Ep. 323: Collaborative Camps, feat. Josh "Kintanon" Wentworth & Jesse Walker

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 Jijitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jijitsu, 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 323. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jijitsu approach. And today, we're talking about a collaborative topic, which is great because I've got a collaborative panel here. I got two guests. First, from Georgia, I've got Josh Kintanon Wentworth. How's it going, buddy? Speaker 3: It's going pretty good. For people that are keeping track, I had elbow surgery back around December 13th, and I can now straighten my arm for the first time in five years, and it's really, you don't know what you're missing until you can no longer actually like move your elbow properly, and then you get it's crazy. So, feeling pretty good. It's been been good, been crazy. We had the mental models camp back in December. Things are going well, New Year's treating me well. Things are going pretty good. Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah, I saw your arm. It's crazy. They like took a a nerve and they moved it and they regrafted it to another place. I didn't even know you could do that. Speaker 3: So, yeah, so this apparently, this is a relatively new thing that they've just started doing in the last few years. And because my nerve conduction, one of the numbers that you're supposed to have at like a six or something, six or higher, mine was at actual zero. So we're like, if we do this and fix it, it's going to take so long for this nerve to recover that by the time that happens, the muscles in your hand will just be completely dead and they'll never come back. So we have this thing we can do that is still like, you know, it's not that common. We're going to take this nerve in your wrist and we're going to splice it over into the nerve that feeds these muscles, like splice it into these muscles, and you'll get the muscles back immediately, but it will feel really weird. And it does feel really weird, but like immediately I started to have muscle function and control and strength in my hand again. So, 10 out of 10, would recommend. I'm going to have similar surgery on the other elbow later this year. It's not as bad, so that one should just be quick and easy, scrape a bunch of gravel out and go. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Modern medicine. Well, guest number two here, we've got from Louisville, Kentucky, from Rough Hands BJJ, friend of the show, been on here before. We've got Mr. Jesse Walker. Jesse, how's it going, sir? Speaker 4: Hey, it's going great. I have not had any elbow surgery, although I'm probably due for some surgery of some sort, but no, things are good here in Kentucky. The weather's, I think it's snowing here right now, maybe. So it's it's definitely winter. Speaker 2: Not having any surgery. What are you doing, man? You're missing out. That's what all the cool kids are doing. Speaker 4: It seems to be. I need to get on the waiting list for something. Speaker 2: Well, the reason we have assembled this particular group of people is because as Josh mentioned, about a month ago, we had our annual BJJ Mental Models camp down at Josh's place, Apex MMA in Covington, Georgia. And one of the things that we've kind of developed over the past few years as we've started these camps is kind of an alternate approach, I guess, to the way that most people do seminars. I mean, credit where it's due, Josh, this was mostly your idea and your doing, but it was kind of a movement away from, I guess, this traditional person at the head of the class seminar, right? I mean, if anyone here has been to a Jijitsu seminar, probably what you have experienced is some name athlete or name competitor was kind of the marquee guest, right? And they basically run the whole show, and they are very much doing one-way communication, where they're kind of at the front of the class and they're talking to everyone, sort of like it's, I guess, a regular Jijitsu class, right? That I would say is probably the way that most seminars are run. That is the way that every seminar that I have been to has been run. And I think the challenge, I've been very critical of this on the past, is if you rely too much on that structure, it can be very hard to give personalized attention to everyone in the room. And often the seminar host feels obligated to kind of just show cool flashy stuff. Even if it's not what's going to help people most in the room, often they feel like, oh, I got to show something that's going to dazzle these people. So the end result is a lot of the seminars that you wind up going to are basically some degree of low-key celebrity meet and greet. You know, you get to meet one of your Jijitsu heroes, they show you a few techniques. You might get something out of it, but it's really not fundamentally that different from if you just watched an instructional or attended a class, right? Speaker 3: And to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, I'm this isn't a a sort of a rant against that kind of seminar. I would do those, like if Emily Kwok was just coming to Atlanta to do a seminar, and I could just go be in the seminar while Emily taught. I didn't care if I learned anything or not, right? I'm doing it for a specific reason, which is to interact with this cool Jijitsu person, and that's one of the great things about our sport too, is that these world champion people, these icons of our sport, you do have the opportunity to do that. This is not a saying those things are bad, just so we're clear on that. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I still attend those all the time. I think they have tremendous value, but I think that because often those that model can be very expensive to run, what winds up happening is you attract a Jijitsu A-lister. Of course, you have to pay them well, right? And if you don't have a facility, you have to pay for that as well. And then the end result is, in order to make it profitable, you have to basically stuff that room with as many humans as you can. And and the net result, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I've been to seminars with like 100 people there. And I although it's cool to get a photo with someone that I really think is cool, at the end of the day, in terms of how did it help my Jijitsu, I probably could have got the same just watching YouTube highlights, right? So, it varies. Now, I want to point out, like you said, not all seminars are like that. I have been to really good seminars by coaches who are much more deliberative and attentive, and they do a really good job of working within that model and teaching people under that model. The problem is though that a lot of the time as a customer, you don't know what kind of seminar you're getting into until you've already paid and you showed up, right? Sometimes you go and you're with a coach who does a great job, but sometimes you don't. I mean, I remember one time, I attended a Carlos Gracie Jr. seminar, and we had like 30 plus minutes for Q&A at the end. And we sit down for Q&A and the first thing Carlos Gracie Jr. says is, the only my only rule is I don't want any questions about Jijitsu. Speaker 3: Perfect. Speaker 2: Like, we all fucking paid you to come here to like, what did you what do you think we were going to ask you about? You know, do you think we care about your grocery list? I don't understand. Turns out what he wanted was to talk about his family, big surprise, right? But but the point is, you don't know what you're getting into with a lot of seminars until you attend. And so I'd maybe turn it over to you guys to talk about this different approach that we've tried and how you feel, whether, you know, first of all, what it is, but also do we feel like it's works well? Do we feel like it has limitations? Are there things that we should do differently? Maybe Josh, if you want to kick this off because you were the guy who organized it. Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, well, one of the reasons that I wanted to do that was the same reason that I teach my gym the way I do with the reverse classroom and stuff is to try to be as like personalized as possible and give people the most individual value. And the same sort of thing about the camps that I've been to is that they really are just that that same seminar format that you were just talking about, which is just a rip of the regular standard classroom format. They just blow it up into multiple days of the same thing. And what that leads to and has led to when I've attended these things, is you just get overwhelmed by the amount of information that's being given to you that isn't attached to really anything that you do. So there's not like a convenient reference point most of the time where you're like, okay, each of these things that we're learning is attached to something I already know, so it's a little easier to build that connection and retain that information. So, I would go to seminars or camps or events or something, and I would spend hours and hours and hours getting deluged with information, and I would retain like one thing. And I was like, okay, we can probably manage to get people to retain more than one thing. So let's start trying things. And so, I wanted to bring in the sort of the collaborative aspect of my reverse classroom stuff to this camp and see how it worked. Really just trial it with a group of people that weren't used to training that way, and see what we could get out of it in terms of making it more individual. And I will tell you this, we definitely learned a lot about how to structure this that we will be able to implement much better in the next camp. And I have actually taken a lot of that collaborative format that we did with the fix my game sessions, and I've mapped it into my competition class for the gym, and that's how they train now. So, yeah, so it's it's just a way we're trying to get out of the lecture format where one person stands at the front of the room and talks a bunch, and then people just try to mimic them with no regard for whether what we're looking at has anything to do with their Jijitsu or not. We want to get feedback from the audience and try to focus our work around collaborating with each other as well. Because if I'm in a room and I'm a black belt and I'm 140 pounds and I have a specific game, I can teach a lot of stuff, but like Jesse is a very different build from me. His Jijitsu is very different. A lot of the answers that I'm going to give, a lot of fancy stuff that I do, a lot of cool things are going to be fucking useless to him. That's the same complaint we've always had about the regular class structure. So why would we just do more and bigger of that in these camps? So we're going to fix that. The idea is like, put Jesse in charge of a group of people that are approximately his body type, and then let them kind of work and figure out with each person's problems. How does their game work? Where are they running into sticking points and stuff? What's going on? And try to to draw from the resources in the room a little better than just having one person talk to everybody. Again, I took no notes for this one because I'm a terrible guest this time. So hopefully that was mostly answering that question. Speaker 2: No, I I think it absolutely did. Jesse, what are your thoughts on this kind of approach, right? The the pros and cons of the I guess what you would call the traditional camp or seminar approach versus a more collaborative, kind of group-based approach where everyone is focused on kind of working on their specific area. Speaker 4: So, when I attended the camp my first time in Lansing, Michigan last year, while it was in a way still kind of a more traditional format, I think the other really wonderful thing that at least this group of coaches in this environment, what they were able to deliver was although they were each talking about individual things and techniques and this that and the other, I think what emerged for everybody was this reinforcement of these concepts and principles that we talk about all the time that although I might have been showing something X and Josh could have been showing something Y, the people in the room were able to connect the dots between them and like, oh, well, they're both talking about, you know, frames or the three-joint principle or, you know, a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the pod all the time and listen about, really emerged from that environment. So, even in that traditional, semi-traditional setting, I think with adding a camp format to it, there being multiple thinkers in the room, I think a lot of that stuff was able to emerge and I think this last camp at Apex really magnified and kind of drilled down on that even more, allowing us to do things like, well, let's look at body type, size, and how that kind of shapes our game. And then I thought the other thing that was really valuable is we also did it, I don't know if we call it technique-based, but let's get a group over here talking about head and arm strangles and let's get a group over here talking about foot locks. You know, I thought all of that was really valuable in having that group kind of collaborative setting. You know, I think it works really well. Speaker 2: I would be inclined to agree. Just to maybe give people kind of an on-the-ground look at how this would actually work. So, let's talk about a traditional, I guess you could call it a one-to-many camp or seminar, where there is one or maybe a smaller group of instructors, and they're basically just broadcasting information to the people in the room. Like we said, those kinds of seminars tend to be not too different from just attending a regular class, because the communication style that you use when you are a coach and you've got a room of a whole bunch of people that you don't know, it's going to be very presentation-based. You just don't have a lot of time to go back and forth and help people troubleshoot stuff. So, it's kind of a roll of the dice from the attendee's perspective. You might learn something super cool, but you might go there and find out that the stuff that you're being taught is just either completely inapplicable to your game or just something that doesn't jive with you for some other reason. I mean, I've been to seminars where, you know, the person's shown 11 techniques and I thought, I don't think I'm going to use any of these because it's just not my kind of Jijitsu. So, what we did differently was to take a more collaborative approach. So, instead of having one coach to many students, there's basically many coaches to many students. We've got kind of groups of students and we cluster them together. So, as Josh mentioned, what he did was broke people into groups of, let's say, three or four by and we tried a few different targets. We tried breaking them down by like experience level, by skill area, what they wanted to actually work on, by size, and just making sure that depending on their goals, there was a domain specialist, kind of a Josh, like you said, I love this, an SME, a subject matter expert in that group, who could provide that kind of guidance to help people. And the beautiful thing about that is it doesn't have to be a black belt, right? If you've got a purple belt who's amazing at Darce chokes, they could be such a subject matter expert. Speaker 3: Yeah, because I I really want to emphasize the utilizing non-black belts in this kind of environment is so important. Because, as I am fond of mentioning from the not this last camp, but the previous one, one of my largest and most effective takeaways technically was a change in my straight ankle lock that we got from a purple belt, right? Who had just been doing a deep dive on them and really had a good, like, he was able to deliver that because he had focused on it in a way the rest of us had not focused on it at the time, and he had great information. And dismissing that and being like, well, no, only the black belts are going to get to talk and teach is just like, that's just wasting so much expertise in a room that it just it is criminal. It's a detriment to everybody who's there if you're just throwing that expertise away. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that I love about this approach too is it lets people work on the things that will really get benefit for them, things that they really need. So, if you've got people, for instance, who are the smallest person at their gym, and they just can't find good training partners and they can't find good information about how to fight as a smaller person because everyone in their gym outweighs them by 100 pounds, and so the advice they're getting at home is just not really applicable for their body type, that can be a very frustrating experience. But you come to a camp like this and you can use every minute of your training clustered into a group with similar people working on similar problems with a domain expert who specializes in that problem. So, rather than going to a camp and collecting a bunch of techniques that may not ever be applicable to you, you get to spend all of that time working on something that you specifically chose as valuable, which I think, given how expensive it is for people to travel and get accommodations to these kinds of things, I think it's really important to make sure that they get their money's worth out of this. So, I really like this approach and also because, as I know we've talked about in the past, it gives us a chance to elevate the people in the room, rather than just throwing more of a spotlight on the one coach who probably doesn't really need that, right? It helps elevate those purple and brown belts and new black belts and maybe less known people who really have a lot of knowledge, but they just don't ever have a platform to show it. Jesse, what are your thoughts on this? Because for those who don't know, as of this recording, Jesse has a camp coming up in a few months in April at Rough Hands BJJ. Jesse, we might as well go ahead and promote that at the same time, but why don't you first, I mean, talk a bit about the camp that you're putting on and also what your thoughts are on this approach and kind of the pros and cons of this and what the experience was from the camp. How did you feel coming out of something like that? Speaker 4: Yeah, so a few questions there. Let me juggle through them. So, yes, we're going to be hosting the next camp here in April, and we're going to be trying to both take some of the learnings from the Apex camp and hopefully carry some of that over. But something else has happened kind of on the coaching side that I thought has been really interesting and we're going to try to embrace that some in April and it did it actually happened at Apex as well, which is kind of still kind of ahead of the class but more collaborative coaching. So, you know, sessions that are co-taught. And so, in April, I think I've got two and a half, maybe three sessions that I'm going to be co-teaching with other folks, but I'm not going to be doing an individual session. And I've done a lot of co-teaching and collaborative coaching in the past. It's one of my favorite ways to teach. And I think one of the most valuable things that people get out of it is seeing two people talk about the same topic, hopefully an expert-ish level, but seeing this demonstration of it's really easy to get in that mindset of there's only one way to do a thing and it's the way my coach tells me to do it, where this, you get to see, well, there's these two guys at the front of the room, they seem like they know what they're doing, but they're doing things in completely different ways. And talking about that and comparing and contrasting and again, seeing the principles and the concepts that emerge out of that and reinforcing this idea of that there's not just one way and there's not just one path and hopefully encouraging people to continue to explore, you know, their own paths as well as hopefully find something valuable out of the stuff that we're sharing. Speaker 2: Yeah, awesome. I mean, I like this approach a lot because it very much is similar to that reverse classroom approach where people choose their own area of study. And the one flip side of this, of course, is that it can feel messier in the moment. I mean, I Josh, one of the things that you said is like, man, it feels like it's kind of messy and unorganized, but I would say it's, I mean, it's that whole ecological thing, right? The the messiness is a feature, it's not a bug. And I think there's a benefit to that because I've seen a lot of seminars where a coach came in, they distributed their knowledge, right? They just went to the front of the class and they talked, and they left thinking, that was a perfectly fine seminar. I did a good job. But everyone in the room thought, man, that seminar sucked. And the coach has no idea because the conversation was completely one-way. So it never feels messy. And as a result, I think you can get a lot of false positives. Whereas if you make the students drive the training, so you get them to cluster into groups to work on something, you're going to constantly be finding weird mismatches and areas where things aren't quite working the way that you expected because the structure of the group is evolving on the fly. And so, I think that on one hand, it can feel messier, but most of the feedback that I got was people really preferred that method because the messiness allowed them to confront the parts of their game that they didn't expect they would ever get a chance to address in a seminar. You know, they came in thinking, I'm going to learn, I don't know, like Nogi Berimbolos or something. And what they actually wind up in is a small group setting where a coach is specifically teasing out for them, how can I fix your game specifically? And that's Josh, something that you mentioned too. You know, we started calling these camps fix my game camps, which I love. Like, how do I make this camp about you? How can we fix your game? Not how can I show you my 10 favorite techniques, but how can we figure out what you need to actually get better? Speaker 3: Yeah, and there is definitely a correct amount of chaos and messiness. If you watch like my regular classes, they're very chaotic. There's a lot of stuff going on. But this past one, I feel like there was some things that we could have cleaned up to make the messiness a little more like channeled and in the right order and things. That's which is just, whoops, we hadn't done that before. So we'll we'll fix that. But the chaos is indeed a feature, right? And I also wanted to to talk about Jesse mentioning the like co-teaching and and stuff. I as a coach, I love that because I get to hear and see how other coaches like use their language framing and what cues that they give their students for certain body configurations and stuff, which will make me a better communicator. Because sometimes you give somebody like 10 different analogies to frame something and like nine of them are meaningless, one of them clicks and they're like, oh, okay, and now it's great. So the more ways you have to explain those interactions, just the better you're going to be at finding the one that clicks the best for your student. And then seeing other coaches kind of show their approach to things, like how they get control of certain parts or what their finishing mechanics are for things. Even when it's not a finishing mechanic that I'm necessarily going to use, will show me, okay, if I have a student whose body type kind of maps to this and is doing this, I can direct them in towards this and it's going to that's going to be a thing that I can help them with now because I've seen how someone else who does this differently approaches it. So that really helped expand like some of my coaching view and make it easier for me to communicate with some of my students that I may not have been able to find a good communication path with before. And that was incredibly valuable to me for this past camp. Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. It may sound selfish, but I feel like the coaches extract just as much if not more value from these coaches, especially if you, you know, you're a black belt level and you're you're running your own school, being able to see this huge group of coaches that talk about things differently and reference things differently and connect things in their brain differently than maybe I think about it is incredibly valuable. Speaker 2: That is actually something that really stood out to me is when we do these camps, we tend to attract a high percentage of black belts, which makes it really easy to do this kind of collaborative approach because there's so much expertise in the room. It does, though, of course, like you said, Josh, it makes it a bit chaotic because you don't always know who's coming in with what expertise. For example, Paul Kinzia, right, black belt from Georgia showed up. He's a long-term friend of mine, but I actually never really knew what his area was. But once we found out, once we started talking about the things that he's good at, we put him in charge of teaching those, right? And it worked awesome. Everyone said they loved his sessions. And I agree though with Jesse that there's tremendous benefit to the coach too because you really have to kind of think on your toes. You've got a group of people looking for your help and it's constantly cycling out because you're doing all of these sessions. So, one group of people might need help with small person Jijitsu. The next group might need help with Lapel Guard or something, right? You don't know where it's going to land. And so, as a coach, I found this super helpful because you get a lot of really rapid feedback about whether what you're doing is working or not, because the evidence is right in front of you. And I think that the structure of a collaborative group makes it easier for coaches to get authentic feedback too. The challenge that I often have in a traditional structure is if I'm standing at the front of the room with a black belt on and I ask a group of 30 people, hey, was that a good class? Did I do a good job? I could do the shittiest job in the world and they are all going to say I was a genius, right? They're never going to tell me to my face that this was, oh yeah, you suck at this. But when you're in a collaborative group and you're sitting down in a little circle with three or four people and you just ask, hey, was that helpful? You're going to get way more valuable feedback. And often what I heard a lot was, yeah, Steve, that solves like 50% of my problem what you showed me, but this other thing is happening too. Like, yeah, you're showing me this great defense that works from half guard, but my problem is people keep passing over to mount there, what do I do from there? And that allows me to then kind of jump the next step forward, which is something you often struggle to do when you're in a bigger group. Speaker 3: So that phrase, yes, but, is what we're trying to create with all these interactions, right? I've given you some helpful information about this topic. Was that helpful? Yes, but, because that but will get you to the next stage of what they're trying to learn or tell you something that what you showed them like missed out on or a detail you left out or something. So the more of those yes, buts we can create, the more progress everybody makes, both in terms of like the students learning things and developing it and absorbing the techniques, and the instructors learning how to frame what they're teaching and anticipate issues that are going to come up, so that we all just get better at everything we're doing there, the more of those yes, buts we can create. And that's like, that's exactly what we're looking for. Speaker 2: Yeah, the big thing that I heard a lot in the camp was that people, you know, they would come in with a problem and then it's like an onion, right? Every time you start asking them about their problem and you start giving them one level of solution, then you realize there were deeper levels to this problem that they hadn't enunciated. And unless you really actually sit down and unpack and and help people, I really felt like I as a coach was able to provide more value to people than in a traditional structure. Maybe it's just because I was getting better feedback, but I also felt like I as a coach was having to work harder and be more on my feet because I had to adjust everything to this constant rotation of people who all have different goals. And I think again, that makes that makes you a better coach if you have to go through that process. If you're always just at the front of the class talking to a room, it's easy to never really get that true feedback about how well are you really doing. Whereas if you can break things down into smaller groups, it's easier to, you know, it changes the social dynamic. It's easier to be critical of someone in a group of like three people, four people, than it is in a group of 50 people. Right? No one wants to tell someone they could have done better when there's an audience of 50 people sitting there watching. So, I found that useful. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's also like when you're in those small groups, if you and your partner had a problem and kind of discussed it, and then you come back to the small group, you and your partner make up a significant percentage of that group. So you feel supported in your delivering of this criticism because it was me and my partner. We both kind of ran into this, we've discussed this. It's a real thing. It's reasonable for us who represent 30% of the people in this group to bring that up. Whereas if you're just like one person in a sea of like 60 people, speaking up is very difficult. Like saying, like bringing that spotlight of all 60 of those people onto yourself as you like say something critical to this black belt who's at the front of the room, that's hard. It's way easier, just way easier emotionally for you to bring yourself to the attention of a group of like six people. And I think that's part of what got us a lot of valuable feedback out of that format was just how more emotionally available giving criticism and asking questions was in those formats. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would agree completely. Jesse, I have a question for you because you've got a camp coming up. What do you think you should do or maybe don't have a solid answer on this, but what are you thinking of doing, I guess, to plan for that kind of structure? Because the way that you plan for and coordinate something like this is much different from the way that you plan and coordinate a traditional seminar. So like I took a look at, you know, on the roster of black belts that you've got coming to this camp. It's a massive, very impressive list of people coming in. And so there's going to be a lot of variables to juggle. How do you plan something like this if you're planning to take a more collaborative approach? What could you as the coach or organizer do to kind of make the experience smoother when things hit the ground? Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's a great question. So, you know, some of that is still a little bit in flux. We have the benefit of actually having two, maybe three training floors. So, we're looking at kind of creating separate tracks where people have choices, you know, they can go to a collaborative session about pressure and base with our friendly old bastard, or they could come in and watch me and Rich Sabb talk about Nogi stand-up work. So, you know, I think we're going to give people some different options and some different pathings. But the other thing that I want to and I feel like it really happened organically at Apex and it may just at the last camp and it may just been the nature of the people, but I like, you know, our school to feel this way anyway, but I want to take a very egalitarian approach to, you know, all the attendees and coaches in that this isn't just about a showcase of all these black belts, but we did try to cram this place with so much expertise that we want everybody to really take some ownership in helping extract that and share it in the most productive ways possible. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Josh, what are your thoughts on someone who's done this camp now a few times? Do you have any suggestions on how to organize such a thing or is this maybe an area where more organization works to your detriment? Speaker 3: So, I think that we're going to want to effectively just shotgun some different formats and stuff. So, I'm very interested in finding out from Jesse how his setup of the format works and how the collaboration works and whether because like one of the things that is a risk if you set up like four or five different tracks is for whatever reason, 98% of the people choose two tracks and you've got like four or five black belts that are all standing around like, I guess nobody wants to do anything with me. So you like, there's a risk there, right? So like, is that is it okay to give the attendees that much freedom? Uh-oh. Or do we need to do something else? So, one of the things that I intend to do for the next Apex camp, which is going to be a fully fix my game collaborative format is all of the attendees who are purple belt and up, I'm going to ask them to list three things that they consider themselves to be subject matter experts at. Just three things. If I gave you a handful of white and blue belts, give me three things that you think you could make them good at, right? And I'm going to use that to put together kind of how we structure and frame our different group breakout sessions and stuff like that and see how that works. We're also going to change the order a little bit next time just because I didn't realize that there were so many people that when I said, what is your game, did not have any idea what I was talking about. So, we'll fix that. But I think that that is again, like we're going to see some different chaotic looks at how best to get collaboration, both amongst the coaches, between the coaches and the attendees, and amongst the attendees. And I don't want to like suggest anything to Jesse about how he should put it together because I want to see what his mind comes up with, like what cool what results do we get out of that, so that when we can take that in its pure unaltered format and then look at it collaboratively, hey, about how to do the next one, right? Like what good things happened out of Jesse's format, what good things happened out of my format, how can we make all those good things happen together? What bad things happened out of Jesse's format, what bad things happened out of my format, how can we make none of those bad things happen? So, very excited for that. Speaker 4: That's exactly right. Yeah. Speaker 2: Well, let's expand on what you just said there because you're right. One of the things that we had planned, for those who don't know, it was a five-day camp, and on the last day, we wanted to have a, you know, basically a build your game plan session. And our thought was, you know, that's as good a spot as any to put this. We'd already booked a bunch of other stuff we were going to do in the early days. But once we started running this thing, we realized as we got to about day three or four, we had a lot of people asking us, like, what even is a game? And I realized that that is something that maybe we as more experienced people take for granted. And I probably shouldn't have because I actually get this question every once in a while from listeners to BJJ Mental Models who say, Steve, you're always talking about this game. What game is it? Is it Elden Ring? What game are we talking about here, right? And I guess I realized that if you're not in, you know, deep in the Jijitsu culture, or if you're at a gym where they actually don't explain this stuff to you, which apparently is quite common. Speaker 3: Well, I tried to think back like, okay, well, when did somebody, like, when was the idea of a game first explained to me as like how to and I couldn't, like, there was no point with when any of my instructors actually like laid that out to me. It was just sort of like maybe osmosis through Reddit as somebody else used that term and it was like, okay, that's what that is, where it came from the broader Jijitsu community. None of my coaches ever approached it that way with me or ever really mentioned. And I realized like, oh, that is not a thing that is as common as I thought it was. Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly. And it's it's one of those things where um, it's so obvious that maybe it doesn't get defined. And we have to be very careful of falling into those traps where something just seems so obvious that we never bothered to define it. I mean, you know, our friend Rob Bernacki talks about this a lot where, you know, everyone in Jijitsu will talk about base and how you have to have base. But most black belts, if you actually sat them down and said, explain to me what that means. You're going to get like 100 different explanations for what base is because no one ever explained it. We had to intuit it because people thought it was so obvious. And I think maybe when we talk about game planning and building a game, we also don't explain these things. And the interesting thing is, it's not just day one white belts. I mean, we had a lot of, you know, people getting close to purple belts who just weren't, you know, they'd heard the term, but they weren't really sure exactly what it meant. And this raises interesting questions about how do you cater to all of the levels in the room? I would say that one of the benefits of a collaborative group structure like ours is that it makes it easier to cater to multiple levels in the room, but at the same time, I think what we realize now is even in that situation, you need to set a common foundation and like a common framework at the beginning of the camp that everyone can then build on top of. And a good one, I think, which we'll maybe do next time is, what is a game? Like what the what the fuck is this thing? How do you build a strategy in Jijitsu? Speaker 3: Yeah, like I've already redone the schedule for the camp, the next Apex camp, which will be January of next year, not 2025, but 2026. We're going to fix the dates too, so it's not over holidays. Anyways, well, it is a holiday, but it won't be the holidays. Anyways, so and yeah, we're going to start out. Our first day one intro session is, what is a game? What does that even mean? When somebody says that, what are they talking about? Because like again, yeah, it just you have to all be starting from the same page for some of this stuff or it just doesn't make any sense. So that's because again, we go back to like it's possible for there to be too much chaos. If we just set everybody loose, well, then we're not actually doing any collaborative training. We're just being not, you know, we're just going nuts and trying to kind of individually figure stuff out. We want to dial it back from that, so there's at least some guidance and like that process of defining a thing, right? Giving you a container, right? This is the container that is the game of Jijitsu and then helping you fill that container. Not just throwing you out there and being like, figure it out, guys. Speaker 2: Yeah, makes sense. Jesse, what are your thoughts on that? And kind of the the whole explaining what a game is and also the foundational stuff that maybe needs to be front-loaded at the beginning of a camp. Any thoughts on things that you've observed that you think make sense to kind of put at the beginning that we would always want to have there? Speaker 4: Probably. I've already been thinking about how I want to intro the camp and kind of what what kind of table setting we need to have in place before, you know, the camp proceeds. And that's something I try to just do at a class level anyway. You know, all the way down to what is Jijitsu, what is a guard, what is this, what is that? Just so that we all are kind of working with the same definitions of things. I think the trick, maybe the trick, I guess we'll see, will be that we do have a large group of coaches that haven't necessarily worked together a ton and may have pretty different definitions for things. Now, we might be able to settle on things like a game pretty easily, but there may be some other ones that are kind of sticking points. I think that's really interesting too and I think it's important to know, you know, where those differences are, but then it does become more of a challenge to communicate that to folks that maybe have not been training as long. So, trying to balance those things is something I'm thinking a lot about, but I do think that Josh is absolutely right, doing some kind of table setting there at the beginning, you know, here's the things that we're going to be talking about and looking at over the course of the camp. Here's how we think about them, you know, conceptually, we think about when we talk about a game, we're talking about this, that and the other thing. I think it's incredibly valuable and probably necessary in order to help ensure that the attendees get the value out of it that we hope that they will. Speaker 2: And you bring up something interesting there, which is that when you have a bunch of people with significant experience in the sport and you all ask them to explain a concept, like what is a game? You're not going to get the same answer from everyone. And I think the thing that I'm coming to realize is that's not a bad thing, right? In fact, it can almost be worse sometimes if you put people under the impression that there is one true way to define things. And I think a more traditional seminar structure lends itself to that way of communicating. Whereas it's kind of cool for junior belts, I think, to see three black belts sitting down together and trying to explain something and realizing that they all have different definitions and maybe they're all incomplete in some way. They've got different pieces of the puzzle, but maybe if we all listen to each other and learn from each other, we can collaboratively put together a definition that kind of brings in the best of everything. You know, as the saying goes, none of us is as smart as all of us. And I think that's very much true. And I think there's a cultural benefit to that too of having the more junior belts see all of the more experienced people sit down and hit the limits of their knowledge and have to talk to other people and learn how to fill the gaps in their understanding and maybe also just to get exposure to different ideas. I mean, defining something like a game, it's not easy to do. My brother and I did an audio course on BJJ Mental Models Premium on how to build a game plan. It took us seven hours to explain, right? Like it it's not easy. You can go down the rabbit hole pretty deep. Speaker 3: Well, all right now, just let's all keep in mind, this is Steve and his brother. Seven hours. For other people, it's probably like 45 minutes like top. So, let's it's not get too crazy there. But yeah, and like learning what other coaches see as like the primary focus for certain things. Like what did they drill down in as like the key idea behind accomplishing something? You can so many people have a different key idea focus for accomplishing things, like when they're guard passing or when they're setting up sweeps or finishing submissions or something. They're like the key thing that they're like, all right, if you get this one component right, you can then build everything else kind of around this one component. And seeing those different focuses for all those things, and then seeing how people then further have different focuses for their their game building. Like you build your game around your takedown or you build your game around your submission or whatever and seeing how they view those key components is such a like a vision expanding experience where you realize like, oh, that is a much deeper look at that part of this than I was taking. I was taking a deeper look over here, but I was still pretty shallow over here. That goes much deeper than I realized. That is again, one of those things that's incredibly valuable as a coach to get that experience because there's so little of that. Once you become a coach, you're the top guy in your gym or whatever, you're the one doing the coaching. You don't get that growth the same way anymore you do as a student where you have all these other students. We don't coach together as a normal part of Jijitsu. And having these camps where you do coach together, you do see what these other aspects are, what these other like focuses are. Again, incredibly valuable from a coaching perspective. Speaker 4: But I also, and I mean, we I was just sitting here thinking, we we're so we're spoiled in a lot of ways in that, you know, we get to talk to each other all the time and we get to see each other at the camps and talk on Discord. So there's always this kind of blending of ideas and language and but there's so many folks out there that, you know, they're just unitary in their school and the only big ideas that they're getting are from that black belt in the front of the room and just being exposed to this idea of like, holy smokes, not everybody thinks about all of these things the same way the guy that normally teaches me does can be and should be really eye-opening and hopefully will inspire folks to seek out and take some more ownership of their journey that there's a lot more knowledge out there than just sitting in the room with them on a Thursday night. Speaker 3: And I think that that like that is incredibly valuable, but I also think that some coaches are threatened by that idea. They're threatened by the idea that like their students might see something from another coach that resonates with them better than the explanation they've been getting or whatever, and then think, oh, well, my coach isn't good at coaching because this other guy said something that made more sense. And that's that's a tragedy that our sport has kind of built itself up like that, where the expectation is that you as the black belt are just the font of all fucking knowledge and you have to know everything. And if they get any piece of information from some other person, that that somehow makes you less as a coach. But that attitude I've found is like annoyingly pervasive and us getting away from that, I think is just can only be good for us, our students and the sport in general. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you completely, man. And I think that you touch on an important point, which is that when you are more experienced, especially when you're the most experienced person in your regular training room, it's very hard to get an opportunity to really work on your coaching, right? Because, you know, if you want to get good at Jijitsu, you need to be surrounded by all levels of people, including people who are better than you. And it's similar with coaching. If you don't have any peers in the room because your experience is so much higher, it's quite hard to get better. And so I think for a lot of black belts who come in here, especially from smaller gyms, this might be their really only opportunity during the year to get into a room with like-minded peers and actually test the limits of their knowledge and learn from other people at their level or above their level, which is I think one of the super cool things about this particular structure that doesn't really lend itself well to the way that we normally run things like this in Jijitsu. Speaker 3: Full agreement. Full agreement. Speaker 4: Yeah, that's absolutely right. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, I guess the other thing I would ask you guys then is in terms of size, what do we think is the magic number for a camp this size, right? In a lot of ways, the under a more traditional model, right? The goal is you bring in an instructor and then, of course, pay the instructor, and you try to bring in as many people into the room as you possibly can so that you can maximize the profit after you've paid the coach, right? Whereas I think that with these collaborative camps, the nice thing about this model is it lets us do things that kind of a more smaller, intimate scale. But I would turn it over to you guys to hear what you think on this. If there's a magic number for collaboration camps like this. Speaker 3: So, the Apex camp is going to probably always be capped under 50 people, and we'll be capping it on the next one at 30. There's going to be a 30-person cap on attendees because for me, that is the maximum number, like 50 would be pushing it. If we start to get more like more black belts and kind of more upper belts in and like we do have a lot of push and interest and we can support getting up to 50, we may increase the cap to 50. I honestly don't expect that to happen. I expect that we will keep the cap somewhere between 30 and 40, maybe 35, and that that's just that's how many people we're going to do because we want it to be a small group, intimate, manageable quantity of people who can get maximum value. Again, I'm not trying to pay my bills with this camp, so I don't have to care how many people show up. I want enough people to show up that we're likely to have groups of similar attributes, right? Enough people that we have skill parity for some of our like older and lighter people, like having a 115-pound purple belt lady in the room who has another 115-pound purple belt lady to work with. Like that's gold, that's solid gold for those people because they never like it's so hard for them to find training partners. So, I want enough people to make sure that we have those pairs, you know, that we can group people up appropriately, but not enough people that it starts to flood the room and distract from the nature of the camp, which is those small groups. And for us, I feel like that's somewhere around 30, 35 people at this at the Apex camp. Jesse's got more room, he may be packing them in. I don't know. Speaker 4: No, I mean, honestly, so Mike Mahaffey's helping me organize this. You know, it's something that we've talked some about and our as opposed to capping it right now, and that's where we're kind of getting into playing with the ideas of setting separate tracks is for me, I had in my head that 35 number of past 35, things are going to get squarely and people are going to start getting lost in the sauce and so, you know, we're at I think we're at 26 people signed up so far at the camp. I'm going to try really hard not to cap it so that we can get people that want to attending, but I think we're going to try our damndest to make sure that no room has more than 35 people in it at a time because I to me, for whatever reason, and Josh and I have never talked about it before, but that feels like the magic number to me too. Speaker 3: Right? It does. It feels like the right number of people. Speaker 4: Yeah, is if it gets bigger, it's like, ooh, I need help, which I think we will have some of that help with some of the collaborative coaching sessions, but that's kind of where my head is right now as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like the Dunbar's number of Jijitsu. What is that? The number of something like how like human tribes fall apart after 150 people. I feel like Speaker 3: Yeah, for us it's 35. Speaker 2: Yeah, for us it's 35. Speaker 3: Jijitsu folks aren't smart enough to go any higher, guys. We got to keep those numbers low. Speaker 2: Well, I think that part of the appeal of this kind of structure is rather than trying to have one big epic camp that you just pack the room with, if you're doing these smaller, more intimate camps, you can do a lot more of them, right? It doesn't have to be this one thing that you only do every one or two years. It can just be a gathering of people. If you can get enough like-minded people in an area, then you just call a camp and then you get people there, right? So I think that's one of the cool things about this model is you don't need to stuff the room in order to make it worthwhile for everyone, especially the visiting coach, right? If you just make it a room of peers and everyone all comes together, it doesn't have to be the biggest group for it to justify existing. And what we found too is sometimes the smaller camps are actually the best ones, right? Because you get the most time to interact with the other people in the room. Something that friend of the show Paul Kinzia, black belt from Georgia, who was at your camp, I'm going to have him on the podcast soon. Something that he said is, it's kind of like in music, sometimes you just do a jam session. You don't have a plan necessarily. You don't go in there with a script or an outline, but you just get smart people together who are talented and passionate about their work and you put them in a room and you just see what comes out of it. And sometimes when you do that, you create value that no one ever could have planned around. And so, the nice thing about this more nimble camp structure is it's easy to just do almost like flash camps or pop-up camps where it's like, fuck it, let's do a camp next week in Bellingham or something like that. Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think we're trying to embrace that some this year, right? I mean, we've got four or five camps kind of either planned or in the initial stages of planning. So, I think we're going to find that if that's true. And I think it is. I think it will be. Speaker 3: I agree. I think the next obvious step is BJJ Mental Models gym affiliation, and you just uh, we just start affiliating gyms. I think that's the way to go. Speaker 2: Can we make people put up our pictures on their wall and they have to bow to us? Speaker 3: I think that is, yes, we Steve's Speaker 4: Yeah, as long as people are bowing to us, I think it's fine. Speaker 3: Yep. Steve's picture goes right up there in the middle. Speaker 2: I don't need money for the affiliation. That's fine. I just want a picture of me at the front of the wall and everyone has to bow to me. Speaker 4: Adoration. Speaker 2: Exactly. As it should be, really. But I think this is a fantastic chat. Any other closing thoughts, guys? Lessons that maybe we learned or observations from this structure that you think would be beneficial to people in a similar boat? Because I mean, I know there's a lot of talk right now about things like reverse classroom and new ways of coaching. Is there anything that we learned here from this structure that you think people could apply to the gym that they teach at or maybe if they wanted to run their own similar camp, any closing advice that we'd want to share with people? Speaker 3: So, the one piece of really like closing advice that I have both to coaches and to especially like lower belt students is to embrace the expertise of your middle belts, right? Your purple belts and your brown belts, and to I guess to some extent your blue belts, I guess. But mostly like this purple and brown belts, like embrace their expertise and use them as a resource. Too many students, I think, frequently get caught up in the idea that only the head coach, like the black belt, is going to have answers to their questions. And talking to the black belt can be intimidating for some of them. But, you know, Jim the lazy brown belt probably knows more about Jijitsu than you can imagine as a a white belt or an early blue belt. He can probably answer all your questions just fine. And sometimes, like a purple belt is closer to the problem space that you're engaged in and will have a more relevant answer to you than your black belt who doesn't even remember what it's like to be bad at what you're struggling with, right? That purple belt was there five months ago. They just figured this out. Now they can help you figure it out too. That black belt has no conscious memory of what it's like to get like stuck halfway through a knee cut pass. He does like, what? That's a problem. Just knee cut, man. Just knee cut all the way. What do you I don't know. Speaker 4: Just finish the thing. Speaker 3: Yeah, come on. So, make use of those middle belts. And from an instructor perspective, make use of your middle belts. Like and get a mentor system going where you tell your brown belts, hey, man, go adopt a couple of purple belts and, you know, help them develop. Hey, purple belts, go adopt a handful of blue belts. Kind of help them shepherd them through their problem solving. You know, that kind of thing. Make use of those middle belts that have expertise that they can help, you know, they can share and be useful with, you know, and I think that's very much underutilized in Jijitsu. Speaker 2: Yep, agreed. Jesse, how about you? Any closing thoughts, lessons that people can take home? Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think I'll preface this by echoing something that Josh said earlier, which is like, this isn't these camps are not a money play for us. There's other things driving it, but it's not monetary. My statement is this, embrace these camps. Come utilize these camps as a coach, as a student, they're eye-opening in so many ways. Having that much expertise in a room, having just different thinkers in the room, you know, it's really easy to get stuck in your gym bubble and kind of solidify the way you're thinking that may not be optimal or ideal for you. So getting an opportunity to see all of these other, you know, thinkers in Jijitsu and and practitioners and seeing how they do things, how they think about things, the value can't be overstated if you are a Jijitsu practitioner. Speaker 2: Amazing, man. Well, let's plug some stuff. Josh, if people want to contact you or train with you, how do they do that? Speaker 3: Okay, guys, the most important and valuable part of BJJ Mental Models is the BJJ Mental Models Discord that is available to premium subscribers. So, step one, go subscribe to premium so you can get on the Discord. Step two, talk shit to me on the Discord. That's where I spend most of my time is actually the Mental Models Discord these days. I've been posting on Reddit a little more frequently because of the elbow surgery. I just have a bunch of extra energy. You can also hit us up on Instagram @ApexConyers. And then please just show up at my gym anytime. Apex Conyers, we're technically in Covington, Georgia. It's about 45 minutes east of the airport. The schedule is online. It is correct. You can just go to apexconyers.com and look at the schedule and know when our classes are and just show up to one. I don't care. It's fine. We don't charge for drop-ins. And I won't be mad if you just come beat me up. It's cool. Speaker 2: I love how you had to add the fact that the schedule on your website is in fact correct because that is such a problem in this dumb sport. I mean, I we should do a whole episode on some point about like dumb mistakes that gym owners do to shoot themselves in the foot. The number one that I see is the schedule on the website is woefully out of date, so people show up and the gym is locked. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, Jesse, how about you, man? Plug your stuff and let's talk about this upcoming camp. Tell us what's going on, who you got coming and what people can expect if they want to go. Speaker 4: Yeah, so Rough Hands BJJ, we've got a website, we're all over social media. I am also on the Discord. I will echo Josh again saying, you know, one of the probably the most valuable thing in in premium is having access to that Discord and all the folks in there. It's amazing. What else? Yes, please come visit us as well. Our schedule is also accurate and up-to-date and on the website. So feel free to come visit us. We love visitors. Zero drop-in rates. We love having folks in. So, the next camp we're hosting is April 11th through the 14th in Louisville, Kentucky. We've got lots of black belt coaches, a couple of brown belt coaches, some folks that you've heard from on the pod before, maybe some new faces for you. A lot of our great pod friends will be there. The other bonus you get for, you know, being a BJJ Mental Models premium member is you actually get a discount on the camp. So, sign up for premium, stay on premium, get a discount on the camp, come join us. We are going to have a blast. Speaker 2: You know, this is normally the point where I plug premium, but I feel like you guys have done my job for me, which is awesome. I want to point out, I did not ask these people to plug this shit for me. I greatly appreciate it, by the way. That was a pleasant surprise. So thank you both. But this was an awesome chat. Yeah, and as always, Josh, thanks so much for hosting our winter camps. That was a blast this year. Uh, it was also a blast last year, of course, as well. And Jesse, I'm super looking forward to our upcoming camp in spring. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes. So if people want to follow either of you guys, check out your gyms, or check out the upcoming camps, I'll put links where people can easily find where those are. But both of you, thanks so much for coming by. I always love chatting with you guys. One of the coolest things about camps like this is I get to see you guys in person more often. So, thanks so much for everything you do. It's just a pleasure getting to talk to you guys and learn from you guys as well. Speaker 3: It is always a delight and I am disappointed I won't be able to make this next camp at Jesse's place, but I will be at the New Jersey camp and the Vancouver camp if that one gets firmed up. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we're just planning those out. We got a few on the on the schedule for this year. So again, I'll put the details in the show notes if people want to see when we're doing those. But thanks a lot, guys. This was fantastic. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you. And thanks to the listeners, of course. We'll talk to you soon too. Take care.