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Brand new White Belt Josh Lu calls on Jake Luigi, BJJ Youtuber from "Less Impressed More Involved BJJ", and other guests for help on the path to improvement, performance, and enjoyment in the sport of Jiu Jitsu. Follow the journey!
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#185 Check In: The Leading Edge, Deandre vs Dorian, and App Updates
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In this episode, we catch up on Jake's return! Getting back into jiu jitsu after injury, thinking about the leading edge when playing guard/passing, Deandre vs Dorian, and updates on our apps. Hope you enjoy!
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Hello?
SPEAKER_01He's back. What's up, Josh? We were just talking uh three weeks like longest vacation time off that you've taken in how long? I don't know how long.
SPEAKER_00I don't know how long, but it's gonna be back. Feel uh rejuvenated, finally get to start watching matches too. So um yeah, and I'm back training again, which is very nice.
SPEAKER_01And it's how long since the injury?
SPEAKER_00Um it was like beginning of January.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, like Dang, I didn't realize it's been five months. Yeah. Whoa. Okay, recap real quick, uh, for those listening, what was the injury?
SPEAKER_00And yeah, I had um bursite, we think I had bursitis in my knee. Um and like a week after it like flared up initially, it went down and then it flared up again. And basically what I was told was if you don't give it time to to heal properly, it can turn into like a lifelong thing where it can just like flare up and you'll you'll be constantly dealing with it. So I've tried to take an tried to take a very like cautious approach with it. Um and yeah, it basically it it told me to you know wait like three to four months, but I didn't feel very good after three months, and I started to feel completely fine maybe after four months. Um, but I was going on this trip and I didn't want to like get hurt right before the trip or have a flare-up again right before the trip. So um I just waited till I got back and and now I'm starting to train again.
SPEAKER_01Got it, dang. I forgot it was in January. I remember in the very initial part, it's like, did it hurt to straighten your leg and it hurt to like put weight onto it, or you couldn't straighten your leg?
SPEAKER_00I couldn't bend my leg. Yeah. Um and I couldn't put any weight on my my leg at all. Yeah. Yeah. Because the swelling was above my knee. And basically what that means from what I've been told is it kind of like shut down all the muscles in my upper leg. Um, so that made it hard for me to put weight on my leg. And then um just the inflammation and everything was making it hard for me to bend my my leg. So um, yeah, I was on crutches for like three weeks, I think. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Dang, three weeks. And then after that, what did the recovery look like from there?
SPEAKER_00I just did a lot of like PT stuff for the first like month. Um and then I would say like after a month, I started to do like bodyweight exercises more. And then um maybe after like month two, three, um, I started to like lift weights. Um, and then I started to lift weights like normally, and I felt completely normal, started to do like more mobility stuff, um, get back to like a normal routine. Yeah, I didn't feel it, which is why I felt like I was like, I'm probably fine to train, but I just didn't want to do anything stupid right before I left. So um yeah, like I said, I I felt fine, I would say, for the last like maybe month, month and a half. Um, but yeah, just kind of let it be. Yeah, which was the worst phase when you're like I could train right now, but probably done. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So then focused on lifting and and all that, no issues.
SPEAKER_00No issues, yeah. I wasn't running um as much, like I would just run like a mile, um, and then I would like slowly add like quarter mile increments, and now I'm running like two miles, you know. Um, but nothing like long distance really. So um yeah, I would say running is the thing I'm like very, very slowly getting back into more doing like bike and swimming type stuff.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, yeah. Dang, and is that the longest break you've taken from jiu-jitsu?
SPEAKER_00Well, no, because when I we moved out here, I didn't do jujitsu for like the first year. That's right. So yeah, that's the longest. Yeah. And COVID, I didn't do it for like a year or two.
SPEAKER_01So that's right. Okay, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Dang, those all those breaks added up as like longer than I've done jujitsu for when you say you've done jujitsu for like 11 years, it's like, yeah, I guess you've been you've been, you know, in the game that long, but you necessarily haven't been training that long, you know. Right, right. It's like started 11 years ago.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. So what was it like in back on the mats yesterday?
SPEAKER_00It was good, yeah. Uh I would say yesterday was uh it was my first day. Yeah. And it was mostly like just kind of testing the waters a bit. Um and like when I got to like mount or like positions like this, I I didn't really put too much weight on my knee. Um, and it was more like I'm just gonna try and take the back from guard type of training. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, but yeah, it's cool. Um, and then Joseph has this uh like wojelock setup from outside Ashi that I've been wanting to experiment with, so I was just trying to do that a lot. So it was a lot of wojlocks and a lot of trying to take the back from guard. Nice. Did you teach class yesterday or uh no, we just kind of showed up and uh I hadn't been thinking about jujitsu very much um the past like three weeks. So just kind of showed up and people were excited to to train. So we just did like a lot of positional sparring type stuff and then um rolled. So didn't really teach, but I'll teach again on Thursday because I'm starting to watch more and got some ideas.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Yeah, before we start recording, you're literally just watching the DeAndre and um damn it. Dorian Dorian, yeah, DeAndre Dorian Dorian match.
SPEAKER_00I remember what happened so long ago.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and you were also mentioning how yesterday you had like so many matches to catch up on. So I'm sure this is one of many, but um I'm curious what are you thinking about in Jiu-Jitsu these days and or any highlights from that match?
SPEAKER_00Um recently I've been I've been thinking a lot about you know that leading edge idea.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, is it like you kind of attack what's closest to you, whether it's like hands to hands or feet to feet?
SPEAKER_00Uh I guess that that's one, like the connection idea, like connect to what's in front of you kind of thing. Um that is one, I guess, example of it, but like the the thing that comes to mind when I think of leading edge is like from a guard retention perspective, which I think it's a it's like a Rob Bernanke term. And I think it was initially from guard retention where like you're gonna frame on whatever they're leading with. So like if they're leading with their left shoulder, that's where you frame, you're not gonna frame on their, you know, trail shoulder. So it's the idea of like whatever they're leading with, that's where you frame. And then from the opposite perspective would be like guard passing or like from standing, when they're pushing on something, you can switch your leading edge to make their frame ineffective. So yeah, this is something I've been thinking about um a bit from standing and from um like guard passing type situations. So um yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So for the next day you're gonna teach class, are you gonna incorporate that in a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Or yeah, this is what I was I was thinking about doing. Um, so like a couple ideas are like, so when you're trying to pass a knee shield or just from half guard, um let's say you're you know your right leg is trapped. Um if you like switch your hips to face them, you're leading with the the left side of your body, and you're generally trying to like flatten them out or like split their legs apart so you can get to like chest to chest, half guard. Whereas when you lead with the right side of your body, you're generally trying to smash their legs together. So the idea being like, you know, that video Greg posted a while ago where you like grip fight and you like pin their hands to the mat or to the hip, to their hip, and then you work to cover their hip. So this is, I think, really good for beating, you know, their upper body, but then you still have to beat their lower body. So the idea being like their knee shield is their is their frame. And if you, you know, you try and beat their frame based on on your leading edge. So whether you win the grip fight and you're able to, you know, pin their wrists or if they're using their hands to frame against you, um, you're trying to, you know, switch the leading edge, meaning your hips. And I think these are the two general paths you take. If you are leading with the left side of your body, you're trying to like split their legs apart. If you are able to flatten them so much that you get them all the way to their other hip, now you can smash their legs together. But for the most part, you're you know trying to split their legs apart. If you're leading with the left side, you're trying to smash their legs together if you're leading with your right side. Um, and I've yeah, this is something I've been experimenting with. The other thing, um, same idea, is Joseph. I don't know if you've seen this, but like he called it like a Greco two-on-one, where it's like, it's like a Russian arm. And normally, like, if you get a Russian arm, you're trying to like close in and like kind of blade your body so your shoulder is like connected to to their shoulder. But the thing that Joseph was calling a Greco two-on-one is where you lead with your other shoulder and you connect to them. Um, so yeah, this is uh something I've been thinking about as well, where like a lot of times from a Russian arm, they're gonna, they're not gonna frame on the shoulder that's far away from them. They're gonna frame like here. And then when they do that, it gives you the ability to switch your leading edge to your other shoulder, and then you get to this Greco two-on-one type scenario. So um, yeah, kind of teaching this aspect. I think it I think I'm gonna focus on it from a Russian arm and from passing half guard.
SPEAKER_01Nice. Uh, it's actually really timely you bring that up because uh I went to class on Monday, and this week one of the games we played was like you start in the uh Andres had to start in butterfly half, but the top person's goal is just to pin our wrists to the body or to the ground and then see if we can they can flatten out and get to chest to chest uh through like the wrist pinning process. And then the bottom person's goal was just to get to that like underhook where you're like you're not lying down on your shoulder still, you have like a post, and if you get to that position, you win. Or the other one where you're going for the uh uh octopus. Yeah, yeah. If you get to that octopus with that like I don't know what to call that grip, that like over back grip or whatever. If you get to that position, you win. Um, so yeah, he started the class off with a bunch of like cat dog, like weird octopus stuff, might just whatever and get on top and stuff like that, and then regressed it back to like this half guard of like trying to get there, um, which was which is pretty interesting. And man, I sucked at it from the bottom. And uh that's been a consistent theme of my guard play. Like anytime I get into that half guard slash reverse daily he was like, Man, it's just it's just so tough down there. But yeah, it's so much more fun playing on top in that position for me. I don't know why.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, for sure. Gravity is a beautiful thing when it's working for you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but then it always goes back to that Dan Air thing where like he kept saying like half guard, like people love half-card passing. It's like the bads pull a lot, and then they also love playing bottom half cards like that in paradox or whatever. Um, do you have a favorite? Do you like preferring passing half-guard or defending from half guard? Like which ones?
SPEAKER_00Um, I I would always take being on on top, I would say. Um I have been because I think a lot I just from being biased, I think, towards top, I tend to like teach it more. Um, but uh recently I've been focused more on uh teaching from bottom half guard and trying to give people an idea from there. Um so yeah, I would say bottom half guard right now is probably more fresh in my mind, but as I just told you, I'm gonna go back to passing half guard still.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah. Uh any tips real quick for the the bottom half guard people like me who who just suck at that position and I maybe can feel like I can hold them off with the knee shield a little bit, but then they either break through chest to chest or just pass to the outside. Um, or like sometimes I can get my uh that key master up and they shut it down, you know. So my retaining is like getting the key master up, they shut it down, I get the knee shield, they kind of split or smash, and yeah, I'm like dealing with that range, I guess. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, I think it goes back to the idea of the the segmentation type thing where like for for the example of like getting an underhook, if you just try and take an underhook, you're probably not gonna be effective with it, right? Um so if you can get their weight, like the underhook is gonna be effective if you can get their weight moving like forward more. Um grant, I mean, there are things you can do if their weight's moving back, but yeah, for the most part, you're gonna get a much deeper underhook if you can get their weight moving forward. So the first thing I would say is to get some sort of grip to get their weight moving forward. And probably my favorite way to do this these days is by getting like a far side arm drag grip. And then you instead of trying to pull the arm across your body, which can be called like a cross arm drag, you basically use like a straight arm drag where you just keep the arm there and you pull it forward, like Gord Gordon does this a lot. Um, and it forces them to post their other hand like up above your shoulder on the mat. And so you threaten the far side arm drag, you get their weight moving forward, and then you take the underhook. If you're threatening the far side arm drag and you can't get their weight moving forward, then you free your leg and you go into key master, and then you can attack from from there. So the the far side arm, this is a nice little dilemma I like to play. If you can get to that uh far side arm drag. Um and then near arm is I would say mostly about getting like outside the the elbows, you know, like you're trying to like get the arm across your body so then you can start um working around towards their back. And if they recover from the back, you have a super deep underhook. Um so yeah, like uh I think the far side arm, you're threatening to free your trap leg or get the underhook on the near side. Um, or the near side arm, you're threatening to get outside their elbows or get the underhook kind of thing, is the way I tend to tend to think about it. And then when whenever they're not giving you weight and you can't get their hands forward, I'm basically always trying to free my my leg to go key master.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And then once you get key master, do you just try to switch hips immediately and get back to if you can't reach their far leg, I'm I'm switching hips like right away.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If you can reach their far leg, you can go K guard. Right, right.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, a lot of people do that to me, and it's like if I get the cross face, I can hold them off a little, but if I don't, man, my leg's just getting pulled way across their body, and now I'm like, it's all it's all messed up. Um I haven't had a lot of success doing it myself, getting to K Guard from there. Yeah from so low, I guess. I've only been successful getting to K-Guard when they're standing, but not when they're like kneeling yet and like pulling the pulling them into me and stuff like that. Right.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, I've I've found I only really get into so I think K guard entries are best when you're able to get outside their elbow. So you're able to like pull their arm across your body, and then you can basically have a clear path into their leg. And I just explained that I'm tending to use the far side arm drag as like a straight arm drag. And I tend to go into key master when they're moving back and not towards me. So all of these things I think tend to lead to me not going into K guard as much off of Key Master because they're moving backwards, which means their legs getting farther away from me, and I'm not pulling their arm necessarily across my body. So generally it leads to me, as soon as I enter key master, I'm switching to to daily Heba. Um so yeah, that's I would say nine times out of ten, that's what happens. I I rarely go from half guard into K guard on their on their far leg.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Dang, dude. That man, it's it sounds so simple with the underhook thing. Like, yeah, it's not that effective if you just come and shoot for it. And uh I realized I've been um just trying to rush the front, not segmenting. Yeah, because uh I would never go for that underhook. I you know what I think it may be because like one day in class I was taught that like you have your knee shield, you shoot your knee shield out under the armpit, and then bam, you just shoot into the underhook, and it's like wow, like there you go. And we you know, so I I think that was stuck in my head, and I was like, okay. Yeah, so then I'm like, that's the only way I ever thought about getting the underhook. Otherwise, I'm just like retaining on this side on the yeah, um, yeah, yeah. So and I'm not uh going towards the leading edge, I'm like chasing this far thing over here, and it's not working very well.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely the kind of like under hook 101 from Half Guard is definitely like an all or nothing type thing. Like either it works or you're like flattened out, check.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, exactly, and then same with that. Uh yeah, I wasn't um getting their like weight off balanced before then going to things. Like I'll just try to go for the cake when I'm like getting smashed already, basically, or the underhook when I'm like it's not there, so no wonder I just keep getting flattened out. Yeah. Interesting. Cool, cool. Yeah. Half card is like a topic, like we've probably talked so many times, and still there's still different ways to look at it, which is cool. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. Um Dorian versus DeAndre. Since you were just watching it, any interesting moments?
SPEAKER_02Let's see.
SPEAKER_00I'm literally entering it right now, so you just look at my look at my notes. Yeah. Um, okay. You just stop me. I let me mute this. This I thought was kind of cool. Because uh so he snaps him down, front headlock, and then DeAndre goes for that like uh two-on-one grip on the the stranglearm, which I think is probably the honestly the probably the best escape you could do from the front headlock, like the most reliable one, is take a two-on-one grip on the stranglearm. But you have to take this this cross grip on the wrist, which exposes this arm to be brought across your your center. So Dorian uses like an elbow pass type thing um to counter that two-on-one grip to get to the single like. I thought this was you know pretty pretty slick. Um this I thought was kind of cool since I'm thinking a lot about Russian arms lately. So like on the far side here, it's kind of hard to see, but Dorian has the thumb down straight grip here, and DeAndre has it the same grip on the far side. And normally I feel like with the thumb down straight grip, you're trying to like flare their elbow out, and then you take an underhook type thing. So I think what Dorian does here is he brings his hand close to the center to prevent DeAndre from like flaring the elbow out. But again, by bringing your hand close to the center, I think this allows DeAndre to go get a uh see the there he goes. Okay, thumb down, straight grip. Dorian brings his hand close, so DeAndre feeds it into a cross grip and then uses that cross grip to get to a rush. Oh. But then again, this this frame here of it's probably gonna be on this shoulder. And I mean, there's so much space here, I don't think you'd be able to do the leading edge thing. But the idea would be if they're framing on DeAndre's right shoulder, you can lead with your left shoulder and try and connect your left shoulder to them instead to get to that Greco two-on-one. I don't think it would have worked here. I mean, there's so much space, but yeah. Um, that I thought kind of worked well with what I've been thinking about. Um and kind of I don't know how deep we want to go on this rabbit hole, but someone um posted a video of them rolling in the Discord, and I entered it into the database and gave them feedback. And one thing that I mentioned to them a lot, which was like a common theme, I thought, was they would get to dominant positions like an underhook, like an overhook, uh like a pinch headlock, things like this. And to defend these dominant upper body grips, the person was bringing their hand like across their center to like frame or like pummel out of an overhook. Like if you're in overhook, you can like bring your hand under to pummel out. But to do that, you have to bring your hand like close to your center. So basically, I mentioned to him, like, I think you're you have very good entries into these positions, like you're getting to very dominant upper body positions, but you didn't have good follow-ups for when they were like defending your upper body grips. And the way they tended to defend them was by bringing their hand closer to the center. And this tends to be very good times to take cross grips and start to work like outside their elbows, in the sense of like a Russian arm in this case. Um, so obviously, there are probably more ways to do that, but this has been my favorite way to do it. Like you get to some dominant upper body grip, and then their defense to that tends to be. Them bringing their hands closer to your center line, which you can use to start to work to get outside their elbows. So this I think is just like a grip fighting thing that I've been thinking about more. And the recent Discord rolling footage uh was an example of that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it reminds me of what we talked about maybe a month ago or so of like using their grip against them. So they're already bringing it towards the center, and then you just keep moving it in that direction across the center. Now it's like overextended and you have a good angle. Yeah. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00This is something I've been thinking about a bit more. Um, so when you take a standing underhook, DeAndre here could take an overhook, and the overhook makes it hard for Dorian to work towards his back. But instead of taking an overhook, DeAndre's trying to pummel his hand inside to get rid of that underhook. So this opens up the opportunity for Dorian to go around to the back. So basically, whenever I'm getting a standing underhook these days, if they're not taking an overhook and they're trying to pummel inside, I think this is a very good time to use a throw by, which Dorian tries here. So he tries the throw by to the back, but DeAndre escapes. But I just thought the opportunity is there, and it's a good good example of of that. Um this I feel like was was pretty interesting. So you know that idea of like when you pick up a single egg and they like take a guillotine or anything that like connects themselves to you or like an overhook, it's probably gonna be easier to run the pipe. Um, whereas if they are more disconnected and you're trying to run the pipe, they can hold their balance a bit better. So I think one of the best defenses to a single leg, like once you hit the mat, is taking that like chest wrap around them and kind of throwing your hips out and away from them. So Dorian picks up this single leg, DeAndre takes a chest wrap, and this allows Dorian to pretty easily run the pipe because DeAndre is pretty connected. So Dorian, I think, pretty easily throws his hips to the mat. And DeAndre is trying to run his hips out and away from Dorian. But you'll see, like, as Dorian's really good at this, he uses this like cartwheel thing when he does double legs and stuff. But you'll see like immediately Dorian is working towards the hips. So he goes boom, puts it on, puts his hips on the mat, and he's like cartwheeling towards the hips, make it hard for DeAndre to use that that chest wrap. And then he collects DeAndre's second leg too. And DeAndre's trying to put his hand on the mat to you know, heist move his head position, but doesn't work. Gets back, gets the takedown. Um yeah, do we want to keep going? Or yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I see you got a couple more notes in there. So I got a couple more.
SPEAKER_00Um, okay. So this one, you can see DeAndre's like very much framing on the head here. So smash pass, DeAndre's focusing on the head. So I think this is another good example, that leading edge idea where instead of focusing on like winning the head position battle, um, or you know, beating DeAndre's frame with his head, um, Dorian just says, okay, if I move my head like farther away or I move it up, I can go into outside passing on the the backside here. So he goes into outside passing here, and his head kind of comes like up a bit more to make DeAndre's frames like less, or he has to like adjust his frames to like you know, um address Dorian's change in posture. And this is where I think it's pretty interesting because I've been messing around with the arm turk navy stuff, and that requires you to have this arm right here in between the bottom player's legs. And you can see Dorian has his arm in between DeAndre's legs here, and DeAndre's trying to use like an elbow escape slash high leg um to retain his guard, and then Dorian takes the hand out, pushes the ankle down, and then DeAndre's still trying to turn in, so he he mounts. Um, but just the idea of getting your arm in between your legs, I think, is a good like sorry, I'm not used to talking this much. Habit, have it to get into. Um and Dorian didn't use an arm turk or an A-B, but he did use it to pin the the near leg down. Um, so yeah, that's why I noted that here. Um, last note, this is uh I don't know what this escape is called, but I've heard it called the Gary Tonin escape because Gary Tonin used it a lot. And um Oliver Taza uses it a bunch too. But like from mount, you bridge and kind of like turn to get onto your shoulder and you scissor your legs um to your hips face the mat. And then you get your hand slash like or like bicep underneath their leg, and then you can uh escape mouth basically. So I think this is very good, but I also think Dorian's very good at um dealing with this escape. He probably sees it a lot in the training room because I mean, this is basically like think of like an elbow escape where you trap their ankle, yeah, and you'll end up in three-quarter mount if you don't switch hips. So DeAndre right now wants to switch to his other hip. And Dorian, like the whole time, is I think it's hard to see, but uh it looks like he's uh focused with his like this arm and everything on preventing uh DeAndre from switching hips, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So you can see like this this hand over here is like lifting everything this way, and he's like, maybe you escape mount, but I'm still gonna be in a good pinning position, you know. Like you're not getting back. Um I'm gonna keep three-quarter mount, you know. You're not getting back to like a proper guard. So I thought this was a very good escape on De. Yeah, here's a good angle of it. Like this, you're not gonna turn your hips. Like, I'm like lifting your hips off the mat. And I'm pretty sure this hand was like initially controlling this arm to like lift it off.
SPEAKER_01Pulling the elbow off the mat so you can't turn it. Yeah, very and then it's it moved to the hip after.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, I think this was a very good escape by DeAndre, but also very good job of preventing rotation on the uh Dorian's part to maintain the pin. Um, and yeah, that's as far as I've gotten in the match.
SPEAKER_01Okay, cool. This last one was so cool to see. I think you were right, like he's holding his elbow up and then he upgrades like getting even closer to where like his elbows across his body, and he's almost got like a tight waist across. Yeah, like on the elbow.
SPEAKER_00This looks like like there's no way this hand is grabbing the hip right now, it's probably grabbing the arm. Like lifting it up. Then getting closer. Yeah, maybe maybe it was grabbing the hip. I don't know. But either way, prevented the rotation. So he kept DeAndre on that, on that hip, you know.
SPEAKER_01Super cool. What a match. Yeah, I'm excited for the second. Yeah. As soon as we get off here, you'll get to see what happens. But um, one thing I also noticed in the beginning of the match was like just how active they were with hand fighting, like touching the back of the knees and stuff, and like not every attempt at a connection was like for a takedown or like to fully pick up the lights. That was really cool, like just making them react so much, uh, and being so fast with it too, and like just constantly keeping them guessing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I thought it was pretty interesting because there were a couple times where Dorian would like reach for a leg and just like touch it, and DeAndre like wouldn't move, like just not respect it at all. And then there were a couple times where he would like you know, reach for it and DeAndre would like kick his leg back. So um, yeah, I don't necessarily know the tactics behind that. Um, but yeah, it did seem like Dorian especially was doing a lot of like fainting and like level changing and threatening the legs. Um, so much so that DeAndre gets a penalty in the first five minutes. Yeah. Because it it did seem like DeAndre was mostly like just shutting down a lot of Dorian's attacks, and Dorian's like constantly moving the whole time, which makes it look like DeAndre's not doing anything. Um yeah, anytime either of these guys compete, I think you know, we got a lot to learn.
SPEAKER_01So it's so sick to watch. I've had to scale a lot of like the task goals or whatever in uh in our standing games where like if it's like let's say two people standing and you win by picking up a leg. So since I suck at wrestling, instead of picking up, I'm just like touching the back. Um my goal is just to touch the back of the back of the knees and like not even go for it. So I wonder if my sometimes a training partner's like, what is this guy doing? Like he doesn't even want it, you know? Yeah, so um I need to now do that same type of scaling to the half guard bottom, like instead of trying to just like fully get there, maybe just work on the segmentation part and like do the first phase instead of like go for the full thing. Yeah, so yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Hands hands to the mat, or I think out. I think it's hard. It's not necessarily hard, but it's harder to get outside their far elbow from half guard than it is to get outside their near elbow. Definitely not impossible to get outside their far elbow. You take a cross drip, pull it across, and then scoop grip their far leg and then you know attack it, whatever. Um but uh yeah, I just think it's easier to get outside their near elbow. So I've I've tried to not necessarily get outside their far elbow unless they're like giving it to me more. Um and like actually the example of uh the Discord thing was the dude was looked like he was looking for like an arm drag or like a choy bar on the far arm, and he ends up getting a pinch headlock on the the far arm. And then the dude brings his hand like inside to like frame on his head. And basically I said this this could be a time to try and get you know outside their their farm because they're trying to get rid of your pinch headlock by bringing their arm across their own body, basically. Um, so yeah, I it's definitely possible, but uh at least for me, my primary attacks have been not necessarily trying to get outside their far elbow, but trying to use the like push on their wrists and the pull of their armpit to get their weight coming forward or free the leg.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Dang, okay. Yeah, I think I'm gonna pay attention more to that. That what'd you call it? The leading edge, right? Yeah. Leading edge. Yeah. So if they're like nearer shoulders in here, maybe I could just try to arm drag and get to the back as they react, they give me the other side pull. Yeah. So to just segment a little bit better instead of the Hail Marys that I've been doing. So yeah, super helpful. Um, very cool. Uh, does it feel good to be back in the jujitsu thinking?
SPEAKER_00It does. Yeah. Yeah. I miss it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And now you can get back to training as well.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I think that helps too. Get me more excited to watch more jujitsu.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Dude, I don't know how you did it during COVID then for so like watching so much and not being able to train at all. Yeah, I didn't even have a YouTube channel or a database back then. Just watching. Dang, it's awesome. Um yeah, we covered quite a bit of jujitsu, which we plan to barely talk about today, which is pretty funny.
SPEAKER_00So it's gonna be an app episode, another check-in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we could touch on the app stuff a little bit because we're kind of uh working on similar, similar ish, um trying to solve similar problems, I guess you could say. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00With the onboarding.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, with the onboarding. Um start. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I can share probably one of the I guess maybe it's recency bias, but it feels like one of the cooler moments of like learning in this app journey. Um every now and then you have like a breakthrough, I guess, of like, oh wait, like I this is much better. Designed in a much better way. So um, yeah, I've been doing some research on how apps onboard people, and the onboarding is a really interesting experience. It's like you uh people come in with different levels of intent, like how much do they know they want to use the app. So some examples are like you download a meditation app, you might be like, uh, I don't know about meditation, like maybe my intent's not too high, versus you download Chase Bank. Like, I just got my account set up, like I know I need to use the bank. And the way, depending on the user's intent, like you treat onboarding a little differently. Um and the other side of the equation that I learned was about like how quickly you can show the value and like make the app make sense. And so I'm realizing for sure, bro, that that last part is like it, I think it takes some time to to help people realize the benefits of journaling and writing things down and being intentional and stuff. It's not like you do it once and you're like, oh, this makes so much sense, and like I'm gonna stick with this forever, versus a meditation you could do for like 10 seconds breathing exercise, and like, oh okay, I kind of feel calm. Like the aha moment's a little more obvious, I think. Or for something like journaling goal setting, like the whole thing is you're doing it over time and like checking in and progressing, whatever. So yeah, switch did a little experiment with the onboarding of having people set up their profile, like putting in a little more work, basically investing a little bit more before then entering like the journaling flow and seeing the rest of the app. It just made more sense, and um, a lot more people are making it through that first screen. Versus before we would just give them a tiny taste of it, like here, set an intention for practice, and then it's like good luck, come back, you know, please. One day after practice, if you can even remember at all, or reflect after practice, and it's like kind of dead end, like setting account now. So before we were like a lot of people weren't making it past that initial like first experience, let alone sticking with it. And so um, yeah, that was a cool experiment. It's still early, like to show like our we don't get a ton of new users every day, so it's like not a true statistically significant A-B test, whatever. But at our stage, it's it's good to see the direction. And I hope it continues. We're probably gonna watch it for another week. Right now it's 50-50 uh for new users to come in if they get the new onboarding versions old, and uh hopefully uh it changes. And I I switched it to 80-20 today, so I'm just gonna keep an eye on it and see if it's gonna continue to work out the way it does.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. It's cool that you can have a dashboard where you can quickly switch um the percentages and toggle things on and off like that.
SPEAKER_01It's pretty cool. Yeah, that's the feature flag. Um, so as you guys start to test stuff, the feature flag thing. I don't know if you'd need a third party or if you can build it yourself. Um now with Claude, you can probably just build it yourself, maybe. But uh yeah, it was it was pretty cool. Very cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we're experimenting with the onboarding as well. Um, it's gonna be a while before we actually run any of these tests because we're basically trying to figure out ways to incorporate uh AI to eliminate a lot of the friction points that we've seen, um, which we've talked about already on the on the podcast. So I won't go into that. But to do this, we kind of have to redesign the website a little bit. Um so Mike's working on that. And then once the redesign is done, then we'll start A-B testing. But um one thing that I thought was interesting that Claude talked about was that like one, we uploaded all of our analytics and and everything to Claude and asked it to analyze it. And it said that people who save clips to a folder are like it was ridiculous. It was like 90% more likely to stay longer than like six months or something like that. Um, so it's said that right now we have like a false story that we're telling ourselves that my YouTube videos are what's leading to the growth of the website. When in reality, people who watch YouTube videos tend to be more like passive learners and they tend to want to just watch information and absorb information, where our product is much more focused on people who are actively wanting to search and learn um by themselves. So it said this is probably leading to more of a drop-off. Um and yeah, it's something that we should we should address. So, one, this like false story that we're telling ourselves, and then two, guiding people more towards saving um clips. So um, yeah, and then like the other thing it pointed out was that education products tend to be not sticky by nature in the sense that like you know, you go to school and you graduate and then you don't go to school anymore. You know, like you learn what you need to learn, you don't need to go back to school. Um and the same thing with just like education products in general, it tends to be like people come on, they learn what they want to learn, and then they leave, which I think is kind of unfortunate with a lot of the jujitsu Patreon type products, where like an instructional is kind of built around the sense like I'm gonna charge you a lot and you buy it once and that's it, you know, which is probably a better business model for an education product, whereas a subscription type product charges less and it kind of expects and kind of you're kind of doubling down on like the community aspect of it as your way to keep people from canceling. So yeah, like taking the subscription model to a education product tends to be difficult. Um so yeah, just uh again trying to convey more to users that it's not something you come on to passively um absorb information, and it's something that you actively use to take and organize notes to um search and you know discover things that that you're interested in learning about. Um so yeah, just kind of some marketing shifts slash some onboarding shifts that we're gonna experiment with. Um but yeah, pretty quad's pretty smart.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah. Yeah. Um dang, I hadn't thought of just education, the business model. Oh, wait, hold on. Did it change? Yeah, I think you unplugged your mic or something. There we go. Can you hear me? Yeah. Oh, still the same. Oh wait, no, no, it's back now. Okay, cool. Um no, yeah, I hadn't thought about the business model of education products, like in general. That's that's interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um which is why a lot of people sell courses, which makes sense. Um yeah, obviously we didn't take that approach.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but the community aspect's interesting too, especially your angle now with the coaching platform and like the connection between the coach and the student and then database like being facilitating all that in their training.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the the coaching thing I think is so much more sticky in the sense that like once a coach has a library of classes, they put in a lot of like effort and like almost sunk costs if they decide to leave. Um, so the idea is like if you put in the effort to build out your classes, it's gonna save you so much time moving forward and that you can like plug and play um as you see fit. If you have multiple schools, it helps keep everyone organized. So, and I think I think just in the marketing of it, I think we've done a much better job of saying like this is where you come to build your classes, as opposed to like this is where you come to like learn, you know, um, which is a it's taking it away from like an education um product and moving it more towards like a uh like building product, you know, which I think is much more sticky.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Um yeah, man. I I uh a lot of like the software like startup podcasts, they all say like do B2B, don't do B2C. B2C is just like super crazy, like consumers just never know. Like it's just not as uh cut and dry where B2B, it's like, hey, if I show you I can save you time, or or I show you I can make you money, like they'll do it if it just makes sense more logically. Yeah. Versus B2C, maybe it's like, hey, do you like this thing? Right.
SPEAKER_00Maybe it's a little bit the like metrics to gauge whether it's worth it are so much more abstract. So like B2C, you know, whereas B2B, it's like, hey, you you signed up, you paid this amount, your school has grown this much, it's worth it, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Where it used to take you 10 hours to do this, now it takes you one, and you'll take that money for time exchange over and over again. Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, which is why I think like content creators reach out to me quite a bit saying they use it to make their content. And I think this time saving is much more easily represented in their like workflow, you know. Whereas like an end user might not necessarily be able to like see that time change because they're not actively like building a project or something like that, you know. Yeah. So that's kind of like the gray area because I guess it's B2B because you're selling to like another like business, if it's a YouTube channel or an Instagram channel or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Um and then maybe that's why so many like the pro like the super high level guys really like the database, because they do spend a ton of time like finding this stuff, and you're saving them tons of time by making the study easier. So Right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Whereas if you're someone who just watches YouTube videos and you like the idea of studying footage, but you never really done it, you don't necessarily have something to compare it to. Oh, okay. I just see like 200 examples of people attacking from K Guard. It's like, yeah, bro, that would have taken you like three years to find that much footage, you know? Yeah. Um, so yeah. Uh that's a good point that people who have seen the other side of it know how valuable it is, where people who are just kind of like, yeah, hopping on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like Lucas Kennard, that conversation, like he loves the database. It's like, man, how long would it have taken him to just find so many clips of skimming the leg, like all those examples he found? Like it would have taken forever to search uh and to know where to search to. Um yeah, it kind of like um these kinds of topics are interesting because they force us to think about like who is our user and like how does the product fit their needs now, and then how do we expand to like fit other because it's like how do you make a product that can fit like a casual someone who likes to study versus someone who like studies a lot versus like makes videos trying to study? Right. So I think your onboarding will like hopefully bridge some of those early people and and like help help them see the value quicker, like by productizing the experience, which is like so crazy to think about. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm not saying we're gonna go down this path, but uh I was listening to this AI podcast and it was talking about anthropics' new like price changes that they've implemented. Have you seen this? No, I'm not too clear on all the terminology, but basically, like Mike, uh he was saying that you know he pays the $200 a month Claude subscription, but in reality he's using like $2,000 worth of tokens every month. So they're calling it like the end of the subsidized AI era, where like now you're gonna have to actually start paying what you're using as opposed to like you know, anthropic fronting the bill for the excess usage by users. Um so they're slowly like working towards that, and they just kind of like flipped over the first domino and said, like, now instead of like lumping it all into one thing, we're gonna break off one section. So you only get like this amount with your subscription for this like specific use case, and it pissed off a lot of engineers and like hardcore users. Um and basically what the podcast was saying is that a lot of these companies they tend to start off by appealing to like the hardcore users, like the hardcore engineers, and then once they get traction, they start dumping the hardcore users in exchange for the like general public, if that makes sense. Um so the the bill gets more expensive for the hardcore users and the product gets better for the general public, basically, that aren't gonna be using like all the fancy features and stuff like that. Um yeah, I thought it was a it was interesting. Like the I didn't realize that this was like a common thing in the software world, but it seemed like this arc has happened um at least a few times in the past.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know of one company that I followed and still uses uh Whoop, and they completely did that. Yeah, yeah, when they first launched, it was like $500 for the product, no subscription, and uh pro athlete. Like that was like their target, target market. Um and then slowly became for like athletes, and then it was like fitness enthusiasts, and now it's healthy people, like anyone who wants to be healthy, like they're yeah, it just got so much broader, I guess. Um it's smart though, because if you do nail like the pros, like that that market, then it's very aspirational for everyone else. It's like easy for them to say, like, oh, if like professionals using it, like probably gonna be valuable to me. They're paying 20 bucks a month for it. I'm paying the same thing. Like, yeah, I probably get so much value out of that. So that's sad though about Claude. I hope I hope we're I hope well, I don't know. I don't know if we count as hardcore users or if we count as the general public who's gonna benefit from it. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I think I'm a general public, but my actual developer Mike is a hardcore user.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think similar. I think Mike, yeah, my uh co-founder Mike as well. Yeah. Although he makes many different models. Yeah, yeah. I'm not there yet.
SPEAKER_00But uh like the podcast was saying, like, Claude's kind of the first to do this because their hand was kind of forced in the sense that like they became so popular that the bill became so big where it's like we gotta pay for this somehow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, but like don't be surprised when Chat GPT does it in two months, and like, you know, it's just it's just it's the nature of the the business. Like you can't just go on giving away money forever and your company is losing money, you know. Yeah. Um so yeah, it is what it is. But it was a fun little like six-month period there where like you could just use as much stuff as you wanted and not pay for it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I remember in, I think it was March when I first got on Clock Code, uh, my roommate gave me uh part of his like a login to his subscription so I could just mess around a little bit. He was like, dude, there's no way I'm gonna use my tokens. He's like, I've been coding for hours and like it's been like three percent of my weekly or whatever. He's like, please like use them. And uh slowly and slowly, I guess people are gonna start running into their usage limits. Yeah, yeah. Have you run into the limits?
SPEAKER_00Um, a few times. Um, but mostly it's just paying for the API. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which uh I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna be worth it or not. Um, but at least yeah, I I guess we won't know until we actually like see how users are using it. Um and it's probably something we'll have to A B test and all that stuff. But um yeah, I I personally think that it will eliminate a lot of friction points that people are experiencing. So um I think it'll be worth it, but I mean you never really know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it'll probably cost us like our expenses are like nothing right now. Um, but just basically an AI bill, so we pay for it when building it. But uh yeah, once we launch this, this should tick up our expenses a little bit with the amount of API calls. So we'll see if that expense is justified. But right, yeah.
SPEAKER_01We'll see if it puts you in a similar situation as uh big or not.
SPEAKER_00Might start having people uh pay for extra usage. It seems like that's like the business model these days. It's like there's no more like flat fee, it's just like you pay based on how much you use kind of thing, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. Like all these wrappers like products like that use AI to help you, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's like their expense cost for the token is this, and then you pay it multiple on top for for the nice like experience that they provide you to make it easier or whatever. Exactly. Um which makes sense because yeah, yeah, otherwise someone can yeah, go crazy. Yeah. We'll see.
SPEAKER_00We'll see if we have people costing us $300, paying $20, and then might have to make some adjustments. But until then, we'll keep the pricing the same.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there was uh there's an AI journaling app, just regular like mental health focused journaling that people use, and it's more in like the therapy space. But I was listening to a podcast with one of their co-founders, and they said that they had a user who was like spending like freaking hours and hours and hours on it, you know, and uh running like that user cost them so much money. Yeah, yeah. We haven't stuffed. Uh I haven't looked at as much into the AI part of Sherpa yet. I feel like that's like a little bit later. I need to get some of like the foundational flows in there a little bit better because our AI stuff, like I think it's terrible right now. What model are you guys using? Yeah, it's still like the original, like chat, I think it's ChatGPT 4.0 mini or something like that. Yeah, so I still need to update the model and then I need to update all the prompts because like the model will treat it differently. And then I just don't have a good hypothesis on like what people want from the AI anyway. Like, do they just want a summary? Like, we can do a summary, yeah, you know, but how beneficial is all that? And yeah, from what? Like, are we taking their metrics like from training? Are we taking their daily like check-in on sleep and sort? Like, do we do AI to that? Do we just take your entries about your goals and stuff, or from practice, like the injury journaling? Like, I I don't know how to split it all out.
SPEAKER_00So what type of uh AI analysis would you want?
SPEAKER_01Like, what would you think? Oh, good question. Um so right now we have like I think actually I had a dream about this yesterday night that I was uh working on Sherkba and I was thinking about investing more into the injury portion of it because I've had like a QL strain lately in my neck, and I'm like, damn, this is the second time I QL strain. I wish I like remembered what helped last time. So I think insights about maybe more specific like patterns would be interesting for me. Like maybe that's just because that's what I'm experiencing right now. We're like, oh my neck, I tweaked it again, like set me back. Like, how was it last night? Like, what did I do? Um so yeah, I think we're starting to get the core like practice journaling in. Maybe if we make it easy for people to do goals journaling, injury journaling, we can have the insights be like more specific around patterns with each. Um I hadn't thought about that till right now, so thank you for asking that. That's yeah, I still need to fix like all the core stuff first, I think. Uh or else it's too hard for them to even get the stuff in there, you know? Yeah. So yeah. Cool, cool. All right, yeah, covered a lot.
unknownYeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like you said, the jujitsu aspect took up a lot more time than we thought it was.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we were talking before we started recording like about the app stuff, and we're like, Jake was like, Do you think people want to listen to this? Should we just start recording? And I was like, Ah, let's just give them some jujitsu stuff in the beginning at least. So yeah, let us know. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the combo. And uh yeah, I remember a few months back, someone commented on our YouTube video, like, rest up, boys. Like both of us were super injured. So it's good you're back. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Are you how's your your injuries been bothering you? The neck.
SPEAKER_01Uh I had like a small tweak and it set me back again. Now I'm like back to normal on the neck, and then I like strained my QL, like took like maybe a week ish off. Um, but now it's like mostly normal. So gotcha. Yeah. Yep, yep. Cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll catch you later. Talk to you next week. Yeah.
