Joe Rogan | Jiu-jitsu is a Gentle Art w/Jean Jaques Machado

There's a lot of people that they learn how to deal with life through the struggle of jujitsu because the struggle of training is so much harder than most of the struggles that you face in your daily life. It makes you more accustomed to dealing with uncomfortable positions. Man, I would tell a funny story that what jujitsu does for you. My older daughter had some health issues like at two o'clock in the morning, something like that, and I called the doctor and said, look, I gotta go and get this inhaler or something at the pharmacy. Man, I was wearing my pajamas, driving crazy to the pharmacy. And as I'm walking in, I have a guy walking out and bumping. He showed him mine and, hey, son of a bitch, I feel and I said, man, two, turn in the morning, I want to fight. Go home. Go to your wife, dude. Then the guy, I'm going to wait for you. Then he's outside. I go get the medication. I put this stuff in, say, man, get the guy outside. He's no longer there. Several months later, the same guy show up in my school. And I did not recognize him, but he keeps staring at me and I approach, hey, how are you? Have you trained jujitsu before? I was like, do you remember me? Did you train here before? No. I bump into you in the pharmacy. And I go like, thank you for not hurting me. And I was like, man, what happened to you? All my father passed away a day before I was so depressed. So the point for me was with jujitsu, I can walk away for something like that. And I feel sorry for the guy. Yeah. I'm not concerned. I'm afraid of him. No, I'm not afraid. It's just the fact that I'm saving him to get hurt. Right. Today, he is one of my best friends. He's my lawyer. Wow. My dear friend. He's been training jujitsu for since that time, almost 20 years. Wow. But I remember that day walking in and the guy bumped into me. I want to fight. Wow. And I was like, man, I walk away. No, no, no. You're too strong for me, man. Go home and relax. That's the difference, too, between jujitsu and kickboxing. Because the kickboxing, you can only hurt somebody. You can't really hold on to them and go, hey, hey, hey. You ever see the video? It was already hurt, man. You ever see the video? Yeah, right. He was already hurt. You ever see the video of Matt Serra? Matt Serra was in an altercation with some drunk guy in a bar or a restaurant or something like that. I think I saw that. Meanwhile. Matt just took the guy down, mounted him, and just just hold him onto his wrist. And he was like, calm down, calm down. And the employers are trying to figure out what to do. He's like, he's fine, he's fine, calm down. But Matt didn't hurt him. He just held onto him and basically just mounted him and grabbed a hold of his wrist and was controlling him. When we say jujitsu is a gentle word, we mean that. Jujitsu would give you the choice to choose to hurt someone or not. And I think while you're training, you realize that that person has something already going on in their life. And we choose not to. I mean, we grew up in our time and it's funny, with teenagers in those jujitsu tournaments, then we go like, how are we going to test ourself? And back in the old days in Brazil, we had some fun time. We go to a nightclub and fight breakthrough and here we are practicing our jujitsu. But not hurting anybody. And not because we choose or somebody provokes. No, we get people coming towards us because we're always little guys. We're never the biggest guys in the place. Then we just make sure like, man, we take them down, hold, choke somebody up and no scratch. And on the end, those people become students of our school. How those little kids can do that to us. And that's one way that's funny in the 80s that jujitsu became even bigger. With some of the altercation on the street, we convinced the person that we just fought, we just choked, to come and become our student. Because you didn't hurt them. Then like, man, they end up coming and learn that. They feel humiliated, but at least they feel thankful that you didn't injure them. For sure, yeah. In a fight, man, that I think jujitsu gives you that sense of control that you have that choice. This is what I always explain to people. I say, if I'm in a street fight with someone and they're swinging, if it's a strong person, if it's a strong person, they're good athletes, they have strong arms, they're throwing punches at me. If I get hit, I'm in trouble. No matter who you are, if you get hit, you're in trouble. Most likely, I won't get hit if I know how to fight and I keep my hands up and I move right. But if I get a hold of you, you're not doing anything to me. Like, there's a difference between someone who's untrained and someone who's trained. Like, if a jujitsu black belt grabs a person and actually gets control of them, there's no lucky, you're not going to luckily submit me. It's not going to happen, but you can luckily, you could hit someone. It can happen in a street fight. If someone has a little bit of speed and they have power and there's a strong person, they can hit you. It's much more dangerous. And that's the only, and we asked when he trained, it was the only opportunity our opponent has is before we close the distance. Right. That's the danger zone. And if you think for a second, a lot of things that we do on the ground in jujitsu, you just bring those two people up in the close distance. It's the same thing. And a lot of people today, they don't do the same. They're trying to fight standing when they hold different than when you're on the ground. The way you move your legs, the way you play guard, it's the same thing when you're standing. Work on the people's body as a hook, as a sweep to make somebody fall. And we learned that when we get close to someone, we make the size not be affected as much as could if you have a distance.