Ep. 334: Project-Based Gameplanning, feat. Josh Vogel & Dr. Mike Israetel

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 334. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm here today with not one but two heavy hitters. We've got two former guests on the podcast here. First of all, I've got Josh Vogel from The Jiu-Jitsu Company. Josh, how's it going, my friend? Speaker 3: Good. How are you doing, Steve? Speaker 2: I am doing good. And second, of course, I've got his charge, Dr. Mike Israetel. Welcome back, Mike. How's it going, my friend? Speaker 4: Josh won't let me leave and hasn't been letting me eat much, but he sure trains me in jiu-jitsu well. Speaker 3: Stay in your basement, Mike. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 2: See? There he goes again. Well, you know, I thought what we could do is why don't we just have a three-hour long argument about ecological dynamics? That seems to be the hot topic these days. You guys down? Speaker 3: Sold. Speaker 4: It'd be the second one we did in a month, Josh and I. Speaker 2: Jokes aside, what we had talked about. So, Josh, we had you recently on the podcast talking about your project-based approach to learning jiu-jitsu. Mike, we had you on to talk about um training intensity. Two really interesting topics and we were chatting offline, something that you guys had both discussed as a potential conversation and something that I always love to talk about is game planning. This is a fascinating topic because I don't know if there's really a right or wrong way to do it. I have heard so many different approaches, but I'm going to shut up because I know that you guys work very closely together and I am dying to know what does game planning look like at The Jiu-Jitsu Company and how do you guys make this work? So, with three people on the line, I guess probably Josh, maybe you're the best person to kick this off. You can uh kind of explain how things go and then Mike, I'd love to hear you kind of chime in. Speaker 3: Okay, so usually with game planning, most of the time what we're talking about in jiu-jitsu are two different things. So, the more colloquial version of game planning is where people talk about having a game or a game plan, which is like your specific set of positions and techniques that you favor during your rolls. So, you know, for example, I play a lot of underhook half guards, so most of my game would funnel into that kind of game plan. And then there's also, I think, a more common version in other sports of game planning where that's specifically planning for an event. Like if I have, you know, 12 guys in my division and then I do scouting reports on those guys and then I build a specific plan of action for playing the game of jiu-jitsu against those guys. And then at The Jiu-Jitsu Company, the one that we focus mainly on for most students is just helping them develop that basic personalized jiu-jitsu game that they play and that they get good at. And then when we prepare our competitors or when I compete, I do the second type of game planning. Speaker 2: Interesting, interesting. And is this something that you guys do just for competitors or is there kind of a science that you apply for sort of the hobbyists and the casuals at the gym as well? Speaker 3: Basically, we focus mainly on hobbyists and casual practitioners. And we do have people who compete and I compete, but the majority of the time and effort is spent on them. And so with them, the basic idea is that we give them sort of a template to follow for their white to blue belt progression and then blue to purple, purple to brown, et cetera, that helps them discover a set of techniques and or positions that they like to play and then troubleshoot those things. So, if I play underhook half guard, what are the most common problems I'm likely to come across? It's going to be wizard, front headlock, darce, backstep, sit through pass, and then helping them figure out how to become intelligent problem solvers so that they can become then they can train those things during open mats and during class sessions to get better at the plan that they're building. And then for competitors, it's if I'm doing Masters 3, black belt, no-gi pans, lightweight division, then I look at my division and then I do more of like a specific game planning thing where, you know, I would see what the general trends are in my division, make sure that the skills that I have are adequate to meet those demands, and then I would look at specific people who are likely to win that division or I'm likely to come across and then I might have a more specific plan for those people. Speaker 2: Josh, something I'd love to pick your brain on too, when you talk about game planning. Now, you mentioned that you look at game planning through two different lenses. One is the kind of internal lens. So, in a vacuum, what does your quote-unquote game look like? The other side, which you mentioned, is external study. So, what does your opponent's game look like and how does that jive with yours? What's the interplay between those two? Because this is a really interesting conversation that comes up a lot. How much of your game planning time should be focused on your own jiu-jitsu versus how much should be focused on opponent-specific readiness? Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think that kind of depends on individual athletes. So, for example, for me, I feel very confident in my division right now. And so, Speaker 2: Oh, big man. Speaker 3: Like, no, I don't mean to sound like an asshole, but like, you know, like what I mean is that I I have like I took nine years off of competing and then I started competing again three years ago and I've I've have enough experience over the last three years to feel comfortable and confident in my division so that I don't feel like I need to overanalyze everybody. Whereas when I was kind of finding my feet in my division again, I felt like I really had to know like are they a left-hand player, are they a right-hand player, do they pull guard, what kind of guard pull do they use, do they attack the legs, do they, you know, what side of the body do they favor? And so I felt like I had to really rabbit hole on that. Whereas now, I'll do more of a general check like, okay, the people that I'm most the best people in my division, I want to know are they guard pullers, generally what kind of guards do they play, are those guards that I'm equipped to deal with, but I won't rabbit hole too deep on it because I'm confident in the game that I'm playing and as long as they're playing positions that I'm familiar with, I feel like there's no need to overanalyze them. I can just prepare with my students and my athletes and, you know, kind of maybe 30% rabbit hole on them and then let the training do 70% of the work for me. Does that kind of make sense, Steve? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Mike, I'd I'd love to get your thoughts on this as well, especially since you train under this lunatic. What is it like and how does this kind of manifest on the ground? Speaker 4: Well, you know what I can speak to and it's probably better talked about earlier in the conversation than later is to give a little bit of a background on the game theoretic space around what game plans are and why they're useful and what the alternatives are and why they're not as useful in order to be as good as jiu-jitsu as possible. There's a couple different ways to slice this and I think the way Josh and I think about it is a way I think many people think about it but maybe have not articulated. I think it might be helpful for people to hear that if that's okay, Steve. Speaker 2: 100%. Speaker 4: Super. So, jiu-jitsu is combat and there's a general combat theory that applies to every single type of combat and then specific combat theories that apply only to one specific kind of combat. So, all of the general combat theory that applies to wrestling and jiu-jitsu and MMA applies to all three of those, but then there are specifics that apply only within one of for example, like a theoretical approach to striking distancing just does not need to happen for jiu-jitsu because as soon as you get struck, you're oh, and that's it, you win IBJJF Worlds again. And so, when you think about the game theoretic space of most combat for sure grappling, and this actually is so general that it extends all the way to two armies fighting a war on a front. There's this two different ways to train jiu-jitsu and two different ways to fight war. One is what you could call like a cross the front war or jiu-jitsu of the generalist. So you learn a lot of moves, you learn all the basics, triangles, arm bars, et cetera, basic takedowns. And you always employ them and you employ them, I don't want to say ecologically, organically in the heat of the moment. Like, you know, you go into a match, you might try a double, you might try a single leg, you might get a takedown, you might choose from one of your goodie bag of passes that you have that you know well, and it may be a lot of these. And uh the analogy for combat for warfare is you have like a 500-mile front line where the opponent has cannons and tanks and soldiers on one side, you have them on the other, and you just like blow the horn of power and then everyone starts advancing at the same time. You just go, full send everything against everyone. Speaker 2: What does the horn of power sound like, Mike? Speaker 4: And then you get fucking the elephants from Lord of the Rings start getting all irate, you know how they do before combat. They're still hard to control the elephants. They're more of a liability than a tool at that point. Speaker 2: Worth the cats. Speaker 4: Oh, but like a gigantic cat that was bred for war would be an enormous tool and an even bigger liability because he could just get bored and start swatting at your own troops. So, bad whiskers. Speaker 2: I was told that by having actual doctors on this program, they would give uh more fact-based advice. Speaker 4: This always goes to hell really quick. All right. So back to the facts. There's another way of fighting war. This is considered much more dominant generally by combat theorists and it's part of what's called modern doctrine. And that's when you try to pick a part of the enemy's front line at which two things are true. One, they're relatively weak. Two, they relatively least expect an attack. And what you do is you somehow secretly amount a lot of forces behind that part of the front line. And then when it's time, you don't even blow the elephant horn because that's dumb because your enemy knows that means you're coming. Slightly outdated practice. And then you just bust through the softest, least expected part of the front line. And that's called a salient. So you make this giant spike like an inroad into your enemy and then you circle back around to their much lesser or undefended flanks and the back of their front line. You open up this huge cavernous hole in the front line and often times it collapses, you go all the way to the major city, Berlin or whatever, and you win the war. So, in jiu-jitsu, the analogy there is you have a few moves at every sequence in the jiu-jitsu process, at every position that you train much more than you train other moves. Maybe even 80/20, sometimes even more if your competition's coming up. You get profoundly slick at those moves. And you have these moves at every step of the sequence. So, for example, you need to have dependable takedowns. What happens after a takedown? Dependable guard passes. And what Josh will later explain, real next-level jiu-jitsu isn't about doing a takedown, stabilizing, and then doing a guard pass. Real next-level jiu-jitsu is about as the person is falling, you're already moving into your guard pass. As they are framing up to catch your control of guard, you're moving into your next dominant position, which could be mount, for example, it could be side control if you're a fat fuck like me. It could be back take. And then from that hyper-dominant position, you execute a variety of submissions, also ones you're very adept at, you're not just doing random shit. And you might cycle through submissions or cycle through dominant positions. A few different kinds of chokes at back mount, it's not catching. You go to try to catch an arm bar from the side, it's not catching, you rotate and now you have some belly down arm bars from top side of mount. That doesn't work, you rotate back to the back, etc. And so that sequence is predictable. Like we know that when you take someone down, the most likely situation you're facing is a guard pass problem. And so what we can do is develop a game plan in Josh's first use of game plan, in which it doesn't matter who you're going up against. You have dependable A, B, and C positions, go-to moves at every single one of these major positions, standing, maybe from a guard pull, when you're in their guard to pass their guard, when you're at passing their guard to take a more dominant position, and of course, you always need one from the bottom of guard sweep position so that you can sweep and successfully restart that game. And because you have go-to moves at every single one of these and all of these are really good because you're hyper-specialized at them, you start by just doing jiu-jitsu. But after training at this for a long time, you have this very smooth sequence of events that tends to occur almost at the same time. And if you ever watch guys that are high-level pros like the guys at B-Team, roll, there's not like a distinct takedown and back take and guard pass. Josh, you know what I'm talking about? It's like single leg and they're passing your guard while you're in mid-air and then you both land and they're taking your back. And you're like, how do you sequence something that complex so smoothly? Well, you have to have go-to moves and you have to not try to have the fucking kitchen sink thrown at a person and you have to understand the concept of the best time to attack is when the enemy is currently defending the current thing. And so you sequence that. Like, one of the big problems to bring up politics, not really, in the Ukraine war is each side is so weak relatively, has so little marginal advantage that as soon as they have one offensive push, they get tired. They pull their troops back, they create a new perimeter, and the other army gets a chance to regroup, and then it's like back to square one. You don't want to be back to square one ideally in jiu-jitsu. You want that person to be always one step behind. If you are very athletic and you know a bunch of random moves, just on your athleticism and youth, you can do this a little faster than your opponent. But nothing, nothing, nothing, I mean nothing beats having a specialized game plan. Why? Because if you work on something a few times, maybe even a few hundred times, you've worked some double legs, single leg, some arm drags, some couple throws, you're good, you're good at stuff. But how good you are can be like multiplied by an order of magnitude, like a factor of 10, if you just train a few simple techniques in a combination of drilling and a ton of different live situations, but you stick to those couple of techniques. And because you can do that eventually, your double legs fine, but your arm drag single just happens at the drop of a fucking hat. And it requires so little cognitive planning and oversight that you can do it while you're doing it. It's essentially automatic. And your cognitive brain space is open to go, what's that next thing I'm doing? Let's order that now. And it said order, not execute. Because you order it in your brain, you're like, you're next up. And when your body detects that it's that time, it's going to go into that guard pass you've been drilling. If you haven't been drilling a game that does one of two things, one, very specialized on a few different techniques at each position, and two, doesn't actually get a lot of work smoothing those transitions out, you can be very good at jiu-jitsu. But with a game plan, a simple game plan, when you train all the fucking time against everyone, including both the ingredients, the specific moves at positions and their transitional states, someone new who's never went at you before, who's never come up against you before, is going to have a real bad time. Like if I ever see anyone go up against Josh and he manages to get the underhook game started, I'm like, this shit's over. And like nine times out of 10 it is. Because once he's in the underhook position, you've been in there a hundred times, maybe a thousand. He's been in there like 20,000 times. And it's not just the volume of data that's made him better, which it has, that's how neural network theory works, the more trained data you have the better. But also, he's been able to figure out exactly what works and doesn't work on these little John Danaher-esque margins. Doing just a little bit differently here, but then making that habit can make him extra, extra slick. So where your usual defenses against his underhook game, you're like, the fuck that that it works on everyone else. He's found a way to do it. Josh is going to speak much more well than I can on how to fiddle with that game to take it, you have now this understanding that, okay, you need you need a pretty specific game, a couple options at each move, at each position. You need to get really good at each option and you need to connect them really well so they're fluid. Josh has an incredible system for how to do that. I just wanted to take a minute or 10 or whatever the fuck how long I've been talking, to explain why we do that. Because random agglomerations of moves can work if you're athletic and strong and you have lots of IBJJF steroids and all that stuff. But it's much better when you have a very specific plan of attack because of a few different benefits. One, you're just going to be really good at it. And two, when the guys you're going against enter your game, it's your expertise they're entering. Their language is now your language. It's like calling someone out in a rap battle, but it's German only. They don't really speak German. They know a couple lines, Hitler or whatever, but like that's all they know. Whereas you've practiced the German language so much, you flow free in that state. And so that is a huge, huge advantage. We used to see this with a really easy example is Bernardo Faria. You guys remember Bernardo Faria, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 4: Know him. Speaker 2: I've heard of him. Speaker 4: Yeah, I've heard of him. Speaker 3: He won like grappling industries, right? Speaker 4: He's that guy, right? Yeah. He had that um underhook half guard to cross lapel situation. And everyone knew it was coming, but he just did it so much. He always found the right way and it just felt like he was fucking with you. Like it was just too goddamn slick. He's just going to get it. He didn't just one day think like, oh, I'll try this. Maybe he did, but he trained the living fuck out of it until the entire thing was just a matter of sequence. That's a big, big deal. In my humble opinion, that's just how you're supposed to train jiu-jitsu to be the best that you can be. The actual training, and Josh does this with students all the time, the nuances of how to get someone through that whole approach to first choose the moves that they like the best because it's not obvious which moves you're going to choose. Josh doesn't just choose moves for his athletes. You sort of gravitate towards them. Once you have good moves at each position, then you can start to figure out how do we make them better and how do we weave them together so that one transition to the next, to the next, to the next, and then you have a fucking baller super slick game. Does that make sense? Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. I am so glad you said all of that. I had a few things that I wanted to make sure we worked into this episode and you just nailed like every single one of them. I I couldn't agree more with you about kind of the principles and the concepts behind building a game plan that you discussed right there. But Josh, I'll turn it over to you. What does that look like on the other side of the coin? I mean, presuming you agree with all of this stuff and your student isn't just going totally off the rails here. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Presuming that you're on the same page, how does that manifest from a coaching perspective? Speaker 3: Well, so basically, there's got to be, it's like Mike said, like there is a plan for the student that like as an instructor, you kind of guide them towards and you don't force on them because like there are things, for example, with Mike, like if I suggested to Mike that he become a triangle spider guard player in the beginning of his jiu-jitsu, then because of his body type, that wouldn't have been a wise plan for him. So that would have been me kind of overmanaging Mike's jiu-jitsu. If I had suggested to him maybe that he would be more of like a pressure passy, top side control, north-south choke kind of person, that would be something that kind of fits more with his body type, with his personality and things like that. So, there's a part of it that as an instructor, you're taking the things that you know about your student, you know, their personality type, are they aggressive, are they passive, are they more slow-paced kind of person, are they more explosive and fast, do they have a long limbs, do they have short limbs, et cetera. And then you kind of guide them towards things that are likely to work for them, but without too heavy a hand because people will surprise you. Like there are people that I've trained with in the past that have a very similar build to Mike that are great spider guard players and who play games that you wouldn't necessarily expect based on their body type. So, it's guiding but with a gentle hand. And then once they start to gravitate towards something and that usually means that they try it and they have some success against their peers. Speaker 4: They like it. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Right? Sometimes they just really like doing it and then you know like, okay, he's just going to keep training like this. This is good versus trying to cram someone into something they can get good at, but they just fucking hate, you know? Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true too because there's there's some stuff that people are just, you know, for whatever reason it doesn't capture their imagination or it feels weird for their body and they just don't want to do it or there's those factors. And so once they start to click with something and you're able to guide them in that direction, then it becomes a matter of um training and troubleshooting. And so that could take a lot of different forms. That could be, you know, if you want to go drilling and then incrementally increasing your your challenge level and your resistance level with your different training partners, that could be doing it through more of a constraints-led approach. Whatever your approach is, the idea is still the same that there's going to be hot spots in the entire game of jiu-jitsu that your athlete gravitates towards or that you guide them towards that they experience success with. And then all of those spots have more likely problems and less likely problems. So again, half guard underhook is going to be mostly, I get half guard, I get leg peel, I get underhook, then I have to deal with the wizard, front headlock, and all the front headlock attacks or backsteps to my legs or sit through passing. And those are the majority of the problems. And then I have to start training and looking for solutions for those problems that'll work for my own body type, et cetera. And then the rest is just a matter of training those solutions and training in the problem space until it becomes second nature and it becomes something that I can just do automatically. And there's still like a there's still a conscious part of it because it is automatic, but because no two training partners are exactly the same, there is still a bit of like, I get my underhook, they backstep, I anticipate it, I try to take the back, but maybe their arm is a little bit longer than I'm used to and I got to kind of solve that problem, but the shape of it is the same. It's just underhook half guard, these are the problems, these are likely solutions. Let's explore that and then build up from there. Does that kind of make sense, Steve? Speaker 2: Yes, yes, definitely. And there are, no surprise, interesting parallels between the things that both of you have discussed. Mike, I agree with you entirely that looking for unfair asymmetric advantages is kind of the key to building a good game plan. I think I don't want to say mistake, but it may be a misconception that many people have about game planning in jiu-jitsu is that you can kind of just moneyball this and look at what the quote-unquote highest levels guys are doing and just copy that. And to some extent you want to do that, right? I mean, you would be a fool to not look at what is working at the high levels, but you would also be a fool to assume that just because something generally applies at the macro level, that it will also apply directly to you at the micro level. I mean, there's so much variability in jiu-jitsu and in terms of what you encounter. And Josh, you touch on this very nicely when you talk about, you know, trying to get like big guys to do triangles. Myself personally, I'm quite short and stocky and triangles just they're not a good move for me because the range of people that I can do those on effectively is very limited compared to someone who has longer legs. I think that those two things are an interesting interplay. Yes, there's things that might kind of broadly work, but that doesn't mean that in one person's specific example, it will also work there. And as you also brought up, Josh, people can surprise you. Sometimes if you rely too much on what the common wisdom is, you can really wind up fooling yourself. Triangles are a great example, right? They're something that are kind of classically looked at as a move that works better for longer, lankier people, but there are absolutely shorter people who can make those happen without fail. And if you go into a match thinking, this guy's never going to triangle me, he's too short. You can get really surprised if you're not expecting that. And that kind of touches into what Mike was saying too about how if you can be that person, if you can be the one with the unexpected game plan, that can have interesting advantages too. But Mike, I'll I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's all really great. I can say at least two things about developing game plans. One is if you base your move selection and maybe game plan on the popular people, the people who are doing the best, the good thing that you're doing is selecting from a set of very well-vetted techniques. You know the shit works because Gordon Ryan keeps beating people up with it. The bad part is that almost everyone's defensive game at that high level is coordinated to resist exactly those techniques. If your techniques that you're using are popular, like triangles, how many people know triangle defense? Everyone? How many people know like deep half underhook defense? I mean, you know, did a month of back when that one fat dude came to your gym who was an old black belt of your professor, he taught it for a while and you forgot it and you never saw it again. So, there is a downside there to essentially trying to copy game because the defensive systems people deploy against you are going to be like just really well trained. If you have your own game that is unique to you in any respect and in many respects, you start to present an enigma to people. Like I enter half guard from the completely opposite side that most people do, bottom side. And it confuses the living fuck out of people. I didn't mean to do it, I just learned it backwards. And Josh told me I learned it backwards when he inherited me as a student, he was like, but we're not going to change that. It's actually really confusing even for me to deal with this for a little bit. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: So that's like a good thing. Um, you know, it's like being a southpaw. A southpaw doesn't allow you any kind of strategic advantage for power or anything like that. It's just the least likely statistical thing that you're going to encounter in a fight. So everyone's designed to fight right-handers. Fighting a left-hander is just out of system, out of training data or just very low training data. Speaker 3: That happens a lot in my division. Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 3: Where like, you know, when I compete against like some of the most experienced competitors in my division, generally are very, very good at passing to people's left side. They're generally very good at playing guard on that opposite side as well. So, you end up in these situations where, you know, you're playing a guard that you're totally used to, but it's on the opposite side. And so like what you said about your deep half, Mike, is like, I know how to deal with deep half, but when you put it on the other side, it's like brushing your teeth with your other hand. Like, I'm left-handed, if I brush my teeth with my right-handed, my right hand, I know what to do. I know my teeth got to get clean, but it feels weird as shit. Speaker 4: Just takes longer. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. You bring up an interesting point too, Mike, about kind of the self-fulfilling prophecies that occur in the meta. When something becomes popular, the meta's natural response is to build up game plans that resist against that. And so people often look at what works at the highest levels and they think that these techniques are kind of absolutely uniformly just good and effective, but they don't always take into account that much of what we see is based around the resistances that people have built up to certain techniques. There can be things that are incredibly effective, but they just don't get a lot of play because everyone is ready to defend them, or maybe the meta is taking people in a direction where they're not even getting into a place to use those. The example I've been using a lot recently is BJJ Mental Models sponsored athlete, friend of the show, Chris Wojcik. He recently popularized his reverse Ioki lock, the Wojlock, right? Speaker 3: I love the Wojlock. Speaker 2: Yeah, a very interesting technique because it kind of upends a lot of people's expectations about what to do when they're being threatened with a heel hook. The Wojlock kind of puts you in a position where if you try to defend a heel hook in the way that people thought was intelligent just a year ago, suddenly you're going to get Wojlocked. It's a completely different situation. And that's an example of how there was a hole, there was an exploit that was there this whole time, and all it took was for one person to figure that out and start using that. And now everyone's going to have to adapt to that change. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think like, if you don't mind if I point something out real quick, I think what the Wojlock is a great example of in certain divisions in gi and no-gi jiu-jitsu tournaments, there's like a starter kit that everybody has to know. So if you're like a featherweight in IBJJF no-gi black belt circuit, you're going to have to know K-guard, you have to know backside 50/50, all the common leg attacks and then Toybar and things like that. And then if everybody's doing all the same meta or everybody has that same starter kit for that division, then everybody is also developing these little quirky hacks to the system. So the Wojlock being something where if we end up in 50/50 and you hide your heel because you don't want to get heel hooked, then there's the Wojlock. That's a hack to the system that is unusual and that's going to get a lot of mileage until that becomes part of the system. And then there's going to be some other hack that takes advantage of that. Speaker 2: Mike, what are your thoughts? Speaker 4: Yeah, another thing to say in this regard is there's this well-known asymmetry in game theory of defense and offense in warfare. Basically, it's the asymmetry of defensive advantage. It's fundamentally easier to defend than to offend. You see this like offensive armies will lose, it's a very rough non-estimate, but the heuristic is there's like a three-to-one manpower advantage that you should have if you want to invade a country. Your army needs to be three times their size roughly at the battlefield level because otherwise any less than that, like if even if your army's twice their size and they're well defended, you're deadlocked and you just lost a lot of guys doing a whole lot of nothing. So, in jiu-jitsu, this actually works in a really interesting way. A lot of people spend a lot of time working on defenses to various attacks. That's not a bad thing, but I would say it's probably better use of your time to work on general defense and not much of it and work on hyper-specific offense and a whole fuckload of it. Why? You already have a defensive advantage. I don't need to know how to defend heel hooks if I just keep my head forward towards you and keep my feet back and take you down and you just never have access to my fucking leg. Now, if I'm stuck in a heel hook position, I already kind of did something wrong. If it's my game to offend from, I'm going to know the whole thing back to front and I'm going to know how to defend too. I know a lot of folks that don't have let's say leg locks as a big part of their game, but they train at gyms where people have a lot of leg lock attacks. They learned really well how to defend leg locks, but the reality is that you could have gotten 90% as good defending leg locks if you did it about half as much. And they don't award points for defense, believe it or not, in jiu-jitsu and MMA. They award points for offense and the all the games fluidly point into offense at all times. There's no such thing as a general offense. Like, just get them, you know, the classic white belt advice day one in a tournament, you started too soon. Defensive advice is more general. Like if you back away out of a submission, if you put limbs and frames between you and the submission and the opponent, if you do the the Josh Vogel bug and you wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, you can wiggle yourself out of a lot of stuff. There are dependable grouping of things you can do, including seeing the submission coming, that are much better defensive procedures than very specific defenses to very specific games. So when people say, okay, this guy is going to be up against me, I got to learn how to defend the triangle. You can review that, that's good, but you're not going to beat him at his own game on defense. You're going to beat him at your game on offense. So instead of getting yourself into a triangle position, learn to exploit the fact that he's going to be setting up a triangle by doing some kind of like open guard, you know, leg drag pass and then all of a sudden he's like, oh fuck, like now he's in my game. So that defensive offensive advantage means you already have a buffer on defense. And it also means that you need as much as possible for offense. You guys ever noticed that a lot of really good matches between really good guys have very low scoring. Like, there's a lot of this. And everyone's defense is good enough to stop almost everyone else. But it's the offense that's the problem. If you can be and but offense is difficult to do because it has that three-to-one disadvantage. It's really hard to thread an offense against even a decently competent defender. And so if you have a really good time, really developing your offense over years and years, you're just going to have this really long sharp sword of an offense. It's just going to poke through a lot of shit. And then no amount of defensive preparation can help because your offense, you're in it so much. You've seen every version of the defensive landscape that could be presented to you or almost every version. And then when guys have their answers, they don't talk about because you're just going to catch them. You know all of the answers better than they do. So that I think is in support of, yes, it's good to have even rolls, but you guys know like when the two guys are just defending heavily and the complaint is like, this isn't good training because we're doing almost nothing. That's not an invalid critique. It's valid to some extent because it makes you work on your offense better and it's good practice for defense, but it really does kind of support the idea that getting more offensive reps, getting a challenge but not enough to stop you, is really good, which is why in Josh's style of applying this kind of methodology, what you do is you start nice and easy in kind of live positions. But the game plan is always the game plan. So you could be at 20% muscular speed and effort, but you're still running the same game. And then your opponent gives you problems by also running their game defensively, let's say, at 20%. And as they give you problems, you can use a little bit of strength and speed to get around them, but the idea is to use slickness instead, aka technique. And when you find it, okay, I'm getting this elbow in my face when I'm trying to pass, how do I deal that? And Josh looks at it, he helps you with it and he's like, okay, try to pull on their lapel only to get that elbow out of the way. You try that, you're like, oh my god, this is fucking awesome. You just keep working that system. So because you're not going full out enough to stop each other completely all the time and functionally learn a lot less, you're giving both people a huge opportunity to thread their offense and you make it incrementally more difficult. And as soon as you plug up one hole, you have smooth that over and then you run into another pothole. Basically, Josh as a coach is trying to build a super highway of completely awesomely laminated concrete that you just race right to, you know, mount, arm triangle, victory, and then whatever, I don't know, people do sexual favors for you. I've never won anything in sport. I think there's like a thing at the end. But that kind of opportunity to train the offense a lot at various different difficulties, at various different paces and with various different people means that the one common denominator is you get to train the same system of offense a ton and build out what's called your world model of jiu-jitsu. How does three-dimensional space work with my limbs and another opponent's? What are the architectures that blend together that allow me to exploit the situation? There's no better way of doing that than doing that, which is a huge nod to the ecological constraints-based approach because what I just described is a huge, like that's ecological training. But at the same time, you're still employing known moves and every now and again going back to drilling to optimize it. For example, Josh tells me, hey, pull the lapel across to get rid of their elbow in a pass. I might not see Josh for another three or four days, but I come to open mat, I try it on everyone. I try that move on everyone. I drill it in my free time and then that extra buffers up the neural network so that next time I do it against Josh in our sort of like private live rolling, I'm slicker with it. And so it combines ecological training, it combines live training, and it combines elements of drilling to make sure that you're running the scenario fundamentally live at each time, but not psychotic 100% live, 20% live, 40%, 60, 80, all the way through. You're seeing what kind of problems you're getting into and you're debugging the problems. Josh has like 10 different awesome ways of debugging problems and correcting them. I'm out of my league for how to do that. That's just kind of the general idea of why offense matters, why defense is general and I don't think you should overindex on training defense. Josh, we've had guys in the gym before, right, who are really good at defending everything, but like the best roll with them is just no one scores anything. You score two points and you're like, thanks. Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like my issue with that is that like, so a lot of people say that white belts should only focus on defense and that kind of stuff. And then there's people that go beyond white belt that just naturally are very defensive players. And the problem is that if you have a room full of people that are training three times a week and they're training for, let's say, six rolls during open mat those three times a week, and you're a super defensive player, you're not really getting better at anything besides shelling up. And like it kind of denies both people an opportunity to work offensive stuff, takedowns, like there's a lot of jiu-jitsu, right? So there's like standing, top position, bottom position, pins, subs, whatever. And so if the game is just locked into these defensive shells for a minute, two minutes, three minutes during a roll, and that's a regular occurrence, those are two or three minutes that could have been spent exploring huge, maybe more important parts of jiu-jitsu that don't get explored because you're just locked into this defensive thing because you're trying so hard not to lose in a practice situation where it really doesn't matter if you lose or not. Speaker 2: Man, I got a lot of thoughts on that. I think that great points from both of you. I've talked about this on the podcast before. There's this weird paradox of defense where, I mean, yes, you need it, right? Because you will you will fall to the level of your defense. If you've got some massive gaping hole in your defense, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your jiu-jitsu is if someone finds that hole. But on the other hand, you have to be very careful not to let defense change from being a skill to a habit. Because if it gets to the point where you get so comfortable on defense that that's kind of the core of what you do, you really can't win a fight on defense. I mean, you can stall out a victory, you can stall out and prevent the other person from tapping you sooner, but ultimately at the end of the day, you can't win on defense. You can just slow down your loss. And this is a really important thing for people to understand. And a big hack, which you talked about, Mike, is at some point, you need to learn to go beyond just defending to defending with purpose. Making sure that you're not just defending and stalling, but that every defense that you do is done with the intent of getting you back on offense. The example that I bring up a lot is, I mean, if I am on bottom mount or whatever, and someone's trying to choke me, and I just shell up on the bottom and cover my neck, right? I mean, yeah, I might be able to slow you down and prevent you from choking me right away, but you're going to get me eventually. It's just a matter of how long. If I just sit there and I make no realistic attempt to improve my position and get back on offense, it's just a question of how long it's going to take you to beat me. So, at a certain point, and really this should happen earlier in your journey rather than later, you need to go beyond just I'm defending and slowing down my loss to every time I defend, it is with an attempt to get right back on offense. And you talked about this, Mike, about how sometimes you get told a little hack by your coach and you realize, oh, well, I don't have to just shell up and defend. There's something I can do where I can take this person's attack and switch a ru it and now I'm the one attacking them. And that's just such an important mindset to develop, which is to try to reclaim the pace and make sure that you're the one attacking, not just defending all the time. Speaker 4: Yeah, the goal in every single part of your jiu-jitsu is end up in dominant position and begin sequence of submissions. That's always the goal. You always play to win, you always play to submit, and you always want wherever you are in your game to circle back through that. So, one important thing that I learned from Josh on a practical perspective is once you build out a dependable sequence for yourself, a game plan, it's really important to be able to basically from every position someone could put you in, let's say you got taken down, not part of the plan. You got mounted, not part of the plan. And they're working on getting one of your arms loose. What is the pathway, maybe several, from that position to not neutral, not to get out of it. That is never discussed. To your dominant offensive posture. That's a big deal because, for example, let's say that you are stuck in a scramble and someone mounts you and then you kind of push them off and then it's back to both people on their feet scrambling. Okay, well you're neutral again, right? The guy scored like, I don't know, eight points depending on the federation. The better thing is as you come back up, let's say you got free from mount somehow, you're about to go back to standing. Right as you're rising, you pop up his elbow, dip down, single leg. Right off the rise. Because you're not the goal isn't to get some catch some breath and go to neutral. The goal is to get right back into your game plan. If you're playing jiu-jitsu against someone who no matter where you put them, they're like like a cat, you throw it away, you know, you throw it out of the Burj Khalifa and Speaker 2: What are you doing with cats? Holy smokes. Speaker 4: It turns out that's too high and the cat dies, but no, you know, you throw it off whatever second story window and he lands on his feet. It turns out like if you are as an opponent to someone else in jiu-jitsu, any place in the matrix of jiu-jitsu that you happen to find yourself in, you know a dependable path back to offense. That's just annoying to roll with you. In the best possible way, that you're always threaded back to getting back on offense. And if you happen to catch one step ahead of someone on offense, well remember we talked about, you're very good at all of your positions already. And you're very good at transitions. And what I we can call like shooting at speed. Like you are as you are moving from into one position, you're already setting up to move into the next one. And as you move into your dominant position, let's say it's a back take, you're already going for that cross arm hold so you can get your your naked choke across. It's not like boom, seat belts and then I wait for a while. It all happens at speed. If you let a person with that toolkit out of a defensive position they were in, it's not just like, you guys know that feeling when you beat the shit out of someone on on bottom for a while, you're tired, they're tired, you go back to neutral, you kind of push and pull a little bit. It's sort of a bitch. Here we go. If you can avoid that part entirely and as soon as you're out, you go into offense, it demoralizes people. It confuses people and then you're back to that slick game. There is a possibility you can be very good at jiu-jitsu if you just know a bunch of moves, if you're athletic, then you're unpredictable. At least that's good. Like you can have a triangle game, an arm bar game, you can have a bunch of stuff and you're pretty good. But the real big reason why that doesn't work is because you can't get well trained enough in any of those to be amazingly good. And every offense suffers from that roughly three-to-one paradigm of defensive advantage. If you want to arm bar me, it's going to be very difficult to do. Even if we've trained at the same, if I've trained defense as much as you've trained offense, and if arm bar is one of your five or 10 go-to submissions, I've probably defended it at least as much as you've tried it. I have a three-to-one advantage all things being equal. You're probably not going to arm bar me. But if you're an arm bar specialist, then you are so good at that position. Now it might be 3.5 to 3. I have the defensive advantage, but you have a superlative advantage on offense and just because you've trained it so goddamn much against everyone. And if someone's like, hey, do a triangle, you're like, I don't fucking really know. I know how to do one, but I'm not submitting anyone with a triangle. But my arm bar setup is so goddamn slick. It's that sharp blade and it goes through all defenses much more likely. That's what wins matches. And I know like it's a little boring maybe for folks or a little like uninspiring to know that like really good competitors just really focus on like one or two or one, two, three game system and really just run that over and over. Some people like to do a lot of different stuff in jiu-jitsu. Josh, you get you know the types that are always trying to learn like the move of the month or something like that and every eight weeks they're like, it's fun, fast, I'm fascinated with, you know, spider guard. I'm going to work on that for a while. That's awesome. I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum. But if you want to be the best competitor you can be in the next six months, in the next year, it really good idea to clamp your game down and just run that system at every speed, against everybody, get as much feedback as you can, and get what works, what doesn't, how do you fix it. And then at the end of that, if someone even lets you start your game, it's almost over from from day one. Like Josh told me before, it was like, jiu-jitsu, if you stay one step ahead of your opponent, it ends in a submission almost always because they're always one step behind. And you didn't push your hand in to defend the choke and that's it. The guy got you. So, that's kind of to me the compelling mindset behind all of this. Speaker 2: Josh, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, I'm inclined to agree completely. I mean, jiu-jitsu is not unique to this, right? If you look at other martial arts like judo, they specifically teach people to specialize and kind of build a game plan that is customized to them. This is so contrary to I think the way that beginners think of jiu-jitsu. They just and again, like you said, it's fun. So people get really obsessive about trying to get as much stuff as possible and knowing more things, whereas often it's more important to be better at certain things, right? You don't have to be great at everything, as long as you can take the game to the place where you can make them play against your one thing that you're really good at. Josh, I would love to know your thoughts on that. Like how do you balance the enthusiasm with trying to learn everything versus the reality that sometimes at the end of the day, you're going to wind up focusing on a few things. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think it it again, it goes back to the person that I'm coaching because, you know, again, most of my students are recreational jiu-jitsu practitioners, which means they're in it for fun, they're in it for exercise. And like they definitely want to get better at jiu-jitsu because almost everybody has more fun being good at jiu-jitsu than they do not being good at jiu-jitsu. And so there is that component to it, but the most important thing is that if they're not motivated and they're not having fun, they're not going to train. And if they're not training, nobody gets better at jiu-jitsu. So, if they're having fun exploring the entire landscape of jiu-jitsu and they want to do spider guard one month and lasso and berimbolo and pressure passing and Gordon Ryan's arm triangle and, you know, whatever, then I'll encourage that, but what I'll try to encourage them to do with that is break those things into four to six week long projects that they work on. So that way, it kind of fits it gives them a chance to like, they're not doing something completely different every single day and not seeing any kind of results, but they're spending, you know, four to six weeks or 30, 60, 90 days, however you want to break it up, doing a specific thing that they then explore in an organized way so that they can really sink their teeth into it and build some skill and get some enjoyment out of it. And then when they start running out of enthusiasm for that thing, then, you know, move on to something else. And I might help guide them in a direction in a new direction to go in with that. But it's just a matter of keeping their enthusiasm high, keeping them enjoying training and having a good time. And then making sure that there's a balance between digging deep and scratching past the surface on something you're interested in, but also making sure that that there's also some attention paid to like jiu-jitsu that is going to get them improving on the mat too because that's part of the enjoyment of it. Does that kind of make sense? Speaker 2: Yes, yes. Speaker 4: I have something to add on to that really quick. So, two things to say. Thing one is as a lower belt, it is a good idea to inject more random variation into your training. What Josh said, four to six week phases of different positions, different moves, different options, different games. That is absolutely indispensable for folks who are beginning because you don't really know what you're going to be either liking or what you're going to be good at until you've tried a bunch of stuff. You can have guesses, but your guesses don't mean shit until you test them in the real world. I used to tell people embarrassingly as a white belt that I was a top player. And I remember once I said that and then Dr. Jen Case, my first jiu-jitsu instructor, like it was actually a professor, I was talking about this in a sports science context in one of my classes and she was like sitting in the class and she was like, no, you're not. I'm like, oh fuck, that's embarrassing. I didn't know enough to say if I was a top player or not. And then I started working on my half guard a little bit, then I met Josh. I just go to half guard immediately in gi now. I love that place. I cook my best meals from fucking half guard. It's amazing. It's like a it's like a smorgasbord of options. And so I end up on the top a lot, but I start from bottom. Speaker 2: I've seen what you eat, Mike. Speaker 4: Yes, it's not very impressive. Like, you know, like someone tips over a thing of oats and I just lick it off the ground. Speaker 2: Oats and uh and grilled chicken. Speaker 4: Oh, hey, all right, that's fancy. I was going to say like way way clumped up whey protein powder. So, it's really good for people especially in the beginnings of their careers and periodically, you know, like after a tournament or a cycle of tournaments, to really just like switch it up. To feed yourself more overall training and awareness and good defense for these things. And to see like, what can you pick from here that you like? The second part is this. You can have as more advanced competitor that can't just train randomly all the time. You can have your cake and eat it too for boredom and efficacy. And here's how. You have a two to three, let's call it for this example, three levels of game. And this I learned from Josh. It's fucking brilliant. A game is what you go to when you have to fight a gorilla and for the life of your girlfriend or something. Your number one go-to move at every single position, your best percentage move, the one you're slickest with, the one you beat the most black belts with, that whole thing. Your B game, your second tier game is something you're very good at, but maybe you haven't worked on it as much as your A game. Maybe it doesn't suit your body as much. Maybe it's a thing where it's just a less dominant position and and for whatever reason it's just not quite as good, but very good. And then there's your C game. Your C game works, right? But maybe if your A game will get you stalemated against the average black belt and your B game gets you stalemated against a good purple, not so great brown belt. Your C game will stalemate you against a good blue belt. Anyone above that, they'll crack the code because you're just not that good at it. So here's the thing. You don't ever just want one game from every position. Then you become highly predictable and then opponents can train for you really well because they're like, well, this asshole's just going to do the same fucking move he does every time. I'm just going to do a three-week workup of defense and remember defense is inherently easier than offense. And then all of a sudden, you're like really good at stopping that guy's game. Or fuck even defending against it, you're going to pretend like you're engaging, juke the guy and go for something else because you're like, I know exactly where he's going to be in this sequence of events because he only has one game. But if you have three games, as soon as you get bored training your A game, you're just like, fuck it, fuck this. You train your B game for a while, weeks and weeks, you focus on B game. You have options in training with other people, you go to your B options. You guys know that that that time in the roll where you just want to fucking win, but like, you know, I need to train my B game. So I'm going to fucking throw it in and see what happens. And then you can go, that gets boring, you go mostly to your C game. That gets boring, you mix all three. If you rotate through those games, at the end of six months and a year and longer, you're actually really good at all of them. And you have a couple of A/B games. All of them are good. And you manage to have a lot of variation, so you don't get bored to tears and you become quite unpredictable. So you have three powerful weapons, two or three at every single position and no one really knows which one is coming. And then you can also create dilemmas for people. This is something I learned really well from Dr. Jen Case, my original jiu-jitsu coach. She's won a crapton of stuff in IBJJF. You especially in positions where there's a submission pending, you want to create dilemma. Dilemma is where you have no good solutions. There's just only hierarchical bad solutions. Most of it's you're going to get fucked, it's just a matter of how. So if you're trying to extend someone out for the arm bar and they're turning away from it, you give them a kimura. If they turn back open, you give them an Americana. If they try to escape that by stretching out, you give the arm bar again. It's just every single it's predictable. You know where they're going to go before they do and you're ready to exploit that next position. If you have that multi-layered game, you solve the variation problem and you solve the dilemma problem for yourself. For them, it's just a terrible thing because it seems to be like, you know where they're going to be and you know exactly what elements to attack with at all times. That I think is kind of tip of the spear of my understanding of jiu-jitsu anyway. Speaker 2: Yeah, Mike, I agree with that completely. And this is something where, you know, people often say like, if you're a black belt, how can you get any value out of training with a white or a blue belt? And my answer is, I get tons of value out of training with white or blue belts. Often more value than black belts because that's the perfect time to deploy your B game or your C game. That's where you try new things because you've got a shot at actually maybe getting to that position and getting to that technique and making it work. If I'm sparring against a good black belt, there is zero chance I'm going to be able to pull out my C game and make anything happen. So, I actually love sparring with the junior belts because that is the best time to get creative, go outside of my comfort zone and expand the stuff that I'm working on. Josh, I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So this is great. So I think this has two parts to it. So definitely like when you're training with, for example, if I'm a black belt and I'm training with a blue belt, like there are positions where that blue belt is also a black belt. So, for example, if the blue belt is never done done any kind of grappling before and they're just doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu for the first time and that's their first sport, then they might need to get deeper into the game, like they might need to get chest to chest on top of me with a double underhooks on top of half guard and one knee free, and then I have to fight out of that position. And in that moment, their chances of passing my guard to the mount are the same as what a black belt would present if they were on top of me. Or if they have a rear naked choke locked in, uh palm to palm, but it's not fully connected to the bicep, then in that moment, their level of challenge is that of a black belt. So there's ways to use your less experienced training partners to sort of level the playing field and level your experience so that you both can get good work out of it and that, you know, it's not just you kind of steamrolling them, but they're the same level as you in those moments. And I think another the second part of that is that you have to have a gym culture that fosters something like that. Because like the gym culture is like the soil that all these plants are growing in and some plants are more well developed than other plants and they all kind of work together in this big system. And if you have a garden where a black belt is training with a blue belt and the black belt lets the blue belt into the game and the blue belt triangle them and then they go post it on Instagram about it like, yo, fuck that black belt. I tapped his ass. Like, then that creates a bad environment and that makes the black belt get irritated and then only play A game stuff with that blue belt. And so then the black belt's never going to have a chance to develop new stuff by opening the game to the blue belt where they can both get good training. And the same thing happens with, you know, between black belts. It's not a belt thing, but it's a it's an attitude in the gym thing and it's a culture of learning thing. So, if you have a culture where, for example, yesterday when I was training, I was focusing on defense and quickly escaping from bad positions. And I have some of my white belts watching me roll with people that are blue and purple and brown belts and they're sitting on top of me in side control. And I know that the white belt's looking at me and they're seeing what's happening. They're not thinking, oh man, Josh owns the school, but that blue belt's on top of him in side control. He must suck. I'm going to go sign up somewhere else. Like that's not part of our culture. They're looking and seeing, okay, Josh is on bottom of side control. He just taught these side control escapes that we did in class earlier. Let me see if he can pull this off in this moment by doing what he taught in class or let me see what he does a little differently than what I was doing. So there's a problem-solving culture in my school and not a culture of like who beats who. And that makes it so that everybody can explore those positions with people of different experience levels without getting caught up in the ego stuff that shuts all that down. Does that make sense? Speaker 2: 100%, man. Now, something I want to ask you, Josh. I mean, you talked a lot about having a 30, 60, 90-day plan, kind of having projects for learning jiu-jitsu. I really love that approach. So, of course, I got to ask, has anyone made an instructional on this that people could maybe buy on BJJ Fanatics if they wanted to hear more about this? Have you heard of such a thing? Speaker 3: Well, Steve, it's funny you should mention that because because yeah, we have uh an instructional called 90-Day BJJ and it's on bjjfanatics.com and I think it's 79, it's like 80 bucks, but it's, you know, on daily deals all the time. And I'm getting good reviews. People seem to like it a lot and it's just basically an instructional on how to take a project that you want to work on, could be anything, and then how to structure it over the course of 30, 60 or 90 days and develop different parts of that project so that not only do you know more about that subject, but you're also training to become more skillful in that thing at the same time. Speaker 2: Amazing, amazing. Now, Mike, for you, man, I mean, I'm guessing most people are probably familiar with you, but if people wanted to check out arguably one of the best science channels on YouTube, hosted by an amazing black belt. If people wanted to hear of such a thing, where could they find that? Speaker 4: I don't know about amazing black belt, but um guy who got a charity celebrity belt from Josh Vogel, I can recommend at least one. Speaker 2: You earned that, Mike. Get out of here with that noise. Speaker 4: I earned every part of that belt. Speaker 2: Like you you earned the best celebrity black belt I've ever met. Speaker 4: Oh my god. What a treat. Renaissance Periodization, RP Strength on YouTube. And I am working on some jiu-jitsu stuff within the year probably. We'll have some stuff for folks to read and videos for people to hear in collaboration with Josh and a few other folks that is just going to be like a really good guide for folks that like to think about their shit, just to have a big framework of what's going on and be able to make better decisions about becoming better at jiu-jitsu. Speaker 2: Amazing. Speaker 3: Steve, is it okay if I plug something that Mike made a while back that I think people would like? Speaker 2: Absolutely. Plug away. Speaker 3: So, this is something I always tell people about this, Mike, and nobody ever listens to me. People have to go on RP Plus and look at your arguing to convince series. And or if they don't want to go on RP Plus, they're you have a I guess like a two-hour video on uh YouTube, which is open to the public on arguing to convince. I think it's one of the best things that I've ever seen you do and I it's changed the way that I see discussion online between people who are disagreeing about something, how they should approach discussion so that they can both work towards finding truth together instead of just like battering ram smashing each other in the head. So that's something I would recommend arguing to convince by Mike Israetel on either YouTube or his RP Plus site. They're both fantastic. Speaker 2: Well, you know what I will do? I will put links to all of that in the show notes and I will ask people, if you have not checked it out, please do. Hit up the show notes. One tap to get access to all of that stuff. If Josh and Mike say it's good, then it's good and you need to listen. Also check out our stuff. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. Podcast is free, um our mini concept breakdown episodes are free, newsletters free. BJJ Mental Models Premium is not, but it is worth your time. Please do check that out if you haven't already. I will save the whole pitch today just to save everyone's time. But again, link in the show notes. I always suggest that, you know, if people are listening to these conversations, I know people get value out of this, but if you really want to actually dig deep into someone's thought process, the best way to do that is to actually see their work. So, I always say when you listen to a podcast episode, don't let it be a transitory thing. Do check out this material. It is there and available to you and you'll probably get a ton out of it. So, links in the show notes. Mike, Josh, thank you so much for coming by as always. Speaker 3: Thank you for having us. Speaker 2: Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it, buddy. Most welcome and thank you to the listeners as well. We will talk to you next time. See you then.