Travis Stevens: Judo, Olympics, and Mental Toughness | Lex Fridman Podcast #223
the following is a conversation with travis stevens 2016 olympic silver medalist in judo and one of the greatest american judoka ever but his story is inspiring not because of that olympic medal but because of the decades of injury hardship incredible battles against the best in the world wrapping up in close heartbreaking losses at the 2008 and 2012 games all of which eventually led to that very silver medal in 2016. as we talk about in the podcast travis is also someone who is largely responsible for me getting into judo for which i will forever be grateful he also happens to be now my judo coach and mentor i'll release a video of travis and i doing some judo in a few days to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description as a side note let me say a few words that i've written down about the olympic games and the international olympics committee i'm visiting family has the t-shirt but i had to pull away to write and to say these words because this very video was taken down by youtube as per the request of the ioc you know it's serious when a russian takes time away from family food and drink i am heartbroken to see continued incompetence greed and corruption on the part of the ilc in failing to do as the olympic charter states to quote ensure the fullest coverage and the widest possible audience in the world for the olympic games end quote i want to give you two facts first they do not make most of the videos of the games available for replay anywhere that is accessible searchable and discoverable whether funded by ads or by subscriptions for example on youtube or their own service it is not available anywhere second in the most absurd violation of the olympic charter they've uploaded all of the videos of the 2012 2016 and the 2020 slash olympics to youtube and they set all of these videos to private this results in a situation like my four-hour conversation that you're watching now with travis stevens being taken down due to us including a few seconds of a small video overlay of travis's epic match against ole bishop in 2012 this is done automatically as per the request of the ioc i have the video due to having screen recorded it from 2012. here you have travis stevens an olympic silver medalist someone who spent his entire life overcoming injuries losses hard weight cuts periods of no financial psychological support culminating in the biggest heartbreak of his career in this one match and this match is available nowhere online not for free not for one million dollars our showing short clips of it results in the ioc taking it down not demonetizing it taking it down blocking it the ioc silences this amazing story of travis stevens of heartbreak that eventually led to triumph and there are thousands of stories like it stories that are supposed to inspire the world to me and to billions of others the olympic games give a chance to celebrate and to be inspired by the greatest stories of human flourishing in the face of hardship and incredibly long odds or dominance in the pursuit of perfection at levels previously thought to be impossible the olympic games inspired kids like me to dream and to work hard to achieve in our own lives the same moments of magic and greatness small or big that the olympic games reveal i believe the members of the ilc are good people but people who forgot the dream the fire that was sparked and burned in their hearts when they first saw the olympics as kids they've allowed the gradual corruption of their own human spirit and thereby have robbed the world of this very fire the fire of the olympic torch the fire that ought to burn in the eyes and hearts of kids watching the olympics today daring to dream daring to be great please please do better the world needs you the world needs the olympic games this is the lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with travis stevens judo is a martial art a sport a set of techniques ideas and philosophies can we start by uh maybe you giving a big picture overview of what is judo to somebody who's like outside of the whole spectrum of grappling sports yeah judo was originated in japan that was used as a police tactic for self-defense and you know subduing people it's the art of being able to throw somebody to the ground and hold and control the situation um i think it's pretty much evolved since then though you know it's as you include like the sport aspect of it it's it's grown to be something more and more dynamic and it's kind of gotten away from that so the basics is people wear something called a ghee yep which i think nicely mimics like outdoor clothing yep like a jacket and uh they start on the feet and there's uh they get to grip each other and the scoring works by the more badass the throw is the more points you get and if you throw the person big and hard on their back you win the match and it's over and that's called an e-pawn yep which is equivalent to a knockout so i guess there's no knock-downs no judo we don't count those yeah they gotta hit their back and they gotta hit it with force and so there's a huge incentive for the big throws and there's also the drama of somebody catching you off guard with a surprise big throw and it's over yep there's there's two ways of losing really there's the i saw this coming right like you just you see it but you can't stop it and those ones tend to be the ones you can live with the ones that are like really hard to live with are the ones you never saw coming right because that just shows that that person has really outglassed you right so there's like a set of a small set of throws maybe you can go through them that are like you saw it coming but you couldn't do anything about it and then there's the set of throws that are more like surprises so first of all the counters or if you fake one thing and go the other way then that's a surprise and it's like oh shit you off balance the person because they think you're going one way and then you go the other way and there's this oh shit moment all of a sudden yeah your back is just slammed on the ground one other one i mean you're good of many throws but one of them is a that i think reveals the beauty of judo is the foot sweep yep there's something about the off balance and the timing that if you catch him right all of a sudden it's like i had the same feeling when i went skydiving like all sudden the ground is not under you anymore yeah and you just you go weightlessness for like a split second and you realize you've lost like all control of your limbs like it's like zero gravity right like you just you can't turn you can't rotate you can't do much of anything and then before you know it you've hit the floor yeah it's a cool feeling when you get thrown um because you hope to do the same thing to another person it's like you're you just hit the ground hard because it's not you didn't see it coming it wasn't a big throw that got loaded up it's like all sudden the surprise and then like this like feeling your back just slams and there's like the air's up yeah and the worst is when you get hit twice with one throw right because sometimes like the guy throwing you didn't expect you to leave either so you hit and then that guy comes down like a second and a half later and it's like boom boom and then the wind is just gone from you yeah those are the worst and then there's the disappointment like then the the intellectual the cognitive part comes in where you're like oh shit i just lost yep and you don't have like a connection to why right it's almost like you've just like you didn't literally get a concussion like you and you understand and remember everything but you can't figure out how this just happened right those are the those are the tough ones to deal with actually have you had moments like that yeah where you don't understand how it happened you have to watch footage to understand what happened even when you watch it you're just like i don't get it like why wasn't i in a position to stop this it makes zero sense conceptually when you watch it you're like i understand how to play defense i understand it looks like i'm in a defensive position but at the end of the day i still got thrown yeah you were talking about what is it a 2008 match you have a non-traditional gripping style yeah that's accurate to say but and then you're going against another right-handed player and then there's some kind of fake that he did and then he caught you yep can you can you describe the throw he caught you with he caught me with a drop sail but he he kind of like we were engaged we were looking at each other and we were kind of at like a stalemate right he couldn't really advance i couldn't really advance and he kind of just let his gaze like wander off to the right like he was looking at something and then i kind of like what's over there and then i got thrown and it's like so first of all uh for people don't know uh sayonagi drop means when you drop to your knees and uh sanagi is one of the fundamental throws of judo that's just just a handful but does that actually ever work i always wondered that about like boxing or judo does the head movement of the person work because we're still like kind of dogs at heart if you look somewhere with a dog the dog is gonna look that direction as well does that actually work ever it does um but on a greater sense what you try to do is not necessarily get like a physical reaction of a look but a lull of security where like they've almost like relaxed for that split second because you've lured them into like a sense of comfort and then that's when you can strike so you have this speaking of senagi you have this gigantic uh standing synagogue yep and um you have a specific grip one of our challenges is there's a large number of people that listen to the audio version of this so we're gonna have to try to describe some of the stuff uh i'll do my best to try to describe with words but uh you have you grip with your left hand on the lapel of the jacket or like that area yep and uh there's kind of a lean into the person and i suppose is there a feeling of a lull there that you're trying to get to where you're just it feels like you're both calmly dancing before you turn your hips and go in for the throw i'm actually trying to create a a sense of weightlessness for my lead leg which would be my right leg and a sense of resistance from my partner so you aren't you both kind of leaning into each other and it creates like an a-frame yeah but when the a-frame is held together at the top half which would be my left hand and their right hand posted on each other's chest it means our legs are free to move and our hips are free to move right and they're not gonna feel your leg move because of the weightlessness and is there a feeling like for them is there feeling like nothing bad can happen here we're all relaxed everything's fine yeah and then they're standing off at a funny angle and before they know it i've spun and my back is on their chest and they can't go anywhere yeah yeah uh how did you first develop that throw so for people um it's called ippon seinagi which means your right hand goes under their like armpit area and that that's like a vice that connects you to them yeah and then they get go on for the ride yep the interesting thing with the standing one is uh as opposed to drop sanagi version the drop saying you kind of um drop under them and because there's the vice they're like pulled pulled under and like over yeah with the standing one i suppose there's some similar physics but you're kind of loading them onto your hip and so they're in the air while you're standing still there's there's a there's a sense in which they're like you're lifting them above where they started yes that's how you get the really big error yeah if obviously if um if everything is right so how did you first develop that how did you first i first learned just learning like the very basics of the throw you know foot placement all that kind of stuff and then you know like anything the basics are nice um but once you get good at the basics it's it's very easy to stop but it gives you a good like fundamental platform to learn off of and to expand off of and then i expanded when i first started watching koga the new wind right because he's the one that first like introduced that split hip style sanagi that i do once i learned that one i built about eight different variations of sayo off that one start position that way i could regardless of your defense i had an answer for a throw so why that one though why can you uh can you describe love to me travis stevens why did you fall in love with that throw in particular um it it was really a sense of you know one of my shortcomings as a kid like i hate leg day in the gym i hate it with a passion i if you ask me to do a squat i'll i'll get it done but i will bitch and moan every step of the way i hate it i remember one time i was at the gym with my trainer and he goes okay we're gonna do front squats and i want you to put 225 on the bar and i was like i can't do that and he was like what do you mean you can't do that and i go i physically i can't do that and he was like are you serious and i go yeah so he's he didn't believe me we put 225 on the bar and i bottomed out and then he was like okay let's go down to 185 and i was like i can't do that i just it's not happening you probably couldn't strength wise you just refuse i just mentally i cannot wrap my head around like this ain't happening i'm not doing it so i ended up your man like principal 95 pounds on the bar i got you with a front squat no problem by the way body weight squats are rough too psychologically so yeah i just when it comes to my legs like i want no part of like leg pressing single leg squat split squat any of that no part of it so you think like the more traditional variance of saying i can require you to have that leg strength yeah that mass like when you watch japanese judo players like their thighs and their hips they're thick they got a lot of power there so you're almost like always dropping a little bit into a squat position for mine never no no no not you sorry for the the traditional ones yeah and so the split hip the split hip actually allows me to keep my legs straight yeah and the farther i split my legs the lower my center of gravity goes now i don't need my legs yeah perfect love it let's do it so that's the way you were thinking about it okay yeah um but it's uh you know the interesting thing about it is because you know as i mentioned to you i've gotten to judo after first watching you in the uh olympics and then uh watching koga as well and so you start imitating the people you first see and then you take it to judo coaches and they're like no no no that's the wrong way to do it and happens all the time it drives me nuts drives me nuts i was in poland one time teaching a camp and i had two coaches anti-coaching telling their kids not to do sayo the way i do it because it never works yeah it's crazy how do you have the fortitude and the guts to just go on with a throw that's not traditional a variant that's not traditional if you think about it you know from a very basic like root of it there's a philosophy and a mentality of judo of how the throes work right there's a mechanical structure there like this makes sense if i follow that principle i can do anything i want nothing else matters as long as we follow those core principles so in the early days even even then you were able to think on your own yeah and i was able to develop a pattern for my foot placement based on my opponent's height because the number one thing any judo coach will tell you is you need your center of gravity below yours well now i now i know exactly where to put my feet because the shorter you are the bigger the split because the lower i need to get the taller you are the less of a split i need is there something you can say about fundamental principles of judo is there over all that time not 20 over 20 years that you've been doing judo uh it's not approaching 30 is it yeah it's it's yeah getting it's going getting there okay we're a couple years away let's get in there um is there some like principles that have emerged like you said you have to have your center of gravity below theirs yeah is there other kind of both on the gripping side the footwork side leverage anything you can speak to there's some that have withstood like time like you have to be able to get below their center of gravity because you have to be able to rotate them around their center of gravity and then the other one is that was always a principle when i was growing up and i didn't change until later on in my career was you have to be able to pull you need to be able to pull to get them off balance but when you think about that statement as a whole it ended with they have to be off balance i don't need the pull to get you off balance i just need you off balance and when you think about it that way it allows you to open up the doors to what do i need to do to get you off balance i could push pull i could flinch i could fake and you could put yourself in your own off balance state right when you think about people who wrestle right if i fake shoot it causes you to over lean forward which means you're off balance there's no pull there's no push there's no nothing i just get a reaction that leaves the opportunity in the door open for an attack and that off balance could be very subtle it could be very subtle and the better you get and the more skills you get the less subtle it is so we should also mention that there is something called forward throws where you throw the person you know they they're going to fly facing forward they're going to fly forward and then a backward throw is they're going to fly back yep and then there's lateral you know they actually go sideways over like a cartwheel almost okay so the forward throws there's the one we've been talking about which is uh say nagi and there's a bunch of different variants ippon marote seinagi there's drop and there's standing versions of them and that all i don't know if there's a way to summarize it but that's like as clean as uh getting your center of gravity under theirs as it gets and then the rest is just gripping variations yep i guess it's all gripping variations on all of these throws but um and then uh there's uh in terms of forward throws there's the other big one in competition is uchimada which is i don't know we can try to explain that one but it uh ends up being where one or you're standing on just one of your feet and the other one is up in the air and i don't know if you put in that same category haragoshi like those kinds of throws where you're kind of a little bit single footed yeah and so there's two footed techniques and then there's a single footed yeah oh goshi where it's like you're doing a mix between the uchimada and it's a hug you you hug a person and then you turn your hips around such that you're now hugging facing the same direction when it comes to forward throw there's regardless of the name of the throw or the gripping variation that you're using the whole principle is how do i get this person to do a forward roll in midair and land on their back the more of a forward roll i can get the bigger the score if i get like a quarter of a turn where like you land on your side and you don't go over your back it's a half score yeah but they all require me to get you to do that forward rolling action so just if we think of one person if they do this nice leap forward and they do a roll and their back nicely rolls over the ground you're trying to do the exact same thing with you connected to them well and if it's nice and it's smooth it's probably not a full score it needs to have like somewhat of a violent impact right so if you think of a drop saying agi if i if i'm moving too slow and you still roll over your shoulders and there's no direct impact it's only a half score right they want the force the force the violence that's good okay uh so then uh in terms of uh backward throws the traditional ones there's stuff where you trip them from outside their body like osotogari it's a trip where you hook your leg onto their leg and you trip them but your hook it goes outside of their legs and then there's the trips from inside their body there's uh one foot is called kuchigari and then the other is ochigari it doesn't matter the the most important thing is outside and inside uh and then there's like i don't even know how you throw them sideways except foot sweeps and then there's the foot sweeps where you can sweep one of their legs from out of them or both their legs at the same time and like we were talking about this kind of is when timed perfectly it's it's effortless for everybody involved and uh the ending like you said is big dramatic and violent yeah is there other kind of oh yeah there's uh sacrifice techniques there's a bunch of them and that ultimately the variations have to do with uh gripping but you're basically you the attacker fall onto your back sticking your legs somewhere on onto their body which is like this fulcrum over which they fly and do that same kind of role that you mentioned you basically sacrifice your back to the mat in order to throw them into that circular pattern so they hit their back sometimes we use a foot sometimes we don't and so we should probably say it's okay for you to go on to your back as long as you're clearly demonstrating control over the other person's body correct you can't go to your back in the same direction that your opponent is trying to put you to your back right you have to go the other way or you have to initiate you going to your own back right uh like clearly and then um and then there's all the counters which almost kind of have a whole group of their own even though they have echoes of the same types of techniques it seems like they're their own whole thing yeah but they follow the same principles it's just most counters like if you wanted to counter enuchimata for example you're trying to throw me in a somersault over my right shoulder therefore i would counter you by throwing you over your left shoulder it goes in the opposite shoulder direction but in the same somersault idea and there used to be i already at this point forget the years but it might be 20 before the 2012 olympics where they banned uh you you used to be allowed to grab legs in the same way you do in wrestling so you have basically all the techniques you would have in wrestling available to you if you would like yeah it's just that some of the techniques in wrestling are not that effective for getting your opponent your to their back wrestlers want to take the other person down in any way possible and have control judo wants to take you down like we said in a big fashion where your back slams on the ground yeah it has to be to the back a lot of wrestling take downs happen because they get behind them yeah and then they they part tear out yeah so uh but judo banned all touching of the legs which is very dramatic change at the sport but also 2012. after it was after 20 it was in 2012 so 2008 i fought the games and everything was free in 2012 we could only touch the legs as a defensive action or in response to an attack so i could try to throw you with a normal throw and then when you try to counter i could grab your leg right so that there uh had to be a secondary technique and didn't like didn't they disqualify on a first offense first offense was a direct disqualification which happened at the 2012 games to the 57 brazilian who won in 16 yeah she was dq'd and i think the quarters yeah and it was like i wouldn't say it was blatant as much as i don't think the act changed the outcome of the match had they not disqualified it so that's not that dramatic and by the way you say 57 that refers to weight divisions and that's in kilograms and kilograms is the measure of weight that the rest of the world uses in the united states does not um so and there's uh we should say the divisions for for guys um i don't know what the 70 i don't know slower level 16 60 66 73 81 90 100 and heavyweight which has no ceiling no ceiling station yeah it is an important distinction um so and you competed most of your career at 81 kilograms all of it all you never did never did 73. well you had to cut big for 81 anyway especially towards the end of my career yeah okay uh i overly grew into the division what's uh uh i'm trying to remember is that about 180 pounds 178.6 i think and you have to weigh in with the the ghee no nothing you're not allowed to wear anything except for your underwear weigh in sorry confusing jiu-jitsu that's right that's right that's right that's which is very nice um okay so we would you say we covered most of the throws or no so the there's the forward and the backward there's the sacrifice throws and the counters yep and the and then there's the leg grabs and we should say for the leg grabs that were effective it's like um the big pickups where you just kind of pick them up and try to figure out once they're in the air what the heck to do with their body to get them to the ground you just kind of figure it out as you go i think the really nice one that was to me heartbreaking as a fan to see go is i guess what's called the fireman's carry which is uh you know it does lead to judo like beautiful throws and the fact that that was gone is is that one i missed a little bit but then a bunch of people i guess came up with the variance where you don't need to grab the leg it's definitely not as effective as being able to grab it but i'm also on the side of the fence having competed in all three it was definitely better for the sport to remove it as a whole it's probably good to cover sort of the whole spectrum of rules of judo is uh there's groundwork so there's uh you do all the stuff on the feet where you're trying to murder each other with a giant throw but then you know if the throat doesn't succeed you go to the ground and you stay on the ground for some amount of time like short amount of time you have to move quickly you have to be attacking and two of the ways you can win is similar to people who do jiu jitsu's you can submit them uh chokes arm breaks all that kind of stuff no foot locks and uh and you can also pin them yep which is get around their legs and this is very no this is not like wrestling you have to actually get around their legs and uh pin them and what indigest is called side control mount all kinds of ways that doesn't involve their legs yeah and then you pin them for like whatever 20 seconds 25 seconds yeah 20 seconds now i think the distinction is their back has to be facing the mat you have to be past their legs and your chest has to be on the same plane as theirs yeah so it doesn't have to necessarily be on top but it has to be on the same plane yeah and all of this is i think different sports of different versions of this but it's like an approximation of what dominance looks like yeah so pin and wrestling is dominating your opponent presumably if you're in a street fight that position allows you to then do a lot of damage obviously submissions is dominance because you're breaking their arm or choking them to uh unconscious and then obviously the throw which is not often talked about but like if you talk about a street fight situation a throw is like the best way to murder somebody like this could end anyone's life yes it's terrifying actually so okay so these are all elements of dominance so going back to set of principles you're mentioning getting your center of mass under theirs which i think applies for type of um like the forward say nagi throws is there is there other stuff um obviously you mentioned off-balance yep there's the off-balance one where you can either pull to get an off balance or you can give way to the force which can also lead to an off balance um you can amplify somebody's force to so for example if you push me you expect a certain reaction that you're ready for but if you push me and i pull you now you didn't expect that much force coming out of you therefore you're off balance the thing that's distinctly recognizable about judo is like when done at the highest level like it's it seems effortless when the big throw happens yeah like that's just it doesn't there is no other sport like it in the combat sports where it's like when the timing is right everything just is perfect i think you you get that mma and um boxing sometimes when this is another scout yeah perfect strike just like yeah where they it but it's not just like a hard hit it's like it's almost like the with conor mcgregor and aldo for example when you just catch him just right that's right and that he didn't look like he hit him that hard yeah but he hit him just right yeah and like you get to see this all the time in judo it's fascinating and so the beginning part of that is because there's a jacket there's also this whole thing that you're master of which is like which is gripping yeah so is there something you can say about are there some fundamental principles of gripping that you can speak to like what the hell is gripping gripping is having the ability to hold your opponent in such a way where you have the ability to be offensive and also the ability to be defensive at the same given time and [Music] it's a distinction because i can hold you in such a way where i might be able to feel offensive but if you can take a purely defensive grip and then i can't be offensive we are no longer gripping we are holding each other right right so like that would be the act of being able to grip is to be in a situation where you have me and i have you and i can play both offense and defense at the same time where you can only play defense so donahue talks about like jiu jitsu that way and not that way but maybe you can see if there's a distinction so you have a set of weapons the other person has a set of weapons you want to sort of maximize the use of your weapons and shut down the set of weapons that they have that they have you see gripping the same way on the on the feet i do if we want to include body positioning with our gripping all right okay because i can give you any grip you want and you still can't throw me because i can put myself in a position that nullifies your ability to use those grips in a successful way and those um would you say the hips are critical to that or is it i think hips shoulders chin position head position you know the angle of your foot yeah where you lean wow okay and so uh and there's a bunch of places you can grip obviously if people like kind of think of a jacket like there's a bunch of places you can grip that are interesting so you can grip on the collar you can grip on the sleeves you can grip like at the elbow joint yeah and you could do uh those bad ass like eastern european georgian over the back back over the opposite sides of the heads yeah yeah the koreans that grab on one side around the head with their hands together yeah there's something really nice about just those like i mean especially george just throwing that hand yeah just over the person and just it's you're not actually gripping a belt or anything you're gripping just the entirety of like as opposed to being all nice so i'm gonna grab this part of the jagger this part of the jacket you're just like taking the whole fucking jacket and just launching somebody for those people that can't picture judo think about it in like if you understood like what a boxing match looks like and you thought about that as like traditional gripping when you throw like a russian grip over the back that's more like a hockey fight like i'm just grabbing you and we're just gonna we're gonna be throwing punches left and right because when we have that grip somebody has to get thrown yeah there's no there's no we don't walk around with this grip it's it's go time once somebody throws it to me as a as a fan and sort of amateur practitioner there's two styles of olympic level judo one is where you're trying not to get thrown and the other is where you're trying to throw more specifically when you're trying not to get thrown there's like the strategy they're using gripping to nullify their offense and all those kinds of stuff you're you're being very clever and strategic and all that you know maybe using conditioning and then there's people who just like step in the pocket and they don't almost don't care if they're getting thrown because they have the confidence that they're going to throw first yep and those like there's a clear distinction between the people that do one or the other and i think both can be done extremely successfully at the highest level it's just like obviously you admire the people that step in the pocket and and i think when you look at the people who do judo the best like if we want to talk about like the top 10 percent of the people who would compete at the games they do both and they do both really well but they favor one because if you look at a player like uh lutetiliani of georgia for example there's a guy that stands in the pocket but we can find numerous occasions where he's hustled some people for like a short period of time to get out of scenarios to elongate the match to make somebody tired so you want both sides of the coin but you better pick the one that you know eighty percent of your strategy is going to be built around sorry for the romantic question but i talked to dan gable and uh he always looked to the russians as um as the artists in wrestling and uh he always wanted to be an artist but i think he's known for being that sort of uh guts aggression mental toughness guy but he always was drawn to the artistry of wrestling it's hard to know when you just watch you because it looks like you're aggressive and you got the guts and the mental toughness but there's also obviously a mastery of technique which would you lean towards in terms of what accounts for your success and just the way you approach judo is it the the guts the aggression the mental toughness and or is it the mastery of technique the artistry mine would be my my aggressiveness if i'm gonna pick those two areas um but i think there's a third area in there that i would put myself in where i'm more of a strategist i look at all of my opponents and all i ever see is their faults and the way i do judo is built around their faults and it's just i put myself in scenarios where i don't even know how i'm going to win but what i've done in those scenarios is i've made it very difficult for you to win and then i figure out the rest as i go like how do you study an opponent are there bins you can put them in like there's a lefty and a righty or yep this kind of stuff how many bins are there in judo in your mind that you put your opponents in yeah there's probably about 20. there's like certain players who you could put in a category of like they're only good for the first you know two-thirds of the match after that they turn into a different player where they're either falling into a sense of panic or uncertainty and you can if you were to take a video clip of let's say church's philly right they got george and i beat in the olympic semi he's somebody that would beat you in the first three minutes and if you clipped out all of his matches and you only watched the first three minutes of every match you would see one style if you found all the matches where he got taken into the last minute and he wasn't winning by a a major score you would see a completely different fighter and so going into like my olympic semi i put him into that category of like i want to get to this guy because this guy is beatable the trick is how do you get there how do you get there and by the way we're talking about the 2016 olympics where you won the silver medal you're part of uh three different olympics but the cardio aspect of it have you faced exhaustion often in your matches where you have to go deep and go like past yeah but that's not from the judo side of it that's from like i did a very bad job of making weight it's always the way cut yeah it's always the weight cut and i think people really struggle with that they blame cardio and training and everything else but when it really comes down to it like we train for an hour and a half two hours twice a day how are you tired after five minutes right right it becomes into a mental struggle your anxiety your stress your lack of belief in yourself or in my case sometimes it's poor nutrition sometimes i had one too many mcdonald's meals it just it happens okay so let's talk about wig cutting real quick so i've i've seen weight cutting break some of the toughest fighters wrestlers grapplers ever like burn out break like where they makes you want to quit the sport yep um so you know this is what people don't often talk about but mentally is one of the hardest things especially when you're doing it kind of wrong because it becomes a mental war um so you competed like you said your whole career at 81 kilograms you walked around at 88 89. so about 15 pounds sometimes 20 pounds over that give or give or take and so what uh what was your process like mentally and physically first of all maybe you can comment on when the weigh-ins are relative to the mattress and then what was your process like leading like a week ahead a day ahead an hour ahead minutes ahead of the the weigh-in man everyone varies tremendously because we're not like most sports because you're dropped off in foreign countries with who knows what right some places have sauna some places have treadmills i went to a place one time in china in the middle of winter where the roads were frozen with ice and we had to use our hotel rooms because it was you couldn't sweat outside because it was too cold right um and every one of my olympics the weight cut was different just given my mass when i went to 2008 i was probably like 80 to 83 kilos walking around so weight cutting wasn't a thing for me in london we actually weighed in the morning of so weigh-ins were at like 6 a.m and the olympics were always beneficial to me because they actually don't start until like 10 or 11. so you actually were able to recover where on the circuit you would weigh in at 6am and the competition started at 8am it's like well i was cutting weight at 5am and most of it for people who are not familiar but maybe you can also correct me most of it you're really just getting the water out of your system it was water at that point yeah like 24 hours before even like so are you like an hour before but yeah but like leading up to it um and do have you eaten the day before do you try to minimize the amount of food in your system my weight cutting process was a little bit different than than most people because i like to eat um i'm not i'm not the type of person that believes your athletic career is determined by your nutrition right i don't i don't believe that i think some sports are built that way but when it comes to combat sports like you know your ability to knock somebody out has nothing to do with whether you had a cheeseburger or a salad my ability to throw you is not determined by that i may be able to perform better because i've eaten a certain way but not enough to justify an entire diet change your body is built and my body is built to operate with certain things that i've had in my system for years yeah i think i'm with you but i also believe that there's a mental aspect so if you're surrounded by people that tell you diet matters then if your diet is off you're going to believe you're going to be off because the people around you tell you your diet should be good so yeah i think it's like it's the same i i've had an argument with matthew walker who's uh who's a sleep scientist about sleep and it's like if you believe sleep is essential it's essential to get eight hours of sleep every single night perfectly then you're going to be very stressed when you don't get it and then i think it will negatively affect the stress will negatively affect your longevity in all kinds of aspects of your life if you actually just learn to truly listen to your body become a scientist for your own body with sleep and food it might end up that it will be the eight hours a night or whatever but it might be something else and probably die here i remember when i was meeting with the usoc nutritionist after london it was probably around [Music] 2014 i think and when we had our team meeting at the beginning of the year and i was talking to him he was talking about the nutrition plans that he could put us on and i was like time out i've done the usoc thing like i've done the couscous i've done the lemon in my water i go i'm full shit the kind of goose oh boy like there was just because there's like a cookie cutter plan right right and i was like look here's what i want you to do i go i'll listen to you but you're going to walk into the 7-eleven across the street from the usoc and if you can't buy it in that 7-eleven it's not on my plan right i go because i go to places where the only thing i can eat is pringles and a snickers bar i've done that like i've flown to azerbaijan stayed in a hotel where the restaurant is closed usa judo hasn't paid for the meal plan and the only thing that's available is the thing across the street so you were eating pringles before fighting a grand slam event while cutting 20 pounds and and a snickers bowl yeah that's the visual of that that's some like that's some rocky shit okay build me a nutrition plan go for it because i'm not paying my own way to travel with 14 days of food right i mean that's that's one of the magic of your whole career and also judo i mean i'm sorry to say of course you want athletes to be super rich and super well funded from an athlete perspective and the sport to be popular and managed in an ultra-competent way but that's not reality but as a fan it's fun to watch somebody like you who's exceptionally driven has to suffer in all these different interesting ways it's only suffering if you expect the other side right i don't expect it i accept it for what it is which is why i write off nutrition for athletes right because it can be done without it as long as you know to what you said before like you don't believe you need it some people believe they need it so the mind getting your mind right is the most important thing you know what i believe i need what's that a snickers bar when i'm tired i want a little bit of sugar makes me feel better you want me to see you uh what are you gonna do yeah so i just love the the the visual of you eating his thinking but that's what it became but that became part of my nutrition plan when the usoc guy wrote my nutrition plan i was eating a burrito bowl with brown rice white meat chicken black beans guacamole cheese two chocolate chip cookies and a diet coke this is like chipotle uh it was below co but same concept same same concept because chocolate chip cookies because i needed the sugar i was i was 88 kilos when i stepped on the scale at six point three percent body fat now i got to make 81. what really yeah and the usoc was like hey you know you can't you can't fight 81 anymore you have to fight 90s and i go i'm already into the quad i'm not changing i go build me a plan where i can do this and now we have to have an acceptable weight cut like it just what do you want me to do i'm not the ijf i can't just change the fact that it takes two years to qualify i know where i'm at i know what i have to go through and i accept the consequences it is what it is we want all right so what was the process i mean can you can you speak too so you you wake up early in the morning the the day of the weigh-ins a few hours before technically my weight cut never started until i got off a plane and to a hotel and how many hours three days so it's a three day cut to three days mentally you're thinking of it that way yep and then you're still eating i eat every day and then like what do you load up on water maybe as you start and then nope or the the water stops just it is what it is [Laughter] so use i mean it's a slow you're not actually like sweating all three days yeah but then it's like torture to sleep part of the process are you able to sleep sometimes it depends so you're dehydrated further and further dehydrated with six seven percent body fat trying to lose 10 pounds i even developed a way to drink water out of a bottle where i don't drink anything but i feel like i have uh swishing it what's the no so like i take like a bottle of water and like if we were to like to draw a line on it i would tip it and i would go like this and you would draw that line but like i've drink now water for 20 seconds or whatever it is and i feel like i get the fix yeah brain told me i got there no problem that's amazing man you just your mind's a very powerful tool and the the problem a lot of people have is they don't accept the reality of the situation they bitch about the reality of the situation i just of all you could always quit right yep so like you're not ex never missed wait never never you can you can perform poorly you can't miss wait don't miss way don't miss wait because you you can always win regardless of how bad the weight cut is you can never win if you miss weight but your brain is also really good maybe not your brain but i know my brain i think most people's brains are good at generating the more desperate things become the better it's generating excuses so what were you doing with your mind that resulted in you never missing weight the plan so like i said like my weight cut would never start until i got to the hotel because i didn't check my weight the morning of i didn't check my weight when i got there i just while i'm traveling i'm doing things at like a minimal level but i'm never not giving myself something i'm craving if i'm thirsty i'm drinking a diet coke if i'm hungry i'm buying a snickers bar i'm buying a sandwich i am and i accept the consequences when i get there and then when i get there if i step on the scale and it says 88 kilos i instantaneously know exactly what it's going to take to be 81. and then you just follow like a robot follow a very specific process yep and then i mean because there's a lot of seconds in three days seconds and minutes and you just i just know exactly what it takes from my body i know exactly what a one hour gym workout wearing a sauna suit is gonna take i know exactly what i'm gonna lose on day one and i know exactly what i'm gonna lose on day three because they're not the same so i can instantly look at a hotel decide is there a bathroom sauna gym temperature of the gym access to the gym and when it is access to the judo mats my training partners the roads versus street lights the weather outside i can take a look at that environment and say this is my weight this is weigh-ins and instantaneously in my head there's a plan to make weight and you have a sense of how much sweat adds up to to 10 pounds how much sweat plus time yeah just and i make sure in my plan all of my meals and how much water i need in between is allocated to still make weight because you have to eat or drink during that time are you incorporating like mental exhaustion into this that doesn't exist it doesn't no it doesn't do you like meditators like what did the thoughts come especially three days we're not talking about four hours of suffering i'll tell you this has broken some of the toughest people in the world the hardest weight cut i ever had yeah hardest one um i fought pan am games in 2015 in edmonton canada on a wednesday and i won so i i've made weight on tuesday i fought on wednesday where i had to weigh in five percent of my weight class so 84 kilos on wednesday i was 84 kilos i got on a plane on that wednesday night and landed friday morning in sochi okay so i've traveled now i got on the scale all my bags got lost everything so somehow i flew from there to here no bags and i threw all of my stuff in my bag i wore sandals one pair of pants and a t-shirt on the plane because i was like i'm just tired i just fought like i don't even want to carry it i don't care what are the odds that i get there my bags are gone yeah very low very low sure enough it's gone i get all the way to sochi i check into the hotel there's one sauna guess what you have to reserve it and you're only allowed to reserve it for an x period of time guess get a small tangent when you found out your bags are gone this is something i'll often think about there's like people that are helping you right like that there's a person airport who goes yep oops just like that and then the person at the hotel who tells you that you have to reserve the sauna and looks at you like you're yep they don't care that you've been suffering they don't know they don't even understand why you need it yeah like why oh you know oh this like uh like this little kid reserved it for five hours or something to block it off or so i'm sorry um is there a frustration that gets in there are you you just accept reality don't don't even hinder on like the things you can't change because the second you get frustrated the second you think you can change it you'll hope on it and that breaks most men yeah that like little thing in the back of their mind thinking oh like what if there's no what if like there's only right here right now yeah if it doesn't work it doesn't work let's just quickly come up with the solution to fix the problem by the way as another small tangent all the greatest people i've interacted with at the highest level think like that they don't linger on the no it's like the next thing yeah because like if you want to do something great heart stuff is gonna keep happening to you and if you're gonna let that affect you you're not ever going to do the great thing yeah it's fascinating actually like that's the one skill you have to learn um elon musk is great at this constantly dealing with emergencies okay okay this happened what's the next step yep except it's not that big of a deal every problem has a solution yeah yeah and if i can't solve it it's not my problem you want me to do it yeah exactly so what uh so you figured it out get this i get to the hotel i check in i don't even know about the sauna yet i go i need to find a clothing store i'm in the middle of russia i open up google maps and i'm like sports store i find an adidas sports store in the middle of sochi russia right i spend like 500 on like average sweats no plastics no nothing and no running shoes because they don't have any what's the temperature outside was it cold it was kind of like springish so it wasn't cold but it wasn't hot yeah so you still need a lot of layers preferably you would need a lot of layers just to cut the amount of weight i'm about to tell you i have to cut because after i bought that stuff that next morning and mind you it's a friday it's a friday morning i go to the venue where we have the mats open to train and i step on the scale and then sagan batara mongolia goes oh pretty good you're almost there and i go oh no no no i'm not i stepped on the scale at almost 94 kilos and i looked at him and i was like i'm 81 and he went good luck you're almost there yeah for the next weight class above uh the this is on a saturday or friday morning no no sorry friday morning the the competition is when sunday sunday i weigh in sunday okay all right like holy crap i throw on all my layers and there's one other person with me there khalida who's my girlfriend at the time now my wife we start doing judo because i'm like this will be the easiest way to knock off like three or four kilos well it's cold i have no ghee and i'm working out with a female i can't get like overly physical to like really get my muscles going to really break that sweat because she has to compete in a dare to do this she's not a training partner you can't just use this person i stepped on the scale i was 91 kilos so i went well i was a nice dent but like workout yeah i go that's that's not going to fly so sure enough the clothes are now ruined they didn't help me lose any extra weight so i go back to the hotel and i start reserving the sauna do you know how hard it is to lose that much weight in a sauna by yourself so it's hard on many levels but one of them is just mental yeah you're sitting in heat heat and you're not doing anything like if there had been a bike or like the sauna was big enough to use a jump rope or you could do some sort of activity but you just sit and you stew and you're there mentally at one point during the weight cut i actually had my mouth on the bottom part of the door where there was a little gap and my legs up on the benches and kalita holding the door so that it didn't open so i couldn't open it so that i could lean against that thing and have fresh air because i was like i was struggling and we're talking about i mean how many hours is that hours and then the thing is is because you have to reserve the sauna i can't even take like a 30 minute break because the sauna's not going to be mine in an hour which means you have to use the sauna and the heat for that a lot of time period and i hate saunas yeah that is always my last resort i would use a bath i will train i will run i will jump rope sauna is like oh let me do that for 10 minutes after all of my gym workouts just to keep the sweat going while i stretch and cool down that's never like the hey i'm gonna do five ten minute sessions because i need to lose two kilos that is never the plan yeah but i mean uh so i've done plenty of sauna for weight cuts to know i can't even imagine what you went through yeah the seconds slow down that's one way to achieve immortality is like the time slows down to like a stop and you're left alone with your thoughts you can't do anything just like you said you can't there's nothing worse than sitting in that kind of heat for 10 15 minutes yeah and then you walk out and you're not even sweating yeah there's nothing worse than that and if you like it maybe if you weigh yourself which you should probably shouldn't be doing because it'll break you yep you haven't lost anything yep and i was weighing myself every time because i only get breaks when i was hitting weight allotments so if i could lose .3 in 10 minutes i'd give myself a break but i had to hit certain numbers because i only have the sauna for a certain amount of time and i remember one time i went downstairs to get my key to the sauna and the japanese team had reserved it and took it from me because the guy didn't put my name on the list when i called down to get the sauna so i lost an entire session that i had to get made up towards the later part of the day because i still have no running shoes and then sure enough my bags show up 30 minutes after williams great that's like uh the universe just kind of giving you a little wink there yeah i think like because so few people do this weight cut at this high of a level people don't often realize because people get a sense of how hard it is to run 200 miles in the desert like they get because they go outside here in texas you can run five miles oh it's hard but like the weight cut is really i can you so you just uh like how did you do it just fucking not refusing to you have to make weight you have to make way and you just that's i am astounded when i hear like ufc plighters like miss weight right like when jaden cox missed weight at the olympic trials i was like at least his was understandable because he missed the actual weigh-ins he didn't he wasn't like not on weight but when ufc fighters like miss wait i'm like how did that happen you clearly like gave up a long time ago there were times where i was like well i can't do this there have been times where i've been in a s in a sauna suit wrestling with a training partner who's probably 60 kilos who fought earlier that day to lose point three to lose point three like are you considering your mortality in this moment like aren't you thinking you're gonna die because like it's severe dehydration you could damage your body i do are you thinking about any of this or no is it just ah man okay yes i'm on the other level too where like i've been in belgium right belgium there used to be a b level tournament and the tournament used to go on and because i was always on the heavier side like 81 fights on the second day which is the heavyweight day um weigh-ins were always at like let's say 2pm the day before for that tournament well there was a sauna at the tournament i remember like being in the sauna and like oh i'm 80.9 kilos weigh-ins aren't for three hours fuck it i'm gonna have lunch because i i mentally understand that what i eat right now is gonna fuel me for tomorrow so i don't want to skip it i have the time to put it into my system and still lose it right it's almost like a computer program you're running through the process you haven't i i get it but like that all relies on your ability to be um to get it back off yeah i mean but also just like go through this process which is painful it's like those monks who meditate while sitting in a fire kind of thing or something right like it that uh yeah it's a it's really interesting is there other people that are critical to this or is this all internal to you are there people that everybody has their own way of doing it um some people don't cut that much some people can't wait cut it all right they would rather have been like 83 kilos fighting 90 then you know be 83 kilos fighting 81. so why did you never move up to 90 what's your sense is it from your deep understanding of your own judo and like the judo opponents you would face at 90 and 81 because 81 is probably the hardest if not the second hardest division in the history of judo compared to 73 and 81. you know when i was a kid like i always wanted to be like the middleweight olympic champion like the 81 kilo olympic champion when i was in high school i made a decision when i was trying to make weight for 73 i was like this is i was cutting weight for 73 like i was cutting weight at the end of my career right and i was like i'm just gonna bag it i'm gonna accept the fact that i may not make a junior world team i may not make this team but i'll grow into the division so when i'm a senior player like i'm ready to go and i'll naturally be stronger there's an understanding of like a growth process when you move up a weight class most people can't just oh i'm going to fight 90s and i'm going to win because i wanted 81. the style of judo is different how you move is different how they do things is different there's like a learning curve that goes into it and because the weight cut didn't really happen until i was getting ready for rio i wasn't about to have my last olympic games be at a different weight class that i may or may not be able to grow into i mean this is an awesome story of you kind of decided that this will be your life's work in terms of judo competitor is like the 81 division i'm going to i mean i don't know if you saw it that way but you're talking about three olympics and it's like this story of i would say tragedy and triumph of just wars and 81 kilograms with with the usual cast of characters of the you know top five in the world kind of thing so you just became a scholar of that let your body grow into it and then let your body outgrow it and still suffer through it to keep it in the 81 kilograms you never competed at like at the highest levels at 90. i entered one tournament at 90 kilos um and that was because before rio from 20 from the end of 2014 all the way up until rios every time i fought i got hurt every time there was no time where i made weight and got injured because my body weight was so high my body fat was so low that by the time i dehydrated enough to get down there and you take the physicality of judo and throw that into the mix something broke everything it was like nature of the beast so the plan was before rio we made an agreement with usa judo that travis you're going to fight 90 kilos but you're not going to weigh in at 90 kilos like hey there's no like you get to be 94 kilos and cut to 90s there's like a you're going to step on the scale at 84 kilos like a little bit of a weight cut but not a full one just so that you feel like you get into like the tournament because when i around 2012 when i was talking with the usoc nutritionist i actually got my weight down so much that i didn't really need to cut weight the problem is i wasn't cutting weight i didn't feel like i was competing got it right there you have to go through like that mental process and i never really reworked that it was easier to just cut the weight and be ready to go but when i entered into the 90 kilo division i was rushed to the hospital the night after because my body broke out in hives like full body my dad they said it was stress induced fascinating so a month before the games i was hospitalized and hungry and filled with steroids to get the hives to drop and every couple days my body when i got back home i would end up in the hospital because my whole body would break out again i wonder if it's like deviating from the process that you so like perfectly crafted already or it was stressed from my mind thinking like even though it's not top of mind there's probably a portion of me that like the olympics is coming around and it could be my last that like my body just reacted to something chemically so i was breaking out in hives i actually bought like a 600u euro hugo boss suit because when i was in the netherlands training at the time i thought i had bed bugs because i was getting bit everywhere then i thought there was something in the detergent at the local thing so i threw away all my clothes like i was paying for showers because i was trying to get the detergent off my body and buying new clothes at the airport trying to figure it out trying to figure it out just go yeah accepting the situation i mean but the level of stress is exceptionally high here can we talk about the other side people are going to love this but you're um you have a long history of persevering through injuries through insane amounts of injuries uh my ability to tolerate pain is probably more than most people but see injuries aren't just pain right it's like um it's also mental like psychological like again like the weight cut it can make a lot of people quit yep can you tell your history of injuries what are the biggest injuries the toughest injuries in your career um starting from what your early teens my early teens um i actually got out of sports from 11 to i say like 15 years old 16 years old because a kid shot a double leg through my kneecap and i partially tore all the ligaments in my knee cartilage meniscus the whole nine yards and i had to learn how to walk again i spent two years in a leg brace crutches you know hobbling around the schoolyard that one was a challenge to come back from i've broken most of my ribs i won nationals with nine broken ribs i was actually getting novocaine shots into my chest to avoid feeling the pain and then wrapping them to try to make sure i didn't pop along i've broken my collarbone um i have five herniated discs in my neck i fractured my back twice i've broken my tailbone i tore my si joints i've torn my right hamstring twice my left one once um [Music] broken my ankles a few times i spun it once in a 360 that had death surgery fingers toes elbows shoulders so all of these are first of all you're um you're tough you're tough dude man so each of those have a story behind them so if you're talking about the collarbone or the ankles uh or or the back the neck is there interesting stories here that behind these injuries heart training heart competing jiu-jitsu judo on so ground stuff like uh sparring in the dojo or like drilling or all that kind of stuff if you were to sort of break it down your understanding of this the landscape of injuries you went through i've never had one in jiu jitsu ever i mean i might have like torn a fingernail or like you know gotten g burned but i've never been like seriously injured i know when ponza straight ankle locked me at copapodio that hurt but i wasn't injured like it felt sore but like if i had to run like i could run i can now understand probably exactly what the injuries came from then you're very quickly excelled at jiu jitsu you have achieved another level in judo and i think that means the intensity with which you approach judo to achieve that world-class level probably is the source of the injuries yeah because the mentality of how i approach judo versus jiu-jitsu jiu-jitsu to me is like a game that like we would play like if you wanted to like grab a basketball and like go play a game of one-on-one that's like jiu jitsu to me like i can't take the sport in its entirety seriously because i feel like the community of jiu jitsu doesn't take it seriously so just for people who don't know just to set some context you're you're a black belt in jiu jitsu but more importantly you've beaten a lot of world-class jiu-jitsu people you've done very well at the highest levels of competition yeah i wouldn't necessarily say i've beaten them as much as i've trained with them and they understand whoever it is that through training with me that like i'm not just a judo guy like i know how to do jiu jitsu right and if any one of them were to come to me and like say hey you know i want to feel what it feels like to do judo with me they would quickly understand that like the way i approach one is very different than the way i approach the other like we probably wouldn't be friends if they did judo with me versus if they did jiu jitsu with me i'm curious asking for a friend because mostly because i'll do a little judo with you today so you clearly because you're a great instructor and teacher you have a mode where you can demonstrate a technique do you know how to like spar where you're going like 50 percent it's hard to put like a percentage to it because i've never in all of my jiu jitsu ever gone 100 in jiu jitsu yeah like i had a conversation with salo one time where we were talking about like jiu jitsu and training and i was like well if i got his arm i would just break it and he was like but what if he tapped i go that's not my responsibility if he taps and the ref doesn't say anything you just break it you just keep going yeah he goes but the tap means it's over and i said no the ref tells me when it's over i go i never give you the opportunity to tap because if you have the opportunity to tap that means you had the opportunity to think about how to get out make a decision that you can't then tap i clearly operated too slowly yeah so there's a it's either broken or i don't have it you're an external person to go against in judo like the on the grounds like everything you did that's that's amazing um that's really amazing that's what made you a really fun person to watch because you really went to war with these people yeah so you know what it's like to go 100 in judo i do because i know what it's like to train with somebody under the mentality of i'm going to do everything i want to do you're going to do nothing you want to do and you're going to accept that do you ever train in judo where where you let people get stuff of course all the time now or like always even when you're sort of building up the four years building up to the olympics like they're smaller guys that are throwing you in the gym and that kind of stuff no i never said that okay that never came out of my mouth i said i let people do stuff i never said smaller people throw me oh you mean you let him get a grip but then you'll position yourself in such a way that it's it's hopeless it's like the number one skill set that judo is going to teach you is the ability to give people false hope because i can really looking forward to the video we're gonna shoot like i can let you take a grip yeah i can let you think that there's opportunity but what you don't understand is by the position and angela that i'm in it's actually false hope yeah like as long as you don't know that it is then now i'm free to operate and do what i want see i competed in judo against uh black belts where i would go in and it looks like it should be able to throw them and then you just hit a wall and then i also saw you destroy those black belts yeah so there's levels to this yeah it's the the cliche thing there's black belts and there's black belts you're unique in this there may be a couple other jidoka in america but you're really like unique i then get to see people that really i felt like were 10x better than me it just feels like that sometimes i've learned that madness that would be true might only be just a little better but i saw you destroy them and it was like holy shit there's a thing in judo right where you know imagine like you as like just an adult right um and i i hope people can like conceptualize this when they hear this but imagine like you're a full-grown adult even male female doesn't matter but there's a little kid in front of you like call him five or six years old and he's acting out like do you think you have the physical capability of with one hand grabbing that person or that kid and making sure that they freeze like they feel like they're nervous and like they can't do anything right when you fight a good judo player when they grab you that's what it feels like as an adult yeah when people even i've felt that from like certain players in japan like when they get a grip i'm like i've now lost the function of this one yeah that's a really good way to put it i think i could potentially beat some of the people i've went against but certain grips they took it made me feel powerless yep i was like i didn't know this was possible that kind of power was possible and you don't even know where it originates from yeah because you're like how does one person's hand do this where i can't use my whole arm yeah or like i can't pick up my right foot because he's holding on to my right sleeve yeah it was kind of um on a basic animalistic sense kind of terrifying it's uh i mean you don't want to part of this is like ego but you realize that there's a food chain and you're not at the top of it that's part of the humbling process i think of martial arts it's like i think everybody um like a lot of people think they're much higher in the food chain than they really are and then when you realize this is why it's a really healthy process for people they're not even competing in the olympics to practice martial arts because you realize okay that like putting yourself more accurately in the food chain is really good way to sort of place yourself in the rest of the world it humbles you to the reality the harshness of the world yep it's kind of like when people look at like survival in the wilderness it's like oh it's not that hard no you'd probably die in a couple days same thing with like judo and martial arts like yeah it's really not that hard but you don't know what to do yet and so when you find out that first time that you don't know what to do it's devastating to a lot of people but those that like stick through it and like start to learn it's a very powerful like feeling that now like you can take care of yourself and i think i want to talk to you a few times before you talked about that there's like like the top three the top five in the world i don't know where you put them but they're they're another like level here yeah and the fact that you're i mean it's it's so exciting to me uh probably because i just felt all the levels here and i have seen you and others at that height destroy those i've i have seen the exponential levels to this game it's incredible that you're didn't quit didn't doubt yourself and just persevered through three olympics to get to that highest always fighting at that like very highest of levels but just like you know from the top 10 to the top five like really breaking in through that i don't know um what would you say it took to get to that highest of levels like if you when you look back to all the weight cuts to just the insane amount of injuries believe it or not i didn't really think i was there until 2013 i thought i was recognized as one of the best because i was able to fight for oppensburg which was the professional bundesliga team for germany which is one of the top clubs in all of europe um when they asked me to i felt like europe had like accepted me as like oh i'm a top level judo player but i don't necessarily think that when i signed on to compete for them that the division or the world of judo saw me as a top level judo player right there's there's a mental shift that happens along that point and for me my mental shift really came into play in december of 2015 before rio that was like when i lost in japan that's when i realized like the world respects my abilities and they compete against them they don't compete against me as a person they compete against the idea or the the persona that i've been able to establish over the years of competing in the division wow so you're the they probably have a nickname for you you're the system of ideas and thought that they study but they're studying me as a conceptual whole not me as the human is your style relatively unique in the 81 kilogram division it was relatively unique for kayla i and jimmy up until 2016. now since 2016 you can see a lot of what we used to do throughout most of europe and even asia like you're starting to see some of those techniques that you didn't see before starting to get implemented because when i was when i was gearing up for 2015 i had such a slew of injuries that entire calendar year that i never should have made it to rio i should have called it quits at the end of 2015 because i suffered that major concussion in february i stepped on a mat in may for the first time i lost five straight tournaments i left the national team went to japan won pan am games got a bacterial infection at the worlds almost had my leg cut off tore my si joint later on that year and then took fifth in japan and when you look at like the calendar year as a whole like the world should have treated me like i was washed up like this guy hasn't been training he hasn't been doing anything but i took fifth in japan now how does a guy that hasn't trained all year take fifth at one of the hardest tournaments in the world on two weeks of training because they were fighting the guy i used to be not the guy i was at the tournament which means they were competing under the idea of like what is he really capable of not what have i brought to the table today and that just gave you the confidence and that told me that like well if i can take fifth and i'm this bad at judo right now wait until i'm healthy and i'm back in shape then they're not gonna know what hit them one of the essential components of being the number one in the world or up in that place is that confidence the self-belief and the rest of the world believing it you can have all the confidence in the world but if the rest of the room doesn't buy it it's nothing that's funny it's like there's certain people right with tyson uh mike all understand he could not train and they're still scared yeah right like he doesn't have to work out that hard anymore there's several judo you know this way better but from a spectator perspective like iliociliatis is like that he's one of them it's like he he's portrayed over the years everyone's so scared of that guy it's interesting yep i people were scared of you too people just gave a certain level of respect to my skill set and whether i had a bad weight cut or didn't have a bad weight cut or not trained for the last three months which never happened i'm just saying they were gonna fight the persona and it's an important distinction when you're looking at the top five because everybody coming up they're training against the persona not who you are even i did that at a younger age that's why i would always go to people's hometowns because like i don't i don't care about the persona i want to know what you do day in and day out when i couldn't beat a russian i told jimmy send me to russia i need to i need to understand and see it with my own eyes what they do outperform so that i can believe that i can beat them casca and this is a small tangent so uh dagestan has produced some incredible wrestlers i don't know what the story where judo is where the source of source of greatness in russia is for judo but what do you make of dagestan why what is it in the culture of their or russia broadly that produces greatness specifically in the combat sports i don't know yeah specifically in the combat sports sorry uh but i don't know if you want to draw a distinction between wrestling and judah i'm almost curious do you understand the differences there in the culture still a combat sport to them they're still in that same like realm of their taking young kids and that that's what they do so khabib speaks very highly of judo yep like it's funny khabib vladimir putin people don't get it but like judo is like one of the premier sports in the world but we just don't understand it it's not just popularity so definitely popularity but also like this respect and there's a certain thing which is why i really value judo internationally you don't get this in the united states but internationally there's an understanding like later in life when you're a scientist meeting a businessman when you both have done judo there's this like nod of respect yeah it's so interesting uh just very few sports like that you know basketball doesn't have any i don't know almost any sport like that and it's fascinating wrestling has that in the u.s yet it's the us only the rest of the world doesn't do that there's a few like you could see that in like iran or something like that yeah they'll respect wrestling in that kind of way yeah it's um but judo on like a global scale is probably that only one due to its like physicality and the hardships that you have to go through to reach that upper level so why do you think dagestan why do you think khabib is as good as he is is there is this just the raw genetics of the human or is there something about the system the system it all has to do with the system so they um they grow up around fighting in all forms yep um they're also i mean their technique is exceptionally good because they they grow up in it they grow up and they don't they don't understand anything else so you don't have to it's almost like you with the weight cutting it's not like a big dramatic thing for them to fight it's like it's just part of life yes and when you're i don't want to say bread into it but when you've done it for you know i want to say like 90 of your life by the time like khabib probably has right from the time he could crawl he's probably been grappling in some fashion thereof right um you know when you as grapplers like you can look at a wrestler and having never seen this person before and go you wrestled yeah why is that it's because he's probably wrestled since he was like six so the way he carries himself the way his body is built the way he grew into it was framed around wrestling right so the people in that culture are framed around fighting and grappling you're right it's like first of all philosophically psychologically but also just like the way you move your body yes that means like when you're young the people you admire move their body in a certain certain way and then genetically it it just as they keep doing that they're just going to get better and better every generation yeah it's just going to keep improving because they just keep building into that system of turning them out and part of it there's like cultural stuff where i mean it's such an interesting approach to wrestling i really want to travel to dagestan and just talk to them because i happen to be able to speak russian because because there's uh less value for this kind of materialistic success that i think sometimes can get in the way of uh greatness it seems like it makes coaching more difficult it makes like following orders as an athlete more difficult i don't struggle with that in usa judo yeah because you want more money but then more money if not applied correctly can corrupt the system somehow can split people up it's just it's same thing with the prestige around certain metals over others because athletes start chasing fame instead of development yeah yeah that's i mean uh the satire brothers are famous for this like ignoring ignoring fame ignoring all of this like focus on the art itself not even not so it's not even the medals exactly like you're saying just the purity of like when you're in it yeah and let everybody else figure out their stupid medals and money and all that because it comes it comes right exactly it's a result yeah exactly like it's not that you don't appreciate it but you know that it comes if you focus on the art there's a distinction when you're talking about your athletic career or really any endeavor right the problem with goal setting is nobody teaches the athletes or the people how to transition from the goal to reality right so when you look at my career as a whole like when i was getting ready for 2008 i actually forgot to train for it i was so happy at such a young age that i became an olympian that that in and of itself was a goal that i thought had to be admired had to be celebrated that you know the games are right around the corner i i didn't really come down off that high you're you're the local optima of of uh just winning the trials yeah that was it's a big thing it's a huge thing but then you're just focusing on the accomplishment not the correct but at some point right when i when i went into london i actually went into london going with i'm gonna prove i'm the best in the world because i believe i'm the best in the world and i believe it from like the bottom of my soul that i'm winning this and then you're almost like trying to tell the universe like i'm accomplishing this thing because it's a goal but when i went into rio i just accepted the fact that i was winning it's not a goal like this is happening you visualize it but i felt it you felt it right like this is no longer a goal anymore like i anticipating i i can see this coming down the path because i'm anticipating that the games is happening and i'm gonna win it's not a goal it's an anticipation and there's a distinct distinction there between the two okay so for people who are just watching the video of this there should be an overlay of uh young travis this is uh you still had to make 81. is this still a tough cut here no this one was relatively easy this is going all the way back to 2008 so this is the summer before the games this probably happened in june i would say so this is the olympic trials so in the united states you have to i mean similar to like wrestling you have to win the trials to qualify for that particular division to represent the united states so this is you said june before an august olympics yep so here i just wanted to show this match because uh what was there there's another one i think you do a pin you do some there's groundwork in the other one but in this one fighting a teammate finding a teammate for me former teammate oh there's an old school double leg i forgot about that and it's weird to see so you so there um the travis's opponent and he's travis is setting up here that sanagi posting his left arm and getting it done that's a big that's a big throw you have too many of those big throws on uh on video because like you often on video you're going against the best people in the world it's tough to get like that much air and a lot of times the the ones that we do see and you know the part that a lot of people don't experience is a lot of those times right through people with that throw it was in training camps so by the time i got to the competition with these guys they were playing a hundred percent defense to never let me do that yeah so you do this um here are you kind of pulling him down no he's i'm trying to get him to come up to come up but are you pulling him down to get to fake him off i'm not doing anything with my left hand uh so here the the opponent's so what i'm doing right now is his head is like in my chest i'm pressing him to get his head to lift with my chest so i'm pressing his hand down so i can use my chest to like pinch my scaps and roll his head up so he wants to pick it up and and then he i mean doesn't he know what's coming here oh no he might not oh no he knew he was a former teammate he knew exactly what i was trying to do and that was a really big step with your right foot it covers uh about four feet so you use the distance and your left um catches up in like perfect position yeah you back it up a little bit keep going keep going right there that's this is like an important distinction between mine and everybody else's is because i split his hip um i actually once i'm able to split i no longer need his center of gravity below mine right and when you say split you mean you put your foot in between why do that split that four foot split yes and then when i get my feet back together it doesn't matter that i'm under his center gravity or not yeah that's why my chest is right around his like sternum height for me yeah so so the there i mean how does he get uh for people just listening to this travis steps is like that's a big huge step gets like my hip is probably right around his nipple because he's he's sprawled back so much yeah that's right so like so you're how does the physics of this work you're violating the principle of your center of mass being under oh i guess somehow it is i don't know but he has nowhere to go he's screwed yes that's the kicker is the way my mind works is in order for him to play an effective defense he needs to have his feet firmly planted on the ground with friction yeah otherwise he can't press into me to stop it so when i get him to sprawl back when i split his legs he effectively loses that contact with the floor even though his feet are on the floor they're not in a position where he can drive from them yeah therefore when i flip he flips so there's a so there's a natural like flailing here so he's not falling forward you're falling forward yeah he's just attached to you so like you can keep him up there and their like legs would be just flailing yep one of my one of my golden rules when i'm training and i get really tired one of the like mantras i would always tell myself is i'm gonna put my back on your chest and then i'm gonna put my back on the floor yeah because then you'll be underneath me that's a good principle to very simple and it regardless of like all the chaos and how quickly things are happening it's something i can just dumb everything down to and focus on regardless of the gripping situation the footwork all of that get my back to your chest and then put my back on the floor so this step of getting your back to their chest like for for people who are sort of more like for example for people like me who are just like amateur judo people like there's all kinds of ways to prevent this turn from happening the gripping and just everything how difficult is it at the highest level to get into this position i mean you make it look effortless often but like to get to the position where you're from facing them to your backs to them is that like strategy is that timing is that timing it's timing it's like anything like if i wanted to punch you in the face like how hard is it to really do that if you know you can just play defense and block it yeah the trick is to get them to play defense to something that never happened and then you go through like another way and then you just go through what would technically be your first plan if you planned on them playing defense so i set the stage from the very beginning for this to work so then this you're uh you're celebrating here it's a huge sort of uh once a big accomplishment big relief to qualify for the olympics and then you go into the olympics and this is where i first saw judo and i kind of thought of them as the same as judo jiu-jitsu and i was really impressed by your performance in that olympics the footage nowhere to be found these days but uh um at that time i think you could still you could watch it live on nbc olympics or somewhere like that and i remember watching several of your matches one of them was the match against ollie bischoff the german and i remember being it'd be nice if you can talk to that match because i don't remember it all i remember is being frustrated yep uh by him not letting you play judo yeah so um obviously you faced him again four years later and there's a lot of frustration there as well but i remember being extra frustrated in 2008 what was that match like so he might have been number one in the world at the time or up there he was up there for sure um especially going into 2008. he was really high up there yeah and did he win gold at that olympics yes yeah because he's silvered in london it was the same olympic final both in 2008 and london yeah okay so you're facing him there were you intimidated what was the strategy can you talk to that match because it kind of sets the stage for the rematch in 2012. yeah he was somebody that i had trained with in the past and for some reason when it comes to him and i when we train together it's more of a physical altercation than a judo training session you know like it's just like the coaches have had to break us up a few times like you guys get almost like angry too a little bit it it always goes you know farther than it should for we're friends like we say hello to each other but for some reason when we train together there's something about like him and me that just oil and water i don't know what it is it could be also the gripping because he's a great gripping strategist yeah it does he frustrates you with certain kinds of grips and then you get pissed off and then you frustrate him and then he gets pissed off and then before you know it somebody's kicked somebody or punched somebody in the mouth or done something yeah so one of the only evidences we have online of you fighting him is you your foot in his groin area is the only thing we have from that olympics from 2008 from 2008 yeah and to answer everybody's question yes it was deliberate now you can say this yeah but yeah i remember there being a lot of frustration uh you go you're actually going for a lot of stuff like sacrifice those i mean maybe you're not going for the high scoring epons but you're just trying to shake things up if i remember correctly yeah because when he i was so young then that and he was you know in his prime really at that time right he was must have been 24 25 26 you know world medalist european champion at the time and when he would grab me i would i had that sense of feeling stuck like i was strong enough if i used all my strength to not let him do anything but then you can't be offensive when you're using all your strength to hold on to the situation so i was getting really aggravated because i couldn't i couldn't generate any offense with every time i felt like i gained an advantage in the gripping scenario he would take some obscure grip somewhere that was like well now i've got to go address this thing give up what i gained and i have to go back and it if i were to think about watching the match now it probably looked like a lot of flailing because we're just trying to generate enough to not get a penalty but also not enough to where he could counter it did you think you were you could beat him like when you were walking into the match until i gripped him for the first time like because i had trained with him before he felt stronger and more in shape than i've ever felt him that day at that olympics which begs a whole nother question but [Laughter] i remember i remember when i when he grabbed me for that first time i went this is different and i there was a sense of panic at the time because i was like holy crap where did this come from this is not the guy that i've trained with that i expected because it was a definite like level change in like his ability strength speed and stamina like looking back at that can you explain that is it just you being more uh less confident because of the olympics it was is there some kind of routine that he followed to like really level up in intensity for this particular event i've been told that he only gets to like his prime for like really big events yeah like he doesn't train like year-round like i would train but when it comes to like the games he doesn't do social media he doesn't work he lives breathes eats his training for the games which could you know institute that level what about you is there uh like dan gable famously said like the one loss he had in college he was doing a lot of media and stuff back back then there was no social media that was a huge mistake for him do you do social media do you do like at that at this point well at that time i was like aol i don't know what's up i didn't even have a facebook page uh myspace nothing at this point yeah i got my first facebook page from the usoc in 2012. yeah when i went through the media thing the lady was like you have to have it i go i don't want it i don't like people i want to deal with the people what am i supposed to do you know like the social part of the social media no okay um i i have to bring this up because uh and then you went on to face diego camilo uh you lost that match but he went on to win bronze that's also an interesting one but we can skip ahead i just remember being really impressed both by your ground work um that was a match i should have won yeah i should have won that i was if you don't know judo you would visually watch that and be like i'm winning but he was technically winning on the scoreboard so it is what it is but the point that he got that solidified his win yes it was a point back in those days so i can't say anything but like my shoulder nicked the ground so it's like i don't know yeah a lot of the stories of your olympic career is like from a fan perspective it seems like you should have won or you very close to could have won yes and there was a lot of frustration you and your game being like shut down in certain ways and but like the thing that immediately grabbed me in 2008 was how much something about the way you approached judo how much you wanted to win because i was young then i was when i was at this at this time in my career i was out to like win like there was no like i'm gonna grab you i'm gonna throw you and if not you're gonna go through a battle yeah you're gonna make sure you earned it it so happened that you competing in 2008 i was uh i became a fan of yours uh at that moment and since then i uh i kind of knew about judo my university had a judo club and i kind of knew about jiu jitsu from martial arts and uh obviously i wrestled for many years before and i love wrestling but there's something about you competing that made me well there's no other way to say but it like changed the direction of my life because it forced me to say you know what i'm going to start judo in jiu jitsu and first of all for that i'm really grateful but it's fascinating to think because this kid is 22 years old i'm sure i'm not the only one that you've influenced like you've changed the direction of my life and there could be a huge number of others like that i mean that's the power of you as an individual at the on the olympic stage you ever think about the pressure of that did you did you think it's a 22 year old there's a bunch of people like i know i'm not the only one who changed i just happened to have like a microphone recently you know what i mean like is that it's fascinating to think about right like you perhaps you didn't think about this it's just just a judo match but you're like you influenced hundreds of thousands of people if not millions is that interesting it's it's not something that really hit me until um 2012 when i lost because that's when like i would say like the world felt bad for me at that point and that's when you knew that like people were watching and people were inspired by the loss because of how much went into that match yeah because you know that 99 of us who watched it thought i won except for the one percent of the people who were considered judges at that day in the event so but i mean that's the the winner lose that that was a really inspiring match and that's when that's when it dinged that like because i don't i don't watch something and really get inspired by like the person and the act it's like a it's an accumulative thing but for a lot of people like when they watch how much goes into it and then when i broke down on the match like the amount of suffering that happens when you lose a match like that and then you know really coming back and winning in rio there's a trend of people who were inspired that knew about london and then when they found out i won in rio that's when like people like in droves felt like they could overcome their own personal obstacles to still achieve something because they've witnessed somebody who's fallen and gotten back up yeah but it's not something that you think about like on the day it's when you look back and you go oh cause and effect i wonder if you can comment on that i'm trying to realize and live up to the fact that there's like young people that come up to me and i'm starting to realize like certain words i say will have a long lasting impact on them yep because you say it as like you don't even doesn't just yeah the whim some of them might come back 30 years later and a word i said was the reason they quit a thing and started the new thing that led them to become their true self like to find success all that kind of stuff like on the flip side though some people based on the actions that we do today even with this cast will alter the course of their lives forever i had a guy one time was it after london it must have been after london he actually found me on instagram wrote me what seemed to be like a dissertation on instagram about how much he i disrespected him 14 years earlier because i didn't step on a podium to take a picture after winning a tournament where he bronzed yeah and i'm thinking to myself like at the time like having dinner with my family because i had to leave the next morning was more important to me as a person not thinking about who you potentially will become and the actions of whatever you do today if you do become quote unquote famous or somebody in a spotlight that that could come back to bite you to me i don't know about you that that's that's super motivating like not to be a lesser version of myself ever yeah just be on top of your game whatever that game is be on top of your game when you're interacting with people and when you're just in your own private life i'm trying to make sure that i'm the exact same person privately as i am publicly and like making sure i'm on point i see like just hanging out with uh joe rogan a lot i see how he's first of all the exact same person and second he he like walks around and there's like a huge number of fans and you'll just take pictures and like it's very cool and it's very cognizant of like certain words he says especially young people like they're going to take that and that's going to be a memory for them for a couple years yeah that might be influential for the rest of their life so yeah i don't know that's a cool responsibility not to fuck it up hey but but anyway i i bring all that up to just say thank you so even if you like were frustrated that you didn't win a medal at least at least uh you influenced one silly russian kid to get into the martial arts and what happens when you get into martial arts it alters the direction of your life yeah mine from for for the better okay so let's go to uh london 2012 olympics uh one of the most dramatic battles of all time rematch yep so you've reached the semifinals once again to face the german holy bischoff do you mind if we step through that match a little bit by all means i've only ever watched the entire thing one time just because fucking so uh for context for the listener um travis first of all you don't like losing i think that's fair to say you know the the hard part with this match is because i went into this olympics thinking i'm not fucking win the olympics i'm the best in the world i never in my right mind thought oh i'm gonna win a medal like that never that never crossed my mind so it's like i would have rather him just fucking beat me yeah because then i lost so here the referees as as many people thought robbed you of a victory but it was also a really close battle again with many of the elements of frustration as 2008 in terms of strategically and gripping wise and it was just a fascinating battle that went to overtime uh so can you set the context so what what did the bracket look like who were the players here um who did you beat leading up to this match myself as you walk onto the mat what happened the day before the the hours before as you're standing there but how bad is this is it when just two people are standing like this and yes fucking that fucking guy man but this this bracket um was really interesting if you look at like the backstory of 81 kilos like leading up to the olympics right because at this point in time you know i was inside the top 10 at all times you know eight seven five four you know sixes i fell out of there sometimes due to injuries but i always climb back in there was another guy um from azerbaijan that was the olympic champion at 73 kilos in 2008 and the entire division got rocked by match one because his first match was with antoine vallis fortier of canada and everybody who saw the draw come out was like yarza bijani is going to win it he's the former olympic champion he's pretty much one of most of the major events including at 90 kilos because he just had smooth judo and you know match one rolls around match two rolls around antoine's in the shoot and he's looking around and he's like the azerbaijani is not here well where is he no joke he runs into the venue a match before throws his gui on and runs onto the olympic platform loses to the canadian in like a three-minute golden score battle so do you think he warmed up didn't he ran he literally ran into the venue threw his gui on and ran out didn't know judo and there you see antoine losing in the quarters so how good was antoine at this point in time this is i believe his first international medal was the olympic games so i don't think he'd ever meddled in paris um he went into this bracket unranked beating the ranked guy first round because he i don't know if he missed the bus i don't know if he was off his cycle and planned on losing because he didn't want to test positive i don't know there's a lot of like questionable things out there that could have potentially caused him to you know run onto the olympic platform for match one but you know it it catapulted antoine into like a belief that like i beat the seated guy i'm i'm ready and that was like a turning point in the canadians career just as a whole right that's that everybody has a defining moment like mine was when i beat bishop in dusseldorf at the grand prix for germany after 2008 right i beat the olympic champion in on his home soil to go win the entire tournament so we all have like those moments it's just when it happens at the games it throws the bracket like into a tailspin because typically you'd know like who's going to beat who where it's going to happen and when you look at my quarter final against the brazilian what most people don't know is i was i was so thankful i had that match most people would never in a million years be like i want to fight the world number one at the olympic games that's what i want to do i want to be the eighth seed fighting the world number one because i'm gonna win i was pissed off at him i was so angry because we we were at the pan am's i think the year before and there was a team tournament and i wanted to fight him i had lost the quarters to a cuban i think in like the first gripping exchange he threw me with a drop sale out of nowhere i was pissed so i wanted my hands on the brazilian in the team match well the brazilian team's warming up so i walk up to him no joke i walked up to him and i go you're fighting and he goes not today and i went are you fucking kidding me i warmed up i taped up you're the only fucking guy i want to fight and you're gonna fucking sit in the stands and read a goddamn book i was so angry i carried that anger because i never fought him until this day i was fucking pissed i was ready to beat him that's right i remember i forgot he was uh the world number one yeah how did he um because i remember like being really excited at that match how did you beat him i threw him with two hands on the same side collar yeah like dropped sail i cross gripped i yanked him behind me and i threw him deep on wasari and then the match ended 30 seconds later yeah i was pumped i was i thought i think okay if i'm remembering correctly i thought okay this guy might actually win gold that's that's what made for me as a spectator remembering now the next match that much more like painful and then the fans of judo that really followed the sport the stats when you look at the games and my draws i had the worst possible draw as you ever could have imagined at both london and rio i fought the world number one to get to the final or into the semis or past the semis and everybody i fought in the draw either beat me the last time we fought or i had never fought before so i always held a loss going on to the mat at the olympic games how'd you feel about that by the way like what were your feelings about facing the brazilian first i was so excited this well that was match three in london i fought the slovenian guy first round who beat me um where'd he beat me was it the worlds might have been the world's and then church's philly i fought in the second round who threw me for wasari in japan and then leandro who i don't think i ever fought who was world number one that avoided fighting me at the team tournament but i mean every single olympics you've fought you really stepped up the only tournament i've ever prepped for mentally and physically and just the whole thing yeah we never trained through this tournament like we did for the others or i would go into it injured all right well let's talk about you're standing there next to that uh to the german he looks he looked always smaller than you but you said like strong yeah um so what are you feeling now jimmy pedro behind you i was fucking ready to take his head off did you have an idea of what you're gonna do did you try do you're thinking of winning by epon were you thinking like going for big throws take or take him in deep waters i'll grip him what were you thinking we were about to have a battle and i wasn't going to throw him until he broke mentally okay that was there was no like oh this is going to be a clean throw that was never that was never the thought process so so here you know there's going to be a lot of gripping so we're seeing a shit ton of gripping and right here he throws it bang close-fisted you got a lot of adrenaline you seem calm i'm pissed you're pissed like you don't look serious you just look like i'm looking at the ref like because he keeps telling me to get up i'm like i have blood running down my face i go okay here see blood see he's like oh yeah go fix it and that's on your eyebrow somewhere yeah he split it just underneath it so you split your eyebrow and so in judo they don't they're allergic to blood probably for a good reason but they so now you have to try to figure out how to uh tape that up yeah which already sets up one of the most badass looks in judo history first 15 seconds yeah busted my eye open was that getting in the way of your eyesight at all or no no damn he looks good at gripping how difficult is it to get a grip on that guy very like i'm struggling just to get my hand in the collar and he wasn't even blocking it is he being caged yeah remember like is he interested in offense nope he's a very cagey you know methodical player like he he never opens himself up yeah there you go you grab the leg as part of a combination yep and people have told me that he's actually very good at throwing people he just doesn't so but he just doesn't show it at these no because he he doesn't care how he wins he cares that he wins yeah which makes him very difficult to beat because he knows when you've strategized to do that where you look at the rule set and you develop a plan to to get through the matches then you've really got to figure out a way to get that person off that game plan you know whether you get a head by a penalty or something right there like he wouldn't give me the sleeve so i grabbed all of his fingers oh nice in which i just opened like to like this way or i grabbed them the other way and i started lifting them uh yeah i started nice first playing mercy like this yeah is great because he wouldn't give me the sleeve and i needed an attack and i'm like okay i can't hold on to this forever because that judge is going to see it so let me just do a quick throw here while i'm using the fingers and then you're just holding on yeah and then i just and then yeah he goes to get up and i go to get on top and right here nice that elbow you get him oh you got him yeah it looks like i elbow him did you do it kind of no i didn't even i at the time i never knew this happened yeah until after i watched this like three or four years later didn't even know i didn't even feel it look at that so he's legitimately angry here yeah he's angry and of course you can't you can't move why would you get this look at this this moment right there is gold if you're not watching this on video you're missing out you do you never get this in judo no i don't know if that's ever happened that little face-off especially on a stage like this the reference and then he brings us in to like talk to us and he's like hey we're good right like you guys aren't about to do what i think you're about to do ah you put up like hey shake hands again because the first time we did it that wasn't good enough well you got to do it again the heartbreaking part about this and why the ijf switched it to an unlimited golden score because we fought five minutes um through the entire normal part of the match and then we did the entire overtime period of three minutes not one penalty was given no gripping infractions zero false attacks like no stalls that's great there was that nobody was really backing up yep i mean it was you know so what was jimmy telling you here how was he was he talking to you at all he's not allowed to talk during medical things and my nose is now broken but he's also oh the nose is broken from what um i caught an elbow from him glad his face is clean that's fun and right here like i was pissed i was so angry at the medic because he's fumbling around and i'm like my whole plan is to break the german mentally yeah you got to hurry up with the tape man like he's supposed to be tired like he's not supposed to be resting is jimmy yelling here he can't no not here not here but during the match yeah and you can see i just take it from him and i'm like give it to me i'm going to do it myself get out of here how scared is the medic it's like this guy's going to can't even tear the tape look how nervous he is [Laughter] we made fun of him for this yes so much throughout the years still due to this day all right here we go oh you look great can't really see don't care was there some outcome in your mind that you could possibly beat him on the ground with a submission or a pin you knew you're gonna have to throw him i knew i was gonna have to if i was gonna throw him or armbar him or pin him whatever the case may be it was going to be his mental like i'm just tired of this yeah right he's too cagey of a player he's too experienced you know he has to mentally make that choice to give that inch and then you just have to be ready to take it so i was just waiting for it and so now this is four minutes in one minute left yep oh um is that in your game plan two potential likes assuming engage like these sacrifice throws to him because the whole point of that that technique and the sacrifice throws wasn't because i thought i was gonna throw him but it disrupts the pattern enough to like get him to make a potential mistake yeah like see he should have gotten a cheeto there hands in the face but again that's just part of judo yeah he poked me in the eyeball this is a rough match does he act at all or no like was he acting frustrated or anything like that was all like he's like acting for the ref you know what i mean like oh that all that kind of stuff you're just going in yeah hard non-stop like angry aggressive feeling cardio here at all like i don't i'm not tired during this and then just always pressing forward time runs out now we're into golden score 12 minutes and 38 seconds later yeah you think about every judo exchange right every time we grip up every time we attack sometimes it can take longer to get back to the line than the entire exchange yeah so the the more aggression the more exchanges you have the the the longer the time stretches then here the six seconds left and golden score your tape is uh is now yellow and red yeah with sweat and blood literally and time is out now what are you thinking here do you think you won the match i i thought i won the match a minute ago i remember thinking to myself like if this goes to the flags i won no doubt in my mind because i felt like the whole time like i was going to him yeah right he was never coming at me yeah that's the way it felt i think like that's the way it felt body language-wise just the intensity how fast you're moving towards him you're constantly going for throws now if you want to rewind that we can talk about the whole because it's a part of this clip so wait wait a minute uh they all went blue they did so in judo there's three referees two on the side one in the center and they all vote and now let's pause it right there now the way this is supposed to work they raise their flags they do like a one two count and then on three they all raise it together yeah now as a little pretext to this entire match up until this point not one match at the olympic games has ever been a split decision meaning out of three people not one of them voted against the other group members so they were all unified blue or all unified white yeah right which is um statistically difficult to imagine yes it's almost like the they had a referee meeting and said um it's better for the olympics to never have a split yeah okay so the question becomes if you click that frame by frame right so right now we have all the refs with their flags out and then click that so the middle middle guy is he is all the way up all the way up the other side judges haven't moved we now have one side raft all the way up then we have a third side ref all the way up yeah so there there's a the time point when the middle guy has the flag all the way up if not 80 90 of the way there yeah then the other one does and then the third one goes uh so now the question becomes who really like did the outside refs really have an opinion or were they told to wait for the center one to start and then lift whatever flag the center ref picked yeah this is very unfortunate because it's very honestly it's very possible that they had this meeting um this this is the problem with the the olympics they sometimes it's also the problem in the soviet union with communism you think the the committee knows what's good for the people and so on so they decide universally as opposed to letting the magic of the olympics be what it is but nevertheless the in this case the center ref decided blue like what do you think do you think it's just a shitty call or like he has the right to pick but yeah the problem is is the other two i don't think did yeah so and then so when you do this frame by frame again right like i can see from my own perspective two of the refs and i see them both blue right so when you fast forward that a little bit to get to like all the flags i see the two go blue and i go i look over and i look at the other guy and i'm like really yeah all three i fought for eight minutes and i can't even get a vote i didn't even get a penalty i can't even get a vote and that's when i broke i like oh i couldn't believe it and i'm not going to lie he looks shocked and here you're on your knees you're crying literally you're right this is it yeah but i think it's the end amazing match that was such a war i mean both people can't believe what happened i know that's the and like honestly i wish we had the rules that we do today as far as the unlimited golden score because i would have loved to have seen what would have happened what was jimmy saying here to you i mean i guess there's nothing to say yeah he he was kind of apologizing for the way the the scores went because he knows how badly you want it he saw the match and he felt i deserved to win it yeah based on like you know what happened but he probably with all his experience knows that this is what the olympics are about the refs sometimes yep i mean that's the magic of it man well and at the same time we're at we're in the olympic semi-final in a sport that's dominated by certain continents and when you look at the three refs on the mat they're all european yeah you're telling me there couldn't have been one pan am one african one oceana you know different like why'd they all have to be european but to be fair it's a back to your sauna story you've dealt with this stuff before and and you've won over this stuff before and that's why like i was broken and you thought you won here those and when i hindered on that for a year and a half like i couldn't even stand i was done but i'm pretty sure there's a slow-motion replay on this when i watch that he's all excited that fucking guy and he's all happy he's released hey hi guys i did it yeah so here's like slow motion replay of the flags being raised the heart being broken travis just spending over right here watch watch his reaction like he like you could see his mouth like open and ah like yeah really yeah and he's looking at two refs just like i am he didn't celebrate until he looked at the third one and said oh all three so you think he knew i think in his head like i don't think he really believed he was winning he did it enough to win yeah yeah because when his mouth dropped like oh yeah hey all three like that's not really the reaction you would give yeah i mean that was uh that's one of the greatest matches i've ever seen i mean obviously it's painful for you but that pain first of all sets the stage for uh 2016 but even without that i think it was just a beautiful story at the olympics you've still did incredible job at that olympics you stood toe-to-toe i think in in hindsight having lost that match did more for me and more for the sport yeah as a whole me losing that match yeah i mean stories aren't about winning stories are about the fighting so and that made one hell of a story but it it also has to do with you know treachery is probably not the right word to use it's probably the wrong word entirely to use but because of the conflict in the match and because of how the refs handled the match there at the end it created controversy that was spoken about for months on world media right i remember articles being written about the olympics and you know the reffing and how it was corrupt and that match was one of them there was another one in fencing where like something happened with the timer where one of the fencers i guess what happens in fencing the timer resets up a second if it's down so the fencer got one second played out i think like 27 or 28 times and then one on like 30. so like there was like clock fixing for fencing there was this match that i think just got publicity good or bad publicity is publicity for judo and then you came back to uh i mean this is the hard thing after this hard break to step up and continue fighting right i really really struggled like unbelievably struggled from 2012 to like 2014. i almost quit numerous times i was so angry i mean at one point i got so mad at the ijf feeling like they were fucking me every step of the way i threw a water bottle at a referee after a match i cussed out a referee one time on a mat i got suspended from the sport because i was just so angry at that point in time and uh igf is the international judo federation and they're are they the people that supply the referees basically like the they're kind of getting run the sport they're on global scale so uh you sent a few emails 2014 15 uh basically quitting one of them said i'm mentally and physically broken another said with a subject line i'm done yep the weight cuts didn't break you no [Laughter] so if this broke you you were really going through a hard time i was like you know what we're just gonna like dumb it down a little bit and get some wins under our belt i'm gonna go to a world cup which is like three stages down or four stages down from like the olympic games like this should be like a cake walk like making the final of a world cup should be a walk in the park i show up i barely beat a 16 year old kid barely then i got smoked in the second round i got thrown three times i was like i'm fucking done they changed all the fucking rules they fucked me out of the olympics like what am i supposed to do and it was at that moment when i wrote the email where i remember sitting at a bar i don't drink by the way but i was sitting at a bar um at the hotel sending this email and i got a response back from jimmy and he goes well just just stay for the training camp go to germany and then whatever happens don't worry about it we'll talk when you get home i was like fuck that fuck these people fuck the rules i don't fucking care anymore i'm just going to do judo the way i want to do judo if i fucking get shit out fuck them that was my response can you become an olympic champion can you become an olympic medalist with that kind of thinking you think or no was that that's counterproductive yeah okay just checking because maybe that's also liberating the expectation was no longer that travis is going to win this tournament the expectation was travis is going to come home and be fucking pissed off we're going to have to figure out how to manage a pissed off person that's trying to quit that shouldn't be quitting and the people still believe that you can be a medalist again yeah like who believed that jimmy believed it the team managers believed it some of my teammates still believed it my training partner still did but they're not the ones that are cutting the weight flying around feeling like you know all of your judo is now null and void right because at this point they took away leg grabs entirely you couldn't break a grip with two hands right the meta of judo has changed again right so i got fucked out of it they took away how i did judo again and now it just got more difficult so when i'm sitting in the hotel and i'm sending this email i remember being at the training camp like i was like i don't even fucking care what the rules are i'm just gonna fucking throw people i don't even care if i'm cheating it doesn't matter to me i'll just play stupid yeah right so i just started going back and doing judo without the leg grabs but with all the same gripping that i was doing beforehand and then when i got to germany i was like i don't fucking care i was like if i gotta cheat to win then i gotta fucking cheat to win if i get cheetoed out like then i get cheetoed out and i won germany uh which event in germany the german grand prix which is grand prix yeah a week after losing the world cup because i was trying to do judo around the new rule set i wasn't just trying to do judo right because when you get to the highest level your game tends to morph around you know what can you can or cannot get away with i was more focused on trying to figure out what i can and can't get away with and i stopped actively doing judo once i said fuck whatever the rule changes are i'm just going to keep doing judo the way i know how to do judo and if i get a penalty then so be it and so that that win that started the road back it wrote back yeah because now it's like i don't care if you penalize me or not because i'm going to throw that guy anyways i'm going to beat him anyways and if i get a shito for doing something wrong then i'll just stop doing that one thing and just keep doing all the other things that they told me i probably shouldn't be doing but they're not calling me on it so i'm just going to keep doing it well you uh you found yourself at the 2016 olympics was that ever a doubt by the way after this after 2014 in germany i had a lot of doubt after the concussion in 2015. i remember when i first came back after four months of nothingness that like even trying to like train the room would start to like tilt the world on me and then when i finally got over that and i could start doing things again i stepped on the mat for the pan ams and i was like drowning's not the right word but like everything was being done in such a slow motion like i had sandbags everywhere that like i just couldn't keep up like mental fog yeah like i remember fighting the brazilian for in the semi-final of pan ams i was halfway through this match i'm just like my eyes roll up i'm like i'm just gonna fucking wing it i just fucking winged it and i got countered and thrown free pawn and i was like i don't even know what to do and i couldn't even think clearly and that's when i was like i may not come back yeah you don't have control over how to come back from this it's like it's just your mind it's not just not operating i can like oh my right hand's not working because it's fractured let me figure out a way i cannot use that like when your mind's not working like it's the one thing you need yeah like you gotta have it so i can work through anything else i needed that though and so how did you come back from that time that's when i wrote another email and i was like i'm fucking off team usa i'm not fucking i'm not done with usa judo i'm done with the tour i was like i quit i'm gonna go do my own thing they were like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa can't quit now the olympics is in like a year like let's talk about this again because it's the second time i've tried to quit in like two years right so then we sit down in jimmy's office and he's like whoa whoa whoa you can't quit you're gonna kick yourself if you don't go to rio i'm telling you right now don't do that to yourself let's figure out a way of like doing this and i was like because when we trained before we did it as a unit right we all went to the same tournaments we all went to the same training camps and i'm like you guys are treating me like i'm the same player i used to be i go i don't i'm not operating at the level you think i'm operating at i go i can't do that and he goes well what do you want to do and i'll tell you what jimmy you know i'm being serious because my answer is something you'd never would have expected i go i want you to send me to japan for three weeks and he was like really i hated japan i refused to go there up until this point but i was like i have to get to a point where i can get so tired and get through it that like my judo will come back and my body will learn again and when you say japan you meet the kodokan like what tokai that is that the highest level of judo it's one of the top colleges in the world yeah and that's so you can go with the best people in the world you can go to war with them top level like strong players yeah there's a lot of very strong players there's a lot of middle class players and there's a lot of volume of rounds so you value all of it the middle class too like that because when you're tired like you can't just train in areas where you're you're battling for every inch at some point you have to be successful right so you still under duress and under strain and through exhaustion you still have to have the ability to score yeah well if you're training with the best people in the world all the time you're not always going to be able to score so you still need those b level players in order to really develop again what is it like if you can comment briefly on training in japan what's it like to go into a different place you probably don't speak the language that well um like is there an isolation aspect to it is it like purely about judo now i really wanted to be isolated no training partners no coaches i wanted to get back to my roots and just learn how to fight again i don't want to figure out how to beat the german i don't want to figure out how i can develop a new entry into my sail against you know whoever it may be it's not you're just i'm going to fight hard let me get back to fighting let me get back to like the root of who i am what were those sessions like what we were talking about five-minute rounds like what what how many six six minute rounds 30-minute breaks 14 rounds of session sorry what's the 30-minute break 30 30 seconds break 30 seconds 30-second break sorry what 14 14 rounds 14 rounds every day every day five five days a week and then 11 or 12 rounds on saturday plus weightlifting plus running plus weightlifting plus running so that those are hard rounds yeah what's it feel like to go through that so you have a bunch of uh just a sea of black belts japan um i'm sure they're hunting you a little bit depending on who you are i was hunted a little bit like i didn't really struggle because of who i am them as college athletes they want to show to their coaches and their you know higher players like oh look i can throw the world number whoever but if you're just a guy who shows up like them beating you doesn't provide any value or raise their status no but your your status raising yes so i was actually like in a situation where nobody was watching me and i was free to just battle at my own will okay which is what it was about for me and you just pushed yourself because i knew how to do that i know how to push myself are you uh when you're doing these 14 rounds is every single one a standalone thing for you yep so you're not trying to pace yourself nope it's just each one as to as much exhaustion as i can get but then there must be ones that were like it's like ground nine where you're got nothing left better figure out how to score it's all you got to do you got to survive you gotta score what's your memories of that of those three weeks what's like what stands out to you it seems like um because that's the place where you found the silver medal yep because it's the place most people don't want to be everybody's comfortable i would rather i would rather find out who i am and what i'm made of and find those those endpoints and if i can't find them then that means everybody else has given up before me were there a few people that just kind of you returned to battle over and over in those times and then it was just yep no social media no none of that it's just like to lock yourself in your room you come back you've thought about it and you come back with a game plan for that day against some players here or there and i would i would develop a hit list like i would be like oh that that motherfucker grabbed me at like 13 and i watched him sit fucking four rounds and then come try to kick the shot at me i'm gonna fucking grab that guy early and i'm gonna beat the shit at him and you just developed that list there's probably some epic battles in that room right yeah uh what's it look like like how crowded is it very and so you're just like yeah it's a sea of people see a people and you're trying to are you doing groundwork at all just throws just throws your throws no transitions no nothing but if i get pissed off and like you keep dropping or like not let me do what i want to do i'll rip a choke right across your face yeah just to let you know that like yeah and if i wanted to you have a really nice style of just like respectfully bullying the shit out of people because some people call me a bully and i have to remind them that like a bully enjoys like beating up the weak right i want to beat the person that fights back right exactly it's not fun for me if you don't fight back right some of the greatest people i've seen like do this they they basically you have this in the iowa wrestling rooms they'll push each other into the wall like they get there's like anger but it's ultimately underneath it all it's like a deep respect i was training with colton brown one time and i went to san jose state because i was in california for something and he kept like he kept circling to the edge they had like a cupboard that had like when you opened it it had like all the tape and like medical supplies i was like we'll fucking put you right through that and he kind of lit he kind of giggled and then he went by that edge and i fucking ran them right through it yeah see to me that's an ultimate sign of respect that both you and colton will remember well and we're still friends we still talk it's just i told him i was going to do it he knew i meant it too yeah i did it anyways that was just testing me uh yeah listen that's and that same attitude was that's that was in japan just day after day after day after day yep 14 rounds that's that's rough uh and you didn't sit out rounds and i did it all with a broken hand uh how wow how did you do it with a broken hand you show up every day you show up okay i actually went left to right my right okay so that's okay so you can then focus on gripping with your left it's always the way there's always a way but that means you can't i guess you don't have to grip or you're right sometimes because i would palm it with my thumb just like hanging out like this just like this so you can do something so you could do like a ghost because you have a um because what were your main throws it was sanagi koshigoroma okay sumi uchimata but you have this big uh um like a goshi type of thing like a yeah but not from like around the waist it's from over the shoulder over the shoulder and i can do it with just the one hand oh as i wish one hand the right one i don't need the sleeve hand you don't need a sleeve hand but you couldn't do with the broken hand i could because i can just put my hand in the key so it can't come off and then you just because what happened was three days before i was leaving for japan a guy my hand was rested like this on a mat and the guy boom took my whole thumb off and tore all the tendons in the palm yeah so when i went to the doctor he was like you know do we have to put a cast on and i go i'm leaving in three days so you're not putting a cast on it and i go this is what i want you to do just like this i said i want you to build a cast that holds it that velcros around so that when i'm not training i can wear it yeah but then when i'm training i'll take it off and then i'll put the tape on it and then whatever happens happens whatever happens happens all right so that's epic and that led you to the 2016 olympics in rio well that led me to winning pan am gold when i got back from japan and then almost getting my leg cut off in 2015. that was like maybe a month or two later i was hospitalized for seven days the leg being cut off for what i had three different types of bacterial infections in my right leg my whole leg swelled and it was in my blood skin and in my bone in my right leg um so i got stuck at mgh in a hospital for seven days until they figured out what the bacteria source was where was the source of the infection as in in my knee in the knee yeah okay so obviously there's a danger of like that's life-threatening yep so when i went into the emergency room when i got back from the worlds the lady was like hey you need to call you're gonna call because you may lose your leg tonight yeah and then they put me in the hospital what do you think in this whole time are you still thinking about olympics they put me into the room like four hours later the doctor came in um i was at mgh in boston and he was like you have a serious infection in your leg i go he's like we have to keep you hospitalized until we can figure out what it is and i was like buddy i have the olympic games in less than a year i go i don't give a fuck what it is i go just fucking take it out and let me get on with my day he goes we can't do that i'm like i don't understand i go you told me it's infected just cut away that part of the tissue drain it do whatever you got to do and then send me on my way he's like it doesn't work like that he said until we figure out what it is we can't figure out how to stop it from growing or how far it spread so it took him seven days to figure out what it was then once they figured out what it was i went in for surgery to remove it then i spent i think it was eight weeks in in-home care with a picc line and then i came back from that in the first week and a half of judo i tore my si joint trying to throw a guy and then i came back from that about a month later and then fifth at the kano cup and then the game six months later how quickly do doctors understand who they're dealing with like is that is that difficult for you to explain who travis stevens is when you go to visit a doctor i don't think they understand you know their role is to get me to do my job to the best of their ability as a doctor right meaning it's going to be less than what they want and they and they struggle conceptually with like the textbook tells me this and i go but i'm not a textbook right like when you go to physical therapy the first thing they do is they pull out that binder that says day one we do this exercise i go but i have my own goals yeah your job is to help me meet my goal let's let's work a plan to do that or i got to go find somebody else did uh the doctors in general people outside of your close-knit group step up if they didn't i found somebody else and typically i could find a person who knew the right person i always wonder with people like because i'm i'm constantly surrounded by one of the biggest problems in my life has been there's a lot of people in my life who love me very much but who want me to the equivalent of that situation um you know definitely don't go to the olympics and definitely like like it seems like the world is full of people that want you to be average and happy which is great which is fine i mean i perhaps that's the way it should be like you know my parents people close to this that's what love how love manifests itself often in people but then like i think the ultimate manifestation of love is understanding who this person is here's a madman who's driven towards a particular thing and the best thing for you to do is not to say like rest is to say work harder like fuck your infection yeah you should be training yeah have you ever met anybody as crazy as you that can help you most of us who get to this point get there because we're all a little unstable yeah even my wife khalida right like when she was getting ready for 2016 um or when she was getting ready for 2020 because she moved to boston to be a coach she had a neck problem right and at that at some point in time it's like what's really important day-to-day life or judo and believe it or not the doctor in canada was like i am never under any circumstances doing an mri of your neck again that's what she told her she goes if you have me do an mri yeah you're not doing judo again so just know if you hurt your neck and it requires an mri you're done with judo forever yeah so decide if you want to do judo or not that was a conversation we actually had to have that's a cool thing for a doctor to say i mean it depends how badass they sound when they say it so that's a tough conversation judo won what's what's this with your wife what's that relationship like so you're both a little crazy a little bit in a good sense or from my perspective in a good sense yeah it's just we've we understand that when it when you set a goal to do something you're not signing on for the good yeah you're signing on for the bad and i don't think a lot of people understand that that's like a valentine's day card from travis stevens you have to like accept everything negative that could possibly happen and until you do you're never gonna make it because you'll always sell yourself short yeah you'll never go far enough and if you sign up for the whole thing then the negative is just like oh great i expected that if you're experiencing the negative they're also experienced the negative and if you overcome it maybe they'll get knocked out from yep maybe they won't deal with it maybe they won't train through it right when i had my five herniated disc and i was in a neck brace i was still in the gym at 7 am doing whatever it is i could do because my job is to be at the gym david goggins i don't know if you know the guy he's he's gone he's damaged lots of parts of his body like you trying to achieve things so you know unlike you his achievements are like your achievements come with a medal he's just running in the darkness in the middle of nowhere by himself it's like i mean it's the same probably as with you if you're able to be introspective about it is he's just battling his own inner demons and working through those and he's breaking up breaking his body doing so are you cognizant of the trade-off of the fact that you know you're damaging your body to get to these levels of achievements of this level of excellence of this level of greatness i mean i guess that depends on what you consider damage really because i don't really see that i have damaged my body if anything i think i've strengthened it my body can go through more than yours can yeah whose is weaker yeah right it's just like it's just like the thai boxers right yeah in order to strengthen their shins they got to break it a few times yeah it's just nature of the beast you just uh had to break a bunch of stuff to find where the weak points are and then made them stronger yep of course strengthen the areas around it to strengthen it by you know the sheer relation to it but the problem is like you may not be able to do judo like for until you're 70. why not i may not be able to do judo to the level i used to yeah don't get me wrong but i can still do judo because and i think a lot of people struggle with they want to keep doing it like they used to be able to do it i don't try to do judo like i used to like you're seeing here yeah i'm not that guy anymore i accept that i don't even try to be that guy anymore i'm a completely different player today than i am when i was winning olympic medals and so i guess when you're looking at like my journey and the trade-off is i never sacrificed anything the people around me sacrificed for me and i never had a downturn after the olympics because i never identified as an olympian you know a lot of olympians suffer from depression because they identify as it now they don't have who they are where was your personal moment of greatness like or do you not experience life that way where you were truly proud to be yourself like every day i wake up you wake up and you're not proud of who you are then you've really got to seek out some like help so that's first of all okay i'll i'll do that because um i definitely am not proud of who i am i just wonder if you didn't identify with the olympics was there times maybe in the training room maybe in japan like where you're all you just kind of felt like i get more of an emotional i guess trigger right where like i feel proud of what i've done when i've set to a task and i've done it so almost any task and the more challenging the task to more reward you fought up a lot of amazing uh battles in 2016 olympics so you got you beat the let's see the world number four in the quarterfinals it's like a replay every single olympics you're all the people i got terrible draws insane terrible draws and then you're facing this is where i was like watching this i'm like yeah he's screwed you face the world number one the georgian and by the way for people who don't know he beat me five times to my beating him once and the one time i beat him was in london and all other times he beat me he beat me by phone and not by like a little throw like he threw me on my head at one point we were in georgia i'm fighting him in the final i go to my teammate and i go guess what make sure you watch this fight somebody's getting thrown free pawn this matching and the same magical distance and about a minute in i tried to take his head off with a big koshigoromo which was like a head and arm he caught me and then threw me on my head and ended the match so first of all we're watching the video of you again standing next to the to the guy leading up to your semi-final match so here if you uh if you win this you're guaranteed a medal yep uh but the chances of you winning from my fan perspective i was like god uh you damn the rest of the world except for me except for you wha wha what are you saying you're talking to yourself here what are you saying my name is travis stevens i'm olympic champion i will not be denied the georgia is probably like what the hell is this guy saying was he talking to himself so he was probably ultra confident yeah had to be the difference is is i understood the last five times he beat me i was purposely trying to throw him not beat him i wanted to find out if i could turns out i can't but i don't need to throw him to beat him i need to know how to not lose but you were still going for stuff here but all of my attacks drag him to the ground they're never standing on my feet which is a complete which is a distinction that we talked about at the very beginning right you have throws where you're standing and throws where you're dropping every time i try to throw him standing he throws me free pony he picks me up and he throws me on my head literally so what i did is i just needed to get to that last one minute mark which is what he does mentally in his own judo where he changes into a panic and just tries to like do things that are uncharacteristic so you knew he's going to start panicking here as you get as the match cl draw still close and you both have a paschito and actually did we pass the point where i went for broke and i broke my rule which one i went for a crazy foot sweep um like epone switch thing i can't remember what it's called because it's not used that often and he actually landed on top of me and some people wanted it to be called hippone but he had actually let go of the ghee and was looking for the mat so he didn't have any control so they didn't award him a point yeah and here we go now we're getting down into the see like he's getting frustrated great yeah i love it perfect second penalty no big deal we just got to get to the one minute mark that's all we got to do so there's no panic here for you you're not this i'm right where i need to be and look it now if you go back into this match uh i would love for somebody to go back and see how many times he did a drop right ippon say an augie probably never yeah so why is he doing it now because he panics and he changes his judo at that one minute so look out look how much i kept that grip yeah you kept you have that grip this whole time yeah of your left hand locking him down walking him down the he he you keep the grip as he's throwing yeah which do were you thinking choke as he drops or no it's just kind of natural instinct yeah because we drilled it i spent two years drilling this transition and then very so for people that don't do judo jiu-jitsu it's like really nice you keep everything is nicely controlled to where you're keeping that ghee under his chin like it's really tight control like it's very like you're cog i guess is drilling but you're cognizant of the position of your wrist the whole time and you can tell based on like just years of doing it whether it's under or it's not right you can just feel the difference and it's probably even if you wanted to stop that it's very difficult because your whole time it's like once it's under it's almost impossible to stop for people who practice jiu jitsu don't practice judo one of the very annoying things about judo is in order to do ghee chokes they have to be under the chin yes even though the kind of intense jokes you do work just fine yeah over the chin but and the the kicker here and why we practiced this choke was because when you go back and watch all of the other matches he always does this tripod when i try to do arm locks yeah which is typically what i would do yeah and when i do that he ends up sliding out and i end up falling off right so you step up here with the choke he does a tripod where he sticks his button to the air and you uh dude what's the name of this choke bow and arrow no but okay i mean when you do from like from that posit is is there a way this entry into the bow and arrow i guess because you're doing we we referred to in judo as a british strangle which when they when they're in that turtle position and you do that rolling cool and here when you go into that you can fall off of him like you said if you're going for an arm bar but here literally because you have it under the chin really well there's just a nice control and i've already planned on it being on his chin that's why i've hooked the arm yeah right it's already starting to go straight probably this choke in the early stages like a few frames before feels like it uh like you're safe it's fine like like the head will slip out or something like that yeah and that's why my left knee is up by his shoulder to keep that pressure down so that he can't posture it up when did you know you have this oh i work right here i i actually panicked um right about here was maybe his head could come out my hand i tore the muscle in my palm because i was pulling so hard that i'm like he may not tap yeah like is he is my hand just gonna give out beforehand and there he is we're right on this edge right yeah so like if we roll a little bit outside and i still don't have it like that ref could stop it yeah and then i felt him tapping and oh the that he is um he's heartbroken i felt surprised there it is the relief olympic olympic final and he knew he knew he lost an olympic medal right there because he already knew that the japanese guy was going to be his bronze that he never beats see the but also he probably in his head was confident that he would be in the final correct and so like this he almost is surprised yeah it's not supposed to happen this way and it's the second time it's happened and that's how you became an olympic medalist man that must be a great feeling that must be a great feeling right here just like all the years of injuries all of it as as fans that watch this too it's like holy shit he actually did it it's a packed stadium too not one empty seat oh man so uh i mean what were you thinking here i'm just focused on the next match yeah it took me maybe like a minute or so to like decompress and then like get back to like my normal state for the final so the the final is against the uh the russian here what can you say about your mindset you're saying the exact same same thing travis stevens olympic champion i will not be denied because i had felt like in london and throughout the years i felt like i kept getting robbed so i made sure in my mantra to have that little bit at the end to reassure myself that like they are not going to control the outcome of today i'm going to control the outcome what did you know about the russian everything um and i i honestly i thought i'd win the olympics right now and i still do think that today just like mentally when you think about it that i've won like yeah he threw me but it was like a one in a million chance that that worked for him like come on so so it's not like you feel lucky to be in the final it's like you you can't remember i'm i'm anticipating the goal like i'm i'm past that there's a confidence in the way you're moving and the way you're yeah like i have his sleeve he's not breaking it like still walking him down still going forward like um i knew exactly how i was gonna beat him and i developed the plan because when i was getting ready for rio we brought in a lot of the top japanese players that weren't invited to the camp for the national team to boston so i had four people three of them were on the national team one of them had won the universities in japan all at 81 kilos i only got thrown once during camp for a month wow like i was i was ready i just i fucking slipped where does it happen right when he threw me so if you let this play out really quick there's a point right here where i'm going to come around his back and i'm kind of going to just yokosoteme which means like a lateral drop and i'm just going to bring him down to the floor which isn't a throw right here yeah it's more of like a a take down right i'm trying to get him to the ground because i want to burn him he doesn't do nawaza yeah so i'm just going to keep burning him and you can see that like i get really close here he just went a little too far to his side during this exchange and like he's running oh my god he he's very wiry for an 81kg player yeah there's not much like muscle on him but he uses his length and his leverage very well and you can see like i'm really burning the clock here like i'm owning these exchanges more than i'm owning the tachiwaza ones the ones on our feet so you weren't trying to necessarily like submit him here or like really hard or like pin him you're trying to break him a bit i'm doing both um i'm being overly physical um [Music] and to a lot of the bjj people who are watching this like they're like oh well i would have done this i would have done that you've got to think like if that referee who's reffing the judo side of it looks at it for a couple seconds and it's like uh he's not really moving yeah they'll stop it yeah so you're uh like you understand judo yeah what's called nawaz or groundwork like what you because you're really showing it to the ref yes you have to show movement and progression that hurt the forehead like see i threw that hand in there kind of hard ripping it across his face just because the i gotta i gotta tell you there's a calm well no he does look a little a little broken but the the russians have like this calmness they're pretty good at well don't forget they've competed like this for a long time yeah it's all he knows and this is where i lose it see how my knee hit the ground yeah my knee wasn't supposed to touch the ground yeah i was supposed to sit to my hip to bring him down something happened where my knee touched yeah and it didn't happen in the first one it just happened there it's like that we never should have been in that predicament yeah and that's that's one of the things where when you're looking at you know sports for anybody who's trying to improve you have to when you're when you're trying to improve you've really got to ignore the ends of the spectrums right the the oopsies and the they got lucky and you only focus on the middle like the technique i was doing was perfectly sound but it just happened that the one oopsy happened on the stage it shouldn't have happened on and there's no there's no amount of drilling that will ever like prevent that from happening and that's just the the that's sports that sports especially olympics especially judo when it's like one yeah oopsie can just be your that's it that's it you know it really requires and you have to wrap your head around the idea of like if you want the ability to beat these people and throw these people like you got to be willing to get thrown yourself yeah like this isn't boxing there's no like i'm going to stand in a place where he can't hit me and i can hit him because we have the ghee and because they can grab it they have just as much ability to throw you as you them so how'd you feel here how long was the duration of you feeling upset that you didn't get the gold versus never felt it never felt it just because he didn't beat me right right it's an important distinction because when i'm training and when i'm competing like i understand that i take risks and i accept those consequences that's why i take them that's a consequence that's not him being the better judo player that dominated a match and i didn't have an answer and then he threw me then i would be a little upset like when you're tired and somebody's coming at you and like you can't do anything about it that's a shitty feeling yeah you know and that wasn't this one and that wasn't this like i accept losing when it's when it's my fault well that was a hell of a story man so from 2008 2012 just the sheer number of injuries the weight cuts all of that the wanting to quit the the doubts uh i'm sure you did not get like the fans probably started disappearing somewhere between the second and the third olympics like the support from it did judo within the united states and just everybody you know just the usoc tried to cut all my funding in 2015 and say nah you're too old yeah so through all of that to win the medal i mean that's what the olympics is about is is there some like when you look back does that seem like another person is this like another lifetime ago or like that's a hell of an accomplishment how do you feel about the whole thing it's a it's an interesting kind of predicament because there's like those cookie cutter answers about how proud you are and how grateful you are but at the end of the day it's not who you are so that that skill set and that mentality that you know it took to accomplish that that's who you are and so this was just a stepping stone in in who i am so it's in the past to me like there's no shrine in my house that has like an olympic medal in it i can't remember last time i looked at it so you're saying like the the all the stories the skills along the way that's like you right now sitting here is the shrine yeah the who you become along the journey is really what the prize is right like when you think about any of them most of the people that you know go through that depression after the games it's because that is their shrine like that is who they've identified as that is who they've told the world the community their friends their family that's how they've identified i've identified as the person who perseveres overcomes and accepts challenges so like i all those things are just like you know putting a suitcase off to the side and i'm on to the next great chapter thing that i'm trying to do and it's it's both sad and cool that um very few people in the world get to to experience what it's like to be you i mean this level of having gone through that yeah journey everyone has the opportunity to yeah yeah i mean i've done a few uh difficult things in my life but i got to tell you weight cuts and sauna um and i would tell people right now who are listening like don't go through that and i think a lot of wrestlers a lot of young judo players a lot of long young like just combat sports people where weight classes are a thing they almost take a sense of pride like when i hear them talking about like oh how much weight do you have to cut if you have to cut a pound more it's like you've accomplished more like you're tougher yeah like you're not like there's no there's no trophies for that you whatever the reason had a job to do and you got it done and that that is truly inspiring no matter how hard that there's a big deep lesson to learn from that then you start getting to the specifics of whether you should wake up or not but if we don't then most of the great things we have in this world we wouldn't have the reason we have many other great things is because people did that weight cut the equivalent of the way cut for whatever the discipline man there's a difference between having to do it because you have to and you get through it yeah then setting yourself up to do that because you think it's the cool thing or the thing you're supposed to be doing in order to be successful yeah there are plenty of like two-time olympic medalists i probably could have been a two-time olympic medalist had i not cut that much weight i probably would have multiple world medals had i not cut that much weight because my body wouldn't have been that broken yeah there's always the other side of it so just when you're looking at it like i just hear it in like young kids even some of my own like when you hear them talk about like where their weights at they almost take a sense of pride on how much they have to lose because they hear stories like this and it's like that's not the takeaway i did it because i had to i was put in a situation where like i may not have gone to this game that i moved up to 90 kilos because i wouldn't have had time to grow into the division and then you get the job done and then you get the job done you're right there's a it's a very important difference yeah also with sleep uh that's what people talk to me about there should not be any glorification of not sleeping yes there should not be a glorification of cutting weight but if that's on the way to your whatever is that fire inside you that you know needs to get done like the job at hand if you need to sacrifice in some of those ways you get the job done yes yeah and uh the wake up is an interesting one because it's different i mean you you you could speak to this there's different sports in which the weight is more important than others and there's different levels to this game i think at the level you operated in that was probably essential yeah like those huge games change completely from 81 kg to 90 kg it's a huge weight jump it's it's first of all it's weight but then the strategy it's like so much changes the height and all those kinds of things the physical like people don't understand it but the physical size of a 90 kilo judo player versus the physical size of an 81 kilo cheater player it's like putting a human in a human like there's enough space that's not like you know you could stand next to your friend who's 180 pounds and you could be 160 and you guys could look identical yeah it is different when both the 90 kilo 100 kilo and 81 kilo both have six percent body fat and they're cutting into the class it almost feels like there's more variety at 90 kilo because some of them are linking tall yeah and some short and stocky stocky it's like 81 is more uniform which but then the you know the flip side of that is the this is why i like in jiu jitsu again amateur uh competing against bigger guys like i love that more i like i like cutting weight just so i'm slim like that's when i feel the best with the same thing that you mentioned but like i love going against 200 220 that because in jiu jitsu the weight doesn't get amplified in the sport like the weight is just the weight right if you can if you can leg press 220 and you can bench 220 then yeah you can train with a guy who's 220 that's that's easy they're not going to hurt you and i mean there's there is a truth that you know lightweights and middleweights in jiu jitsu and the same is true for judo it's just like a lot more of them that means if you want to be is you're just competing at a higher level so like there's much more variety of games the level is much higher so you're taking on a bigger challenge even if you're like um have a weight advantage so those are all decisions you have to kind of make and certainly jiu jitsu people that are way cutting are silly i mean that's that's the natural beginner thing to do is to feel um the way the nervousness about competition expresses itself is through the desire to be as light as possible which is the totally wrong desire to have right like when you when you look at me now i'm probably like 230 right but i probably have the strength of a 70 kilo judo player yeah right the weight doesn't really do much yeah i mean you have the same thing with wrestling yeah the skinny the skinny guys the skinny you that we're looking at there just the amount of power in that person yeah it's fascinating because it doesn't look like you have some muscle but it doesn't look but i felt the power of some of those people yeah uh it's scary yeah it's different that's the best way i can describe it it's like scary it's like oh shit again it's the food chain you're not at the top of the future yeah that's the that's the natural feeling when you're going with some judo people um what's your sense about this recent olympics what uh stands out to you as uh so like uh teddy renair who was on a big run for a long time man he considered to be one of the greatest judo players of all time two-time olympic gold medalist and uh two-time olympic bronze medalist the four-legged clothes yeah uh not counting like team stuff just doing individual and then like yeah i'm not 10 times world champ yeah i'm not sure they're going to catalog that team event like are they all technically olympic champions or is france an olympic champion no they're all technically olympic champions but i'm going to ignore that is that how they're gonna classify it now according oh sorry according to wikipedia like according to the internet i don't know according to igf or whatever because you know some of those players never you know want a match they just filled a spot oh that's even a starker example oh that's sad you know they lost in the individual and then they also lost in the team and so well it's interesting because in in the case of uh teddy uh he was a you know important to the win against japan in this olympics so like in the team event so like if you i feel like you should put that in the equation and say who won gold right it it does feel like he won gold in the team because he carried the team well you have like namura at 60 kilos from japan three-time olympic gold medalist no team event yeah yeah are you gonna weigh teddy's team event no no we're not we're not arguing this of course no i'm just wondering how like the ijf like when you look at a player's stat yeah is it gonna be like team gold medal for the olympics versus like their own personal gold medal yeah i think in sports we have to be brutally honest and i think i hopefully this doesn't piss off people i hope it does but judo is an individual sport it's honestly just that one athlete maybe the athlete and coach right if you look at the big big picture but there's no there's no team in judo that's the beauty of combat sports that's the honesty of it that's the the brutality of losing to another human being in a combat sport that's why it's so damn embarrassing when you get slammed is because it's like you there's no team to uh uh to like carry some of that responsibility it's all on you and you suck that's what you lost there's that weight and that's why it's like magical it's not it's not like soccer it's not uh it's not like basketball yeah i couldn't play team sports because if one of my teammates wasn't doing their job correctly i would go play their position i'm going to do it better than you yeah but that you know some of the greatest leaders of teams also do that michael jordan is like that right i mean it's like with your actions you raise the the level for everybody like excellence is expected and therefore everybody needs to step up so some some of the greatest uh i would say uh team leaders are individualists at heart but so okay so teddy i think ten time world champion not team regu regular uh it's a big number but i think he has some like open weight categories in there open weight right right i mean you can count those right i mean that that's interesting it's the same division twice it's the same division twice that's right one day after another yeah that's right i don't know if i want to count that yeah well i mean that's one of the the reasons people don't usually put heavy weights in judo as like the greatest of all time because the level of competition is lower yes uh but anyway he did lose in this match to um to a young russian yep uh tamerlan besheath match also not on the internet thank you olympics i am definitely going to go on some rants on the internet because uh as a fan of um olympics i feel like this definitely needs to change moving forward the like every single major olympic event i also like i also like random sports like weightlifting even though i don't do olympic weightlifting it's fun just to watch fun to watch such high level of excellence and the fact that we can't just freaking watch the full like each nicely categorized event is really heartbreaking in judo in olympic weightlifting and track and gymnastics all of that anyway uh so teddy lost i mean that does that stand out to you if you were to like recap the things that you remember from this olympics i picked him losing already like in my predictions lose which where that match or just in general somewhere in the final in the final you thought yeah final or was it semi when i looked at his draw because he decided not to compete throughout the squad and do like the bare minimum to go because of his age i didn't think he would have enough energy to battle his way through yeah the draw that he had and sure enough he didn't he he felt earlier than i thought but he just he's not the young athletic person he used to be and when they changed the rules to judo they allowed people to take people into really really deep waters which you saw at this olympics which you know it didn't ruin the sport or did it not like i'm not sure but it was definitely difficult to watch would you put him at the greatest of all time or asked another way like who do you think is the greatest judo player of all time he's definitely not the greatest judo player but he's definitely the best competitor what's the difference between judo player and competitor there's an ability to like do the act of judo of like throwing pinning arm locking versus can you win a judo match right like when you look at somebody like nomura who like threw everyone he fought through three olympics multiple world championships multiple things like that's a pure judo player in the essence of judo he can throw pin or arm lock just about anybody he steps on the mat with during his time teddy tended to when you look at his judo because of his size again it's just because he's in the heavyweight category he was so much bigger so much stronger people just couldn't handle it and you would see really good judo players just break yeah like they could hang in there for a little bit but eventually his size like you can't control that weight weight moves weight and when you have to use all your strength to keep him upright and off of you your muscles just give out because you don't have somebody of that stature and that skill like to train with to train those muscles so what you're thinking more like those uh 73 81 90 kg people that just stand in the pocket and just give yeah everything like what comes to my mind is like a koga koga you know a namura who's a 60 kilo guy but again like his dynamics and how long he was dominant for like it just do you put value to like epic throws like singular moments of greatness if it's against um a noteworthy player in a noteworthy position there are a lot of highlights of people that are good judo players but their highlights are of you know scrubs yeah on the ijf circuit but it's like great the japanese guy threw the guy from you know senegal free pwn great we kind of expected that you took the world number one against the 330th person in the world what did you think was gonna happen like when i see those highlights like thrown around like social media i'm like that's not a highlight they might as well have just been at the dojo like practice and throws if you look at the like top 10 list for judo kano always comes up you know as um but he's not somebody that i don't think his results are there but you don't really know how he got there so it's hard for me to like i can't see his judo yeah so i'm not sure kano by the way is the founder of judo for people who don't or considered to be the founder of judo yeah the sport evolves yeah the players that are like if you took champions from the past and you fought them against the players of today they're it's not happening and that goes with anything right so every time you think of like who's the best of all time it's probably somebody within a generation or two of today yeah if i'm gonna pick my my top three let's say top three and i would go generationally speaking i would pick ono for today probably illiadus for like my time frame like the from a developmental standpoint and then i'd probably go koga and then before koga i'd probably go nomura as like the person of that generation that people like as a whole in judo respected yeah well in the case of uh i wonder if people feared koga yeah yeah like here that that little guy's gonna get under you and you're gonna go for a ride you know he was 78 kilos when he took second at the all japans which is an open weight class yeah you know like he he could throw down with anybody any weight class and still win he was one of the early people that planted the seed uh of judo love of judonia like yeah and when i looked at him like that was how like i wanted my judo to be portrayed that style yeah and then elias iliadus you just like i mean you have a similar attitude with him mm-hmm so you just like the way he cares that's why we get along [Laughter] you guys hang out anyway i'd love to see that conversation i remember when we were talking about like his coaching i was like why didn't you take this team or like why'd you pick this team and he's like i can't work with those people like those people are weak they're children like they don't know how to train hard i love that guy uh what about ono because he was competing in this olympics he got he got gold in this olympics right uh yeah yeah he lost in the team tournament though i think he just didn't care yeah he just really wanted to throw that guy he like throws everybody yeah so he's he represents the thing you're mentioning i signed up to the judo fanatics best of uh ono is there something that stands out to you about him that's especially you find beautiful like or powerful about his technique um his adaptability to the situations and understanding of like what needs to happen in order to throw these people i specifically watched a match with his and i was going to do a breakdown video on it because is there a match do you remember what it is it's him versus garvey of hungary um is he good at gripping so we're watching the match against hungary uh so the one minute comes right here coming up i've heard he's freakishly strong i've never had the ability to to train with him so i'm not obviously looks super skinny but but when you see him without his key jacket on like he's a jack dude which is uncharacteristic of a japanese player from back in the day in a way changed all that he was like we're gonna get physical to compete with the europeans that's another one of the greats right and yeah he doesn't get mentioned enough and he's a righty here yeah okay and this is where he starts setting it up it's like you can see he was standing in like a left-handed stance and then he changes [Laughter] so he grips almost like a double uh uh double sleeve not a double sleeve tricep the tricep and the the front sleeve standing like a lefty and no body grip just correct tricep and sleeve and it was like the the biggest whip and twist of a of a new chamada yeah he doesn't actually lift him off the floor yeah and if you look at it in like slow motion almost um yeah let's yeah there we go um the hungarian player was like a hundred percent defense and he still did this right so right here like press pause this this is like and identify if you're trying to like learn judo and figure out how to set it up because knowing how to get to the point right before you pull the trigger is probably the most important so when we watch this play out what ono ono's going to do is he's going to pivot off his right leg right here he's going to back step with his left and it's going to pull um garvey's front leg all the way forward into what we would call like a neutral square stance so he plants hard and look at there's an interesting pull with the track oh no it's not try so he almost like if he starts with the tricep and he like collects the gear or something like that but it's still above the elbow because you can see the bend right and right here see how he never put back it up a little bit that this is kind of like one of those things yeah pause it right there so when he puts his right foot down he's pulling so hard with his back that when ono goes to put his left foot down it never touches the mat but by putting his left foot back it actually pulls him garvey's foot forward and so he's able to speed up his throw by just continuing that motion back yeah which what was supposed to have been a step turned out to just in the middle of the action he makes a split second decision before putting the foot down to just continue yeah because he recognizes that feel in his hands yeah and so it's like it never it's a swing like he never touches the guard but it never it never started as like a big swing to a back step yeah he changed his mind part way through so it's right there right yeah and then he goes nope he's bringing that foot forward i'm just gonna go for it and wait is he full like full air look at that boom boom and look at if you go a few more steps forward right there his hip is the same height as um garvey's shoulder yeah because he's leaning so far into the throw with his body weight and he's allowing that tricep grip to rotate that's going to draw and garvey forward and now when you pause it right here you think about the sheer physics to like get your body into this position jimmy and i were so like when we saw this for the first time we tried to just stand like that and we couldn't do it his left foot is pointing straight ahead his chest is perpendicular to that foot or parallel with it right and his head is by his foot yeah is that only possible in the midst of a throw do you think he works on making like i think he's done this particular throw not this style of it but uchimada so much yeah that his body has adapted to be able to do this so when people are trying to learn and like break down videos yeah they don't understand like the power he has and what we call end range motion yeah look at that so like look at the full range of motion he takes right yeah that left foot swings all the way around and the torso starts like at three o'clock and it goes all the way around like almost back to the three o'clock yeah like like like that what it and he never lifts his leg above his hip and the crazy part is he never fell over during any of it yeah look at that stayed on his feet what's he doing is that is that a matter of pride or just i think that's just habit the way the forces work like he can just stay up i that's one of the most beautiful throws i've ever seen there's so much wrong with it but it worked it worked because when you think about remember what we talked about the very beginning like he's got to get his center of gravity under his wow well here's one of the top players in the world throwing another top player in the world with his hip at that guy's shoulder height and it's still working it's okay so he this generation he could be the great yeah and like he switched a lot of those details of the throw in the middle in the middle and that that only is that means he's probably what like a hundred thousand times that throws happen yeah i saw you were into chess recently so you're like me a bit of a beginner in chess you're part of launching the website effective chess so i got to ask maybe it's a personal question but uh do you have advice to yourself and to other beginners in exploring chess of how to one have fun and to start getting good it's nice to see like olympic caliber athlete take on a difficult task with a beginner's mind so like what's that process like i'm a huge fan of just learning new things in general right like when i left judo like i took a job as you know marketing for fuji sports and i was getting frustrated with designers so i learned photoshop i also got angry with a photographer so now i take all the photos too just because i don't mind learning you know i've spent my entire judo career learning all the time like adding new techniques finding new ways practicing developing and so when it comes to chess i treat it just like i do anything else i just stick to one plan and i learn all the ins and outs of that one plan and then i develop another plan right like i might practice like a london opening for example and just i don't even care if i win or lose i just want to figure out how i'm going to lose and then figure out how i'm going to win and once i know that position is now done then i start with another position and then once i've figured out how i'm going to lose and how i'm going to win the next thing i do is i don't go to a third i figure out the bridge between the two like at what point during my openings can i transition back into this opening right so like you have like some basic openings and you want to see how they go wrong how they go right all the different ways and then that starts to solidify a higher level concept of that particular opening and you start to stitch together the concept the concepts together because being able to go from one to another and then back and forth is part of the reasons why like i was successful at judo is just because everything i do at some point it touches that spider web of like being able to get from one area to another we refer to it as like a toolbox right you need more tools in your toolbox but if you're always grabbing the wrong tool for the right for that job then you're just not going to have success i actually forgot to ask you mentioned a few greatest chess players of all time and i noticed he didn't mention vladimir putin i gotta ask you about um his judo do you by chance know much about his judo what do you think about you know a president of a major nation being a judo black belt and i think from what i've seen pretty good at it i think it shows you know if he if he actually got it like let's let's go with that premise of like he earned it right that just shows like a level of like physical persistence and mental fortitude to be able to like you know take those beatings and just keep showing up until you've overcome yeah and can now give those beatings as you know in japan and russia you get it by just like when you're young it's easier to get a black belt when you're like just go through a bunch of beatings for like 10 years in your in your teenage years uh but there's also from it um springs like a camaraderie like there's a definitely a brotherhood and and sisterhood in terms of judo to where you're you're connected forever because of that yeah for many people it's their childhood connection you sort of leave judo you know in your 20s and your 30s but that's always there and the same is true with wrestling so it's it's interesting to see him uh pay respect to that like by going uh with the with the russian national judo team and i think he did obviously they they have to get thrown right but just you can tell and you probably can tell even better but you can tell when a person moves in a way where you're like okay you've had like 10 years of beatings you can tell yeah the way they pull the way they move yeah but i also like in contrast to the us national team or the i don't even think there's a national team for us right it's the pedro judo center right that there is some it's really cool when there's a camaraderie like that amongst the highest level olympic caliber athletes in russia i suppose japan might have similar kind of thing and and then you have then you can have the system of people together and then you can have a strong coaching staff not just like a coach but a coaching staff and you can have the nation backing that stuff i mean yeah and then the result is like you have some incredible level of judo emerge um is there something you could say we did we didn't talk much about jimmy i mean he was a critical part of your just like of your perseverance through all the all that you had to go through um what did you learn from jimmy what are some impacts that he had on your life both on the mat and off the mat you know if we had to like put it down to like a very simple thing he taught me how to win right it wasn't necessarily like the technical side of judo like we went over gripping we went over this we adapted that but the real strength to jimmy was like he knows how to win and most people think well if i get really good at this technique i'll be able to throw people with it not win that is not how the world of sports works right like i remember in one of my youtube videos i was doing a breakdown of a match from the cuba grand prix where i was fighting a mongolian guy he's kicking the shit at me not gonna lie four minutes in like he was just throwing me like left and right he was so fast i felt like i just couldn't get to him in the last 30 seconds he changed he started protecting his lead instead of continuing the fight the way the entire match was going in his favor he made a mental shift and when he made that mental shift i beat him yeah because he didn't know how to win the fight he can win exchanges but he can't win the fight so the last thing you want to do is have to win every exchange in a match you want to know how to kick it into sixth gear like when to step off the gas when to focus on gripping when to attack how often to attack all those things like and you've had those conversations with jimmy like this is not like how to stop trying to win every exchange that kind of thing yeah and instead because i was a brawler before i was like if i threw you once i'm throwing you again yeah and sometimes you get caught yeah why would i do that i'm already winning what about like the mental side of the game the preparation all those things one of the biggest things jimmy brought to the forefront when it came to like the mental side was the visualization right and when i started visualizing myself winning i started seeing more success but once i started seeing more success with the visualization also came self-doubt because as i'm starting to picture myself like i would picture myself before fighting church's philly i'm going to throw him with koshigoroma and i can see it and if i stand in the chute for too long you start to like but what if he counters then you go well if he counters with this i'm gonna counter with that but you already let that doubt in and then you start playing this like five step scenario but you still come out on top but all that doubt has like seeped into your mind right and a lot of people don't understand that that's a bad thing you're still winning in your mind but you're also doubting yourself in your mind yeah once you let the like that little sleep in itself destructive yeah and so i remember i was at the world championships i can't remember what year it was but i was ready like i was healthy i was ready to go and we all thought like this is the year travis wins the worlds i go out there in the first round i'm in the shoot for like 45 minutes like the match went into golden score then the next match went into golden score and the fucking next match went into golden score then the referee came and told me you can't weigh your ghee then big jim goes why can't he wear his key any gui that has his name on it we're not going to let him wear he has to wear a different key so then i go fuck you i'm leaving and i walked out there and i fought i lost in golden score because i did a cochi and they called it a false attack and i went great i'm out of the fucking worlds but when i was in the shoot i struggled because i started allowing the like hungarian guy that i was gonna face to do things to me that i would have to play defense to and then counter it's like great but now i'm doubting my own ability so i went to a sports psychologist and the big game changer for me was i focus more on the emotional physical response that happens in matches rather than the actual you know quote unquote like instagram picture that would have happened yeah so when i was getting ready for 2016 you think about like how do you feel like standing in the chute like what does your body feel like is your heart racing how's your breath is your mouth dry and then you think about like okay the ref just started the match what happens like how was the atmosphere like how do you emotionally respond to these things more so than me trying to beat a specific judo player right like oh the ref just gave you a penalty at a minute 30 like how do you feel and then you start thinking about the physical responses and when you do that really well you can actually get the pins and needles and your body will start to sweat and your heart will start to race as if you're in it because it's not about the technique it's more about the physical like what does it feel like to have your fingers ripped out of a ghee in the first exchange now my hands can feel that that's fascinating and then on a cellular level like i fought the olympic games so many times to the point where like it is no longer a goal it's an anticipation right so down to the experience of the grip break the just the sweat the the heart beating the yeah does it feel to have your head smashed into a mat and driven across the mat with a map burn yeah and then getting about that yeah and getting back up yeah like with a bit of a burn all that kind of stuff the actual sensations in this case the actual sensation of what it takes to fight it you don't matter it's not a strategy like but the actual sensations the experience that's fascinating because then your body's gonna fight hundreds of matches without the physical damage and you could probably get really far with that and not also in just judo but basically anything you can simulate yeah if you learn how to simulate well you've lived a very uh a hell of a life is there a device you can give to young people instead of high school college you know thinking about their career thinking about life how to live one they're proud of i think the the number one thing [Music] i can tell people is and how i've lived my life is you've really got to like forget everybody in your life right now your mother your father your grandparents your girlfriend your boyfriend whoever it is and really decide like what is gonna make you happy right at some point in my career the act of pushing my body to the limit made me happier than winning a grand slam medal pushing my body to the limit didn't make me happier than winning an olympic medal right there was a there's a balance there and i think a lot of people struggle with living their life where they're happy and they make other people happy or take in their their feelings into the considerations of what they need to do in their life and i think if they can cut those strings sooner and it'll allow you to get over it quicker and get to a happier place sooner and then as long as you're focusing on what's making you happy the things you do that make you happy will attract other people who do those things that will in turn build stronger better relationships and then you will also realize the the best form of yourself and inspire many others like yeah you've inspired me to uh for whatever the hell i've done uh at least to do a slightly better job than i otherwise would have by doing martial arts but taking that uh journey and i think becoming a better person because of it so travis i have been i continue to be one of your biggest fans i love your whole career in the way you pursued happiness i love what you and jimmy have done i love the support of judo as represented by you so i deeply appreciate what you've done man and i'm honored that you would uh spend your time with me today thanks for talking man thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with travis stevens to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from napoleon bonaparte never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you