty mundane. And a young Las Cruces police officer, I watched the unfortunate video of him being stabbed to death, and that was basically a trespasser. And I've watched a West Tulsa sergeant that was near the end of his career murdered on a traffic stop for towing a car. There was a firearm in the car, the guy did not want to go to jail for the firearm, and he ended up shooting one police officer and killing another. So these things tend to escalate, and yeah, you never know who you're dealing with. That's like my training officer used to s say to people like, It's it's funny how there's this suspension of reason. It's like somebody that does all the good work you do in nonprofit, which I support wholeheartedly, and you're an educated man and an accomplished man or something like that. But sometimes people, a policeman will contact them, they don't know the circumstances that led to the contact with the police officer, and that they'll say these things that are kind of a suspension of reason. They will look at them and say, don't you know I'm just a normal person? And it's funny how because it's pretty easy to come to a rational conclusion that a police officer you never met doesn't know that you're a normal person. And that's not to take it into account. There's 1.2 million police officers in the United States. Not all of them behave the way they should, and some of them have outright behaved in crimes and deserve to be either terminated from the police department or prosecuted when it's appropriate. But it is a unique job that, you know, my old chief at Culver City used to say, everybody's an expert on police work, but it's always after the fact, and it's never having been the person who would pay the ultimate price for being wrong. So I I surgeons in a trauma hospital have to make split-second decisions. But if I'm the doctor, it's you on the line at the end. Policemen have to make split-section decisions where sometimes their hesitation can result in them not just being killed in their job, but being murdered in their job. And so that's a real different dynamic to make those judgments really quick, like that. We have to be held to a higher standard for sure, but I tell people there's a difference between a higher standard and a reasonable standard. Let's hold our police officers to a reasonably high standard, understanding what they do. And we don't want guys in our profession that shouldn't be in our profession.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

No, of course. Look, there's bad doctors, there's bad lawyers, there's bad police officers, I'm sure. The vast, vast majority, and certainly every single police officer I've ever met are great guys, yourself included. Totally wonderful people chose to go into policing because they want to help the community, family people almost always, right? And so I think to your point that people need to realize that every time a police officer pulls someone over or knocks on a door, there is always the chance that they're going to be facing someone who is going to try to kill you. And it's you, and it also is like, are you are you going home to your wife that night or are you not going home to the wife? And you've made a promise to your wife or to your kids that you are coming home, and that may not happen. And you have to stay vigilant, and it can be very hard to understand how you can stay vigilant, how can you like, I don't know, k keep the spring tight, because it needs to be there if you need it, but don't release it. And also to be able to tell the difference of like how much to release it. That's talk about reasonable force. And we're going to talk about that. When police officers have an option, something between nothing and pull out your weapon, that's a really good thing. It helps them, it helps people. And I know that's been a big theme of your career.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

It's probably at the end of the day, I've got to work a bunch of different stuff throughout my career as both a police officer and a deputy sheriff and investigations and as a supervisor and everything. But the jujitsu program at the Orange County Sheriff's Department is probably the single greatest contribution that I have made for the welfare of the deputies and the people that they serve in my career for sure. And that's no testament to me, it's just the testament to what jiu-jitsu can do. And the point you're bringing up, that spring, it is something that young officers, men and women have to learn to manage because on one hand, we have to realize that a lot of police work is routine, and then it's all of a sudden just absolute chaos. You could be driving around doing nothing, and then you're driving 90 miles an hour chasing a bank robbery suspect. So we get taught that in police work that complacency kills, that we can't view things as routine. And so I think the solution to that, that spring is to have these levels of diligence that are manageable throughout the person's career so that we don't stand in doorways, we don't have long conversations without patting somebody down when we have an appropriate legal reason to pat someone down. We try to assume that people could have weapons and we try to control people and not put ourselves in positions. But to your point, the problem with policing today a lot with use of force, and this is where jujitsu becomes a solution, is there is a technical disparity that has been going on for decades with a solution presently available. And also very mission statement associated to policing. So if you get in a grappling situation because you're on a raid in Afghanistan, you're a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, and you take someone down and you go to Neon Belly, their transition is likely to their pistol. The goal of policing is to be able to take someone effectively into custody. All our non-compliant arrests end up being on the ground. So a ground system that is, I mean, sometimes you have to strike. That's a part of actually fighting for real, and jujitsu guys, when they fight for real, they strike. But it's primarily driven by a controlling force option. And it is also uniquely of the grappling systems appropriate because of the styles I mentioned, judo, sambo, folks style wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. There is one style that has, because of the rule set of the way they train, ultimately for competition, but that rule set affects what we can do. It's the style that's most appropriate for a people of variety of physical ability. Helio Gracie famously said, jujitsu is the triumph of human intelligence over brute strength. And that's so it becomes very police mission focused for what we do. There's if you're a police officer and you box or do juice, those are all great things too. And I'm a martial arts nerd, so I have a tendency to like all styles. I like watching judo, I like watching grappling, I like watching Thai boxing, all those things. They all have value. But for the mission statement for what departments are looking for and this wave that's happening now, which is for some reason finally, after 30 years of it being available in the United States, there's a really open kind of attitude about implementing it. I think it's the most applicable thing that we can teach young police officers and deputy sheriffs or highway patrolmen that's going to give them a very strong basic syllabus as a nucleus. There has to be a period of time of regular training. You have to have aliveness, you have to do positional and free sparring so that you're used to resistance. But that goes with their technical ability, their de-escalation confidence. De-escalation, which is a catchword these days, if you don't have a response to when people don't comply, then de-escalation is just begging. Please, please put your hands behind your back. So I'm sure we'll talk. Marietta PD is one of the agencies that is mandatory jujitsu training and did an 18-month study, Mesa, Arizona. It's mandatory in Pasarobas, but we have Orange County Sheriff, Santa Ana Police Department, Glendale, Pasadena, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo. These are all agencies that it's become now part of the training. And we need to have that. Use of force is one of the biggest things, both as a challenge and also what has become problematic in the United States. Mostly what you're talking about. Most controversy I see is failed empty hand use of force that results in a police shooting of a suspect who doesn't have a firearm. And when I was running the unit in charge of defensive tactics at the academy, one of the things I used to tell the guys who worked for me, who were all I can say now, today at the Academy, there's four black belts and a purple belt that represent Art of Jiu-Jitsu, Millennia MMA, Alliance, Gracie Barra, and Black House and Triumphal Jiu Jitsu. Two of them have fought pro-MMA, very accomplished group down there, integrating jujitsu into the Sheriff's Department. But this particular solution is once again like the most mission applicable one. When I was at the academy, I would say, like, when we watch these videos, we're not gonna the legal conclusion that has nothing to do with us. Whether it's lawful or not, I don't even want to have a discussion about that. That's for internal affairs and a grand jury and all those people to decide. What we're gonna look at is these videos where somebody can't break down a turtle and say, would jujitsu have solved this? Would the average blue belt that trains under Dave Meyer prevent that guy from standing up to what led to a shooting later? And in a lot of them, the resounding answer was yes. I mean, no blue belt would have left that after the takedown, after the foot pursuit, would have let that guy get back up. He would either handcuffed him or held him in a controlling position until another officer came and allowed him to handcuff. So it's been the solution for a long time. Renato and the Machados, along with Gokor and Horian Gracie, who were part of an advisory board for LAPD in the 90s, and the techniques have integrated. But here's the problem that I tried to explain to the command staff when they were, and I appreciate Sheriff Don Barnes, under Sheriff Jeff Halleck, retired assistant sheriff Andy Stephens, these guys pushed for us to have the jujitsu. But here's the thing that happens with that aliveness training that's so important. A lot of times they would say, Well, what if we do this short training where you teach someone how to do a chimura? Let's say we bring in Dave Myers to the academy, he teaches everybody just how to do a kimura and transition someone over to handcuffing. And I should clarify this by saying after a veteran police officer graduated from the academy, the state requirement for arrest and control techniques training is four hours every two years. Yeah, I was gonna say a couple, I was gonna say a couple days a year. It's four hours every two years. Okay. So here's the thing about that importance of aliveness in regular training. Let's say we bring you in and some young deputy takes your class and he retains the information so well that 12 months later, when you retest them, you're like, hey Adam, you know the guy did great. He's got an A plus chimura and everything. Well, first of all, we know a student's not going to be able to do that. But let's say he did. We have the perfect student for retention. It doesn't matter because at 2 o'clock in the morning, when he's scrambling next to a patrol car and trying to get that chimura, and he hasn't had the regular training to reinforce these invisible kinesthetic things that happen with all of us that know how to grapple, under stress when you're afraid and there's no one there and you can't get your radio and the guy's fighting, it's he's not gonna pull it off. The only chance someone has to have to get what we want with the upper level of technical use of force is they have to have a period of time when people can discuss whether that's they get to blue belt, a hundred hours or something like that. A period of time that forever alters them with that kind of language of grappling. I use this language analogy. I had a good Spanish and teacher in high school, refused to speak to us in English, five days a week, immersion, she wouldn't answer you. I go ahead and I don't speak it for like 10 years. But when I start doing police work, I'm able, it wasn't good Spanish, future past tense a little bit off, but I could get by because of that. So what we need to do with police officers is give them that alteration that happens with a certain degree of time that's regular aliveness-based training. You know as well as I do that let's say a guy gets a blue belt early on in his career, a good solid blue belt, and then the kids start playing baseball and he can't go to, he doesn't want to train anymore and everything. Nine years later he's on a traffic stop and someone shoots on his leg and he starts fighting, it's gonna be there. That language, he's been forever altered. He might be rusty a little bit, not as in good shape or anything like that. But the ability to not give his back his neck and to know how to pin and do cross side and stuff, all the important syllabus of basics, it'll be there.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

Yeah, I think colloquially people will say, build neural pathways. So if I walk in, like you say, and teach people against a compliant partner, okay, grab their wrist this way, weave your hand in that way, grab your wrist and move like that, they might be cognitively learning it, right? They're remembering the steps, but they're not training it kinesthetically, like it's not being embedded into a real neural pathway. And it's and like you say, someone who's smart even a year from now might remember, oh yeah, I remember I'm supposed to grab here, do this, do that, but that is totally not what you're saying. What's happening when you're really under pressure? Like you, you in fact, it's the opposite of what you need. When you're under pressure, you are not remembering anything. It's what is your body doing? Like you're a little bit of a witness at that point.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Like your body should know what to do. If I put you in a police uniform tomorrow and put you in front of a guy that you grabbed his hands and you're about to pull the handcuffs, he heard the chink of the chains and started fighting. The controlling force response of jujitsu that you're gonna do to him is instinctive. Now, it's always amazed me that I can go to a jujitsu school with five blue and purple belts on the mat, or one's a teacher, high school teacher, one's a lawyer, the other one's a scientist, whether, you know, you're there or whatever. How come these people who are doing these other jobs able to be more adequately technical to deal with live resistance than people whose business it is every day? So my hope is that in the future that training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu becomes synonymous with police officers in the United States, that being like their national sport of activity. I think operationally, as a police officer in the United States, you should have to have a bluebell, a hundred hours or up or something in jiu-jitsu training. And then we should encourage for all these other benefits mental health, fitness, de-escalation, engaging with people in the community, the police officers you know from jujitsu. And uh it's free community engagement. So there's all these other benefits too. But I hope it becomes a national activity, and there's a a chance now that it can continue that way. There's things happening that I never thought would see before. The state of Michigan, this bill is still in the process, but they're trying to create a bill that for police officers in the in their state to get a certification to be a peace officer, they have to be a blue belt in jiu-jitsu. Then there's some waivers that they can do if they're not in jiu-jitsu. If you're a brown belt in judo, if you've wrestled at the varsity level at this much in high school, they have a whole thing. But they're clearly trying to raise the level of their ability. But I hope one day there's a generation that can't even imagine that there was police officers walking around there that trained four hours every two years. I worked at an academy where there was hundreds and hundreds of recruits from all sorts of agencies and the sheriff's department coming through. And when they get there, sometimes in the defensive tactics arena, which was the unit that I ran with a lot of very good, competent martial artists. I think at when I was there, our combined experience between all of us was like over a hundred years in combat sports or martial arts, and then close to that in policing. And sometimes what we get, very good candidate, right has the right attitude, wants to be in law enforcement, will do things ethically the creative way, or they're smart, they can write good reports and everything like that. And sometimes, unfortunately, you see young people who have they have absolutely no idea what to really do when somebody wants to hurt them in a physical aptitude. No, no, no, physical aptitude. And how do we develop that? How do you get that experience? Jiu-jitsu is this replication of practicing physical resistance in a very safe environment. You're not striking, you're on the ground. Judo is far more injurious than jujitsu is. Judo guys, when they're rehabbing, they what do they do? They do nawaza. That's the biggest complement to the safety of jujitsu. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:48

So for our listeners and watchers is the ground portion of jujitsu judo. Basically jujitsu.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Yeah. So Brazilian Jujitsu. So it's a great has a great safety record for policing too. We don't want people getting hurt in training if we can avoid it. But that thing, I think we were talking about earlier about the comparisons to other forms of training. If there's a police chief watching, is there's other areas of police work where we do a form of aliveness-based training to practice something that's very important without getting injured. I don't know if you've ever heard of simmunitions, but yeah. So we wear these protective equipment to cover eyes and have these guns that they're they mirror a Glock or an HK and they're blue so that we can and there's these hard paint type rounds that we use. So you get the experience. You lean around the corner when you're a little bit too far that you don't, and you get shot and you feel it without really getting shot.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

And I was mentioning our police dogs, which are such an epic part of law enforcement. The dogs we buy come from these sports in Europe, like KNPV from Holland, or ring sport, or Schützen from Germany. And what the it's like jujitsu for dogs. So basically, the dog is doing obedience, bite work, sometimes tracking, depending on the rule set of the sport. Now, when they come over, does there have to be changes? Yeah, because now you're biting an actual person or not on the equipment. But it's the same thing with jujitsu. People go like, oh, well, you know, they're training the sport, and uh yeah, and it's important to to teach people the difference between sport and reality. But one of the things that I've encountered a lot that you've probably heard, and I was talking to a couple police chiefs at a conference in Florida talking about jujitsu, and they would talk about like, don't you think we should teach this kind of police specific kind of stuff? And people get focused on the police specific kind of thing. And that is important. But what I was explaining to this one chief is that whatever I'm teaching him technically, without that regular training in jiu-jitsu, you're giving me a kid who doesn't even know how to scramble. I mean, give me a kid who knows how to scramble first, and then I'll tell him stuff like, hey, in in our profession, the guard is a very secondary position. Right. Fight from the top, from the top, like Howder always says, fight from the top. Of the locks that we do, the kimura is probably the number one thing for policing. It helps facilitate handcuffing. You can hold it in a pin. It's the easiest thing for a weaker person to hold against a stronger person. You don't have to execute the break, it's a good holding position. So there are things that are better for sure. And the fighting from top, more of a tactical thing. And I think non-police jujitsu guys would tell their students, like, if you get in a self-defense situation, try to be on top. Don't play from your back. Playing from your back is if you're either forced there, or stylistically, in the modern application of the sport, there's a lot of options for people who have very high-level guards, and you see people with very high-level guards.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

I think where I've landed after my decades, at various times, I've felt differently about sports. Like before I encountered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, me and Steve, we would do kumite, we would punch and kick and then grapple on the ground, and we would beat the crap out of each other. But it wasn't like the majority of our training because we also were rehearsing neck strike and an eye gouge and stuff like that. And I definitely had a sense that that's kind of the majority of your training. And then you spend a little time roughing it up, and it was more for toughness, and then of course encountering Business Jiu-Jitsu and starting with the first night, but realizing I can't do anything, like I'm under control. Like I can't forget about gouging the eyes. I can't even touch the guy, like and he gouged my eyes till the end of time. I decided, and I think you might agree with this, that there should be a basis of, like you say, live resistant sport, which by definition means yes, there's rules. You're not gonna do the most dangerous things, but what you're gonna do, you're gonna get really good at because people are gonna be resisting it, and they're really good at resisting it, and you're good at doing it. So if I can get an arm bar on you, a black belt in jujitsu, I can get an arm bar on anybody in the street, and that's gonna break their arm. But like you say, then with those skills, now to remind yourself and spend a certain amount of time saying, okay, now in the sport we do this, we expect the softness, we're not paying any attention for weapons, we're or well, you should, but we don't have to. We don't have to pay attention to objects in the environment or other people. Now that you have the skill, now that you can apply a choke, now that you can just really impose your will in these different ways, here are the rules that you want to pay attention to for real fighting, and then rehearse that a bit. And so I would say it's maybe 80-20 or something like that. 80% safe sport against full resistance within the rules of the sport, and then 20%, let's calm it down a little bit, but let's put our jeans back on. Or put our utility belt on, or get a chair in the mix, or bring a rubber knife in, or let's go two against one. And obviously we're gonna tone that down, but then we can rehearse our more live scenarios, and just that's I think a good mix.

SPEAKER_00 41:38

Yeah, and I think people look at it the wrong way. And I see this between reality-based martial arts instructors and the combat sport arranging. These guys say, hey, you're training in a rule set, and we're not training in a rule set, and the combat sports guys say, Yeah, but we have the aliveness. That's what really matters when you fight. And the thing is, it's not mutually exclusive.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

So you do both.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

If you have somebody that's maybe like Jeff Thompson and Lee Morrison are prolific, and I love their stuff, and really reality-based guys from their bouncing in the UK and stuff like that. But if you take a guy that's one of their students that also wrestled folk style for six years, boxed, amateur, and also took his grappling and learned some jujitsu and catch wrestling submissions, they support each other. I think my dad dislikes the sport. And sometimes I have to remind him, I say, hey, you know what? First of all, it has to be about more than fighting.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:30

And if you enjoy the surgical aspect at Naga or the ADCC or IBJ JF, and that's your way. I'm pretty sure I used to tell him, I'm pretty sure that guy who got a bronze can win a fight. Can scrap for it. I'm pretty sure he can scrap for it. But here's the thing, I'll take it even further. When we would have these discussions at the academy, and people who come from a jujitsu perspective have a tendency sometimes to denigrate pinning-based sports. And the here's the thing is that yeah, d denigrate the reality-based things when they're not taking into account that they're not mutually exclusive, as we agree. Right. But also let's look at the pinning-based sports. So a short pin in American wrestling systems, and then a 22nd for a full pin in judo with e-pone, and they would win in judo. That's one of the ways you can win in judo. Or ensemble, there's this variety. I think they get they score a crazy amount of points, like six points or something, for a hold down or something like that. And uh so I would tell guys, like, when you look at the sport as just a laboratory of dealing with resistance, you don't get lost in chipping away at like, well, you can't heel hook here or this, that, or I can't, I could have punched the guy. It's like, look, everybody, we can all start punching each other when we grapple. That guy who just won in that sport didn't suddenly forget to punch when somebody socks him in a parking lot. He's gonna remember to punch. But when you look at the pinning based sports, I tell guys all the time, like, hey, in jujitsu, in our sport, there is no win by the pin. The grappling continues in our particular district. But one of the benefits of the guys who come from the pin-based sports, they may not in in wrestling they don't have submissions, which you could argue is a big hole. And in judo the naewaza, which is the grappling in judo, you could argue that a lot of modern judo players don't practice that a lot because there's other ways to win and the exchanges they're fairly sure. There's some great you know they get broken up. But here's the thing is that one of the positive, at least from the police perspective, but also self-defense, one of the positive benefits of that rule set is people have a great aversion to being on their back, a deep aversion to it. In other words, they don't just settle into allowing someone to have cross sight on them or mount and say, well, I'm just gonna like take my time to come out and to wait. So there is a an expediency that creates that has actually a benefit for self-defense in that rule set. So and I used to always say that uh uh to guys too, as I say, hey, you see that judo guy who just pinned a guy for 20 seconds? I think he can hold someone for five minutes. Yeah. He just happened to be able to stop at 20 seconds because the ref said that's it.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

That's definitely true. The things that you learn under pressure in sport can be there for you, and they're usually good. There may be a couple of instances where, okay, certain sports are actually training a bad habit for fighting, and that's okay, and that can be unlearned pretty quickly. But the other thing that I've realized about sport is you develop just good old-fashioned toughness.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Yep, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:28

Toughness. I remember when I started teaching jujitsu at UCLA, it was very stylized, but very nice people and technical, and they could do their wrist grab escapes and throws and stuff like that. And then I don't know, they came in one day and one of the guys said, Hey, we're gonna do this test, like we're gonna start everybody on top in these control positions and see how long you can hold somebody down, right? But they didn't practice as a sport. So when they were doing it together, they could hold each other down because they didn't know what they were doing. I had done a lot of fighting stuff. When I went on top of them, these guys could not get out. I mean, they were never going to get out. And then when they went on top of me, it took me one second to get out, two seconds, right? Because they had just never felt the real application of this. And I know I'm sure you've seen this too, where someone has trained in a kind of a modern day mom's class of kickboxing where they're doing pad work and it looks and it's looks like boxing, and they're kicking a bag, but they have never been hit. No one's actually ever hit them. And the first time someone gets hit in the face and just the shock on their face and they're kind of stunned and they're checking if they're okay, because they just have never had the experience. And they could be training death grips and eye gouges and all these kind of very good movements, but if they've never just had the experience of being hit and being out of breath and being in a bad situation, I think that toughness is so much of it, which is why if you tell me there's two untrained people, but one of them has played football, give me the football player. Yeah. Because that person's used to rough housing, right? So toughness, I think, is a big part of it, and the ability to keep your composure and recognize that you're okay, and you get that in sport.

SPEAKER_00 47:08

And I think that's the best way to look at it. It is a laboratory of learning to deal with resistance. I think what you enjoy after that is up to you. Going back to that aliveness type of training and the things you're referring to, you can sit a bunch of guys in a room and they could argue between Western boxing, savat, tie boxing, and a lethway, which are all striking systems. And uh you can argue that, but my argument, and the same thing with grappling. You could have a Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy, a catch wrestler, a luto livre guy, which is the other grappling sport, the no-gi grappling sport from Brazil that was traditionally a rival in the past, and a guy from Kosan judo, which is the style of judo they do at the Imperial Universities, which there's no interruption for their ground. So it ends up being more similar to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. People can have stylistic arguments, like uh Thai boxers can tell the Western boxers, like, well, you're not kicking the legs, we kick the legs. The grapplers, some guys will be better at takedowns, some guys will be better at the ground. Those are eight different systems, and I haven't my argument is they have more in common with what's important than what they're really talking about, which is these stylistic arguments. Because I think there's tough guys from all of them. I think going back to the policing thing, what we need is an aliveness-based system of training that is a laboratory for resistance that's safe. So you have that with jujitsu. There's a rapid development increase more than I've ever seen for martial arts. I mean, yeah, especially when you talk about these kids that are young, CrossFit, athletic kids. I mean, 14 months later, they are a completely different person. And you have to have that for a period of time. We like to see people continue to do, for all the benefits, they continue to do jujitsu training. But if you're going to work as a police officer, I would say you have to have that couple of years of training. I'm sure you roll with very good blue belts today. I I roll with very good blue belts. I watched a middleweight division match in one of the European IBJ JF competitions in White Belt, which didn't exist when we started. And in fact, when I started jujitsu through you and my dad, there wasn't even a pan. That was 96. Yeah, there was nothing. Which is why you and the Machado brothers were fighting in judo competitions and stuff to jump in there, which is a a great uh a great video to watch. I encourage people to watch it as a it was an amazing thing. And and why John and uh and Hickson and I think even Jean-Jacques dipped into Russian Sambo to try.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Oh, yeah, they just wanted any kind of competition they could get.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

I think they learned the rule set like that day. Yes, exactly. Or even not, just didn't understand the rule set.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

And they just told hey, you can't do that.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

Ensemble a lot of times you can't in the sport sambo, not the combat side where they do, but you can't uh in the one that's non-striking, you uh you can't choke. So they they're probably told before, hey, you can foot lock, knee bar, arm lock. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 49:55

I'm just looking to see uh well, I don't have all my medals up here, but because we I probably have some of those judo medals, they would be all smaller and older. I don't think I have them up. I have more medals.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

It was great to see you guys all line up for that five-on-five match, and it was oh yeah, it was amazing, and it's a testament to Higgin. Higin was such a Mike Tyson type figure, iconic figure one in the way. We uh before I forget, I because I have you here, I was actually at the Korean black belt challenge where you fought Fabio Santos. Carlos Machado fought one of Marilla Bustamante's students, I believe. Yeah. And Hernato fought Francisco Brenett. He did. Your viewers must know. I think you had several matches with Fabio Santos. Two in the end, but one one that night. That was the epic back and forth to you, and to credit to Fabio, he's a legendary figure. But there was a lot of back and forth, and that is in that match, I think at least once I saw you do what Hernado and I call the Dave Meyer sweep. It's kind of an off-balancing sweep that's very similar to Lasso Guard, but it's without the hook in the arm. It's a little bit more deceptive in drawing the person in.

SPEAKER_01 51:04

Yes, I make the person feel like they're gonna pass my guard.

SPEAKER_00 51:07

Yes. And that was especially when you were like a purple belt, that was one, and I got so you obviously instructed me on that. And 30 plus years later, when I'm tired, when I'm under pressure, that is the go-to open guard sweep for me, is that sweep from me. See, I should have charged interest. Yes, you should have. And I've taught it in Hernado, I have to credit him because that's kind of how the term came up, because he would catch me sweeping people like that in class. And he's oh Dave Myan. Well that we just didn't really, it's like I said, it's a slight variation. I don't see many people do it that way. They usually depend on that hook with the leg a lot. But I think one of the great things about this as you get good at it with that control of opposite sleeve, opposite leg, is the first evolution of that sweep is this space gets created that, especially for wrestlers, they just feel like they have to go that way. And then later on, I even learned how to kind of drive my knees forward and force it on people sometime that I trained with a lot that knew that I was trying to sweep that way. But you gave me what today, and this is what goes back to having fundamentals, or I think we were talking earlier that I like this saying, some shooting instructors say that there's no such thing as advanced techniques, just the perfect execution of fundamentals under stress. And all of us, when we're tired and under pressure, are gonna resort to this short syllabus. Yeah, whether it's striking or grappling, there's a short syllabus that we're willing to bet our ass on. And that's the number one for me.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

I am honored, but my name continues on. That match with Fabio Santos that night, Mark Denny from the Dog Brothers, he used to videotape stuff back then, and I know he had a video of it, because I think I saw it once, but I don't know that he has it anymore. And there is one video online, but it's like from way in the stands, and you keep seeing the back of someone's head, and then the person's really excited, so they're looking at the ceiling half the time. Seeing, but that was a crazy back and forth, super fun to watch with Fabio Santos. I remember that. And these were a lot of pressure, but you're right. You mentioned the five-person judo fight. That's when Hagan and the brothers wanted to fight judo, so they asked me, can I go find some judo competitions for them? Their English wasn't that great. And we did. We went down to downtown LA, I don't remember where it was, but there were some good judo competitions, and one of them we did was a five against five, and there would be a team, and there was a team around Robin, and whatever your weight was, the lightest person would fight the lightest person. So it would be like that, but your lightest person might have been a lot lighter than their lightest person, but that's how they did it moving up. And you know, of course, there are five Machado brothers, but Hajir was not that into competition. Hajger's great at jiu-jitsu, but just didn't particularly appreciate the stress of competition or whatever. So I got to be the fifth brother in those situations, which was a lot of honor and a lot of pressure because I was putting on a black belt. I was a black belt in jiu-jitsu, I was a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at that time, and I was not ranked at all in judo. So putting on a black belt to walk into a judo competition. But it was great experiences. Yeah, I'll post some of the links.

SPEAKER_00 54:04

Yeah. The thing is, I think that goes back to kind of that stylistic difference that was going on in that period back then, because if you watch those matches and for people that end up watching the matches, obviously, you're super accomplished martial artists and the four other members of your team were I think Higgin has probably over 300 victories in jujitsu in a row, and I think he had one day, which was 19 black belt matches with all submissions. I mean, he was just incredible level of difference. And they were all like that. But you see as these matches occur because those judo players were not used to people forcing the nails, really. Right. Or the grappling. So they were used to people standing up very upright and doing the throw. And you could see the level of difference that has changed a lot these days. Like I said, I think when you go to judo clubs today, it is not uncommon to find somebody crossed. Yeah, sure, of course. Yeah, at either black belts in jiu-jitsu or some of them very good purple belts in which is a super advanced belt for sure. They have remained to keep judo as their activity they like, but they have added this on.

SPEAKER_01 55:12

Oh yeah. Look, judo is a great sport, and judo nawaza, there's Tashiwaza, the standing techniques, newaza, the ground techniques. Was always good and was fine. It was just that jujitsu took that and developed it a bit further. But some of the toughest guys, Scott Goddard, who used to train with Chatos, he came from England. He was a black belt in judo, and he was just blue belt in jiu-jitsu, and then eventually got his black belt, but like tough as nails to deal with. They tend to fight a little bit stiffer, a little bit more, but still really good. I think our advantage, like you said, at that time was if we could just avoid getting thrown, we'd get penalized for sometimes like sitting and not trying to get thrown. As long as we didn't get disqualified, if we could take it to the ground, we'd probably win on the ground. But to the credit of even the people back at, they learned very quickly, don't engage on the ground with us. I have a match, I'll I'll post it here too, where I was fighting against an instructor in one of those matches, and he was great. And he was almost throwing me and almost throwing me and almost throwing them to get him in my guard exactly where I want to be. Sweep him over, get things going, put him in a triangle, and he lifts me one inch off the ground in a triangle, and that breaks it. So he knew and he eventually won that match. I think he did a foot sweeper, did something that did not seem like a throw, but I think the refs were getting sick of me at that point. But I mean, even to the credit of the Judo players at that time, they quickly understood don't go to the ground with these guys. They were smartly trying to maneuver us into the corner, work your throw in the corner, then we're out of bounds, start over. So very talented fighters. Judah are very talented.

SPEAKER_00 56:38

Yeah, and it's just they they're just like we were talking about with these other styles, it's it the way you train gets influenced by the rule set. Of course. And then jujitsu has changed over these years. I'm a big fan of Robert Drysdale as a historian of jujitsu from Japan to Brazil to here. He does a lot of really detailed research about that. But the rule set in jujitsu has always been very much more open in the sense that the continuity of fight occurs and that decisions are made by points when there's no submission, but the goal being a submission. So there was a slightly different kind of thing. I think now obviously things have changed. I give a lot of credit to the Machados and the Gracie's and Hernado for this explosion in the United States, which I think popularized other grappling arts. I think who knows what the future of these other arts would have been without them. One of their greatest contributions was saying that grappling is an effective way of winning a fight. I often think like Carlos Gracie Sr. and Helio, one of their you can argue over the years that there's been technical innovations that make jujitsu different than judo, but I think historically it was really Cano students coming over Brazil that taught it. But it was their rejection of a rule set that didn't allow the continuity that caused this focus in this world. They became grappling specialists to a way that was surgical, for sure. I think they popularized. I mean, I mentioned that Kosum style that they do at the universities in Japan. Yeah. That remain for many years, and you watch they do like a five-on-five thing, and you will see Spider Guard. You'll see like Lasso Guard and everything like that. So and I think I'm kind of a nerd about this stuff, and historically I like to see these other styles preserved as well. I mean, of course.

SPEAKER_01 58:26

I was talking to Justin Flores, I don't know if you know who he is, Jay Flo. Yeah. Phenomenal takedown specialist, interviewed him. And actually, I did interview him, and that was really interesting. But it was actually talking to Eric Paulson about books and people getting all their information off of the internet. Actually, everyone's talking about people getting all their information. And I think the general sense among high-level people is you can see things that can be interesting, like little snippets in social media, but generally speaking, you don't want to learn jujitsu that way, you're not learning the system, you're not learning how it connects up to other things. Half the times the stuff is kind of bullshit anyway, but it just kind of looks good for uh gets views or whatever. But Eric was talking about the value of books. And I know John Will has like a wall, the library in his living room of martial arts books, and I've got a few, not in this room, but it's not the same as watching a video. But if you're only gonna get your jujitsu or your martial arts from watching videos, you're only gonna get stuff from like the last 30 years, maybe 40, maybe some black and white footage stuff. But people have been writing about martial arts for uh a thousand years, if you're gonna go back to read Musashi era or things like that, which isn't actually that old. But going back and looking at pictures, if you actually look at books, that is the preserved knowledge, and people have been fighting for a long time. And I think that a lot of what we see today, I think there are new things happening, certainly new today, but I'm not sure how much there is new in the world because humans have been involved in hand-to-hand combat for a long time. And I've said, I think we have forgotten more than what we currently know now, because civilizations have come and gone in different parts of the world where they developed sophisticated fighting systems that were very appropriate to whatever their challenges were at the time, and now that civilization isn't around anymore, and so we just don't know what those fighting techniques were. But people were choking each other out and doing every heel hook imaginable and every leg lock imaginable and every weapon imaginable. So I feel like you don't want to cut yourself off just because you're not seeing something in practice today, to assume, like, well, if I'm not that interested in what I see going on in a judo school today, I'm not gonna look at an old judo book. Like, no, look at an old judo book because you're gonna see some great, thought-provoking stuff that then you have to try to make work. Or look at some old book about kickboxing, or just find the oldest stuff you can because there's a lot of wisdom that's been lost.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

I mean, that stuff interests me. It doesn't interest everybody. I I like seeing the historical stuff. I used to tease some of the younger guys I worked with that that the people who went before us, if it weren't for them, you would think a guard is somebody who works at West Tech. So we have to, I think, always, even shortly within the Machados, you, Rick Williams, Chris Howder, Bob Bass, Hernato, Fernando, all these guys that really kind of pushed it out. You talk about the the match you had with Fabio Santos, obviously Bob Bass with Fetosa, Howder, the things he was doing. I'm very good friends with Chris Howder and I have been to this day. Hernato fighting out there, first 96, I think Pan Am in Hawaii, he was out there as a gold medalist along with Hagen in his category and Fernando in his category. So I feel, once again, as a martial artist, there's an obligation to look at these people. And when you look at some of the history, and like I said, Drysdale is a very good example of doing it, you see guys. He always says looking at an old Cousin judo book, you won't see stuff much technically different from what Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys were doing in the 80s. And Takeoyano, who was a guy who brought jujitsu and judo to Brazil, was kind of known for his heel hook, and you see guys do Daily Hiva and stuff. So there's certainly been a lot of innovations, hard to keep track of. I mean, I think as a purple belt, I was a victim of like technique collecting, which I try to advise people not to do. Um certainly my personal opinion is that I'm always more impressed watching Hodger Gracie cross-collar choke somebody from the mount over and over again. If you hold me down in the mount and I can't do anything, that always feels worse to me than being caught in a calf slifer or a loop choke or something like that. I go, okay, I mean, I don't like we all don't like getting caught or try not to get caught, but I really think the control of the I love it when I see high-level black belts force techniques that are being taught the next day in a white belt class as a technique. Cross-collar choke is one example of that. But just simply taking people's backs or people who have triangles that you can't stop that are kind of like, I like the setup you do of like using the knee to kind of kick down that other arm and stuff. Those kinds of things, they're so important. And uh especially for self-defense, because again, there's a lot of value to the sport of activity. I'm not discounting it like my father does, who just doesn't believe in martial sport really. Believes in sport as a training vehicle, but doesn't really believe in modern sport. There's certainly all these new and innovations and techniques, but often I would talk to guys in jiu-jitsu, and when the subject matter of their police profession comes up or self-defense comes up, I'd tell them you have to remember these lengthy grappling exchanges, these chess matches that you're doing in class, they don't exist in the Costco parking lot at two o'clock in the morning. They're not. I mean, can you sprawl? Can you hold someone down? Can you get up off the ground? Can you stand in base from guard? Can you do these basics that are gonna happen under pressure when somebody's punching at you and doing all those kinds of stuff? Get that? I think everybody should get that. And then if you decide that for life, one of your goals is to engage in the competition or whatever sports you like. That I mean I cheer that on. And I think everybody should. I think stepping onto the mat and fighting an unknown opponent is good for everybody. I've done it, everybody I think everybody does it to varying degrees, and some people it's something they want to do a lot of. And I'm glad to see you're still fighting. I am still fighting and quite successful.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:17

You and Chris. You and you and Chris.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:19

I don't know if Chris has been fighting lately, but I well, he's certainly on the mat training, fighting there, but I don't think I think he stopped doing actual competitions. I haven't, and I keep thinking I probably should, got nothing left to prove or whatever, but it's fun, it gives me something to work towards. Yeah. I notice that the people I compete with are less injured than I am because they haven't they've been doing it 10 years and not like BGJ 35 or whatever I've been doing. Even though I might technically know more or something in in a five-minute match, I might not get to express it the way I want. I think some people are probably taking a little testosterone to make themselves feel good in their 60s. I can't fault them for that. No one's testing, but I don't do that, so I can feel like, wow, that guy's got a lot of juice strength for five minutes. But that's okay. I mean, it's just another challenge to me. But that's the reason I do it is to continue to have the experience of a little butterflies. I still get that even after all these years. And that was my main reason for doing competition ever was to approximate what we don't get in the gym, which is a little bit of adrenaline, usually. We're not getting that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

That unknown factor with opponent is huge. Because think about it, like the hierarchy of who taps who and stuff like that in regular training at jujitsu school, it's pretty sad. It's kind of like you may get surprised, you kind of go like that. But when you step onto the mat in front of somebody, start from the standing position, have to work under pressure. The adrenaline of it, I think that's I had one friend who all credit to him, Kenny Bond, he passed away, great black belt from street sports. And he was one of my friends, Chris Lisiandro, another one that was kind of like that, that most approximated being almost as relaxed as they were in training. It was all credit to them. They just really kind of just rolled into it well.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:56

But I think for most people, it gives you that exposure to adrenaline. And stylistically, the guys in class might know I straight foot a lock a lot or do the Dave Meyer sweep or try to turtle and do the Macaconi sweep. But somebody else doesn't know that. And you don't know their particular game. Right. And then you have that time pressure. Like you brought up the in masters and senior, the five minutes. I mean, one takedown and then someone's in your guard and they're kind of conservatively trying to pass, but not really trying to pass.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:24

It's hard to work back up from that. With people that because they know something too. And they know how to not expose themselves to too much danger. They're already ahead, that kind of stuff. So it's a different dynamic.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:33

But competition is different. But I think everybody should do it. They don't have to, but I think it has some good benefits. You know, rarely do people get injured. I mean, that can't happen. But I don't really, I don't recall anybody saying, I wish I wouldn't have done that competition. I think when or lose, they're like, that was a good experience. That was interesting. Gave them something. They might say, I don't want to do it again. But I think competition is a good thing. Just in terms of what you've been successful at getting law enforcement to do in terms of requiring a blue belt or something like that. So how exactly would that work? Would that be you can't even apply unless you have a blue belt, or we're going to pay for you to get a blue belt before we hire you, or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:07

Okay, so I I worked for a police agency in LA County for 15 years. I spent the last 11 years at Orange County Sheriff's, the last four of that, as a sergeant in charge of the ACT unit, the arrest and control techniques, which teaches solely the defensive tactics and the empty hand stuff to both recruits and advanced officers, the sheriff's department, and a whole host of agencies. And so that's just my particular background. There's a retired assistant sheriff, Andy Stephens, who's a big supporter. They had just created a sergeant position in this unit. And I had the jujitsu background and everything. I had done ACT instruction at my first department, but I ended up putting in for this and working for Andy Stevens, who's a fantastic command staff member from the Sheriff's Department, very supportive. And we talked about what are we trying to do. So at the time, there were some examples. The only two mandatory places I'm aware of are Paso Robles in San Luis Obispo County. Their chief was a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, big proponent of it, and Marietta, Georgia. They had done an 18-month study, and there was a drastic decrease in injuries to the officers and the suspects, the use of the taser, escalations to hire you, all the things that I already knew, and even a non-law enforcement person like you already knew. That's what's going to happen when you make people regular change. So, to anybody watching it that's like a police chief or a command stuff, there's really three ways to do it. Orange County is one of the largest sheriff's departments in the country. Again, I explained to them and they supported me that I was a proponent of regular training, that a culture change happens where young deputies train in jiu-jitsu as like a there's an interwoven kind of thing between jujitsu training and being a peace officer. Using the 80-20 principle, I told them use of force problems in the United States. 80% of those problems are going to get solved by this action, which is in the 20%. There's other things we have to do. We have to use a firearm, baton, taser, we have to use verbal, so we have to learn how to strike sometimes. But this is the best nucleus. So to do that regular training on a large department, I advocated that the tuition reimbursement that we have as a county benefit for the deputies, which is used for higher education like a bachelor's or master's degree, sometimes for an activity that has a nexus to the department. If you're a SWOT operator and you want to go to a sniper school, guys who want to do, you know, scuba dive of certification because they want to work on the dive team or anything, that they start allowing jujitsu to be judged as one of those nexus activities. I see. So they can get it paid for. They can get it paid for. The Sheriff's Department was all for it. At first, I think the county looked at it like, well, that's like paying for a gym membership. We don't and I was explaining to them and I'll use this comparison, like I was in a master's program at one time where one three-unit class out of state tuition was$1,755, so almost$1,800. And I told them if you took that$1,800 and you gave it to some guy and his jiu-jitsu school was$150 a month, that's a year of training. And I'm not saying a degree in security studies of international type of emphasis doesn't help a police officer, but this stuff will change the entire dynamic. So we used a tuition reimbursement that's been going on for about four years now, maybe five. And we're 2,000 sworn, but there's a lot of command staff and investigators and stuff. I was just talking to the guys the other day. There's probably 300 or so deputies that are actively using this program, which is it's a huge change. Yeah, that's amazing. There's other examples of Santa Ana PD, Glendale, and Anaheim would be an example of what I would call in-house training. So let's say Dave Meyer is a sergeant or he's a homicide detective and he says, you know what?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:42

I'll teach a class.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:43

I'll teach a class regularly. Santa Ana Police Department probably has one of the most robust programs. There's classes going on four or five times a week. And I've been on the mat with those guys and with 50, 60 people on the mat, and really good percentage going on that. Their chief was very supportive of it. But that would be called the in-house model. That's usually smaller departments. We might have a San Rafael police department or something like that. For us at the Sheriff's Department, we got guys living in San Marino County, LA County, San Diego County, Orange County, all over the place. It was better to say they can select a school, it goes to the arrest and control technique sergeant for approval as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school, then their membership dues are paid, and then some equipment-related stuff like GIS and stuff like that. And it gets reimbursed onto their check as an area of training that is obviously professionalizing their use of force skills or their ACT skills. The last thing that you can do as a department is you can do what Pasadena and a couple other places have done where they've selected a school to be their contract school. Riverside PD does this with peerless. And what they do is they pay a certain amount a year, and then the school says any sworn peace officer can come there anytime in class.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

Oh, that's cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:00

So what we're trying to do is remove the financial thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:04

Remove the barrier.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:05

Yeah, so that we can get down to like guys and say, like, are you just being lazy? or you know, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So we want to eliminate the excuses and to create, I mean, the studies that Marietta did, that Mesa, Arizona, which is another large police department that has a very robust jiu-jitsu, what they call police jujitsu program, Pittsburgh Police Department, another large agency, now buys giz with the Pittsburgh logo for their recruits, and during their academy, they train jujitsu every week. So you have this kind of wave going on, but it seems to really fall into that the reimbursement model, the in-house instruction model, and the contract school model where they select one school. I think Park City, Utah selects a Gracie Sparrow school there, and that allows people to engage in regular training. But my personal opinion was going back to our Pavlovian aliveness argument, is that I told guys, our command staff on my department, you're looking for society seems to be since the early 90s. I started right after the King riots and everything, saying police technical ability for use of force is here. We don't like those outcomes. We want it to be here. Okay, how do you get it to here? And what I explained to them is there's a bridge that you have to cross. This is the only way it's going to happen the way you want it. And that involves aliveness-based training in jiu-jitsu regularly for a period of time. That's it. Otherwise, it'll never change. The technical ability will not be there unless the standard is has to be changed. What we want a police officer in the United States to know in physical hand-to-hand combatives seems to be here. And what we're seeing sometimes with unfortunate outcomes gets way down here. And going back to what we were talking about, how come the lawyer, the high school teacher They have time to get good at it? Yeah. The animal control, whatever it is, they're getting good at it because of their own and I'm one of those people. I would be doing jujitsu if I was a librarian. I just happen to be in law enforcement. I like martial arts, period. I would do them if I was painting houses or was a university professor. Right. I would do it. But for peace officers, I hope they like the activity and all the benefits. I think they will. Whether they're in a line of duty work, it'd be helpful. But it's just, it's a high consequence profession, both litigation-wise and your life and somebody else's life. And what I experienced when we were trying to draft the curriculum, and we changed a lot of things. At Orange County, they get the reimbursement to train. We have quarterly seminars at the academy that are free. This is where the civilian community comes in and tries to work with us. And that's the solution. The solution, you as an instructor, if you have three or four cops, I'm convinced through jujitsu you're doing as much for them or more than the state of California ever has done with the technical training. The first seminar we had was Hernato and Rico, a four-time NCAA champion under Dan Gable. They taught a seminar. Weena has been there, Tynan and Guimendez, a host of other people. Bao Kwatsch, Paul Barbosa, who's a Culver City police officer, a black belt from New Breed, very successful jiu-jitsu competitor, him along with Rob Casey, who's a Chris Howder black belt. And my first department ended up starting to pay for the jiu-jitsu. So it's a big wave. But I think, I hope if there's anybody in law enforcement from the command staff side that can make a decision, this is the best investment you can make for safety of the officers, which is a very important thing, but safety for the suspects, decreasing IOD injuries from officers that are involved in altercations. In the Marietta study, like none of the jujitsu guys were getting hurt at all. Everybody else was getting hurt trying to fight. They were not getting hurt. And to create better de-escalation skills and what people seem to be asking for. And I'm not talking about a civilian who thinks, you know, we're supposed to fight like Jack Reacher or Batman. That's just not how it is. But you and I both know the power that comes with a blue belt in jiu-jitsu. I always tell people there's only two real big belts in jiu-jitsu. It's blue and it's purple. And I used to talk about purple belt being kind of the advanced thing, you can jump in a room with a bunch of brown and black belts and sambo guys and judo guys, and they're fine. But the blue belt is this shift where you are a competent grappler, and in the essence of original Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you have the ability to control a bigger, stronger, untrained opponent in a self-defense situation through the application of jujitsu. That's what we want for cops. It's the single biggest thing they can do. That doesn't mean it solves everything. It's not a panacea. There's a lot of dynamics to street altercations, as you pointed out. Of course. But it's the best core nucleus to change what we're getting from peace officers as far as their level of professionalism in that. Otherwise, we're failing them. Total failures. I can give you specific examples of shootings, including a department that now has a jiu-jitsu program in Michigan, where I believe not only did the person being arrested end up being shot and killed, there was a criminal prosecution of the officer. And in watching the video, we used it for two years at the Academy as a training video that involved essentially breaking down a turtle, pretty easy, a hip check and a cross side would have stopped the whole thing. I said, look at that video and what that department went through. Somebody lost their life. There was a criminal prosecution of the officer. And I'm telling you right now, had that been a blue belt in jiu-jitsu, that never would have happened. All the subsequent two minutes that followed the initial takedown, it wouldn't have happened. So how much, they probably paid out 20 million, the criminal prosecution. How much was that one year of unlimited jujitsu training at$1,800 worth? It's just we have to have that alteration. It's always going to be there. People will try to talk around it and say, well, can we do like a one-week class once a year? It's like you're not going to change them. They have to be changed.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:09

If I had to describe what we can do in jiu-jitsu, because this is how I think of it, because I play a pretty old school game, even against all the young guys, that's fine. Also, as I'm getting older, just because joints and stuff like that, I tend to calm it down. But I don't know if people who don't know jujitsu what they might be thinking of. And when you look at fights in the movies, it's wild and people are swinging and people are tossing people over. To me, if I had to just put into a couple words, it's we shut people down.

unknown 1:18:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:36

That's what we do. Well, I'll take you off your feet, I'll put you down, and I will shut you down. If I get behind you and choke you out, I will shut you off. But I will shut you down. You won't be able to hit me, you won't be able to get away, which is exactly what you want in a police situation. You don't want to start exchanging, if you don't have to, spinning back kicks or anything like that. You want to just shut the person's ability to harm you or themselves down.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:02

What I kind of told the people out of my department was jujitsu is the one art that allows you to press pause. For our police officers, when all of a sudden a violent situation escalates, what they want to do is press pause, either until they're able to handcuff themselves, or most of the time, what we want them to do is have someone come there in a facilitate the handcuff. But it allows you, like the shutting down, it allows you to press pause. And if you're on top of somebody and you're holding him in a twisting a gift wrap like Hickson won all his fights from, and you're just maintaining them out, we teach that a lot in the academy because that one risk control allows you to use your radio at the same time. Sometimes fights happen before people know where we're at or even to go to help us. And you can just press pause. Now, yeah, if other people are coming out, there's other dynamics that happen. But we want the technical ability of the officer to outmatch the technical ability of the suspect most of the time. As much as we can control. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:01

And I would say and outmatch the combination of whatever technical ability and berserkerness the other person has. If they're on drugs or whatever, or if they're strong or whatever, just to be able to just shut that down. One of the things that jujitsu also gives you is people tire themselves out. For sure. Right. So they immediately, if you put someone in that control position and they start freaking out trying to get out, they're going to quickly tire themselves out.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:27

So you'll Yeah, you bring up two good points. I've seen guys on the quote unquote suspect side or guys in the criminal community that are purple belts in jujitsu or have boxed and stuff like that. So there's certainly a technical ability. But there's something to be said for police officers in California and they're stopping a guy as a parolee. When these guys are fighting on maximum security prison yards in California, they're getting a lot of aliveness experience and violence. They're in riots, a lot of those custody facilities, there's weapons involved. Some of them, it's almost all weapons, but they maintain good shape. I've talked to guys that would do like a thousand burpees a day in a cell. They're in really good shape, and they have some of these nefarious individuals have the capacity, unlike the average person, even an average police officer, to get violent like that at the drop of the hat. Once they see that they have to use that to solve the problem. So that pause you're talking about in people getting tired, it's a it's an important thing. But the second thing I wanted to add to that is jujitsu also changes the de-escalation presence of the officer talking to them. Those guys that have been in and out of prison and on the street and stuff like that, they can tell when there's something different with the person interacting with them. And they can tell where somebody's, a young officer who doesn't have those abilities, is scared to take action or feels uncomfortable with the situation. You are comfortable using controlling force if you had to. It's something that's innate in you. One of the things they found, like with the Marietta study, was that the portion of officers that were training jujitsu were less likely to use force in the first place than the officers who weren't trained. And to me, that spoke to scientific data that had to do with that some of the suspects that were contemplating resisting were sensing something that it wasn't a good idea to resist. So their ability to talk to people, it completely changes. They're more level-headed. Jiu-Jitsu as a martial artist is one of the ones that obviously is like a huge confidence boat for your application of it because you're experiencing it in class. You're like, wow, you go away from class, that guy was huge and outweighed me, and it was easy for me to control. So people know that, and that's the confidence you want to give these officers. So there's so many other benefits other than the ability to do an Americana on a guy on the ground. I mean, it's just endless benefits for not a lot, and it's sad that it took this long. It's been in the United States for three decades, but I'm glad for whatever is changing because it's changing in a lot of places.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:55

Well, I think you've been a big part of that as one of the early people really trying to push that into the Southern California departments, which is where Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu landed.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:02

And here's an example of some of the stuff that in the past they would come up with. I think Chris was interviewing Jean-Jacques on his podcast, talking about that initial kind of pitch to LEPD, and one of the lieutenants or captains was saying, Jean-Jacques was showing a takedown, and he said, Well, do you know how much police uniforms cost? Because they're going to rip their uniform or something like that. And Jean-Jacques was confused, and obviously, being the nice guy he is, he tried to answer it diplomatically. I mean, had I been there, I would have looked at that guy and said, like, hey man, that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life. You can't fix stupid. You never fought anybody on the street before you became a captain. I mean, Jean-Jacques's example is a high-ranking decision maker at a police department criticizing what he was offering with an argument that is I'd be being kind to say it was completely asinine. Yeah, short-sighted. Yeah. Yeah, most okay, short-sighted. Yeah. That's not does make a lot of sense. But I think that's changing, and people understand. I know at my department I I can't say enough good things about the Orange County Sheriff's Department from the command staff down, and them wanting to give the deputies something beneficial to professionalize them and benefit their life in a whole bunch of ways, fitness and mental health and everything. So they were supporters from including a lot of non-Jiu-Jitsu people, including high-ranking guys who said, I need to start training jujitsu to set an example. That's a rare commodity these days in law enforcement. So I can't say enough good things about them for being a leader as a large department on the West Coast and saying, we want our culture to be one where these young deputies are benefiting from jujitsu from not just the technical aspect, but from the controlling force aspect, the mental health aspect, everything. They were supporters from the beginning. So it was just a matter of trying to implement it, and it's in full swing now for sure. That's awesome. If anybody sees this and they're a lieutenant in their training division at the department, or they're a police chief or a sheriff and they're interested in how they can do this, I would always encourage them to contact the Orange County Sheriff's Department. There's a bunch of guys that are willing to help down there at the Academy, UCSA Academy down in Tuston. And they can always help them get in touch with me. I've spoken, Don Barnes brought me up to Oxnard, he's the sheriff of Orange County, to speak to all the sheriffs in California. I mean, so you have the guys from San Mateo, Siskiyou, Riverside, San Diego, and everything to talk about some of this. And what I would encourage police departments and sheriff's departments to think about doing is that I'm a big believer that the action is the most important thing. How you do it, do the in-house model, the reimbursement, get a contract school. If you got a purple belt that's there that wants to hold a weekly or two times a week class, the point is to get people involved in jiu-jitsu and you'll see the benefits. And I think taking the action of doing it somehow is, you know, there's a saying my friend Andy always tells me, which is you don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. So I think the progress in the United States with jujitsu and law enforcement is to just recognize it. The data is indisputable. This is something that you and I know experientially, whether one of us is a cop and the other isn't, we know what's going to happen. The Marietta study and these other studies, I knew would happen if somebody would do it. But this is a chance to make real change within the culture of your department. That's all positive. Everybody benefits. It's not just the deputies or the officers, it's the suspects, it's the community, it's what they want out of police officers. They want that higher technical ability. Jiu-Jitsu is the solution to doing that. You're going to find, as we know, like the learning curve at the beginning is just like the first 12, 18 months is just insane. Insane. It takes a long time to start plateauing. And that's where those other types of training, like the positional sparring, putting yourself in bad positions, checking your ego at the door, stop being the Americans that are worried about who's tapping to who, just try to learn. So I would encourage police departments to give it a try. Go on a six-month trial, go on a 12-month trial, do 10 officers, you know, do a study later and see what their feedback is to it. There's already that stuff going across various police departments, and as you know, it's all positive. People come back and say, This has absolutely changed me. So take the action. That's what I would say.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:17

Yeah, I agree. I think that for all the reasons that you've said, that it gives officers some competency so that they can keep themselves safe, that it gives them confidence that might cause there not to be an altercation, that it causes them to have a better option other than lethal force unless lethal force is really needed. All of that's great. I think it also helps them even if they're coming to the aid of somebody else. Because sometimes the person using lethal force is not the first officer that was engaged, right? So it should be able to take some to the ground, should be able to subdue them, no problem. And then of course it like you said, it prevents the lawsuits in a lot of ways. It protects the suspect. But I think it also, to your point, there's a lot of other stuff from martial arts too. Jiu Jitsu is great, it's a community building opportunity. Exactly like you said, like all the cops I know from jujitsu. I know them because they're training in jiu-jitsu, and that is great community work. When I'm sitting here saying every cop I know is a great guy. The reason I know that is because I'm actually getting a chance to train with them. Most people, their only interactions with cops is when they're getting pulled over or whatever. And even then, police are generally respectful and stuff, but they're on duty, they've got their guard up, they're not there to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:24

And the nature of our profession is it has an aspect that's a negative, toxic, and caustic. Yeah. But if even beyond that, I might show up where I'm arresting somebody's nephew or their brother or their cousin, and the circumstances aren't great, and then that doesn't go a certain way. What you're speaking to is the personalization that happens with us, that lack of separation that people always talk about the community and the police aren't together. The Brazilian jiu-jitsu community has this huge ability to make the civilian Brazilian jujitsu community and the law enforcement community completely mix. And you're obviously very supportive of law enforcement, but over the years I've trained with people that had a very negative view of law enforcement. And then it changed by knowing me and Lou and other guys that were doing this as a professional.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:15

Okay, so I need to, of course, put the caveat, of course, I'm supportive of law enforcement. I'm a white guy in a middle-class neighborhood. I'm not getting pulled over for driving while black, or I don't have to deal with a lot of the problems or the suspicions that some people in other parts of our society do. And I acknowledge that, but I can still be likely to encounter a cop in a bad situation or someone with a bad attitude. And I've seen people getting upset or getting frustrated when someone's not listening to them. But it helps me to just understand like hey, it's okay, he can have a bad day too. Yeah. It's cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:47

We're drawn from the human population, and you're right. There are certain areas that because of the level of crime, there's more interaction with the police. I mean, statistically, being male, you're gonna have more chances of having interaction. That's not to say females don't commit crimes, but the majority of violent crimes or state prisons are 97% male. Those are people that we're gonna interact with. And they can be positive, they can be negative. You draw from the human population, so there's guys that have everything from in not a good bedside manner, no social skills, all the way to we've had people like in the rampart scandal at LAPD, and then we've had everything in between, people that do a very difficult job. I used to tell departments that it's like free community engagement. You want the police to be involved with the community and the community to be involved with the police, get them to train jujitsu together. You're killing two birds with one stone, you're creating a police officer or deputy, and then you're creating a situation where other people actually know an officer, they see something, and maybe they understand now why we do certain things when we search a car, or when we or what circumstances where we can search people. And they start to understand and personalize that there's somebody else there because they know a person. They say, Oh, I don't know what that guy did, but I'm keeping open mind. I know Dave, I know Adam, maybe that's another one of those people. So I think it's all the benefits you talked about. There's been a lot of studies about dealing with PTDSD with veterans and the mental health aspects of jujitsu. I had a deputy tell me it was like a game changer for him.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:16

Lots of people say that about jujitsu. I mean, and to the point that some people say don't let jujitsu be your therapy. I mean it is just jujitsu. But no, it's I agree with you, it is just a really wonderful thing. Especially if you get a good instructor and in a good culture. Yeah. Because there's bad apples in jiu-jitsu. For sure, too. Yeah, we've seen exam examples of that. So Okay, so but one last thing. So again, talking about like the humanization of police officers, like I know police officers, I have friends, and you mentioned Lou, many friends in the police department who I've met through jujitsu, either as training partners or as people who I have trained in the times that I used to teach. You're my friend Adam, you're a great guy. You chose a life in law enforcement, and you have spent your entire career, I don't know, 25 years, 30 many years, putting yourself in danger and through a lot of that, especially time when you were out on the streets, right? To protect society, to protect communities. I thank you for that. I think that's an astounding level of service that you have done. So, as a a very small token of giving you something back, what would you like us non-law enforcement people to know that can make your life better? And that could be in interactions with you, that could be in what we do civically, but what would you like regular people to do to support police officers?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:35

Going back to, I think we were talking about the suspension of reasoning that happens over the years. One of the things I've heard from police officers is not necessarily the feeling the need to be thanked for what they're doing, but to maybe be kind of understood. And so I think, like everything, we've seen it like in stuff that happens in the jiu-jitsu community. We've seen this in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, military service members being brought forth and charged with different kinds of stuff. And I think sometimes it's important to know the facts, just like we would ask somebody in any other aspect, whether they're gonna have an opinion on the environment or politics or whatever, to try to know the facts before.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:16

Spend judgment. You mean the facts.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:18

Contempt prior to investigation. So yeah, when you see something, what one of the problems that happens, it's interesting that you bring this up. One of I think problems happen with it's almost not civilians' fault. With these videos, I think very few people that are civilians know what real violence actually looks like. I think they don't. Most people don't experience it. I mean, I see that on the training side because I've had young cops who've literally never been in a street fight in their life and they're about to go to a maximum security county jail or the streets of Santa Ana or whatever. So uh I think knowing all the facts is an important thing. And uh, once again, I think we need to be held to a higher standard. I think it's important police officers have to follow the law. Despite what people think, there's robust processes for that. In many parts of the country, when a police officer gets in an officer-involved shooting or has certain levels of use of force, there's as many as four or five different aspects in investigating them, from internal affairs to the DA's office to a civilian review board, all sorts of stuff. So you have to look at all the facts. One of the problems I think is people have to understand there's and this is what people use as an aspect of supporting jujitsu, there's a term called lawful but awful. And that means you may see something on a video that it's a lawful use of force, but it's an awful use of force. Some other police officer might have to do something in a situation that's a lawful use of force that didn't necessarily have the ability that you or I would have to not have to go to that level of use of force. So I think uh yeah, I mean, uh that's what I would say about recognize that police departments are drawing from the human population. So we get everything that comes with the human population. And when you hear about something that's negatively reflects law enforcement, try not to have contempt prior to investigation, try to know all the facts before, because often what's reported, my experience, has not been the totality of what the facts are. So be open to that and just some understanding that once again, like Ted used to say, is always after the fact, never having been the person that has to pay the ultimate price for being wrong. It's a high consequence business for sure. And when you roll the dice in a decision you're making, it's your life that's actually your it sometimes it's other people's lives, sometimes it's a suspect's life, but sometimes in having to make a decision very quickly, it's your life. And we I think society as a whole, we can have a higher standard for police officers as long as that one is reasonable considering what they have to do and the people that we're they're dealing with. There's a whole group of people out here in this county that are great people and are not violating the rights of others. But suffice it to say that it's important to remember there is a segment of the population out there that are really There are bad guys. They're really there are really bad people out there.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:08

And I've seen them on the streets and I've seen them work in county jail, and it's And when the policeman talks to you, they don't know if you're one of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:16

They don't know you. No, they don't know you. I think that's good advice for everybody and yeah, and try to look at what the circumstances were that brought them to that radio call or anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:25

I always try to present myself in the least threatening way possible. I don't get pulled over much because I'm a pretty sane driver, but occasionally I do. And I will always roll down the windows, especially if my back windows are a little bit tinted, turn the car off, put my hands very visible, even fingers out, just so they can absolutely 100% see my hands, absolutely 100% see what's in the car, just so they're comfortable when they're walking up. And sometimes I've even had people say, like, you a cop, but just because I'm being so nice to them. I happen to carry a folder knife in my glove compartment. I always mention that because they're gonna ask for registration or whatever. I'm gonna have to open the glove compartment. So just let them know there's a weapon in there, just want to let you know. And usually they're fine. But I mean, it's just do everything I can to just make them be comfortable, be cool, not feel threatened, and I feel like that's appreciated.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:15

It is, because to you it's a single incident thing. You ran a stop sign. But to that guy, it is the culmination of a career where we are taught that traffic stops are inherently dangerous. I mean, a lot of us get killed on traffic stops, a lot of us get giggled in domestic violence calls, and sometimes routine calls where we got complacent. But, you know, sometimes the resistance, including trying to murder a police officer on a traffic stop, it comes right at the beginning. Because the suspects have these things that they're looking for. Like once they're asked to exit the vehicle, they know that it might be getting searched, which is a problem if there's something in there they don't want searched. Once they hear the handcuffs, they know once they go on, things are a lot more difficult. They also know if you're a solo officer, whatever decision they have to make, if they're planning on resisting, is to do it before a back-off officer's. I saw an interview with a member of a prison gang and he talked about all these things that he goes into evaluating. He looks at the officers, the physical ability of officer. If he might feel if it's somebody he thinks he can take physically, he's gonna use that option. If he's always gonna try to make a decision when there's one officer there before a second one gets there. And if he has to solve the problem with a firearm, he'll solve a problem with a firearm. And this is a guy who's just a former gang member that was being an honest career criminal about if he was doing certain things, he'd be definitely looking to take the officer's life. And there's people like that out of there. Intermixed with the larger portion of good people in the world, there's people in there that are more than willing to, without hesitation, violate and take the lives of an officer or people when they're in the community that they're robbing or don't do anything like that. And so being retired from it now, I enjoy being retired, you know, civilian, just promoting the jujitsu in law enforcement. But I the young men and women do it, will always have my support. I understand it's a difficult job. It's only gotten harder and harder over my career and more demanding and more scrutiny. But I tell them just make sure your intentions are good and that you're working with a good ethical basis and don't hesitate if you have to use force, regardless of what everybody else is gonna think. If you know it's the right thing to do, don't hesitate because that guy's not gonna hesitate. Try to be professional and solve your problems with a big picture of working a 30-year career so that you can make it to the end because I like it. So I hope they make it to the end.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:31

I'm glad you made it to the end.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:33

Thank you for coming. It's good to see you, bud. Thanks for that sweep, by the way. Oh, you're welcome. I hope you keep doing it forever. I will, forever. To the day I die, I'll be doing that sweep. Okay, awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:43

I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Adam Trainer. Please do share any thoughts in the comments if you're watching on YouTube. And thanks for taking a moment to like and to share. I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab. And in the meantime, keep developing your strength, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.