The Trust Starts With the Tap

Pete and co-host Professor Lucas Rubbo open with the question this podcast keeps coming back to: why are so many of the people at the top of jiu-jitsu so humble and so good? Bernardo’s answer is trust. Every time you tap, your partner stops — and that simple promise, kept over and over, builds a trust between training partners that makes friendships form faster than almost anywhere else in life. When someone starts hurting people, he says, the school usually shows them the door, and the community is better for it.

From there the conversation turns to BJJ Fanatics, which he co-founded to put a great athlete’s whole system in front of anyone, in an easy format. He started training in 2001, when there was no YouTube and the only way to study was on VHS tapes. He was lucky: he grew up two hours from Rio de Janeiro, moved to São Paulo and Alliance, where five world champions lived in his building, and then to New York when Marcelo Garcia’s academy was the best place in the world to train. Most people don’t live near any of that — and that’s the point. Even now, when he teaches a move that isn’t his A game at his academy in Massachusetts, he studies first, sometimes with the BJJ Fanatics app in his hand during class.

Bernardo also traces how fast the art moves. In the 90s there was no half guard — it was just a way to pass. Then came deep half, leg locks that people once looked down on, and the berimbolo. He talks about instructors earning six and even seven figures a year from instructionals, why a sport whose fans actually practice is different from soccer, and whether jiu-jitsu can reach ESPN, where he thinks no-gi may grow faster with mainstream viewers even though he is a gi guy at heart.

Asked what made him so hard to beat, he lays out three buckets: technique, conditioning and mindset. His game was narrow — half guard and the over-under pass — but inside it he knew more than anybody. He would accept losing to better technique, never to being tired. At the Worlds, with the last match of the tournament on the line, that mindset meant refusing to tap to a toe hold. He closes on the two most impressive people he ever trained with: Marcelo Garcia and Gordon Ryan.