Robert Drysdale: Hard Training Builds Real Fighters | EP 42

Host Dave Meyer sits down with Professor Robert Drysdale — IBJJF Black Belt Heavyweight World Champion (2005), ADCC Absolute Champion (2007), undefeated MMA fighter (7-0), and author of multiple books on the history of BJJ. They cover the decline of self-defense training, the warrior ethos of Carlson Gracie, competition vs. memorized moves, and how to keep training well into your 60s and beyond.

For all Robert Drysdale Books and Merchandise

https://zenithjiujitsushop.com/collections/all

Zenith Jiu Jitsu by Robert Drysdale, Las Vegas Academy

https://drysdalejiujitsu.com/

Robert Drysdale's TEDx Talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_drysdale_what_is_the_point_of_winning

Topic Links:
Roberto Pedreira
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6997001.Roberto_Pedreira
Dr. Jose Tufy Cairus
https://wwwifc.academia.edu/JoseTufyCairus
Elton Silva
https://www.amazon.com/Long-Before-MMA-forerunners-1845-1934/dp/B0C6W1HCQM
Gracie Jiu Jitsu book
https://www.amazon.com/GRACIE-JIU-JITSU-Revised-Helio-Gracie/dp/0975941135
Jack Seki
https://budoshin.com/about-bjj/budoshin-lineage/jack-seki/
Mikey Musumeci
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikey_Musumeci
John Will
https://www.redcatacademy.com.au/john_will.html
Rigan Machado
https://www.theacademybeverlyhills.com/instructors/rigan-machado/
Willy Cahill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Cahill
Neil Adams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Adams_(judoka)
Carlos Gracie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Gracie
Helio Gracie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lio_Gracie
Carlson Gracie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlson_Gracie
Carlos Gracie Jr.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Gracie_Jr
Rolls Gracie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls_Gracie
Rickson Gracie Books
https://www.amazon.com/Books-Rickson-Gracie/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ARickson%2BGracie
Alberto Crane podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic93Ro9QLs0
Islam Makhachev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_Makhachev
Khabib Nurmagomedov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabib_Nurmagomedov
Ze Carioca (Brazilian Disney character)
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%A9_Carioca
Rico Rodriguez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricco_Rodriguez
Tito Ortiz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito_Ortiz
Jean Jacques Machado
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Jacques_Machado
Frank Trigg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Trigg
Eric Ries
https://leanstartup.co/about/team/eric-ries/
Incorruptible book by Eric Ries
https://www.incorruptible.co/
Adopt-a-Pet.com
https://www.adoptapet.com/
Matt Hughes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Hughes_(fighter)
Landmark Forum
https://www.landmarkworldwide.com/
Chris Haueter
https://www.combatbase.com/

Music “Disambiguation” by Robel Borja https://open.spotify.com/artist/7j0DUZ79z4edeLkU2H1UoJ?si=eISl0YfaQ-yLThljs48j5A

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_02 0:00

And if you want to grow, you have to be uncomfortable. If it's comfortable, there's not going to be a lot of progress. Because progress is on the brink of what you can and can't handle. The frontier. That's where progress takes place. It's not in the comfort zone. And that's life. It's not going to stop. So all you can do is love the fight, enjoy the struggle, and don't let it put you down. Don't let it knock you down and keep you down just fighting.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab. I'm BJJ Coral Belt 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 a discussion I had with Professor Robert Drysdale. Robert's a Brazilian American BJJ Black Belt, 2005 IBJJF Black Belt Heavyweight World Champion, 2007 ADCC Absolute Champion and multiple-time medalist, and a retired professional MMA fighter with a record of seven wins and no losses. He's a coach, academy owner, and author of books, including The Rise and Evolution of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Opening Closed Guard, What is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu today, and The Triumph of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, 50 years of a martial arts revolution. His Las Vegas Academy is Zenith Jiu-Jitsu by Robert Drysdale. We talked about what actually prepares someone for a real fight and why much of what's sometimes taught as self-defense may not hold up under pressure. We talk about competition, the evolution of Brazilian jiu-jitsu as a sport and a fighting art. And we also talk about something bigger, comfort versus growth, and the importance of honesty and loyalty. Now, this is a lab and you are part of it. So let me start with a question for you. If you're learning something like Brazilian jujitsu, do you think there's value in understanding how it evolved? This is one of the things I talk with Robert about. Why the rules became how they are? Or do you think that's interesting, but basically not impactful for your actual progress? What do you think? My take on it is it doesn't make you better at the sport, but it can really help you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and help you evaluate if what you're doing meets your goals, like self-defense or health. Am I right or am I wrong? If you're watching on YouTube, you can pause and comment below. Okay, now please sit back and enjoy my discussion with Professor Robert Drysdale. Robert, thank you so much for making the time to join me early in the morning. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dave.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Thank you for having me, man. I've heard good things about this podcast. So I'm excited to be part of it.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Well, if you've heard good things about the podcast, it's only because of people like you. I'm doing everything I can to destroy it, but I just keep having good people who keep it alive. So, you know, I've watched some of your other interviews. Super interesting. You're obviously an expert in a lot of things, including the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I have some thoughts I want to share with you because I have personal observations that I kind of want to run past you and get your reaction to because you've thought about this stuff like a thousand times more than I have. But I'm so happy and honored to get a chance to talk to someone who can think intelligently about this stuff because it's been a little bit of a void in terms of what is this Brazilian jujitsu stuff. And I came from another style of jiu-jitsu, which we'll talk about. So I have an impression of what I encountered, and I'm curious your thought. But before we go there, it seems to me that I mean, like everybody, you have you're wearing some different hats, right? You have different sides of yourself. And I know you're a family person and I'm sure a great friend and stuff, but in the martial arts sense, I notice that you are a well, you certainly were a competitor, but I would say you are a warrior in your ethos now, whether or not you happen to be currently competing in BGJ or MMA. I would call you a truth-seeking historian, which I think is super interesting, and you're a coach, right? And I want to talk to you about some of the struggles there about preserving standards and compromises to run a modern business. I have a lot of thoughts on that too. Do you see yourself as any one of those? Are you more coach, historian, fighter? Is it just depending upon what situation you're in?

SPEAKER_02 4:22

I mean, obviously a parent, a father, uh now a husband, recently been married. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. And uh as far as my professional life goes, I don't see myself as a fighter. I don't train as hard as I used to. I've slowed down a lot the last, I want to say, last five years. I don't go to war anymore. I'm trying to preserve my body. I like to be on the mats till the day I die. That's my goal. So I have to like I tell people I'm like a Toyota Corolla with like 400,000 miles on it. You gotta drive it carefully. You can drive it, but you just gotta you like I used to train because I only had one gear when I was fighting now, so I had to slow down. So I see myself more as a coach. I'm very proud of my career as a coach. It wasn't perfect, it isn't perfect. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but I love it. I think no one can say that I don't love to teach. I think that's the one thing you can say anything you want about me as a coach, but you can't tell me that I don't love to do it. I do it with my heart, and it's uh it's a very giving job, but I am very much in love with it. As a historian, I I love that job too. I just wish I had more time to do it. It requires a lot of focus. It's not just, oh, I get an hour here, an hour there. That's not gonna help me. I need four hours of absolute silence so I can produce anything half these things. You have to be really immersed in it. You gotta do it every day, too. So you gotta be on a roll. And you all do it once a week. It doesn't work. I need like seven days a week, three, four hours a day. That sort of commitment. And right now it's been difficult for me to write the way I would like to. I really, really enjoyed the process.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

You know, life is long and there's a time and a place for everything. So I know you did some of your writing during the COVID lockdown, and hopefully we won't get that kind of an enforced quiet time again. But I've got your books here. I've actually got four of them. And exactly what I was thinking when I'm looking at these books. Like, these are not like these are not at it's just not like an essay or something like that. This is dense, well-researched, really good information. I'm just thinking, like, holy shit, this took a lot of thought and a lot of time. This guy's an academic. I mean, and it's interesting to me. I have a particular appreciation for fighters who are sort of scholar warriors like yourself and teachers. It's it says to me, a very well-rounded person that I have to think makes you better as a coach, both because of your competitive experience, because of your knowledge of evolution, of the sport. It doesn't surprise me that I've always heard that you are actually an excellent coach. Because I think all of that sort of gets baked into what you're able to give to students. So I think it's super impressive.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

Thank you. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate the kind words. Just one thing here. I just like to quick little footnote there. Yep. In terms of research, man, I don't feel like I'm an academic. I don't do this for a living. I just like I like science, I like books, I like reading, I like studying. I like to think that I am pursuing the truth. But in terms of research, man, I have to give credit to the people who have done the heavy lifting. Like that's the heavy lifting as far as research. I've done some to say I've done none would be incorrect. But uh, the heavy lifting was done by Roberto Pedreira primarily, and then others that influenced me were Joseph Dufi, Cairos, Elton Silva, Marcel Serrano, Hala's book, the Grace's book, was very important to me too. All these books played a role in my research. I want to tell you I say this because a lot of times I get the credit for being a historian. I'd like to always add that footnote to that comment. So I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

No, that's fair enough. And it's always good to give credit where credit's due. It takes a village, takes that on the mat too. We'll be talking about that. So I want to tell you a little bit about my martial arts background because it will it'll help you understand where these questions I'm coming to come from. But before we go there, I just want to give you some thoughts and get your impression. So when we're talking about Brazilian jiu-jitsu, when we're talking about MMA, things like that, it tends to become a discussion of whether something is a sport or more of a fight. And what I note from my lifetime in martial arts is those lines can be somewhat blurry. I think when I hear a lot of martial artists talk about, well, I do this on the street, right? There's this in the dojo, and then this is on the street. Like the street is this thing that is very well defined. And I think most martial artists do not really think through what they mean when they say on the street. For example, to me, on the street just means truly no rules. That could mean road rage. That could mean you one you against three guys. That could mean you walking with your daughter and someone pulling a gun on you. That could mean being hit in the back of the head with a crowbar. I mean, there's so many different potential fight scenarios. Unruly guy on a plane, all of these different things. And it's hard to say that there's any one good style that's good for the street. It kind of depends on what is the situation, what's the environment. So even when I think of MMA, or I think of Valetudo, which has even less rules than modern day MMA, there was still a gentleman agreement of rules, no eye gouging, no biting, fish hooking or whatever in the cheek. But even more so, there was an agreement that nobody extra is going to jump in. It's going to be one-on-one, no one's going to pull out some hidden weapon. It's going to be in a clear space where you don't have to negotiate objects in the space. And it's going to be on some sort of a ideally forgiving surface, not always, depending upon where the fight is happening. And so, like anything that isn't truly no rules, fight to the death, has some kind of limitations on it. And I guess I just want to call that out as we try to understand the evolution and what is moving more towards a sport and what is staying true to its martial aspect. There's always some kind of rule or some kind of situation that's going to impact how you're training. And I just want to throw that out there because I don't think a lot of people think about that.

SPEAKER_02 9:59

No, you're absolutely correct, Nick. Like your thoughts are my own. I've always been hesitant to speak of self-defense because I consider it's such a broad category. I have been critical over the years of people that speak about self-defense with a certain degree of conviction and authority, even though they have very little experience in combat. It's like, oh, I know. How do you know that? Like, even someone, oh, I've been in many streets, like how many? Like, because I've been in hundreds of jiu-jitsu matches, and I wouldn't consider myself, like, oh, I can't speak with conviction where I can say that I know what's going to happen when I go out into a jiu-jitsu competition. Granted, the jujitsu competition, as you bring up, is a much more framed, much more predictable environment. When you're talking about out in the streets, it's completely unpredictable. So you have an environment that's completely unpredictable where you have no experience at all, or very little. Even if you've been in 20 street fights in your life, that's very little experience. How do you know? They don't know. That's the truth. But you have a terrified population. People are scared, they have trauma, they've been bullied, they've been harassed, and women have been raped, right? So they go out into the world, they want to have some sense of security. And if a man comes along and says, Look, if you learn these moves here, pay for these private lessons, I'll teach you how to defend yourself. It's a very comforting feeling. Now, how do you know that? Like, how do you can you put it to the test? Throw her in a room with a grown man and see if she can defend herself. She can't. But see, the thing is that there's two worlds here. You mentioned art and sport. And I'm not gonna call self-defense an art because a lot of times I think it's just like I'm very critical of some of these systems. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has fought and has been punched in the head, a lot of these people don't know what they're talking about, they have no clue about what real fight looks like. And it's a lot of improvisation, that's what they don't understand. But on one end, you have guys who are like they have these moves choreographed and they walk away with a source of confidence, but even they're somewhat more worried about real situations. So they do knife unarming, gun unarming, and then and multiple opponents. And I think this is somewhat on the right track because you have to be prepared for these things. If you are to the finish, I would avoid it. I'd be terrified and unarming someone. I would avoid it at all costs. But there's some concern there at least. Whereas a sports practitioner has no concern whatsoever about a knife. You've never seen Mike Mussamatsi worry about unarming someone with his beriombolo. It's not gonna happen, it's not interesting to have, it's not his world. They have very different interpretations here. Now the question is which one is more apt to defend himself in a real life situation? And I would argue, and I will pick this fight with anyone, then Mike Muchamazzi is more prepared because he's used to real life reactions. Like someone that's not used to someone grabbing them, like, oh, but you didn't grab me the way my coach normally grabs me when we do the drill. And I'm like, that's not how a fight takes place. No one's gonna tell you how they're gonna grab you. The most important thing about a real situation, my understanding, is quick thinking. And when I say thinking, I don't mean thinking in the traditional sense of the word, I mean like the reflexes. I mean like the muscle memory, like you just reacting intelligently, quickly, as you would in a competition. And a lot of people, so the fence, like, oh, there's no points in the streets, competition is not real fighting. And it's true that many positions in competition don't transfer over to real combat. Lapel guard, easy one. That doesn't transfer. Easy. But what a competitor does learn that a lot of the self-defense crowd doesn't understand, is that for you to be a competitor, you have true, you have a point system, you have a time limit, you have an opponent, you have a strategy, you have tactics. That requires this sort of quick thinking that I'm talking about because you have to adjust to change in circumstances. You have real pressure. You have real pressure. So under the heat of battle, under the heat of pressure, you can adjust to new circumstances quickly because you don't panic. Now, someone that's never getting hit in the face, the first time they get hit, I don't care how much you drilled it, you're gonna panic. I I see this in my kids' class. I do a little sparring kids with the kids, right? And some of the kids get touched and they fall on the ground crying. And I just have to explain to them you're not crying because you're in pain. You're crying because you panic. And that's the real and a lot of people don't understand that. Like, you if you're too scared of jumping in a competition because you get too much, too nervous, too much anxiety, it's too difficult emotionally for you to handle it. What makes you think you're gonna be ready for a real life situation where someone's trying to kill you? If you can't handle the emotions of soft mats, a paramedic right there, a referee, and rules, right? This controlled environment meant to mimic a real fight. If that is too threatening, menacing, what makes you think you're gonna be ready for a real fight? You're not. It's just self-deception, it's just delusion. And there's so much of that in martial arts. It's I mean, I I don't even know what to say. I'm like, who the hell believes this, man?

SPEAKER_00 14:19

But people do. So I am in total 100% agreement with everything you've said. I think of if we think about application of training to a real, like I say, a real fight with that gigantic asterisk that says, we don't know what a real fight is, because we don't know what any of those parameters we said is. What is this real situation? It could be so many different things. I think that if you do want to be best prepared for that, I call it my circle of training, where like you have the circle and the real fight is in the middle, and you can't train in that middle. You can, someone's gonna get hurt, you certainly can't do it very often. So you've got all of these things where you're dancing around the edge of it, and it's my grappling skills and it's my kickboxing skills, and it's my knife, whatever skills, and my flexibility and my strength and my endurance, all of these things are things that you can sort of independently train. And then if you have good background in all of them, you hope that whatever that thing in the middle is, I've got something for it. But a crucial one that even people who train different aspects of things don't train is fear and that pressure. That's exactly right. And I would say that may even be the most important one because if you can't control your emotional state, everything else is gonna fly right out the door and you're just gonna flail like anybody else will flail when they're freaking out. Exactly to what you said. And to me, the only way to do that is to put yourself in competitive environments, which again, even in MMA, which I've not done professionally, and I've certainly done a lot of sparring, is not the same level of fear as fearing for your life. But I mean, that's pretty close. I mean, you're really dealing with stress, you're dealing with fear. And it's interesting to me, a lot of people get that even in a jiu-jitsu tournament. I have a friend who is a very successful MMA fighter who was throwing up outside of a jujitsu tournament. He was so nervous. And I'm like, dude, you fought like UFC and like you're worried about a jiu-jitsu match. But the mind is a very interesting thing. And that is the reason that I've been competing my whole life, and thank goodness I'm still able to compete. If you're watching in the video, you're seeing all these medals behind me. And I only put that up because my podcaster said it would be cool. But that to me is a sign of I've stepped out into competition, but I always note that not a single one of those was any competition where anyone was taking a swing at my head. That is all Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So I'm very well aware that was mostly in pajamas on a soft mat, no matter what the stress was. So I think what I'm hearing from you is honesty. And I think what a lot of the martial arts that, like you say, are talking about self-defense, they're not being really honest, most likely with themselves, but certainly to the people that they're talking to, if they haven't really taken this approach and tried to build in all of those things into what they're teaching.

SPEAKER_02 17:03

I agree. I couldn't agree more. Like by your words, I mean I'm glad we think alike. I think it's just somewhat something cowardly about it as well as dishonest. Not just because they don't want to compete. That's not what I'm saying. It that what is cowardly is that you would tell people that to in order to make a living teaching on moves that have never been verified. Like I have some of these arm twisting moves that I see, some of these self-defense moves. You have to approach these things logically. Have you seen it in the UFC? If the answer is no, it doesn't mean it wouldn't work. Because there's things that have never been tried, they may work down the road. Right? But you must be suspicious. And you're better off relying on things that have been proven over and over. Right hand, left hook, double leg, guillotine, red naked choke. So I stand by what has been tried. I think those are the ones we should trust the most. Anything outside of what's been tried at the very least been viewed with a healthy degree of suspicion.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

I will say that I had a lifetime in a martial arts, which we'll talk about in a second, because it affected how what I saw in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I want your opinion on it. But I definitely thought that the sport wasn't really good. I mean, it was okay. You could spend some time doing some rondure, like let's try trade some throws or compete a bit like that or on the ground. But the problem is the rules have stripped away the lethal stuff, and you don't want to be practicing habits that aren't lethal. So if you're a serious fighter and you really want to fight, you need to practice only lethal, deadly things. And of course, you can only do those on a dummy, or you can't really do them on anybody because I don't know, we can't eye gouge, or some of the things that I don't know, someone might consider more lower neck break. I don't know. And so you end up doing these things that you never get good at because you never practice them against resistance. And it wasn't until the day I walked uh onto the mat with Higgin, actually John Will, who was teaching my first lesson, he was a purple belt. You may not know who he is. I think you maybe have had some contact in Australia. He's John's great. And then Higgin, because the first thing that I said after I was so nicely humiliated, they were so nice to me, but I'm like, oh my God, I tapped out 16 times, I can't do anything. I'm like, yeah, but we were just like, we weren't striking, right? So if this was a real fight, I could beat Higgin because I would just I gouge him and hook his nose. And then I realized, like, no, I can't. First of all, he could do the same thing to me. And he's in a 10,000 time better position to do it because he owns me. I'm a baby on the mat. And that's when I realized, okay, you may not be practicing the deadly things, but what you're practicing can snap people's arms and make them unconscious and break their jaw and do all these things in sport.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

And you're actually getting good at it, which counts. No, and to your point, that's the point funny you mentioned. I'm glad we think so much like it. That's what I always say. So you're gonna eye gouge me when I'm mounting you. Who's in a better position to eye gouge who? Like exactly the belief that you're gonna eye gouge someone, like D1 wrestler shooting the double leg on you, you're gonna eye gouge him mid-shot. Like, are you serious? Like, who believes that? Yeah, I think people do, man. I and I look, I thought that the UFC eventually would bury all these all this into UFC laboratory for real empirical trials to take place. Like, we're gonna find out what works and what doesn't work. It's there, it's right in front of you. I thought that this would end this conversation, but it's not over, man. It's mind-boggling. Like, don't discount, don't discount pillow people's ability to delude themselves. No, it's terrifying actually, beyond jujitsu. It's terrifying. The facts would be right in front of someone and they just don't want to see it.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Okay, so here's where I came from. Because I started in jujitsu, not Brazilian jujitsu, and I want to talk to you about this because it's always this weird conversation. Then people will say, Oh, you mean Japanese jiu-jitsu? Like, it's like a traditional style of Japanese jiu-jitsu. But I started as a six-year-old kid because my brother was being bullied. My parents put us into a class where we had a cousin who was a black belt. This is at a local community center in Los Angeles, actually at a community college, with a very well-known instructor, a guy named Jack Seki. And he was half Japanese, half American. I think his father was in the US military in World War II, small guy, very serious. I can't tell you the lineage of that style of jujitsu because I didn't know it at the time. I would have, I was a little kid, I wouldn't even have thought to ask it. But what I can say is we did spend maybe a little bit more than half the time standing, and we did do stuff on the ground, but it was very static. It was like you throw a strike and I parry the strike and throw you. And then so very planned, very scripted, not actually combative with resistance. It was still good. We were, it was tough. The training was tough, and we would throw some strikes, sort of karate style strikes, maybe yet some karate stuff. And then we would do stuff on the ground, and I was okay. Like I won schoolyard fights with that. I could fight, but it certainly wasn't anything like a sport. And I grew up when all through high school, I was known as like the jujitsu guy, got my black belt in high school or whatever, did some other martial arts too, just for the fun of it, like some kung fu, which I just thought was interesting. And I liked the hands work, which I still use in jujitsu, by the way, kind of. Sort of Wing Chun style hands. But it wasn't until I got with a friend who became my training partner, another jujitsu guy who had also done full contact kickboxing in Germany and was like a national champion there. And we started to really train together, like hit each other and try to put a joint lock on with the person actually resisting, right? And that was, I think, very good. I just sort of stumbled onto that. He made me so much better. I think I made him better. That's when I really started to get a sense for okay. And then I started to look around at the other jujitsu people around me. And they all looked they're very nice people, but uh what I would call armchair senseis, guys with pot bellies who wear really multicolored belts and 10th degree this and all this kind of stuff, but literally couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. And it just didn't make any sense to me. And that was where I was at when I decided, okay, I was teaching, never professionally, which we'll talk about in a second too, but also at a just a kind of a community center kind of thing. And then I wanted to do a more of a fighting art, was looking at Muay Thai, and that's when I first met Hegan Machado. This was like 1990. And so, and I just was so excited by it. It took me, I don't know, a month or two to just close down my class. Keep in mind it wasn't my profession, so it was an easy class to close down. I had a day job, and tell all my students, we're putting on white bolts, we're going over there to BJJ. And that is exactly what I thought every jujitsu person I knew would do. Because why wouldn't you? Clearly, this is such a better style. And almost none of them did that. And that was an indication to me, like, wow, I guess maybe everyone, the ego, whatever, they're not willing to start over. So I'll pause there, but that's who I was when I first saw jujitsu. Well, just before I pause, I saw the Gracie in action tape. The Horium was circulating. Someone brought that to me. I was impressed with the toughness of the guys. I mean, they're doing these like no gloves fights and they're doing them on hard floors and karate schools and whatever. But the technique that I saw with my eyes on the video was to me basic jujitsu. Oh, yeah, are you doing a foot stomp? Oh, you got a kind of kind of a sloppy double leg takedown, sort of a wrestling move. Get onto the Tate Shio Gitame, the mount, right? And slap the guy and then take him in a sleeper hold or grab him in an arm bar or whatever. To me, it just looked like, oh, these guys are just thugs. I mean, not in a bad way, they're tough. But I did not appreciate until I got on the mat with, like I say, John and Higgin, like, oh, wait, it looks like what I'm doing, but it is not what I'm doing. Like, there's so much subtlety. I couldn't possibly understand that. And so I want to talk to you, first of all, curious any of your thoughts on that, because I was trying to figure out like, what is the difference? What is going on here? Because if I looked at this in a book, it would look like everything I've always seen, but actually feeling it was something totally different. And I have some thoughts as to why that is, but I want to pause and get your reactions to that and maybe your thoughts on why that is, and then we can talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

It's funny. You just summarize the the you might have it at the hardcover book, The Triumph of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I do. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

It's got amazing photos. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

So you just summarized the argument of my book. Well, you just the system you were practicing is what we call pre-war judo. Many people called it jujitsu. It's essentially what the Gracie Academy was practicing. It's pre-war judo, a little bit of striking, a little bit of takedowns, a little bit of ground, self-defense oriented, not a lot of live action, just enough to give you like an idea of what would happen in a fight, but not enough of what? Not enough heinya, as Hart Carlson would call it, right? Not enough of uh battle, not enough battles going on to really tone your skills to actually get good at the mounts, get good at the head and arm, get good at the armor, right? And that's why I divide jujitsu pre-1975 and after 1975. The jiu-jitsu you experienced with Igan Machad was post-1975 jujitsu. It's what we now call Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It is descended from the Gracie Academy, which is in turn descended from judo, which is in turn descended from Ktory. I'm not denying the genealogy. There is a genealogy there. What I am implying, what I'm saying, categorically speaking, is that there is a distinction. There is a split there. There's a there's an evolutionary marker that we must acknowledge. Much like we must acknowledge that the Gracie family, Carlos and Helue in particular, they part from judo beginning in the 1930s. We must also acknowledge that their children in 1975 created a whole new evolutionary track by awarding four points for mount, four points for the back, right? Two points for takedown. They abandoned that one-for-one ratio because prior to 1975, it was one point mount, one point takedown. Their approach was already leaning towards where we're going, right? Again, it's evolution, it's not birth, it's not creation, it's not invention, it's evolution. But at the same time, you see that they still carried on pretty much that system that you were talking about. That's the pre-war judo one-for-one. A lot of self-defense. I mean, if you up to these old timers, they called they don't even like competition. I'm not making judgment of values here. That conversation is behind us now. We're talking about the differences between the two systems. I I tried to give the evidence because I was gonna bombard people with footnotes, and I'm like, you know what, people aren't gonna read them, they're not gonna go through them. But what if I just show this through pictures? And I had all these pictures that told exactly that story. So I try to tell exactly make the basically what you just said through pictures and say, look, there's two different worlds here. Like there's a self-defense world with a little bit of ground, a little bit of stand-up, and then there's the what the world practices today. And the story you're telling me about you getting handled by guys who came from BJJ. I hear that story everywhere I go. I hear that story over and over again. It's the same thing. Because one did not go through the competition empirical trials, the other one, that's all they do. It's all trial after Carlson Gracie, after the 1975 rule set, it's all about trials, it's all empirical. So that's the difference.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

And there's always been this weird, like when I first heard of what they called self-defense, and I looked at that, I'm like, oh, that's what I do. That's what all jujitsu people do. Like, that is what everybody's doing. And it was hard for me to kind of square, like, I don't understand what's the relationship between that and there seems to be this reverence for it, but it feels to me like it's oh, I don't know, it's like out of respect. We should keep alive this self-defense thing. When in fact, going back to your point about Mikey, if you want to talk about who's gonna have a better chance at self-defense, give me the jujitsu competitor who's never done any standing, put the guy's arm behind him, because he's just gonna put somebody on the ground and rip them apart, really.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Yeah. I mean, in Mike Musumesic poll guard, he would burn Bolo summon the fight. Like, oh, you know who he wouldn't do that to another fighter. He would not do that to a good fighter, a good wrestler, someone that knows how to fight, yeah. But the average person, he'd be better equipped. It's crazy. That sounds he'd be better equipped than someone who doesn't spar or spars within the limits of their comfort. That's the other thing. There's no comfort. And if you want to grow, you have to be uncomfortable. This whole idea that the priority is to cater to the comfort, a customer. I hate that term, customer, the client. Like if it's comfortable, it's not good, there's not gonna be a lot of progress because progress, as anyone knows, is on the brink of what you can and can't handle. That's at that the frontier, the threshold of what you can and can't handle. That's where progress takes place. It's not in the comfort zone, right? And and a lot of these systems, like they're so concerned with comfort that I'm skeptical as to how much these guys actually even sweat in progress and how many injuries they have. I'll look at injuries. I know you're beat up. I don't have to ask you. I'm looking at your medals behind you, I know you're beat up. You don't have to tell me about your arthritis and your lingering pains and the chronic injuries. Like, I have them too. But uh, when someone's like, I got no injuries, I'm a blackbird, I'm like, that's kind of strange to me, or that healthy.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Yeah, there's something. Yeah, if you don't have any dings, you haven't been driving your car very hard. But I think you're right, and I think that's true of any sport. Like, if you just tell me there's two guys who are untrained in fighting, but one of them played football, give me the football player. I don't care if the other guy's bigger or stronger, someone who just knows toughness, who is not afraid to mix it up, who's comfortable with conflict and comfortable with being roughed up. I think that's a big part. I agree. I agree.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

And even something as like like football, like it requires a degree of toughness, like as you mentioned, and courage that a lot of people that spend their life in martial arts may not have. They may break at the first threat of confrontation, they fold. I've seen it. And I'll tell you what I do with another one. This happens in even MM. This what we're talking about is very it runs very deep. I've seen guys, I've known guys, I've trained guys that on paper were tough as like they walk in the room, people will be scared of them. They look so scary and play the part, and they look tough in pictures and they talk the talk, and they actually fight. But the second things get hard in the ring, the second things don't go their way, they fold. I've seen this time after time after time. People fold quickly, you'd be surprised. And then I've seen the mom who's never fought before, the mom, the grandma, goes to that master's world, Jitsukan, and she's got a heart of a lion. And I'm watching that, and I'm going, that woman is more courageous. She actually has more heart than some of these MMA fighters. She's a mom. So I when I judge a martial artist, I think you have to judge the whole. And if it's not just, oh, I know all these moves. Like, so suppose you could download YouTube videos onto your brain. Like, is that which we're probably gonna be able to do in a few years? Does that make you a good martial artist? How do we have this discussion? How do we define a martial artist? And I think that courage is probably the number one virtue of a martial artist.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

I think, yes, and that's a very interesting discussion dealing with fear, because everybody has it. If you don't have it, you're kind of insane. But set that aside for a second, I want to dissect why Brazilian jujitsu that I experienced and that I experienced still every day was better. You mentioned the 1975 rules, and I completely agree that the rule set defines what's being practiced, right? So that's going to cause you to get you well, it's like they call it like teaching to the test in school. You're gonna get good at what the rule set tells you should get good at. That's just the way it is. And sadly, you are also gonna get bad at something the rule set prohibits. So if you I think, for example, like slamming, like if someone really wants to depend on their triangle, because they've got a good triangle, which I love triangle. If you're in a sport where it's not legal to pick you up and slam your head down as a otherwise perfectly legitimate way to get out of a triangle in a fight, you might not realize that you better hold on to the guy's leg or your or if he picks you up, you better let go of your frickin' triangle before you get your head smashed on the ground, right? So the rules can cause you to get good at something, and the rules can also cause you to ignore something really important because it's simply not allowed. But what I would say, and I don't know if you disagree with me, that like you said, it's an evolution. It wasn't that somebody said, Hey, let's change the point system for the mount, and suddenly everyone started caring about the mount. I mean, the reason they changed the point system is they already knew that we want to value these positions. That's the reason we're changing the point system. Like we've already been valuing these positions. We just want it to be reflected, I would say, in the points.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

Yeah, I think you're summarizing my book. Like that's exactly those are exactly the points I'm making. We're on the same page. It comes from Volitudo experience. Yeah, I argue that, like, that the Volituto experience taught them that Mount is a great position in a fight. Therefore, a Shawi should be rewarded more than a takedown. Now, you gotta remember Volitudo was very different from MMA. I make this point too, is that the Volituto matches were longer, the rounds were sometimes 30 minutes long. There were less interruptions, there were no gloves, which favors the grapplers. So once a fight hits the ground, it would stay on the ground. So these guys understood that a real fight in their understanding, a real fight was a ground-oriented kind of business. Therefore, they created a rule set that they felt mimicked the reality of combat. Now, whether they achieved that or not is a different story. To what degree did they achieve that? That's a completely different conversation. What happened now is that their mindset, what their values were descriptive of people that wanted to gain the popularity that judo had. They want to grow through competition, but they didn't want to lose the martial side. They wanted to keep it grounded within the reality of combat. Obviously, these things deviate different leadership, different values, different times, the worlds change. You can't slap people in practice anymore. Well, back in the day they would. And if you couldn't handle it, go home. You get hit in practice. That's how it was. I was saying today, if you do that, you'd lose all your I miss those days, but yes. I I think at every now and then people should train that way. I thought of a black belt test where people have to go through a top idea session where it's like people, okay, if you're gonna wear a black bell, you have to and you would uh obviously accommodate to age, like someone in their 50s, 60s, you're not gonna treat them the same way, this uh uphold to the same standard. You would hold the 20-year-old. Even for a mom that's in her 50s or 60s training, so you should be able to put her hands up and if someone throws a punch at her, like be able to defend as best she can and clinch. And so it sounds like I'm going back to that self-defense conversation. I'm not against self-defense. I think people should learn it. Yeah, what I'm skeptical of are people like A, what kind of moves are being taught, and that someone can actually learn how to defend themselves without any competition experience. Right. I skeptic of I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:13

I'm right with you on that. When I encountered BJJ, it was very clear to me that there was something else going on here. It's not just a rule set because I could wrestle on the ground. If you didn't have skill and you were a big guy, I'll get you in an arm bar on the ground, a hundred percent for sure. I was a good black belt in jujitsu, spelled J-U-Jitsu. And there was no question about that, which is why, in fact, what got me onto the BJJ map was two situations where people came into my class. One, a guy I didn't know who just wanted to roll with me, who then gave me a really hard time and then revealed to me that he'd been taking privates from this guy Hicks and Gracie. That was the literally the first time I ever heard of Gracie or Brazil and Jiu-Jitsu. And I would didn't believe him. I'm like, you're not telling the truth. You've had years of experience. He's like, well, I'm telling the truth. And then one of my own students who had left and got with Higgin, that's how I heard about Higgin, then came back, and I had a hard time with him. So what I saw was that something different is happening here. Like it looks like my jujitsu, it looks like my mount, but something is different. They can mount me and I can't get out. And I, like I'm saying, I didn't spend as much time competitively doing it, but I did it. And specifically, even once I started doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I moved very quickly because I had all that other jujitsu background, but like I went as a blue belt, we went, I went with the Machado brothers, we went to judo tournaments because there were no other tournaments happening. We're talking like early 90s, there was no Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournaments, and I was tapping out black belts in judo on the ground. If I could avoid being thrown, if it went to the ground, I was tapping out black belts in judo. And those guys, again, understood because their rules said they're not spending as much time with Nawaza on the ground. But some of them were very good. We went up to, we were in Los Angeles at the time, and we went up to Northern California, where I happen to live now, to Cahill's judo, Willie Cahill's uh Olympic judo coach, and Neil Adams, who was like a god, like the god of armbars in judo, a guy who just his whole thing as Nawaza was there. And Higgin tapped him out like a white belt repeatedly in armbars. So, what I think that even beyond just the focus they were having on the ground, other people focused on the ground too. And BJJ was so categorically at that time better. And I guess, I guess, do you agree with that? And I want to run past with you why I think that is and get your impression on that. But do you agree with that premise that even where there were other sports of people who were focusing very much on the ground, that BJJ, certainly at that time in the 90s, was categorically better?

SPEAKER_02 37:47

Oh, 100%. And it was for the reason this is exactly the war that Carlson had with Healy. You just described the war. That was the problem. I mean, it wasn't the only problem. But Carlson wanted essentially like I want Higan Machados. And Healy was still like with that pre-war judo style, right? Calling it jujitsu. Because they borrowed confusion with the terms. I think I've explained that enough. It's in the book, too. I have a couple of chapters on it trying to explain this confusion. But Carlson wanted something that was combat oriented, something that would prepare you for a real fight. And having the experience he had, he understood this. His priority was to teach the student how to defend himself efficiently, and he understood that the means for that was competition. That's why he loved competition. Or not the only reason why he loved it, but that's one of the reasons why he loved it. It wasn't a model about let's enrich ourselves, let's you know, target rich people, private lessons, comfortable setting. Your ghe is washed. They're targeting the upper classes. Yeah, you think those guys want to grind? No, they want to feel good, but grinding is like it's hard. Like these people like comfort, they want their ghee washed for them. I'm not gonna wash my own g. I'm too special for that, right? You can't wash your own clothes. It's a way of dealing with things. I'm not against it. I wish someone washed my geek. But when it comes to Carlson, he's recruiting people on the beaches. Yeah, it's it's because a lot of these guys they speak of the beach bums like they're in a derogatory way. Like they go, Oh, these uncultured animals, and those are the real martial artists. These animals are the real martial artists, not the people talking about philosophy. I love it when people talk about philosophy. I love it. I love it when I hear that. What are you talking about? What philosophy are you talking about? It's bogus, man. It's just like because it's a comfort, it's a great story game. That's why people like it because they can tell themselves, I'm a real martial artist, really. Why what why why is the guy who's actually fighting the D1 wrestler who has three, four hundred wrestling matches, not a real martial artist? But you are because or a golden gloves boxer. Exactly. Anyone who's actually throwing a Muay Thai fighter for that matter.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

And Higgin, by the way, his coach was Holes and Carlos Gracie Jr., but it was Holes while Holes was alive. And my impression today of why BJJ then, and to a large extent still today, but it's not everyone's so cross-training, it's kind of hard to parse it out. But uh was better was first of all, a couple thoughts on this. What I was experiencing that felt like it made it better was first of all, a much more sophisticated understanding of the guard. So for me, things were individual movements, like putting someone, I don't remember in the names now because I haven't spoken the Japanese stuff in so long, but I close my legs around you, that's a move, right? I put you in an arm bar, that's a move. I put you in a Sankaku Jimei, a triangle, that's a move. And even when I went with like judo people who could string them together, it was very rigidly strung together. I'm gonna do this move and this move. And there was something about the way the Brazilians, I think you've called it a Copa Cabana culture, and maybe this has something to do with that, but my friend, like a smoothness of putting things together. And I mean, I'm focusing on the guard because there was so much more intricacy in ways, even back then, we're talking 35 years ago, ways to turn people over, ways to sweep people, ways to retain your guard, things you could do from the guard. So that seemed really different to me. But it was all things, not all, but lots of them were individual things I kind of knew, except for a lot of the sweeps. But it was strung together so fluidly. It wasn't done like a hard style. And I feel like that was at the time what was making it so good. Now you change the rules and put them in a three-minute round in MMA where explosiveness really does matter, and you're not gonna get to wear somebody down for 30 minutes like that. And maybe that kind of relaxed thing is not gonna serve you very well. You need a much more rigid and explosive style. But anyway, that was what I felt was different about BJJ at that time. And I wonder your thoughts on that.

SPEAKER_02 41:52

I think that what the stringing of moves together, that's the real knowledge. Anyone can memorize moves, and this is why the memorization choreograph format doesn't work. You need the head of conflict to string it together. Practice through conflict is what's going to string these moves together, and that's what the actual knowledge is. It's not in memorization. A lot of people misunderstand it. They oh, I know the move because I've seen it. That's great, you're acquainted with the move. But to know a move in the sense of mastery, in the sense of mastery of the word, right? That's what I'm talking about. You have to have exactly what you just described. Like, how do you string this transition to that transition seamlessly? So you're not really recruiting your memory. Because if your memory's being recruited, it's you're it's too slow. Memory's not memory's useless in a fight. Oh, is it you can't recruit your memory mid-fight. Oh, I re no, you have to be doing things on the fly. Your body's thinking for you. Your body's doing the thing, I am for lack of a better word. And I think this is something that's completely missed. Like the it was the live action, the live rolling, Carlson's insistence in creating that riot live rolling that that warranted this. I just like want to make one observation because this comes up a lot, Dave. You mentioned that Keegan was under Holes, Carl's Gracie Jr. and Holes. It's important to remember that Holes was Carlson's student. I know he started with Helio, but he wasn't the dominant guy he became until he started training with Carlson. And this is according to multiple testimonies because Carlson was training differently. It's essentially the difference that we're talking about right now. A little bit of ground with like rigid moves because the guys are just spending so much time on the ground, they're just flowing from move to move without having to actually recruit memory and consciousness because they have that repetition, that time. The empirical trials are what's gonna make you good at jiu-su or fighting. Yeah, and Holes absorbs that model. Even the Gracie Academy later absorbs the model. Yeah, they have to. If you want to keep up with the competition, how are they gonna be Carlson students if they're not training the way Carlson was training his guys? So everyone absorbs Carlson.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Right. Yes, I remember even when I started there was a rivalry, I still understood it between Carlson Gracie students and Carlos Grace. Gracie Jr. Holes had already passed away. And there was sort of that rivalry, but it was all jujitsu. And Carlson was more feeding into MMA. And their guys were kind of seen as very tough. And the we as me coming through the Gracie Baja sort of lineage saw ourselves as more like technicians and a bit more sport. Higgin was in lots of fights, but I don't think he did any professional MMA fights. Jean-Jacques did, who doesn't have any fingers on one of his hands, so he can't really punch with that hand. He fought Frank Trigg after he moved out here. So kudos to him for doing that. And we certainly were dealing with challenges all the time of guys coming in and trying to fight us for real in the school. That was just like a daily occurrence before the UFC. Interestingly, it stopped when the UFC started. I think it's UFC kind of scared people and made people think twice about it. But I think I agree with what you're saying, the active rolling. But like I say, there are other sports that were doing active rolling on the ground too. And there was something qualitatively better about the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I feel like it was something about the relaxed nature of something about that flow, about flowing techniques together. I might give the analogy like basketball. I don't play basketball, by the way, but basketball pata, right? So practicing movements, like striking in the air, that's like practicing free throws with no ball. Like, okay, it looks something like what you're going to do, but I wouldn't bet that you're going to be able to sink a free throw, right? And that training the moves in the absence of the flow would be like, okay, I will teach you how to stand and shoot. I will teach you how to run. I will also teach you how to bounce a ball. But I'm never going to, we're never going to actually string together bouncing and running and spinning and jumping. Like you will never get good at basketball. And I think that's what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 45:47

Hey, man. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And the other thing, too, is that the emphasis in positioning, right? Which is again going back to the 1975 rule set. The 1975 rule set emphasizes positioning. So when people talk about oh, oh, these moves already existed in judo or in coast and judo or in catch resin, it's all true. Much of what we do is much older than it goes. I mean, you can take it back to as far back as you want. Like we, you know, it's these moves are not a lot of what we do is fairly it's fairly old. But what the 1975 rule set did was emphasize, for example, the back take. I talk a lot about this. Oh, the back take exists in other martial arts, sure. But no martial art emphasized the back take as much as BJJ. Because they created a four-point reward. Of course, people are going to get good at taking the back. Not to mention it's the place where you're most likely to finish the fight. With all the move, all the revolutions that have gone on the last 30 years, all these new moves, the rear naked choke is still king. So what does that tell you about the back take? But that emphasis is a byproduct of the 1975 rule set. So all these reasons you're giving, I I couldn't agree more. And I think they highlight the evolution that I'm trying to describe. Like I'm trying to show that I'm not denying the genealogy, I'm not trying to take credit away from anyone. I'm just trying to get people to understand that things changed and things have changed and how they changed. And why, if you go to like say, like the Gracie Torrance Academy or the Pedro Valenti Academy, and any Gracie Baja, Atus, AOJ, Alliance, Zena, any team on the planet, any Machado gym, they're fundamentally different. They have the same genealogy. No one's denying that, but they're fundamentally different martial arts. They're using the word jiu-jitsu, but they're describing the content. Forget about labels. The content is completely different. I think.

SPEAKER_00 47:30

Yeah, and well, and also I think even within individual fighters, because we're putting it to the test, as opposed to everyone's just doing the same move like a kata or something like that, you develop your individual game. And so two people in the same school are not going to be doing the same jujitsu. One guy's gonna have a really, I don't know, guard-oriented game, one guy's gonna have a really top game. And that's the way it should be because two, no two people have the same body. So it can't be the same jujitsu for two people, can't be the same anything for two people if you're actually putting it into practice. I just wanted to mention you talked about Weird Naked Choke is still king. We don't use the name anymore, the Portuguese name, but it's Mataleon, right? Kill the lion. Am I right? I know you speak Portuguese. I just love that name because that's exactly what's happening. It doesn't matter how big or strong the guy is. If you can get behind them and you know what you're doing, you're going to put them to sleep. I mean, that's just the way it's going to be. But also in my thinking of like what was making Brazilian Jesus do better, that kind of flowiness. You made a really good point, Robert, about positional control. I hadn't thought about that, but I think that is exactly right. In the case of judo, they would go to position, but then they would have no finish from that position. So they would hold you in a pin, but they weren't then training how to finish you from that pin. So that sort of lacked that. So if the rules allowed you to go on for 20 minutes, well, you'll eventually work your way out of the pin if you have a good defense. But also, when I looked at like catch wrestling or shuto guys or people who would come in, they would have all these moves and they could do them really fast, like in a demo. It was like really, really cool. And we would see, like, whoa, they did this and they did that and they did all that. And then we grapple with them and smash them, past their guard, mount them, they turn their back, they choke. It became almost this joke like you've got all these great things and it's amazing, and you're really good. And I've got my five things, and we get together, and I will never see your good stuff because you can't stop my five things. And it's because those things were built around getting past the legs, creating positional control on the upper body. And then if you make the mistake of turning your back, it's like this is the path it's always gonna go, and I will never get to see all your fantastic 16 different finishes because you cannot apply them to me because you can't get the unless I'm careless and we haven't controlled yet, and you like catch me in mid-air on something, which can always happen, especially like a foot attack. Once the control happens, I'm gonna win. So I think you're absolutely right. I think BJJ's insistence on control positionings.

SPEAKER_02 49:54

It was with differentiated Brazilian jiu-jitsu from other grouping forms is the emphasis on the ground, the emphasis on positioning. And it was derived from MMA, like that was their inspiration. This is very clear to me. There's a lot of things. The culture was big too. You mentioned the culture a few times. I always talk about this. You gotta remember, martial arts typically have like a very militaristic-like sort of environment, which makes it organized in some ways, I think, beneficial. I appreciate order or discipline and hierarchy, but that's not a very Brazilian thing. And what Carlson and those guys do in the 1970s is to bring the beach culture of Copacabana onto the mats, which and it's this very interesting hybrid, and I think it helps explain BJJ's success. And this is very descriptive of Carlson's personality. You're supposed to be a warrior on the mats and in the ring, but off the mats, why be tough? Like, why act tough? Like you like it's relaxed, it's very beach-like, it's very Copa Cabana. You have to have gone to Copacabana, the South Zone of Rio, to understand why BJJ is the way it's how everyone is. Like, and Carlson is just like a he's like a such a descriptive character of Copacabana, like he's the typical Copa Cabana street dweller. He is there's a Disney character called Zach Carioca, it only exists in Brazil. It's a Disney character, but no Americans ever heard of it. It's just like this parrot that's got like carioca-like manners, like he he's relaxed and he's like sly and he's like funny. And it's like, man, that's Carlson. Like that's carioca with fighting skills, yeah. Right. And I like that approach because I don't I don't like the militaristic style off the mats. On the mats, I do, but off the mats, like, why do you have to be that way? Like, relax, man, laugh, smile, have fun.

SPEAKER_00 51:27

And I think Carlson brought that core. I like that too very much. And we'll talk more about that, about what jujitsu has to offer people beyond the fighting. But I never got a chance to train with Carlson, but I did get to hang out with him. And I remember we only hung out one afternoon with him and me and Rico Rodriguez, who trained with us, who was a training partner of mine, and Tito or T's. And we were at the beach in Hermosa Beach. And I'm so glad that I got to hang with him because he's just such a cool guy. One other thing I think about of maybe what helped Brazilian jiu-jitsu to get so good, it's something I've talked with John Will about. It was actually John Will who first mentioned it to me. Higgin tells us the story of like Terazopolis, and they're all in this house with 19 rooms, and everybody and Henzo, and and then just everybody was there training, and it was this laboratory going on morning to night, brothers, cousins, and all that stuff. And I note, like we see the Rotolo brothers and we see the Mendez brothers, that you do have these situations where even when there's like two brothers who are growing up from a small age together, they kind of sharpen each other's knives as they grow up and they become very good. And the thought of having an entire clan of people with like 12 kids and nine kids all fighting of different ages, of different sizes, I feel like, and John certainly feels like that has a lot to do with why this Gracie Jiu Jitsu advanced so quickly and became so good, is because of that family living together, doing it, eating it, and breathing it all day long with so many different people. And I'm wondering if you think that is part of it too.

SPEAKER_02 53:05

It's huge. Between Carlos and Helio alone, right, let alone the other brothers, just between the two of them, they had 30 children, 20 of them males. So statistically, the odds worked in their favor too, especially if you're talking about the 60s, 70s, 80s, where women barely trained, if at all. The fact that they had 20 males in the business of jujitsu is huge. Because had they had 20 females and 10 males who didn't practice jujitsu, I don't care how dedicated they were, they wouldn't have worked. Because they didn't have enough students to warrant the evolution. To warrant what we have today, they needed at least a cell that like something to grow from. And they created that because they had so many children, they had some strong uh like people like Jean Berto and Armand Duvri did. These guys were like diehard, crazy academy soldiers. They were not from the family, but they were as if they were from the family. They till this day you talk to Joan Beto, but he raves about the Academy and Helio. So these are diehard soldiers, and that initial group out enough space and time, right, for what we now call Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to develop over time, not overnight, over time. This is exactly what's happening, man. We're watching these changes, and some people get they get a little upset when I like it seems like I'm trying to take credit away from Helio because so much of Jiu Jitsu history has been around Helio, and I pay what I consider to be the greatest compliment to Helio, something that no one's ever said. And I think it's I'm I've never heard anyone else say it, but I talk about it all the time. And I cannot think of a greater compliment. The man who held this small little unit together for decades was Helio, he was the political force. That militaristic, authoritarian, stubborn style of his, you may dislike it on a personal level. I wouldn't like it, but I think it was crucial to maintain these guys together long enough to allow that generation of children to grow up to begin to transform the old style pre-war slash jiu-jitsu, what you practice, into what we now call Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It was a cultural figure in being that leader that kept these guys together. Otherwise, why didn't they just go to judo? Or how do you keep a whole family trained in jiu-jitsu? That's incredible. Yeah, like try to get your kids to follow your profession, see if you can do it. Try to have 20 of your children follow your profession. I mean, it's incredible when you're thinking that is their greatest contribution. Like, really, I mean, when you think about it, it's an astounding contribution. And it's not a small, oh, the guy was small. Like, why we gotta we know he wasn't weak. He was a very accomplished athlete before he found Jitsu. I'll show you pictures of him. He's a very Kigley was a very good athlete. I think that he was just weak is a myth. I'll prove it. But people are caught up with these tales, like this martial arts lore, and it's completely irrelevant. It doesn't, it doesn't add any value. Oh, he was smaller. I fought open weight classes, people fight open weight classes every day. Like it's not an achievement to beat someone bigger than you. It happens every day at the gym. I see some little guy beat a big guy. It's normal. Okay, but the real achievement is keeping like for 40 years, really keeping these guys believing that what they had was special and it was gonna work out one day. And it did. And I don't think anyone could have done that. I mean, it required a very specific, very unique kind of personality to achieve that.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

That's a really good point. And I've heard from Higgin and from Horian, and just how I know how Alio he really fostered a competitive culture. I also read Hickson's book, both his books, actually. I think he was amazing in that way. And it's good that you're giving credit. I've not heard people making that point. I did hear you say on a podcast, it might have been a recent one with Alberto Grain, which I'll link to. It's a great interview. Talking about sort of the community. It's it almost seems like a paradox, but it follows along what we're talking about when you have this laboratory of so many great people who are just there day in and day out together. Maybe we don't all have a family and we can't do that, but that is what where the club subs in and different people are coming, and at least we're training together in the laboratory together in a jiu-jitsu school. And you were talking about how fighters have become sort of journeymen who will just go for reasons not to find better competition or a better instructor, but just for other business-y reasons that are kind of drifting from gym to gym. And you made the point about how there's great gyms in Las Vegas, but there haven't been a lot of great fighters necessarily coming out of Las Vegas. And I'd love your thought on that because fighting, whether it's MMA or BJJ, is an individual sport. It's not in and of itself a team sport. Like you're out there on the mat. You may be fighting for your team, for the honor of your team, for the honor of your instructor, but at the end of the day, you're out there on your own. And yet, what makes you good is this community around you and that trust and that friendship, I think allows you to train harder and safer. And it was interesting to me what you were talking about, where there's a breakdown of that, the fighters don't get as good.

SPEAKER_02 57:46

I say this all the time. I think that there are benefits to cross-training, like some of my students do. And I have the reputation for stopping people. I've never stopped a single student from cross-training, I've never kicked a student out for cross-training. I've never done that, not once. I'm against it because I think for a variety of reasons. For one for performance reasons. That's the hard one.

SPEAKER_00 58:05

When you're saying cross-training, do you mean between styles or between jujitsu schools?

SPEAKER_02 58:09

Schools. I saw a kid at a tournament in California this weekend, or this past weekend. He had six patches on his rash card, six logos, six gym logos. He was going to six different gyms to train. And I know his dad, what his dad is thinking. Oh, I'm getting the best out of all six. That's why I'm doing this. What he's doing is he's preventing his son from having community. He's preventing his son from growing a family, he's preventing his son from having training partners that will have his back when he needs them. This unit, I believe that fighting is even though it is an individual sport, it's really like a team sport in many ways, because you can't do it alone. I'll use the Dagestan as an example. In what world can you imagine Islam Makachev coiner against Habib or vice versa? What kind of money would you have to offer one of them to betray a brotherhood that you know they've been trained together since they were children? They fled and sweat and they've been through hell and back together, but I have no doubt. I don't have to interview them to find this. I have no doubt they have so much history. You think they can betray each other? They support each other in a way that is very difficult to create that in an environment when you're visiting someone's gym, and that person will give advice on how to beat you to the next person that comes to the door. There's no loyalty, promiscuous environment. And I think this damages progress. Now, yes, you need high-level training partners. No one's disputing that. But that's the ideal model, is where you have high-level training partners and you have unity and you have loyalty. And I'll give you another example. This is even for social reasons, for ethical reasons. I had a student of mine, a wife though, he didn't need to bounce around, but he just it's a lot of it is socializing, making friends on Instagram and networking. It's a lot of it is just high school politics. They're not actually there for training, it's more politics and training. But he was visiting, and we were talking about his visit to another gym. And I said this what if the next time you go to a competition, the next time you compete, I decided to corner your opponent, how would you feel? And he goes, Oh, I would feel betrayed. And then he could see like the wheels turning in his head. He goes, Oh, yeah, because what if a student expects a coach to invest 100% of his time and energy into his students, right? But if a coach expects the students to invest 100% of their time and energy into the gym and coach and the team, then there's a totalitarian asshole. And I'm like, where does this come from? It's a two-way street. This is a community. Now I happen to be the leader, sure, but that doesn't mean I'm taking advantage of it anyway. Like, this is another part of the mythology like all the coaches are abusing. Where is this coming from? All I see are coaches working on weekends for free on their feet for 12 hours. I've been doing this for 25 years on my feet for 10 hours a day. I just went to California this weekend to corner one of my students for ADCC trials. We had two other kids that competed. We did really well. We actually had five students, one gold medal, three, two bronzes, ADCC trial, super competitive event. Very high level, very high level. It was my daughter's birthday, and she was in a piano competition. She took third. It was very important to her. She practices piano four hours a day. She's obsessed with it. I missed out her birthday and her piano competition to spend$700 of my money to go corner my students. I didn't make any. They're not gonna pay me back. I'm spending$700 to go to California. I'm missing out my daughter's birthday. I will regret this one day, maybe to corner my students. And when I expect loyalty, I'm a totalitarian asshole. Like, it's just like it's a very weird equation when you think about it. Like, hold up here. I'm doing all this for free. I'm gonna pay you this. I do this because I like you. And when I expect commitment from the student, I'm controlling, I'm a cult leader. I think this is just it's an ethical matter. Like, what would you teach your children? You teach your children to be loyal. You teach your children to be loyal to their siblings, to their parents, to their family, to their friends, to their country. What is patriotism? What is at the core of patriotism, if not loyalty? Loyalty to one's country and republic. Like these things run at the core of human values. We devalue in the jiu-jitsu. We completely devalue these things. Oh, it's not important. You're controlling. Do whatever you want. Individualism, individualism. It's extreme individualism is a problem. What made BJJ great was the unity I was describing a second ago, helio keeping these guys together. I can reach that. I don't stop people from going. I understand sometimes they need it, they need better training partners. That's an exception to me. But in any other situation, I think it's unwarranted. I think for very high-level practitioners, there's a reason. There's an argument there to be made. But other than that, if it's just socializing, I feel like it's a bit of a slap in the face and it harms their performance long term because it's a very promiscuous environment where no one's really helping one another. They're just using one another for social media followers.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

So I have never been a professional jujitsu instructor. I've never had my own school, and that's by design. I'm uh have a different day life, which we can talk about some other time, which is uh helping animals. That's been my thing. But all of my instructor friends have had the experience where they have somebody that they have nursed along and poured their guts into, like what you're talking about. And either when they get their black belt, then they move off and take half of their students or something like that, or they haven't gotten their black belt yet and then they go somewhere else and they get the black belt from somebody else. It's frequently like the top student, but it's some sort of a weird betrayal that happens. And I know that there are some instructors who have been through it enough that know it's coming, and so they plan for it with their students, say, look, I know you're gonna want to start your own school. So let's figure out how this is gonna happen, that it's not gonna impact me. I will support you, you'll go to a different town or whatever. But it's a kind of a recurring story in the martial arts of kind of betrayals where people have taken a lot from their instructor and then don't feel they need to give back. So I'm right with you on I think loyalty is important. That's certainly when I came up through Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I mean, people were like tattooing the Machado logo on their body. I thought, like, wow, that's a commitment. I don't have any tattoos. But I think loyalty matters when someone has earned it. And I think when an instructor has put their time in, regardless of whether you're paying them or not, right? It's not just a business relationship. We're a team, like you say, we're a family, and we want that family feel. But to do that, I think it does go both ways. I think that's fair enough. And it's good for you to expect that as an instructor. I know my instructors did. I think it's a quality.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:12

When people talk about Krayonchi, like, oh, they go like that. It was like it was they're against that whole notion of Krayonchi. And I think that's teaching people a good lesson. Like you should be loyal to the people who have sacrificed their youth, their time, their energy. They've given you their knowledge, they've given you all these things, like, oh, I pay a membership. Really? You think a membership warrants all the things I dig not? That's not and most of us don't the crazy part. A lot of these guys don't even pay. The ones that don't play those the ones who complain the most and expect the most and demand the most. It's it's there's a lot of narcissistic behavior in the community where people expect people to just give them things and pay attention to them and them only. I've been through all of it. Everything you're talking about, I've been there and back many times, and it's the same story. But at the very core of it, I think it's a lack of courage. I'm gonna go back to courage of opening your gym with zero students is terrifying. To put your name on a lease as a personal guarantor, where you have when you have zero students, it takes a courage that most people don't have. But to take 20, 30 students gives you a base. It makes it less scary. So that's why it's easy to backstab the people who helped. You don't want to put your name on a lease when you when you know when you have zero students.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

That's a good point. Yeah, it sort of de-risks your embarking on your own school to take a bunch of your instructor students. Just jumping in here for a second to ask, what do you think about loyalty to a martial arts instructor? What does that mean and how far should it go? I think it's a free country and you should train wherever you want. But if you're in a competitive sport where schools are competing against each other, and if it matters to your instructor, I think it's fair for him or her to ask that you only train at their school as a condition of them training you. So am I missing anything? If you're watching on YouTube, pause and comment below and tell me what you think. Okay, back to the discussion. My original jujitsu instructor, that half Japanese man I mentioned, his name is Jackson. Now, this was jujitsu, and generally jujitsu and judo were not taught at professional schools or whatever. They tended to be clubs or just uh community centers, things like that. At that time, you had karate professional schools and taekwondo professional schools, even some Kung Fu professional schools, but it tended to be just more a club. And it was an ethic, actually, of his that he didn't want to be paid for his teaching because he didn't want students to feel like he owed them anything. He taught because he wanted to teach and he might close the class tomorrow if he wanted to, or he might tell you you can't come here anymore tomorrow. And you can't say, Well, I paid you. You know, so for him it was kind of an interesting ethical thing that he didn't want money involved. It was like a purity of I'm teaching because I want to teach, you come here and you give me respect, which made it easier for him to demand respect because no one could say, Well, I just paid you$150, you owe me something now, right? He didn't take any money from anybody. It was like six dollars that went to the community center to be in his club for six months. He didn't take any money. But and that was the ethos I grew up in. But then when I started to see Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I realized, yeah, okay, that's really great, but you're only going to get your instructor three nights a week from seven to nine because he's got a day job and he and he can't put in that time. And if you want a professional school where you can go in daytime classes, you can go to evening classes, you want to be paying the instructor and you want that instructor to have a good living so that they can fully devote themselves to it. So I've really flipped on that, but it does create this weird thing where when there's money involved and then people feel like, well, I paid you, you owe me. It does muddy the waters a little bit when there's money involved. And I've heard you talk about, and we can talk about now if you want, it also puts pressure on the instructor to lower standards, right? If there's money involved.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:50

A hundred percent. So, like that, these are the problems that martial arts encounter as they grow, right? The lowering of the standards, the the dynamic of commerce, right? Where the customer is always right. I have a chapter about this in my new book, is the customer always right? And I don't like that customer approach, which is why a lot of these guys, when they go, Oh, the customer, what they lose with that is is the hierarchy, is the authority. And then when you say authority, it comes such a bad connotation. Oh, authority. Like, yeah, I've been trained for almost 30 years. I've coached and trained and competed at the highest level, you know, the N MMA. Like, I do know what I'm talking about. Like, forgive me if that sounds arrogant, it's not my intention, but we must be realistic here. If you have this, anyone who's been training as a black girl has the authority over the white bill. That's why you're coming to it, because you know something they don't. And I think to reverse that hierarchy by putting the customer in charge because they pay is a bad long-term bad strategy. And I think I see more and more schools going that way because it's more profitable. Students, coaches tell their students what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. If you keep shaping the product in quotation market, you don't want to call jiu jitsu a product. But if you're gonna look at it as a product, you're gonna shape it to the customer's appetite. And when you do that, you're gonna lower standards and it's gonna lose value because that's the next step down the road is that the more it loses value, the less interesting it becomes. So, I mean, to preserve the integrity of the martial arts, preserve these things, is actually healthy for the long longevity of the art, for the quality and the integrity of the art. People are tend to think immediately, now, what can I gain right now? How do I benefit right now from the situation? There's no long-term thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:22

This might seem like a weird analogy, but I recently had on this podcast my first truly non-martial arts guest. He is a business leader. His name is Eric Reese, and he is the founder of the Lean Startup Methodology, which is this thing that kind of transformed Silicon Valley. And he was helping people create businesses and not waste time building the wrong product. And it was all really good stuff. It helped me build a very successful pet adoption website. I mentioned my animal stuff called adoptapet.com. So he was been a mentor of mine, and I thought these rules apply to martial arts too, where you don't overcommit to things. You kind of test things first and course correct and make sure you're moving in the right direction, don't just blindly move in one direction. So there's martial arts analogies. But he just came out with a new book called Incorruptible, where he's talking about, okay, he was very successful in helping lots of people create lots of successful tech businesses. But then what ends up happening is they lose their original mission, the founder gets kicked out, or the short-term thinking, like you just mentioned, where profitability extract the most profit, and then a great company ends up getting destroyed. And what I said to him was that is similar to martial arts, where you have a founder or there's an instructor that has some belief they're doing this for a reason. And then once the investors come in and once money comes in, and once other pressures come in, it loses its original focus and it becomes sort of a slave to that new focus, which generally in a business is making as much money as possible. And I think that's kind of exactly what you're talking about here. It's those same pressures that can destroy, I don't know, blockbuster video can also destroy a martial art itself. And that is a real problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:59

I I was more militant about this a year or two ago than I am now. They're like, I've changed a lot. I become more mild. I'm like, I think it's that ship has sailed, man. Like, I don't think people care because people talk about it. But even for myself, a while ago, I was so fed up with this. I only want warriors in here. I incre increased my class to two hours long. And then I started realizing numbers went from 30 to 25, 25 to 20. The numbers started getting smaller, and I started losing students. So let's do an hour and a half. And I was still like on the brink, they're not doing great financially. So I go, maybe I lowered to one hour and the classes are starting to fill up. It's just a dynamic, man. People want more in exchange for less. It's just human nature, it's economics. They want more rewards, they want more ranks, they want more medals, they want more accolades for less effort, less money, less time, less energy, less error. So, and once you enter that dynamic, it's almost like this spiral. You can't stop it. Like, I don't think anyone could stop it at this point.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

It's like inflation. It no, I fully hear what you're saying. And I've seen it for sure. The training is not as tough. I mean, it I love the evolution of jujitsu. It's interesting. I think you had said people come for maybe they come for self-defensive fitness and they stay for other reasons, like community health, things like that. And John Will, that is exactly what he says. Like he says what got him into Brazilian jujitsu, and he was a very serious martial arts before that, is not what's kept him in it for 35 years. He likes the complexity of the sport and durambola and just and the whole development of the foot attack game and all that stuff. And that's true. That keeps you interesting, and it keeps you getting these other benefits like camaraderie and hopefully health and fitness if you don't break your body too much. But I think that it's true that things do evolve and there is good and bad from that. And obviously, some people try to split their school, right? So they'll have their fighters, and you really want to keep those people sort of maybe out of the main class because they'll drive away your business people. But so try to kind of have two schools at the same time, which I think is hard to have a fighter culture school and to have a like a regular businessman culture school. But what you're describing of that sort of, let's just call it watering down. And I think some of that is needed. Like you mentioned that people should be pushed, but commensurate to their capabilities, like to their age. Like you're not going to push a 55-year-old guy in the way you'd push a 20-year-old guy or something like that. And so we want it to be accessible to the 55-year-old person, especially. I mean, I think you might agree with this. The person who needs jujitsu most is the weak person who's not very strong right now and who needs maybe to have it toned down a little bit just so they can get some calluses, right? And get in there and go. So I think there's some sort of a balance between making it easy for people to come in and then setting the dial, right, that it's just pressuring them enough so that they get tougher and tougher, but not doing what I do think is happening, which is people are getting belts handed out to them, people are getting to black belt who I that they were not at the level of the black belt when I got my black belt. And I don't know how you stop all that because that does seem to be the direction everything moves, is a softening. And I've seen it.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:11

The best we can do, Dave, is what you mentioned a balance, a harmony between these two opposing forces. I think that's the best we can wish for. I I think it's irreversible. I think when I started this whole jiu-jitsu history thing, part of my motivation was like to I don't know, like do something like can we stop this? Can we reverse this? Right? Can we go back to a martial art that where the ambassadors of the art had a concern for the longevity, integrity, and quality of the art? Whereas now, like you you sit in a circle with some of these gym owners, and all they talk about is how to make money. Don't talk about jiu-jitsu. I've been in these circles hundreds of times. Like, all they talk about is how do I do this? How do you just is that they're showing each other tricks on how to make more money from the gym? And I should listen because I'm not a good businessman. I say this all the time. I never care to be one. I've always wanted to make enough to feed myself, my family, and live with the minimal level of comfort. Anything beyond that is like never makes sense to me. Like, it's irrational, really. You would dedicate your life to have more than what you need. It's all people talk about it because it's become like the main topic is like how to optimize profits. And it's I don't know, man. Like it I don't I don't I wonder what the benefit is long term. And these guys are trying to build empires through jujitsu. It's so disappointing. Like empire to me is what Bushesha did, 13 world titles. That's where the bar is. That was my mentality is like fighting in the UFC and winning a UFC belt, but it's become very, very money hungry business owners.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:32

Well, you said it. There's a balance. You should be attentive to your business and not make it so tough so that you just don't have any students, and not make it so soft so that no one's actually learning anything that's of any value. I mean, I do think that there's a wide range, and I think that there is a balance to find there. The fighters, the great fighters, kids today, they don't know their names. Like you they won't remember, like you could talk about Matt Hughes, you could talk about all these big names that happened, and people who are into MMA today, unless they are older or are really MMA buffs, they only know who's like the champion today. And so I think what lasts in the public view is do you have your name on an association that you know that is going to be around 20 years from now, then you'll keep making money and you'll keep being famous. And it's sad because that is a more of a business tactic that's gonna keep you remembered. But the actual warrior ethos, the fact that you fought the battles, that you stood your ground, that you won titles, that will not be remembered, sadly, because I mean, like I can't name boxers of yesteryear because I'm not a real big boxer fan. And I think that's maybe it's just the way of the world. But maybe it's good if you can do both. Like you made your name, you have a legacy as a fighter, and you also have a school. And that's not a lot of people that can do that. I mean, we see in I know you see this too, fighters who once their career ends and it's a short career, they are strapped for cash. They haven't saved money, or maybe they never made a lot of money. And it's a sad thing. I think you're in a special position where you're a smart person and a good instructor. So you are able to both live the life as a fighter and now live the life as a successful BGJ instructor.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:10

I'm against like any kind of form of personality called martial arts or elsewhere. Humans are inherently flawed, and we should focus on the flaw so we don't get carried away with this person is better than they are. But I the reason why I think it's important and we remember the people we came before us, it's not just for a reason of gratitude. That we need to study history, not just before gratitude or because history is cyclical and you know we must learn from the past. But I think that more than anything, we have to see what is good and what is polished about the past and what we should be teaching future generations. Like the reason why I admire Carlson is not because of Carlson as a human, a person, it is what he represented above all. Like he represented a set of values that I think are the real true values of a true martial artist. Like these this is what we should be representing, this is what we should aspire to be like. It's almost too radical. The man died broke, it was too much. Like Carlson was such a good, kind person. He would love I mean, people don't know this, but I'm hearing this story from his students. When it was cold in Rio de Janeiro, you know what the Carlson would do? He would open his gym and let homeless people sleep on the map. Talk about Christianity. Carlson never opened his mouth to talk about Jesus or the Bible. I've never heard him talk about Jesus, not once. Like who's the real Christian? The person who puts a patch on his G that says 100% Jesus, or the man who opens his doors to let homeless people sleep on the mass. Right? You know how many students train for free? Yeah. A lot of it. Because he was more worried about the arts evolution than anything. And I think the reason is why we need to cultivate the right values to hit the right people, because these people upheld good values. Right. Right. Now you contrast that with the guys that all they talk about is how take money from students. Like I'm not saying I'm better than them. I'm not, I'm not, I'm probably more like them than I am like Carlson, if anything, to be truthful. But I think we should admire the right people for the right reasons. And this is one reason why history is so important.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:04

So, this podcast, Ageless Warrior Lab, what I'm trying to talk about is lessons from the martial arts in life. And you did a TEDx talk, and I was super impressed. I watched it online. It was very honest. You talked about some of your challenges. You talked about a switching of your thinking of maybe winning is not the only thing. You mentioned some of the challenges with the drug testing and stuff like that. But I want to say that I was really impressed. I thought that is a really powerful guy who can look back and reflect and say, I did this right, but I did that wrong, and is willing to go out in public and say that because it lets other people know that, hey, if you've made a mistake or if you have come to a realization like that's okay. I just thought that was really big of you to do. And I'm impressed. And I thought that was really cool. And by the way, you you talked about feeling some, I don't, I don't know if it was guilt or whatever, feeling like that there was a period where you weren't being honest, you weren't being truthful, or something like that. I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. I mean, lots of people are not truthful. I mean, we are human beings, and frankly, lots of people are breaking rules of sports and not getting caught at it. So I just feel like you shouldn't beat yourself up on that. But I'm just impressed that you shared that.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:23

Thank you for saying that, Dave. I'm not proud of any of my many flaws, but I learned how to live with them and learn from them. That's all you can do. I don't have a time machine. If I did, I'd do things differently. But uh, you learn, man. You learn. That's the real treasure, man, is the lessons you take, man. The more time goes by, the more I realize that this is what I take from jujitsu is what jujitsu has taught me. It's not the metals, it's not the achievements. These things have been great and they've opened many doors, and I have lived a very adventurous life, man. I got stores for days, all because of jujitsu. But I think my greatest treasure really are my fault. And then I've fallen many times. But I learn that every time you get back up, you get back up, and you fight. And that's what you do. And I thought one day it would stop. It doesn't stop it. You fight till the day you die. Life is a fight. You gotta keep your hands up. You fight, don't quit. You're gonna fall, you're gonna mess up, you keep coming back up, you don't quit. You fight, and that's life. It's not gonna stop. It doesn't stop. And I realize this now. So all you can do is love the fight, love, enjoy the fight, enjoy the struggle, and don't let it put you down. Don't let it knock you down and keep you down. Just keep fighting.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:27

What you're describing comes 100% from jujitsu and martial arts. I mean, it is you're using a fight analogy, but that is exactly, I think, what we learn. I think it's one of the most important things we get from jujitsu training is discomfort and getting knocked down and coming back up and loss and coming back from that. And I think what you're describing is a great example of how you're bringing that martial arts lesson off the mat and into life. Thank you, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:53

I yeah, I have jiu-jitsu to thank for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:55

You talk about being truthful and truth-telling and stuff, and it got me thinking there was this thing that I did once, kind of like a psychological thing that took an all-day thing called the landmark forum. And it was interesting and it had a lot of interesting things in it. But one of the things they talked about was being impeccable with your word, meaning just speak the truth and even in the smallest way, don't let yourself take the easy path and say, like, oh, I'm sorry I was late, the traffic was bad. No, I'm late because I did not take into account that the traffic might be bad and I should have left earlier, and that was disrespectful and I'm sorry, right? So this kind of radical honesty. But the reason that it was preaching it was if you get in the habit and you have this muscle of being honest on little things and on big things, tactful, but honest. And just having your word, your word means something. Like if I say I'm gonna do something, even if it's I'll pick you up in five minutes, I will be there. I will pick you up in five minutes because of my word. Then you've strengthened this word. And then if you want to do something important in your life and you say, I'm going to stop eating late at night, or I'm gonna stop smoking or stop drinking, or something that you want to do, your word is strong because you've exercised it like a muscle that when you say something, you're gonna do it. And then that becomes a very useful thing because you said, now you're gonna do this important thing, it's gonna be hard, but you gave your word and you have strengthened your word. I share that because you mentioned actually Christianity and who is being a Christian, like letting the homeless people come in. I know even people who study the Bible, it's like the word. I mean, that's what the whole Bible is, words. Like words are powerful and strengthening your own word is powerful. And I know, like in the Bible, like God said, let there be light, and it was light. It was these words, right? So I think that being truthful in life is a muscle that you have to exercise. And it takes courage sometimes, to be honest, either if you're admitting a flaw or if you're telling someone an honest truth that they need to hear. But I think that like a muscle that strengthens you, and once your word matters, then I think that can be a very useful tool.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:08

I think it's not just a useful tool, Dave. I think it's the origin of goodness. Anyone can be good when it costs you nothing. But to be good when it's difficult, that's when it matters. That's how you measure goodness. What did it cost you to tell the truth? Convenient truth has no moral weight. Me saying two plus two equals four has no moral weight. It only has more weight when it's difficult and challenging, and you're bound to upset some people and lose some political terrain or it harms you financially. So you having the strength to have a word. I understand exactly what you're saying. I think it is a cornerstone of goodness. It's too cheap to say I am good because I have a sticker on my car with an American flag. I'm a patriot to my flag, or there's a sticker to say I love Jesus. Like real men love Jesus. What does that say about your? I mean, that's easy anyone to do that. Like, can you open the doors of your gym when it's cold outside to let homeless people sleep inside your gym? How many people have a like I almost associate goodness with difficulty? I cannot associate it with things that are easy.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:04

That's a really good point, Robert. I want to be respectful of your time. I just want to talk to you just a little bit about any thoughts, advice you have. A lot of the people who are listening to me are listening to me because they want longevity in jujitsu and they see that I've been very fortunate to not have any really major injuries. And of course, I've only been doing jujitsu. I've never stepped into a ring, and that helps a lot. I think maybe I don't know if you view it this way. You might have had, if things have gone a different way, a very long and very successful MMA career. You had a successful MMA career. Maybe it's good that stopped because I think you might, I don't know if you think about that, but a lot of the really successful MMA fighters that I've know who are older, they are hurting and they're hurting for a really long time for the whole rest of their life. So maybe it was good that I don't I I don't know if you ever view that, but um MMA, there's a lot of damage.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:58

That's one of the reasons why I stopped, Dave, was I try to preserve my brain. Like it was I didn't want to be that guy. It's not the only reason. I it's a long story, but that was one of the reasons. Like, I just don't want to be that guy, man. I want to be healthy. I want to walk, I want to go into my 60s and 70s and 80s if I make it that far. My mind is sharper than ever.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:17

So, do you have any thoughts on aging as a grappler pointers that you like to share? You mentioned that you're, I think slowing down is good. Physically slowing down, it reduces injury. And I think maybe for you, I'm just guessing, as kind of a bigger guy, I always feel bad for bigger guys because I feel like other people get intimidated and then they throw things on as if the bigger guy is indestructible because they just are intimidated by their size or whatever. And I feel like, hey, he's just a human being. Like his elbow can snap like anybody else's elbow, like be cool. But I just wondering what are your pointers, what are your thoughts on how you are now trying to preserve your body as much as possible and stay fit to train and have fun into your 70s and 80s?

SPEAKER_02 1:27:03

I drive the car carefully. I don't go in certain positions. I had to change my jujitsu because of my injuries. I advise people to stay on the mats, don't stop, don't stop. It's worse if you stop. It hurts more if you stop. I after my last fight, right? 2016 was my last anemic fight. I took six months off because I had been on that treadmill for 20 years non-stop, six days a week, twice a day, like a mania. So I wanted to give my body some time to rest, but it was more painful to rest than it was to train. It's hard to explain, but my body was in more pain by not training than it was when I was training. So I recommend don't stop, slow it down, pick your training partners, find a pace, accept that you're gonna lose some rounds. That was very difficult for me to accept is me getting swept today because I can't post on the ground with my hands because my wrists are destroyed. I don't post. I'm gonna hurt myself if I post, so I don't post, I don't switch. And that was very difficult for me to accept because I just got two points scored on you, Robert. What is happening to you? Are you a quitter? And I'm like, struggle with this because I don't want to be a quitter. I don't want to be A whiny baby, but at the same time, it's like, dude, like my wrists get inflamed. The other day I had a hard time carrying a box because my wrists were hurting so much. So, I mean, I don't know, man. I don't have great advice. They like my advice is be careful, but if someone has better advice than dad, let's share it with them because I could use some.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:16

No, I think you hit one of the main things, which is pick your partner as well. Uh, if you have good training partners who are wanting to have a fun and push each other but can protect each other, I think that's important. And there's all the other things. I actually did a whole podcast on this with all my thoughts on it, like, oh, training near a wall. So you're not likely to have some guy fly into your training space and just all the little things that you can do to up the chances that you're not going to get injuries. But I think the biggest one is you're who are you training with by far. And you mentioned, and believe me, I hear yeah. I spend more time training these days, watching things happen and thinking, dude, 20 years ago I would have made you pay for what you just did. But now you think you did this great thing and like you came on top of me, and you don't know that the reason that happened is because I'm spending 50% of my energy fighting you and 50% protecting my elbow, protecting my wrist, protecting my neck. But my take on this, Robert, is jujitsu is about adaptation. That's what it is. You were saying it before about what made BGJ great, the ability to adapt and flow things together. And so, as my friend Chris Howder uh says, you got to fight with the body that you have, not the body that you had, and not the body that you want. And jujitsu is there for you. There's always another move. I guess one way I think about this, and I think you'll appreciate this, is we've always, since the day we started jujitsu, we've always been adapting to things that we didn't have. We just didn't feel like it before because we felt young and we felt strong. But you could have been stronger, you could have been faster, you could have been more flexible, but you hadn't tasted it. So it didn't feel like you lost it. So you were already adapting to a body that might have been strong, but it wasn't as strong as somebody else's body. So now, okay, our bodies are not as strong and we can't move our shoulders in this way. So it feels like we've lost something. But the challenge for us, if we really are black belts and masters of jujitsu, is to say, okay, now what are the correct moves and what are the correct things I can do given this body at this time? And it helps me to remember instead of feeling like I've lost all this stuff, even when I thought I hadn't lost anything, I still didn't have things that other people had. I wasn't the strongest guy. I wasn't the best. So now I'm really not the strongest guy. And now I'm really not the most flexible guy. It's okay. There's always an adaptation that can be the right thing for the right moment.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:44

I think that's that this adaptation never I've never thought of it that way. But yeah, I am adapting all the time. But it's always been that way. It's just more obvious now. It's just high, it's been highlighted.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:54

That's right. That's right. Well, hopefully you stay healthy and you stay in it. Just last thought. You mentioned you got married. Congratulations. What's success for you five, 10 years from now? Where do you want to be? What's going on in the world of Robert? Are you gonna write more books? What's going on with you?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:10

I got some drafts of some books that I want to write. I gotta find the time. I'm trying to fix my life in a way so I have more time to write. That's my prime objective now, is to make my life in a way where I can have like four hours a day where I could just be alone and write. That's my main goal, right? Be a good parent, be a good husband, I'd like to have more kids. I want to be a better coach. Just improve on myself morally, intellectually, and physically as you go. I think that's a good standard from our source. But it's just a better man as a person, as a human. It's an uphill battle, man. It's not easy, man. It's much easier to slack, right? But it's getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Like that's gotta be the norm. And I try to remind myself of these things all the time and just try to keep improving in every way possible.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:52

Well, that's wonderful. You sound like you've definitely been on a road, but you seem like a fantastic, humble guy. I look forward to getting a chance to meet and get on the mat with you in person next time I'm coming through Vegas. I still compete in like the master's world, so I'm there like at least twice a year, ghee no gi. But I will be sure that we have links in the show notes to all of your books, to anything you want us to have links to. We'll communicate on that. I think people should check out your stuff. It's astoundingly interesting and really good. And I think knowing where you came from helps you know where you're going. I think it's not just a curiosity. I think it's really interesting. And I think people should understand the history of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I just think you have a lot to offer. So I'm thankful of you taking this time with me and have a great day and good luck.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:43

Thank you, Dave. Thank you for the kind words. I'd love to have you or any of the listeners, any of the viewers, if you're ever in Vegas, stop by the gym. Open door policy, everyone's welcome. So I hope to meet all of you guys in person one day.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:56

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Professor Robert Drysdale. If you train BJJ in other grappling systems that also involve finishing holds, do you agree that BJJ is different because of its development of the guard and its focus on positional control before applying those finishing holds? Leave me a comment and let me know. And if you want to get in touch with Robert, you can find links in the show notes. If you have any thoughts on anything at all about the show, do comment on YouTube or hit me up on Instagram at the Agel Swarrier Lab. Also, be sure to subscribe and let your friends know about the show. I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab. And until then, keep developing your strengths, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.