Antonio “The Brooklyn Monk” Graceffo is an American author, adventure traveler, martial artist, fighter, and academic, who dedicated his life to exploring and unpacking eastern philosophies, cultures, and techniques, especially how they relate to martial arts and fighting. He is one of the few Americans who lived inside a Shaolin Temple to study the art of Wu-Shu up close. Over the last 15 years he travelled to almost all asian countries to learn their traditional martial arts and document them in detail. He wrote 8 books and over 40 papers on eastern martial arts, culture, and economy. He is especially known for being the first foreigner to learn the lost traditional Cambodian martial art Bokator, which was believed to be extinct after the communist revolution in Cambodia. The Brooklyn Monk travelled to Cambodia to find the last masters of Bokator. This journey has been documented by History Channel and on his Youtube Channel. 
I talk with him about his travels, his time in the Shaolin Temple, his best and worst moments, the clashes of culture, differences in training philosophies, about his fighting style, and of course about his adventure into Cambodia to re-discover Bokator.  

 
We will find out in this episode :

* why he believes Western Boxing is the best fighting style in the world
* why asians are great martial artists, but terrible fighters
* how Shaolin Monks use video analysis
* what “discipline” means across the globe
* what elements of the Cambodian fighting style Bokator could be useful in Mixed Martial Arts.

You can find Antonios YouTube Channel HERE
You can find his Twitter HERE
 

 
 
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Gerrit Keferstein:    Hi! What’s up! Thanks for tuning in to The Order & Kaos of Human Potential. I’m Gerrit Keferstein and today I’m here with Antonio ‘The Brooklyn Monk’ Graceffo. As his name indicates, he’s originally from Brooklyn but currently lives in China. He’s a mixed martial artist, a student of the game and a professor of economics. And what I mean by saying he’s a student of the game is he dedicated his life in the past, at least, 15 years to travelling around the world and learning, studying and documenting martial arts. And today he’s going to share some of those great stories that he wrote eight books on that you can all find on Amazon and some of those great stories are about him living in a Shaolin temple, he’s actually done that twice and he’s lived there for many, many months and we talked about him learning different styles off martial arts around the world from Cambodia to Taiwan to Thailand to China and India. We talk about differences in training philosophies and how they relate to differences in culture ultimately and religion. Also, that’s one of the most amazing stories is he’s going to tell us how he went to Cambodia to find the lost and forgotten art of Bokator. There was only one master left that taught the martial art of Bokator and he was dedicated to find him and he actually he wound up finding him and he wrote books about it. He basically brought the art back to life and he did documentaries with Discovery Channel on that and it’s just an amazing story and he’s going to share that with us today.
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