He’s talking about O’Brien himself, who took over the Triad legacy established by original studio founder and widely-acclaimed 5th degree jiu-jitsu master Johnny Lee Smith. Smith studied in the early 1990s under Brazilian jiu-jitsu legend Rickson Gracie, and there’s a strand of Gracie’s revered approach to the discipline that threads directly from Smith’s early training days to O’Brien’s own technique. In the small but intensely dedicated global jiu-jitsu community, Smith achieved household-name recognition in the 1990s - and O’Brien is doing it again, more than two decades later.
It was just that kind of recognition that led Harel to seek out a residency with O’Brien in the first place, with a literal ocean of distance posing no obstacle in Harel’s determination to learn from the best.