BTG 44 - Drew Weatherhead of BecauseJitsu

[Music] hey guys what's going on i'm david avalon here with my co-host robert dreisdale in another episode of breaking the guard today we have a very special guest drew weathermore thank you very much how are you doing i'm doing good the name's weatherhead everybody gets it wrong the first time so you got your one out of the way it's okay thanks thanks for bringing me on guys i've really been enjoying your podcast so it's a real treat to get on myself awesome um you know drew was uh affiliated with us he was on the team what five years ago we were perfect yeah yeah for a couple years that's right you were purple though right that's right yep yes and uh he's in a red deer in uh in alberta alberta way up there man oh okay but um yeah so uh yeah uh drew has been like he knows those of you who don't know drew he is the mind behind because jitsu one of the most popular pages on the internet as far as like memes and jiu jitsu um how else would you describe it like is it just yeah it's basically it's uh everything's satirical about jiu jitsu so i poke fun at a lot of uh goofy [ __ ] that happens and um you know i really vibe with what you've been doing rob with the uncovering of jiu jitsu lore as it opposes to history because that's half of the funny things that i like to poke fun at is all of the nonsensical parts that people like to sort of brush over with with culti language and it's so easy to make fun of because they can't say anything you know yeah yeah and i i always say this like we didn't talk about this before but like through humor you can actually you can actually say it's an easier way to say things if you're making fun of them that's right if you're serious like you watch chappelle if you watch the chappelle's last stand up uh sticks and stones i don't know if you guys saw it or not i haven't noticed no you have to it's probably his masterpiece but he's constantly pushing that cultural boundary of what you can and can't talk about he's on the on the frontier of what's acceptable even for me and i'm a pretty open-minded guy a couple of times i'm like damn man that's pushing it that's that's a little too much you know but yeah there's a certain you get away with it there's a certain level of art where you can say something that somebody shouldn't laugh at but they have to yeah it's definitely a very especially nowadays i think that line is very blurry as far as yeah how far you can go before you offend somebody and not only that you can ruin your career too because if you really get you know chappelle is always picking on the transgender people for example and then you know he's like constantly pressing that button it's like man you know they're gonna fight back but he just gets a kick out of it i think you know but you know i i like what you're doing because it does i i think that i think it's a sign of growth of the sport as well the fact that you have accounts that are just exists perhaps not with the sole purpose but with the main purpose of making fun of ourselves right exactly exactly we gotta we gotta take ourselves lightly every now and again because it's too many people take ourselves seriously you know i think to me yeah it was very interesting about all this is the whole concept of the meme you know it seems like this should have come out like much longer ago than it did but like i think that for most people the meme is a very new thing but it and it's so simple it's just a picture with a camera and a caption this could have been done like when the internet started yeah yeah whatever reason it took like over a decade before like it actually caught steam i think like instagram probably helped sure feel it because it was just a picture engine at first you know think it was instagram that really got the ball wrong but you know what the word a meme comes from it's not the what we call meme is not an actual the original meaning of the word no it's a dawkins word it's a dawkins word you're right dawkins coin and memes are for culture what genes are for the body so memes are like these you know superposed like like cultural ideas that we that we live with and they live on the next generation just like jeans do so like religion you know would be a meme that's how we look at it right and for some reason uh social media borrowed that word from dawkins has nothing to do with dawkins original concept but it kind of caught on that's what means memes mean now they mean something completely different yeah it's it's a bit of a uh incorrect nomenclature if you look online the official term is internet meme and they differentiate meme in general so like you're saying a meme is considered like an idea seed so something that seeds a concept into people that that passes on from one person to another and the internet meme is basically like the uh the cartoon version of that so we we definitely pass ideas like i've i take uh a little bit of evil joy every time that i make a meme that becomes part of the culture like a lot of the things in the leg locks that have happened over the last few years like some of the wording around that uh we've made it super popular um and that that is the the idea seed part of the comedy so like there's there's actual uh changes that happen in the the uh what do you call the zeitgeist i guess of jiu-jitsu yeah yeah interesting um no i'm with you man i think that's um um you know it's and it's entertaining too like i can get lost every now and then your explorer page i don't know it's very often sometimes next time like 30 minutes have gone by and i'm just looking at funny pictures it's highly addictive you know and it's like i think that's a positive side of the social media people neglect is the humor you know there's the addiction and the creeping on people's lives and all that bad stuff and you know it takes too much of our time but as far as humor i think the world has never been funnier in some ways like we um you know like i don't know like before you had to retell a story right if you're wondering if you remember if something funny happened you just pull up video after video after video like it's never ending like the other day so i posted a video of like i think it was like a lioness pulling guard on a she was fighting some other animal i don't know what animal was but she basically pulls guard and then it's looking like it looks like she's pulling the guard the other hand gets on then it bites his neck from the bottom yeah it looks like a justice fight i watched that video like 20 times yeah that was like a wildebeest or something yeah but like you don't get that i mean it's the it's the internet gives you all of that it comes with that but it comes with a lot of good too well that's part of the addiction quality to it nobody would keep coming back to it if it wasn't uh entertaining or engaging in some way so that's kind of the driving feature we were talking just before we went live here about the documentary um what's what's the one called uh the the social dilemma that's going on right now yeah what are your thoughts on that dave hasn't seen it yet i keep telling that um i think that you know the social the only thing it's it's something we all know we're all aware of it we're just in denial about it because we're having too much fun it's kind of like we'll deal with that problem we know it's a problem but it's it's such a fun problem right because we're all addicted to our phones and the disturbing part is that you know they they know you better than you know yourself yeah you have you know if i ask you to list down like 20 of your personality traits you get lost you by after six or seven you start struggling google and and instagram and facebook they have like hundreds if not thousands of personality traits because they know what you like they look how you like it for they know how long you're staring at an image and they're timing that they're timing how long you're staring at an image and that allows them to better you know push advertisement which is i think that their goal really isn't an evil one per se other than making money i don't think there's anything evil beyond just knowing finding out better ways of making more money faster through our attention right but at the same time i i i'm bothered why like i want someone's out there today they had an alexa and i couldn't stop thinking like alexa's listening and recording everything we're talking about right now yeah which to me is disturbing that part bothers me more than the fact that they're just okay they're just gonna send me ads they're more specific to my likes honestly i kind of like that because i don't want to go through every you know item on amazon to find what i really need i prefer it to just send the stuff that i'm actually interested in my way so i spend less time shopping it makes sense but it's that the privacy is the part that bugs me like that's the part that i'm completely against like you know i think the u.s likes this huge movement for second amendment rights which i'm like okay i think there's an argument that i get it and there's complete silence over the fact that we have no privacy like wait a second talking about freedom here one is way more important than the other like our privacy it should trump everything in my opinion right where are you getting are you where are you getting the idea that nobody cares about that it's it's from privacy yeah it's like where do you get your news you get from social media you get it from the tv so those are already being filtered and siphoned for you so if you think nobody's worried about it it's because they don't want you to think anybody's worried about it yeah it's uh and and and it's you get quickly manipulated in this industry like it's easy to get and only that like that they're very selective about what kind of information they put show in that's the other part that's disturbing and social little talks about this a little bit but it's the same with google like certain topics if you google you're gonna have to go page six seven to five the right answer yeah because they're gonna throw they're not there's certain things there's certain like topics that i've done this before as a test they're more controversial there's less within the the the spectrum of what's debatable and acceptable you have to go page six seven to five you know find out that the answer you're looking for because it's like they're it's like they're so they know that very few people will go on page two you're going to read our item from one to five so that to me is it's a form of propaganda as well you know it's just like i don't think there's an i'm not convinced there's an evil intent behind that but at the same time it does i think it does it makes us more ignorant in some ways because information is very selective yeah do you guys know the um the old ai analogy of the paper clip machine no i don't uh so the the idea this was a thought experiment where uh somebody who created uh an ai so like an artificial intelligence where its only sole purpose was to create more and better paper clips and with that intent in mind they press the go button and it turned every piece of matter into a paper clip so if you don't have enough guidelines around how to do the objective the objective can itself become uh malevolent yeah yeah no i think for sure with the whole google thing with search engine filtering or whatnot it's problematic because they are a business so that of course they have to do things that generate revenue and then when you start combining politics and ideologies and stuff like that the censoring of certain voices or certain ideas that's going to help their business continue to thrive is going to become an agenda item at some point and now you're talking about again freedom of information that's no longer there because certain information is damaging to that particular company you know so i don't know it's it's very tricky and companies like google and facebook i've gotten so big it's hard for competitors to step in you know it's kind of like we think the ufc is a big dog in the senate other sport organizations like bellator and like you know when fc are trying to step up but like ufc is so giant it's easy to perceive as a monopoly google is like a sun and we have the little meteorites of other businesses that are trying to like compare to you know so it's it's staggering the scale it would take a catastrophe for google to lose its spot in the world this place in the world like i can't imagine what would happen for google to lose its prestige because if you the other thing too is like for example there's an advantage of like companies like tesla and amazon have been a ceo who's become a public person like jeff bezos or elon musk but there's a lot of risk that comes to that because it takes one scandal to ruin the whole company because because elon musk loves his scandals he's like you know wrecked his own stock just to bring it back up like yeah but i think that these are just some pr maneuver i'm talking about like he gets caught doing like beating his wife or something right and then that ruins his company whereas with google i can't name a single person that's uh like that's influential in google that google is like it's it's body of itself it doesn't really they don't expose themselves maybe that's for the better i don't know but i just don't see them losing that position ever i can't see how well you want to talk about the zeitgeist to people online how when's the last time you've heard somebody say i'm going to search that they say i'm going to google it yeah yeah no one says the word search is not even in the vocabulary you're right yeah they're going to google it even if they're using a completely different kind of uh um even though i'm if i'm searching in my email or whatever it's like it's i'm googling it i'm not searching yeah that's a big win on their end absolutely um i know you've been your partner on your you guys got a podcast through the naked radio i've been on there um jamie kilstein those of you who don't know jamie he's a stand-up comic super cool guy um how'd you guys get together man because i've known jamie for since i don't know maybe 10 years now six years i can't remember how i met him but we go way back well we're um i'll get into how i met jamie in a sec but i'm not part of the podcast anymore i actually stepped off about a month ago just to focus on my own jiu jitsu stuff i got a lot of other things going on that was kind of taking up the time but man jamie's a great guy he's a brown belt under marcelo garcia i knew him as a stand-up comic actually before i knew he did jiu jitsu i saw him on joe rogan's podcast a couple times and i was i don't know i just the name was in my head i'm like he's a cool dude and then i just happened uh we had some sort of weird interaction online where he was commenting on something i was commenting on then all of a sudden like oh hey it's jamie kilstein so we started talking in the dms and he was talking all about jiu jitsu and how he loves it so much and yeah he was at a point where he wanted to really get into the jiu jitsu culture online and he's like do you want to do a podcast i'm like yes i want to do a podcast and that was about all so we did that for like 10 months like straight every week that was good man i i i listened to a few episodes you guys got some really cool guests there um what's the let me ask you this because you've been in this in this like jiu jitsu media world the for a while now drew give me some stories i bet you got some good stories of people talking [ __ ] to you or some hate because you're gonna get a hate mail man give me some some of your like top three like like either through the podcast or 3d because just a page okay um to be honest it's probably less than you would expect because as as big as the pages itself for the most part for like 90 of its existence it didn't really have a face on the admin the same way you're talking about with google so it wasn't like if i put an opinion out there it wasn't necessarily drew's opinion it was just like this funny meme so if i was like [ __ ] on aj out of his arm one day not necessarily he's gonna get an argument with me in the comments and i definitely do [ __ ] on him from time to time uh but but there have been sorry i don't know it's not a difficult one there was one point where i pissed off kenny florian because i was picking on aj i guess they're friends and it was the point when uh vagner hochia kicked him off the stage in a super fight yeah and i i mean it uh of like a slo-mo of him being kicked off the stage and um like like wagner was monday and and he was kicking me off the stage like i'm getting my ass kicked by monday kind of thing and uh yeah kenny got all mad about that and there's this blow up it was kind of weird uh but probably the strangest thing swear to god this happened this isn't even a joke is for a jujitsu meme page i've actually had somebody send me a legitimate dick pic for no reason no reason at all imagine this is the first first thing i wake up in the morning and i check my messages uh in the dms and i go into the request i'm like oh i wonder what this is it says there's an image and you know how like you click on a request when it shows like a blurred image it's like tap the image if you want to see the image like i wonder what the image is probably a meme somebody's sending me or an idea for a meme and nope just a dick i'm like how screwed up do you gotta be how bad is the dating world that you gotta throw like an unsolicited dick pic to an account that has no face on it you don't have to say anything but i would guess it's kit dale there's a good chance there's a high probability of this kid throwing that net out wide [Laughter] it's a numbers game baby yeah yeah that was a funny one that's funny um um yeah because like you know there's no way out of it you you know you're gonna you're gonna get you're gonna upset someone you know at some point you know people are going to touch you i laugh it off like i take it more seriously now i just like i go along with the trolls like every now and then i'm like all right bring it you know i think it's funny that you could have someone following your page or any other meme page and laugh at a bunch of stuff and then when something comes across like oh no no now you've gone too far it's like dude you laughed at all this other crap but then this one thing you're going to take offense to it's like i know for me what you guys were talking about being able to laugh at yourself and i think as part of the martial arts one of the things that we're supposed to have is humility right and i think being able to laugh at yourself even at things that are you might be sensitive to which is your own problem it's not yeah you know it's not somebody else's problem it's your problem that you still really haven't like you can accept things about yourself and then you can laugh about it yeah people who haven't accepted those things they get angry when they see that mirror you know which is kind of um what humor does it puts a mirror there and if you're not strong enough to look at it and laugh you know i think that's on you not on the guy who's showing you the mirror 100 like if it's like someone someone talks [ __ ] to you and you get offended you're the one with the problem not the other person yeah it's like um you know you got the either the new guy the newer guy in the gym and they don't know their weakness yet and then like you sweep them 50 times with the same thing and they're like they get mad at it you know they they have a reaction uh and and sometimes some of those people don't want to find out how to fix that and those are the people in the comments those are the people are like you know leglocks wouldn't work on me bro or not on the street or i would you know gouge your eyes or you know picking on their favorite fighter and they start rattling off his whole career achievements like man like this is this should be like you're saying a reflection on what your problem is yeah 100 you know speaking of which i have to ask you because you know i've seen like you're very prolific as far as like the amount of posts that you you do and i see other people who do the memes also like that how do you do it because for me to think of something clever and funny it would be like it takes me a minute yeah a good generosity yeah yeah or so like no i'm going to get a good singer on you know but i mean it's amazing that you i always stand at all when i see man this guy's posting like five six memes in one day and they're all hilarious you know it's like how do you feel like it's a skill so i'm just wondering like for us common pleadings like how do you how do you get there where you have such good creativity and you can just spot things like boom right away well this is something people ask me every now and again um i'm sure that there's a skill to it and i'm sure i could show you a few tricks but like really it doesn't seem hard to me which is is weird so i guess there there must be something to it like a talent of some sort that i didn't know existed because it's never really been that difficult but my process generally is i'll find a picture first and it's it's just something about it is like okay there's definitely something there how can this apply to jiu-jitsu and and really like having been in it for 13 years now i've seen and heard enough of all of the different tropes and things in in the zeitgeist of jiu jitsu and in training and how people think and talk that the jokes become pretty obvious when i see the pictures yeah yeah i mean like you know i remember the one with like wagner hoshi and aj again and i i don't know if it was but like he had like it was playing with that that 300 quote that goes like this this is tampa there you go it just writes itself was that you or no no that one wasn't me no that was great man that was so good uh there's some other really good i think this one was you there was one with was like it was like making like [ __ ] on like ibj jf advantages and the guy's missing the plug was that he was like putting it into the walls like almost there like almost you know yeah yeah the almost technique what is it worth really yeah yeah no man it's uh um no it does take a skill because i'm like that like every now and then i'll have a moment like oh man that'd be a good meme but like i guess if you're in his industry if you're doing what he's doing like your mind is constantly looking for things like you're always on the lookout for like what you know what could potentially be something that's going to entertain the public yeah yeah i'm sure it is and again it's probably background noise to me at this point it just sort of sort of just happens you just see it and it happens i got if you don't mind me switching topics on you here is one of the things i was excited because david this is the first time i've actually met you i've known of you for a very long time because of your uh kimura trap and adcc and all that so i've been a fan been following you for years nice to meet you officially um yeah what one thing now that the three of us have in common that for me is semi new it's been like the last three years or so is i've been focusing a lot on the instruction side of jiu jitsu and i know that that's something obviously with your kimura trap you have a lot of experience and obviously rob he's been leading uh an entire affiliation basically for years um i'd like to get into that topic with you guys like the difference between doing jiu jitsu and teaching jiu jitsu because i think this is a subtle thing that a lot of people don't understand until they have to do it yes uh it's definitely a skill and i think all of us have known guys who are great competitors but they couldn't show you anything you know because they they're they're good at absorbing knowledge but they're not as good as delivering knowledge and it's not even the fact of knowing teach is knowing how to teach exactly so it's a whole other skill set you know and i think that's the difference between your top competitor versus your top coach it's rare when you have both you got a guy like rob you know who's like he's got it all going on he's an excellent instructor he's also an excellent competitor but i find that if you can tie that both in it it makes you because one of the things i know personally i got better at teaching i mean i'm better at uh competing the more i talk because yeah i i was able to understand techniques at a higher level because some people can absorb a technique and only understand it on a superficial level like maybe i could you know i understand it and i could do it myself without problems but when i have to teach it i might have that same level of understanding try to pass it to rob but he doesn't get it i have to go another level deep and by going another level deep maybe i get to him but i also learn some new nuggets into that particular technique that elevates mind like now that oh i could leverage this more than ever like i know like one of the things i teach a lot for like the kimura trap system and all that is shoulder pressure right like top side kimura a lot of people and i see it's still top where they they just you know sit up and pull and you can see that guy's upper body from the bottom come up right and and that to me if i see that i know that guy's missing something because that's the shoulder relieving pressure whenever someone crunches up like that you know so if i'm able to keep shoulder pressure when i apply that kimura now there's no relief so the tap comes in you know and that's a little nugget that i figured out that now makes that move a whole lot more effective and there's tons of them out there i i think that they influence each other to be honest so like i think i became because you can be a phenomenal athlete and execute all these techniques and i have a clue of what you're doing right oh and then he can be a guy who breaks it down but perhaps has a more limited arsenal and understanding because he's trained very little in his life right so you know and then the guy gets away with you know maybe because he's got other qualities puts his heart and soul into it but i think like that that the combination of both is important like i think i was fortunate enough like we were part of a generation a lot of the young competitors don't get this stat it's good and bad because we have to teach to make a living whereas if you're boucher you don't have to teach to make a living you're fine you get you can make enough from sponsors you can just train twice a day and that's all you have to do um but it was like an exercise of like trying to better understand the move for yourself and consequently you did a better job explaining to your students and i think that's uh that's something that's lost like i do at my gym i have a new program it's an internship for all color belts it's management igem right and i've been trying to push the affiliations to do the same thing because i think people benefit from it but for you to get your black donor zenith you have to have taught 60 classes to beginners either children or white girls because then some people are like oh that means i'm going to work for 60 hours for free i'm like yep that's exactly what i mean it's an internship because when you when you become a doctor you don't just get a degree after school you actually have to have some practice yeah like we have to start looking at fighting the same way it's a lot of responsibility and it's a skill you'd be surprised i thought my brown belts have three stripes on their brown books they trained for 10 years you throw him and go teach this white belt his first class you'd be surprised they freeze yeah this guy's one step away from about to freeze like he's never taught before yeah he's never taught me has no idea what to do so i make my guys teach and once they get the hang of it they actually enjoy it at the end they're like oh man thanks for that because i'm walking out of here with a skill that i would have not walked out of here with you know if i had just gotten my blackboard and nothing you know with no teaching experience yeah that's right it's coincidentally that's something that i've been instituting myself in my own gym so since we've reopened after our first shutdown we've gotten to ten adult classes a week five in the weekdays in the afternoon five in the evenings and as it stands right now uh the afternoon classes if there's a color belt in it the ranking color belt is the one in charge of teaching the instruction for that class i'm still there they can ask me questions if they need to rattle stuff off me but my objective is i expect my color belts to be able to start uh verbalizing what they know and i i don't expect to teach all of jiu-jitsu but i'm like you're good at at least one or two things better than the people in the room like you you have a game you have a thing that you do explain that now in words and that's that's a talent um i found having to teach now myself i think about this a lot i i really put a lot of thought into the verbiage that i use so that i can make it as easy as possible to come from my mouth to somebody's brain and have it stick there's there's like a certain balance of what you words you use how many words you use what you focus on specifically if there's one core thing you need them to understand for this thing and and just having to do that class after class after class sort of whittles down just like training jiu jitsu it whittles down the path of least resistance oh no 100 i i like the uh um i think everyone should teach at some point man like i think it's it's a skill you get better at like i i still find myself improving as a teacher it's been almost 20 years i've been teaching and i still find like i'm not done learning i still get a kick out of it i've been recently teaching beginners and i used to hate teaching beginners i've been teaching beginners class to gym now and i found like i i really enjoy explaining an armbar from mount to someone and it sounds like oh that's so simple how could you enjoy that and i used to hate it because it's so simple like how can you not know this this is so obvious you know but i enjoy it because i get a feedback from the white boat that i don't get from my color belt so when i teach a de la hebrew suite for my purple belt he's like yeah yeah yeah cool whatever you know and then it doesn't there's no such thing as is enough for that crowd but for someone who just walked through the door a mom and she learns how to do a kimura she sees the look on her face when she finishes some of the camera she's so happy she's so happy she learned her naked choking i get like oh man you you're happy like i'm happy because you're happy now yeah you know i'm getting a kick out of it that um i used to not get but i think it's um it's people that don't teach are missing out on something like it's a very rich experience i think it's your martial arts experience is overall impoverished if you don't teach yeah um sorry go ahead dave you look like you're gonna say something oh just that i do agree that it's part of the martial arts experience is the the giving back right i feel like myself when i started uh i would say wrestling was the first true i i did ji kundo for a year but it was more like katas and stuff and wasn't really the combative nature that for example wrestling gave me but like once i even when i was wrestling i was already starting to teach like buddies that weren't wrestling like i thought it just came very natural i want to give like this is doing good for me like maybe that's going to help you and let me show you this i think it's an important part that communication going back and forth and try to spread the art because ultimately you know i mean you know better than us now with the with your book but that's the goal is to spread the art get it everywhere you know what i mean and if you're not doing your part in teaching i mean then the legacy can die yeah absolutely yeah it's the plan it lives its life and then it lays its seas so that the continues you know yeah i mean we we definitely make a living from what we're doing but that's not why we're doing it we do it because we're passionate and it has kind of like a philanthropic feel to it like you're giving something to people like this is something that's depending on what you're teaching them could be hundreds of years of knowledge has come down to the way that this is applied to the human body that is as real today as it was back then but if people weren't teaching between then and now where would it have gone you know it's left in hieroglyphics you know yeah this um there's there's something here that that rob you were touching on before about um the difference between competitors that really know how to do it at a high level and instructors that know how to explain it at a high level something that i've been like i said i put a lot of thought into this is like my main focus right now is is sort of like the meta of instruction how best to do it how best to make people get the most out of it and i feel like the more i look into how to explain situations concepts ideas uh game theory it's is uh like most people when we're teaching and and when i was learning it's kind of step by step technique by technique you learn the one through three to get from here to there the a through b very linear progression and you kind of have to to not overload somebody at first but then if that's the only system that you've been learning from by the time you get to black belt um like i would say that 20 of what i do in a given role is conscious and i would say 80 of what i do is unconscious and i think that that's a travesty if you don't understand the 80 percent so this is what i'm trying to to understand with each of these transitions with each of these positions is what am i subconsciously doing that i learned kinetically while doing this for years and years that maybe i don't even know is important yeah yeah that's definitely where a lot of the gains in the game will lie is on that unconscious like you said because you just do it yeah and that's what an athlete like a elite competitor will do he just does things he does that at a really really high level but he doesn't have to question it particularly if he's successful with it but that doesn't mean that he's mastered it like there could be more in that space and that's kind of where i think instruction has its benefit because your unconscious effort would be someone's conscious effort and they're going to ask you like uh i'm doing this wrong and you're like well that's right that you have to get in there like well let me show you and then like when you're doing it you're like oh this is the part that this guy's getting yeah yeah and now i can pull i can make this now like you said consciously available to me and then amplify it and make it better so yes for sure i i feel like i have probably more experience than this and a lot of people because an artist is always the same seminar there's always a tomorrow chop system i've got like hundreds of them so i'm always teaching the same stuff but what's awesome about it is i'm always teaching it to different people and everybody and of all different skills i've taught from like five-year-olds up to like a 70 year old you know men women people missing limbs and stuff so from white belt to black belts you know belts so i get to see like the whole range of you know skill sets and body types and i could still boil everything down you know and like i pull little pieces from questions that people ask me and then i'm able to make a new answer you know so it becomes very powerful but it's hard and like what you're doing is i believe is the right idea just look at yourself and do a role and then think okay everything that i can't remember is a problem right because if you just it just happened unconsciously you know uh for my brother and i in the early days we would always film our spine matches okay and then we would watch this sparring afterwards like particularly just to see like wait wait wait what was that that you just did and then and break that down you know and then okay now let's actually make this a move i used to do this thing uh from the closed guard just do a cartwheel from the close guard yeah and open the guard up but like i was just doing it because i was a spaz and then i was only into reviewing video like oh that's actually a thing i do okay you know and i have a bunch of moves like one probably my most successful move that i didn't even know until i watched this video was what i call like a double leg slide am i right i took down jeff monson with this i took down a bunch of dudes but in my head i always thought it was a single leg i really took out jeffrey munson man that's a that's i mean i'm not like at the abcc level he's one of the most successful wrestlers of all time i mean yeah back like this is like 2004 2005. i'm still killing you there but i remember i thought i took them down with a head inside single leg but then when i went to review the match i'm like it was actually a transition like i actually slid on both knees like doing a shot but i would slide to both knees and then it started off as a double and then i slid all the way out so then my head popped my side and then it became a headset single and i realized that's why i burned everybody with that shot because they thought a double leg was coming they would sprawl but then i would end up behind them yeah and i didn't even know i was doing it until i watched the video and then i'm like oh crap now i can actually you know make this better and understand what i'm doing but you know it's like we have two separate brains there's the the conscious brain memory right and then there's your body that this thinks by itself and i always tell people for the purpose of fighting you want your body doing as much thinking as possible because if you have to consciously be aware of what you're doing when you slow yourself down then your hesitation and your doubting versus if your body is just going on autopilot you're always going to be faster and react uh you know quicker but as an instructor you have to be able to do exactly what they've described which is analyzing these all this movement that's going on that your body is responsible for right and you're not always aware of what you're actually doing and that has happened more times than i can count where i'm showing a move that i do and while i'm showing because my body is moving in a certain way i go like oh oh and by the way i'm shifting my weight on my left shoulder i realized i was actually adding a lot of weight on that shoulder that's why the move was working it was only when i thought that i made myself aware of it um you know we're going go into the the teaching thing like because you're you're at you're talking about like how how to teach a methodology yeah one thing i always advise gym owners because if you're only dealing with athletes you have a room of like 20 athletes it's actually easier because everyone in there is looking at the same thing about the same thing it's actually an easier methodology right but when you're in a class what i always advise instructors you have to look at the room this is what i do when i teach seminars i look at the average of the room what is the average of the room you get a bunch of moms two athletes or you get a bunch of athletes two moms right and then we're gonna go where is it that i'm gonna have my teaching and you have to be able to read the room and that's a very different skill that doesn't come without experience because if you don't have experience you're going to go in there and show the room your best move right but that's not what the room wants right you know so i'm trying to find if i have a bunch of like i'm sorry chubby people i'm not going to show birth models you know and you get seminars and it's hard at seven because you get from white to black old and young advanced beginner you get all these different you know variables and like how can i teach something that's going to make everyone happy and that is a skill too and that doesn't because it's not necessarily a um you know because there's certain things that are universal like rear naked chokes are universal arm bars are universal that kimura is universal but there's some things like this guys explain all the time like people struggle doing certain things and if you're showing that the room is not improving it and maybe you're getting the kick out of it but if the room doesn't like it are you a good instructor yeah yeah there's a few self-defense seminars i've run for like crossfit gyms and one of the moves that consistently blows people's minds which again to your point is hilarious from our point of view is a technical stand up they love it they're like wow that was so smooth this is like a turkish get up i understand this you know yes and you plug that into a guard escape on bottom and getting back to your feet like something somebody who doesn't want to fight needs right yeah yeah it's like the most basic part of jiu jitsu and their whole mind just gets blown you know where the technical stand-up comes from though i just learned this recently i just learned this from your podcast so you go for it yeah comes from capoeira used to be a lot more mma oriented back in the day but one of their ways of standing back up was kicking from the ground and on the way back standing back up so that would kick you off the technical stand up and then pull the leg back and stand back up because that's not judo you've never seen a judo club that does the technical stand-up yeah that that blew my mind but once you said it i was like of course it even looks like capoeira yeah yeah it's one of the few i mean one of the many but um yeah you know you're you're absolutely correct like the there's you know teaching is is an art man like i i i'm still in love with it man like i still enjoy teaching because i feel like much like grappling it's never ending even though like as i grapple with my body i have to i'm like so many miles left in my body i have to manage those miles that's kind of how i look at it now i got x amount of miles left i want to manage them intelligently right but teaching is something i think that's an intelligent way to manage it right there uh and i think that like you would know this more than anybody because of all the red belts you talked to in the last few years is that is the most that an elderly person who does jiu jitsu can give somebody is the knowledge they've they've gained over decades of doing it and you know like one thing um it's something that we don't value because i mean when i was a kid there was a thing that you were from a generation when people like listen to your elders like that was a thing yeah that's not a thing anymore knowing there's an old man now they say okay boomer yeah yeah and i'm talking to these guys right and then yeah they can't show me moves like he's showing one time i was getting corrected on my guillotine defense and i'm like i'm pretty sure my guillotine defense is better than his but you know like i'm not going to say that of course but like it was not that you get not but you get this life wisdom man like you sit down with these guys they through everything you're going through and they know what the answer is like that's a legit knowledge man they just people we don't value anymore but like while i'm with them i'm almost constantly trying to pick their brains and like you know learn something because you know your grandpa does have a lot to teach you it's just that we decided to listen to tony robbins and gary vee instead but your grandpa's way more experienced than both those guys put together yeah he does have a lot to teach you but we just don't you know we just don't pick their brains enough yeah you don't ask right um my one grandpa was a war veteran in the second world war uh he was on yeah he was in the navy and this is the thing is i was young when he died like i was no eight or nine years old but there was a couple times when i went over to his place and i didn't ask to to know about stories but he asked if i wanted to go to the war museum with him and so i would i i remember one time specifically i went to the ward museum with him and i've never been i was like oh cool we're going to see some planes and bombs sounds like fun so he takes me down and i'm i'm sort of wide-eyed looking around at all these little displays that they have and it i knew that my grandpa was in the war that didn't really mean much to me at that age i was like seven years old but i remember walking along like a 15 20 foot long torpedo replica and i was running my hands along and looking all the components just wowing and wooing over this thing and then i looked over to my grandpa and i'll never forget the look in his face it was like a thousand miles off and he said this thing killed a lot of my friends and there's some yeah yeah there's stories that we can't even comprehend of the people that we don't necessarily the time to get from them that's that could be life-changing you know and i hear these stories as i imagine the suffering and the strength that has to come from that suffering from people like your grandfather because every day i have a bad day at the gym like someone forgets to pay with some bill or you know some student complaints and that [ __ ] bugs me and then i i hear stories like this one imagine what your grandpa went through i mean how you can't even begin i mean it's the strength that comes from that because we have never experienced anything like that imagine seeing your friends get blown up in front of you like yeah you know it's it's just i i i feel like we you know i'm i'm soft in comparison there's a much tougher generation and that should come with a lot of respect and appreciation i feel like and i think that you know perhaps out of ignorance more than anything we don't appreciate that in the elderly mm-hmm yeah like you said it's not in the culture anymore it's it's we've become not only soft but like sardonic like we we look at everything with kind of a slant to to it like a little dark humor instead of the respect that it deserves like we we are allowed to live soft because of the hard men for the last few hundred years who fought for that yeah absolutely man yeah absolutely well let me ask you a question i know you're also a kimura aficionado yeah i guess we got the two the two popular kimura guys on the same podcast now this is kind of weird yeah yeah it's like it's i have a in like more just i have a what i call a reverse game or a trap but i've seen i've seen some of the stuff you're doing which is a different angle that i'm doing yes tell us a little bit how you got into the reverse kimura game sure so this is this is definitely not something i created i hate it when people say i made this move i'm not trying to say that but what i did was basically what we were talking about that like this was a grip essentially that i had used from time to time since i was a purple belt i found a video of me playing around with it in 2011 so it's been like nine years that i've been playing around with it but i started putting some actual focus into it for about a year in 2018 between 2018 and 19 where i was like there's more here that i i'm missing that this is more than just like a an avenue to the back because basically people use it oftentimes from like a open or closed guard to essentially be an arm drag to get back exposure but i started finding sweeps i started finding submissions i started finding transitions that all stemmed from the same start so i put some actual um effort into expanding that and not necessarily systematizing it because i wouldn't it's a system but i looked at it from as many different angles as i could and just sort of made this culmination uh into two different series one is from the closed garden ones from the half guard and they have slight variations and differences but essentially it's it's just a it should be a versatile tool as far as a grip is concerned that i don't think people were getting enough use out of so that's that's how that came apart google no i'm always a fan of anybody doing kimura stuff so yeah you know what i'll send you a copy and you can check it out i think there's some cool stuff in there i'd love to see your your take on nice sent two nice um um no i i there's like couple i do from that reverse kimura i don't have sequences i have like that one to um the omoplata which i transitioned to and then the bicep slide so those are the two ones i use all the time really i've been using more and more in the last few years but like i don't have a whole bunch of sequences there so yeah i'm always like looking at like different ways of of using old tricks and like adding new new tools to it that's like it's never it's never ending is it man yeah well it's just it's like the hubble telescope what are we done there's no end to this you know you could you can point the hubble telescope at something that looks like the size of a pin in outer space and just let it sit there for a number of days and it will pull enough light to show you galaxies you didn't know existed it's kind of the same thing we're never going to see all the galaxies because there's so many to focus in on oh that there's i've gotten a better appreciation of the scale of the universe i don't know you guys remember like i think it was me or maybe my girlfriend she had mentioned that they had these video games uh or computer games that were like the biggest like game world okay in like all time and the one that popped up was called a game called elite dangerous which is sci-fi space like plane but essentially it's the size of the galaxy or the milky way galaxy it contains the whole milky way galaxy and it's like procedurally generated so like it has all these planets and you know stars my god and i loaded it up played it and just like you could do like these it's actually like very scientific apparently they got like astrophysicists to help them do the modeling and all that and whatever they but you can travel in the game like light speed like going like 40 times the speed of light and you're there and after like an hour you've only traveled across like maybe like 10 gal like 10 solar systems you know and when you look at the map of the game it's like you're here and then this is just one quadrant of this galaxy and the galaxy is like this and when you're flying the thing it's just all space around you and you see like a giant sun and stuff like that and you're like man like i would have to play this game for like my whole life and then hand it down to my my grandkids so they can keep trying to explore this whole because you can't yeah i guess they say the stats of the game world only like point eight percent has been explored of course yeah there's a real time aspect right yeah exactly which to me it was like fascinating like imagine you were able to create this and nobody chances are people are never going to see the whole thing which is just bizarre i don't like to say that life is insignificant so insignificant is not the word i'm going to use but we're pretty small in the grand scheme of things yeah yeah you know we're just you know this little you know talking species on the edge of a small galaxy you know but it's it's it's kind of like it kind of puts you in place too like i i like it but at the same time it's kind of disturbing i would like to believe that we are the center of the universe know but yeah i don't think that's basically especially a safer way to think it's it's too big for our brains otherwise and you'll start uh getting depressed yeah there's there's a there's an edge there what we you know what we can understand yeah there's uh something i wanted to leave um i know you're probably running out of time here so i want to get this in because uh the topic of instruction and again i i really respect you guys for what you've done you're you're an inspiration and uh i pull a lot of um you know motivation and inspiration from from both of what you guys have done and are doing uh my objectives the thing that kind of pushes me because i said like my focus is really really really on teaching and and conveying information to people now that's really my my passion about jiu jitsu like i could give a [ __ ] how many more medals i ever win this is what really matters to me right now um do you know what epistemology is yeah study of knowledge that's right yeah i took i took a dictionary definition here so i won't get it wrong but it's uh the theory of knowledge especially with regards to its methods validity and scope epistemology is the investigation of what distinguished justified belief from opinion and that is kind of like my my guiding arrow to try to find what is true in jiu jitsu that 80 percent that i'm unconsciously doing what am i doing why is it working does it work could it be better and trying to find like these these big things that can consciously make somebody's game better faster that's huge man that's huge it's finding like the the best i honestly don't think that you know in the jiu jitsu world that they we have really narrow it down to an ideal system because we train very differently from wrestlers and judokas and i wonder why if they're not doing it right and we're about doing it all wrong and sometimes i tell myself well there's more impact than jew and wrestling that's why they drill so much and there's less live-action for example right but i don't know i mean like i'm doing the same thing i've been in the process of refining my teaching methods for for as long as i've been teaching and i'm still tweaking it like i still do more of this like i'm still trying to figure out exactly what works best that you know was again looking at the class that you have like who are you teaching right now right um but you're right man like it's uh i think that's part of the job too is it's to perfect that is to be constantly sharpening that tool and not be like oh i'm done this is the teaching method that my teacher taught me and this is how i'm going to hand it out because then there's no more evolution no nothing interests me less than people that teach like that you got to be tweaking them you got to be adapting selecting and perfecting and i think that i think the whole community is better off that way that's one thing about bjj that like for all i mean i you know comparing it to judo i think judo has been more fixed in its canon over the years yep whereas bjj and i talk about this in my book like i call it the culture of open software and that's what it is there's no curriculum like people even have a curriculum until a few years will start writing stuff down because it was all about what works for you and how you're going to change this and make it better it was very open for all to tweak and i think that's probably one of the most endearing qualities about jiu jitsu is that it is open for everyone to modify mm-hmm and i think they're the the problem with teaching is that like you said there's a lot of ways of doing it i feel that one of the the the common mistakes that like rookies make when they're trying to teach is that they try to teach the perfect execution to a beginner student which is never gonna work i always like to say like you know the statue of david wasn't made in one day yeah like you know you're not gonna chisel that masterpiece on that one student and you can you can demoralize somebody by trying to get them to get perfection and when they don't reach it you're like uh okay and then i'll come to you later and now you just that person's spirit just dropped a little bit and you know there's a saying for we have an instructor training program and one of the things we say is that your students either one step closer to the black belt oh one step further yeah and every day you teach you know so obviously the goals get them closer every day and you know one of the things is morale you all know like in the beginning to keep those people in you have to keep them happy you have to keep them excited and motivated so you can't be demotivating at any point and i think one of the things to understand is that you're not going to get the perfect execution off the get-go so like that has to be part of your teaching as well which is if i'm going to show you for example a car engine or just even a car and then i'm going to explain to you this is how a car works talking about every process the engine the combustion hydraulics you're never going to get the like idea of a car it's just gonna blow your mind away yeah but if i show you a car four wheels room room like okay now okay a car is transportation good that's day one then day two like okay now we'll break down different parts of it so i for me technique is the same way like if i'm going to teach an an arm bar or something like that let me get like the for a beginning student just the baseline view of what an arm to look like right and then next time around okay little details because now you're ready for those little details yeah you know because you have something to work off of and like continuing that journey like you don't learn an arm bar in one two days a week a month it's years i know for me double leg i still learn things about double a right so the the misconception that there's like an end point to them and you're going to continue to learn you know but that's what makes it rich too like imagine if you were going you know every wipo wants to they want this right here what's the best joke what's the best sweep what's the best takedown but if we had that imagine how incredibly boring it would be because yeah and then you close it down too where you go oh this this is it this is how you do it there's no other way of doing this you can't you know adapt or change this move like man it'll be so boring it's because it's constantly changing and i think it's so enticing and i i have this argument with people many times because i always think about you know the future of jujitsu is it a fad i don't think judo is a fat i don't think judo is going to go anywhere i think it's established and it will remain what it is for the next hundred years like they did they did it right bjj sometimes worries me because it's not as cohesive as judo is but there is something about jiu jitsu that i think that other martial arts perhaps lacks is besides what we're talking about it's very it's not only has a very friendly and laid back culture but the the ability for everyone to insert something new with the technique makes it very engaging very enticing because now you have a canon of techniques that is the opposite of fixed it is constantly changing if you're and if you're not following you're not keeping up you're out of jiu jitsu for three years you're completely outdated and that doesn't happen in other sports you cannot wrestle for five years and you come back and it's like not that much has changed i feel like because wrestling's gonna rough a lot longer julia the same thing but i feel like this because it allows for so much the possibilities through jiu-jitsu are endless and and like i literally like i i'm just talking to the king about this a while ago and you know he was doing something muhammad ali with the but i still don't know what he's doing he's got to show me someday because i don't know what he was doing like he's doing stuff with the lapel but i don't know what the hell he's doing like i have to i'm sure he could understand if he broke it down to me but it's just to give an idea of how you blink and you get left behind yeah yeah it's uh to put it back into a video game terms for dave because you were talking about your massive video game is you know some of the most popular games out there they call massive multiplayer online games they're basically sandbox games is another way of thinking about it where there's no primary objective and you can kind of do whatever you want in your world like grand theft auto kind of thing you can go around jack and cars you can make a gang you can try to shoot down a helicopter you know whatever you want to do for the day the those are are some of the most engaging games because a they have replay value it's never boring like you're saying it's not just well i'm going to be drilling this leg drag for the next hour again like i did yesterday um but also it's it's the another thing the gaming industry has done a really good job of is called dlc downloadable content so uh for jiu-jitsu you go on instagram be like what the hell was that move every day there's more videos out there it's like oh i've never thought of that before why haven't i thought of that before you know it's it keeps making it re-engaging and and the replay value i guess you could call it keeps going up yeah so that's that's a good way of putting it is like a game that doesn't get boring like it's not you don't you're always surprised like i think anything that is you don't know what's on the other side it's like like sex will get boring very quick if you know what's happening when you get home nine o'clock this is and there's a routine to it and then it just kills you right it's like yeah yeah you know but if it's a novelty every time it's like something's different and you have that sort of energy with your partner it just doesn't get old it's just like this is incredible right and we've all had both so we know what that's like and i think everything in life is like that if it's there's something about not knowing there's something about the excitement of the build up and and like a new experience every time right and jiu jitsu in some ways trying to compare to sex already you know it's more fun because that's the garden if it's different every time oh man my mind just went like a whole year well it's something to speak about jiu jitsu i think that it's supposed to be since we have you here on it's something you haven't talked about because i've been i've been reading the book the close guard cool the one thing i haven't seen yet is where does the park come in about every six years that we're defending the planet against aliens i haven't seen that for the sword fighting and stuff man my god i know like some one of my students made like a meme of like nicholas cage reading a closed guard kind of like yeah they're doing it for everyone like this is what's going to happen you're going to get some kids they're going to walk through the door looking for a sword or maybe kid from naga had it right all along and he's been laying the ground for the nicolas cage is just a movie like handing out stores to all the kids but yeah man i i don't know what to make of that bro like why did they choose the word jiu jitsu is what i don't understand someone showed me a screenshot because they messaged the officials i sent that to you that was that you okay and then the explanation why like and i'm like okay let's assume that you do have sources for all those claims and let's assume that that's true that doesn't explain at all why you guys chose the title of that movie to be jujitsu no you're [ __ ] on our jobs you know i understand that right just just just took a crap a gigantic crack on like like 20 plus years of experience like trying to do something for this sport and you guys just come along and yeah in one move they they turned everybody who does jiu jitsu into the guy online that goes actually yeah now and then someone makes the world something on my post like man nicholas cage has got to say no to some roles at some point he just takes any role you give him like no that's like dude you're a famous actor he's not a bad actor man like you know you gotta you know he's gotta have a better agent i just don't know what else the house is there buddy yeah this is read it nope do you got any notes nope let's do it do it i think he just that's exactly what that i think he's just looking how much am i getting paid i think that's the only number look at it maybe that makes sense maybe he's at the end of his career i don't know but like i would have been more you know protective i guess of of a micro he doesn't give a [ __ ] but i think they're great for the memes though i think the end result though will be positive in the day i think it's people are going to walk through the door looking for i think it just makes it just like a disappoint what is that i was expecting that over there i was in the trades for a long time one of my favorite expressions i took out of it was uh making honey out of bear [ __ ] [Laughter] we'll make some honey out of this yeah you know i think it's funny that they because i saw on the vaginal movie poster it says the ultimate fighters will rise i was like you assume i have something to say about that that's a good one i hope the ufc goes after them maybe they'll change everything yeah you can use ultimate anything and it's a problem you know and they're definitely building on that jiu jitsu ufc crowd yeah or they're trying to they're not tricking anyone because even like ignorant fans will be able to tell that there's no jiu jitsu there like everyone knows has an idea of what jujitsu is now it's not like 1980s when no one knew everyone has an idea of what jiu-jitsu is grappling today even you know maybe your grandma doesn't but you know most people who have watched ufc at some point or like martial arts which is who they're targeting understand the difference between jiu jitsu and ninjutsu i wonder if this is the way that karate and kung fu felt in the 70s hitting the big screen like we don't do that probably well i know for them actually the movie like the karate kid was such an amazing thing for that industry because it brought national attention to them and like people moms were enrolling kids all over the place like it was one of the big booms in like karate and then i love the part with the aliens and the swords too that was my bet my favorite part of karate kid i am watching colebrook either you guys seen it yeah i just finished the second season i i limped through it to be honest yeah it's it's not great but it's not bad it's very corny but it does bring back a lot they bring a lot of back in the 80s it's heavy on the nostalgia but really not great on the character acting no no but what i do like is the um the instructor the let's forget his name the colebrook instructor uh the older guy chris yeah no no no not that guy but the main character oh uh yeah yeah johnny yeah i just love how he talks [ __ ] to his students like that's how i want to talk to my students that's exactly how i want to talk to my students every day but i can't don't punch like that you're not a [ __ ] what they talk [ __ ] do you wanna lie what about your that's exactly how i feel about things oh i'm that guy in some way like like fossilize me well i'm sure once the this judiciary comes out it's going to give you a lot of memes oh yeah this is something that i i revel in good or bad i can make i can make that honey out of it this has been a ton of fun and i hate to be the guy to shut it down but i got a class starting about 10 minutes here so depending on when this podcast comes out uh i've got a guard passing series that's about to drop in a couple days here uh it's a companion to a guard retention series i did earlier this year in september so they kind of vibe off of each other uh it's almost like a a a bad marketing ploy like we're going to show you how to retain the guard then we're going to show you how to smash it so you can sort of pick your favorite part and go for that or learn them both um and then of course like we were talking about i've got the reverse kimura from closed guard and the reverse commander from half guard which are both very popular um thousands of people looking into that and like anything if you don't know the trick you're gonna get caught by the trick so it's better to know it so you can check those out because dash jitsu.com follow me on instagram at because underscore jitsu.com um or just you know because jitsu and my personal page on instagram is drew.weatherhead awesome all right awesome very good we'll make sure that good people know definitely check it out guys because just you were saying before this is like dlc right you got to add them to your game if you want to get better and you know for sure a lot of stuff you were highlighting i think uh particularly your weight your approach to teaching and trying to draw out the unconscious will be a valuable tip for people out there and i've seen a bunch of the video clips it's all good stuff so make sure to go ahead check out drew's content awesome drew thank you so much for coming on our show man i appreciate it i haven't seen you in quite some time but i'm sure we'll catch up at some time down to your country i'll be there man absolutely more than welcome come train with us come visit and uh keep up the good work man i'm sure we will stay in touch and uh yeah i'll talk to you soon sounds good man bye guys hope you guys have fun you