Brotherhood, Jiu Jitsu, and Living with THUMOS

Thumos - people have called it spiritedness, passion, courage. Plato put it in the chest. Not the head, not the stomach — the chest. It's the thing that makes you get back up. The thing that won't let you be average. The thing that, once you feel it, you can't unfeel.

Anyone who's ever trained jiu jitsu knows exactly what that feels like.

Nick Ortiz and Spenser Ortiz are brothers. The kind of brothers who've pushed each other, frustrated each other, and made each other better for years. That shared history shows up in how they carry themselves. There's a groundedness there that you don't manufacture.

Nick (@n7ckortiz) has over 70K followers and reps Real Gangsters and Thumos, but what actually draws people to him isn't just his performance — it's that he seems genuinely curious about the knowledge that it takes to be great. He calls himself a "young student of the world" and you can tell he means it. The best grapplers always do. The more you actually know, the more you realize how much you're still figuring out.

Spenser (@spensee22) moves the same way. Same mentality, same relationship to the mat — a place you go to build something, not escape something.

Here's the thing about jiu jitsu that outsiders miss: it makes you obsessive in the best possible way. You tap, you figure out why, you come back. You're watching footage at midnight. You're running that sequence in your head in the shower. You're flagging down the guy across the gym who swept you and asking him to walk you through it again. It's an endless search, and that's the appeal — there's always more.

The tradition of the art has always been generous. The Gracies didn't keep it to themselves. Danaher built entire systems and poured them into his guys. Ryan shares his breakdowns publicly. The sport grows because knowledge moves through people, not around them.

And at some point, every serious practitioner hits a wall — not a technical wall, but a purpose wall. You've accumulated enough that hoarding it starts to feel hollow. You want to give it somewhere.

Nick and Spenser hit that wall. Ninja School is how they're answering it.

Thumos, at its core, isn't about ambition. Ambition is taking action. Thumos is becoming — and then feeling compelled to put that becoming to work for something beyond yourself. It's the purple belt who stays after class to help the white belt with the same problem they struggled with two years ago. Not because anyone told them to. Because it would feel wrong not to.

That's the energy behind what Nick and Spenser are building. Not a content drop. A knowledge platform — a real one — launching on Skool, where the community around the learning is as important as the learning itself. White belts in the same space as people who've been doing this for decades. Questions that actually get answered. A culture, not just a curriculum.

They're calling it Ninja School. And honestly, the name fits. A ninja isn't just someone who can fight. It's someone who has studied a complete system, internalized it, and can move through the world with that understanding baked in. That's what these two are trying to pass on.

Teaching is where you find out what you actually know. You can fake a lot of things in training, but you cannot fake clarity when someone's looking at you waiting for an explanation. The best coaches will tell you — their own understanding deepened the moment they started breaking things down for other people.

That's what this is. Nick and Spenser aren't doing Ninja School because it's a smart business move (though it probably is). They're doing it because the knowledge wants to go somewhere, and they've got the brotherhood and the background to carry it there.

If you train — or if you've been thinking about starting — this is worth your attention.

Follow Nick at @n7ckortiz and Spenser at @spensee22.

Ninja School is coming to Skool. Get in early.