Jocko Podcast 293 w Rickson Gracie: Stay Calm In Bad Positions. That is Important. Jiu Jitsu is Life

this is jocko podcast number 293 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening hicks and gracie approached me and asked me if i wanted to train with him yes sir at that time i was a blue belt in jiu-jitsu a lean 225 pounds i worked out every day and had been training jiu-jitsu hard for about two years i had competed at the blue belt level and won many competitions i trained daily in san diego with dean lister a future world champion and with many other highly skilled jiu-jitsu practitioners i was focused and motivated and determined but none of those things mattered hixson who was 40 pounds lighter than me made me feel like a child he effortlessly controlled my movement isolated my limbs and submitted me over and over and over again i fought hard applied technique after technique made adjustments tried to surprise him used all the strength and trickery and skill and effort i could muster my resistance was futile there was nothing i could do nothing when he was bored with my pitiful attempts at survival we stopped sparring and talked for a bit he asked me about seal training he related to the warrior culture of my occupation he also gave me an assessment of my jiu-jitsu quote you do a good job staying calm in bad positions that is an important thing end quote soon the class was over we shook hands and i thanked hixon for his time and for his knowledge and over the next few days i thought about what he had told me you'd do a good job staying calm in bad positions that is an important thing i realized that this did not only apply to jiu jitsu it applied to my job in the seal teams as well you are going to get put in bad positions the enemy might get the upper hand you might be outnumbered or outgunned panic will destroy you you have to stay calm and that was only the beginning of the correlation i began to see from jiu jitsu to combat to leadership to business and to life itself as i continued to learn jiu jitsu and progress in my seal career jiu jitsu taught me much but it was hixson's words that initiated my journey the principles of jiu-jitsu can be applied to every endeavor in life you have to stay calm when you are in bad situations you need to cover and conceal your intent with other maneuvers you need to utilize the simplest and most efficient methods you need to prioritize your focus of effort you need to train until you trust yourself to move intuitively without having to think you need to move at the right time you need to do to defend critical areas you should not attack your enemy's strong points you must utilize leverage you cannot let your emotions drive your decisions you have to establish a good base foundation to build upon you cannot be overly aggressive but you can't just allow things to happen when you make a move you have to believe in what you are doing you have to be mentally strong you have to keep an open mind you have to continuously learn new techniques while always reinforcing the fundamentals you have to adapt your plan if circumstances change the list goes on and on when i deployed to iraq as a seal combat leader i continuously operated with these fundamental principles in my head ones that i understood because of jujitsu i continue to utilize these principles now in the civilian world as well as a businessman a teacher a father and a coach jiu-jitsu gives me confidence but also humility strength but also compassion a disciplined code but also a free and open mind as hixson says jiu jitsu is not just a sport jitsu is a philosophy and it is at the root of everything we do and that right there is an excerpt from a forward written by me for a new book that is called breathe a life in flow and is written by brazilian jiu-jitsu legend hixson gracie and it is an honor to have [Music] hixon here with us tonight to share some of his stories his philosophies of jiu-jitsu and his lessons learned hixson thank you so much for joining us it was an honor to have you here my pleasure joko and uh it's a great pleasure to see you guys and uh first of all i like to really thank you and it's an honor for me to have you do the introduction in the book was a special compliment for me because you're such a highly skilled motivation warrior and with all your sayings let's kind of establish a very high high end for my my journey so i appreciate your support my brother yeah i've often talked about the fact of what jiu-jitsu gave to me and what jiu-jitsu gave to me was connecting all these things i started to see jiu jitsu everywhere and everything became related to jiu jitsu and and really i i it was in i think it was 1996 or 1997 when i went up and i stayed in a in a crappy hotel up in los angeles for like like 10 days or something and i went to pico your academy at pico every day and and just was absorbing i'm still sore from those sessions but i have good memories people at people would ask me what it's like what it was like to train with you and um i said i've told people if you've ever like felt the pressure of a of a high-powered hose like a like a high-powered hose just just water just bearing down on you and when you move a little bit it doesn't matter it just flows around you that's what that's what it felt like when you when i was rolling with you i everything that i tried you were already there waiting for me and and the pressure and the tightness but at the same time the fluidity it's hard to describe yes jiu-jitsu is a very is a very very special technique because give you the sense of utilizing your body but not exactly trying to stress yourself is up is a continuous motions with leverage and angles and and the ability for you to to bring based on weight distribution and and different grips and maneuvers the chance for you to flow into uh harmonious control because it's not about holding and and fighting for but it's about to understand the motions and be ahead of the game so when you escape from the neck you already give me the arm and the idea for the one who's suffering the attack the pressure is there's no relief until you tap but for me it was just a continuous understanding of what's next and it's not in the ability to move and to make it be there in the right precision time so it was a very interesting technique and and and give me this chance for really use not only my techniques not only my physicality but also my mindset and my emotional control and also what i believe is a very important tools for the spiritual water is using the spiritual energy from forgiveness and acceptance and not fear death and accepting the circumstances in a way to be like you said comfortable in hell you know so as many things with jiu-jitsu favor you to to accept life as it is and transform the battle in a ground and a growing situation for your mind and your spirit so jiu-jitsu is a great component for anyone yeah i i try and explain to people sometimes that when you do jiu-jitsu the more jiu-jitsu you do you get to a point where you can kind of see the future because you know what this other person is going to do and when you know what they're going to do you can be there waiting for them because you know what they're going to do and it's the same thing with anything that you practice and you train and you pay attention to you can get to a point where you can kind of predict the future and i i think some people say you know you you're a couple moves ahead in jiu jitsu and the better you get the more moves ahead you're going to be yes similar to chess chess game you know if you play a guy who's a champion he's already know what you're gonna when you move a piece he knows five or ten movements ahead and he's all ready to strategize your defeat so i felt like the same as jiu-jitsu you can anticipate the emotions based on on the mechanics and the and the tension and so you can capitalize basically always in some kind of mistake or some kind of lack of timing or something like that so you wrote this book um i was lucky enough like the honor to be able to write the forward but that also meant i got to read the book early and i have a copy of it here and uh just want to kind of jump into some of the book and talk about how you grew up which is i mean it's just an incredible your journey has been incredible your whole family's had such a huge impact on the world and it's very interesting to kind of hear what it was like for you and growing up inside this this such an influential family so let's jump into the book a little bit um here we go by the time i was born my father was already one of brazil's biggest sports icons in addition to being incredibly tough fighter he was also a showman of the highest order who publicly challenged boxing icons primo carnera joe lewis and ezra charles although the boxers all declined in 1932 wrestler fred herbert ebert accepted 17-year-old challenged elio's your father ebert outweighed him by about 50 pounds but they fought for an hour and 40 minutes before police stopped the fight two years later my dad fought 225 pound world champion wrestler logic zebico to a draw when japan's greatest judoka masahiko kimura traveled to brazil in 1951 elio also challenged him kimura agreed to fight my dad if he could first defeat yuku yukio kato one of the black belts traveling with him my dad's first fight with cato was declared a jaw but elio choked him unconscious in the rematch clearing the way for a match with the judo champion elio and kimura squared off in front of 20 000 spectators a week later and even the president of brazil attended the match the judoka outweighed my dad by 80 pounds and threw him around the ring like a ragdoll but could not finish him at one point my dad went unconscious but because he didn't tap kamira thought the choke wasn't working and released it and alio regained consciousness 13 minutes into the fight the judo champion secured a bent arm lock and again my dad refused to tap kimura kept twisting and ripping at his shoulder still alio refused to tap but kimura kept cranking and my uncle carlos threw in the towel my dad later said he got his samurai spirit from kimura and named the bent armlock the kimura so there's your dad how much did your dad weigh 140 pounds 135 yeah was a light guy and going up against camiro who's a beast and and by the way you can see at least parts of this match online you can go and google it and see this match yes yes kimura was the champion in japan which is very unusual for a champion in japan to become five years consecutive champion normally every six months they they trade places but kimura was established and a true champion in the japanese community and when he went to brazil my father challenged him and then he fought kato first and uh in the fight with kimura kimura put in the newspaper if he passed three minutes he was already winning the fight like if ifelio survives three minutes he wins and the fight went to 13 minutes so in one point the whole crowd saying oh he's done he's done stop the fight he's already won but the fight continues and my my father bet by gets submitted by kimura and [Music] and even though after that fight kimura went to my father's house with a translator inviting him to teach in the imperial school in japan because he said the jiu jitsu he knows japan has forgotten and i don't believe it's like that exactly because a big part of the brazilian jiu-jitsu was created by my father exactly because my uncle carlos learned from maeda from from condi coma and [Music] maeda was a champion he's been fighting for all over and and went to brazil to settle and he started teaching uncle carlos based on the friendship he has with my grandfather and in that process uncle chucalus learned a lot from from aydah but elio was 12 years younger than my my uncle and was very very young kid at this time and then they went to rio in 1925 cerro in rio and my uncle carlos opened his first school in 1925. at this point my father was could not do any sports he was doctor said for him to not do anything not playing soccer not ride a bike not skate nothing because he's very skinny and he has vertical all the time he so he's pass out any any effort he's passing out so he had to rest so my uncle opened this school my father's sitting on the corner all the time watching my uncle teach and for three years from 13 years old to 16 he was just watching amazed watching all the details all the says all the moves but he never practiced and one day a student arrived at the school and my uncle was not there yet so my father said mister if you want to do let's play a little b until my brother arrive so with that they start to practice half hour later my uncle arrived and the student said carlos if you don't mind i like to keep training with the kid because he's so good i love to practice with him so and that's the way my father get into jiu-jitsu practice but different than a normal person my father could not do one pull-up one pull-up or one push-up he don't have the strength in the muscles to do that so he basically a choke for example which is a he learned as an arm movement where to grab the collars and squeeze the guy to choke he could not even think about choking somebody with the strength on his arms so he has to bring together and use the chest which trans trans which transforms the whole pressure on the choke giving less effort muscularly and much more efficiency technically so that's just a very simple example of how my dad in every movement he could do he adapt for him weak for his own weakness and he's another very important element is he was so light and so small he could not ever fight on top mount positions passing guards and and and kick axe kick kick-ass from the top so he was able to just stay on the bottom regardless and he was able to create from the guard position as such a new arsenal of tricks because he has nothing to do but guard so he developed a guard in a very elegant style in a brazilian style which doesn't belong to japan at all all the ground techniques from the bottom are developed by by my father which is weak enough should not do other things so he's improving we normally say in in the family elio grace is for jiu-jitsu as einstein is to physics he's a creator he's a genius he's impossible to compare and follow this this idea of of of total connection with the techniques and the development the jiu-jitsu the brazilian jiu-jitsu becomes more like effective in the valley tudo and the no holds bar and effectiveness overall with ghee without gi because gives to the weaker one elements to to submit the bigger one so i felt like jiu-jitsu really becomes a a art for a weaker one after passed through through brazil before cuando coma con de maida cuomo was a very effective he has many many victories but he was a stuck guy he was solid strong japanese not too tall but he was very solid maybe 80 kilos or 85 kilos or something so he was dealing jiu-jitsu and his own form of athleticism which is different than what my dad implies so we are very grateful to have eddie gracie and the family to to bring another possibilities for our style yeah that's um it seems like in jiu jitsu when when you have jiu jitsu like that it's the situation where like you said somebody that's smaller and weaker can defeat someone that's bigger and stronger and everybody that starts jiu jitsu for the first time when i started jiu jitsu for the first time you know i was like i said i was 220 pounds my first teacher was fabio santos i think he weighs i don't know 150 160 pounds he would just do whatever he wanted to me and he was an old man at the time he was probably younger than i am right now but he seemed like he was an old man i said how's this old man with gray hair going to do anything to me and jujitsu allows you to do that jiu jitsu is you know what what your dad because he had like you said because he was smaller because he was weaker he had to develop that style and it's so effective yes leverage replaces strength you know techniques replaces speed so when you have the perfect combination you can anticipate the movement you can use timing at your favor and other deflections so it's a very interesting concept of winning without really banging heads to head you have to make like set him up or or fake or set up in a way to to almost surprise the guy with in and defeat not exactly smash him you know it's too brutal sometimes it's too much to boost fighting you know i love to see the the articulation of a technician suppress the strength so for me i was amazed about the effectiveness of and the possibilities of jiu jitsu i'm going to fast forward a little bit and just so everybody knows i already skipped a bunch of the book you know you talk about the originations of the family it's very interesting you know you came from i think you had you had a great what was a great great great grandfather that that was in the civil war on the confederate side yes the gracie family is in the warfare for a long time yeah you mentioned uh what was it archibald this guy archibald gracie and um archer bald gracie ultra brawl iii was a warrior at west point he earned superintendent robert e lee's respect after he got beaten up in a fight on the parade grounds when gracie was called in the lee's office he refused to give up the name of the man he was fighting after his opponent turned himself in lee did not punish either of them when america's civil war broke out archibald gracie iii sided with the confederacy he started the war as a major but after fighting heroically in some of the conflict's fiercest battles grace he was a brigadier general at the age of 29. robert e lee survived the civil war but archer bald gracie iii did not yeah so that's the side that went to america yes i didn't know much about it until peter which wrote the book with me yeah he's a story historian and war military professor so he enlightened me with that kind of interesting story yeah i actually looked up on the internet and saw a picture of archibald gracie iii dressed up in his confederate uniform it's so crazy uh yeah you go into some more of those details which you kind of discussed about the history of you know how it came from japan to brazil how your uncle got involved how your brother got involved those details are so rich in the book it's so fascinating to read from a jiu jitsu perspective but also just from a historical perspective in the world i'ma fast forward a little bit to what it was like for you growing up you say initially we kids went to the academy just to play tug of war or have a game of soccer we were introduced to jiu-jitsu slowly nothing like what i see these days today too many parents push their kids to compete before they are ready for young kids jiu jitsu should be nothing more than a fun form of recreation that introduces them to the movements through games and structured play as they get older you can introduce more jiu jitsu but it should be playful if you push kids too hard too young they will quit forever parents should never burden their kids with their unfulfilled ambitions frustrations anxiety or any other form of emotional baggage parents support the parents support must be cons consistent the most important thing is that the child gets the experience win lose or draw without judgment so this is something a lot of parents need to hear this is something i wish i would have heard earlier i i was telling you before we started i definitely pushed my kids too hard into jiu jitsu maybe that was my unfulfilled ambitions that i tried to impose on my own children and you know i i i read a book later in life um and it it talked about how you know you want to make things fun for your kids and it sounds like for you guys at the beginning jiu jitsu was just fun yes because you know it's a must for us we no matter what we're representing i mean we are graces we all dress geese from i mean i get my my before my diapers so we all become little graces and our identity is recognized by oh you're going to be a champion true you're going to fight like your dad so you you it's a natural for you using training inspiring it's all fun and i never felt like it was a serious business even competing because my dad didn't put me pressure he he always like my first competition he said to me if he asked me if i want to compete i said yes and then he said if you win i give you a gift if you lose i give you two gifts so that's kind of in in the between lines say my dad's not going to be upset with me if i lose so i didn't know what's really represent that kind of statement but i felt like my dad's not going to be upset so that's a plus and i lose that fight and i don't even remember if i got two gifts or not but what i felt from that that situation is my dad was not upset he's okay and after that i keep continue competing and i i was successful in my other fighters fights but was a good support of my dad and no pressure make me feel like jiu-jitsu is something for me to practice regardless of somebody else's judgment you go on to say this you say even as a small boy i silently observed from close proximity fear courage aggression and cowardice i noticed small things about people because they provided clues about their true nature things as simple as the way someone shook my hand the way people acted when they won and the way they acted when they lost told me a lot i often wondered why a guy who beat me so mercilessly made excuses not to train with my older brothers i didn't judge them i just knew that i didn't want to be like them there's a lot of human nature that gets revealed on the jiu jitsu mats oh no doubt about it man i was young and i would start teaching helping my brother harion to teach private lessons i was 13 14 years old and i was there like a dummy you know so hicks on lay down john mount and just to practice movements so i was helping him to teach and i got a little tip after the class you know he gave me some ice cream or some so i was there to just watching and teaching and helping and then i asked my dad said dad what i should do to be the best teacher and then he said to me if you want to be a good teacher you learn a good arm lock a good escape from the bottom whatever and and teach your student and you will be efficient on do the technique but if you want to be an excellent student you have to see you have to try to understand what the students needs to learn so it's not about what i want to teach it's about what he needs to learn so based on that another road was created because i cannot just be a jiu jitsu teacher i have to be a psychologist and understand what i need to teach to make happens to make the guy seeking happiness more efficiently so a student who is tense and claustrophobic i will teach him like to be calm and relax and do the movements almost in slow motion for the guy who stands and try to be tough and aggressive and so calm down and relax so the other guys are lazy give up man come come come up so i i bring the energy needs to be naturally on him so becomes a half psychology half jiu jitsu class and that was a big transformation for me because i start to understand my service as a something to enhance people's lives qualities of life you know it's not about being just a martial arts or or a teacher to you to fight i have to teach you to breed i have to teach you to strategize i have to teach you to have emotional control i have to teach you to visually make visualizations i have to teach you to not only using the technical elements but also the spiritual elements i have to teach you to have hope faith and and and things like that so in order for you to become an expert in jiu-jitsu is you you basically becomes an expert in life too because you you know how to put yourself in situations and be able to to recognize the the situation and see if you need a better calmness in your brain a better control in your body or if you have to really surrender to a higher god and and put because in one point we cannot have be afraid of death you know and if you're able to understand your mission your your your commitment your your honor are above that kind of that line you become a fearless opponent because you're not afraid to die at all how a navy seal can go to battle not visualizing the possibility to die how a fireman can save a kid from a from a structure without the slice chance of him to die and fall with so once you become comfortable and the acceptance of the a result you're not in control you become a much more complete not a warrior because you just find your mission as a priority not exactly so in representing jiu-jitsu was a big thing for me which transcends my life my my my physicality was something i put my honor and my faith on top of everything so i was able to accepting challenges and be ready for challenges which different than a soda representing an army which you have commands you have uh weaponry you have strategies you have situations which are not exactly up to you for me by representing my sport i was preparing myself for no no time limits no rules no cups no mouthpieces no no weight division so how unpredictable this can be how much i have to be on my toes how much i have to accept my my final moment how much i should have to be calm and the day before in order to achieve my success so it's a lot of complex a lot of uh aspects of my life not only the technical not only the spiritual not only the matter i have to be checking every day and being calm enough so that's why in my career i was putting a lot of attention and my breathing i put in a lot of tension and take bad ice baths before anyone tell me about it so i started creating situations which kind of put me myself on the edge and and and being fearless being connected with my spiritual guidance and and accepting anything even death if it was the case so i was preparing myself to be a warrior but but without the the command without the the the force behind me was just like a i have to create a lot of things to deal with the pressure you know and i felt like today i'm not a jiu jitsu fighter anymore i have many injuries but i still in my mind sharp as always using all my invisible tools in jiu jitsu to keep me on my best game in terms of using timing using visualization using breathing using the the capacity for me to emotional control and and the capacity to surrender forgiveness and another important thing too is all my warfares all my situations i don't i i don't resolve with hate i love to fight i love to to to use yuji so i love to represent i love to put myself on the edge so love was a big important part of my my my history because i never been ordered to do something i never been obeying people to do something i always a free will and i put myself in a situation as i i i not regret but it was tough situations to be in based on my own passion based on my own love so i being a warrior which being guided by the heart not by the rationality and this is kind of a little different yeah it's it's interesting it's different um one of the one of the things you said and again there's so many connections that i make with jiu jitsu with battle with life with relationships with with everything and just one little example you said there's sometimes in jiu-jitsu you gotta calm down you gotta remain calm you get put in a bad spot you gotta calm you gotta relax you gotta not panic you gotta think your way through it you gotta wait for your moment there's other times in jiu jitsu where if you don't explode and make a move right now it's gonna be too late yes and you have to and it's the same thing in you know if you're if you're in a business you might have a situation where you gotta calm down you got to make a decision you got to think through it but there's other times where you got to make a move right now on the battlefield same thing sometimes something's starting to happen you're starting to see the enemy do something and you need to wait and be calm and relax and detach and not get emotional there's other times something happens you got to go right now and jujitsu you start to identify that look there's times where you've got to take a step back relax you've got to be calm and there's other times where you've got to be aggressive you've got to make things happen right now and those type of lessons that again i learned them i i learned them a little bit from my seal training i learned them a little bit interacting with my from a leadership perspective but when i really started to see it was when i when i started training jiu jitsu all the time and started recognizing oh sometimes you got to be calm sometimes you got to be aggressive sometimes you got to be flexible sometimes you got to be strong in that position and you got to be know when to make these adjustments in your life yes i feel like with the practice of jiu-jitsu like you said give you more awareness of the situation to be in and the sense of applying the the right the right action for the for the situation is is based on reflexes it's based on practice it's based on on preparation which sometimes that preparation comes from understanding a strategic understanding sometimes that preparation coming from a heavy training a heavy muscular and explosive training or sometimes the preparation coming from a completely emotional control i was kid about 12 13 years old practice with men's at the academy after the class everybody trained a little bit together and they all take care of me i was a kid still and training with adults and in one particular practice this strong guy blue belt grabbed me gave me a headlock and i was caught in a headlock i was not able to to to escape i was not able to to be comfortable and normally we don't tap in arm and headlocks because you can keep and keep breathing but i always get panicky and tap and was like a disappointing for me i cried a little bit the guy said hey kid you okay said i'm okay thank you but i'm very so i was pissed and i went back home and when i arrived i decided to lay down on the on the floor on top of a carpet and ask my brother holes to to i kind of stay like straight like this and ask my brother to roll me in the carpet like a like a bujito [Laughter] a hickson burrito yes it was like a summer time in brazil about 110 humid you know very hot and i said just take me from here in 10 minutes so first minute was struggling claustrophobic and i started thinking about seagulls and breeze on the ocean and ocean breeze and the nice wind and i eventually passed through the experience my brother relieved me and then in the same year i did three more just to make sure i could handle that kind of suffocating agony and claustrophobic feeling so that's just to show how competitive i was and how much on top of my problems i was fixing my problems as i as the problems happened and i was just comfortable and become you know agonizing and breathing suffocating and then i start to become and and find myself in peace and then i felt like this is not going to happen with me anymore i'm never going to tap in headlocks anymore because it was just the way i felt like i was fixing my emotional yeah that's um you're confronting your weaknesses is what you're doing i remember when i started jiu-jitsu i hated being on the bottom because i was bigger and if i could get on top of someone i could smash them and be okay and i hated being on the bottom and for that reason i remember one time for it must have been a year every every time i rolled with anybody i started on the bottom yes and oftentimes with them across side or or maybe even mount just to get used to that and get over the fact that i didn't like it you have to con in jiu jitsu just like life you got to face your weaknesses and you got to correct them yes definitely now you mentioned your your brother holes i want to give just a little bit of background of your family which is hard to give a quick background of your family yeah so many chances crazy it's huge uh you have this section here um uh carlos gracie this is your uncle decided to this is he so he lost two loves of his life he lost his fiancee and uh was his fiancee and his first wife is that right yes they both died so after they died carlos gracie decided to father as many children preferably boys as possible and he encouraged my father to do the same their goal is to create a clan of fighters between 1932 and 1967 carlos and elio fathered 30 children with eight different women 21 of them were boys when margarita my my father's first wife the woman i considered my mother was unable to get pregnant my uncle came up with a plan my father with my mother's knowledge and consent would impregnate our african brazilian babysitter bellina am i saying yes who gave birth to me to me and my older brothers corian and helsin the whole thing was an elaborate ruse margarita wore a fake belly during belinda's pregnancies and when the time came for her to give give birth she went to the hospital and came home with a baby not even her best friends knew when i was young i looked at myself in the mirror and saw freckles i thought they were from my scottish blood little did i know i was half african brazilian man that's a crazy story yes man that's part of the the gracie fanatic idea of growing jiu-jitsu and creating a clan you know it was just epic epic so with that let me let me go a little bit further so now you got all these brother i'll go back to book this is fast forward a little bit i studied all all my brothers with great interest when we trained because they had different strengths and weaknesses i want to know who was brave who was scared who would fight to the death who was crazy who is indecisive nobody impressed me more than my brother holes a decade older than me he was our leader and my idol because he was an incredibly charismatic person and a natural warrior holes was uncle carlos's son from claudia an 18 year old woman who worked for my family because my mother margarita could not have children uncle carlos gave holes to my dad to raise as his own son when he was a baby holes grew up with us and shared a room with me for much of my childhood and this is what's interesting when you talk about holes fast forward a little bit my brother's open mind helped him in jiu jitsu because he was willing to look outside of it for ideas when other family members were not holes trained and competed in judo wrestling and [ __ ] which he used to improve jiu-jitsu like elio he always wanted to win by submission and had an aggressive attacking style if i disappointed holes there was nothing that i was not willing to do to redeem myself so that's that holds with that attitude that open mind where he was doing [ __ ] and wrestling i mean that's a game changer completely he was just such a brave fighter on water and competitive and with a good open mind to understand jiu-jitsu is great but doesn't have the the ability to to throw as a judo doesn't have the ability to to get some other situations like wrestling some maneuvers from bottom to the top some reverses so adding this we're not going to hurt nobody it's just going to add for us the capabilities of not only controlling better from the top throwing better from this from the standing aspect and also be doing what we do good in terms of jiu-jitsu so it was just a complete uh improvement in our capacity to handle the athletes all over so it was just a great addition and for me also has always been the number one guy he pushed me the most you know different than hauden which is very technical but harding was less competitive so and i was very competitive so i was seeking to to do what hollis does you mentioned hori and here a little bit nine years older than me my brother horian could not have been more different than holes alio's first son with our birth mother belinda horian was 10 months younger than holes horian had an easy going nature and while he was never the fighter that holes was he was a born teacher training with horian included the theory behind such concepts as positioning technique leverage and base he explained jujitsu much better than holes who was impatient and saw things as either black or white he had a big influence on my teaching style and got me to focus as much on the person as the techniques our father taught us that a good teacher taught the techniques well but that a great teacher taught what each individual student needed to learn in strife or in life horian was a great teacher eight years older than me this another brother helsin might have been the best fighter in the family if he wasn't such a wild man helsin would show up at a tournament having had no sleep still hung over from a night on the town but when he put his on his key and tied his belt he turned into a tasmanian devil helsin would fight all day almost die but win this this is it fast forward a little bit just a a little glimpse into what it's like being in the family elio encouraged competition among us and always wanted to see who stood where in the gracie food chain there were confrontations and tests my dad would step on the canvas tarp clap his hands and say okay whorian holes go and without hesitation they would step forward and spar holes and horian had totally different attitudes toward life which were reflected in their jujitsu there was never any question that holes was the best of our generation now you get this sort of side of the the martial arts family growing up training all the time but you're also in in real which is a crazy place and and the lifestyle that you had going on there which you which you talk about here going to the book rio is like new york city and bangkok combined it is a turbulent whatever you want whenever you want it mix of sex crime drugs nature and beach culture although we lived in a nice apartment in copacabana rio is not like la there's not a rich town like beverly hills and then a poor one like compton they are combined one minute you're in beverly hills and the next you turn down a side street and you are in compton as a kid i developed street smarts from gang bangers to fighters to the high society matrons to the surfers to the most beautiful girls in ipanema i wanted to understand all of it i would often ditch school and just walk around rio i had normal rounds that i made through the city so you're kind of living this kind of crazy lifestyle yes and you're just drawn to that very much because you know in my house i was the youngster and the halls horion and helson was eight nine and ten years older than me so when i about 11 12 i like to hear what they say to keep up with you know so for me when i go home i was listening and learning with those smart guys you know and when i go to the street i don't want to stay with the 10 11 year olds which are just thinking about silly things i was just walking with the older guys talking about things i hear my brothers talk and the guy said hey this kid is not he's not so he's not what he's saying so i was trying to be very you know compatible with the higher level street guys i said i see on the street so that's kind of put me in a in a very uh soft place because i have to be smart i have to be very much solid with them show no fear show so to be able to walk with them to be able to get in the car and go some surf somewhere so i was there to just show them i can handle you know so i was just give me a mission i will do you know sometimes the guys they they want to smoke pot for example and nobody wants to go in the dealer's spot because they all want to afraid of the cops i was 12 11. i said no i can go with my trunks i can go up and down hide the thing and nobody gonna see it so i was just being like the kid which helps the older guys to get what they so i was just doing things regardless of right or wrong i just try to keep myself in a position to be respected from the the boys on the hood you know and and being like a street guy not exactly a a spoiled kid which forbidden to play on the street or something so i was just taking care of my life as a i was a girl i was 18 19 and i was just 12. you know and you ended up kind of running with a gang of kids oh yeah i mean for me it was a demonstration of courage demonstration of being tough you know it was not about doing right or wrong it's about to be keep be able to keep with the boys and be respected in the hood as a as a as a guy who can not gonna flick you know we're not gonna so that's gonna give me a good sense of be be part of a team which is a tough team the guys they're all fighters they all have kids they all you know very very much born to just do trouble and things and i always start to growing up a little bit i start to see all those values i learn on the street are not values i should take in my life as a if i want to grow up and represent what i want so my mission my passion for the family was take me away from that dark side of being just doing problems and start to become more an athlete and becoming completely focused on my life as a representative of jiu-jitsu but with a sense of base and sense of you know i i'm not gonna let my friends down and i'm i'm always good to be uh a solid you know no matter if he's going you know if he's a good thing if it's the wrong thing i want to be part of and be trusted by my friends so that's what i accomplished yeah it seems like you you you ventured into that world of sort of that gang mentality and then you say here in the book i began to drift away from the gang when members started stealing stereos and using guns i knew they were on a path that would take them nowhere fast and i was much more interested in jiu jitsu surfing and girls than a life of crime although i was rebellious and did things that my dad didn't agree with i never stopped competing and never stopped winning in his eyes that made me special it was about this time that i began to train with my brother holes up to this point alia was my teacher whether he was surfing training fighting riding horses hang gliding or chasing girls holes was constantly in motion he was fast technical and always pushed me to train harder and achieve more training with holes was essentially fighting he reinforced what elio had taught me [ __ ] points [ __ ] judges win by submission or not at all i began to improve quickly under holes and elio was not surprised i wasn't stubborn and never choked under pressure now the expectations for me were both from holes and my dad and they were extremely high how many hours a day were you training with holes at this time at least four hours at least two hours in the in the morning or or in like in the early afternoon for classes and and then at the training at night so i was always at the school you know i was never being too much a st a good student you know so i get any excuse to stay away from school and stay at the academy or at the beach but you know it was a good training very fun how much time would you spend sparring how much time would you spend drilling how much time would you spend creating new stuff normally the class follows up with a sequence of drilling learning some techniques some drills and after the freeze for the free sparring so i follow the protocols of the class and i always gonna learn something training something or grab some improving some kind of technique and also the practice afterwards so i just follow the program of every class did you find yourself in holes especially as holes as bringing in [ __ ] and and wrestling would you have to break stuff down and and kind of adapt it into jiu jitsu do you remember doing that kind of thing i remember hold showing the techniques and we immediately because he also have the eye for what's good for us or not i was not learning from a wrestling teacher i was teaching i was learning from a guy who learns wrestling but he's a jiu-jitsu teacher and tried to favor us with the best of it so things he may learn and he didn't like it he'd not even show us he just showed the things we are related to if the guy grabbed you here on the so you do that so i was just follow up his his lead on what i should use from wrestling what i should use from [ __ ] what i should use from judo some techniques in judo are suicidal techniques and put you after the draw you get caught in a bad position so you don't want to do those those techniques so basically i was not there to learn judo i was actually learning efficient way to take people down with judo but for jitsu so was that all the preparation the techniques are kind of slightly different than being just a judo practitioner yeah i was i was lucky uh my my son when he wrestled he had a wrestling coach that started working with his wrestling team that was a jujitsu guy too and so he could tell him hey do this like hey this is like a sweep hey this is like a scissor sweep he would be able to coach him to wrestle using jiu jitsu with wrestling can relate much better yeah yeah that's nice and uh you're surfing all the time at this point too yes yes you you go into some pretty good details there about some of the um some of the experiences you had surfing pushing yourself a little hard sometimes taking some risks that maybe you shouldn't have taken in the water yes because for me surfing was not exactly just the practice of the ability to go down in the wave and carve and do this snaps or whatever sir for me has to do with nature with the power of the ocean so sometimes when the waves are too big first thing to do is get afraid because you don't know what's going to happen if you get pound so dealing with this fear knowing and strategizing the best way to go in and out of the surf when you get the wave the timing of the wave so it's a lot of things which has to keep you in control of the situation not only the ability to surf but to to stay calm to to pedal in the right direction to understand nature the wind the the the rip currents so it's a lot of things to learn and to be comfortable in sometimes in a very uncomfortable situation so the ocean plays a very important uh teacher for me because you cannot fight nature you have to understand nature and deal with in the best way possible so that's surfing was a very important for me in terms of the reading the ocean and and stay connected with the ocean and the more in the in the most deepest way i could possibly do and surf was just a bonus i guess it's the same thing with with opponents right because of opponent has some really good move that they're really strong at what why what's the point in fighting that move that they're really good at go go at them from some different direction of course the the perfect strategy is work your strengths on his weakness so when you feel like you're losing the the perfect aim about where the weakness is you have to shift not just try to force the wrong entrance but finding another way to to get the whole you know so that's the idea of jiu-jitsu is just capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes and be aware of if it changes you have to flow and change again and again so no expectations you maybe expect a choke but it's gonna arm luck is gonna happen or footwork so everything can be unpredictable if you do right i'm gonna fast forward a little bit to this section here by the time i was a brown belt my matches with my brother holes were getting closer i was beginning to understand the limitations of his game holes had an excellent neon belly move that he used to set up arm locks and he was lethal if he got your back but he was also predictably aggressive in our final 10 training sessions not only did holes not submit me but i was getting reversals and our fights were now even one afternoon we were training together by ourselves at my dad's ranch the only thing i remember is engaging with roles then going through the eye of the hurricane with all the violence you would expect when the storm passed i had holes in a choke and before i even realized what was happening he was tapping it was a completely reactive fight i'm not even sure if i was mounted around his back all i remember is that i finished him with a choke nobody else saw me beat holes and when we finished training he hugged and kissed me on the cheek and said you did good kid i'm proud of you what i remember most about that fight was the sadness i felt afterward as though i had made a mistake by beating him a huge but invisible weight of responsibility had shifted from holes shoulders to mine in my heart i knew that i was now a better fighter but worse so did he it wasn't luck or a fluke holes just didn't just couldn't surprise me anymore i also realized that i would never have to beat him again to prove it were you bigger than him are you smaller than him are you about the same size i was a little bigger this time maybe five to ten pounds heavier he was uh maybe 168 pounds and i'm 174. no he was 68 kilos and i was 74 kilos okay yes you get your black belt um and that's you know this is always an interesting thing when you when when someone you know you get that edge on someone that's been beating you for your whole life yes it was a very special feeling because i have him as my idol as my coach as my my training partner and but at the same time my goal was beating him because no other way i have to to change this pattern i have to to be the best one so my goal as a student is to be better than my teacher and when i achieved that i felt like somehow was was not exactly posit only positive the way i felt because i put him in a bad side in a bad mood or feeling he was not exactly the best anymore he's number two so it was a sad thing for me and was a happy thing for me but my my demonstration of love and respect was after that even though we going in every tournament and i go and hit i go in my weight division he go in his way division and we go both for open and before that we close the bracket because we could not fight before the finals because we're representing the same brand so in the finals i always gave it to him the victory rega not fighting him and even after i could be able to beat him i still doing this for life you know until he pass out i pass away because you know i felt like he was my i honor his representativity on me and so he was going to be number one and i'm number two for the world i can be throw the light through the alliance before him but in the official tournaments where he goes with me i never gonna be capable in my honor and my integrity to to take his medal you know or to fight him or to tell him i'm better than him so he was the champion of the family until he passed away and after he passed i take i take the the responsibility for myself it's uh when when i train with people and i'll be training with them for a long time and you know sometimes they'll say one day i'm gonna get you you know they have that goal one day i'm gonna get you and i always say yeah of course and i and i say listen jiu jitsu works and if you put a jiu jitsu move on me that i didn't expect or i didn't see coming will happen what's going to happen i'm going to tap that's the way it works jiu jitsu works it's a beautiful thing yeah that's what we trained for um you have a situation here where you had a little lesson learned you said i was growing so dominant in jiu jitsu competition that when i stepped on the mat and the referee said go the crowd would begin to ch chant 10 9 8 7 6. if i didn't submit my opponent in 10 seconds they would start counting again even as a black belt my only jiu jitsu fight that went more than five minutes came after the judges robbed my brother hoiler of a win against one of my cousin carlson students my final match was in the open class was against carlson's 240 pound heavyweight i was so upset that i decided that i wanted to make him suffer after i got him down i mounted and just put unbearable pressure on him i was not fighting my actual opponent instead i was trying to punish carlson for robbing euler i'm glad i wasn't that guy everything i was doing was fueled by ego and anger and i was working against myself because my emotions were negating all my precision and martial artistry i was spinning my wheels as if i were on ice going nowhere i was just blindly punishing him until until holes yelled eight minutes are up i was shocked to see i was shocked because that was too long i snapped to my senses got mad at myself and easily submitted him afterward i realized that i never wanted to fight like this again because i was putting emotion before reason although nobody else realized it at the time i learned an important lesson that day that it was a mistake to fight emotionally because emotions blinded me yes i think the the biggest experience i have in that matter was on my first fight with zulu which i was 19 he was 30 something years old he had 120 fights and only four draws and 120 victories so he was a professional valitudo guy no holds bar fighter and i was just you know watching my my dad talking in the phone with his manager trying to set up somebody to fight him and my dad said no man i'm sorry about them i don't have nobody to fight this guy because you know we are and then i i catch the conversation dad please pull me and pull me and pull me and and he looked at me and said yes voldemort i have here my son with 19 years old he may want to try and valdemar said no master no no he's not it's not something to try out for a kid the guy is tough he's mean and as my as the guy tried to talk my dad out of the deal my dad got information yeah but i think i'm going to put him because i like to try the kid see how it goes so and then set up a fight for me with this zulu guy and i went to to the his state the the capital and in the day of the fight uh we engage he has this kind of typical move he does which goes and put one hand between your legs and and connect you and then lift everything and throw you back on the floor some kind of catagorum in his style how much how much zulu weigh about 230 and he's just a beast of a human you said he had a hundred and something fights yes he was just unorthodox he has no sharp techniques but he was just a very intuitive animal very flexible very strong very mean you know a very complete fighter for the time and i was start to dealing with him and as you go for his straight move and this is what sorry for interrupting you but this is your first actual fight that you're ever going to fight my first valitudo mat yes officially on the ring and and how many people are at this fight about ten thousand five to ten thousand people and you have the gracie name yes at stake yes you're 19 years old yes how much do you weigh about once i mean 74 kilos so about one 170 something seven yeah 75 yeah okay so he coming he coming for the trade move i kind of understood what he called me i hold his his shoulders and his head was down so i hit him with my knee the strongest heat the solid heat i could imagine possibly give to somebody and after the heat boom he just lifted his he lift his hand head shook his face like speed a tooth and come like nothing happened and i get scared you know i get wow man i thought i'm going to kill the guy and he just shook his hand his head so we start to back to the the the the engagement and he throw me off the ring i went up back again and get him in the back many times hit him with the elbow he throw himself out of the ring and we start again and again after the first round 10 minutes we stopped and i was dead tired so i was crawling to my corner and when i get the corner said dad i quit i cannot go anymore i'm exhausted did not even hear me he said oh he's worse than you you're gonna now you're gonna kick his ass you're gonna do as a dad i'm serious i start to argue with my dad trying to plead my case you know i said hey man i'm exhausted to cut the and he did not even listen to me statue okay then my brother hulk throw me a bucket with water and ice and my head and then the the bell rings and i back to the action and like my dad said three minutes after he was sleeping i could get his back he was tired i'd choke him out and then i realized my worst enemy was my mind was the worst enemy i could ever have is somebody inside your brain telling you it's time to quit you're not going to handle the guy is strong so i realized if i was trusting myself i was done so i could not have this enemy this powerful enemy hanging on my head all the time so i decide now i will fight to die but i'm not gonna quit anymore quitting is not my word anymore either i'm gonna die or i'm gonna win but no quitting so what's maybe the biggest lesson in action i have ever to have because i understand how your apart mindset can can really kill you from within and i understood that and from that on i was just putting all my mental spiritual physical in one direction and the other direction is only death no quitting no i think i'm done nothing like this so my brothers has the the idea of if something happened throw the towel because i'm not going to quit so and that's kind of make me happy because i become a water in a good direction and thanks my dad for don't let me quit sometimes a bad show can kill you a bad coach can kill you if he accept your your moments you know so you have to transcend that kind of panicking and and just back to normal and regain confidence and after i learned that i was completely different guy a much more superior entity in terms of putting everything together all my package was together always and i felt like was a blessed by that now i was going to ask you how you changed or what did you learn from that fight from a training perspective what did you do different but i know that this is around this time at this one you got way into uh into doing yoga with uh orlando connie yes i was a little before that okay because uh since my 12 year old where i roll myself on the carpet feeling the the the panicking the claustrophobic feeling was always close to me a little bit i always been an athlete i always run forever training forever and young guy was always being natural for me being and and fight and do whatever but in one point if you don't have if you don't master breathing when you get too tired you get confused you get your mind fading away it's not ex enough oxygen in your brain and your muscles for you to feel clear mind and still getting tired and still sharp so i felt like was always a lack of this you know this profound understanding and one day because my mother he pulled me to do yoga in one point and i did and i stopped because i didn't like it transcendental meditation which make you see it and repeat a mantra for a while and start to open your mind i also end up by sleeping almost all the time and not didn't adapt much about it by that so it was not for me and then a friend recommended me to go to orlando county which was an army pentaton champion he was also a yoga teacher and it was start to develop some kind of exercising with movement and breathing which can be very helpful so i went there to the sky and he knows my dad he's very friendly guy he said okay so goes to the class and practice with us so i started to go into his class with other people and statue practice and right on the second time he said hickson you're very flexible you're very strong you're in the top high athlete i like to teach you personally because i can improve your speed i can improve you personally more than the class said great so i started doing with him a couple of times a week only privately with him and his place which is mirrors and one side has the the wall and has the wood attached on the wall for you to hang so from here to the roof all these woods kind of so you play different games and you sometimes you imitate a monkey sometimes you imitate a eo uh crocodile or whatever so you play animals and moves and breeds and he starts to teach me to work the diaphragmatic breathing and that's going for a month for two months almost three months on that one day we're about to initiate the practice he said hixon i mean the phone the bell rings the phone rings and he said you keep doing because i'm gonna take the phone and come back so for the first time i was doing the exercising without a leader i mean i was following i was improvising myself to doing my things and breathing and doing my things and breathing breathing and things going and then eventually i opened my eyes like wake up and i was hanging on the top on the top wall on the top wood in the wall side hanging like a monkey dripping sweat and i opened my eyes and i kind of started to understand where i was i kind of wake up and i saw hold on the city i mean standing up on the corner and uh and he said to me kind of crying a little bit said hickson i don't think you need me anymore because you achieved the highest level i said why you say that master why you say that so because you're here for an hour and 15 minutes and i call you a few times i try to get your attention and you kind of you cannot even hear me you completely in a meditative state of mind empty mind doing your things breathing moving and now you just wake up now you just put yourself conscious again before was just reflexes and subconscious mind and i realized i could achieve meditative state of mind empty mind through that practice so through that practice which i started doing in my academy on the beach i start to understand breathing in a much more profound way not only to help me mechanically not only to help me to to uh charge myself and and and rebuild my energy from the oxygen standard point but also to give me some kind of meditative state of mind empty mind be tranquil be able to control my emotions so this practice become a central part of my life because by breathing i could be able to not only have a better functional strength and an ability to recover faster from tiredness but also what is very interesting is the lungs because the heart and the brain are the only organs who are able to give and receive information so sometimes you can get affected by reading a bad email you can get a stress immediately you get affected sometimes you see something which is relevant somebody you love or somebody touch you you feel immediately emotionally by the heart it's not they can get information and they can send information for you and say i'm not happy some take care of me i'm not happy take care of me i'm very exhausted so you're tired your heart can tell you or your brain oh i'm confused i'm stressed i'm afraid i'm out of my game so the brain and the heart are there to be controlled by the lungs the lungs are the most fast the most effective way for you to deal directly with your brain and with your heart for example if you hear you just read a bad email and you stress so if i keep that routine for three minutes no stress can keep on because i have to control i have to integrate motion and feed in in movement breathing and movement together and as i start to play on this nothing can be like i cannot thinking about oh the time to travel i have to go to san diego tomorrow i have to give my daughter whatever it is you have to refresh it because the way you breathe you can really clean your mind the way you breed you can lower your heart rates for fighting for example i was doing like i get an event three hours before the event my fight so i go to the locker room sleep for hour and a half hour 40 minutes by weew i just breathing my relaxed breathing i can sleep deeply wake up one hour before the fight mourn myself up for 45 minutes putting my heart beat my heart rates to 160 140 to really break the sweat and make sure i'm cool and then sit for five minutes and bring my heart rate to 6 500 heart beats a minute so i was deeply raw hot ready to go with my heartbeat so i see my other opponent in the other side of the ring jumping around he's already 85 90. so when i engage i engage not to to to make some kind of nice uh rhythm i try to to improve press the gas and let's go for power so we do everything we can do so if i'm struggle you cannot rest you have to keep up with me so when i'm 80 you 110 when i'm 110 150 when we're 100 when i'm 150 you're already trying to i had a heart attack yeah so you start to regroup and start seeking for air and that's time normally where mistakes happen and i really make the close the deal so breathing become my best friend not only to control my emotions to keep my my my heart rate and the best performance to recoup so to be controlling panic controlling emotions become calm to strategize everything coming from this capacity within to control yourself by breathing so i felt like was a great addition to my my practice and makes a huge change in my life this is something that i i connected the dots on a few years ago because people would ask me i would say listen when things are going bad you have to stay calm you have to you have to learn how to you know control your emotions and and don't get all excited about something when things are going wrong and people would say well you know how do you do it and one of the things that i realized that i would do is so in the military you know you have a radio with you and when you when you talk on the radio everybody can hear you and in the military it's very frowned upon if you get on the radio and you are emotional if you scream help over here if you panic like this so every time i ever talked on the radio my goal was to never sound panicked never sound emotional no matter what was going on sound very calm and cool so that means whenever things were going crazy and i was about to have to get on the radio what would i have to do i had to breathe i had to take a breath and so it's the same thing it's just that something that i was doing so that i could you know i'd be oh there's got stuff going on okay i'm about talking radio hey this is jocko we need about 10 more guys down at this building right now and that me taking control of my of my breath also would help me get into a controlled emotional state where i'm not losing my mind yes that's very powerful from jiu jitsu yes because you know the the the breathing system or because you stay seven days without food you stay three days without water five minutes without oxygen is already dead yes so the efficiency of the breeding system is very needed and people take this for granted they don't oh i i i born i get slapped on the butt and you are alive and well and you can live like if you don't train in breathing it's like your biceps it's like your your strategies your techniques your if you don't train in the breathing system you're going to work with 40 percent less the capacity capabilities to really refresh yourself hyperventilate bringing yourself to a next level of understanding because if you get tired and you don't know how to hyperventilate you get tired and your mind starts to face to fade a little bit you start to making poor decisions you start to get completely off your game because there's no oxygen enough for the brain and the in the body but if you know how to hyperventilate you can have cramps that's the lattice all over you cannot even move well very tired but your brain is too sharp you can see details you can see the girls smile at you you can see the super bowl you can see everything you want to see and talk because your brain is still fresh and that's the capacity you have to learning how to hyperventilate and use the diaphragmatic breathing which improv improves your life like a dawn oh that's awesome stuff uh going through the book i mean at this time you also uh you had met your you had met kim yes you she got pregnant with your first son yes at this time um and she was what some kind of a model some kind of a surfer girl she was the first sponsor surfer girl in brazil she was doing hang gliding she was a top model for for fashion she do some some uh modeling for for soap operas and stuff so she was pretty pretty hot girl at the time um i'm gonna fast forward a little bit here so you you have your first son it says the year 1982 was a bittersweet one i was now the father of the son i'd always dreamed of but i also suffered a devastating loss in june holes and his family went for a family weekend in the mountains holes noticed his old hang glider was strapped to the roof of a car in front of his hotel it turned out that the owner was a friend of a friend even though my brother had promised his wife angela that he would quit hang gliding after he'd had several close calls and friends had died in accidents he made arrangements to go the next day the following day the conditions were very bad because there was no wind if holes got his mind set on something however there was no saying no to him although the owner of his old hang glider did not want to go because he thought it was too dangerous holes talked him into letting him use it for just one flight my brother ran down the ramp launched initially got some lift but then began to spiral and he hit the ground 90 yards from the ramp his friend ran over ran into the overgrown forest and found my brother hanging upside down with his eyes wide open although he looked perfectly fine his neck was broken and holes was dead i received the news over the phone and it took only seconds to know that my life would never be the same not only had i lost an idol a teacher and my favorite brother but i was now officially the family champion now i would have to answer all the challenges and lead the next generation of gracie fighters i was now my family's last line of defense his death affected our family dynamics dramatically holes had brought the two sides together because he was carlos's son but raised by elio he acted as a bridge between the two sides of the family but now that bridge was gone forever tragic yes i know uh my my my original teacher fabio santos yeah he he was originally uh as well yes he was and and uh i always he the way he talked about holes was always uh just elevated beyond belief yes fabio has a passion for halls not only for the teachings and being jiu-jitsu guy and inspire him to to do the best but they also have a lot in common you know they they go out together they so they're good friends so it was devastating for fabio [Music] at this time on top of all this you start to have this uh this kind of famous or infamous rivalry with uh luta libre fighters yes and had some um had some uh interesting interesting things going on there and again this this book is so filled with so many of these details that people will be interested in meanwhile you you you have a uh daughter right yes your first daughter and then a second daughter yeah so now you're now you're up to three kids and again these are all things that are detailed in the book and all kinds of interesting stories around that you also say the gracie clan continued to to divide along bloodlines while horian was trying to establish our martial arts in the united states carlos gracie jr was going in a different direction in brazil and primarily focusing on a competitive form of jiu jitsu that would become known as sport jiu jitsu and this is what a thing i appreciated you said i had little interest in the politics of jiu jitsu i had three children to support i wanted to fight vale tudo professionally and the only place to do that outside of brazil was in japan so at this point horian had moved to america yes and and you're looking at um possibly fighting in japan yes going with my friend to japan to see if i can find some i was having a letter of introduction to antonio noki which was ambassador in japan very famous wrestler and i tried to find a pick a fight through him in japan so i was there but i was you know wasn't i could not achieve my goal and back to brazil and and then you have crohn is born yes and now things are really seem to be heating up with the lute libre academy and there's uh at one point um you guys drove over to the luta libre academy academy yes you say here we walked in and 20 or 30 fighters stopped training and stared at us marco who else rock walked over and greeted us everyone was very respectful at first i told huas that i heard he wanted to fight me and i was there to fight him he said that he wanted to fight but that would that he would need four months to prepare this made me feel that he was more interested in capitalizing on the fight than proving himself which pissed me off i was the one who walked into that lion's den ready and willing to fight for nothing but honor it started to get heated and my dad stepped between us to calm things down and then you have hugo duarte it's kind of stepped in and and you know saying hey i'll fight you too and then you said i had a friend tell hugo to meet me at pepe beach on saturday i got sick the week of the fight and was thinking about postponing it until my messenger called and said it's all set hugo will be there on saturday now i knew there was no backing out so i started to eat well and get ready get to the beach you get to the beach i walk up to hugo and slap him in the face yeah he took off his shirt and sandals and we began to wrestle on our feet until i was able to drag him to the ground hugo used my ponytail to control my head and stood back up he fell on top of me then i swept him but my knee got buried in the sand and hugo escaped we stood back up and smashed into a vendor stand that we went down on the ground again with the crowd surging all around us i mounted again gift wrapped them and began to punch him in the face at will there was nothing he could do to stop the punches when i asked hugo if he wanted to give up he said you'll have to kill me so i kept blasting him with punches and elbows after a few more blows to the face he changed his mind and said okay stop i let him go that that's another one you can find on youtube that whole fight probably has a billion views uh um fast forward a little bit a week later i was sleeping when my friend pulled up in front of the apartment on his motorcycle and screamed hixon those [ __ ] invaded your dad's academy boy that seems like a bad move it seems like a real bad move yes but it was crazy they kind of because they they coming for a revenge google was prepared for for next fight he was not happy with what happened on the beach so as they walking maybe about three or four miles walk from from a different area of the city and and some of the guys who are with him are coming from the ghettos you know like gang banger so they come in with like the face masks on the face guns knives bottles i mean all crazy type of not only fighters but also gang bangers so when i get into the school when i bought i was getting in my friend's motorcycle on the he coming to us so i was going back to the school on his motorcycle and i saw about 200 people in front of the school like half of the street already with full of guys so the traffic was jammed so i get into with my bike with my friend's bike ins inside the crowd and immediately go up to the stairs on the to go into the school and i meet google coming down with my father and other guys like about 20 luta livery guys the students so we all meet in the middle of the the stairs so i said uh let's go down and talk and fight so we went down to the parking lot and i and i call him with his coach and another guy who fought higher afterwards eugenio tadeo they went to a corner and my father and we talked and i said to say hey man i respect you i see you come here for a revenge and i accept that but you brought a lot of bad guys a lot of guys who has no integrity no no fighters if somebody touched the fight before is over you're going to end up on the ditch sometime i promise you you're going to be on the ditch very soon no no it's fight for men men too man me and you nobody's going to touch the fight it's just me okay so let's go back to the crowd and let's fight so and then we kind of create a a circle on the concrete and crowds around me and him and i felt like from the first from the previous fight he felt like he was missing the stand-up game he was missing punch me in the face somebody told him maybe oh you should start fighting him punching don't grapple him just so i felt in his stand he was looking for to hit me hard you know and i play dummy i play a kind of little unaware and expect his attack when he come in with a direct i deflected grab his body lift throw him on the ground and bang him on the concrete mount and start to punch him on the head he protect his face i put my hands on the on top of his head and push his head against the the floor a couple of times and he soft up a little bit and uh and then he said quit stop stop stop stop so i stop it stand up he stood up and said okay man i respect you it's all cool for us now we said okay man i respect you true you have a potential you know you can become a great fighter so we shook hands and as we start to to to finish that to terminate our problem while we start to fight the the eugenia tadeo right there you know and the confusion steals and then the police coming and one guy a police guy very short guy with a cigarette and moustache i cannot forget this guy he got a gun machine and shoot on the roof so the bullets touch the roof and coming down hit somebody on the leg and stuff and i now i want to see who want to fight and the guy was very funny so and then hoyler's fight was postponed for next week they fought again with the same guy but my deal with hugo as resolve how'd the fight with hoiler go was a draw because we put 10 guys from lu talibri 10 guys from jiu jitsu and an auditorium closed doors and hoyler will fight the guy to the end right so and then they start to fight hoiler get punched in the face and lost the tooth and then the fight continues while i control the guy he put the guy in a bad position but not submitting and the guy said okay i want to quit if i was no better if i was smarter i said okay stop while her win but i was pissed and was want to see highly revenge the punch said okay hilar you just stop the fight if you want if you if you don't want it you keep fighting keep beating this guy and the guy that formulated stood up and said but that's not i push him on i push him down like sit down here and shut up the guy was acquitted you know he was not a tough brave guy so he don't want to fight said poor hicks and why you did that no they gonna fight until the end so they keep fighting and eventually hoyler get tired and both get tired so they agreed to stop we want to stop okay stop so they stop and it was a draw was i should stop the fight sooner and make her victory but it was not exactly for me it was not the politics or the was just you know the guy just reserved some punches in the face and highlighted missed to get it so for me was a missing point what i want to see happen and didn't happen man hoiler is uh he's he's i train with hoyler and and he helped us out at our academy here a lot man what a great freaking jiu jitsu player he is he's a water for sure 100 it's kind of uh kind of cool you know you talked a little bit about forgiveness already today but you you say this in the book looking back today on the fights between jujitsu and luta libre i see them very differently at the time we were all young men full of aggression and testosterone the rivalry between our two martial arts made all of us better fighters steel sharp and steel we should all be grateful for the fact that we always had the ability to fight one another respectfully although there were black eyes bloody noses and broken teeth our fights were always one-on-one and were governed by honor and mutual respect it was part of the natural competitive process it was no accident that marco huas hugo duarte denis and majia eugenie to do my brothers and some of my cousins and i would all go on to fight mixed martial arts professionally in america and japan definitely um a good attitude to have yes competitive but respectful against these other guys yes it's an honor between fighters you know it's not about it's not something we've had to have integrity have to have respect that's part of the code you know this is something i i highly appreciate it the next chapter in this book is coming to america you say there's a little left for me to prove in brazil at that point america was a bigger stage and more opportunity and i thought my kids would have a brighter future there when i decided to move to the u.s kim and i had been separated for over a year and a half i went to see her and told her i would like her to come with me and the kids and give our relationship another chance she agreed to my offer i wanted to make a fresh start while i might have been the best fighter in the gracie family horian was by far the best promoter of gracie jiu jitsu he was a born salesman with a great product to sell and nothing helped spread jiu jitsu more than the portable video camera after horion and horian came to america he began challenging fighters from other styles and videotaping the bouts footage from these and other fights transformed what would have been urban myths into documented truth in 1988 horion put together a video called gracie in action which he advertised in the back of martial arts magazines and sold by mail order there you go that's yeah that's that's the beginning yes that's the beginning right there that's when the word started to get out yes because you hear it but to see it is something totally different yes i mean that's a brilliant marketing move hey come and fight anybody wants to come and fight come and fight we're going to video it and then we're going to show it to the world yes that's a brilliant move i think so true he was a genius on that i know uh we fabio when i trained at fabios he had uh he had some of those videos that weren't even in the videos and he would show them to us like on a special friday night we'd get to watch some some real gracie in action videos people's arms getting broken because they didn't want to tap exactly uh you go on here our students regularly fought and won challenge matches against other fighters and then converted them into students chuck norris for one the actor in american martial arts icon was not only a great supporter but was also a dedicated student who eventually earned his black belt in the 1980s norris took a vacation in rio everywhere he went heard about gracie jiu jitsu and the exploits of my family norris contacted my dad and arranged to have a private lesson after i grappled with him my dad told norris to mount him and when he he did said okay chuck punch me the american hesitated but my dad was was in his 70s by then but elio kept insisting finally norris drew back his arm to punch but before he could throw one the old man had choked him out chuck left brazil impressed by the gracie family and invited us to come to america and hold a seminar for his students fast forward a little bit horion and the actor had a disagreement over money this is after one of those seminars chuck norris hired our cousins the machado brothers carlos higgins hodger jean-jacques and john to teach him the machados came from a more stable upper middle class background than we did their father was a judge and they did not grow up in rio not only were they much more reasonable than horion they were great jiu jitsu fighters and teachers in their own right my cousin jean-jacques machado is an inspiring person who went on to become one of the greatest jiu-jitsu teachers in america born with only a thumb and part of a pinky on one of his hands jean-jacques learned how to adapt and improvise better than anyone i had ever seen his jiu-jitsu is both intensely personal and creative so he had the machado brothers now teaching chuck norris yes but you did there's a there isn't there there's a video of you going against chuck norris isn't there is a little mistake on that video that video in the seminar is a very strong talk blonde guy who was a struck notice good student tough tough fighter it was not chuck at that time got it i sparred with chuck i teach him a few times and i sparred with him a few times so he knows our power but the training was not with him at the time um you when you showed up in in america you didn't even speak you didn't speak any english did you know where'd hori and learn to speak english he come prior that he coming few times to america in the 70s and stuff so he he loved here the culture and his statue learning and working different jobs and tried to make hollywood work as an actor as a stent man so he was and he likes to speak the language so he he learned very quickly and very effectively fast forward a little bit even though alia wanted horion to lead the gracies in america it was easier said than done there were just too many of us moving in different directions and horion's efforts to control the clan backfired after he threatened to sue members of the gracie family whom he had grown up with on the mats for using their own gracie last name many family members surrendered gracie jiu jitsu got renamed brazilian jiu jitsu i believe that if my brother had allowed everyone to use our family name our martial art would still be called gracie jiu jitsu today and perhaps it'd be even bigger than it is so i wanted to mention that part in the book because i think echo charles and i get asked at least 10 times a week you know should i train gracie jiu jitsu or brazilian jiu jitsu what's the difference between the two is there a difference between the two and i think you summed it up right there pretty well i think we start doing jiu jitsu in the protocol where you have to learn self defense you don't have you're not required to use collar belts no collar belts at that time so a student can be 10 years a student in a steel white belt and the structure will be forever a dark blue belt so that's what's the reference and then in 65 my father started to create the federation because the demand is growing big and a lot of people try to train and so he started creating rules for a federation for the sport jiu jitsu and that's to start the difference between the color belts because if you're ten years wide belt you're gonna be better than a six months white belt and if it's not fair for them to compete so let's make a blue belt purple belt to create the reference not only for practice but for competition because a new warrior is not going to be a gold water so let's make different rankings and that's what's the process for callers belts was the evaluation of levels and stuff so with this jiu-jitsu becomes also a sport jiu-jitsu who has points mount position throwing and has the self-defense aspect which lead you to a more open-minded situation if somebody come in with a knife if two against one if the guy coming to punch me is there's no punches in jiu-jitsu so you start to open your mind to possibilities for unpredictable situations against a knife against a punch with fight with globe fight without so we start to become a more open mind so with the coming to america after especially after hoy's kick-ass on the ufc people start to say wow what this kid did with the ghee is so people want to learn jujitsu but they also want to compete in jiu-jitsu and competition becomes bigger than the actual platform for learning jiu-jitsu with self-defense the protocols the technical protocols for spending technically the jiu-jitsu are not there it's just brazilian communists with experience of fighters to to experience how to fight and they come here and display and fight so in many gracious academies or brazilian jiu-jitsu academies people teach how to pass a guard he people teach how to choose to choke or to do a foot lock but they don't teach gun retention harassment control knife attacks and and fighting without gloves fight striking so because that lack of information competition jiu-jitsu becomes much bigger than the self-defense judges and now brazilian anyone can do brazilian jiu-jitsu can fight can pass guard can do sweeps but not anyone knows the total grace in jiu-jitsu which is self-defense and more elaborate techniques for self-defense like the the law enforcement programs or situations which require more techniques so that's basically today is a big difference when people refers gracie jiu-jitsu they go more towards the traditional aspect of the art and and when they talking about brazilian jiu-jitsu they really recognize as a competition but they say they are the same with lack of information you know in in both sides because sometimes now you see self-defense academies who have no fighting skills they're more like self-defense and the others other academies they have fighting skills but they have zero self-defense so it's important a movement to bring those together for the perfect academy become a center of knowledge and practice for competition not only competition or no not only self-defense yeah i i don't know if this is positive for or negative but i just i just refer to all of this as jiu jitsu now yes i don't even i i don't even say brazilian i don't say gracie but it's just to me jujitsu is all of it i agree and and that's not just me i should say that's when i talk to everybody in the jujitsu community they just say jiu jitsu so you used to have to say well it's different this is gracie jiu-jitsu or this is brazilian juice because you had japanese jiu jitsu and all these other things now jiu jitsu is what your dad made yeah my my federation is jiu jitsu global federation it's not bjj or no self defense racism yeah do you think that some of the confusion also comes from because you have like gracie academy you have gracie baja you have gracie humaita and there's so many great like officially named academies and places that have gracie in it yes and your question is if i feel what do you think that that adds to the confusion you know for people so to so we end up how jacob said we end up eventually just calling it jiu-jitsu do you think that that added to the like the confusion of the the separation of them right now the situation becomes very very uh complex because the brazilian jiu-jitsu states for tournaments and competition the gracie's jujitsu is more traditional and jiu jitsu embraces everything i believe talking about jiu-jitsu is the perfect way now to deal with the situation because it's just jiu-jitsu and and how you practice will determine make the determination if you going to be a mma fighter if you're going to be a police officer if you're going to be just a practitioner or if you want to compete so all this it gets into the jiu-jitsu category which i believe now is from here to the future becomes jiu jitsu do you do you find or do you know anything about like grace gracie baja comes off as like one that they focus heavy heavy on competition yes is that do you think that that's the case yes because carlos gracie jr which is the president of the ibj jf felt like marty feeds the tournaments with students better for him as a prophet better for him as a growing the politics of jiu-jitsu so he's emphasizing the the competition element and creates us a a a team around that which is very strong gracie baja and other teams like allianz or checkmat or or other teams that they all coming in that same pattern so it's very big it's a very good for the sport yeah so is there options because that's a lot of time the question right where it's like oh i don't know what to choose and why and all this they just kind of want to start but then they hear like oh some some academy is focused on sport jiu-jitsu which might not be aligned with my interest yes i feel like for every jiu-jitsu practitioner today who is blue belt maybe a hundred give up before get the blue belt at least if you put in a perspective with jiu-jitsu put you confronting yourself every time you go to the academy you have to somehow put prove yourself show yourself is like a tough enough resilient enough capable to to to create strategies so it's a challenge there the average jiu-jitsu academy for every 10 students who come in to try the jiu-jitsu road eight will live in less than six months because somehow it's not only show you the techniques i show you the techniques you love it and then you repeat you love the class at the end of the class say okay echo sit uh lay down john mount john you try to keep your position echo try to escape at this point we unleash the wild yes sir the wild white melts yes and then that confrontation can lead to a little brute movement a little violence or you know sometimes the guy is too young too aggressive so you're gonna deal with a beast which you you recognize as your worst nightmare and you have to basically be comfortable or say okay the guy kicked my ass too they are gonna go back there to me tomorrow gonna fight again so you have to have within your your capacity to be resilient to be tough to be competitive so when you have this no matter the road the bumpy road ahead of you you're gonna get from jiu-jitsu everything he can give you because you have you have the the the balls you have the courage to go there and put yourself there to to to learn some days you're gonna get hurt some days you're gonna hurt somebody but that's part of the practice for 90 of the people they don't have they get short on that capacity so they experience jiu-jitsu and they say hey man i love jiu-jitsu but it's not for me i work in computers i'm an artist you know you guys are tough you can do for me i'm very gentle i am a doctor i'm so so they cannot involve in that practice because in one point it's not the practice it's what they have in their hearts you know it's their courage is their resilience their capacity to handle pain is compare so the elements are lacking for if you lack of those elements you basically don't find yourself fitting in any academy of jiu-jitsu because you have to roll yes sir my idea of the future for jiu-jitsu is to create a level in jiu-jitsu where you experiment the essential sensitivities it's a sensorial jiu-jitsu you start to breathing you start to feeling the leverage you start to feeling the angles you start to feel your invisible power you start to feel your connection your reflexes your defenses for the sake of knowledge for the sake of being proof you have a chance but at least for the first year of practice you should not have an opponent you should have only training partners this way you're gonna have a guy who's gonna experiment jiu-jitsu gonna love the techniques gonna understand their strategy and you're gonna probably gonna lost weight you're gonna get fit you're gonna get you know confident on his knowledge but not to prove all the time not to be able to go and and be a fighter or competitor this way with the jiu-jitsu we can help executives you can help anyone in this in the full circle but if the jiu-jitsu is traditional competition is drive you to to do to be an athlete sometimes you fall short because you don't want to be an athlete so the idea of give something i never ever find somebody who don't like jiu-jitsu depends how you will be introduced depends how your practice is so you can appeal for the good kid for the tough kid for the bully for the for the shy one they all love jiu jitsu if i don't put for the shy i want the pressure for him to quit so he's gonna love to roll he's gonna have to move he's gonna love to do for the bully i'm gonna give him not only the knowledge of jiu-jitsu but i'm going to put him to compete for him to start to respect others and be more mellow in the attitude so i can help the bully i can help the shy one i can have the the soft one the top they all can learn but in a different patterns so what i try to accomplish and and still in my time in my lifetime is be able to to create a program who involves anyone in the family without the the this the idea of prove yourself prove you capable because when you put that kind of challenge a lot of people are not going to enjoy the capacity in the in the in the development of themselves i was thinking about it from a surfing perspective because i know echoes echo's planning to start surfing if i said okay welcome to surfing echo and we took them up to mavericks in half moon bay with 20-foot day yeah our pipeline but maverick's even better though because it's a whatever 52 degree water it's freezing cold it's foggy it's dark and there's sharks you aren't even gonna go out yeah you aren't even gonna paddle out well you're not even gonna pop it out so so that's like going to first day of jiu jitsu and there's you know a 220 pound 21 year old blue belt that's getting ready to crush the person that just showed up that wants to learn yeah in some academies you're going to have a bad experience in the first day and the world and other academies you've been protected first month or the second month so you say okay now it's time for you one hour class 45 minutes okay now you guys stop let's keep rolling guys you guys can roll you can so you protect somebody from rolling for one or two months but in one point you have to allow him to roll right and that that that drop off will start from that point when you start to understand yourself as having to roll all the time and that sometimes can be completely depressive for many yes so taking that challenge taking that compromise to compete and allowed yourself to go there to enjoy yourself is is the is the key for bringing more people to the benefits of jiu-jitsu because i see like jiu-jitsu can help you in a in a huge spectrum not only help you on the mat but outside of the match so sometimes you you you practice jiu-jitsu you become calm and you become better father better police officer it's just for the practice you know so it's a very important element of self-confidence build self-esteem and and and so on so it's something we all can do regardless your as your desire to compete or to really fight well i'm glad it's going where it's going because it seems to keep growing for sure yes um you also you know you hear you mentioned that it not only is horny and trying to control all this stuff but he's also got guys like henzo coming in who's you know a great teacher you said uh you said henzo became a father figure to his younger brothers half and high and into many others by the time he arrived in america he was already leading many of the younger gracies and other friends who lacked direction henzo was a born fighter who rather than getting scared in dangerous situations got focused henza would go on to be one of the most successful jiu jitsu teachers in america meanwhile you had uh you say the west l.a karate school rented me their school on pico boulevard in an industrial section of los angeles it was a traditional japanese karate school complete with raised wooden platform an oil painting of an old japanese karate master hot in the summer and cold in the winter my school had no sign no parking no windows no showers and it was almost impossible to find i can vouch for that but since i was a family champion in california was buzzing about the about gracie jiu jitsu it did not take long for dangerous men from all over the world to to find this run down karate dojo tucked away in an alley next to an auto body shop most of my first generation of students were aspiring professional fighters lifelong martial artists from other styles surfers or professional men of action who use physical force in their daily occupations soldiers cops prison guards and bouncers that's what i mean by dangerous some wanted to learn while others just wanted to test their skills against us but in the end almost all became dedicated gracie jiu jitsu students my pico academy was a neutral environment where you you had to leave your preconceptions and prejudices in the locker room i didn't allow it onto the mats you certainly did not uh this i thought this was interesting because you you say this about coming to america when we first came to the u.s kim and i were working our asses off just to get by while life on the mat was always the same life off the mat was more difficult because america was so different from brazil like the united states brazil had been a colony but it was the it was one where the europeans at first went primarily to fill their boats with golden emeralds and go home in contrast america had been much more idealistic had a much more idealistic constitution and grew into a more orderly society literally people here did things i'd never seen before they stood in line stopped for traffic lights and mostly obeyed the laws [Laughter] these these may seem like obvious requirements for a workable society but to me for me it was a strange new world my transition to living in american society was not always so smooth you got some good stories about some of the things you went through there um yeah and it's the same for for your kids and you say this moving moving was probably hardest for hoxin that's your oldest son in a few short months he had gone from being the prince of rio to being just another skinny hispanic-looking kid in california public school who didn't speak english and his being physically small compared to most of the american kids made him insecure all the esl classes in the world can't help that one morning he came out of his room to go to school with football shoulder pads under his shirt and insisted on wearing them to school i said no of course but i saw right into the source of his pain in an effort to become a leader hoxin tried to overcompensate with aggression and become extreme and became extremely reckless in order to prove himself he would accept any challenge and fight anyone when i sent him to elementary school in torrance he wanted to fight every kid there at least once a month the principal would call me screaming hochson fought six kids today he doesn't understand the rules of basketball and won't let the other kids have the ball another time hoxson came home with a backpack full of candy he told me some [ __ ] story about how he found it but i knew he'd stolen it even my punishing him did little to correct his behavior i have been a fighter in my entire life so i understand putting myself at risk but hoxson was always putting himself at risk in situations that were not rational or intelligent this trait had always been with him he was very young when he was very young hoxin once said to his sister i'm either going to be rich in prison or dead can you imagine a kid saying that he was drawn like a magnet to trouble that he could easily could have avoided this imbalance concerned me because it took hoxen out of a zone of comfort and put him constantly on the edge i was not just watching another aggressive gracie growing up i was watching someone with an unbalanced mental approach to life when kim tried to reign him in he became rebellious and defiant toward her this caused strife between kim and me because she did not want her kids to be gracie brawlers she'd hoped that the move to america would put them on a different track but it was too late hoxson was already on a self-guided mission to be the greatest gracie of his generation reckless yes but forever a fighter then we get to early 1993. horian's dream of bringing vale tudo fighting to america to showcase jiu jitsu was about to come true he asked me to meet with him and his student hollywood director john melius and told me that they had backers for the ultimate fighting championships america's first valet tudo event finally an opportunity for me to make a name for myself in america this was the opportunity that i had moved to the united states for and now it was a reality when horian told me that he wanted our younger brother hoist to fight in the first tournament and keep me as a backup in case he lost i was disappointed so there you go the the first ufc yes you must have thought that you were going to be the the guy i i was sure about that you know i was sure i was the one who represents the family and then i don't come with the news voice will do because if he lost you came up you come up and back it up and stuff i felt a little tricky was a good situation for her i don't keep things under control but i took as it is and help heist to fight i i got to backtrack a little bit you were going at this time you were teaching up at the before you had your studio you were teaching in the torrance garage right i start i come here rent a house start teaching my garage under audience 100 students he sent me a a list of students so i already fooled full schedule for for teachings privates in the garage and then we we left the garage and opened the first academy tournaments academy and i was keeping teaching private lessons group lessons helping the whole system of the film of the academy there were some seals that came up and trained with you during that time yes and um there was well one of them was a of old vietnam seal a little guy and he he i remember him telling me he goes oh you gotta try these gracie guys and then another one was a was a wrestler a college wrestler a champion wrestler in america and a big guy who's who's a good friend of mine and and apparently you two used to just go at it yes definitely yeah i have a very very deep respect about about the seals you know because and i also met steve watkins which was also a sergeant at the conorado bay i guess because he was selecting people he was training trainer for the ceo teams to make the selection like the hell week and stuff so i know a little bit about the preparation about the situations they they go through to to get graduated as seo and i also experience the practice with them which emphasizes a lot because when you get tired you start to get confused you start to get doubts you start to make the poor decisions ceos they get exhausted and they obey exactly what they hear so they don't have they don't blink or they don't ask or they don't have doubts they just dare to to go to move forward on the mission so if the missions keep holding the knee they will hold the knee until they pass out [Laughter] so our training with them sometimes are done at the academy sometimes they're in different places sometimes on the carpet and they're training on the carpet and half hour into the training they're all bleeding blisters and and they don't even notice and two three hours rest for an hour another two three hours and they go forever and if you stop the training they they engage they fight it and you say okay stop you jump on the window they will stop and jump in the wind they there to obey what they so i'm very impressed with their focus their capacity to to completely fearless completely no doubts they they believe they they show what they have to so it's a very very special people you know and i also hear from my student who are trainer there in some tests for example you have to go diving in a 200 yard pool and they say okay you go to the other corner if you don't make it don't show it don't put your head up so whatever you do get the other hand or stand in the water and 90 the guys they try to go for air when they lose the air because no chance for you to make the other side so what they want is make you pass out under the water constantly say okay i'm going to die here but i'm not going to put my head under the water and when they pass out they take you off they survive you and that's all cool but your mindset is there to accept death to going through death and now no problem don't put your head out so this kind of makes one guy out a thousand a guy who is able to accomplish so navy seals are guys completely prepared to do what they supposed to do they have no mind problems they focus they is admirable how they can control their own emotions and how they can stay under pressure and be comfortable and do whatever they have to do you know no matter if i'm going that direction with a gun machine my partner looking backwards with another gun machine looking my back so if i start shooting here he cannot even turn the head he have to accept i'm take care of my side so the loyalty the surrendering the trust the the courage is through the high ceiling you know it's just off the roof so much personal qualities you know and it's it's impossible to make a guy like a guy like that can be a champion can be anything because he controls his mind in a very special way the first guy that i trained jiu jitsu with was a guy named steve bailey and he he was probably a a mid-level white belt when i met him and he was an oh i thought he was another guy thought he was 100 years old he was probably about 40 or something like that but he had trained with you guys and yes and i was in his house also yeah down down here in san diego yes and he we showed up on deployment over in guam and he came and said who here wants to learn how to fight now i was a brand new guy i was like hey i want to learn how to fight and i also thought to myself maybe i can teach the old man a little something you know because i i'm i'm pretty badass myself i just graduated from seal training i'm pretty tough and there's probably five of us that that showed up jeff higgs is another one and when jeff higgs is a is uh trained with fabio sanchez santos black belt and so we showed up and again i'm thinking what what's this old man got for me and he just like i said he was probably a white belt at the time but you know he lined us up and just tapped us all out and then tapped us all out again and then tapped us all out again and that was my introduction to jiu jitsu yes and then we got hook yeah totally totally hooked man totally hooked um yeah i didn't want to skip over those early days because those are pretty legendary days inside the seal teams and it's so interesting because nobody knew anything i mean even from that from what steve bailey taught me i probably got in i don't know how many skirmishes like fights but platoon fights you know where you're fighting your friend where you're not gonna beat the [ __ ] out of them but you're gonna definitely figure out what's up right i got into all kinds of those things with my friends and just from what steve bailey taught me like hey this is the this is the elbow escape this is the mount this is the rear naked choke i think i actually just knew the americana the rear naked choke and like the arm lock maybe what guard was a little bit a little bit of mount that was like enough back in those days man you were like into the world king of the world yes in a blind land who has one eye is the king right and that's kind of going back the book that's kind of how it was for for the first ufc oh yes it was hois fighting against people that had no comprehension of jiu jitsu really yeah they coming from different styles was a was a was a war of styles you know kickboxers sumo wrestlers and and wrestlers but the wrestlers they have no submission they have no striking they are not good completely today you see wrestlers with great striking skills great guard defenses and things you see judo guys with striking skills you see striker guys with jiu-jitsu skills and rest so it's a mix but before people represent their own styles you know and then becomes a huge difference yeah if you don't know jujitsu you're dead on the woods you're dead i was you say here uh so this is the first ufc after hoist beat the boxer without getting hit then made ken shamrock the fighter who posed the biggest threat to him tap in less than a minute his confidence surfaced in the final hoy's faced a tall dead-eyed dutch kickboxer named gerard gardu gardeaux and stuck the same winning formula when hoyce took him down to the ground and was just about to choke him gordo bit hois's ear after the referee after he freed his ear ahoy's choked him and when he tapped hoy's kept choking him and not stop until the referee pried him off gordo i'll tell you what's interesting i was watching this fight the other day between between hoyce and ken shamrock and ken shamrock went to do a foot locker heel hook no hesitation whatsoever hois totally saw it disarm like did the perfect defense to it got up on top got the got got the position and so people will be like oh you know flocks are new right no he's being being around yet yeah they've been around because hoyt's defended that like it was nothing yes which is pretty impressive i think for 1993 yes um after hoist won the tournament in less than five minutes of total fighting time americans were stunned and amazed by the power and efficiency of gracie jiu jitsu overnight hoist gracie became the biggest name in martial arts and gracie jiu jitsu exploded in popularity horian thought it was hard to control the gracies but soon america would be flooded with non-family members who represented the good the bad and the ugly of my family's martial art during the 1990s an unusual thing happened to brazilians when they flew to the u.s some of their belts magically turned from blue to brown or even worse from purple to black and as you just said in the line of the blind a one-eyed man is king that was uh that i mean if the first ufc's were like miraculous for martial arts yeah i think it was like an open eye everybody start to feel something they never felt before was like this mix this integration of fights and fight people fight differently and engage and they who win so they start to make up different conclusions about what they see on the movies you know like uh bruce lee's and stuff so they can kick fight 40 people and nothing happens and they start to feel like a little different their reality is a little different from the striker than supposed to be and they start to feel like how impossible is to not engage and not have this kind of tight and once it's tight it's not easy to separate and risk a mess if the referee is not there to create the space so and then the value of the grappling becomes you know people start to get aware of how dangerous a grappler is when it's just around your neck you know and they start to create better techniques and it's a different open mind for everybody yeah it's weird because if you look at a striker and a grappler and you don't know anything the striker kind of appears to be more dangerous yes because they're hitting and especially in the movies you hit them and they fall down and it doesn't whereas the grapplers like grabbing hold of me i mean my wife grabs me that can't be a problem right but the difference is major oh yeah [Laughter] so now you start looking to uh you start looking to fight and you're gonna end up in japan and you say unlike the ufc the japan open had gloves in 20-minute rounds because it was an eight-man tournament the winner would have to fight three bouts in one night i would have to keep an open mind i couldn't go in with a strategy or plan because i didn't know who i'd be who'd be fighting me my solutions to problems had to be reflexive and responsive to me my fights were solemn celebrations and i wanted my family friends and students to there to witness the culmination of all the training all the sacrifice and all the hard work on the morning of the japan valet tudo open i got to the stadium early and took a long nap in the locker room when i woke up i thank god for life and then acknowledged that it was a perfect day to die because of my life's mission was complete i was representing my art and my family in the ring my opponent would have to knock me out or kill me to win for i was never going to tap this was not a sport to me it was my sacred honor and again i mean people have to buy the book to read through the details that you give what it was like before the fight what you're going through and and you detail some of the fights themselves and it's fascinating to hear about them from your perspective that's why people have to buy the book but fast forward a little bit and three sharp outside won the japan open i bowed the crowd on the four sides of the ring but did not smile the samurai did not celebrate victories and neither would i why celebrate a victory your next fight might be your last battles are not parties win or lose fights are sacred to me so this is an interesting uh thing that unfolds here um you say when i got back to la i learned of that one of japan's most famous pro wrestlers no buhiko takata had challenged me a few weeks after we returned my representative in japan called me to tell me that takata was telling the press that i had not responded to him because i was afraid to fight and then a week later takata's protege yoshi anjo one of the villains of japanese pro wrestling had a press conference to announce that he was traveling to los angeles to fight me to the death when i heard that andrew had said this i caught i told him to call me when he got into town i wasn't going to stress out about it if anjo came to fight then we'd fight the japanese promoters and reporters were always creating dramas and fanning the flames these kind of threat these kind of theatrics were the story of my life by then i never lost sleep over the barking dogs and then december 7th comes 1994. happens yes i was i mean tranquil as always at my house and then my instructor called me from the academy said hickson has a cop has a couple here japanese couple who wants to talk to you immediately i imagine could be the fighter i said okay i'll be right there as i'm going in the car i was taping my hand a little bit to give me a little support for the bones and setting up the camera my son will film so he was with me in the car so when i arrived at my school which was in the alley deep alley first thing i saw was a van full of japanese photographers cameras and stuff so i was getting in i saw the van open doors with japanese inside so i get through getting to my academy and has this tall guy who is the president of the ufo the the ufc the the wrestling association in japan oh mr grayson nice to meet you i'd like to come here to talk to you i said yes uh you said you i like to invite you for a fight in japan i said man i told you already i'm not going to fight in the ufo because you guys are not legit you know no matter if i win or lose in your arena can be always fixed so i have no intention to fight in your arena yeah but you also said mr gracie you're willing to fight for your honor for free he said yes that's what i'm here for i thought you're gonna fight me but i saw you not here for fight yeah but the fighter is here he's in the backyard he's in the outside he can come so okay so call him and as i saw the guy go out to pick up the the fighter i said for a student who was in there i said hey man you stay in the door let the guy come back let the fighter come in but don't let the press come in so keep the press outside okay so the guy the guy the president come in the angel come in the door was locked and i said luis get on the waiver please and give for mr angelo sign because the waiver is always a good secure if you get hurt or something it's a waiver right to everybody signs waiver here and then the angel look the waiver with ugly face and talk with japanese with the guy and the guy said to me mr gracie you mean if you don't sign the waiver you're not gonna fight immediately i felt like was a tricky question because if i say no he has to sign he said okay let's leave them so he will leave and he will talk whatever he says oh he quit i was here said no no forget the paper throw this paper out you you want to fight without the paper just you're welcome let's fight without the paper forget the paper and then he jump in the ring we start to bathe each other how big is how big is andrew it's about 200 pounds my my height a little stacky solid and uh what did what do you think when you looked at his eyes would he look like he was surprised that you accepted this no i felt like he was he was playing a villain in wrestling so he has the ugly face the attitude he don't he don't flake he don't blink he don't show emotions he's just like ready to go you know i don't know if he was pretending or if he's for sure but he was ready to go and and the all these reporters none of them came in no one come in i didn't let nobody come in because i don't know what's going to happen i don't like somebody which is not my not my friend to to recorded everything but but your son recorded it yes so it was life was the camera was on so and then the fight starts i felt like he wants to punch me i can feel the difference in the stance and the way when you're looking for a position for a punch when you grappler when you strike when you want to kick so depending up approach i can see if you more like as a kicker if you want a puncher if you want a grappling and i felt like he wants to have your hands on my face you know he wants to just solid punch and i did the same thing i play a little dummy when he came with the right i i deflected grab him under the waist throw him on the floor we fall off the mat on the on this hardwood and he got caught like in a little fancy so he got caught in a bad position and i start to punch him punch and he was uh turn back he turned back to me and i was thinking if i put him to sleep he can wake up and tell whatever he want to say so has to be bigger than that has to be a punishment his face has to show so i was hitting him backwards on his back until he turned faced me again so i didn't choke him i wait for him to turn face me again and then i keep punching and i broke his nose a lot of blood and then he turned back again and i put him to sleep finally i could make the tank and make it happen so i put him to sleep and he was passing out facing down on the mat so when his was out i tell the guys okay now the press can come so when the press come into the the place start to picture everything he was already standing up and the guy tried to cover his face with his he's hugging him like protecting his face from the photographers and then kim said so show his face so the guy move out and the guy's taking pictures of the guy all bloody and uh and they left two days later andrew came back to my school with a gift with a samurai helmet and said was dishonorable what he did was a lack of respect but he's apologizing he want to say he has no problems he was very very you know straightforward give me the gift and said he's respect me and left and then one week after he states in japan he was jumped into the in the fight they jumped me they so it's like a villain he talked one face with me other face in japan and at this point i have a tape fortunately so my guy coming through here to us i give the tape to him he was able to show the tape to the press in japan no make no copies and bring it back to me i said no make no no no copies messages so he showed it for the present so my name in japan was even bigger because everything andrew said was a lie and was proved wrong and uh so that's happened and and then eventually i fought one more time in japan and then after i fought noburico takada which was the the boss of that association in a big event in tokyo dome 70 000 people sold out arena was a huge event that was against takata who was he was like uh yoji's uh master right yeah he was the number one of the the the wrestling i think andrew was better than takada as a fighter he come in with a better fighting background but he was the villain he always never going to be the number one you know takada has a better pretty look has more like he's appeals more for the audience so he was the good guy who always wins in the end in a fixed fight you can arrange that with no problems man that video is still not released now only for friends so you're going to be one for sure going to see a copy yeah i've been waiting to see that for a long time meanwhile there's still life going on outside of fighting so you got all this stuff going on and i i pulled this one out it says one day a policeman who knew me called and said i have hawks in here we caught him trying to steal from a store you need to come down when i arrived my son was sitting on the curb hixson i'm not going to take him in the cop said but talk to him he could have gotten into some serious trouble when i lectured hawkson on the drive home about how it was wrong to steal that he didn't need to do it in order to prove his worth he remained silent and stared at his feet when we got home i said go to the garage i'm not finished talking to you he looked me dead in the eyes and groaned dad can't you just hit me i'd rather you do that than more talking we don't need to talk anymore just give me my punishment i thought [ __ ] what am i gonna do to make him fear the consequences of his actions that was when i realized i was losing control of my son hoxson reminded me of my brother holes in that they both possessed psychologies that made me uncomfortable but while this worried me i figured that it was a phase he would pass through as i had when i returned to japan in 1995 a few weeks before the tournament i went to yuri nakamura's mountain cabin my pre-flight routine was the same and again this is all stuff that you detail you talk about you know what you're thinking about psychologically it's so interesting to read the book and get that side of the the fight that's why people got to get the book um you have these these fights that you talk about uh you you hurt your neck a little bit then you submit a couple guys you end up in that classic fight against yuki nakai yes who had had is i gouged in his first fight against gordo yes and he ended up becoming blind in that eye because of that eye gouging yes and he was he's also yuki nikai is a small little guy yes he's a brave warrior for sure i have a lot of respect for the guy but you went out and it's clear when you watch that fight i remember watching it actually that you went out and basically didn't do any further damage to the guy yes than you had my my friends my my guys and the practice and the in the locker room they said you have to kill him punch him start to damage him whatever you have a chance you said no man i'm not gonna do anything i'm better technician than him i'm bigger than him i don't have to be hurt him he's already hurt i mean why are you going to be just mean by going to win him with techniques so i went to the ring commit to do my thing and prove myself i can win without the brutality without the fear the aggressiveness which are no need for that so i was calmly putting him in uncomfortable situations until you get the choke and this plays a very important role because i always admire japan i always felt like i leave my personal bushid which is my moral code my my code of warrior and uh and i never knew details about japan very details but i know i after that the fact i use white it represents a lot for them because the sunride dress is white before the armor you know in terms of surrender is a beautiful war color the white i didn't know that the fact i'm not celebrating fights it's the same thing then samurai samurai are not going to be fighting because he kills somebody next week next day can be him so the fighting is just a a way to go away of life which cannot be celebrated at like a party or so so the japanese also noticed this because in the in japan different than u.s or different places when the fight starts you don't see nothing you don't hear anything the crowd is all quiet and when you do a move they all oh they follow the fight with precision with details they admire not only the fight but also the personality how they can relate to you your attitude your character so when i'm not celebrating yuki nakai's defeat show some respect show some attitude and the fact i was not mean to him also they notice they say hickson didn't punch the guy they're supposed to so they noticed the fact i was nice i was serious for battle but not overpowering not trying to be a coward and and hit him or hurt him in a bad way so all those little details add to my my profile in japan because they notice all those details and they feel like i was the expression of a new samurai you know because i was not bringing back to japan like i thank you them for because at the first tournament i said i'd like to thank you japan to bring in jiu-jitsu to brazil and now i'm bringing back because i feel like is my way to give back to japan so all this translates in me become some kind of expression of what samurai is supposed to be today you know japan has a big problem with secure state of mind because once they lost the war the kindness becomes some kind of fear so they smell they smile at you they bow to you but sometimes they don't like you at all and they show that kind of code image of respect of but eventually they becomes your enemies they so japanese lost their soul when they lost the war the attitude of samurais proud and so they lost their source they lost their attitude so they become more like servers and and complying with the energy of the the rest of the the universe so my image brought somehow some kind of example of how the the modern summer i supposed to act no swords but attitude the way i speak the way you know sometimes they prior to the fights they have like a day a press day and then we have 30 different magazines for 20 minutes interviews always coming in the in the room and doing quick interviews some pictures and they live so some guys coming from very important magazines one of them coming to me and said mr grace i just have one question how you do to fight a polar bear i did not laugh on that question i don't say anything i just thought what the question is that and i answered to him without losing my my pace i said man i never intend to fight a polar bear it's not my my goal but if i have to fight one i'm going to have a nice jacket for the winter i'm going to have a lot of meat a bare meat on my fridge and i'm going to have a nice necklace of bare tooths so with that answer i show him i'm not afraid of the outcome i don't blink in front of my f so it's oh my i not expect anything like that i'm sorry they left so just to see how his mind works japanese is very special in terms of uh they have a somewhat helmet almost like a scent on the altar you know they have the katanas like example the god for them comes from like a a bushido life of type have to have honor and dignity integrity so when they see me they see me like as a new samurai they bring the kids say can you touch touch his face please can you touch his head things like you don't believe happens and you say okay sure [Laughter] so japanese becomes a very much enlightened with my my knowledge of martial arts my my ideas of how to deal with my opponents how to deal with my peace of mind emotional control and so on so was uh was something very interesting my experiences in japan now that's that's a little bit correct me if i'm wrong but in the movie choke right when you're dealing with this you you know you have yuki nakai coming up and you're you're basically telling hoiler hey listen i'm not going to hit him you know i'm going to be p i'm going to be as do as little damage as i can and euler's like [ __ ] that you need to kill that [ __ ] he's going to be trying to kill you it's a really good contrast but you you were able to overcome that and maintain that that samurai spirit yes i mean oil is a great guy he's very tough and because he was not too big all his life he was a smaller guy so people they disrespect while in a different way than disrespect me it's forget jujitsu forget gracie family but they look at me they don't have problems with me they look at her and say hey man get out of the pla so they have no respect so hoyt is always on his toes letting nothing pass because he's a warrior and he don't want to be disrespected so any glimpse of lack of respect he becomes agitated so one day we left the academy to surf surfboards on top traffic in brazil traffic jam and somehow i cut off a tax driver i make a mistake and then he he get on my side and he called me names and i immediately said hey man i'm sorry brother sorry bro and then holly look at you mr hickson the guy call you this this and that how you can apologize for the guy why you don't kick his ass i said hoiler can you imagine the hell this guy living just being on traffic crazy like that can you imagine we're going to surf now can you imagine just coming from the school training sparring kicking ass training hard you think i'm gonna fight this guy he's old he's fat he's out of shape just to because he called me a name i have to beat him up come on holler forgive this guy let him go let his let let life beat him he's already a poor guy and hoyler told me up today said hickson that message for me was hit me on the heart because nothing can be more you know i never expect this from you and once you tell me that i start to redo my life and see how much people i can forgive and how much calm i can be if i don't have to prove i know i can beat the guy but i don't have to just prove every time just because you asked me for and that's kind of message highly never forgot anymore so you end up you you end up fighting takata once and then you fight him again um you beat him i think you beat him by armlock both times yeah both times that's why as they say hixson by armlock going back to the book here this is 2000 earlier that year hawson injured his knee while training it was slow to heal and i think he felt his dream of becoming a champion fighter slipping away while i was in rio there were rumors going around that hoxon was a prospective member of an la street gang by the time i returned to los angeles hawkson was getting ready to leave for new york with his brazilian girlfriend after hoxin left for the east coast i received a message from him that he had made it to new york and that everything was going well when we didn't hear from him for over a month i wasn't worried because he was still using his atm card in new york city a month later december turned into january and we still had not heard from him now i was truly worried my cousin henzo's academy was in new york city and some of his students were policemen so i asked henzo if he could try to find my son a few days later a sheik and henzo called and told me that an officer had found a photograph of an unidentified corpse at the coroner's office with a tattoo that read hicks and gracie number one dad up to this point hoxson had been a missing person this was the confirmation that he was gone after i hung up the phone the whole family melted into tears seeded beside me looked hopeless i told the kids that hoxson had moved on to another life and was now with holes now representing the gracie family i had to go to new york city for the physical confirmation i knew in my heart that my son was dead you talking this um you know in this section here i mean obviously i don't i don't think there's anybody that that thinks there's anything worse than losing a child and you talk about what you did what you thought and how you had to get through this yes um some some of the some of the lessons that you had to learn and some of the things that you you had to do you know you ended up um you ended up building like a like a like a tree a tree house yes kind of platform on the tree and that was sort of your your escape but it was an escape but it ended up sort of being a reconnection definitely i felt like up to that point my life was being just a a very beautiful ride you know even with the pressures even with the the doubts i have always been in charge of my own desires i was thinking i was controlling time i have a perfect family kids loving friends and and and trainee i mean my life was perfect and i was thinking i was in charge when hawks on departure i felt like the the floor just got out of my feet i was just lost track of i lose the desire to serve i lose the desire to train to teach you know i was a little unsocial a little bit you know i i was not saving tears i was crying a lot i was i let myself get down to the hole in a way to embrace a rock and go to the lake and go deep on the on the bottom of the lake and i allowed myself to get deeper enough to know to feel important and also from that lower point decide if i want to kill myself if i want to drink drugs give up from like i don't know i was just allowed myself to get weak enough and fragile enough to from that point see what's happened and once i get to that bottom i i decided to make i was in the in the side hillside on my house i was there just and i was climbing some trees and then i saw a beautiful tree with a beautiful ocean view said i want to buy i want to create a platform here to talk with oxen so for about three weeks from first light on this first light to down to dawn i was working on this project from designing to buying the wood to buying the the screws and then bringing the electrical to make the holes and stuff and just focus on this my hands are kind of bleeding so much work and so i'm making focus on creating that kind of platform and after that platform done took me almost three weeks i would make amazing job put the wood and put varnish so it was beautiful i felt like was a mission accomplished there i said now i make my tribute to you so i want to be in peace and it was a better feeling for me to make this because i anytime i miss hawks and i was going up there light up an incense meditate a little bit thinking about good things have a picture there and i spend maybe a year more in a much better vibration but not exactly out of the hole and one day i was thinking up there and i remember what my dad said about nothing can be a hundred percent wrong or bad nothing can be 100 right or good it's always a dual aspect in everything and i started thinking what's going to be the advantage of hawke's departure how i mean how this can be good in any way i started looking for a reason and i and then i i i find something very important which was up up to hawks departure i was in charge if him or anyone else something hicks can you teach me today dad can you take me to the beach whatever it is i can say no not today let's go tomorrow let's leave this not today i'm gonna feel good i wanna so i was thinking about being in charge of the time in a much more powerful way than i was than i have so after his departure i'm sure tomorrow may never happen so based on that difference i start to use in my day much more efficiently to give you an example i could be down on the freeway to to fight in japan or to make a big program in japan i'm in the freeway if my daughter called me dad i have to talk to you she's crying i will stop the car in the freeway and talk to her what's the problem ah this and that so has all the resolve this so i will talk to her until i be able to give my best opinion my best information give my time as long as it takes after this finish i turn off the phone i will see if i still have time to go to japan if i still have time to get the flight whatever if not i will reschedule i will do because today i have i cannot do this for tomorrow so i learn effectively how to use my time with precision with with not exp wasting time with things are not matter or not give you the value of time which time is very valuable and i start to become more effective on how to use my time how how the purpose of my life my service what is really matters for me and i started using my day much more worth it from a conversation like that today from a teaching a student from talking with my family i will be much more precise i would be i want to be much more on time much more you know with no loose ends or no no gaps it's just tight so by doing that i reborn i i reinvent myself in a different me with much more compassion much more interested for things much more ways to to to bring jiu-jitsu to others i'm still at service so being happy with that make me feel like i have to thank you hawkson for his departure in order for me to achieve that kind of enlightenment that kind of depth on my being alive and being at service if i was not for that i could be a lot of loose gaps up today and having my mind in a different manner so i saw the positiveness of his departure have given me the chance to become a better man so i'm thankful in a way he's taught me that with his departure so i compensate a little bit and from that on i become fully restored my energy levels my happiness my this my my desire to to live my life and let hawks on be in peace in in heaven and with you know with halls and waiting for us dancing and being happy yeah that's um i've i've had that conversation with myself uh quite a few times you know i've lost some very close people to me and i've i've actually had that discussion with many other people um as they lose lose their loved ones and you know they will people have literally asked me you know what possibly what possible good can there be from this there's nothing good this is horrible and like you did you have to kind of pull back and and look at things from a different perspective and and they're there always is something positive there always is a lesson to be learned there always is the memories that you that you get to keep yes um and obviously this this had an impact on the rest of your family you you say here losing hoxin put kron on the path to martial arts greatness on some level i think hoxton knew that kron had the natural talent and tools to be even better than he like all my kids he had trained jiu jitsu all of his life but was never inter as interested as hoxin now it was his turn to shine even though they were brothers hoxin and crone were completely different hoxson was emotional intense and intent on proving himself a gracie warrior kron was more observant analytical and calm he wanted to do the right things and always be at his best in one of their last conversations hoxin told cron that he was a gracie and to give 110 and never quit in whatever it was that he chose to do after hawkson died kron took that to heart and was now on a mission to become the next apex predator in the gracie food chain you say here the the more kron won the less attached he became to winning after he realized that the outcome of fight does not define you as a person he improved by leaps and bounds he trained as hard as humanly possible and when he competed he let the chips fall where they may win loser draw he would be back in the academy on monday and train as if the fight had never happened when my father died in his sleep in 2009 at the age of 95 i was in europe with kron for the european jiu jitsu championship we received the news the day of the tournament and knew that we could not get back to brazil for the funeral instead we went back to our hotel room and held our own memorial we cried and shared memories the day elio died kron represented his grandfather on the mat as elia would have liked he won both of his matches by submission and after he won the european title he kissed the picture of hoxin that always as always and bowed to the giant mural of elio the tournament organizers put up to come commemorate his life it was a beautiful moment for both of us alio and carlos gracie's legacies were now being carried and upheld by a third generation that's the family tradition huh um again you know in the book you you carry on and and and talk about um you know some of some of the other things that proceeded after that and i wanna i wanna get a little bit go towards the end of the book here um and you know you've talked about this a little bit today but i think it's important to reiterate you say my goal today is to create a form of jiu-jitsu that will empower the entire person both on and off the mat if i can ever make a nervous person feel more relaxed than they've ever felt before i'm changing them from within in a way that a psychiatrist or a pill never can today conflict comes in many forms and physicality is only one aspect of it conflict follows humans wherever they go and people adopt different strategies to cope with it modern enemies can strike in a text an email or in a social media post as the world of instant communication has evolved many negative unintended consequences have evolved with it 50 years ago a 10 year old boy went in his room only to sleep because he spent all day outside playing today if parents aren't careful their children will spend the entire day alone in their rooms we cannot dismiss technology but why let us turn us into brains with veg vegetable bodies one of the worst side effects of technology is the way it is reduced human direct interaction because people can get almost everything they desire food entertainment friendship sex via the screen they have gotten to the point of being scared of face-to-face interaction there are so many wonderful things that are impossible to experience on a screen jumping into a cold river making the drop on a big wave and walking in the rain or just a few even worse social media provides an arena arena for cowards to lurk in the cyber shadows and say things that they would never dare say in person mike tyson put it best when he said that social media has made people quote way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it today i try to use jiu-jitsu as a tool to teach patients hope strategy emotional control breathing and many other things all without conflict and competition this allows those who need it most to learn the visible and invisible aspects of the art in ways that could help them in their everyday lives i have developed a training routine wherein students learn the practice learn and practice all the movements and techniques of jujitsu in a cooperative instead of competitive environment i can teach the most critical invisible aspects of jiu-jitsu like base timing weight distribution and connection with little stress in this type of class i can have two beginners blocking punches and doing hip throws your training partner is there to help not to fight you so that's what you were talking about earlier today yes i felt like we all in warfare is not about being a soldier is not about being a fighter we are under stress we are you know our lives today are driving in different modes and different aspects so what you really need to conquer is happiness your biggest achievement is to focus on how you how to be happy how to bring your family to the best scenario how to bring your job how to bring your your assets how to bring your your uh the way you practice your physical so you want to conquer a lot of things a lot of things should be conquered in order for you to be happy and in order for you to be happy he's not lucky i don't believe in luck i don't believe you you you're gonna be happy just by close your eyes you know and if you're happy today ten years from now what make you happy today either evolve or doesn't make no no sense it's not gonna make you happy you have a different goals every every time you just have a different first buy a car then buy a house then get married whatever it is is next step to make you happier to make you in a good position and i see those kind of challenges those kind of obstacles as little battles which when you focus when you have the capacity strategical capacity when you have emotional control when you have believe in yourself when you have hope so a lot of elements on the water toolbox has to be used for daily practice for average joes it's not about being a special warrior and be able to have emotional control it's for the weak ones for the guy who has an email and gonna lose his rent or whatever so this guy needs emotional control it's the same i need the same you need you know so the idea of empower people cannot come in with i will empower you but you have to prove you can handle sometimes that i don't have i don't have what it needs i don't have what it needs to to be a fighter but he loves to learn details for self defense he loves to learn details for self-emotional control through breathing he loves understand what's the solution for that for that problem what's the solution for that so based on information based on practice he may never fight nobody but that's will incorporate on his behavior a completely different mindset a completely different way to breed and and and rebalance the stress a complete different way for you to feel good about a possible engagement so sometimes i train in my students to keep the distance not in hey not in not clinch but keep just stay away from my punch so i will try to so based on your space you can survive you see people in the ufc surviving an attack basically moving away so if you just move away you don't have to be a fighter to survive so i i put my expert in not getting punched that's already a a big asset in your life if you average joe you make sure you're nobody going to punch you in the face so it's a big win already so my purpose with that knowledge is to prepare people to win without a fight based on different components mental components spiritual components and physical components okay man you don't have to prove me you just have to believe you have a chance so by giving that chance for average joe i want to empower the world in a different and a very special way because i will offer them what they need to become more humanized to become more sharp to become better in control to become more strategically correct what makes life different if you tell me what the successful people has in common all the successful people have few things in common they all love what they do they're all capable to to to to to pass obstacles and not give up easy they all capable also to to to become to making decisions under pressure they're all able to keep learning and keep progressing keep it take advan so they have open mind about how to strategize how's the new game coming so they're not they're not unfamiliar with with behaviors and situations which everybody's successful has in common so give you those tools give you the glimpse of what you need to become successful if you have to believe in what you do you have to to practice you have to make sure the strategy is correct and so on so based on those elements i cannot transform people from a coward guy to make him a courageous but i can make a coward guy becomes talent enough to believe he has a chance and that's can transform his decisions and a courageous decisions so because we live in a life of pretending because we live in a life of images and look good and so i like to take you from you looking from the mirror before you start you feeling so when you start to feel yourself in that you start to understand your breathing understand your leverage understand your base completely change the dynamic you handle the word the way you shake your hand the way you approach somebody looking in the eye and things like that so that kind of jiu-jitsu can favors anyone in the globe different than a specialized jiu-jitsu for competition which favors just the warriors who want to favor true jiu-jitsu yeah that's uh you know you were talking about what does successful people have in common they got they can they have an open mind they overcome obstacles they use the right strategies at the right times they're comfortable in these uncomfortable positions and situations and these are all things that you can learn if you learn jiu jitsu yes of course because a meta form for life you know this is the same situation you have to be calm enough and breathe and put your hand and start working leverage instead brutality same thing in life you get any any any problems you have to have the same articulated mindset to just survive or escape or or control whatever it is it's all about making quick changes and start to become focused and the purpose you know i'm going to read one last little section from the book we're almost at what we are three hours right now so i'm going to want read one little last section from the book goes fast when we enjoy it does i could sit here all day you say this on my best day now i'm only five percent of what i once was as a fighter however my invisible power transcends my physicality and will be part of me until the day i die that is why for me jiu jitsu is about much more than fighting it is a tool to teach people about themselves it is great to see it become so popular and provide lucrative businesses for so many but this has nothing to do with what i teach of my students 98 trained two or three days a week trying to perfect basic techniques and then testing them on a level playing field helping my students try to become better people not just smashing machines is what motivates me jiu jitsu is my philosophy my sacred honor and my family tradition it has made me strong enough to forgive and confident enough to fight for my beliefs just uh just outstanding um jiu jitsu is life yes so before you before you go um once again this book is called breathe a life in flow it's by hicks and gracie with peter mcguire who's actually become a friend of mine and i know he's a friend of yours and a great guy a surfer a jiu jitsu practitioner yes a a scholar yes so i look forward to working with him some more um so the way that you're spreading the word now you have hixson.academy yes that's where you do online training i watch some of the videos you're gonna get people are gonna get such good details out of what you're saying um sometimes i think it'd be impossible for someone to explain how you put pressure and how you how you stabilize hips and how you move hips and but when you watch those videos you start to understand you do have the ability to explain what you're doing yes because jiu-jitsu is about feeling it's not about seeing or understanding you have to feel and i like to approach jiu-jitsu in i have to make you feel when you relax when you just about angles just about details invisible details who translates in a deep effectiveness so i don't start to seeking to you show me what you have i try to make you i try to take you off your elements okay relax and put you in a way for you to understand and feel the week's vision the vision of the weak one into the approach because if you feel like you can fight as a weak person imagine if you put the muscles you have on if i turn if i change around and start you using exporting the muscles you have on you may never gonna perceive the the depth of what i want to show you so my father always say when he's training somebody said hey man stop stop you too dance be relaxed loosen up if i'm not i cannot fight because he was just seeking to give you the information which goes into your gut feeling you say wow i never felt like that difference can change so much and effectiveness and by feeling that you start to feel like it's a different element to be added to whatever you have if you're strong if you're fast if you if you compare all this are qualities personal qualities but the the the depth of the knowledge we try to pass to you transcends all this so you're able to not only explain for a weak person but to also to in case somebody with 300 pounds solid muscle can you have the chance to deal with them in a different natural comfortable situation so it's amazing how much that kind of sensorial feeling can add to your capacity to mental capacity to your spiritual capacity and to also to your physicality so that's that's hixon academy hicks and dot academy is how you get there um great stuff on there you have you have hixsonggracy.com it's sort of where you can uh buy you can read some history stuff but you got a store on there uh and then on facebook you're hixing at hicks and gracie and on instagram which you have a bunch of cool little clips on instagram too and that's uh hicks and gracie jj yes echo you got anything i have many things but in the sake of in the spirit of saving some time i have one question so you know what uh the first ufc one nature when horian chose hois yes did he did he tell you why he chose hoist rather than you yeah his answer was i want to put voice because in case something happened with him we always have a better a big a bigger bullet to put it on so but in reality was he has control over voice did he did have control over me i was already working on pico boulevard i was already my own you know have my own school okay so in order for him to have control of of of not only the fighter in there but still with the best brand was better for him to have voice gotcha they they said that um i think might have been like in the documentary or whatever they were like he wanted to kind of display jiu-jitsu with someone who was like uh less physical less you know big or whatever that way it would display jiu jitsu a little bit better because like if you went in and you're like this more athletic guy they were like oh well he's more of an athlete so it doesn't really highlight the jiu jitsu part of it yeah i disagree with that because for me and between me and him are only 10 pounds difference so i felt like he was able to even even the first payment for for the ufc he hold i supposed to get a 50 000 check and i supposed to get 5 000 from oysters i still waiting because he didn't pay voice he didn't pay hoist didn't pay me so was just pure love for us and he was a businessman so he knows better what he's doing so i kind of disagree with that statement if he heist was smaller and look fragile i swear stuff too i've trained with voice he's not small and he's not fragile that's for damn sure yeah yes thank you pleasure brother hicks and any closing thoughts man first thank you you are such an inspiring warrior and having you know you helping me on the book and and get me on your podcast is already a blast second man i feel like we are in the same business of empowerment you know you you bringing your knowledge your expertise to help people in terms of understand pressure understand discomfort to understand victory understand you know bravery and i'm in the same business which empowers people and give them better chances to handle life which is not easy those days so it's a pleasure to talk to you it's a pleasure to see the energy which is similar and we are in the same mode of supporting the future generations you know with your expertise with my expertise so it's just a great day on the office and happy to say you know this book maybe help a lot of people and this book is just the idea my is my personal life is not something which has the intention to make you copy or or be what what is in the book but create something creates a venue for different discussions creates a venue for different seminars different speeches and and everything coming from that because in essence we all need to use more love in our hearts we all need to use more techniques to victory you know nothing comes for lucky nothing is just uh act of god i feel like you have to represent yourself in terms of have god be inside you and bringing the best service to make people get beneficial benefits from it so thank you chu well uh thank you thanks to your whole family uh i guess especially your uncle and and to your father yes uh who created this incredible martial art brought it to the world and and like you've been saying it's not just it's not just to help people fight better but actually to live better and it's had such a huge impact on my life and i i i can say without hesitation that my life would not be even close to where it is if it wasn't for you for your family and for jiu jitsu so it's an honor to know you it's an honor to talk to you and i will continue to do my best to spread the art that your family and you taught to me thank you my brother thank you echo thank you perfect thank you appreciate it thank you and with that hicks and gracie has left the building only after he did spend a few minutes talking about invisible jiu-jitsu and you know showing me some stuff yeah were you you you were hit did you hit recorder were you you videoed a little that a little bit yeah yeah it's weird he so he talks about this thing called invisible jiu-jitsu which we didn't really talk about today but it's a thing and i know it's a thing because you know when you're showing a move like let's say i'm showing a move with you and i'm talking to so i'm using you as a dummy and i'm talking to the group of students right and i say well you can't really see what i'm doing here to the students but i'm like echo do you feel this and i it feels one way and then i go now feel this and no one can tell anything different but you go yeah it feels a lot heavier it feels a lot like i'm off balance or feels a lot more stable so there's things in jiu jitsu that are invisible and obviously the hardest thing to teach well hixson that's sort of hixson's thing yeah is he's got the these things that you cannot see but they're real they're invisible but they're real and and like i was trying to explain he talks about some of those on on hickson dot academy he starts to go into details of those things and he can explain it yeah so and just when he was explaining it to me and [ __ ] and i will say you know he's doing it to me and i'm like well that is freaking awesome yeah right yeah and jiu-jitsu is so dynamic even if you don't see it where doing it versus not doing it is night and day when you're in there you know so like even like the the thing was where you you're essentially controlling your base right you controlling your base versus not controlling your base in that way when you go up against somebody and they have to contend with you controlling your base in that way versus not is going to be a completely different scenario for them different experiences when i grabbed the single on him yeah and he was like you know go ahead and i started like trying to get a little little uppity with that thing and i couldn't move him and i was you know i'm starting to think i'm i i'm actually i mean we did it for 20 seconds right and i in my mind i was like i'm working right now that's what i was thinking i was like i'm working i'm trying to pull this thing and he's not working he's just he's just using invisible jiu-jitsu versus me and it's it's gonna wear me out oh yeah and you can't even see it but you before you came in when he started he you could see he kind of wanted to show me some stuff and he goes he goes stand here and you know start with it and um he's just like stand here and he started doing like some basic self-defense with me and i was like okay you know cool you know i'm thinking of course what am i thinking i'm arrogant i have a big ego right i gotta know this and he goes okay now do this and i was like okay and he's basically he pushes me and i like immediately get my base right you know my put my foot back again into a fight stance he goes okay well that's okay right and he says now do this and he teaches me a little invisible jitsu and he now he pushes me again and i don't go anywhere right that's the jiu jitsu so awesome to have hixon on uh speaking of jiu jitsu we're training jiu jitsu if you're not training jiu jitsu obviously start training jiu jitsu and when you do that guess what you're going to need supplements oh look at you yeah yeah it does rock and roll it does help he did talk about two uh actually i'm not even sure if he talked about it on air where you know when you a lot of people start jiu jitsu and then they they stop jiu jit then they stop because in one of the elements one of them is that they jump into the competitive part of it go to war yeah the war and not even necessarily voluntarily like they'll get they'll get thrown oh yeah we're sparring right now ghost just go spar and then they'll come across someone who's you know intense or whatever and a lot of times you just become intense just because of the unfamiliar nature with what you're doing because you're a human being it's being escalated on and you're going to escalate back and the ego and the whole nine yards you know it's level seven war yeah and then just but just even before it gets toward just that stress it's like some people they don't want that beef right away yeah even if some people they don't want that beef they just they want to learn they want to learn and you know have kind of a stress-free learning kind of experience but that's part that's part i never really thought about you know because i think we kind of go in down for that beef you know i i mentioned surfing as a comparison i'm like hey if you're going to start surfing and i take you to mavericks yeah which is scary rocks cold water sharks giant waves you're not even gonna get in the water bro yeah you're literally not gonna get in the water and i think that's the way a lot of people unfortunately view jiu-jitsu and they're kind of right because if you go to a lot of schools guess what's happening day one you're in the big water in the deep water in the cold water with sharks yeah and you're getting bit just kind of left yeah you know it's a so that man i i wish i would think about that a little bit more yeah it's definitely something to think about but it is good form of exercise which is important exercise in all capacities very important and yes we do need supplementation from time to time i think if it's part of your routine you're gonna be you're gonna reap way more benefits over time short and long long term by the way so jocko supplements are jocko fuel let's start with the energy drinks and that's what it is discipline go real energy yep had one today by the way actually i've been having one currently kind of down right now pretty much every day mm-hmm you don't have to drink one every day but that's just happened since whatever you can yeah some new flavors out watermelon and mango passion fruit mango passion fruit's the best flavor according to some people yeah well factually i think i'm pretty sure if actually is the best flavor so yeah if you're not if you didn't uh know that travis mills might have something to say about that you know i yeah i would expect that to be the case he might he might have to open a can of what basketball is watermelon i anticipate that being the case yes nonetheless he has new flavors so yes chuck check those out let me know what you think the mango one good reviews so far anyway yes healthy energy drinks that's echo's thing that's echoes flavor by the way so everybody knows all good it's not a bi it's it's not an unbiased judgment it's his flavor his signature flavor like i said factual nonetheless all healthy all good no bad drink a bunch of them and you'll be bet literally better off be a better be a better person we also got joint warfare look you're doing jiu jitsu you're lifting you're running your joints are going to take a little bit of abuse joint warfare krill oil you can just go on to those just get on them just get on them and don't look back and if you have to look back you'll be looking back at sore joints so don't and by the way so if you want to get on them and say on them subscribe yeah so go to jockofield.com order them subscribe to them and then shipping's free you'll get it for you get the stuff shipped to you for free you won't have the mental lapse like some people used to in the podcast used to have where they would forget to order don't let that happen to you uh disciplined powder we got vitamin d3 and cold water those are also just just sort of staples of life yeah right staples of life you're not getting enough d vitamin d it's not happening get it the proper way yeah it's one of those things too where you get in the routine you got the subscription all that is it's just part of the routine you don't have to worry about those effects anymore that's the big one you don't notice it but it's better to not notice it than to notice when you don't notice it in a good way you're not like damn my knee hurts damn my elbow hurts you're just going damn i'm looking forward to training today yes exactly that's what you're getting yeah that's true if you need a little extra protein get yourself some mulch i ate two ribeye steaks last night for dinner that's good and i'm all i'm gonna say and and it was a triple monk so here this is this is an is not a normal thing for me but i went like you know start to i was on fast and what do we call it when you you don't mean to fast incidental fast what it was yeah then it was like man i f incidental fasting it was getting kind of late i was like man i didn't eat anything today so i'm just eating one time essentially and it's gonna be big i'm gonna gotta go big so yeah two rib eyes brown rice how big are the rib eyes the regular size one okay so those are big yeah they're big they're not those thick thick monsters but not the thing regular i have an image yes sir we're talking probably 14 to 16 ounces you know probably about a pound yep that's like a regular ribeye it is a very normal person yes because my rib eyes are those thick ones yeah the thick ones are good too but bro you think i'm gonna eat two of those i don't know you know i'd have to be pretty hungry put it that way but then the trip what's a triple mulch you said it was a triple mulch three scoops okay two big fats in fact it was so big the milk was so big like my stomach was getting like way too big but it was tasting good so i pounded it but i didn't mix it with regular malt milk half milk half almonds see that's the thing with the banana thing and i gotta say you know people like think i'm closed-minded about you know nutrition or i'm closed-minded about my habits because i am a very habitual person but these things that have recently been introduced to me coconut milk uh almond milk oat milk like i've been trying these other milks and what's nice about them is if if you get that little lactose i'm not lactose intolerant like strictly but if i drink a whole bunch of milk let's face it we're not feeling great it might have some effects yeah so you mix up the milk with the almond milk or the coconut milk or whatever kind of other milk that's out there you're you don't know you don't really know the difference it still just tastes like a freaking dream yes so the the almond milk obviously there's a plethora of different types of almond milk sweet sweet bark milk or whatever exactly the particular one i did was the unsweetened it's super like milk to me does doesn't taste sweet at all milk is not sweet but apparently it is because unsweetened almond milk is like whoa like you can taste the unsweetened goodness of it so i did a half and half and but with the milk and the banana boom you're good oh yeah 100 disappear it was essentially a dessert mm-hmm an additional there was like a thousand grams you ate so much protein yeah though why can't you train today uh i have some prior engagements okay but why can't you train today well maybe if it was later like it may be like five okay why can't you drink today it was bumped out of the stuff all right so we realized we trained hot i mean i don't know if you thought it was hard but you know okay you know when you get into like a routine working out training you don't feel doms as much you don't feel like every once in a while like i'll have one with greg yeah and yesterday was was actually kind of intense one with you where the next day like today when i woke up i was like you had full body dogs full body like like i got hit by a truck like you've been rolled over you did essentially you know what it was it was that choke that i was trying to defend that you didn't have sunk in but you had it tight you know that kind of stuff so you feel like oh i can defend but i'm gonna take some heavies on this and i'm like defending trying to build that and then at the end it's like all right it did you know what's bad about your choke i'm just gonna say so your choke sinks in and it's tight but you know how most people when they sink in a submission that's not all the way sunk in and you feel them like pushing hard you fee after a few seconds you feel them let up a little bit for some kind of adjustment you know or maybe because you know you can't keep that intensity on the the application for that long you know so you feel them loosen up a little bit and maybe adjust and then go for it again or whatever right yours just gets tight like harder and harder like it's like your joke doesn't even get tired i'm like oh my god i'm resisting it resistant and then yeah for whatever finally i get choked so i tap and then like i'm paying this price for it even after i tap and then i think he choked me like again too anyway so i'm like all right cool and after you train you're all loose and you know warm and stuff so about next day which is today by the way hurting okay but we got a train all right well i'm gonna go train all right so any of this stuff you can get it you can get it at the vitamin shop you can get it you can get the drinks at wawa yes wawa's fully sp in full support go get your wawa get yourself a hoagie a shorty from wawa and a discipline yeah and a discipline go and um and also jockofield.com like i said subscribe we know shipping can be a pain but if you subscribe you don't even have to worry about it it's just coming for free so that's that also we were talking about jujitsu today and also at origin originusa.com get yourself a jiu jitsu gui just go get one you know hixson was talking about like oh we were had geez before we had diapers go look at pictures of like the the gracie family when they're little they're all we're just wearing these that's true it's funny because i joke about like hey you can't just wear a ghee around apparently yeah if it's 19 whatever 1965 and you're in the gracie family you are wearing mickey you are wearing a ghee we're wearing it to the beach where we're in the market we're wearing it wherever yeah yeah that that's that's fine like all those i got kind of fired up for that like i'm thinking about wearing a ghee more often in more regular situations just representing jiu jitsu it's crazy the whole comprehensive psychological approach that they had because they every once in a while you'll hear about like hoyler would tell us about it where he'd be like yeah if you know if you lose your first tournament you get 20 bucks if you win you only get 10 kind of a thing it's like huh that's some weird psychology not weird but that's some like intense psychology like they're thinking it's not like they're just throwing people in and do jujitsu because you have to your name is crazy it's like there's this whole kind of thing so every once in a while those details or whatever this it's real interesting that's that's interesting they were so used to it just like yeah you just wear the ghee that's just wearing the ghee yeah i'm kind of pissed off at myself that my kids just weren't wearing a ghee to school when they were seven years old what are you doing jiu jitsu back away so if you want any of this jiu jitsu stuff or if you want to get jeans if you decide maybe you're not ready to wear ghee all the time like i'm deciding right now if you're not ready for that cool it's cool get yourself some jeans get yourself some boots get yourself some t-shirts origin usa.com and the usa part isn't just like oh it's origin usa we're calling it usa no it's cause it's made in america which by the way is not no is it is no small feat yes we are making everything in america even the clay even the copper rivets on your jeans are made in america the copper is from america the cotton is from america some people call it cotton yeah yeah of course you know what i'm talking about so originusa.com go check it out go support america and support jiu jitsu and yourself what else is the right way also jocko is a store it's called jocko store this is where you can get your t-shirts hoodies hats with discipline equals freedom good the attitude hey someone's talking about the attitude of good you saw it in there yeah right yeah 100 oh yeah so yeah in the toughest of situations oh yeah one of them men yeah yeah to the nth degree yeah in my opinion the um but yeah you can get uh again apparel all this stuff got some shorts on there good stuff on there we also have a a subscription scenario called the shirt locker different designs more artistic sometimes more clever sometimes i don't know it's hard to explain they're cool go in there check it out jackalstore.com if you like something and get something you can subscribe to this podcast if you haven't yet if you haven't yet i don't even know if you should maybe you should just back away from itunes and and spotify do you know that there's a name for people who uh who watch videos or listen to podcasts but don't subscribe what's the name ninja ninja watchers or ninjas they just stealth yeah like they'll come they'll come you know whatever i don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing i mean it's good if you're not looking to support we also could call them what we could call them freeloaders freeloaders yeah but it's all free so i don't know that that might not be as accurate it's not asking it's not asking much just to click that subscribe right it's not like you're like hey you know give me your first born child i'm gonna be honest with you though straight up i don't even know what subscribing like does for like uh for the podcast like i know what it does for the person subscribing i do it it's on your feed you get the thing that's all it's benefits for sure if you're down for if that's a podcast you want to listen to but like why do you care if someone subscribes i'll tell you exactly why i care you won't know why i care listen we make this podcast to help people out if someone subscribes to the podcast if you whoever's listening right now subscribes to the podcast that makes the podcast when it gets downloaded when you download it when you listen to it it makes the podcast more popular the more popular the podcast is the higher it goes in the ranking of podcasts the higher it goes in the ranking of podcasts the more it gets promoted inside the various podcast platforms the more it gets promoted inside the various podcast platforms someone that doesn't know about the podcast goes i wonder what that's about seems popular a lot of people listen to it they click on it they listen to it next thing you know they're learning about leadership they're learning about how to overcome loss they're learning about what's doing a breakup they're learning about jiu jitsu so you're not just helping yourself you're not i mean look like you said does it benefit us directly or oh yeah you echo doesn't send me a text going uh hey you know our podcast is ranked number three you're not doing that no but if it broadens the people that get to hear this information that's why it's important important yeah i guess i never really thought of the whole chain and that's assuming that it does in fact get you higher in the rankings oh it it definitely does definitely assume it does yeah because i mean the rankings are based on download so if you subscribe to it it gets downloaded if you and two of your friends do it that's three that's true but can't you download it without subscribing though and you know what else is weird i forgot to ask hixon this let's face it the gracies could have just held on to all their knowledge right yeah right oh yeah and just be dominating the jiu mma world right now not to not open any schools just keep it hidden keep it secret it's true and other people would try and figure it out but it's different different right way different yeah it's but the right thing to do and their art has progressed more because they opened it up and gave it to the world that's all we're trying to do too so you're just asking to subscribe is to receive essentially no way no to subscribe is to help it's to help other people learn it's to help this mentality so that way when you go get a job at some new office there's people that are like hey nice to meet you their ego is in check they're looking to cover and move and that you're able to function better and the world gets becomes a better place so you guys um in the teams what do what's the expression pass the word spread the word pass the word spread the word right yep pass the word so we're all on the same page we're all doing it you're making the whole place a better place so like i was saying subscribe don't forget about we have jocko unraveling podcasts that i do with my brother daryl cooper dc who also has a podcast called margaret made a grounded podcast which is about jiu jitsu i guess we just kind of did a digital podcast in a way a warrior kid podcast as well for the kids out there we also have jocko underground.com where we have a little alternative podcast we do some some expanded topics we go into some detail we do a lot of q a that people can ask questions directly if you're a member of jockowunderground.com you got to pay to be a member well actually technically you don't have to pay look we request you pay eight dollars and 18 cents a month to be a part of that subscription but if you can't afford it it's cool we still want you to be in the game we still want you to have this knowledge you email assistants at jockleunderground.com and the reason we have that is because look these tech platforms are very large and very powerful powerful and they actually have the power to insert advertisements into our podcast they have the ability to edit or remove or whatever ban us i'm not gonna mention the podcast name but it's one that's kind of in our network i know here's the thing i in fact i maybe shouldn't even say this but i don't know the thing is it was randomly removed it's just removed yeah from only one specific platform too by the way and i noticed the title of it i was like oh that could be a controversial title yeah so we don't want to have any of these platforms to have final say on what we're doing so we made the jocko jocko underground.com and if you want to help us out with that alternative platform if we ever have to leave these platforms we have a place to land and we appreciate the support that we have a youtube channel where i am the assistant director to many of the superior and amazing videos that's real fun that's been catching on that you're the assistant director what's funny about it it's just you know what's funny about it is what's really funny about us is that we joke about it yeah but what's really funny is you know it ain't funny it's kind of true because you know occasionally yeah you got some good input you do i do the shot so go to go to youtube and subscribe to jocko podcast also origin origin usa has a podcast channel let's put if you want to know what's going on up in maine yeah yeah go check that one that's a good one to stay to stay like kind of in the game as far as like hey this is what like legitimate almost in a way redefined american manufacturing yeah it is a unique one because of like the culture of all them and peed and like all them yeah it's cool to know what's going on too right like you order those boots you can see who made it oh yeah you can see the thing about that you go to a regular store and buy a pair of jeans you have no idea what you know starving person in a sweat shop in china yeah you you don't know right you know that they got paid 13 cents for their week's worth of work like slave labor yeah or you can actually go to origin usa and see the people that are making your stuff and see what they're doing and get in the game it's freaking legit main ties up there doing it yeah doing great work up there also psychological warfare if you're having moments of weakness like i used to not anymore all right maybe i do sometimes but if you have those you you want to skip the workout you have a workout planned and then all of a sudden you're like hey man maybe today would be best to rest but you know that deep down that that's just you being lazy or not in the mood and being weak or whatever psychological warfare he got jocko helping you through those moments successfully it's a little album with track so get that wherever you purchase mp3s it's a good one and if you want some cool stuff to hang on your wall to keep you on the path go to flipsidecanvas.com dakota meyer he has that company and they're making cool graphical things images to put on your wall which is cool books got a bunch of books hey this book right here breathe a life in flow by hicks and grace you just heard from him there's so much more information that i didn't cover i wrote the ford what an honor i read a little bit of the ford there's a quite a bit more to the forward to explain some of these things about jiu-jitsu what impact it had on me so get the book breathe by hicks and gracie and and peter maguire another awesome guy that helped help them write that book final spin let's face it we don't know what's going to happen with final spin people are unsure what final spin even is is it a book is it a novel is it a poem is it a story is it a manuscript we don't know what it is literature literature there's no one that's going to try and pin it down i i think it will create its own form of literature you're going to want that first to dish so pre-order that right now the the you know that the publishers are like well you know my publisher hears this and they talk to me about it so so i need to do it more leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocol displays freedom field manual way the warrior kid one two three and four miking the dragons about faced by hackworth extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership these are all the books i've written thus far check them out i have a leadership consultant consulting company where we solve problems through leadership go to echelonfront.com if you want to get some of that we have extreme ownership academy it's an online leadership training academy i'm there two three times a week answering your questions so if you want to talk to me you want to give me a scenario that you're in that you need help in go to extremeownership.com join the academy we also have some live events the next one is the muster in phoenix august 17th and 18th coming up then it's going to be las vegas october 28th and 29th check out extremeownership.com no actually go to echelonfront.com and go to events for that all these things have sold out in the past these are going to sell out too so check them out and if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org and if you want to get engaged with hicks and gracie once again hixson.academy is where you can learn his invisible jiu jitsu hixsongracy.com he's got a bunch of information on there as well and he's on facebook at hixson gracie and he is on instagram at hicks and gracie jj and by the way hixon is spelled with an r in case you're wondering that's the portuguese brazilian portuguese pronunciation and if you happen to want more of my prolonged pontification or you need more of echoes obtuse or rating it's not obtuse if you want more of echoes obtuse or rating you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on instagram which echo only calls the gram and on that facebook charles i am at jacqueline willing and thanks once again to hicks and gracie and the gracie family for giving us all the gift of jiu jitsu and also thanks the gracie family i didn't mention this but they've spent a lot of time teaching our military the art of jiu jitsu many of the gracies have worked with the military over the years to improve our operational capability it is much appreciated and to those military folks that have taken those skills and used them to protect us overseas we thank you for that and the gracie family has also helped much of law enforcement and we hope that law enforcement further embraces jiu-jitsu as a highly beneficial thing that will help them in every aspect of what they do so thanks the gracie family for that and also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders who put those skills to work to protect us here on the home front and now everyone else out there please no matter who you are no matter what you do no matter what you think no matter where you're from or where you are do me and yourself a favor and go train jiu jitsu it will make you healthier smarter stronger more confident more aware i mean i could go on but suffice to say it will make you a better person so go out there and get after it and until next time this is echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 542,531

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: mt_8doJ6M4k

Length: 221min 1sec (13261 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DenverStud]

Absolute legend. Will definitely be listening to this one when I have the chance

[u/Sort_of_Frightening]

Rickson/Hugo Duarte fight on the beach mentioned in the episode

[u/revmhj]

When I saw who the interview was this morning I was glad I was alone in my car because I emitted a sound of excitement that would have been embarrassing in front of another human. As soon as he got to the "you do a good job staying calm in bad positions. That is an important thing" all I could think was "If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things."

If you can stay calm in bad interactions with people or bad life situations, you can make better decisions.

[u/danlson381]

Pretty solid episode.

[u/justbarelymadeit]

Jocko's been knocking it out of the park lately with the guests he's had on!

[u/tom_tam123]

Hmm.. Only an hour in.. very cool, but there is the usual Gracie mythmaking.. Like discounting what they learned from Maeda, exaggerating opponents' sizes. And I don't get the connection between warrior mindset, willing to die, and BJJ. NHB or at least MMA, yeah I get that..

Edit: it gets worse when he talks about single handedly bringing Samurai spirit back to Japan.. he has QUITE an ego

[u/whostolemyscreenname]

Jocko is now Joe Co in my inner voice.