 I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Jesse Encamp, known to many in the dojo verse as the karate nerd. Jesse has a wonderful channel full of rich history, tips, and educational glances into the world of martial arts. Jesse reached out to me and we had a wonderful conversation about our YouTube journeys, how he transitioned from tournaments to the amazing channel that he has now, how even we got our own start here on Art of One Dojo. So today, we're just gonna share some of our conversation with you all because that's what this is. It's a platform to share ideas and our experiences. What made you decide to do that transition from tournament coverage to more educational and presentation topics like you're covering today? So it all started when I was living in Okinawa. So I went there because I wanted to learn more about karate, which I had been doing all my life since I was a kid, right? And so when you kind of grow up, you have to decide what to do with your life, right? So I decided, well, I wanna go deeper into this karate thing because I've been doing it all my life anyway, since both of my parents are my teachers and I grew up in the dojo. So I moved to Okinawa and while I was there, I experienced so many different and weird unique cultural things that I decided to just start sharing them online with people through something called blogging, which was the new thing back then, right? And so what I did was I started a blog and I just shared my experiences and observations from living in Okinawa, you know, going to find an old master's gravesite or practicing with that dude over there. And these things that I would have loved to read about myself if I wasn't in Okinawa, right? As a karate nerd. And so that started to resonate with a lot of people who didn't have the ability to go to Okinawa, who didn't have the same connections or influences that I had. And so gradually I built a community around this whole journey of exploring the art. And these people are known as karate nerds, right? And so from there, people started asking me to also post videos. And that's why I started doing more tutorials, teaching some stuff that I had learned. And gradually I got more and more requests. And then I kind of thought it was a fun way to share knowledge because text or blogging is kind of, there's a separation between you and the audience. There's a wall of texts, right? And it's fine to begin with because it's a safe way to express yourself. You can always go back and edit things. But when a video is out there, it's you looking into the camera and everybody's seeing you and there's nothing to hide behind it. And you can't really go back and edit a video. When it's out there, it's out there, right? So that was kind of the gradual next step because I'm not a naturally extroverted person. I always love to read and write and kind of be on my own. And that's why writing or blogging was the best way for me to start sharing my observations and experiences. And the next step after that is, of course, in real life, right? Doing seminars, which is what I started doing afterwards. And I still remember my very first international seminar because I'd been teaching since I was a kid in our dojo, right? So teaching a class is not a problem, but I'd never taught in English because it's my third language and I never thought outside of my own dojo. So in 2014, I decided to do the karate nerd experience where I wanted to invite some really awesome instructors. I had an excuse to learn from them myself, right? And then I got a bunch of dedicated karate nerds from 25 different countries attending this very first seminar. And I still remember, I didn't know, like, should I say punch, strike, or hit? Because I had never even thought about these things. I was so nervous before I taught that. And now, today, I've taught seminars in 19 countries. And I traveled a lot before that, competing with the national team and stuff. So I've been to a lot of countries, but it always kind of escalates or progresses once you reach a new kind of milestone all the time. And that's the way I try to see my work is always kind of growing and expanding, going outside of my comfort zone. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Once you step out far enough, that becomes your new comfort zone. You got to keep pushing it outward. Exactly, right. Yeah. How about yourself? How did you get into the whole YouTube space? Oh, it's funny. We have my friend, Zach, he's actually on the channel. He's Whitebell Zach sometimes. We have been running our own video production company for about 22 years now. We met in college and we just started working videos. We started doing freelance work. And several years ago, we were looking into YouTube marketing as like an advertising platform. And we wanted to put together a service. So we went to my instructor at the time. He had a school and we're like, hey, you want to help us this? You know, we'll give you a whole bunch of free videos, you know, like short little one-minute videos. And we'll film them and we'll release them and see if we can promote your school. We wanted to test the process. And we went to a school and we did like 30 to 40 videos each day. So we had ended up after two days of shooting, we had like 60 videos. They're super short. I kind of, looking back now, I kind of cringe, like, we weren't really prepared. He wasn't prepared. We had him with the question, like, you know, what's the history of MMA that he tried to sum up in one minute? So there's a lot of information left out, but it was sort of a platform test. And we released, you know, a couple of videos a week for a while. And it built a little bit of momentum. He got a little bit of business out of it. We're like, okay, this is great. We want to keep building this. And then about two years into the project, he decided that he wanted to close the school and move to North Carolina. And we're like, oh, okay, well, there went that project. But, well, we know we got to play around with it, we saw how it worked. And then we let the, we just let it sit for a while. And we noticed over the course of the year or two, it was still getting a little bit of traffic. And there were trolls that were jumping on there, but certain videos we saw out of the 60 videos were like four that were like surging. And we're like, okay, there's still something here. There's some momentum here. And we just watched it. And people were asking for more content that were like, all right, maybe we should turn this into something. And it was one of those things that we kind of talked about. It was in the background for the longest time. And then in 2018, my father passed away. And it was kind of like a lot of things came to a halt. You know, we kind of stopped the business for a little bit. And as we were picking back up, I realized, you know, I need to get myself back to the martial arts. Cause I've trained on and off for about 28 years myself. And during his time of the sickness, I didn't really focus on it. So I'm like, you know what? I want to step outside my boundary. Like you said, I want to see what's outside of my local village. So I looked into some judo schools and I found a really good Japanese Jujitsu school here in my town, met with the Shihan, wonderful guy. He sat down with me. We talked for about an hour. He let me try a class and I fell in love with it. But that culture shock was there. I'm like, wow, this is so different than what I trained in. This is so, I mean, there's similarities, but the whole dynamic is different. So I got really interested in expanding my own horizon. So we started to just do a bunch of little topics and we're like, why don't we restart the channel? And we rebranded it. And the funny thing is we kind of tried to keep on the same content my instructor had, which was based on parents looking for schools, kids going to the martial arts, you know, how to find a school. And we did a bunch of videos like that. And as we started to release them, we realized that wasn't our audience. The people who are watching were other martial artists, more serious martial artists. And they were asking questions and I'm like, oh, these are not parents watching our show. These are people looking for real information. So we had to kind of stop and regroup and did a bunch of research and just talk to a bunch of people and realize that the world of martial arts was way broader and richer than we ever thought. And the more we got into it and we started doing topics for fun, like I've got my whole Pride and Kid series that I'm just totally obsessed with, but we threw fun stuff out there. But we saw that people were starting to connect with the material. So basically we kind of watched people were flowing and we're like, well, let's make material for that group because they seem to be the ones liking it. Yeah, I always struggle with that. Like, so there are two paths you can take with content creation. You can make the stuff that people want to see or you can make the stuff that you want to create. And they're not always the same, right? Because a lot of people want to learn like, let's say, you know, beginner tutorials, how to tie your belt or how to make a fist. But if I wanted to do just what people wanted to see, then I would kind of focus more on those types of videos. There's always the other path of like, if you consider yourself more of an artist, that kind of creating something that people don't even know that they actually want to see. Kind of that's what Henry Ford said. Like, if I just gave people what they wanted, we would just have faster horses and not cars. I don't know how you view that, but kind of. No, I agree with that. I took it as a challenge because the stuff, the material that people were asking for, we weren't quite 100% prepared on. Like they were asking for a lot of art history. I'm like, okay, we do a lot of research before we start putting that stuff out. I still find a way to throw in the stuff I wanted to talk about. But then we tried to explore, like I started to listen like people's comments. People started asking me advice, like, hey, I'm really short, what's the best art for me? Or I'm getting picked on at school. What's the best art for me? And it's like, when we started realizing there's people out there who have a lot of challenges. There's disabilities, there's learning issues. There's people who can't find a school. Their school shut down. I have a history of, you know, my school changed so many times. Two different instructors, like probably six different locations. We kept changing the curriculum. So I understand a lot of the struggles students can go into. So we're like, well, why don't we dive into some of that? So we try to mixture, you know, people want art history. We put those out when we can. We do some fun stuff when we can. But then we try to do a lot of, well, this is a challenge a lot of people face. How would you overcome it? Well, here's our perspective. This is what we did. Here's the people we talked to. So yeah, I agree with you. There's a lot of topics people want to see. And there's the stuff that you want to do. But I definitely think there's a kind of a middle area where you kind of mix and match them together. That's what you want to find, right? What would you say is the number one challenge that people seem to have? Some question you get a lot. A lot of age related. We have a lot of, we have a lot of older martial artists. People are like, it's funny because I get people when they're 40s to 50s ask me, is it too late to start? Well, no, but I get the same question from 15 year olds. Like, no, absolutely not. There's always something you can get out of it. It's a weird, sometimes I get questions from like somebody who's like 75. And honestly, I don't know. I haven't been 75 yet. I'll tell you when I get there, but I don't think it's too late. I mean, what do you do? No, well, here's how I look at it. No matter, okay, if you're 75, you're not gonna be going jumping into tournaments or competing, but who is to say you can't learn one or two things that could help yourself to defend yourself? Or if you fall, you may even learn how the fall properly could save your life. Or if someone does grab you, you just get the grab off or just health in general and the interaction. There's so many... We had one guy come into the Jiu Jitsu class and he was probably around 70, 75. And I'm like, I give you credit dude because he was doing the falls. And after a while, it got to be too much for him. I'm like, I give you credit for trying because that's rough to start at that age. But no, I think regardless of whatever age it is, as long as the person speaks for the doctor, I think there's always some sort of benefit they can get out of training the martial arts regardless what it is. Whether it be grappling or boxing or whatever, they find what's right for them. There's a lot of low impact arts that they have injuries, but... Maybe the problem is that they compare themselves too much with others. They expect to be able to perform like a 25-year-old. I don't know. Well, there's a lot of stigma out there too because there are people, I have had viewers say like, oh, once you're past the age of 40, you don't belong on the mat. Like, why? That's your perspective. But I know, I have sparred 60-year-olds that have kicked my butt. So I know for a fact the age of 40 is not a cut-off. Mm-hmm, right. There is this Chinese saying, I think it's a Chinese saying that the best... What's the saying? The best time to plant a tree was yesterday, but the second best time is now. I like that. Yeah, yeah. We'll see, maybe I'll be super stiff and weak one day. We'll see, I hope not. Yeah, but then we look at someone like Superfoot Bill Wallace and he's still kicking. He's amazing, yeah, absolutely. Have you heard about this diet? Is diet, no. Milkshakes and hamburgers. I mean, I thought it was a joke when he told me, because I invited him as a guest to teach at my KNX seminar. We filmed two videos, but he also did an interview for the participants, kind of Q&A thing. And he honestly, he said that his diet is hamburgers and milkshakes. He said it greases his joints and that's why he's so flexible. I could see him saying that. He was, and he got upset when we thought he was joking. Well, he doesn't kid around like that. He's a very straight shooter. He is, he is. So maybe I think maybe it's something with his genetics also, because other people on a fast food diet, they would just break down. Yeah, but he also doesn't stop training. He told me one day in an interview, he goes, look, he goes, I keep moving because he goes, if I stop, I die. So he posts off on Facebook all the time. He's always doing classes. He's always teaching. He's still doing seminars and he's still really fast. Exactly. So whatever he's doing is working for him. For sure. For sure. He's like a shark. You know, if they stop moving, they die. I think I believe some of the first videos of yours I saw were your trips to Okinawa, which I found were absolutely fascinating. And I know you went to China as well. I haven't had a chance to see those, but just seeing you actually going around and you didn't just do a tour, but you actually got into the culture and you showed how each dojo operated. And it was such an eye-opening experience to see how different martial arts training is across the world that that got me hooked in your channel right away. And your material was fantastic. So I love that you did stuff like that. And then just how you bring different techniques and where the history comes from and, you know, misconceptions. And with your brother being in MMA, I think that the mix of perspectives that you have is really rich. And you've actually inspired me a lot of just kind of directions I want to go and how I want to present to people because your material is out there and I think it's one of the better channels, honestly, in the martial arts. Yeah, I hope that I can inspire people because honestly, just putting yourself out there is pretty, it's pretty scary to begin with. But it is. I mean, I don't think you have to be an expert or a master at anything at all. And I definitely don't consider myself, I don't even call myself a sensei, but others do. But still, just putting yourself out there, that's the scary part. But you don't have to see the whole staircase to help somebody take a step. You just have to be one step ahead of them, right? And, actually, I think it's a shame because there are so many people out there with awesome knowledge, like world champions and experts and professors, but they never share what they know because they don't like, for instance, that intranet trolls can criticize you super easily, right? And so I always try to find these golden nuggets, these people with super high level proficiency or expertise, and then try to extract some knowledge from them and then try to share that with as many people as possible. I'd like to extend a great big thank you to Jesse Sensei for your time and sharing your journey with us. Now, if any of you out there have not seen this channel, then I cannot recommend it enough, and you can find it in the link in the description down below. Also, be sure to join us in the next episode when we continue this conversation and we talk about our experiences exploring other arts outside of our own. Thank you so much for watching.