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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing,
and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Jujitsu Blackbelt and instructor Charles Harriot.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Charles's parents immigration story from Jamaica,
his journey into the martial arts, American Kempo, kit boxing, his journey into Jujitsu,
the paradigm shift he had from student to teacher, his leap of faith out of the corporate world, traveling and so much more.
Now before we get to this amazing conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
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So with that being said, I introduce to you Charles Harriot. Enjoy.
Well Charles, I want to firstly say thank you so much for taking the time.
We just did some rolling here in BJJ Swamp Academy in Gainesville.
So I want to thank you firstly for all the times that you've helped me during this.
Last time we rolled you were telling me about being staying attached to your partner.
So everything that you tell me, I promise you does stay in.
And secondly for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
No problem at all.
So I don't know a whole lot about your early life.
So I would love to start at the very beginning.
We'll walk through your journey into martial arts, your career side,
and then the kind of wonderlust element that combined with Jiu Jitsu.
So let's start at the very beginning.
Where were you born? And tell me a little bit about your family dynamic.
What your parents did, how many siblings?
I was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Both my parents are naturalized American citizens from Jamaica.
And so I was born in Fort Lauderdale.
I have two sisters. So my elder sister is four years older than me.
And my younger sister is two years younger than me.
And when I was three turning four, my parents had the brilliant idea of taking me to see the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie,
the live action movie. And I fell in love with that.
And I was doing really crappy cartwheels down the movie theater walkway.
And I told my parents that I wanted to be a ninja.
And my father found a Taekwondo instructor who was teaching lessons out of his garage and enrolled me in there.
And that was the beginning of my martial arts journey when I was like about to turn four.
It was like right before my fourth birthday.
And I was in a garage throwing really bad kicks and punches and thinking that I was a ninja.
And I used to wear my headband because the karate kid had the headband.
I used to wear, I was like, you did not have to wear a headband.
I was like the only kid in class, I want to wear the headband.
So like that was the beginning.
And then fast forward two years after that, unfortunately my father passed away.
And quickly I was kind of thrust in this position where like family members were letting me know that I was like the man of the house and all of this and that.
And the only kind of other father figure I had in my life at that point was my Taekwondo instructor.
And we returned from the funeral in Jamaica to find out that he has sold the school because he has just gotten married and his new wife has told him he needs to get a real job.
So he sold the school and became a prison guard.
I don't ever know what happened to him. I haven't talked to him since then.
But he was really nice. He came along, my mom, him and the new owner of the school to talk to me and like kind of convinced me not to quit.
And because it wasn't even Taekwondo, it was a karate instructor who took over the gym.
And I was really like sad and upset about the whole thing.
And they convinced me to stay and I ended up staying doing that.
The style of karate they did was called American Kempo.
So from age six all the way through when I graduated high school at 17, I did that.
Along the way in that process I played school sports, did normal stuff, was a pretty like I guess if I wasn't an athlete I definitely would have been considered a nerd.
So I kind of got away with not getting as much of the nerd stigma because I also played sports.
But academically I was very studious so to speak because my Jamaican culture, what you hear about Jamaican culture is a lot of like Reggae and Bob Marley and Rastas and stuff.
But like a heavy part of the Jamaican immigrant culture in America is an obsession with academics.
My parents were very, very much pushers of like we'll support you whatever you want to do but you got to do your school and you got to take it seriously.
And anything that you do in life try to make sure that you're not just the best that you're like 10 times better than the next guy.
That was the ethos of my household. Just we'll support you, just give it your best.
And so I kind of was very heavy into my academics but I also was heavy still into the martial arts because it was the one constant in my life.
And so at the age of 13 I became an instructor at that gym.
I got to like assist teaching classes and teach some karate classes up through my teens and I loved doing that.
And teaching in general was always something that I loved. I tutored some of the other kids in school because it just always kind of came easy to me.
And then from there on I ended up going to university. But I don't know if you want my entire like granular life story leads. I'm going kind of heavy into this.
Yeah, no, actually I like going heavy but let's go back for a second. I'm obviously an immigrant to this country.
Your parents coming from Jamaica when for example Jamaicans made it to England on the wind rush that was somewhat negative chapter of British history.
They weren't received very well. Now you go to London for example, there's beautiful Caribbean culture all over the place.
What was their immigration experience? I mean obviously you lost your dad early but did your mom's story tell about either the pros or the cons?
It was a mixed bag. I guess something that could speak to that is the fact that if you listen to me speaking, right, I don't have a Jamaican accent.
I don't speak Patois. That's partially because my mother and father found that because they had accents it was harder to find work.
Because they were seen as foreign. They weren't like there was definitely stories of discrimination and things that happened to them.
It was the 70s when they got here. So not it wasn't like it was the 40s but it's also not 2023 either.
So but that's part of why my mother was very heavy on you just speak properly. You need to conduct yourself with dignity and respect.
It was a very big piece of it. I would say that there were definitely areas like the same way how like you said in London there's areas that kind of became Caribbean areas.
The same is true in the US but my parents chose my father was a professional tennis player in Jamaica and was obsessed with tennis.
So that's why I ended up. We ended up right outside of a city called Boca Raton, Florida in Palm Beach.
And the reason we ended up there is because he was obsessed with tennis and he was scouting around places to move because they first moved into Miami.
And they actually had someone break into their house and they were like we can't keep living here with this crime. We need to move north.
And so they were looking at various areas and they found there is just a wealth of tennis courts in Boca Raton, Florida.
And they found a house that had a tennis court in the community and for him that was that was it.
And so they ended up moving into Boca Raton horribly shortly before he passed away.
My elder sister was being taught tennis. She's the eldest and I was being taught tennis as well.
I was at that kind of young do whatever your other sibling copycat phase and she is she got into an argument with my father one day and decided that she was done playing tennis.
And I was next to her and I remember there was some show coming on a Nickelodeon that in the back of my head I was like I want to go watch this show.
And so when she quit I was like I quit too. I want to go home and watch my show.
Not realizing like how big of a deal would be because like I know now being a grown man and like having my passions and obviously one day one to share them with my kids.
Like I probably broke his heart. He brought us home and went to my mom was like they're not my kids. They don't want to play tennis.
I never took it personally anything but it's one of those things I remember because ironically my younger sister was too young to be taught tennis by my father and she ended up being the only one of us that went on and actually played tennis in high school and was actually quite good at tennis.
Because she was going through and she's like how come you know Charles and Melissa have tennis rackets and I don't.
And so then she ended up becoming a pretty good tennis player ironically enough.
But I would say there was the situation which I think is very true.
I had no idea that there was the stereotype of I guess kind of Jamaican industriousness because shortly if I fast forward the story a little bit after I had graduated college I ended up in a situation where I had three jobs and one of my coworkers at one of my jobs was like wow you're really doubling down on this Jamaican thing.
I'm like what are you talking about.
I was like yeah every Jamaican that I've met has like three four jobs for some reason. I had no idea because it wasn't a stereotype that I had learned from my family that like there was a stereotype about being Jamaican and having lots of jobs.
And so that I guess kind of hardworking ethos was something that definitely got passed through to me because I knew growing up in America that for example everyone always asked me where I was from even though I was born here.
And I would say Florida and they'd be like yeah yeah but where are you from.
Like from here.
But I also know that there would be cultural things where like just even with the types of food that I ate growing up. And so I think I also kind of ended up having an affinity towards a lot of the other Caribbean immigrant populations that were in my area because where I grew up there wasn't that many other Jamaicans but there's a lot of Spanish speaking people a lot of Venezuelans a lot of Colombians Dominicans Puerto Ricans you name it.
And most of the people that I ended up making close friends with growing up even that some of my friends that were from Guyana Trinidad like were not Jamaican because there just weren't that many Jamaicans in my area.
My family friends were Jamaican who were usually down in Cooper City Pembroke Pines area about an hour south of where I lived and we'd go see them because my mother's office was where she worked.
But I always kind of had an affinity because I go over their house and I'd be like oh we plantains they plantains they call it platinum but like it's the same food or like rice and beans like the flavoring was close to my family and that was more familiar whereas I went over my other friends houses who were from you know kind of more traditionally American houses like just the food was very different.
Like it's and my mom didn't just make Jamaican food she made Italian food she made Mexican food my mom was a really good cook so because of the culture she really believed in home cooked meals so every day even though my mother was working hard because she's a single mom and my grandmother had moved in and was working hard.
There was a home cooked meal and so I was I had the culture shock when I went over some friends houses where like their normal meal was Chef Boyardee or Kid Cruising Microwave Meals and I was just confused because Boca Raton Florida is a very affluent area and my family was not very affluent.
We weren't poor by any means but we were not mansion rich and some of the people at the school I was raised in were mansion rich because I was lucky enough that when I was very young I took some sort of aptitude test and I scored very highly and I ended up getting some partial scholarship to this very prestigious school called Boca Raton Christian School.
And so it was a very kind of ritzy school very great quality education that I was getting but most of the other people that were at that school were either from you know very very wealthy families or they were children of the teachers at the school because one of the perks of being a teacher at the school was that your children got to go there for free.
So the only people in my kind of socioeconomic status at the school were the children of the other teachers there or other people in my situation where they had some sort of a scholarship.
And so when I went over their houses it was very very culturally different and so I knew that my family had a different culture and that we were different but I also knew at the same time that like I wasn't fully Jamaican because whenever I went to Jamaica a few times a child I would meet my cousins in Jamaica and people who were raised in Jamaican culture of that era.
Okay well I'm not Jamaican like they are. I can't speak Patois. I get made fun of. I get told I sound Irish when I try and speak Patois. And so like I'm not that but like here in America at the same time like when I'm in America I'm not American.
I'm something else but when I leave America I get to be American. I remember I first felt that as a kid and it got reinforced as I began to travel later as an adult which was the feeling of like it's kind of funny that I'm most considered most American once I leave America.
I can actually relate to that. I mean I'm British born and bred till I was 27 then I started traveling and you know it took me around the world and then I lived in Japan for a while and we'll get to Osaka because that's where I lived.
And then obviously America but I spent some time in Australia and so now I've been here 20 I think it's 21 years now 22 and so to people here I sound English to people at home I sound American so I'm stuck in this limbo where as you said every time in the opposite country I sound like I'm from the where I just left but not when I'm actually in that country so it's an interesting kind of paradox.
Well the irony is now after the travel my accent has changed because now at this point I speak English I'm conversational in Spanish and I'm survival in like German and Japanese and a couple other languages just from the traveling.
But then also I did Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for all these years and most of my coaches were Brazilian and they have a certain way of speaking their English kind of singing.
If you ever had like a Brazilian coach that's from certain parts of Brazil they sing their English a little bit and I picked that up I realized that my I'm very very good at mirroring speech patterns.
So if I hang out with somebody who English is not their first language and I feel that I should be shifting my vocabulary so that I'm not speaking beyond what they what they know I'll start speaking broken English because I have some friends from travel some of my dearest friends like my friend Marius in Ireland.
He's Polish we moved to Ireland he has a very heavy Polish accent and he lives in Ireland and so the English that he's mirroring isn't even American English and so I hung out with him for a day and I'm speaking like him and my girlfriend will tease me just like who are you right now.
But because of all those times of kind of any or same thing when I taught English and in other places where English wasn't their first language whether it be Germany or Israel other spots I was told by the class like hey like we love your teaching but we need you to slow down.
You're speaking too fast for us to understand and the people who are having a hard time are too proud to tell you but I'm going to tell you I understand you but like some people here only speak English at Jiu Jitsu.
Once a week twice a week three times a week so they're not going to be able to absorb at that speed so I slowed my English down so then I come back to America and I start talking like Obama with a really long and drawn out pauses between what I'm saying so like.
You end up with having this kind of hodgepodge of speech patterns and so like I'm 100% a chameleon in that way when it comes to just understanding all right this is the the manner of speaking that's appropriate for this time and place.
Yeah it's amazing I mean I think the the enemy of prejudice is just traveling.
It's so true because there's some places that I've been that like when I was growing up were war zones right like I have got I've been lucky enough to get to go to Cambodia like it was a war zone when I was a kid I was learning about what's happening in Cambodia like there was a literal genocide going on or even like I went to Belgrade Serbia and I've met people from from Bosnia and like all these places that when I was a kid like.
On we watched on CNN like war is happening and it would be like well I would how could you go there it's not safe but I've I've obviously the words aren't hot right now in those places I've been there but like.
Anywhere on earth no matter how poor or bad that the TV convinces you it is there are people there living their lives day in and day out and at the same time when if you look at the stats like there's parts of America that are just as bad as the other countries.
Like there's parts of America that are just as bad as those areas that were worried about because I grew up in the time when like.
If you watch the TV long enough and it got late enough that those infomercials will come on it would be the African boy with the fly in his eye and for five cents a day or something ridiculous like that and that have you convinced that these parts of the world are just.
Every ounce of everyone is suffering at all times and we aren't you so happy and lucky that you were born and raised in America and I have to be happy and lucky that I was born and raised where I was my parents made the decision for having a better life that they were.
To leave the opportunities that they had before them in Jamaica to come to America due to what was going on politically at the time with Michael Manley and the shift of power in Jamaica and their attempts to.
Make the country communist the country didn't actually become communist but a lot of people left Jamaica and a lot of the intellectuals of Jamaica fled as you saw to England Canada and the US and so my parents made that decision to give me a better life.
And so I do appreciate that but traveling is also let me realize that like you can live a happy life most places on this earth but most places on this earth also have their problems right there's places.
Like there's places where you would think are less fortunate than America but if you get hit by a car and you survive that they will nurse you back to health and you're not bankrupt for the rest of your life afterwards.
Whereas in the US you get hit by a car you don't have insurance you're paying that hospital probably for the rest of your life.
Absolutely or cancer or.
Or even worse like the like being hit by car actually is significantly better if you get one of those diseases cancer or lupus or one of those things that you have to be inpatient for months and years on end and slowly die those.
So like every country that American has we have our health care problems we have our problems here but every country has the things that make me absolutely love them every country has things that are like.
A funny thing that made me fall like that I appreciate about America after traveling it's two things that I really appreciate America one I gained appreciation from going to Japan and one from going to continental Europe and these are both places they're beautiful I love Japan I love how clean it is I love how safe you are that there's virtually no stranger crime and I say no stranger crime because there is crime in Japan it's just very Japanese it's organized there's there's no other way to describe it.
There is crime in Japan and there is other parts of crime in Japan but generally speaking if I left my laptop on a train station platform which I did and I missed the train and I come back 10 minutes later it's still there no one stole my laptop.
That's amazing but.
There are no trash cans in public so if you want to throw something away you got to carry the trash with you home.
And throw it away that was isn't a big deal but as an American I'm accustomed to if I go and I have some ice cream or sandwich or whatever that I can just throw the trash away there and the fact that it's very hard to find trash cans in Japan is just mildly inconvenient but as an American I'm used to that.
Other thing is when I was in Netherlands and kind of a I wouldn't say fully suburban but not a truly urban area it was like not country but like not American suburban but like kind of residential area.
There's no bathroom.
And places that I'm accustomed to as an American hunting for bathrooms aren't successful like in America if I want to go to the bathroom I can go to a grocery store there will be a bathroom for me there.
I can go to the department store there will be a bathroom there I can go to a shopping center there's a plethora pretty much any place even a tire place any place that is selling some service in America we have public restaurants.
That are available to people and in Netherlands I went to a grocery store ran in circles no restroom.
I went to a shoe store no restroom.
You're pooping a boot.
To the point where like I and I'm looking like a crazy person like luckily I didn't have to poop I just had to pee but I'm still like looking very strange kind of holding my crotch walking around in the bathroom.
Because it just isn't a thing now mind you I was informed by my Dutch friends later as I planned it was before they're like hey hey Charles like go to a bar pubs have restrooms because people who drink alcohol have to pee a lot.
This is very logical it makes sense but that's not my go to I'm looking for a public restroom here in America I'm not going to a public restroom.
That's like the last place the most disgusting restrooms that you're going to find like I'm not going to a bar for this is these little differences and things I appreciate and they sound really small.
But I'm finding more and more like those those little things you enjoy are like some of my favorite things about about travel because there's certain things that I love about other places and places that I can then.
Appreciate about home I don't I've met people who leave America and then all they do is shit on America they're like ah it's so much better over here and they have those rose colored glasses about wherever they're visiting.
And I might have been that way a little bit the first time I traveled but then you realize you talk to people they're like they've got their own gripes like if you're there for a day they're just going to go to a bar and they're like.
They're going to show you what they're proud of in their town. Hang around a little longer. Everywhere has their problems I've yet to meet any place on earth I've been where everybody is like yeah this is great no problems at all.
A-OK because if that's the case you're you're not talking to everybody. These people that you're staying with might have a charmed life but there's usually a cost there's usually someone who's not OK.
I've had guests from all over the world people that spearheaded the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal prison superintendents from Finland I'm sorry from Norway educators from Finland all the all the people that are kind of at the forefront of what that comes to.
Yeah yeah yeah. So when you couple humility which is something that we struggle with in the U.S. because we'd say we're the best at everything. Yeah I think that we are great at some things and we definitely need to swallow our pride and learn from other people.
But if we take the best of each of the countries including the U.S. and we're the best at everything. Yeah I think that's the best thing about it.
ories and the U.S. and I think it's cool that we take the best of each of the choke takes us to the top. And I think that we are the
I think that we are great at some things and we definitely need to swallow our pride and learn from other people. But if we take the good of each of the countries including the US, yeah and we share it around the world.
and we share it around the world,
the rising tide of social ships.
I completely agree.
It's funny that you mentioned this
because those are some really amazing things, right?
Because that cool problem they had
that they didn't have enough people to fill those prisons
in the Scandinavian countries
and how they've proven that decriminalizing drug addiction
and treating it as an illness versus as a crime
has been like, Portugal has it imploded, right?
It's not anarchy, there's not fire in the streets.
It's the opposite.
It's better.
People are realizing, oh, this person is in pain.
They didn't decide one day that they wanna
be on the streets hooked on meth or heroin.
Something else messed up probably happened
and they unfortunately reached for the wrong release valve
to try and self-medicate and then things didn't work out.
100%.
Yeah.
So even if you think a bit financially,
if you take an addict and then you put them in prison,
you've taken someone who,
let's say that they're struggling,
so they're probably on welfare at some point,
in this example.
So they're using tax and then you put them into prison
where you're using tax.
But you take someone who's struggling with addiction
and you help them heal and they go back to work.
Now you've taken someone who was using tax
into someone who's paying tax.
So even if you don't care about humans, which you should,
fiscally, it makes sense that way too.
No, I like that you did that
because I'm always a big fan of that
because I know it's putting yourself outside of yourself
because as humans we tend to think
I have this set of morals, so does everybody.
But no, there's some people who care about the human fact
and they're very empathetic.
Other people are like, it's just brass tacks.
You need to have personal responsibility and blah, blah, blah.
We don't wanna make things, fine.
If we're just gonna be cold, heartless pragmatists,
it's not actually pragmatic to spend all of our money
putting everybody in isolation.
It's really, not to mention that the mental health
of the people, because anything that you do,
there's the mental health of the people that are imprisoned.
But then I know very few people who have taken up jobs
in the penitentiary having to be a prison guard
or prison warden or any of those things
who don't experience some mental and experiential damage
from being in that tense, conflicted, angry environment
all day, every day, day in and day out
where they're worried that the people around them
are fictitiously or actually out to get them
because you've deprived someone of their liberty
and freedom and mind you, these people have done crimes
to get in there, ostensibly, if they weren't wrongfully
convicted, but it's still an adversarial relationship
where there was definitely, if you go back just 20, 30 years
in this country, you could make something of yourself
in prison, you could learn to trade,
you could get a college degree.
There were all these programs that you came out
and didn't go back, which have unfortunately,
I think mostly been pretty gutted at this point.
Yeah, and even the addiction programs,
I think a lot of them have been kind of scooped out too.
I wanna get to the American Campo.
I was big into martial arts, it was the karate kid
that really got me into it.
I'm a little bit older than you.
And then I had Bruce Lee posters everywhere.
I even had a Wing Chun dummy, had no idea how to use it.
I would just kind of like fling my arms into it.
But I used to read all the, it was a British martial arts
combat was one, martial arts magazines,
I think the martial art monthly or something, I forget now.
But when I think of American Campo, is that Ed Parker?
And that was Elvis's style, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ed Parker was a Hawaiian guy.
I believe, I believe, or he moved to Hawaii.
I don't remember, I should probably know this.
But, and yeah, Elvis was one of his most,
he gave Elvis the honorary black belt
and he had the American Campo patch
on one of his performing outfits.
It was definitely a wild time.
All of that's before I was born, obviously,
but these are just the legends you hear
from your coaches growing up.
The interesting thing about American Campo
is that even though it is a traditional martial art,
and they all have their flaws, there's a lot of good in them.
A lot of the power principles and ideas of motion
and stuff that's in Campo and the ideas,
I still use to this day in my jiu-jitsu.
Because one of the, I don't know about every style of karate,
but because it was an American style
that was very Y oriented, even though you're not gonna go,
because the nature of the art is that it has a series
of katas or forms, a separate series of katas or forms
that are made for kids, at least there were.
I found out later that wasn't even part of Campo,
it was just the owner of my gym had taken
this universal kids program that everyone was doing
at the time and just taught it to us
and told us it was part of Campo.
It wasn't, but the big thing that is Campo
is these self-defense techniques, right?
Because self-defense was the thing of the era.
I think it was partially a branding maneuver,
so people didn't get sued.
No, we're not fighting, we're doing self-defense.
Because if you look at almost anybody in any martial art
who does sparring, who actually does fight
at the end of the day, you're fighting.
Now we want to have the mental values
that you're taught to kids, right?
Respect, honesty, discipline, self-control, et cetera.
And I think that most owners of child-focused
martial arts programs understand that the parents
of their students have no desire for them
to be world champions in whatever martial art is.
Their parents want their kid to stop talking back to them.
They want their kid to be responsible.
They want their kid to be respectful.
They want the internal values of the martial art.
And at least for me, it was very clear
that the gym I came up in, because you could debatably
call it a mick dojo by today's standards,
but I don't think that it was.
I think that the style itself, and obviously
I'm gonna be a little biased because I think
because at least thinking about what I learned
and how applicable it was, the basics, the punches,
kicks, elbows, knees, the stances, the footwork,
the timing that I learned in that martial art
that then I used in both point karate
and then later on kickboxing, they worked.
And we would regularly spar.
Now mind you, was I, with the hand techniques I had,
gonna beat someone who had been boxing?
Absolutely not.
My hands were garbage back then.
They're slightly less garbage now.
But we sparred and we sparred every week.
And even if it's just kids sparring, as point sparring,
and then as you became a teenager,
you were allowed to do continuous sparring,
which was pretty much kickboxing by another name.
We were kickboxing and then later on as I got older,
we were allowed to do Muay Thai sparring.
So we were allowed to do leg kicks.
And so for me, it was kind of a cool thing
where what started out as a kid, as a clever game of tag
and foam dipped gloves and feats,
kind of became actual fighting
without me having to be a brain damaged 16 year old.
Because of the fact that we're just playing tag,
now mind you, we were punching as hard as a six year old
or seven year old could,
but with the padding and the protection,
like there really wasn't much
of people getting seriously injured.
At least when I was younger,
I actually did, as I say that,
a memory just pops in.
I was unfortunately part of an accident in training
that did severely injure one of my training partners.
I was 13 and he was 16,
but that was few and far between.
There weren't, it wasn't like everyone was getting
concussions every day.
Accidents do happen in a combat sport,
even in point sparring.
But I think that actually,
I think I was doing continuous at that point in time.
But long story short,
what in my opinion makes Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
and MMA and kickboxing Muay Thai
and all of the martial arts that I think that have
a bit more respect post UFC,
is just the fact that they are being applied
against a fully resisting opponent.
It's not the art itself that I think is any better or worse.
I think it's simply the addition of realism to the training.
Once you add the idea of this person
is gonna be aggressive,
this person is gonna be strong,
this person's not gonna let you do the move.
It definitely improves your ability to train,
which isn't to say that martial arts that don't have that
are entirely useless because to this day,
I'll still steal stuff from martial arts like that.
I do moves that I learned from watching Aikido.
If you go back and watch Shinya Aoki,
he was doing Aikido moves and snapping people's arms
for a little while there in Japan.
And so these moves work.
It's just,
if you're preparing for prize fighting,
you don't do any traditional,
kata based martial art.
You can gain skills
because you're still gonna be in better shape,
have better coordination,
be more prepared to strike and fight
than a person who doesn't train at all,
which if I remember correctly in the 90s and early 2000s,
that was the advertisement.
The advertisement was that you're being prepared
to defend yourself against an untrained person.
And I think in solving that problem,
they do a decent job.
If that's, but in the age where it's become almost fashionable
to train martial arts,
well, the average guy at the bar might know something.
So suddenly,
it's not gonna be quite as easy.
This person has at least seen UFC.
They at least understand that if I just fall on this guy,
he probably is not gonna be able to punch or kick me.
Even if he's got no grappling,
just someone who's played football.
Like if you've ever tried to grapple a high level
collegiate or a professional American football player
who's a lineman or a linebacker,
their sense of balance, coordination and timing is impeccable.
Now, they're not gonna necessarily be a trained grappler,
but if all you've ever done in your life is say,
a traditional martial art with punches and kicks,
and you're trying to defend yourself
from a 300 pound NFL lineman,
I think it's gonna go badly.
It would for me.
I think it's gonna go badly for most people.
And I think that I, especially when I was young,
I thought I was a ninja,
because I learned from whatever medium I was reading
or watching at the time that ninjas began their training
at four years old,
and I began my training at four years old,
so I'm a ninja.
And so I genuinely believed up through elementary
and middle school that I was unstoppable,
that there was no possible way
that I could lose anything involving fighting,
because reasonably I do this every day,
because I did train every day.
Every day after school I trained,
and I trained on Saturdays.
I only didn't train on Sundays
because my family had me go into church,
otherwise I would train on Sundays.
And so for my entire childhood,
I'd been doing this thing,
playing this game of tag at that point in time,
and then later on more,
I had a sense that why wouldn't I win?
But because of the nature of the style,
every style has its gaps.
I never liked punching.
I was really powerful at legs,
and I was very good at doing kicks,
especially side kicks and round kicks.
I didn't fathom the idea that the fact
that I hadn't done boxing and wasn't very good at it
would be a problem.
And as I went on and was always very comfortable
cross-training, I would train with people who were boxers,
and I'd be like, oh, this really sucks
when this guy steps inside and punches me in the face.
This isn't fun.
I don't like this very much.
I should get better at that.
And then later on when I came up here to college,
mid-ten, mid-ten, mid-high school,
I went to an MMA gym,
and they dropped me in the ring
against one of their pro fighters the first day.
And I did decent against the first one, who was a boxer.
I kicked him a bunch, and that kind of scared him.
He punched me a bunch, that kind of scared me.
Felt pretty even.
All right, look at me.
My traditional martial arts have served me well.
Second person they dropped me was a wrestler.
He'd only been training for three years.
This point in time, I'm like 20, 21 years old maybe.
And so I've been training at this point,
depending on how I do my math,
like almost 20 years I've been training, you know?
15, 16, 17 years, depending on if you're gonna count me
training in a garage at four as actual training.
But he's been training three or four years.
And he just double-legged me, and double-legged me,
and double-legged me, and double-legged me.
There was nothing I could do about it.
And I was like, what have I been doing?
Because mind you, because I actually had
a pretty forward-facing karate studio
towards the end of my time, after the 16th, I think,
they had what we called ground fighting.
So we were trying, we were starting the grapple,
because the owner of the gym kind of had a sense
that he had to keep us from quitting.
Because we'd been training for so long.
Not everyone was like me trained since they were four,
but that people need to learn new things.
So we did some kali on our knees, I did stick fighting.
We did a little bit of judo.
He would have seminars where judoka would come in,
or we had this MMA guy come in,
who his name was Trevor Sherman,
and he did the MMA seminar for us.
And so we knew basic positions.
I knew Keizaka Tami, I knew side control,
which I think he called cross mount.
And we knew a few positions,
and I knew how to do a guillotine.
But we didn't even call it the guillotine back then.
They called it the anaconda,
because I didn't know that in the guillotine,
that your arm was what was submitting them.
I would just squeeze them as hard as I could with my legs,
and people would tap.
So I thought that I was doing guillotine right.
I thought I just had to hold their head
so they didn't get away.
Like my understanding of grappling was so like,
like beyond Mickey Mouse,
because the only people I had to grapple down there
were other people who were karate guys.
And so like I was the one-eyed man
in the land of the blind.
It's like I was the best grappler
at my non-grappling school,
and my best technique was a headlock.
I would just headlock people, and I would win,
and so I thought I could grapple.
So when I was in the ring,
I was like, oh, I'm just gonna do a headlock.
And then I met actual grapplers,
and I was like, oh, oh, this is a whole different thing.
Like as obsessed as I've been with punching and kicking
for all these years,
they've been with strangling people and positions,
and apparently there's more to it
than just doing a headlock.
I had the same kind of journey.
I started martial arts a little bit a lot later than you,
but probably like mid-teens, I think I was.
Got into taekwondo for a tiny bit,
then get into show-off camp for a while,
and then got into the WTF, the ITF taekwondo.
Actually did well, I mean, won national tournaments,
all kinds of stuff.
And then what was next, boxing.
And Jesus, was that a humbling experience.
And then Muay Thai, like, oh, I can't just skip
on one leg now because they just kicked the other one.
And then jujitsu, and it was just like this,
you do okay, and then you get chopped down again.
You do okay, and you get chopped down.
But it's a beautiful journey of humility.
But it was funny, because I agree with you,
especially for kids, the semi-contact,
the point sparring, I think is great,
because they're just moving.
They're almost flowing with each other.
Conversely, when I started MMA in California,
it was Shootbox, Vandelele Silver, all those guys.
And coach just asked today,
how long have you been doing jujitsu?
And I said, technically almost 20 years,
because that was my first time.
Now it wasn't consistent at all.
20 years ago was my first exposure.
But we learned almost nothing.
It was just Fight Club.
We just kicked the shit out of each other.
That's so true.
But it's so bad.
Like I said, my first day, I was in the cage with a pro.
And I never got taught anything at that gym.
It's a gym here in town called F2.
It's not that they couldn't teach,
because they did teach me things.
I learned a lot from those guys.
But so many people quit,
that they stopped teaching new people anything
until they'd been there a certain amount of time.
Because it wasn't really a gym that was meant,
if it wasn't like this gym that we're in right now,
it's to instruct people.
That's the point of this.
They were a fight team.
They were there to have bodies
to get better to win their competitions.
And then if you didn't quit after a few weeks or months,
they teach you something.
I remember someone liked me, they pulled me aside.
I don't remember who it was.
It might've been my friend Doug,
where I still get, and he's like,
hey, hey, hey, you're doing really well.
And he showed me how to hip escape.
Do this.
All right, now get back in there.
And then that was how you would be learned.
Somebody who had been there longer than you
would pull you aside, and they would give you a gym.
And then you get back to the grind.
And I do think there's the upside
and downside of that method, right?
The trial by fire.
The upside of that method is that it builds grit.
And grit, I think, is one of the most important things,
not just in martial arts, but in life.
Like the ability to take punishment
and not mentally break and keep pushing forward
is immensely valuable.
And mind you, you do mentally break many times along the way,
but you know what it feels like.
So in the future, when you're feeling that,
okay, I know what this is.
I know what it's like to have someone
make me feel claustrophobic.
I know what it's like to be so exhausted
that I don't wanna move and still move.
It's valuable.
But on the other hand,
not everybody is prepared for that their first day.
And you lose a lot of people.
I saw so many people come through
that could have been great at Jiu-Jitsu or MMA who quit
because they got injured their first day.
Because there wasn't the same notion
of taking care of your partner.
It was, if they can't hack it, they shouldn't be here.
Like that was the ethos back then.
Whereas now people have realized,
oh, these things can be businesses.
Yeah, well, so in this training can bite you on the ass
10 years from now where your memory starts to go.
Oh yeah.
So I think-
Well, the gym wars were a thing.
I definitely, fortunately or unfortunately
was part of that era.
Like I had zero professional MMA fights.
I only had one amateur MMA fight and I lost.
And could I have gone back and done more
and not gone out, oh, and wanted something?
Sure I could.
However, at that point in time,
I had shortly before that,
I had just gotten a promotion at my job.
I was making real money.
And I was in a situation where I was like,
am I gonna go here and essentially like knock
my college education out of my brain
to the point where like I lose not only this thing
that I'm doing, but also my day job.
Or am I gonna take care of myself?
And that was part of my shift from obsessing so much
about striking and realizing like I can get all the things
I love out of striking in Jiu-Jitsu without having a headache,
without having little cuts in my mouth
where I don't enjoy my food.
Because I love cooking.
And anytime if you spar, mouthpiece or not,
and things get heated, you're gonna at least have
little cuts in your mouth.
And I got sick of that.
But like I completely agree with you on the CTE front.
I just, I know there's gotta be a way,
but I know for me at least, I'm lucky like,
I'm still obviously I'm talking to you right now.
I'm coherent, I don't have headaches.
I don't think I have any long term CTE problems.
I've been knocked out one time in my life.
I don't think I have horrible damage from that.
But I also know that because I've been in those wars
in kickboxing and Muay Thai in the gym,
or even MMA in the gym, I would be,
as the frustrating part for me at that point in time
is like I was hanging with the pros at my gym
and doing very well and then I lost my first amateur match.
I'm like, well, how does this make any sense?
And that was very psychologically frustrating to me.
But I also knew that like deep down,
like I don't actually like hurting people.
Like a lot of the things that I've done less in my life
is because I've broken the ribs of a good friend of mine
with a sidekick.
I've accidentally like I've caused harm to people
that I like and I don't feel good about it.
There's some people who are able to kind of tap
into that darker part of themselves and be okay with it.
And I think to an extent, you need a little bit of that
if you're gonna be successful in a game
where your opponent is trying to harm you.
If you're sitting there like, oh, I don't wanna hurt you
and they're like, I wanna kill you,
you're at a terrible disadvantage.
And you'll only be able to win if the skill gap
between you and them is very large.
At least that's been my experience.
I can take care of you.
If you're a beginner or even an intermediate
and I'm an expert, I can beat you and keep you safe
and keep me safe.
But if we're both experts, I don't know,
unless I find some angle of the game
where I have a big lead over you,
I'm not gonna be able to both take care of you
and take care of me and win.
That's gonna be really challenging.
And so, I think that maybe 21 year old me
might've still had it.
I think back to like how I used to spar at 21.
I don't even know if I like hurting people.
I think I was very blissfully unaware
that the fact that I was kicking people
in the back of the head might not be good for them.
I'm glad you said that.
Because firstly, I remember my first ever
Taekwondo competition and it was me and a friend of mine
from my school got matched up in the first heat.
And I'm like, oh, it's just my buddy and I'm all relaxed
and he murdered me, murdered me.
It was like, I think it was what,
up to 10 in Taekwondo back then.
So it was like 10-0, whatever it was.
And so I was like, oh shit.
So the next time, next tournament I fought in,
I just was able to turn.
But we're talking about again, semi-contact,
tippy-tap at this point.
I did end up doing WTF,
which is you could knock them out with your feet
later in life.
But yeah, but then I had to tap in.
But after shoot box and boxing and Muay Thai
down in Orlando, I just knew, all right, I'm not a fighter.
And that's okay.
I've put myself in a place where, okay,
I've had people, some pretty good people,
try and knock me out and hurt me and everything.
And I survived.
So I'm not a giant pussy.
But at the same time, I am not a fighter.
I'm not gonna masquerade, oh, I could do that.
If I just, no, no, no.
I, as you said, I have chosen my health
and my time with my kids and all these other things over it.
So even here, they're like, oh, you're gonna compete?
Like, no, I have competed.
I've done a jujitsu tournament with my son.
It was awesome.
Both of us got silver.
I didn't roll with him.
But that was an amazing father-son moment.
But it was just, yeah, there's a certain point
where you're like, I've done that, checked the box.
I still train to this day.
I love it.
I still do striking on the bag in my garage sometimes.
But yeah, it's a really powerful thing
to look yourself in a mirror and go,
I would not be a good fighter.
That's okay.
And I think that for me, it's one of those things
where like, I'm confident that I could be good
if I only took matches that I shouldn't be in, right?
Like, if I get paired up with people
that shouldn't be in the ring with me, I could do great
because the skill gap between me and them
would be big enough that I can take care of us.
But at the end of the day, the whole point
is to eventually face someone who's actually at your level.
And in that moment, there's the person
who wants it more is gonna win.
And I know that I still have it to an extent
because I know that at least when it comes to jiu-jitsu,
with striking it's less, I don't like harming people.
And like, I think to me, especially because I have
like very specific incidents where like,
I have directly caused harm to someone else's future.
And like, it's not something, for what?
This was supposed to be fun.
We were supposed to be having fun together
and now like, you've got broken bones in your face
or in your ribs or things.
And so like, I don't need more of that on my conscience.
But at the same time, like, I've been given both.
I've been given the other side from some friends of mine
who were like, it's, I think I guess a bit colder,
but the whole of you was like, Charles,
you're being disrespectful to that man
by giving him anything less than your best
because he signed up to test himself.
He didn't sign up to be taken care of by you.
And when I think about that, that's the only way
that I'm usually able to turn off the empathy
in that moment and just, you're right.
I'm supposed to be trying to win.
Now that being said, especially now in jiu-jitsu,
like culturally, jiu-jitsu has changed, I'd say,
as it gets more professional and there's more money involved.
In that there used to kind of be an unspoken rule.
I mean, maybe there never was.
One of those things where like,
there's that whole like back in my day nostalgia
where you pretend things were better than they were.
So maybe there never was.
But for me personally, giving your opponent time to tap
is something that I've always cared about.
If I have a submission on you, I'm gonna pause
and look at you and be like, hey, this is gonna go soon.
Please tap before I do something.
And even then, depending on the tournament,
like this is a tournament for a $5 metal,
I'm not gonna break and tear all the ligaments in your knee
for a $5 metal.
Like maybe I have a strange morality.
I might mess your ankle up a little bit for a $5 metal
because I know you're gonna be better in two weeks.
But I know the rehab time for a torn MCL
because I've torn my MCL.
I know the rehab time for torn meniscus,
I've torn both of them.
And so this metal ain't worth that.
And so like I should be good enough
to strangle you or something,
but you should be reasonable enough to tap
before your stuff breaks.
But culturally it's becoming more and more common
that guys just don't tap.
And then you're seeing these horrific breaks
on people's shoulders and elbows and knees.
And to me like, the thing that made me fall in love
with jiu-jitsu was the fact that I have a choice
of how much force I have to apply to solve a problem.
Before I knew jiu-jitsu, if I had to solve a problem
that was a physical altercation, I had to strike you.
I had to kick you in the leg and the knee and the ribs
and punch you in the face.
I had to cause you bodily harm to convince you to stop.
Whereas the power of jiu-jitsu is like,
I can restrain you and cause you minimal harm.
In the case of a grappling match,
I should be able to put you in a checkmate position
where you and I both know you lost.
If I can't do that, then in my opinion,
it means I don't actually have as much control of you
as I think.
I haven't actually won as completely as I can.
But now because of the fact that like,
if I break your leg, it's a pretty decisive who won.
But I've never liked that feeling.
And I've had people who have broken their own leg
trying to escape submissions that I was holding them in.
I wasn't trying to finish, I was holding on.
And they didn't know how to get out
and they did the wrong thing.
And I hear it, I can feel their leg.
Clack, clack, clack.
Ugh, why?
And so at least in training,
outside of competition, it's debatable.
I think that in the competitions for money,
when you know that your opponent is trying to break you
as well, you should probably be willing to break them too.
Part of why I'm not an elite level competitor is that,
I've been competing a little bit just because I know
that by feeling those emotions
and putting myself through that again,
it allows me to better relate to the people
that I'm teaching.
It allows me to better test out, honestly,
the stuff that I'm saying works.
I've been trying to create things.
One of the things that I've loved recently
about my Jiu Jitsu journey is like,
I've been a black belt now for over seven years
and getting to add to Jiu Jitsu,
getting to have not new moves per se,
but like my own approach to making people better at Jiu Jitsu.
Well, if I say this will make you better at Jiu Jitsu
and it will work against a fully resisting opponent,
well, then I should put it on the line.
I should say that it actually works.
And so I wanna, my goal in tournaments these days,
it's definitely to win.
Cause I want, I'm curious how good I am.
I'm 37, but it's also to be like,
I wanna prove that what I said is in BS.
I wanna prove that it actually works.
And if it doesn't, awesome.
I get to grow.
I get to find out, okay, there exists a person
cause within the gym, everybody knows me.
We know each other.
I'm making it work on these people.
And I traveled to other gyms and open mat,
but there's also a thing of respect.
Maybe people were being nice to me.
They don't wanna hurt me.
I don't know.
And so I get competing.
I like testing the art.
That moves me.
I don't like maiming each other.
I just, I don't believe that it is necessary
to figure out who won the match to injure each other.
I understand that that requires both people
being mature enough to yield before their limbs break.
And that unfortunately, some people just understand,
hey, I know Charles doesn't wanna break my leg.
So I'm not gonna tap.
And maybe while he's trying to convince himself
to break my leg, I escape.
I'm gonna take those chances.
And to an extent, fair play, but to another extent,
like these are the things that make our sport more dangerous.
When I hear people say, oh, I used to do jiu-jitsu,
but I kept getting hurt.
I can tell them now because there's a reason why I drive,
what did I drive, 30 miles each way
to come here from Ocala.
You're at the wrong gym.
It's that simple.
Now, if you're an 18 year old, high school wrestler,
and you are determined to be in the UFC,
there's a school that's the right fit for you.
It's probably gonna replicate some of the ones
that we just talked about.
But if you're a 30, 40 year old guy wanting to get into it,
say you're a police officer,
which I wanna get into a second,
and you go to a place where it's all young dumb,
full of cum on the mat, there's a lot of people
who are like, oh, I'm not gonna go back to that,
which I've been to as well.
And you're just like, fuck, every single time,
my neck, my ribs, you're not gonna go back.
So this is the thing I tell people is,
you've also got to find that right tribe within jiu-jitsu.
Find that school and maybe specifically
that class that fits you.
Yeah, everybody has their different,
that's kind of the cool thing about jiu-jitsu
because it's been influenced by so many things.
Like if you're really straight edge and you don't like drugs,
you're not gonna go to that school.
You probably shouldn't be going to high rollers.
If that stuff makes you uncomfortable,
that might not be the school for you.
But at the same time, if you wanna go to a family
friendly school, find a family friendly school.
There's family friendly schools, there's MMA schools,
there's what's go really hard schools,
let's just chill out man schools.
I personally think at least for me,
with my goals as a martial artist, I like them all.
I like that my jiu-jitsu is able to go to the school
and be very chill and come on bro, we're just gonna flow.
I can go and I can roll with them
and I'm not gonna injure anybody.
They can match me up with a 95 pound woman
or a 300 pound man and no one has to get hurt.
But I also like the fact that there still do exist
those gym wars, if he dies, he dies schools.
I like that I've taught myself enough jiu-jitsu
that I can visit those schools.
To me, those are the schools.
I like to visit a place like that once a month
or every couple of months,
because I don't wanna get soft.
At the end of the day, it is a martial art.
However, if I do that day in and day out,
I'm gonna fall apart.
I can't train that way.
You're exactly like you said, if you're 21,
you're pretty much Wolverine at that point.
You're going to bed and healing every night,
so you can do it.
But I completely agree that there's so many types of schools.
If you like the formality and the pomp and circumstance,
then there might be a school that's heavily traditional
where you only wear white geese and you like bowing.
If you like that mysticism, enjoy it, enjoy it.
It's very much finding the flavor that you enjoy the best,
in my personal opinion.
Absolutely.
For me, and I do it still within this gym at the moment,
because I'm only blue, so I'm still, as you said,
I think there's a lot of value to being humble enough
to understand that, all right, once I get to a certain level
in jiu-jitsu, now I feel like I can travel
and at least be able to protect, like you said,
protect yourself, protect the other person.
But there's times where I'm like, all right,
I'll roll with one of our super strong younger guys
that never taps to anything and tries to murder you
every time, because we have a master's class starting up,
and for me, I'm doing this for outside the doors, that's it.
And I know this isn't a self-defense school, quote unquote,
but that's what I'm thinking.
I'm thinking, can I strike with elbows here?
And so the people that are probably gonna be a nuisance
on the street are not gonna be 50-year-old accountants.
They're gonna be, you know what I mean?
So every once in a while, all right,
let me see how I fare with this 21-year-old.
And we're not trying to kill each other,
but there's that athleticism that you only get
from a young, enthusiastic man or woman.
So it's nice to dip into there, and other times,
you know, you've been just destroyed at home,
whatever's happened, you're low energy,
then you're like, all right, and I've got guys
I can go to, you wanna just float a date?
Yeah.
You can just chill out.
Exactly, so you have that spectrum to jump into.
I think it's super important, I completely agree.
And the cool thing is, what I've realized,
if you ever have someone at your gym
who is a bit too aggressive,
but you find yourself that you wanna be able
to roll with them, kinda remember this.
You don't necessarily wanna tap them out immediately.
Meaning, if this person is 21 and full of energy
and really, really strong and athletic,
and you tap them out in 15 seconds,
what you just did is motivate them.
They're gonna go twice as hard now.
And if you wanted to relax,
that wasn't the way to have relax.
Ideally, if you can control them and minimize
the amount of explosive movement that they can make,
slow the match down, put them in a position
where you're ahead of the game
and you have weight on your side,
you have gravity on your side,
and you can slowly take a good three or four minutes
to submit them while maintaining misery for them.
Not injuring them, but just making sure
that they're feeling your weight.
Then you tap them.
They're not gonna necessarily wanna go crazy,
because they realize that if they make a mistake
and end up in a bad spot,
that you're gonna make them suffer for four minutes.
And that can calm things down.
Now, mind you, that's not gonna work
if this 21-year-old also happens to be a D1 wrestler
or a purple belt, because then your blue belt Jiu-Jitsu
abilities might not be enough to outmatch that.
But I'm mainly talking about the people
who are a little bit less under control
because of inexperience.
Now, that's if you're not okay talking.
One of the things I think that is very underutilized
in Jiu-Jitsu schools is talking.
And I don't mean gossiping in the corner.
I mean, hey man, especially if you have the seniority
and right to say this.
Hey man, it seems like you're a little nervous.
It seems like you're a little jittery and nervous
and you're taking this a little bit more seriously
than is necessary.
Like, if you wanna have a hard role,
there's people who can do that.
But I think it might be better for you
if you wanna get better at this,
that maybe we just calm down a little bit
and you try to make calm decisions
about what you wanna do to accomplish your goals.
Because if you need to do something
as fast and hard as you can in order to make it work,
against me, who frankly is not going
as fast and hard as I can,
it'll never work against somebody actually trying.
Because if I'm only giving you a calm flow place
and the only way you can make something work
is by tapping into every ounce of your physicality,
it's never gonna work against a fully resisting opponent.
So maybe try to damp down your athleticism during this role
and figure out what you're doing.
Now there's a time for athleticism.
There definitely is.
If we're both putting it on, then yeah, we got to.
Because I learned the hard way at Brown Belt
that if I'm trying my best to use no power
and I'm facing a brown or a black belt
who was using all their power, I'm gonna lose.
So you need both, but in the beginning,
you don't learn how to drive driving 200 miles an hour
in a NASCAR.
You learn how to drive driving 25 miles an hour
in a Honda or something,
and taking your time to figure out how to control the car.
And I think Jiu Jitsu is the same way.
If you can slow down the role a little bit,
it'll be a learning experience.
I'm not saying don't have fun, roll hard, do your thing,
but occasionally turn the volume down
and it'll help you stop being that spazzy guy.
If you think you might be the spazzy guy in the gym.
I just think back to shoot box again.
When we were throwing everything,
you were learning nothing.
So if you're muscling each other,
then you're not really learning.
But if you just take, this is my experience,
take 30% off so you're at 70.
So you're still using your strength,
you're not just a wet noodle.
You're able to now, it becomes more of a chess match.
And if you stay in the same position,
this is what I'm finding at Blue Belt,
for three, four, five minutes, that's stalemate.
So take your foot off the gas,
allow them to maybe even get a better position
and then try and sweep.
And you're gonna get so much more out of that
than saying, yeah, I won that
because I laid on top of them for five minutes.
I completely agree with that
if you trust this person not to harm you.
So I will give all that room to the people
who I know aren't gonna knee me in the face
the second I let them out.
Because there's some people who,
when they've been getting controlled, they panic.
And I might be better than you, Jitsu,
but my face still hurts when you elbow it.
And then you're kneeing it.
I got poked today.
And so I will let people out to work
if those people have shown me that when I let them out,
I don't get a black eye out of it.
So unfortunately, if someone has shown you
that you can't trust them not to punch you in the head,
they might be someone you gotta give a boring role to.
Or like I said, have that conversation like,
hey, I can keep you here for the rest of the round.
Or I can let you out.
But you gotta promise me you're not gonna flail
and punch me in the head.
Make a deal with it.
Communication.
Well, you touched a second ago on control.
And something I wanted to ask you,
there's all these conversations about law enforcement
and there's all these horrific videos
of basically under trained officers.
And again, that could be their own lack of ownership.
It could be a complete lack of support
from their department, a lack of understanding
of where the bar should be, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm not picking on the individual solely.
But the three cops trying to restrain one person
and failing, the one that turns into a boxing match
where they're literally squaring off
with someone that's supposed to be cuffing.
It seems to me, wrestling, judo, jiu-jitsu,
that kind of area of martial arts
seems to be the most appropriate,
especially for, and I don't think most people appreciate this,
an altercation that you're not trying to just win,
but you have to restrain them
while people are watching and filming
and put them in cuffs.
Like I have problems just trying to get a choke or a tap
no matter getting one arm cuffed and the other arm cuffed.
So through this journey of jiu-jitsu,
what is your perception of grappling in law enforcement
and how do we continue to promote that
to get more agencies on board?
I've been pretty lucky.
I've actually taught,
I don't think I've ever taught at a police department,
but I've taught various law enforcement officers
over the years from back when I taught American Kempel.
I actually taught all kinds of stuff back then
from like, there's a few of the officers
would bring their various weapons that they had
and I got to show them how to swing the round.
I think it was a fun job for 14 year olds
because I remember that for whatever reason,
they switched away from,
they used to use those, the old nightsticks
that had the kind of the tonfa shape.
Yeah, the tonfa handle.
So that was the thing,
but the Florida department has switched away
to the kind of like snap-extend stick
and I remember we had, for whatever reason,
I don't know why I got to help
and why they chose to let a 14, 15 year old
teach police officers how to hit things.
I don't know, but I had the gig and it was awesome.
But into now helping various gyms,
like for example, my friend Phil runs a gym
south of Chicago, about an hour south.
I'm forgetting the name of the town
that is called Furnady, I can't pronounce it.
It's an Irish thing, Furnady, Furnida,
I can't pronounce it properly,
but he runs a gym and it's made for law enforcement,
the whole idea and I've been kind of obsessed
with the notion of like, what do you need to do
and two main things you need to,
one, stand up, right, because you don't,
as a law enforcement officer, you don't wanna be
laying on the floor getting kicked in the head
by a suspect, that sounds horrible,
as a person in life, you don't wanna be
kicked in the head by anybody.
But, and then second thing is you wanna be able to
maintain control as efficiently as you can.
And so I think by adding that requirement of yourself,
of personal efficiency, especially because
as a law enforcement officer, you're wearing all your gear,
20, 30, 40 pounds of gear sometimes.
If all you have is I'm just gonna go really hard,
you're gonna be exhausted really fast.
And so I think there's definitely a place for it.
I think that the biggest thing is shifting it,
because you talk about, earlier you said the word
self-defense, and the problem with self-defense
isn't the techniques or the moves or what they teach.
While there are some suspicious moves that are taught
by some of these experts, we'll presume and pretend
that what they're teaching is actually good.
Imagine that every move taught by a self-defense expert
was perfect.
It's the nature of how it's taught.
The nature of how it's taught is, all right,
we're gonna go away for the weekend,
and we're gonna learn this.
Then we're never gonna train it again,
and we're gonna assume that you guys all got it.
Right?
Right.
Whether it be women's self-defense,
law enforcement self-defense, the notion that
I'm gonna give you three to six hours,
maybe I'm gonna be generous that you're giving
a real intensive eight to 16 hours in a weekend,
and now you're Batman, I think is just laughable.
But the people who teach these courses
are very, very charismatic, and oftentimes I've seen it.
I've seen women I know in the past who have been like,
yeah Charles, I can defend myself now.
Like I'm blah blah blah, and I'm like, okay, what'd you do?
Like have you joined a gym, are you training regularly?
No, they gave me this little pokey thing that they give them.
Oh yeah.
They gave me this little thing,
and I took a class for three hours, and I'm safe now.
Now, to an extent, some of the social things
that are taught in those things are really valuable,
because if you don't look weak,
if you don't look like a victim,
you're less likely to be chosen to be victimized.
And that part of it, I think, is invaluable.
However, I think it's very dangerous to essentially
put these people in the position that I was in
when I was 11 or 12, or I thought I was Superman,
when I was in fact completely untested.
And if I've never had to do these things under adrenaline,
under stress, and I don't maintain them,
maintain those skills, it's gonna be very hard
to react properly in those scenarios,
especially with adrenaline, and even worse,
when you see yourself on film.
I know that for me, when I'm competing in a jiu-jitsu
tournament, or an MMA match, or any sort of match,
and I see people filming, well, in my head,
it's like, oh, I hope I don't screw up on camera.
Everyone's gonna see this.
And that adds more adrenaline.
Adrenaline is the friend of habituated behavior,
and the enemy of new things.
When your blood pumps, boom, you're not thinking,
what was that move that I just learned yesterday?
You're gonna do what you've been doing for the longest.
And if what you've been doing for the longest
is punching a guy in the head,
you're gonna punch a guy in the head.
If what you've been doing for the longest,
that's all you're gonna do.
Or you might just freeze.
I don't believe that most police officers,
because unless it's their first day on the job,
they have had an altercation before.
But I think that if you're not confident
that this stuff works because you have those reps,
I think that confidence comes from success.
When you're in the gym, and you can regularly
take down an opponent, and you can regularly
pin someone to the floor, even if it's just the white belts.
Say that you're a blue belt level in jiu-jitsu,
but you know that if you put a white belt on the floor,
you can turn them over to their belly, and hold them there.
That means you can probably handcuff them.
Great, now get a white belt that goes to the gym.
Be a little bit harder.
And now maybe try a fellow blue belt,
and you keep progressing.
But the thing is, say you do that once.
One week, say you train a year, and then you quit.
In a year, you'll probably still be able to do that.
Two years past, three years past, you're gonna get rusty.
I think the biggest thing of whatever the methodology is,
whether I've done striking martial arts,
and the advantage of striking martial arts
is that you don't have to get entangled with someone.
If you've ever seen someone who can throw a nasty leg kick,
or liver kick, or punch, you can stop a situation
in its tracks.
But as you said, you're being filmed.
And you're going to have to justify to the world
why you found it necessary to put this person unconscious.
And it might be valid, right?
There's definitely a valid reason
to knock somebody unconscious
in the situation of being a police officer
if that person is attacking you and trying to harm you,
or has been attacking someone else.
But if there's a situation where, say,
that you just simply have to trespass somebody,
this person's not violent.
This person just is somewhere they're not supposed to be.
Which means ideally, as a police officer,
you should be able to remove them from where they are
and take them outside or take to the police station.
But no one should die for that, right?
If this person struggles and is annoying,
they shouldn't need to be unconscious.
You should be able to carry them along and move them.
But I think that the more that you practice these things
and habituate them, you can be successful.
I really do think that the notion
of educating yourself in general principles
of how to move a person.
If I wanna move a piece of someone,
I go to the end of the lever and I move it.
If I wanna attach myself to someone,
I go deep to the core of their body
and I attach myself to them.
If I wanna stand up and someone's trying to hold me down,
well, I have to stop them from being able to attach to me
while I move into space and get to my feet.
That's three sentences.
You don't have to know all the moves.
I don't think that you need to be a jiu-jitsu ace
who can win tournaments and know all these moves.
But if you have general principles
and you can follow them intelligently,
I think that you can successfully do your job
and keep things safe.
All that being said, I don't think that it's inappropriate
if the situation is needed that you can do it MMA style.
Meaning, if this person has a weapon
or this person has harmed you
and they won't put their hand behind their back
and you have to punch them in the ribs
to have their hand open,
I don't think that that is an appropriate use of force.
I think that it's gonna get you, now it's a difference.
If you keep punching the ribs and break a rib
and puncture their lung,
well, that wasn't you hitting them
in order to make compliance happen.
That was you probably trying to kill them
or getting your frustrations out.
So there's a line.
I think that striking has its place when used appropriately.
I don't think that it needs to be the only tool,
which is part of what I fell in love with with Jiu Jitsu.
When I realized that I can stop a scenario
without having to break someone's ribs.
I can stop a scenario
without having to break someone's arm even.
And ironically enough,
because of some of the stuff that I've taught,
I've been able to use, ironically,
I do a submission when I have my people's back.
I stop choking people,
because people are really good at stopping chokes,
but they're really bad at defending hammer locks.
So I actually regularly put people's hand
behind their back as a submission as a joke.
Like a half Nelson.
Not even half Nelson, just literally,
I just have their hand, I just keep pulling.
Like the old WWF hammer lock.
And I realized that I can do it pretty consistently.
And it's frankly, I understand why that's where
you put people's hands when you handcuff them.
Like it works.
Absolutely.
Well, I wanna get to your kind of leap of faith
out of the corporate world.
But before we do,
what were the principles and philosophies
that kept you into jiu-jitsu
and made you dive in so deeply
when so many people fall off at Blue Belt,
Purple Belt, et cetera?
Obviously I was frustrated about the fact
that somebody who only trained two or three years
could beat me when I had been training over a decade.
That bothered me.
But then I think what really got me in there was,
I actually didn't answer it earlier,
the principles that I was able to borrow
from American Kempo,
the idea of marriage of gravity, torque, leverage,
all of those physics principles,
because I ended up graduating with a degree in physics
in the university that I kind of,
I liked the idea of being able to apply physics
and kinematics.
And once I got that realization that I can
really get good at this jiu-jitsu thing,
I don't have to get hit in the face.
I don't have to be bruised.
I don't have to be in pain,
but I can still dive in as deeply
and be as obsessed as I was other stuff.
And I think what happened was,
I got into Judo as well.
I ended up getting my black belt in Judo,
and I started doing choi-li-fuk kung-fu here in town
at Gainesville Dojo.
But once I got heavy into leg locks,
I realized what I was doing as a triathlete.
How can I keep all these skills up?
It felt like juggling.
It felt like, okay, I sharpened back up my muay thai,
but now my Judo's going away.
Okay, I brought my Judo back up,
but now my jiu-jitsu's slacking.
I got my jiu-jitsu, oh no, and there's leg locks too.
And then I realized just how bad I was at leg locks
and how much more there was to learn there.
I'm like, there's not enough hours in the day
to be great at all these things.
And so slowly, because in the beginning,
I was truly obsessed with my training schedule
because I had like, I was teaching private lessons
in kickboxing, I was tutoring physics to university students,
and I had an internship at a natural gas company.
I had three jobs.
And then once I got made full-time
at the natural gas company,
then I stopped teaching physics at the university.
And then I was just, I mean, tutoring.
I was just at that point, teaching kickboxing
and working at the natural gas company.
Then that gym closed down
because it was back in the day
when it was like one of the only gyms here in town
and people didn't want to pay dues.
Like people would legit sneak in the back door.
Like it was one of those situations where like,
no one wanted to pay dues.
And so the gym closed down.
And then everyone was like, Pikachu face, like, oh.
It's like, yeah, if none of us paid dues,
then they can't pay rent.
Now we have no gym to train at.
And so it was a brief moment in this town
where everyone was kind of homeless.
There was nowhere to train.
And one of the gyms started a Vale Tudo program.
And I showed up and like, I've never done Vale Tudo.
That sounds great.
And then I realized like, it's just a branding thing.
And I see all the same guys I've been training
with at other places in town here.
And I'm like, oh, it's you guys.
And as I got deeper and deeper into it,
I really think the leg locks was a thing.
As like, as a circle back to it.
Like I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to get good
at this whole other branch of Jiu-Jitsu
and my regular Jiu-Jitsu.
Cause I had the big, in the beginning,
I was just trying to stand back up.
My whole game was like, I just stand back up
and then I get to punch you again.
I kick you again.
That was the game.
Just don't, just make your BS Jiu-Jitsu not work on me.
That was the original goal was to become Jiu-Jitsu proof
so that I could kick box everybody.
And all my years of training how to punch
and kick really fast would be valuable.
But then I felt like a fraud.
Like I remember I got my blue belt and I felt like a fraud.
I was like, I don't even play guard.
Like I don't think I've ever hit a guard arm bar.
Like I'm, I don't know why they gave me this,
this blue belt.
And I started playing guard more.
I started, and then I was like,
then the world got even wider.
Once I, it was the first time
cause I had a hard blue belt plateau.
I stepped away from my A game entirely.
And I was like, I have to play guard.
Every day I gotta play guard.
I gotta play guard, but I gotta play guard, gotta play guard.
And I started losing more.
And that's the hardest thing is realizing
cause especially I think at blue belt,
you have this pecking order in your head in the gym.
This guy beats me, I beat this guy
and I'm even with this guy.
All right.
And when the guy who you usually beat
starts beating you regularly,
you're like, oh, I'm getting worse.
You never think that that guy got better.
Like, oh, I must be getting worse.
I'm horrible, but you have to step back.
Of course that guy's gonna beat you.
Cause you were beating that guy with your best stuff.
You gotta step into some stuff that you're not great at
and you're gonna do it wrong.
You're gonna mess it up
and you're gonna start losing more.
And that was the big step.
And that's kind of how I've solved my plateau problems a lot.
It's almost always like, let's dive in
and just play different games.
These days we're a little bit more sophisticated with it
with different types of specific training
and skill development games.
And I have more precise ways of improving
when I hit plateaus.
But the biggest thing was realizing that
keeping track of how many times you tap this guy
or that guy and all of that,
it's not the way.
Like it can be fun.
Like, let me be real,
if you don't have a desire to get better,
if you just, I always have to remember this.
Cause I've always thought that everyone else
is trying to become the best they can.
And to a degree, some people are,
but a piece of training is just having fun.
Some people view Jiu-Jitsu like pick up basketball.
Some people view Jiu-Jitsu like playing Xbox.
To an extent it's about winning,
but to the real extent is just having some fun.
And I always try to be careful.
I don't want to foist this serious hermit growth mentality
upon people who don't want it.
Cause there is a value in Jiu-Jitsu as community
and Jiu-Jitsu as stress relief.
And I never want to discount the value of that.
Ironically, I think Ken was the first person
to talk to me.
He's like, hey Charles, not everybody wants to be the best.
And I just sat there like, what do you mean?
Why wouldn't they want to be the best?
Absolutely.
I've experienced that very thing myself.
And even with my son, it's funny,
cause I had to take my own advice and apply it to myself.
You forget when you're in school, in a Jiu-Jitsu school,
that your friends are getting better at the same speed,
or in my case now faster, because either,
either and or they're younger than you.
They just simply hear more.
They just get it better.
I mean, legs, oh my God, it's my kryptonite.
Like I just still, I still was joking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
But yeah, but you realize again,
I remember someone telling me this a long time ago,
stop trying to win the roles.
And I get what they mean.
I totally get what they mean.
And stop counting all that stuff.
And as soon as I did, like you're on a boat, on a stream,
you are moving and it may not be a speed boat
and you may not be, you know,
rafting in the canyon somewhere.
But if you get off the boat,
you're never gonna move forward again.
But if you get on, maybe you'll find some paddles.
Maybe you'll speed up a little bit.
But that's again, is where the humility comes in in Jiu-Jitsu.
Stop looking at everyone else and enjoy your own journey.
It's also, I think learning that
this person tapping you out in a given role
isn't a representation of they are better at Jiu-Jitsu
than you.
It's a representation that it's just like a hand of cards.
You chose to play and do these things.
They chose to do these other things.
In that moment, in that day, they came together
and they ended up on top.
To me, it's almost always a lesson.
I look at the discrete movements and I'm like, okay.
If someone responds this way to this thing that I did,
it has these consequences or can have these consequences.
And you only get that if you really look at
how the match plays out.
My biggest thing is it's okay to lose,
but try to lose differently next time.
Meaning if they play the same game again with you, right?
If they beat you with an arm bar
and they're trying to gun for that arm bar again
from the same position, just do something different.
And that little bit of changing what you did
allows you to learn something.
All right, I tried this and I tried that.
Were the results different or they're the same?
And that can help you grow.
The biggest thing that I like doing is
setting myself little mini goals.
Have you ever played the old shooting games
like Halo and stuff?
I imagine they still have it in Modern Warfare
and the newer shooting games
where you can win the death match or whatever,
capture the flag, but at the end,
you have these little perks, little bonuses
where you, oh, five headshots or you capture.
I like doing that in my Jiu Jitsu.
It's like, okay, my goal is to get this many sweeps
or my goal is to get two on one
or my goal is to get their back
or my goal is even just to be able to count to five seconds
between each of my moves
or my goal is to try to do the entire role
on the beat of the music.
Like I'll set all kinds of crazy goals
like little missions for myself
and it keeps the role interesting and fun
and I'm constantly building skills
because I'm not just rolling to say,
okay, let's beat this guy.
And I find that my little side quests
are immensely valuable in skill building
and maintaining the fact that like,
I don't, you asked me why I haven't quit.
It's never been boring.
That's the crazy thing.
Since Blue Belt, since that big plateau at Blue Belt,
I've been getting better at Jiu Jitsu the entire time,
whether it be learning more moves or learning more concepts
or now as a teacher, thinking of different ways
of conveying Jiu Jitsu or shifting a paradigm.
I've had these big jumps over the years
of things that redefined Jiu Jitsu for me.
Like leg locks were one of them
and then getting better at my theoretical approach
was another one.
And then bringing my Judo and wrestling kind of together
was one.
And then the idea of defensive postures in Jiu Jitsu
was another one.
And then the idea of just standing up, right?
Like, ironically, I had the,
I'd been teaching a seminar called Just Stand Up
all around the world and I was gonna film it
with BJ Fanatics and then Craig Jones came out with his
and I was like, no.
No.
His is not at all the same as what I'm teaching,
but it was such a good name for a DVD.
But just that idea that like, oh yeah,
we don't have to stay in guard when we're in guard.
I think a lot of us, when we're in guard,
we're like, I have to stay down here.
I must sweep or replace guard again.
When, no, you can literally stand up.
But then also after just standing up all the time,
realizing like, okay, maybe sometimes
I should also still stay down.
Like, it's very fascinating to me that it seems
the more that I learn, the more that I understand
there's more and there's more.
And it's not just a like Pokemon,
gotta catch them all of moves.
It's a lot more than that.
I got one more area I wanna throw at you
and then we'll talk about obviously where people can find
your seminars and your personal coaching.
Something was very interesting to me
when I heard you want another podcast
and I wish I'd written down which one it was
so I could give him credit.
But I think it was an American,
it sounded like a Brazilian gentleman as well,
but I don't know if that rings a bell or not.
You went to his gym on the very first day of his jujitsu,
it sounded Brazilian and French.
Oh, he's Polish.
He's Polish.
Trying to get the accent,
because he's got that American lilt now.
So anyway, those gentlemen.
And this journey from being in the corporate space,
having the things that we're told will make us happy
and making the leap of faith
because I did this with this podcast
and it wasn't to get out of the profession for me,
I was driven into it because I was going
to firefighter funerals and I wanted to make a difference
and make a change and ultimately I was at a crossroads
and it was, do I stay and possibly be told
you can't say these things or do I jump out,
terrify my wife financially and then do this
and that's what I ended up doing?
Talk to me about where you were in the corporate space
and what made you make that jump to follow your dreams.
I wish I could say it was that direct
and also like that responsible.
Like, I worked at the same natural gas company
since I was an intern for eight and a half years total.
For seven of those years, I pretty much every six months
to a year and a half was getting promoted.
I was doing really well at every job they gave me.
So I was an intern, I was a trade room analyst,
then I was a structured hedging analyst
which is like the financial insurance on the natural gas
that we were purchasing.
Then I was a business systems analyst,
so like the liaison between the business speaking people
and the technical speaking people.
Then I was a software developer
where I was actually writing the code
to build the internal software for us to do
some of the operations of the company.
Then after that, I was a business system,
so I was a, what is it called?
Wow, I'm forgetting it.
I can't believe I'm forgetting this.
A business analytics manager, that's what I was.
I forgot the name of the title,
but I managed a team of people who would then use databases
to query data from the company and make reports
to help the business make decisions,
as well as automate various tedious tasks
around the company with scripts and such.
And then finally, I was a natural gas scheduler
in my last year and a half at the company,
which a natural gas scheduler is kind of like
the company buys and sells gas,
and I kind of route it through the pipelines
to get from where we bought the gas
to where our customers were burning it.
So I did all of those jobs.
In the end, I kind of got to a point where,
I don't know if you've heard of the,
you kind of get promoted up until the point
where you're no longer amazing.
So like every job I had for the first seven years
at that company, I did really, really well
and was like getting the five star,
like A plus reviews and everything, and did amazingly.
The very last job, I was no longer that.
I wasn't the best person,
or the best thing since sliced bread.
I was not the best person ever to do that job.
And for someone who was an overachiever in school
and did really well in everything,
and got a degree in physics, which is really hard,
and kind of fancied himself a smart guy,
it wasn't easy to not be that guy all of a sudden.
All of a sudden I wasn't, and I wasn't crap at the job,
but by no means was I amazing at the job either.
And ended up in a situation
where the company I parted ways,
and the moment was I was at home,
and I looked at my resume,
and I was like the youngest person to do this and do that,
and had all this success,
and I was like I knew I could get another job.
But then I was like, and then what?
And I had been very frugal with my money,
lived far beneath my means, and so I had a good savings,
and I had a mortgage, and I figured out
that I could Airbnb my place,
and that would pay my mortgage.
I never had any other bills, I owned my car outright,
and I was like, so I can leave.
And so I got on the road,
and just started traveling for fun.
I wasn't teaching, wasn't making any money,
it was just seeing places,
and back then any place that I went,
I would, I mean I think I taught,
actually I taught a couple of seminars
here in Florida and Georgia before I left.
So I had been teaching already seminars,
but the plan wasn't that I was gonna go
and travel the world teaching seminars.
The plan was to go see the world.
I think shortly before I left the job,
I had done a small world tour,
and I remember that was part of what it almost
like set me down this path of not wanting to just continue,
because I'd never dreamed of being a corporate guy.
Like the problem I had is I never had a dream.
I remember that around me I saw these people,
like I wanna be a doctor, and I wanna be a lawyer.
They were so confident in their life goals,
I never had that.
All I knew was I liked the idea of like being an old man,
and sitting down and regaling my grandkids with stories.
That sounded really romantic to me, so I wanted that.
That was it.
And then beyond that, I wanted to know that
the sweat of my brow meant something.
I wanted to know that the hard work that I was putting in
had some kind of an impact,
that I wasn't just digging holes
and filling right back in for money.
I didn't want that to be the feeling about what I was doing.
And so after, only reason I ended up at that company
was I didn't know if I wanted to go to grad school,
because I was terrified when I talked to all the people,
all the newly minted physics PhDs
that I was talking to for advice were miserable.
They weren't happy people.
And I talked to one of my professors,
one of them that I respected the most,
and I was like, hey, what do I do?
I was like, no one does anything with a bachelor's of physics.
I have to either get a PhD or do something.
And I was pretty much told that like,
if I wanted, I could probably be a manager
at an engineering company,
because engineers respect physicists
for their big picture view.
But frankly, that I probably should have just gotten
a damn engineering degree if I wanted to get a job.
But this was all like, I was not proactive about this.
This was all like a few months before I was about to graduate.
And so I was like, all right, I'm gonna get this job.
And if I hate it, I go to grad school.
Well, as I told you, I didn't hate it.
They loved me, I loved them.
I really loved working at the company.
They kept promoting me.
I was like, all right.
But then after I was no longer with the company,
I was just like, I don't have a reason
to work in this industry.
And like, I enjoyed being a software developer.
So I thought about tech, like that pays well, I like it.
But like, I also didn't dream
of being a software developer either.
At that point in time, I was 29 or 30,
and I was like, I dreamed of having some good stories
for my grandkids.
Let's go make some stories, let's go travel.
And then I just kind of fell into it.
I got lucky that I'd been teaching
since I was 13, right?
I'd been teaching since I was 13.
We also did the performance, the catas.
I was kind of, in a way, I'd been a performer
for a long time.
So being in front of crowds and public speaking,
I had a lot of public speaking at my job as a manager,
having to talk to groups of people.
So like, I already was good at public speaking.
And that kind of made it easy that once I started traveling,
that I kind of got a lot of nos
when I asked people if I could teach a seminar.
A lot of nos.
What have you won?
Some nagas and some new breeds and,
are you a world champion?
No.
Are you a Pan Am champion?
No.
Are you a European champion?
No.
So why do you think you can teach here?
That was kind of the train of thought that I got.
And I was also a pretty new black belt.
I hadn't, I'd been a black belt for like,
I think at that point, either a year or a couple of months.
And I would go to open mats
and I would just roll with everybody.
And I would set myself this set of rules,
which was, I have to convince these people
that I don't suck at jiu-jitsu.
And I have to convince them that I'm not an asshole.
And not in that order.
Because at that point in time,
I had been hearing rumors
that a lot of the people who are currently touring,
teaching seminars were making
bad relationships with the gyms.
They would, you've been to the seminars back in the day
where seminars at two, they don't show up till four.
Or while they're there,
they're spending half the time getting the girls' numbers.
Or they injure students.
Like it's all these little things
that kind of put black eyes on Brazilian jiu-jitsu
because of the people who were touring in that era
were not professionals.
They were really bad motherfuckers.
That's what they were.
They were great at fighting jiu-jitsu.
They were great fighters, but they weren't really teachers.
And they weren't really professional business owners either.
They were guys who were really, really gifted
at the art of strangling and breaking things.
There are people from that era who were separate.
There are people who were good teachers even in that era.
But I benefited from the bad experiences
that people around the world had had
with those people who were just fighters.
And so once I showed them, like,
hey, I'm just sitting in the corner
teaching one of the white belt something
or helping people out.
And mind you, when I'm rolling,
I'm trying to make sure that I leave a good impression,
which means I can't get beat up.
I have to win, but I cannot injure anybody in my winning.
I have to make sure I do so with control.
And even also, back then, I was thinking of the egos.
So if this is the owner of the gym,
I am not going to tap him out in front of his students
unless he strikes me as one of those people who wants it.
Because there's gym owners who are just gym owners.
Then there's gym owners that are psychopaths.
And by psychopaths, I mean they're still
the fighter they were when they were 21,
and they still have that fire inside them.
And if I'm nice to them, they will lose respect for me.
And I have to figure out who you are
when I'm rolling with you.
Because if I'm too nice to you, you're going to think I suck,
or that I'm soft, and you're not going to book me for a seminar.
But if you're not that guy, and I tap you out
in front of your students, I'm going
to hurt your pride and your ego, and you're not
going to invite me back for a seminar.
So that was what I learned how to do.
I learned the right way to roll with people
and to leave the right impression.
And people started inviting me for seminars.
And then I got a great opportunity
for my friend Dan in Taiwan, who just welcomed me
to teach in his gym on faith.
And after I taught in his gym and the adventures
I had there with him, he actually hooked me up
with a spot getting to take the Craig Jones Heel Hooker
Camp in Thailand.
And so I got to go over there and meet
all these people who would be crazy enough to fly all
the way to Thailand to take a jiu-jitsu seminar.
I met a lot of cool people there.
And I got recommended to Christian Galgart,
which is how I got the gig being sponsored to travel by BJJ
Globetrotters and became a teacher for them.
And then I got lucky that one of my friends who used to train
here in town at Marcelo Gracia's ended up
being one of the instructors for Bernardo Faria.
And so I got to go train with them using my same method
of rolling but not injuring them in there.
Managed to leave an impression on Bernardo and those guys.
And Mike Zenga asked me to roll one day.
And I rolled with him.
And then after we finished rolling,
I guess he decided I didn't suck at jiu-jitsu
and handed me a check and said, would you
like to make an instructional for BJJ Fanatics?
And I got to make an instructional for BJJ Fanatics.
And that was the beginning.
And that kind of is what brings me
into kind of my current life.
Actually, no, that's kind of my previous life.
Because at that point, then I was traveling the world about
10 months out of the year teaching seminars and studying
and trying to make instructions for Fanatics.
These days, I'm making a shift this year.
I'm still traveling.
But I want to be able to do more online stuff.
So I've started a Patreon.
I'm posting more on Instagram and YouTube.
And I'm designing more instructionals
that are going to be on Fanatics with the goal of being
able to do more distance learning
and build people up remotely.
Whether it be Zoom lessons, I'm going to be doing not
instructionals.
Because instructionals are usually in a certain format.
It's going to be more of an actual course, where
I want to make actual classes, where you would watch the video
and you would do this day's video today.
And then you do tomorrow's video tomorrow.
And that it actually is taking you
through a progression with actual goals
and measurable skills that you want to have
at the end of this course.
Versus most of the, even the best taught instructionals
on BJ Fanatics, mine included, it's we're giving you knowledge.
And we're going to tell you kind of how we want you
to develop that knowledge.
But it's mostly we're giving you the information processing.
And now there's the ecological guys,
who I love, who are also giving you
some games, some ways to practice and build skills.
And I think that you need both.
I'm not 100% ecological, where it's just
like all of Jiu Jitsu will magically
appear if you just play games.
But I'm also not just drilling, because I've always
hated dead drilling.
And so I think that that's my view on the whole thing.
And I hope to be able to make an impact.
I've had a really lot of success and really been
happy with the Patreon model.
And being here in Gainesville more and teaching more
private lessons, I love private lessons.
I love getting to know exactly what your personal problems are
and kind of together devise a plan
and then get feedback from you guys.
You're like, OK, I did this.
And we can tweak and guide people
and help them on their journey.
Because I only have one body, and I
have certain gifts and disadvantages, and so do you.
And so getting to solve your problems
is like getting to play the game through a second time
on a video game as a different character.
Like, I really love teaching private lessons.
So.
Beautiful.
Well, I know we're going to be mindful of your time.
People listening, how do they find you on social media,
and what about the website?
So my name is Charles Harriet, spelled H-A-R-R-I-O-T-T.
That's pretty much how to find me everywhere.
So on Instagram, it's Charles Harriet.
On Patreon, it's patreon.com slash Charles Harriet.
On YouTube, it's Charles Harriet.
And on BJJ Fanatics, you type in, once again,
my name, Charles Harriet.
My website is CharlesHarriet.com.
So it should be pretty easy.
I did pretty good of buying up all of my internet real estate.
My last name is spelled oddly enough
that there's not many Charles Harriots out there.
So at this point in time, there's
a special that I'm running, meaning
if you join the Patreon this month,
you will not only get a 15 minute jujitsu diagnostic
and all your things, but also I'll double it to a half an hour
because I realized that I want to just talk to people longer
anyway.
And kind of set a plan for your jujitsu journey.
And I'm going to be teaching a seminar actually today,
and which probably won't be in the past by the time
this gets released, but in Placa, Florida.
Then another one next week in Orange Park at Smiley's.
And then two weeks after that, I'll be in Pensacola.
And then my friend Chris Paynes and I are doing a full USA tour.
We're starting here in Florida, going through Georgia,
Tennessee, over to Austin, Texas, California, Denver,
Philadelphia, and Connecticut.
And that'll all be in the end of March and April.
All those information will be on my website,
charlesharriot.com, in the coming days.
Beautiful.
Well, we could talk about a whole bunch of stuff.
I mean, a time in Osaka, for example.
But I would love.
I want to be part two.
I want to I would usually do this.
I made the mistake of booking something after this.
We can do a part two.
And this experience is, once again,
just lighting the fire under me to do my own podcast more.
Because I've recorded some.
I just haven't had the courage you've had to actually properly
release it.
So I'm going to take this as more motivation to release mine.
So I'll talk to you.
I'll have you on my podcast, or I'll
come back on this one again.
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