Paul Elliott, Black Belt, Software Engineer, Backpacker, Photographer - Beyond the Belt #23 - Beyond the Belt

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:19):
Hey Paul, thanks for being here.
hey glad to be on.
So tell me what it was like for you to get your black belt.
was, uh, lot of work.
I mean, as, as a black belt is, um, I was, uh, I was, uh, I trained from white belt toblack belt in the, in the same place.

(00:44):
So that was kind of nice.
Um, you know, I had the same people training me all the way through.
Um, like when I started, I started at 37 and my idea was I got it.
I got to be a black belt by the time I'm 50.
So it was like super aggressive about training as much as I could, studying as much as Icould, doing the jiujitsu camps, competing, everything I could think of to try to improve

(01:09):
that process.
I got my black belt before I was 50, for sure.
But it was kind of funny when I actually got my black belt.
I had been in brown belt for three years, and it was kind of like,
I'd already had people ask me, when are you getting your black belt?
you, you know, like, it'll it'll get there.

(01:31):
You know, it's it's uh we'll get it figured out.
And uh and when I was finally scheduled to get my black belt, I was like, super, supersick.
Like I had a big, you some kind of chest congestion.
You know, I could barely breathe.
And, you know, we were kind of the the old school murder, the black belt.

(01:51):
You know, if you're getting promoted, you got murdered like from.
from blue belt all the way up, you got murdered if you were getting promoted.
So my kind of black belt test, I was just trying to survive the whole time.
And I had students that were like, all right, this is finally our chance.
We can take them out now.
But yeah, so I survived that process, did a few demonstration techniques and it was reallycool getting the black belt.

(02:19):
was like that final goal of
of jiujitsu and, I think the thing that excited me most about getting it is it opened updoors.
made it so that I could do more of the things that I wanted to do.
could, I could go out and teach like, like, you know, like at the Globetrotters camps andthings like that.
I, I, and, you know, been invited to other camps and it opened things up.

(02:48):
you know, not just in the opportunities I got, but also
was you know how people talk about how getting a black belt is like you're being set free.
That's what Chris Hauter says and it really is that at that at that point I've got I meanI don't have anything left to prove it's it's more about what can I what can I do with my

(03:12):
jiujitsu uh and you know for me teaching is a you know kind like a core component of whatI want out of jiujitsu and the black belt
made it so that I could go around, I could teach more, I could explore more and withnothing to prove.
So it's like if I'm rolling with white belts, it's like if they do techniques correct,they get the tap.

(03:36):
I'm totally cool with that.
If they're learning something and I'm learning something, I might have to put myself in areally bad situation and maybe I bite out of it, maybe I don't.
it's just that kind of being able to free being free to explore Jiu-Jitsu.
without any constraints or without any expectations or having to prove something.

(03:57):
That's really kind of what tricked my trigger, I think, the most with the black belt.
It's not something that you necessarily...
I mean, it is a goal and you hear all these things that people talk about, getting theblack belt or even any of the belts.
You hear people talk about what it's like to get it and you don't really quite get it.

(04:18):
until you get it.
You know, you get that, you get that belt and you're like, okay, that's, that's, that'swhat this is like now.
Yeah.
Yeah.

(04:39):
in some ways I'm indifferent.
I mean, I, I know, I know some schools that have like extremely formalized tests, um,other places that are just like,
you're going to get the belt when you get the belt and you know it's just going to be thislike random thing where you have to survive the process.
um I'm pretty open to like any interpretation and on one hand I like the that sharktanking and that you know you have to prove your jiujitsu under duress because jiujitsu is

(05:11):
a real thing it's not like we're doing katas and and you know showing forms and thingslike that.
we're we're trained to completely dominate somebody against their will so being throwninto a shark tank like that at like any arbitrary time i think is a good thing i think
it's a good thing for people to realize hey at any time i mean that that's jiujitsu at anytime i could be called upon to use my jiujitsu and i want to do it efficiently i want to

(05:41):
you know avoid having to uh but you know when called upon you should be able to
perform at a level that's appropriate for who you are as an individual.
So putting a 70-year-old through a shark tank is going to be very different than putting a23-year-old through a shark tank.
It has to be appropriate for that person.

(06:04):
in general, I'm in favor of it, but I don't have a problem with people that are like,look, you've already put in your time, you've already put in your hard work, you've done
all the hard things.
is getting promoted is just a formality and we just hold it as a ceremony.
It's like,
I'm okay with either way.
just depends on the person who's giving the belt, how they want to be.
In some ways, it's more about the person who's giving the belt than it is about the personreceiving the belt.

(06:29):
That's fair.
we were talking earlier that uh you feel like jiujitsu doesn't solve everything for youkind like you're not that jiujitsu solves everything kind of person.
Like, what does that mean to you?
So you've got the, you know, the people that, know, jiujitsu saved my life.
It changed, it changed everything about me, you know, and all that was cool.

(06:53):
I don't have a problem with that.
um When I, when I think about jiujitsu and what it's done for me, yes, I've, I've obtaineda lot of benefit out of it, but that's just it.
I've obtained a lot of benefit out of it.
If you aren't getting benefit out of jiujitsu, then why do it?
I mean, why be potentially miserable about something?

(07:19):
And that's not to say that you give up on it or you decide it just isn't for you.
I mean, it just may be a season in your life.
So, you know, when people take breaks, it's like, yeah, I hope they come back.
But if you're not enjoying jiujitsu, then, you know, it's basically a cost benefit, right?

(07:39):
You have certain costs that are associated with doing something hard.
And if you enjoy the process, if you enjoy doing hard things and achieving the the endresults cool.
But if you're not enjoying it, you know, maybe some other hobby is for you.
I mean, I don't even really don't even really care what it is.
If you get benefit out of out of doing, you know, Tai Chi, cool.

(08:02):
Awesome.
You know, if that's if that's your gig, great.
You know, if you if you get more out of rock climbing or scuba diving or skydiving or youknow, what have you all those, you know, whatever
Jiu-Jitsu is something, the way that I like to think about it is Jiu-Jitsu is somethingthat should help you bring balance to your life.
If you are finding that Jiu-Jitsu isn't bringing balance to your life, then you need totake it down a notch.

(08:26):
For example, you get these people that are like, they get burned out on Jiu-Jitsu.
They're doing like, know, five days a week that's starting to take over, starting to takeover their life, everything, you know, because they see people get consumed by Jiu-Jitsu
and like, man, I want that.
They look like they're having so much fun, but then they try it.
And it's not working.
And jiujitsu is not worth nuking your job, your relationships.

(08:47):
I mean, there's a lot of things that are way more important than jiujitsu.
And as much as I enjoy jiujitsu and as many opportunities as it's given me, if for somereason it started affecting me negatively, then I'd change what I do.
And this is actually happened when I was a uh brown belt.
uh My main black belt that was teaching all the classes

(09:11):
decided to leave and he had been wanting to leave for a while and it wasn't like it wassome surprise, but there wasn't anybody else to teach.
so he asked me if I was ready to just basically take over all the class.
like, yeah, sure.
I teaching fundamentals, I was doing my thing, but it was going to be up to me.

(09:33):
So I started teaching everything and that started causing issues because I would go towork.
I would go immediately to Jiu Jitsu after work because Jiu Jitsu was like 50 minutes away.
So I'd have to leave work, go down there, train for two, sometimes three hours, and thenget home.

(09:56):
maybe my kids weren't awake.
So I would see them off to school.
And then that was the last time I'd see them.
was times where I'd be working late.
I'd get up late, see them off to school.
So there could be times where it was like four days that I'd
basically didn't see my kids at all.
And that is going to take a toll.

(10:17):
So, you know, I had to cut back.
I had to start training somebody else to teach one of my classes so I could have a breakin them and all of that.
you know, while mentally and physically I could train that much, it was going to causeproblems outside of Jiu Jitsu.
And so it wasn't worth it.
So I cut back.

(10:37):
um You know, we're...
You know, like another temple.
Yeah.

(10:57):
If there's like some internal conflict about it, you know, you got to look at the thingsthat you care about.
So like if you if you have a, you know, a spouse and they're getting annoyed by how muchJiu-Jitsu training you're doing.
If jiujitsu is more important than your spouse, you're probably taking jiujitsu tooseriously.

(11:19):
Having the people that you care about or your boss, ah if something is like you're gettingbehind on things because you're spending too much time looking at jiujitsu videos when you
shouldn't be, that's a problem.
So anytime that
You start seeing those negative effects.
You have to decide, okay, is this, is this an obstacle to adapt and overcome?

(11:43):
Or is this something that's not going to change?
And it's going to negatively affect me over the longterm.
So the, the, the Brahma is always going to come back to what's going on inside your ownhead.
For you personally, whether it's like, you know, you're overtraining and getting injuries,uh, or you're just getting mentally burned out.
feel, you know, you're, you're kind like dreading going to jiujitsu, which happens.

(12:06):
ah That's all the stuff that's inside your own head.
But then you got to look at the other things that are important to you.
Family, uh work, the things that really should matter more than just rolling around infunny uniforms.
It's funny because like what you know I teach a lot of I don't teach that many classes butI teach the morning classes and I feel like the type of people that come to the morning

(12:32):
classes are different than the type of people that come to the evening classes and I veryrarely see the people who are overdoing it at the 8 a.m.
Heh.
classes.
I feel like the people that I always see that are kind of overdoing it are the eveninggoers or like the middle of the day plus evening and I think it's funny that there's like

(12:53):
a certain type of people that sort of overdo it and they stick to a schedule that allowsthem to overdo it in a way.
Yeah, I mean, I don't I try to avoid Jiujitsu before 10 a.m.
So I wouldn't know.
uh
I finished teaching about 10.30 in the morning as the latest class I teach and everythingelse.

(13:16):
I'm done with my workouts before 11.
Okay.
So when you when you teach like how much of the so let me back up a little bit.
You write a lot, right?
You have the simple BJJ.
You send out a newsletter, which is an interesting thing for like a written thing for aphysical activity.

(13:39):
Before we even get into that, how did you get into that?
Like what made you decide to start writing?
You know, 10-12 years ago, a jiujitsu newsletter or jiujitsu blog.
So when I started jiujitsu, knew that I was going to be an instructor.
I knew that was going to be the end goal because that's just kind of how I do things.

(14:04):
If I'm going to get very deeply into it, I know that I'm going to end up teaching.
um
Because part of that is I enjoy the process of figuring things out.
So in the case of when I got my purple belt, it was kind of like I was at the point where,OK, now I'm a beginner expert and I'm just going to record my classes for my students so

(14:33):
that they have a recording of the class.
I'll give a description and I'll go into more depth than what maybe what I was able to doin class.
And so it started out as kind like a resource for my own students, but it was also it wasalso practice.
I knew full well that you know starting writing as a purple belt, starting doing videos asa purple belt was not was not necessarily like I'm not I'm not necessarily going to get

(15:00):
things right all the time.
I'm going to have things that I look back at in the future and you
I have some questions about, you know, what was done.
But I also figured that was also the easiest.
Well, it was the most efficient way to get better faster was put myself on the spot.
And if somebody had a critique, I take the critique in the spirit given, you know, if Idid something wrong.

(15:21):
OK, cool.
I want to know about that when I'm a purple belt, not when I'm a black belt.
So a lot of the.
A lot of the doing the writing stemmed from doing classes, but I was also trying tocommunicate to students like.
what I consider the deeper truths of Jiujitsu.
And kind of like over time, I stopped doing the class videos and just focused mostly onwriting because as I was thinking about Jiujitsu and thinking about, you know, what are

(15:50):
the core truths?
What are the things that we're trying to communicate?
You know, a lot of the writing would stem out just conversations I was having withstudents and I'd be, you know, it's like they could ask me a question, I could give them
an answer, but then I get thinking about it.
Okay, was that the best answer?
Is there?
a better way to present this?
And so I started writing kind of frequently at that point.

(16:13):
When I say frequently, know, like, you know, I was trying to get like in maybe once amonth, that kind of thing, or, sometimes once a week.
It just depended on what was going on in jiujitsu as to how much I tended to write.
Because then
of like processing?
Like you're almost like processing what you learned in written form um as opposed to likemaybe, I don't know, excessive drilling.

(16:39):
I'm just juxtaposing it against like an idea.
yeah, no, no, I think it was, I think it was more a case of all of the writing that I didwas I had something that I wanted to pin down the ins and outs of, you know, I could give
a, I could give a competent short answer, but I wanted to really flesh it out.
So writing helped me flesh things out in a way that
you know, like for example, what I could do is after the fact, somebody would ask me aquestion and be like, okay, here's a short answer, but if you want, you know, get into

(17:07):
this a little bit deeper, go to my website, look for this particular article, and that'llgive you a more in-depth view.
So that was like, you know, I wanted to have something that was a resource in the futurefor, you know, when people had particular questions that I've answered before.
So.
Yeah.

(17:28):
Um, it's kind of funny, like over the years, it turns out that the, thing that gets readthe most is some articles I wrote about training with Henry Akins.
I don't know if there's like, I mean, I, don't, I don't like, I don't pay any attention tosearch engine optimization or anything like that.
Everything that I put out there has just been like, this is just what I'm putting outthere.

(17:50):
I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to accomplish some like big grand school goal with, withthese things.
It's going to be this.
thing that I'm writing it because that's what I want to do.
So when I did a seminar with them in Costa Rica back in 2014 I think or no 2015 whateverit was I think it was 2014.

(18:15):
Part way through I'm like I need to write about this because the stuff that I'm learningis just amazing.
That, that, that became a popular thing.
And then after a year, I wrote another article, you know, a year with Henry Akins becauseI kept on using his stuff all the time.
It was, it was a thing where.
because I used what I learned from them, like literally every single role, um it was uh itwas was something interesting to write about and what my recollections and observations

(18:46):
and those two collectively have been like easily the most popular, you know, things thatare that are read on my website.
um There's there's other ones that are like, you know,
close seconds, because I don't pay a lot of attention to it, I'm not sure what they are.
It's just I know over time, if I look over long periods, those are definitely the mostpopular ones.

(19:10):
It's kind of surprising that it's like a random thing and not to, I guess, I feel likeit's always the thing you put like the, not the least effort in, but it's kind of like,
just this throwaway thing.
And then all of a sudden that's like the thing that people frequent the most or goes viral
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, whatever close people's was I mean, you know, as long as aslong as my Whenever I put something online.

(19:32):
I want it to be one of two things whether it's on Facebook Instagram, you know my ownwebsite I want to be one of two things.
I want to either be informative or humorous if it's Not that then I'm not going to put itup there And since the vast majority of my online life revolves around jiujitsu That's
pretty much all anybody sees
So it's like, you follow me on Facebook, you don't see like random observations about somepolitical thing or some other non-Jujitsu thing.

(20:00):
It's all going to be strictly about Jiujitsu.
And so that's, as far as anybody can tell from an online presence, that's like literallyall I do.
Yeah, that's fair.
I know you do other stuff and we're gonna talk about that in a little bit.
But before we do, I'm just curious, like you started Jiu Jitsu at 38, which is, that's notlike a young age to start damaging your body the way we tend to do in Jiu Jitsu.

(20:24):
Like what have you done differently over the years of, you know, between training as awhite belt at 38, 40 to being a black belt around 50 plus, you know?
Um, so when I, when I started it, like everybody in the school was like, think at least 12years younger than me and most of them, like, you know, 14, 15 years younger than me.

(20:48):
And man, that was brutal.
That was, that was really, really, really hard.
Um, because I was still, you know, reasonably athletic, reasonably strong.
And at 37, I could keep up with them.
I just didn't have quite the stamina.
Uh, so I had to, I had to basically train a little bit smarter.

(21:09):
couldn't just, I couldn't just assume that, okay, I'm just going to rush this and, and,you know, make things happen.
I do that for a brief amount of time, but I couldn't spend an hour of training doing that.
So, you know, Mike, Mike, when I started the classes were an hour long and then open, thatwas an hour long.
And because I was driving at that time, it was like close to an hour to get there.

(21:29):
Um, I was trying to maximize my time.
I didn't want to leave early or anything like that.
I wanted to do as many classes as I physically could.
So had to do things like, okay, it turns out that training three days in a row hard is areally, really bad idea.
It turns out that instead of my accustomed six hours of sleep at night, I got to get sevenhours of sleep now, whether I like it or not.

(21:55):
So pacing things and taking recovery really seriously were the biggest things for me earlyon.
as as as things got later, you know, as I got better at jiujitsu, then I could pick mybattles a little bit more.
So like we had, man, we had so many like young strong guys coming.

(22:19):
We were right next to Fort Drum and 10th Mountain Division guys were coming in and I mean,I literally had people come in that I would try to arm bar and they would like curl me
like, no, this is a problem.
And, you know, where they would, they would, uh, like basically pick me up and slam me.

(22:39):
And, and it's like just a lot of high energy things happened with, with the guys that weretypically coming in.
So I had to be smarter about it.
had to, you know, early on had more overuse injuries and I had to spend more time in PTand, and, know, but that got old really quick.

(23:01):
So I started, you know, really
Just paying attention, like anytime something fell off, I had to take it seriouslyimmediately.
The young guys, you know, like these 19 year old guys, they go to a competition, they gettheir elbow, you know, they'd fight off like 10 armbars in a row.
And the final one, you know, got cranks of that, that they're like nearly in tears,putting ice on their elbows.

(23:23):
Three days later, they're fine.
I'm like, yeah, that must be nice.
That's one of the things that I think I struggled to get across to some of the youngerfolks in jiujitsu is like, yeah, you might be fine now.
You might be able to get away with popping an elbow and then getting right back at it, butthat stuff takes a toll and you need to take it down a couple notches.

(23:46):
Cause the rest of us don't heal like that, especially not as we get up into our fortiesand probably older.
don't think that's really something that you can communicate to somebody.
I think everybody has to go through it because they're like, well, it's working.
It's like diets.
You can engage in some really
horrific dietary habits and get away with it for a while.

(24:08):
But eventually it's going to catch up with you.
know, and jiujitsu is the same way.
Our bodies are remarkably adaptable and we can take advantage of that fact, but only forso long.
So that's why being sensitive to what your body's doing and taking things seriously.
Now you can't take it too seriously.
When I was like, I don't know, blue belt somewhere, I had a, an overuse.

(24:35):
issue in my elbow.
was like a golfer's elbow or something.
And you know, I did the smart thing.
I went into a sports physio or a sports ortho to take a look at it.
And he's like, okay, take a month off and we'll be fine.
So I took that month off.
That was awful.

(24:56):
You know, yeah, I recovered, but not doing any jiujitsu at all was just, it sucked.
And I never took that much time off again.
But what I did do was I, if I had anything that was like approaching overuse injury, Iwould back things off and, and, you know, take the PT seriously and make it so that I

(25:16):
could still train.
and that worked out really, really well until it was like a brown belt.
ended up with a uh bicep tendonitis issue that kept me out of competition.
It kept me from like rolling as hard as I.
would have liked.
And part of the problem was that it wasn't really properly diagnosed.

(25:37):
At this point, you know, I'd gotten so used to recovering from different little nigglingissues that it wasn't, it wasn't a big deal to just be like, okay, I'm going to continue
training because I can.
And I spent like close to two years with a, what turned out to be a bicep tendonitis.
And as soon as I got it properly diagnosed, which took all of, you know, 30 seconds bysomebody that knew what they were doing.

(26:03):
Then I went to my PT.
I'm like, okay, this is what I've got.
And he's like, oh, it's that.
All right.
Well, let's, let's fix that.
And, know, six weeks later I was fine.
Um, so, but that's, that's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, that, that was, that was, you know, it's, it's a good lesson to take, takethe little things seriously.

(26:30):
You don't have to be paranoid about it.
mean, if you train smart, you can train through it.
I mean, you look at, you look at the competitors out there and they train through injuriesall the time because that's, you know, their goals require it.
They don't have any choice.
You know, if you're trying to be number one in the rankings or something like that, youhave to go train and compete with whatever you got going on, whether you like it or not,

(26:52):
because that goal is greater than, you know, the suffering that you have to put up with.
um
And there's, you know, there's definitely, there's definitely something to be said forthat.
But if you're a hobbyist, don't, don't pretend that you're like, you know, some hardcore,you know, Oh, I'm just going to train through everything.
I'm going to, you know, I'm going to lift more, even though it hurts, you know, it, kindof stuff just doesn't make any sense to me.

(27:20):
Uh, and so as, as long as people are, you know, paying attention, yeah, you can workaround just about anything.
But just like the overuse injuries, you start overdoing it, you got to take it down anotch and take the recovery more seriously.
While it's super tempting to roll hard, you just don't do it.

(27:43):
Having that self-control is really tough.
It is really tough.
That's like, it's one of those things that I think there's only one way to learn thatlesson and that's usually the hard way.
Like you gotta learn that self control.
So I wanna talk, go ahead.
Yeah.
like the small things where I'd have to take like a week off, I used to go into Jiu-Jitsuand watch the classes.

(28:07):
A, that was torture because like all I could think about was getting out there on, I can'tdo it.
Because what happened was I'd be like, can get away with it.
And I would go out there and like it would start with just like saying, hey, you know, youshould be doing this a little bit differently.
And then before you know it, I'm doing full live roles.
When I all I intended to do was just go in and watch.

(28:29):
now if I'm like if I'm injured enough that I shouldn't be doing jiujitsu, I'm just I'm notthere at all.
It's a.
Yeah, I don't I basically put you to sit down for a little bit when that happens, youknow, it's like I don't even really necessarily watch videos or anything like that.

(28:52):
It's just like, all right, I'm doing something else now.
And that's why I think it's important that people have other hobbies and other interestsoutside of jiujitsu.
Otherwise, when you get injured, then you lose your identity in the fact that your injuryhas taken away your, you know, sole source of passion or, or sole source of escape or
whatever you use it for.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, 100%.

(29:14):
So you're like full-time, you are a software developer, right?
Like you work in technology.
You got into writing software similar to me in the late eighties, which is like a crazyearly period of time to have started doing something that is so pervasive.
What was it like for you watching, know, assembler develop into like the modernprogramming languages?

(29:41):
Yeah, that's something I've been, know, just uh when I was thinking about, you know,getting on here, I got thinking about the, you my kind of history in computing.
And it started in 84 on a, know, a TRS-80 color computer, you know, 8-bit computer, thatkind of thing.

(30:01):
And in those days, you know, if you had a 64K computer,
It was like, ah, this is pretty good.
And you would have a memory map for it and actually know what was going on in thecomputer.
You pretty much had a really good idea of what every location in the computer, what it wasfor, what the purpose was, how you could tweak it, and doing things like writing assembler

(30:24):
code to get the most speed out of it.
I mean, was trying to make a Star Wars clone, and I had to use assembler in order to getthe graphics to draw.
fast enough.
And, you know, I was, you know, 14, 15, something like that.
So I never was able to fully make the clone.

(30:46):
I only found out just recently that the Star Wars games in the arcade actually use thesame chip that I was programming on.
So I was like, oh, turns out it was theoretically possible.
It was fast enough.
I just sucked.
It is disheartening as a programmer to realize what you could have been capable of andcouldn't figure it out.
I know that sentiment very well.

(31:08):
Yeah, so it was going from those days of writing super low level code to now the ecosystemis so vast that you can only hope to be good at what you're working on.
You can't be good at everything.
Basic, just.

(31:30):
also?
Yeah, I started in basic.
I started in basic and then I shifted over to.
uh So first it was like the old DOS exec bat files and then I got into a little bit ofbasic.
uh In school they had us doing something on apples called logo writer.

(31:52):
yeah.
of us that were.
Yeah, that was like my real intro before I got into BASIC.
And then I think I started with C and then got into Assembler.
It took me a little while to get to the Assembler side of things.
But you just dove right in the deep end.
yeah, yeah.
I dove into deep end then, uh, what, uh, I progressed to Pascal, uh, which was my, yeah,my very first commercial piece of software was in Pascal.

(32:21):
And then, uh, and then I went to college for, uh, first software.
Uh, it was, uh, it was a thing to convert artistic files like AI and EPS files.
into uh DXF files that were suitable for machining.
My brother had CorelDRAW and he had a CNC router, just like a desktop CNC router, and hewanted to do these artistic things on that router.

(32:52):
But A, there wasn't an easy way to get from CorelDRAW into what the router solver needed,and so he uh
I came home for Thanksgiving and we started basically just making something to do thatpurpose.
And we ended up getting deeper into it and optimizing that process of it generated betterfiles.

(33:17):
And it was like, oh, this isn't just something that we could do.
This is something that we could actually sell.
And so I basically stopped going to college and we started selling that.
But while I was in college, I audited a graduate level course for C++.
Um, and it was actually the, Marshall Klein, the guy that maintains the C++ FAQ, uh, hewas the one teaching it.

(33:41):
So I got, I got my introduction to object oriented programming from one of the best in thebusiness, so to speak.
And that class was actually more useful to me than anything else that I did in college.
And when I, when I left college, I started, I basically put down the Pascal, uh, as soonas I could.

(34:02):
started programming in C++ and did that until 2006, 2005, something like that, when Istarted doing C# man, it was like, I could do all these amazing things in C++.
It was an amazing language for letting you do whatever you wanted, anytime you want,including, I was doing things like putting in assembler code in it to make the matrix

(34:28):
multiplies faster.
There was all these
these different things that you could do really really well for low level stuff in C++,but also let me get in a lot of trouble.
like sometimes there was like these intractable bugs in my software that were just becausethere were so many layers of code and preprocessor directives and things going on that
made the code look super elegant.

(34:50):
But if anything went wrong one of those levels is it was impossible to figure out.
And then when I went to C# it's like all that stuff went away because it kind of enforceda bit more simplicity.
And it ended up being a overall it ended up being a better language for me for softwareengineering and making sure that things didn't get nutty.
So, I've been C# ever since.

(35:12):
going down that low level was C++ didn't let you get as uh specific with your memorymanagement as C.
And so if you did anything preprocessor inside of C++ that was C related and you got lowerlevel, then C++ would try to do your memory management in a way that C was like, ah, I've
got this.
it's like, they didn't behave in consistent ways.

(35:34):
And I remember that because I ran into a lot of bugs.
writing C++ and trying to go lower level than I should have, then having to jump back upand clean up the memory management the way C++ liked it.
it always ended up being something for me where I had to have the right tools.
Because there was always tools like, know, if you were optimizing, there was VTune to lookat what the low level timings were.

(35:57):
You had uh memory profilers that would, like I had this one, oh, I forget what it wascalled.
But basically it instrumented the entire build and made it so that it would track all theallocations.
that was like the only decent way to...
No, no, it was some commercial package.
can't remember what it was, but it worked out really well for figuring out those kinds ofissues.

(36:24):
And uh yeah, they're all basically doing the same thing.
You instrument the build, it keeps track of it separately, and then...
get to a point where you're like, okay, everything should be okay.
And it's like, it is not in fact okay.
And then you had to figure out, okay, what, did I do wrong?
What did I miss?
And all those, those, those memory issues were always, oh man, they were always so such ahassle to, to, figure out.

(36:46):
And, that was, you know, one of the reasons I went to C# is because I'm like, okay, well,you know, they say they've got this memory management thing figured out.
Not really.
I mean, you know, to a large degree it's figured out.
but you still have to take it seriously.
If you're doing anything beyond trivial projects, it's like my current code base issomewhere like, don't know, maybe somewhere between four and 500,000 lines of C# code.

(37:14):
um Yeah.
So yeah, it is.
But that's what's accumulated over the last, well, getting close to 20 years.
of writing the C# code because we've been kind of like in the same industry.

(37:35):
And so we've been really kind of building out all the features in this one particularpiece of software.
And the code that I originally wrote is all still being used.
know, there hasn't really been, there's been like new generations of code, but all the lowlevel stuff that I wrote back at the very beginning is still 100 % in use.

(37:58):
So it's a,
fairly large active code base that I'm not doing anything with it.
That's pretty awesome though.
mean, like one of the things that's been amazing to me is how LLMs in the last six monthshave gotten to the point where they can learn large chunks of your code base, make

(38:19):
reasonable suggestions.
I mean, they're not replacing junior developers or anything anytime soon, but they makelike reasonable suggestions based on what your code's doing and what you're attempting to
do.
And they shortcut the workload of like senior or experienced developers prettyeffectively.
how
But they struggle.
They're effective on green field, less effective on large existing code bases.

(38:42):
Like how have you dealt with that on a large existing code base and still made use of likewhat LLMs offer?
Recently, I've actually been finding that the tools in the Visual Studio, where they'vegot the agent mode, that can work pretty good.

(39:05):
one of the things that I found is that you have to give it some kind of grounding.
So if I'm working with an existing code base, one of the first things I do is I tell theAI, OK, here's the files that are involved in this particular
subset.
Is there anything you're missing?
So we make sure we've got everything that at once.
So like one of the places I like to do that is in Claude.

(39:26):
I use their projects.
I upload the files to it.
Say, okay, do you understand the code base?
Do you have any questions?
Is there anything that you're not seeing?
As I got, no, I got a pretty good feel for this.
I'm like, all right, let's create a design document for this.
Because, you know, I never had time to generate design documents and everything was justalways evolving.
So like if you've made a design document,

(39:48):
It was just getting obsolete immediately.
But with AI, I could say, okay, let's create a design document.
This shows me what your understanding of the architecture of the different pieces.
And if anything doesn't make sense or it misinterprets, I can correct that designdocument.
So we start with a bunch of code, a design document that says what my intention is.

(40:10):
We get all of that on the same page.
Then I can continue on and say, okay, now I want to create this.
And even in the green field stuff, keeping it, getting that design document together isfor me, it's been uh really, really important.
And it's kind of funny because like, know, classical software engineering says, you youneed to have some specs to go by.

(40:35):
You need to make these decisions about what you're doing or if you're making specs forsomebody to build it, like you're uh contracting out to a third party.
It's like, you got to good specs.
giving these LLMs these good specs makes a huge difference.
um getting, getting everything.

(41:00):
Yeah.
Nope, just me.
Yeah, small business.
no judgment.
This is like really interesting to me, because I manage large teams of engineers andproduct managers.
So I get to say, hey, do the design doc, do the product spec, right, engineers, jump inand do it.
um Do you store the design docs alongside the code and then tell it, here's the designdoc, go deliver on this.

(41:29):
And then do you have it right back to the design doc, some of the changes that it made sothat it can like
That's a really good idea.
It makes a huge difference.
So you're just because I want to repeat this back to you to make sure I understand yourworkflow is here's the code.
Here's the files that I think you will need.

(41:50):
Here's my goal.
Write the design doc.
You read the design doc at outputs and you say, OK, now go ahead, create an agent to go tomake those changes.
And then I assume probably write the tests on the backside to make sure that these are theoutputs that you get from it.
Yeah, exactly.
you know, it's great for...
It does a really good job because I can say, okay, I need a test for this part of thedesign doc.

(42:13):
um So, like, if I have existing code that doesn't have tests against it, it does a realgood job of writing the test.
And then, you you've got this iterative development of the...
the design document is being built at the same time as the code.
then anytime I smell something weird going on, it generates code that I look at and it'slike, seems a little bit fishy.

(42:40):
OK, let's take a step back.
Let's look at the design document.
Let's figure out if I have a logical flaw in what I'm doing.
Because sometimes the design document is wrong.
My interpretation of how things should
be architected is wrong.
So by looking for those things that smell a little bit fishy and go back and say, OK,let's get back to our first principles here.

(43:02):
Let's let's get our baseline and get all this ironed out and work through the logic.
And then only once me and the AI are on the same page as to what the code is currentlydoing and what the design document says, then we can make incremental changes.
And AIs are really good at making incremental changes.
If you just handed something, you know,

(43:23):
Like this uh was zero-shot coding stuff where you basically say, hey, this is what I want.
And it tries to make the entire thing.
It's like for trivial things, yeah, I mean, for trivial things, it's fine.
But AI where AI really shines is if you look at the LLM models, it's basically just areally good prediction engine.

(43:44):
So if you give it a good starting point and ask it to extend it just a little bit, it doesa pretty good job of predicting.
what the code needs to be, what the design document needs to be.
And it's getting better all the time, absolutely.
um But you still have to use the tools intelligently.

(44:04):
over the last, from when I first started using AI for generating code to now, the codequality has gotten enormously better.
um But it's still, you still have to be a domain expert.
You still have to be able to interpret what's going on.
Do you start with baseline rules?
Do you have like a rules doc inside your repo and say, hey, here's my coding standards.

(44:28):
Here's the standard ways I want you to write specs and tests and whatever, or do you justgo straight for the design doc and let it work from context?
Yeah, I try to keep it focused on what we're conceptually looking at.
I'm not trying to give it like, you know, here's how to do absolutely everything.
Because the other part of that is that is going to give me

(44:51):
something that's closer to best practices, which being a solo developer that was mostlyself-taught, while I take standard practices pretty seriously, I'm not really exposed to
them all that much.
Just like with jiujitsu, I research, I look at what other people are doing and all thepair programming and agile development and all these different ways of looking at

(45:17):
developing software.
I took all those things seriously, but...
If you're a solo developer and there's like, you nobody above you to enforce these things,and sometimes you just don't have time to enforce them on yourself.
So I tend to, there's a lot of times where I say, okay, this is what I'm doing.

(45:39):
Does this look like best practices to you?
Like, you know, working on an MVVM pattern, you know, maybe my model isn't quite asstrictly constructed as it should be.
And a lot of times the AI is perfectly willing to say,
we've got some, you know, user interface dispatcher code in the model.
It's completely okay with it.
Unless you say, you know, is this really best practice?

(45:59):
You know, cause I'm the problem I'm running into smells like this is a bad idea.
And then it'll be like, Oh yeah, it's a bad idea.
That's like, you could have let me know that earlier.
this is what I meant about rules, right?
Like if you're writing, you know, like model view controller and you say, Hey, I want tokeep business logic out of the controller.
Like that would be a standard rule that the AI could then follow.

(46:19):
If you just have like your, your rules doc.
but there's so much of that already out there.
I mean, the kind of the way that I look at it is these things that are standard.
Once you identify what the pattern is, the, you know, called the weight of what it wastrained on was trained on, you know, what ought to be correct, or at least really, really

(46:40):
common.
So I don't really worry about these kinds of like big, huge rules.
I'm looking at it more in terms of.
I want it to accelerate whatever I'm whatever I'm starting with.
And the more stuff that I add on as, oh here's more baseline, here's more rules, here'smore how I want things to be done, it kind of clouds what the AI is doing when it comes to

(47:08):
solving one particular incremental problem.
So I uh prefer to have it be less constrained on things that aren't
necessarily relevant to the immediate problem.
Now, if I'm trying to debug something that's in the MVVM pattern and I might say, okay,let's look at the code base.

(47:30):
Everything is clearly labeled.
Am I doing anything that goes against best practices?
And so I don't have to have a document that says what best practices are.
I just say, hey, does this follow best practices as far as you can tell?
Do you see anything smelly?
And most of the time, if you look at it in those terms,
It does a good job of saying, yeah, this might look a little bit suspicious.

(47:53):
So I tend to stay very focused on the specific tasks that I'm trying to do and try not tohand it too much.
Do you worry about technical debt a lot?
Cause that's a thing that I see a lot of with like the AI code is that it will create LLMbase code is that it creates a lot of, I don't want to say garbage, but it's it's

(48:13):
extraneous because it's trying to like be a little bit more verbose.
So do you feel like it gives you a lot of technical debt or do you feel like it's just nota thing that you're as worried about as a sort of solo developer?
I go through my commits pretty much line by line.
So like if AI was involved in it before I commit, I make sure that there's nothing thatlooks nutty.

(48:36):
And sometimes stuff does get through.
I mean, I just had something I was working on this weekend where I had some SQL queriesand because this was a project that's been going on for a while and I've been using AI on
it extensively, it ended up misinterpreting some things and I ended up with like twovirtually identical
SQL statements in two different functions and but they weren't completely identical butthe AI hadn't picked up on it hadn't it hadn't uh looked for that opportunity to to

(49:07):
optimize what was going on or even question why there was these things it just accepted itas is so I had to I had to go back and say okay I had to do you know normal software
engineering okay what are we trying to accomplish what are the you know which one of theseis correct can I consolidate them down into one function did
I or the AI misinterpret the problem that ended up with this, you know, what ended upbeing like that technical blip where we've got something that shouldn't even be in there

(49:35):
that it put in there.
know, AI is AI is a great accelerator, but it doesn't replace the domain experts.
uh So you still have to pay attention to what it's outputting.
It's just like if you had a junior engineer that you sent off to do a project and theycome back with the code.
The smart thing to do is to look through that code and make sure that they didn'tintroduce anything that's going to be a nightmare later.

(49:59):
Right.
So AI in that way is can be a little bit like that junior engineer.
They just have to kind of keep an eye on and make sure it doesn't do anything stupid.
If it it passed the test, if it gets the job done, probably good enough to check in.
But if you want to avoid problems later, it's best to just double check everything.

(50:20):
I think that's a totally reasonable way of looking at it.
It's also something for me that's interesting is that with junior engineers, you can sortof expect to some extent that they're gonna learn like, hey, you know, here's something
I'm gonna show you, you're gonna do it differently.
Well, the AI is like, hopefully they learn, but they're not retaining often what you tellthem.
They might make the same mistake, you know, on repeat.

(50:42):
And that's one of the reasons I was asking about rule sets, because I find that rule setsoften em
are a slim negotiation around what you consider to be things that are important to you inits operating model.
uh Like the way you particularly like to write tests or if you do test-driven developmentor if you like dry code or if you have uh a specific uh model view pattern that you like

(51:07):
or a logic sense for what goes in the view, what goes in the uh controller, what goes inthe model, what goes in the...
like just the different parts and library services, et cetera.
And so I just think it's interesting that as like an individual person, you're not relyingon that more heavily.
uh And it's interesting to me to hear that the way you structure things is more outputdriven than uh safety driven, and you still rely on yourself for the safety.

(51:37):
It's not a judgment.
It's just observational, like, uh you know, talking to engineers kind of over the last fewweeks about how they use it.
It's something I see a lot.
I kind of wonder if it is just more, um I mean, because I have to be so intimatelyfamiliar with everything that's in the code.
uh If I was working in a bigger team, I can see where that would potentially make a biggerdifference to make sure that you have some of those baseline rules in place.

(52:04):
it could just be, you know, how many minds are involved in it.
uh
I know.
I might experiment with that, try to give it a little bit more of that, this is how Iexpect things to be done, uh more corporate standards, so to speak.
Is that kind of like what you're talking about as far as what you put into that kind ofthing?

(52:25):
Yeah, but it's very loose.
Like, uh you know, in the same way you might have a readme.md file at the top of your...
uh like a markdown at the top of your repo, you might have like a, know, LLM rules fortesting and you're like, hey, include this one when you're writing tests or include this
when you're writing to the model, right?
And you ask it to check for best practices or if you're asking it to, you know, includethis file when you're writing SQL.

(52:48):
So it can say, hey, you know, check all the SQL files and make sure there's nothing thatlooks similar to this and you're not, and you can be smarter about reusing existing
things.
Just stuff that like does the legwork that you're doing,
not so that you stop doing it, but so that it at least thinks about it and you're nothaving to run through your mental models checklist repeatedly on every commit.

(53:12):
You know what, it could just be something that, when I first started using these AImodels, they had such small context windows and they started hallucinating so fast that it
wasn't worth doing.
It may be now that they have these much larger capabilities.
I should probably investigate that and play around that a bit more because it's

(53:33):
it's probably less likely to cause me problems than it was, like say, a couple of yearsago.
It's a good tip.
that those rules are very helpful when you have standard patterns that you tend to applyto your code, your style, to your libraries, whatever kind of model you use on a regular

(53:53):
basis.
I also wanted to talk to you about uh backpacking, because you're a solo developer and youalso do remote backpack.
How did you get it?
It sounds like you do a lot of stuff by yourself, by the way.
I like figuring.

(54:14):
Very much, I, I, call it a high functioning introvert.
am super happy by myself and I like figuring things out and optimizing things and, But Ialso, you know, it's like, I don't have any problem having a deep conversation with
somebody as well.
And it's not, it's not like this, like, you know, like, you know, terrifying thing to meto interact with people.

(54:39):
Um, so, but I do enjoy.
doing things more or less by myself or with very few other people.
So I backpacking.
When I was a kid, I'd go up into the Adirondack Mountains with a group of teenagers andadults.
And we'd go up there and hike all over the place.

(54:59):
And that was really cool.
I enjoyed that.
Getting out in nature, eating really horrible food.
But it was cool.
It was a lot of fun.
And then I didn't...
I didn't do much backpacking uh after college.
uh But then uh my college roommate, he moved to Alaska and he had been trying to get mefor years to come up to Alaska, but it was the only thing I didn't have the money to do

(55:29):
these big Alaska trips.
uh So when I finally did have a bit more disposable income to work with, I started goingup there and it was always about
going out into the wilderness and it really appealed to me to go out there in places wherethere was no support.

(55:51):
There weren't any trails.
You could basically put your tent wherever was going to work.
had to pay attention to the bears, you know, all these things that was appealing to me,you know, for whatever reason.
And so my, my, my secondary goal was always to do photography.
Um, always, I was like doing photography and I looked at

(56:12):
going out into these remote areas and capturing the landscapes or the foliage or theanimals, all that kind of stuff, the stuff that was hard to get, the stuff that not many
other people did, kind of like Jiu-Jitsu, do the hard things.
And it was just me and my college buddy that we went out and did all these trips out intothe Arctic.

(56:41):
Prince William Sound, Lost Coast of Alaska.
I don't know how many times I've been up there now, it was, I have never felt more relaxedthan in the middle of the Alaskan Arctic, where there was nobody else for, you know, 50
miles, like literally nobody else for 50 miles.

(57:02):
And to be able to just sit there and be just almost effectively completely alone.
Yeah.
my backpacking buddy with me, but somebody that I've known forever.
But I could just sit there and relax, and just have...
There's no concerns.
The only concern I have is, am I going to eat the freeze-dried fruit, or am I going tohave a granola bar?

(57:25):
That's my biggest decision in the next five minutes.
So everything else gets emptied out, and all you have is this beautiful scenery aroundyou.
You're pulling out the binoculars, looking for sheep on a far hill, or maybe hear somewolves.
paying attention to whether there's any bears around you.
it's like, everything is so fundamental and raw.

(57:48):
And all of my backpacking was focused around kind of like optimizing that experience.
for, I would spend hours in Google Earth looking for an interesting mountaintop that wouldgive me just a really cool picture.
uh Or studying caribou migration.
Figuring out okay if we go down this river at this time of year Where are the chances thatwe're gonna run into a big caribou or what are our backup plans?

(58:15):
um We had we had a trip uh Then we went down the conga cut it was me my buddy and his wifewe were doing a float trip and We we encountered a bunch of caribou, but we got up to
where the takeout point was and

(58:35):
decide that we were just going to hike up to the Arctic Ocean.
It was like, from there it was like 20, 25 miles, something like that one way.
So we had to, you know, hike, camp, get to the coast.
And we had enough days to do it.
But in that, it was cool to just like, okay, we're going to hike to the Arctic Ocean, youknow, over the next couple of days.

(58:57):
And, you know, take a dip in, take a dip in that ridiculously cold water that's got iceall over the place.
And it's like,
These kinds of things that just people don't normally get to do and there's nobody elsearound to, you know, for me, there was nobody else around to spoil it.
You know, there was just the close friends and there weren't like these masses of otherpeople that, know, like you go to Hawaii, you can't do anything in Hawaii without lots of

(59:25):
other people around and it's beautiful and it's a great experience, but there's still lotsof other people around and you know, that's the...
guess that's like the one thing that puts me a little bit on edge is when there's a ton ofpeople around doing something that I would much rather do by myself.
um I go to a museum.

(59:46):
If I could rent out a museum and just go in there and enjoy it, I would be so happybecause I wouldn't be dealing with jossling with other people to see things.
So backpacking is kind like that.
museum on a weekday, usually a little bit less crowded than on weekends.
Yeah, but it's like, like, I don't even like going into cities all that much.

(01:00:08):
I've gotten better over the years, but it used to be like, I would just start driving intoa city and it would, would like put me on edge because it's like, there's going to be so
many people that I have to deal with that are, you know, got their own agenda.
going, they're, they're going to cause me issues, frustration.
And that's what I intended to focus on.
But over, over time, it got more like, okay, yeah, I don't like being around this manypeople, but there's

(01:00:32):
there's benefits to be had too.
um So one of my baseline assumptions is that I can do pretty much anything.

(01:00:57):
So when
The first backpacking trip I did up there, had my DSLR, I had like three different lenseswith me, and that added a lot of weight.
And I didn't want to suffer while trying to enjoy the wilderness.
So I started like trying to, okay, you know, I'm setting up spreadsheets for figuring outwhat my macros are for my meals.

(01:01:22):
I'm trying to minimize the weight on all of that stuff.
And the tent was like this, this uncomfortable
amount of weight.
I'm like, know what?
I looked at what these ultralight guys are doing, which they do insane stuff.
The ultralight backpackers, they are willing to put up with a lot of misery.
uh I am not.

(01:01:45):
I want to optimize what I'm doing and be comfortable.
I always refer to it as comfortably light.
I don't want to be ultralight.
I want to be comfortably light.
And in order to achieve that goal, I looked at some of the
some of the tents that were being built.
um was this material, Cuban fiber, at the time and is called something else now.

(01:02:08):
um But people were using it to make ultra lightweight tents.
They were making all kinds of care with it.
And it was sail cloth for these America Cup racers.
It was the same technology.
Basically, you have two layers of Mylar and then uh Dyneema in the middle of it.
So you have this material that

(01:02:29):
the the cords inside don't stretch at all.
It's totally waterproof and it has and it's super super light for what it is.
And so I thought well I you know I know how to sew.
I know how to I know how to you know figure things out.
So the the tent I decided to make a tent but I wanted to make a tent that was minimalist.

(01:02:56):
And by that I mean I wanted something that
was super light but also gave me some nice features.
And I ended up, I spent a bunch of time working on the tie-outs.
And what my stated goal was I wanted a tent that didn't have any stitching anywhere thatmattered.

(01:03:17):
So like the entire canopy, no stitching.
This material, the cool thing about this material is you basically can use adhesive tostick it together.
And with the right adhesive, it never ever comes apart.
So.
A lot of people would sew, they would tape and then sew through that and then you have todo a seam sealing and all this stuff.
I'm just gonna go full send.
I'm gonna figure out how to build this thing so I don't need any sewing whatsoever.

(01:03:39):
And the only place I had any sewing was in the tie outs.
And that was a process of testing it and using, like, I was literally taking like a pieceof rebar through the tie out and yanking on it as hard as I could to try to test it to
failure.
And so iterating on that, trying to make that tie out as strong as possible and notcompromise the canopy.

(01:04:00):
So it's just kind of like this cool process of figuring out, okay, well, how can I buildthis thing that's as light as possible?
Two person.
Yeah.
guys sharing the carrying load or just a two person tent for yourself?
That's kind of a funny question because I I always kind of insisted on having my backpackbe capable of being completely solo So that meant I was carrying the tent that meant

(01:04:31):
anything the things that that could be shared I tended to be more interested in carrying Imean not a hundred percent
Just like the idea of I part of it is I wanted to be prepared to go solo If I if I everwanted to go out by myself, I wanted to make sure that I already had everything ironed out
to go solo um I It's funny enough.

(01:04:55):
I never actually ended up going solo out in the in Alaska um There was a couple times thatI was going to take some side trips but you know whether we get in the way of that kind of
thing um So now I just I I like the idea of
achieving something on my own, know having everything is down to just me and and how Iprepared for it and That's that's that's always been something appealing to me is figure

(01:05:25):
it out make it work so that I can I can do this effectively by myself and You know seewhat happens
Sounds like why you might like jiujitsu.
You need someone else to prepare, but ultimately it's on you.
Yeah, mean, I joke sometimes that the only problem with Jiu Jitsu is that I have to getother people involved.

(01:05:46):
You know, I don't have a choice.
So I've learned to enjoy that part of it.
But yeah, I like this.
It's on you.
The success, the failure, it's on you.
And if you fail, that's something to optimize and make better.
Try to avoid that failure in the future.
And you try to make it so that

(01:06:06):
If you do fail, it's not going to be a catastrophic failure.
mean, you're talking a lot about preparation.
Like, it sounds like you almost spend more time preparing than doing the trip.
Is that kind of how you think about it?
yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, especially about, yeah, when I was, when I was coming up through the ranks, Ispent basically as much time off the mat studying as I did actually on the mats.

(01:06:38):
Uh, so, you know, thinking about it, preparing for it.
Yeah.
It was that that's, know, if you, if you want to maximize the results when your feet arebeing held to the fire,
You got to prepare.
know, can't you can't just, you know, the see red and make things work.
It just doesn't, nothing operates that way.

(01:07:01):
So yeah, I spent, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, optimizing, refining, figuringout, is there a better way to do this?
Uh, whether it's jiujitsu, whether it's backpacking, um, like, like pretty much everythingI do, I'm always looking for an opportunity to, optimize whatever I'm doing.
I like that process.

(01:07:22):
What are you optimizing these days in backpacking?
Everything has gotten uh pretty stable.
It's like anything that you optimize.
You can always do too much and it's just not worth it.

(01:07:45):
The only thing I've got some like back burner projects that I couldn't ever do because itwould have required machining or Capabilities that I didn't have now with 3d printing.
I think I need to revisit some of that stuff Like I've got a I've got a design for a thingthat attaches to my bear can that turns it into like the Like the core structure of a

(01:08:09):
backpack.
So I want to what I'd like to do is I'd like to build a backpack that
goes around this unconventional theory of, I've got my bear can anyway, and the bear canis nearly as long as my back.
So let's design a backpack that incorporates that into the design.
It's not so dissimilar.
Like the tent that I built, um actually had to, in order to do what I wanted, I had toplay around with building carbon fiber parts because it was the only thing that was light

(01:08:37):
enough to achieve what I wanted to do.
So I had to make this thing that attached to my
Trekking pole and then could Velcro to the top of the canopy to hold it up.
So my trekking poles were my support But the only thing the only way that was going towork without any sewing in the canopy was to attach uh basically to tape Velcro onto the

(01:09:00):
canopy and then have Velcro on this carbon fiber cap for my pole and then that was thatwas the you know, I Had to manufacture something
But for the stuff like the backpack, that has such a dramatic impact on your dailycomfort.
I wasn't willing to get into that before I could really do it correctly.

(01:09:22):
And now that my backpack has pretty much worn out, I'm actually starting to get back into,okay, I need to take this design a little bit more seriously and optimize my backpack so
that for what I'm specifically doing, I think I can use that bear can as a foundation.
and then incorporate some of the ideas that I had on my tent and come up with somethingthat is optimal for me.

(01:09:50):
I don't know if it'll be optimal for anybody else, but it's an interesting idea.
it's like, once I get an idea, it's like, I'm going to chase this thing down.
I'm going to find out what's the logical endpoint of it and is it worth getting into.
now that I have...
like mid, like just going through and you're like, you know what, this is a more troublethan it's worth.

(01:10:12):
yeah, yeah, I mean there's there's there's I got into like I was designing some uh Whatabout to like water gear?
And the idea was I want something that was super light that I could like kind through thethe rivers in Alaska the rivers and streams they're all insanely cold and I'm bizarrely

(01:10:34):
allergic to cold
I gotta be real careful about getting cold water on me.
So I was trying to make these uh basically waders of a sort that I could slip on that weremade out of this ultralight material.
It had some Vibram rubber on the bottom to give me traction.
I had some templates made and I'm doing all this stuff and it's like

(01:11:01):
I'm going to be in the water for all of like 30 seconds at a time.
I'm optimizing for a scenario that I'm adding, you know, yeah, it's only like an extraeight or 10 ounces of weight.
But the reality is, is I just need to tough it out.
You know, I can, I, I'm not going to run into that big of a problem for the amount of timethat I'm going to be in this insanely cold water.

(01:11:24):
So it was just like, I was optimizing.
I feel like there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of companies who do like campinggear, hiking gear, backpacking gear, like really high end stuff.
Was it like a cost thing or just you're like, No, I'm I've got the itch, I'm going to dothis myself.
And then you kind of said, screw it, I'm good enough.
I mean, I mean, building your own stuff is not cost effective.

(01:11:46):
Um, so it was really more about things like weight.
True.
Yeah.
Yeah, and but oftentimes a hang here wasn't it wasn't I thought I could do it better,right?

(01:12:08):
So, you know, sometimes yeah the high and like like my trucking poles, you know Sure, Icould build my own but the ones that are out there are much better and like even even the
like the carbon fiber ones that I use that are like ultra light uh
sure, I can die.
They're simple.
I could build that.
There's no point in building it.

(01:12:29):
uh I would learn some interesting things, you know, and if building things just for thesake of learning something is, you know, is the goal, then sure, you know, there's nothing
wrong with that.
uh It's going to be expensive, but it can also be very fun and rewarding.
And then you have something that you can say, okay, I know how to do this.

(01:12:50):
I made this on my own.
I understand why it works.
You build a deeper understanding of what you're interacting with by getting into nittygritty of, how do we build this?
then you can look at the existing, you can look at maybe something commercial thing comesout that replicates what you've been doing.
And you can look at the features of what you did and be like, all right, well, I guess Idon't need to make my own anymore.

(01:13:13):
This will work fine.
optimize everything and don't get attached to anything.
That's kind of like how I do.
pretty much everything, everywhere in my life, it turns out.

(01:13:39):
So my, uh just as a, as a, as a quick example, uh, cause it made an impact on me.
I, my, my first trip into, into the Arctic, had these ultra light carbon fiber.
trekking poles.
And my buddy had these more conventional aluminum ones.
And as we're hiking around in the Arctic, you got these things called tussocks that arebasically just like grass that grows on top of itself and grows on top of itself.

(01:14:07):
And then you have these like these big balls of grass that sometimes fall over when youwalk on them.
So as you're trying to cross the landscape, like there's water in between all thesetussocks.
So you want to walk on top of them.
these things aren't necessarily stable so you're you're always just like you know one footplacement away from potentially toppling over so i'm i'm crossing between like these two

(01:14:32):
big tusks all bunch of water in between and i go to step and things go wrong and i put myhiking pole out to catch myself and it snaps and i'm like and i and i'm like you know like
four days into a 10-day trip and like wow this
this really sucks because you know yes you can hike without trekking poles it's justnowhere near as efficient and you know when you're walking through you know no trails

(01:15:00):
hiking poles become more important so
That changed how I look at the hiking poles.
So what I ended up doing was, part of my tent design, I utilized a third pole.
So I started hiking with three hiking poles.

(01:15:21):
And because of my tent design, it actually turned out that having two hiking poles to holdit up and then a third hiking pole to hold open other parts of the canopy, it was actually
a super
It made it so that my enjoyment in the field was much greater and it also gave meredundancy on my hiking poles.

(01:15:44):
having my equipment fail uh also opened up thinking about, how can I turn compensating forthis failure into something that makes me more comfortable despite maybe, yeah, sure, it's
a little bit more weight.
But if it brings me more capability, like I said, I had three

(01:16:04):
I had the three trekking poles.
Okay, well, I guess I could make a tripod out of this.
So I threw together some carbon fiber, like really rudimentary, this like, know, ounce anda half effectively tripod head that I could stick my hiking poles into it, put the camera
on top of it.
And now I've got a tripod for like no extra weight.

(01:16:25):
My first trip out, I took a conventional tripod and that was awful.
It really heavy.
I didn't like it at all.
So then making what amount to an ultra-light tripod that depended on having those threepoles that I want to have a redundancy and also to improve what I could do with my tent,
it actually worked out really well.
But if one of those breaks, now you've lost your tent and your tripod, no?

(01:16:46):
Well, no, I've only lost convenience.
a bipod for camera is almost as good as a tripod.
it's like there's ways to compensate for one of those poles breaking that's not going tomake my trip harder.
ah If I had two poles break, well, now I'm going to have to be using sticks, which arekind of hard to come by in the Arctic.

(01:17:09):
two sticks breaking, I'd have to be creative with
tie outs with rocks and things like that.
So it's like, there's ways around it.
There's always things where you need a certain amount of redundancy in what's going on.
Especially when it's your life or significant comfort on the line.

(01:17:30):
You have to have redundancies.
You have to have a plan for what happens when this breaks.
oh Sometimes, like in the case of the tent, one of the questions is, okay, what happens ifI get a hole in?
a bear chew through it or you know whatever who knows.
Do I have enough repair materials with me to fix the problem?

(01:17:51):
Or you know like I would have like a really small sewing kit that I took with me in casesomething broke.
The kinds of tools that are brought with me always came down to okay what is thelikelihood of something failing?
What are the consequences of it failing?
And what can I do to fix the situation if it does fail?

(01:18:12):
And what are my ultimate things that have really all gone wrong?
Do I have the capability to get rescued in some way?
So things like taking a sat phone.
That was always something that when we would go out, that would be one of the things that,could we make it without the sat phone?
Most of the time, yes.

(01:18:32):
But there are scenarios where having a sat phone and calling for an expensive rescue, youjust
You have any choice.
You break a leg in the field and nobody's going to be there for months.
You need to get rescued, whether you like it or not.
So being prepared for that is part of the planning.

(01:18:56):
I mean, have you ever needed the sat phone?
No, no, I think, I think the, think the most significant thing I ever used a sat phone wasfor my wife and I were in the process of buying a house and she needed to talk to me
about, you know, what offer to make.
That's like the most serious thing that ever happened on the sat phone.

(01:19:21):
Yeah.
You took a tripod, uh you made the tripod for the tracking.
Was the photography stuff that you were doing critical to the trip for you or was it aside thing or how did you view photography for yourself, having it be not only part of

(01:19:41):
your profession but also part of your hobby?
Yeah, so the...
It's kind of weird because when I first started uh backpacking, my idea was that I wantedto eventually create a book.
So I was taking voice notes.
I had like this little tiny USB voice recorder that I would use to take notes with.

(01:20:03):
uh And my idea was that I was going to turn my experiences
Alaska into a book.
uh Both describing the things that happened as well as having high quality photography.
It's kind of funny because over time the smaller cameras...

(01:20:26):
While I was getting some amazing photos using really high quality lenses, high qualitycamera, all that stuff, I was getting amazing photos but it was always such a hassle to
get out of my bag.
I had everything in a top pack and I could unzip and pull stuff out, but it was still alot of work.
And then my buddy with this just little tiny digital camera, he was pulling up, there's apicture of a flower.

(01:20:49):
Oh, there's a picture of an animal.
And it takes me 30 seconds to even start.
I was like, it's great to have excellent tools and it produces excellent results, buthaving any results is better.
So I actually ended up gravitating towards a reasonably high quality, smaller digitalcamera that still has good resolution, has good zoom, and I kind of converted over to

(01:21:21):
using that for most of my stuff.
With the full understanding that, yeah, there's going to be things that I won't be able tocapture in the field.
But I'll be able to use it so much more that I think it'll end up compensating.
Did you miss it?
Like, did you miss the film cameras?
Or were you just like, nah, the convenience is worth it.
I never did anything with film cameras.

(01:21:41):
I did not take any photography seriously until digital cameras came out.
Back in the Canon, like, I think the first one that we bought was a D60.
It was like the first Canon was a D30 and then there was a D60.
And we got on board with the D60 for my wife and I for portrait photography.
And then I started really getting into the photography angle.

(01:22:05):
And, you know, this, I hope...
she was always doing people and I was always doing objects or know fine art style stuff.
uh So we didn't take any of that seriously until it's easy.
that did it for you?
Well, everything, everything like so my wife was the main one that wanted to.
Well, it's it's kind of funny.

(01:22:26):
So it started out, you she just want to take pictures of her kids.
Right.
Mom with a camera , MWAC.
But she wanted to take better photos and then.
People were like, oh, wow, I really like your photos.
And so she started taking it more seriously.
So we we actually did seminars with like.

(01:22:49):
world famous portrait photographers and I was interested in learning it but she ended updoing it as a business and I learned all the portrait photography you know partly just to
do to learn more about photography in general and then I gravitated away from it.

(01:23:09):
I had the formal training you know classical formal training for for portrait photographybut I tended more towards things that weren't portraits.
And we did like, you her business, we ended up doing like school photos.
So I would take I would take all the girls.
She'd take all the guys and, you know, run through that high volume stuff, but stilltrying to do it to a high quality portrait standard.

(01:23:35):
Just tricky.
But but that was fun.
You know, I even ended up writing my own software for that in order to keep track of thestudents in the photos.
made stuff to generate the bar codes.
I had these scripts written for
Photoshop that would build the barcodes and print them out on the 3x5 cards and made thesoftware for scanning the barcode, getting the photos from the camera, getting which one

(01:24:00):
is associated with which students.
I built all that stuff from scratch, which was kind like my introduction to directlyinteracting with the camera through an SDK, which then for my regular software business
that I'm doing now is actually a cornerstone of what we do.
My wife getting into digital photography and us learning portraiture ended up turning intosomething that primed me for all the stuff I've been doing now.

(01:24:32):
The original stuff started out in C++.
It did end up getting converted to C#.
um So, you know, it was when I was doing the portrait.
Yeah, yeah, so it m
eh It was like in kind of like in-between time.
When I was transitioning between, I had a lot of existing code that was in C++, but I wasalso building out the C# stuff.

(01:24:58):
So like if I wanted to get something done quickly, I'd it in C++.
If I was doing something with a future in mind, that was all C#.
So there was quite a while.
No.
Yeah.
Probably could have, but it was...
I didn't, I'm very focused on what I'm trying to make money off of.

(01:25:24):
like my main software business, that's what I'm making money off of.
I don't want to make money off of Jiu-Jitsu.
I don't want to put my time into anything else.
Like, you know, I don't want to be like, uh, get into woodworking for, making stuff forpeople.
don't want to, I don't want to do anything that's that distracts me from my main source ofincome.

(01:25:44):
Um, so like the photography stuff that was always her business.
So my goal was to facilitate her business and you know while the software uh Easily couldhave sold it but it would have required more effort than I wanted to put into it It would
have required proper marketing getting getting you know, maybe doing trade shows all thatkind of garbage I didn't like it into it's just like I will never own a jiujitsu school

(01:26:07):
because I don't want to do all those things that aren't teaching Yeah, so
I get that.
So it always comes back down to, I want to have one thing that I use for my income,everything else I'm doing for enjoyment.
That's fair.
I wish I had the ability to take a similar tact, but for the most part, just have so manythings that I like doing and some of them pay too.

(01:26:34):
So I just, you know, I do them and I get enjoyment out of the majority of things that I doand also get paid for not all of them, but most of them.
Yeah, and that's cool.
It's just as soon as I start having to...
It's like, if I have to think about something, I'm going to take it out to its logicalconclusion.

(01:26:56):
it's...
Have you ever used an AI and you're like, okay, I want to do this.
And it comes up with this huge plan to turn it into some big commercial monstrosity.
And you're like...
I'm just trying to solve one little problem and you're giving me like all these, you know,cloud-based solutions and saying, you know, what the scalability is going to be for

(01:27:17):
worldwide distribution.
It's like, take a step back.
That's not what I'm trying to do, you know, but when I'm presented with something like,you know, let's say it's something that's could potentially make money.
As soon as I, as soon as that is on the table, well, now I have to take that partseriously too, because I don't, I don't want to just go part way.

(01:27:39):
I want to.
If I'm going to engage in it, I want to be fully immersed in it and do it to the best ofmy ability.
So I don't want to have my attention to buy it.
It's probably why I don't have a ton of opportunities.
There's been a lot of things that I've done.
I've done skydiving, scuba diving, the backpacking.
I've done photography on the side.
There's been some things that even that I've done that I was able to make a little bit ofmoney on.

(01:28:05):
But ultimately,
How many skydives did you get before you kinda said no more?
ah I I didn't I didn't I didn't even technically get my class a license.
I think I had like 20 I had like 20 some jumps I I went to uh, Deland in florida they hada thing for their their advanced freefall thing where you basically your first jump is

(01:28:29):
with two instructors on either side and then they peel off and and you're pulling your ownchute So you're you're like, uh, you're cleared to jump after I think it was seven jumps
you know cleared to jump solo
So my brother and I did that and that was awesome.
And it was super appealing to me because it's like, all right, yeah, we're gonna, youyou're gonna, there's no tandem jump.

(01:28:53):
This is on you.
And know, the very first thing you do, yeah.
And I did not have the money for it then.
The only reason I did it was because my brother offered to pay for it.
I'm like, all right, cool.
And then he got into the skydiving really seriously.
Yeah, I got about just shy of 900.
I got about 878 skydives or so, and I had to put it all down a few years ago, the more Igot into jiujitsu, because it was just limited time, limited money, limited focus.

(01:29:23):
And it's also why I didn't go into coaching skydiving.
Like I coached a couple people and then realized this is not how I want to, I don't wantto make money doing this.
I want this to be a hobby and be a passion.
And I couldn't find the balance there.
Yeah.
But I do that in jiujitsu, right?
love teaching, you know, and so I stick with that and yeah, it pays a little bit, but I doit because I love it.

(01:29:47):
But I could not find the balance with skydiving.
And so I had to back out and said, it's too many things to do at once.
It's a lot of fun.
know, skydiving, scuba diving, all these like, all these different things are a lot of funto do.
But there's just not so much time in the day.
And if you're if you're oriented towards wanting to be an expert at things, you have tocut down on what you focus on.

(01:30:10):
So when I when I got serious about jiujitsu, I actually ended up playing a lot less videogames like my my late 20s, early 30s, you know, getting on playing Halo.
after everybody went to bed, that was like my standard thing.
Yeah.
And it was a lot of fun.
It wasn't interfering with my work.
wasn't interfering with my family.
And it was fun.
But.

(01:30:30):
You know, when I started doing Jiu Jitsu, it's like, all right, well, if I want to studyat night.
I'm going to have to I'm going to have to give some things up.
You know, you know, when I I started studying Jiu Jitsu stuff, it's like if my girls weregoing to a dance recital.
Well, more practice than recitals, but, know, I'd have Jiujitsu University with me andreading that book and studying the techniques in it.

(01:30:56):
You know, I was, I had a subscription to MG in action and I was, I was looking at that,like almost every single night studying stuff.
So, you know, if you want to be truly good at something, it takes a lot of time.
So it's like, you know, these people that are like really, really good at lots of things,I really admire them.

(01:31:16):
Um, it's like, yeah, I would love to be, I would love to be good at, uh, on the guitar.
I don't have the time for it.
I really enjoy it.
Um, but I don't have time to get really, really good.
So I have to kind of pick my battles, especially when things like software, when you're asolo software developer, there's, there's always something to do.

(01:31:40):
There's always something that you could be working on.
Um, so you're always behind the eight ball.
So
you most like evenings I will be writing software.
Yeah.
And, different like, you know, like the last year I had a period of about, I don't know,like eight months where I was working 14 hours a day every single day because we had some

(01:32:02):
stuff that we just absolutely had to get out in order to meet the market demands.
And that sucked, but you know, had to do it.
Didn't have any choice.
There's only so many hours in a day and putting food on the table and a roof over yourhead is uh usually, you know, thing one before you can go do jiujitsu sometimes.
Yeah.

(01:32:23):
Yeah.
Is there any piece of advice that you wish everyone knew?
You know, like you've got all these hobbies and all this life experience.
Is there anything you wish everyone knew?
life experience.
em And in a long release, I think we've really kind of covered it because you have toprioritize things and you have to assign a certain amount of value to the things that

(01:32:45):
you're doing.
And what's the cost and benefit?
I mean, it sounds a little bit sterile, but realistically, you have to do that.
You have to decide what are these different things worth and what are the benefits thatI'm going to get out of it?
Am I going to
like jiujitsu, I knew getting into it, it was something that I could do for the rest of mylife because I saw people that were 70, 80 years old black belts that were still doing

(01:33:11):
jiujitsu and teaching and like, I can do that.
I tried to take that kind of stuff seriously and anytime something...
and I still explore new things.
It's good to try things out and it's good to see if it's something that you know Maybethis is going to be a core part of what I do um But if it's not that's okay, too, you have

(01:33:41):
to you have to be responsive to What you yourself and those around you can handle and aslong as you're honest about it That's all gonna work out.
You know, if somebody walks in and says they're going to be a world champion at Jiu-JitsuIt's like alright, cool.
Here's what you got to do if you're willing to do that great, you know
That's, know, let's see how close you can get to that.

(01:34:03):
Maybe you can achieve that goal, but they're not willing, you know, if what the statedgoals don't match with the actual output, then you have to be honest with yourself and you
have to make adjustments to what your goals are.
So, you know, being honest about what you put in and what you get out is like probably themost important thing, not just in jiujitsu, but everything, you know, are you going to

(01:34:24):
optimize a process?
Cool.
Is it worth it?
You know,
If you spend way too much time on that and you miss a window, then it's not worthoptimizing.
It's better to have something that actually works.
I don't think most people understand how selfish someone needs to be in order to bereally, really great at something.
Like that, I think is like a lesson that the average person doesn't understand.

(01:34:47):
I think like there's this overestimation of people's own like competence and ability togain knowledge quickly or gain skills quickly.
But to be really great, like you can be good at something like passively, but to be great,you have to be selfish.
And I don't think that's a thing people understand.
No, it's hard to divide your attention and to be excellent at two things at once.

(01:35:14):
It's like when I had one competition that I went to where I was competing and coaching atthe same time, I will never do that again because getting my students ready for
competition and getting myself ready for competition
It's just you're not going to be able to do both extremely well, or at least I certainlycan't.
You know, I, I, I found out that, you my performance was going to end up suffering becauseI had to pay attention to my students.

(01:35:40):
And, know, if it's me or 20 people that are depending on me, I'm going to pick the 20people that are depending on me.
Um, you know, if it, if it was just me, I'd have to be like, all right, somebody else isgoing to need to coach you guys because, know, the process of, you know, like you said,
being selfish.
demands a lot of you.
you want really to have true excellence at something, you do have to be selfish.

(01:36:04):
You have to be ruthless with your time.
um And if that's worth it to you, cool.
If you can't do that, well then you better adjust your goals.
There's also something about coaching that I feel like people don't think about when itcomes to, like I don't compete, so I'm not really, it's just not something that interests
me.
I haven't done it since college wrestling.

(01:36:26):
But I noticed that when I'm coaching, like it's a fair amount of effort to keep a fairlyconsistent emotional level.
And if you're competing yourself, then that makes it even more complicated because you'remanaging your own emotions and then the result of your competition.
you have to manage those emotions, whether they're positive or negative, and then resetlevel-wise to go uh be consistent with your emotions, to be able to think straight and

(01:36:53):
coach people and meet them where they're at.
And that's a lot of effort that uh it's really difficult to do if you're competing at thesame time.
I'm gonna push back on that just a little bit.
So for me, when I'm competing, um I tried harnessing...

(01:37:16):
like some people want to get amped up before competing.
You know, or go be like, you know, visualizing, just tearing through people, you know, andany times that I tried to do anything other than just go in and do my plan or think about,
know, how, how, how's anybody else, you know, what it's how students compete or anythinglike that.

(01:37:40):
When I go in and compete, I basically, the only thing on my mind is take down control,submit.
That's it.
Nothing else matters.
There's no emotion associated with it.
When I'm coaching, it's a very mechanical, okay, this is where we're at.
This is where we need to be.
And I don't like, like the, the emotional aspect doesn't like come into it at all.

(01:38:04):
You know, if they, if they win or lose, that was mostly, you know, I'm there as anassistant when I'm coaching, I'm not a puppet master.
All of the, all the things were.
their success or failure, it comes from the stuff that they did before that.
I'm just there to analyze the situation, maybe call out some things that the other personis doing, make sure they're aware of what their goals are.

(01:38:27):
You know, they're not getting too focused on one thing.
And for me, that is a very non-emotional thing.
So for me personally, there's not a lot of managing uh that because it's just anotherproblem to solve.
It's another thing to analyze.
and I do my best work when there's no emotional attachment involved other than where arethe goals?

(01:38:54):
How do we achieve the goals?
yeah, no, I definitely think so.
Because I tried to do something very similar, not be like emotionless or anything, butjust to try to like keep a very stable, like lower bound and upper bound.
But for example, like when my wife competes, like I get very into it.

(01:39:15):
Like even when I'm like coaching and whatever, like I get very into it.
And so then to go coach somebody else immediately after that, it's like I have to bringmyself down to a sane level.
Otherwise I'm going to get burnt out from just the emotional highs and lows.
Yeah, no, I actually have to.
um
forced myself to insert at least a little bit of emotion into it, but only after the matchis done.

(01:39:37):
And it's like, you know, when, somebody wins, it's like, all right, that was awesome.
You did it.
You did a great job.
Really happy for you.
You know, all that hard work paid off.
You can't just be a robot on things like that, because that's just not, it's not conduciveto a good environment.
So even though it's not necessarily my first reaction, my natural reaction, and you know,maybe this is just, you know, the big introvert in me, but my natural reaction is

(01:40:03):
Here's the job to do.
Let's get it done.
Move on to the next thing.
But when we're dealing with coaching, you have to put that human element into it.
You have to pay attention to how people feel about it.
So you can't just be this like, you know, effectively robot.
Nobody wants that.
And it's not, it's not helpful to people.
So you have to, you have to know what people need and help them with where they're at,which is, that's actually hard for me is to, is to, is to have that kind of.

(01:40:34):
being able to bring that in.
But it's also really important if you want to help people the most.
When I see somebody who's getting ready for their first competition ever, like a whitebelt, and they're like, okay, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it, and you're like, hey, the
only thing I want you to do is breathe.
And they're like, no, no, no, I'm gonna go in there, I'm gonna arm bar, I'm gonna takedown, and you're like, whoa, just breathe.

(01:40:59):
Just breathe, right?
You do that, and then you go over to the purple belt or brown belt, and they're like,okay, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna go for a single leg, and you're like, okay.
Cool, let's look at their posture.
Let's look at what like the range that you have to have when you're coaching people, Ifeel like is why that that particular thing is a bit challenging sometimes if you're going

(01:41:21):
to try to do it yourself, because you can be cold and mechanical about yourself if you'vegot the experience with it.
But you have to have range because, you know, we've got four or 500 students at my gym.
when there's a tournament in Berlin, we end up.
coaching 50, 60 matches per coach or something like that.
And so you can go a lot of ups and downs and you got to kind of maintain it, yell theright way with you, not with your throat, otherwise you've got no voice by 9 a.m.

(01:41:53):
So I think that particular set of skills is really hard to do if you're competing andcoaching at the same time because you have to manage your own emotions and then range
through into dealing with other folks in healthy ways.
Yeah, no, that's definitely, like you said, that is the normal way of how everybody has todeal with it when culture coaching is a separate skill, an entirely separate skill from

(01:42:19):
Jiu-Jitsu.
uh And it's
It's tough to do that because you have to, well, like you said, when you're competing foryourself, you have to be selfish.
When you're helping somebody else compete, now it's all about them.
It's all about how do you help them achieve their goals?
You are an assistant and hopefully a very competent assistant.

(01:42:40):
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
What are you excited for in the future?
Like, what are you looking forward to these days?
The biggest thing that I'm looking forward to is getting out and doing more seminars.
I mean, I like going to the camps and teaching at the camps.
A lot of fun.
But I'm trying to get more people on the books for some of the stuff I've done.

(01:43:01):
gone to a few different schools.
They brought me in to teach and do seminars, private lessons, kind of stuff.
and I'm looking forward to visiting more parts of the country in the world.
So, know, I've always wanted to be one these people that other like black belts go to,right?

(01:43:25):
I want to be kind like that that next level black belt that, you know, people are lookingto me for advice, not because I'm trying to.
It's more a proof of my own ability more than I'm I'm not looking for people to say howwonderful I am.
I'm just
I'll feel like I've made it to that level of excellence in teaching when I've got otherpeople that are already experts are looking for my input.

(01:43:51):
And that's a work in progress always.
um But part of my proof that I'm achieving...
No, no, I actually all of my all of my writing is focused on like white belts and bluebelts.
um I'm um because I'm there's so many people out there that are saying how to do jiujitsugiving techniques giving you know, oh here's a here's a cool techie here's something you

(01:44:19):
may not see before and like every black belt has some little thing in their back pocketthat you know that they've worked extra hard on and and they have
cool technique.
Anybody can do that.
um What there isn't a lot of out there is how to think about Jiujitsu.
What are we really trying to accomplish?

(01:44:40):
When we're doing a submission, what are the mechanics that are actually going on?
What actually matters in every choke?
All the abstractions of Jiujitsu and how to think about it.
That's what I'm focused on, and that's what I hope to spread out to
wider community is how do we think about jiujitsu and come up with these rules andabstractions that facilitate everybody from a white belt up to black belt.

(01:45:15):
I think how to think about jiujitsu is an underdeveloped area of jiujitsu.
It's so focused on technique.
It's so focused on sequencing moves and okay if this thing fails then we go to this
there's still a little context and I you know things like the eco approach attempt tosolve some of that but I want just like in software where I'm looking for abstractions I'm

(01:45:38):
looking for what are the rules of what I'm trying to do that facilitate not only solvingthis problem but solving a larger class of problems and I want that in jiujitsu I want to
take you know effectively my skills in software and abstracting things and looking fordeeper rules
apply that to Jiujitsu and spread that around.

(01:46:00):
So I want to get out to more schools.
I want get out to more areas of the country because like my standard thing is I'm not...
all it takes to bring me out to someplace is give me a long weekend, give me a planeticket, someplace to sleep, and I'll go teach.
You you want me to teach for eight hours?

(01:46:22):
I'll do that.
I've got more than enough jiujitsu stamina to do whatever level of teaching they want.
And I go out there and I want to spread how to think about jiujitsu.
Obviously there's going to be techniques, but it's really more about how do you thinkabout jiujitsu and how do you apply that thinking to these techniques.
So that's what I'm looking for, Pretty easy to find online.

(01:46:48):
um Pretty much if you search for Simple BJJ, I'm the...
main thing you're going to find, find me on Facebook, Instagram.
I've got my website, but if somebody's trying to reach out to get a hold of me directly,either Instagram or Facebook or X, I'm on the normal platforms.

(01:47:09):
Just send me a message.
Find the time to, I usually schedule about a couple months out in advance.
So like right now, I'm scheduling two months from now and two, three months from now to...
to go out to places.
ah And, you know, if you've got students that could really benefit from a private lessonfrom somebody that thinks the way that I think, let's do that for free.

(01:47:36):
You know, if I go out someplace, I want to see what the local area is like, you know,like, you know, going to North Carolina to like the Asheville area, was, you know, cool
craft beers and, you know, all sorts of cool art and stuff like that.
I didn't actually visit open source.
actually went to Josh's place and also right in, went to Speakeasy Jiu-Jitsu right inNashville.

(01:48:03):
you know, I haven't gotten out to open source yet, hoping to.
But like, you know, I went to Alabama and one of the things that I went to see there wasthe National Space Center, which was
really cool to see these old Atlas 5 Rocks.
if you're someplace that has really cool nature or cool technology or anything like that,I'm pretty interested in visiting and doing as much Jiujitsu as anybody can possibly

(01:48:34):
handle and also hang out and do other cool things too.
And because Jiujitsu is not my business, I want to it basically inexpensive for people todo that and to have somebody that is
super passionate about jiujitsu and takes teaching that stuff very seriously.

(01:48:55):
Awesome.
So I'm gonna link to all that stuff in the show notes, simple BJJ everywhere.
And um I really appreciate your time today, Paul.
Thanks for the conversation.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
was really cool.
And I'll try to implement some of those AI tips that you gave me.
Thanks.

All Episodes

Paul Elliott, Black Belt, Software Engineer, Backpacker, Photographer - Beyond the Belt #23

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Paul Elliott, Black Belt, Software Engineer, Backpacker, Photographer - Beyond the Belt #23