How Hate Found a Home in Jiu-Jitsu & MMA

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, this is Steve here. Hope you're doing well. I've got a bonus for you. Now, you may not be familiar with my other work, but over at BJJ Mental Models, we've been producing an audio documentary on the dark side of martial arts history, especially as it pertains to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And we just published an amazing episode in that audio doc featuring fellow Fighting Matters host, Stefan Kesting. It's an awesome talk on mainstream extremism in the martial arts. And given the recent accusations against Andre Galvao and Atos, this conversation is incredibly relevant. I've decided to take down the paywall on this episode and give it away for free. So, you can get it here at no cost without being a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber. So, please do enjoy and let me know what you think. And if you want the rest of the series, you can check it out at bjjmentalmodels.com. Speaker 2: Welcome back to our series on political extremism in martial arts. My name is Ben Vandorn. I'm a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black belt and owner of Deep Blue Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Speaker 3: And I'm Eva Schubert, college instructor and creator of Villains and Virgins History Podcast. Speaker 2: Over the last two episodes, we have had great conversations with Kareem Zidan about politics and sports. We've looked at both organizational power structures in sports and extremist groups that utilize Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA as part of their recruiting and propaganda. You can conceptualize those two conversations as discussing outliers. You have billionaires in boardrooms shaking hands with powerful politicians and extremists in the corners of our society fighting to prove their worth to each other. Today, we're going to talk about political extremism that exists in the mainstream. Athletes fighting in prime time being cheered on by casual fans and supported by both Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and MMA organizations. There are a good number of athletes and coaches with sponsorships, big followings and financial incentives to keep pushing hateful rhetoric and conspiracy out into the community. There are also companies that continue to platform and promote these voices. To help us with this conversation today, we've called upon someone who not only has been in the game for a long time, but who has also had a platform in the community for years. He's a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black belt who has spent decades sharing his knowledge, building a platform, and who hasn't been shy about speaking out against the darker side of martial arts. He is the host of the Strenuous Life podcast, co-host of the Fighting Matters podcast, owner of grapplearts.com, and author of the recently released book, Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic. Stefan Kesting, welcome to the show. Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me, guys. I'm really excited to be here. Speaker 2: Yeah, before we begin, I just want to say that I've been learning from you for a long time. I think before I even started Jiu-Jitsu, you were putting out a lot of really high quality content and I know you've been very influential to a lot of people in the martial arts space. You know, more recently you've put out a really great instructional on the Kimura that I recommend people go check out. So, it's just great to be able to sit down with you and and talk about the sport. You've been someone that I've been following for a long time. So, thank you again for joining us. So, we're going to talk about some specifics here, but I wanted to in this conversation kind of start by getting your long view about politics and martial arts. You've been in this space for a long time. So, how have you seen the nature of political extremism in martial arts change over the last like 20 or so years? Speaker 4: Sure. Well, I I think the sport has always veered a little bit towards the right. Historically, the UFC, when I started watching it, you know, we'd watch it at strip club because that was the only place in Vancouver where I live that would air it, that would show it. We didn't have ways to stream it over the internet. This is in the early 90s. So, there was this general sort of right-wing, call it a trailer park, blue collar bias to people who watched the UFC, and to some extent to people who did the sport, but it was really never an issue. You know, I trained with cops, I trained with criminals. I never really worried about it too much. And this became more and more of an issue as we went along. And I don't know if it was just me getting more sensitive to the rampant conspiracism in the sport. You know, Joe Rogan never ran into a single conspiracy that he didn't fully embrace. Really? The moon is made of green cheese? Tell me more, oh honored guest. And this was kind of like a, ha ha, isn't that crazy kind of thing. But I think the dividing line really, it began to fracture more under the first era of Trump, but then when COVID came along in 2020, and the Biden-Trump transition was in in play there, that things really started going off the rails. And I've talked about this before, but you could watch, I'm focusing on Joe Rogan here because he kind of is a spokesperson for the community. You could watch Joe Rogan's opinion shift in real time. From being one of the first people to take COVID seriously and have, you know, actual epidemiologists and actual doctors talking about this, to going, wait a second, that means stand-up comedy is closed in California because we're taking measures. I'm moving to Texas. And then just swing super hard the other way. And you could watch people whose career or identity was wrapped up in sort of the public performance aspect of it. Whether that was Tony Robbins not able to do his very lucrative large evangelical sessions, or Joe Rogan and his buddies not being able to do comedy for a couple of months, or Jiu-Jitsu instructors not being able to teach Jiu-Jitsu, the thing that paid their mortgage, pivot off in search of alternate explanations. Because you can't be a good person and keep your club open when there's this deadly virus going around. So, one way to resolve that moral dilemma is to say, well, you know, I was listening to this guy and he says that it's really no worse than the flu. So, therefore, I'm not doing anything bad by keeping my club open in the middle of a pandemic or not modifying my behavior at all. And that really schismed the martial arts community pretty hard. I think that the effect was more visible in the United States than in Canada. Canada had somewhat better financial support for the small business owners that were closed. I'm not saying that they were the right measures or that they were sufficient, but there were more measures, whereas in the states, sounds like a lot of people were just expected to close and still somehow pay their mortgage. Speaker 3: I'm going to chime in there for a second and just reflect on the fact that I think this phenomenon, while it's acute in the martial arts space, was also society-wide, because the turn to the embrace of conspiracy theories was definitely not limited to MMA and Jiu-Jitsu people. I mean, I was listening to someone call in to talk to a psychologist yesterday, this woman who who loves her husband and says, how do I even communicate with this guy? Because he's convinced the banking system is going to collapse any day now, and we shouldn't be putting money into a retirement fund, and he wants to hide cash under the mattress. And like, how do I even have a conversation or try and partner with this person? And and this is a woman who loved her husband. She wasn't ready to get a divorce. But the fissuring in that marriage, the living in alternative realities is something that I think many of us can relate to even outside martial arts, because we all know some family members or some friends who've kind of taken that that hard turn and are now living in a totally different reality where the things they're concerned about and the things that they think are the biggest threats look radically different from what the rest of us think. So, yes, it's definitely a thing in martial arts, but I think it's actually a lot wider than that as well. Speaker 4: I think we can explain a significant part of society's malaise with two principles. Principle number one, social media algorithms try to keep you on their platform for as long as possible, and the best way to do that is through outrage. That's well proven. So, if they can present you with ridiculous stuff. Look at these blue-haired radicals that are insisting all boys become girls and all girls become boys and that it happens at school between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon when they come home, they're a different gender and their genitalia has been mutilated. If I read that and I believed it, I too would be outraged. So, it's this outrage farming and this attempt to maximize time on a platform so as to be able to serve people more advertising and thus maximize revenue. That's principle number one. And principle number two is that these social media platforms are owned by billionaires, and that billionaires have a political agenda. Typically lower regulation, lower taxation for corporations. And that's why the Trump inauguration, there was just a lineup of social media people, everyone from Elon to Zuckerberg, you know, and all the people who are going to end up buying TikTok. You know, they they realize what a powerful tool this is to shape political opinion and to drive an agenda. I mean, look at the creation of Grokopedia by Elon Musk, right? It's busy citing stormfront.org as a source for its knowledge base. Stormfront.org is a violently, vehemently pro-Nazi white supremacist website that I was incidentally featured on because they took one look at me and there was a discussion of who's good at this self-defense stuff. This was years ago. And they took a look at me and they go, ah, shaved head, white dude, likes martial arts. Clearly, he's of he's a fellow traveler. Clearly, he's a fellow white supremacist. And so they were promoting me on stormfront.org. Speaker 2: Some context there is that it was years ago the case that, you know, white supremacists were just called like skinheads, you know, people who shaved their heads. That was sort of like the sort of niche subculture within that white supremacist community. Now, I think they've shifted identity-wise. You said a lot of things in there that I I kind of want to touch on. So, you know, you're kind of characterizing the early 90s about, you know, maybe there was always this sort of rightward tilt, but it wasn't an issue. And I I wasn't training martial arts in the 90s, but I was watching the UFC in the late 90s, early 2000s and I remember it primarily being as it was um kind of going into the mainstream, getting sanctioned. There was, you know, commercials late at night for the pay-per-views that happened three or four times a year. And it's really just mainly about the violence. Like people didn't understand it. And I remember that was the major pushback is are we going to accept this level of violence on our sport? And it really wasn't about anything else. You know, you know, politically John McCain was looking at the sanctioning of the sport. So there was a political element there, but it didn't follow the same sort of, I think, right-left culture divide that we're seeing today. Speaker 4: There was actually a period of time when it was trying to be more inclusive. I believe it corresponds with the time that they were trying to get onto mainstream cable networks. And that they were presenting Rich Franklin as the face of the UFC, right? He's a high school teacher. This isn't beyond this is not just brute savagery. This is, you know, intellect with fists, right? And and now they're busy promoting people like Bryce Mitchell and Sean Strickland, or at least not having any consequences for saying the most horrendous and polarizing stuff. There was an attempt to present the sport as more inclusive, more cerebral, not just a human cockfighting as John McCain called it, not just a gladiatorial bloodbath. You know, if you like boxing, if it's the sweet science, this is kind of the sweet science squared. And now all pretense of that is gone. You've covered it at length, we've covered it on Fighting Matters. To call the UFC not a political entity is ridiculous. It 100% is. Speaker 2: That era was a bygone era where, you know, I defended the Dana Whites of the world back then because I thought that they were doing something good bringing the sport to the masses. You mentioned something a little bit earlier about the Biden-Trump transition and how that had affected martial arts. And I that's really interesting to me. I live in the United States. I live in that lens. I have a bias towards the politics of the United States, but our martial art is global. So, it's hard for me to get into the mindset or the lens of people outside of the United States of how much they followed what's happening here. Do you really think that the domestic politics here has has sort of shifted the global culture of Jiu-Jitsu? Speaker 4: That's a really interesting question. I'm not sure I'm qualified to speak definitively on that. But my guess would be yes. I think the UFC is so much the face of MMA. Yes, there are other organizations, but really the UFC is the preeminent one. And when everyone in the world is acutely aware of what's happening in the United States in a political sense, you know, there there are many Europeans are going, holy shit, they've discovered fascism. Because they've experienced it, whether it's Spanish fascism or German fascism or Italian fascism, one full generation ago, 80 years ago, and then less in the case of Spain, this was a very real thing. And when you have, if you're watching the UFC and you watch Trump and his entire cabinet sitting there in the front row, and when you watch fascist movements all around the world align themselves with MMA, as you guys have covered, and this, you know, we are strong and therefore we are right kind of mentality. Yeah, I I do think it has shifted it. I mean, another factor to consider is that you and I and Eva a little bit are have practiced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And thus, we're tied to somewhat to the politics of Brazil. You just take one look at Renzo Gracie's Facebook feed, which is incredibly pro-Bolsonaro. Basically, the Brazilian Trump. Basically a fascist type figure, basically somebody who tried to overthrow the government when he lost an election. But it's impossible to detach Brazilian politics from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and that does probably bleed over into MMA as well. Speaker 3: This is something that we've kind of done a a closer focus on, both in our conversations with Kareem Zidan, who was looking at strongman autocrats deliberately using MMA as a way to promote their brand, to to kind of unite a political message with this physical combat sport. And the same thing we actually covered in an even earlier episode in terms of Mussolini and Italian fascism, where you have this kind of bizarre image of Mussolini, who I believe was formerly a journalist, trying to reinvent himself as a political figure. And one of the things he wants to do is to be seen practicing all these physical sports, and this boxing and and all this, because he wants to put himself out there as a man's man, and therefore fit to lead. That it's sort of this this idea of physical strength and the ability to use force as the main criterion for leadership, which is at the heart of fascism. And so it's it's not at all surprising that you see the White House talking about, you know, having an MMA oval right there. I mean, it doesn't get more blatant than that. And I mean, I am not an authority on BJJ, but in terms of whether or not American politics have shaped the sport, some of the biggest spectacles, some of the biggest broadcasts that people are watching in martial arts are staged in the states. So, how can it not? Speaker 2: That's a great point. Just in terms of the the media center of the sport is very US-centric. And as far as like the trend, you know, internationally, we United States, you know, gets lots of attention because of its size and its sort of political power. The trend we see you see it in Hungary, you see it in Poland, to Stefan's point, you see it in Brazil. You know, this is an international trend. And whether we're talking about the extremists that are, you know, white supremacists on the Stormfront forum, they're all over the world. The push to nationalism politically, it's all over the world. So, I think these trends are you're definitely seeing the trends globally. I see sort of Russia and Eastern Europe as being ahead of us and it's sort of moving in this direction. Again, to your point, Stefan, about billionaires with influence, you know, they're seeing how they can look at oligarchy as a model and using that to influence what's happening in in this country. Speaker 4: I don't think you can call Russia properly fascist, although it's certainly authoritarian. And fascism is a subcategory of authoritarianism. But, you know, there's a reason that there's footage of Putin out there doing judo or riding shirtless on a horse. And I don't play hockey, I don't follow hockey, but there's this amazing clip of Putin playing hockey against the Russian national team, and basically skating circles around these elite-level Russian players, and they're just like, oh my God, I can't even skate anymore. And then he, you know, shoots a puck into the net and basically the goalie dives out of the way to make sure that it goes in. And then Putin does a victory lap and falls down as he's skating around the edge of the rink. So, it certainly it's not limited to the countries that we've mentioned. And I think the Russian connection here, I mean, the amount of money that Russia has spent on bots and trolls and shaping the conversation is massive. And so, it's not surprising that we're seeing this trend come sort of eastward or westward from Eastern Europe. Speaker 3: It it's funny you mentioned that hockey video because we when we talked to Kareem Zidan, he described a bizarrely parallel thing where you had a dictator who was sponsoring MMA, stage a fight with this incredibly talented MMA fighter, a guy who was mopping the floor with with people younger and far more skilled, but they have this sort of staged match where Mr. Dictator gets to beat it up this MMA champion in in a way that allows him to demonstrate that he's the alpha dog, he's the the manliest man of them all, and he's going to take down this MMA guy on camera. Of course, he couldn't actually have done this if if the MMA champion was really fighting, but the point was for this guy like Putin to have this theatrical performance in which he appears to be the epitome of all of these martial virtues. Speaker 4: Is it a coincidence that there's footage being released by Mark Zuckerberg of him sparring or training with Alex Pereira? So, you got this little dweeb fighting in air quotes against one of the best MMA guys in the world and, you know, passing his guard and taking mount. I mean, it's pretty obviously presented as training footage, but still the dominant image is of him dominating somebody who's 10 times the athlete and has a thousand times the amount of combat knowledge than the dweeby little head of Meta. Speaker 2: I see that stuff and I always think about it's interesting like who has access to who in the context that, you know, the billionaires and powerful politicians can have access to top-level fighters so they can record their video and push it out for their own purposes. But the fighters are also utilizing that relationship as well to get close to power and to network and get as close to the money as they can. So, it's a very transactional thing that's happening. I wanted to sort of quantify a little bit. We talk about the slant towards the right and how it's grown, but quantify in social media terms just the the reach that people get on the right. And so, just a sample of audiences. And we looked at Instagram here just because it was a common denominator. Not everyone has a podcast or YouTube channel, for example. So, I mean, Gordon Ryan has a million followers on Instagram. Eddie Bravo has half a million. Jake Shields, a quarter million. Sean Strickland, 2.4 million. Bryce Mitchell, 650,000. Colby Covington, a million. You know, if you throw in people like Joe Rogan that you mentioned, maybe Alex Friedman, you're easily in the tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions with Joe Rogan as far as following. Voices that are speaking out against the stuff that we're talking about, if you look at their following, it's a big disparity. So, you know, your following, Stefan, you have 75,000 followers on Instagram. Luke Thomas, who's a MMA media journalist, who has, you know, he's been on the Fighting Matters podcast with you guys before. He has 80,000 between both of his his accounts. BJJ Mental Models has 19,000. Robert Naki has 8,000. So, there's just this huge disparity between these numbers. And I don't I don't think the numbers represent sort of I don't think it's a a statistical representation of the people in the martial arts, but it's definitely is a reflection of their attention. Like what are they looking at? What are they watching? What are they hearing? What are the voices that matter to them? So, do you think this is just, you know, algorithms or is this really a reflection of our sort of demographic and who we are and where we're headed? Speaker 4: I think you're right. This is not necessarily representative of the practitioners of the sport. First of all, I want to say, it's insane that I, Stefan Kesting, who has a master's in biology and has worked as a firefighter, but who the hell am I? It's insane that I should have the biggest social media following of all the people on say, the opposition to this right-wing fascistic swing. That's just nuts. Where is somebody else, you know, pulling their balls out of their purse to stand up and do this? And I'm still going to do it. But, you know, why have none of these people spoken up? Number one. Number two, it may not represent the average distribution. You know, so let's just say that on average, if you're posting right-wing rage bait conspiratorial content, your following is 10 times that of mine. As a rough metric, that's probably correct. If we don't include the Rogans, if we include the Rogans, we're much more like a thousand or a hundred times that of mine, but he's a stand-up comic with a massive platform. So, ignoring that. Let's just stick to the Jiu-Jitsu people and the MMA people. It doesn't represent the fact that there are 10 times as many fascistically conspiratorially minded people practicing the sport, but it does reflect the influencer class in the sport. Whether that's instructors, whether that's people selling their instructionals, whether that's people competing, but it's especially instructors, especially people who are making their money, running schools, doing seminars. That I think is a fairly good representation. I'd say 10 to one. It's a fair bit of work to find a club that is call it anti-fascist, not in an Antifa sense, but just a, we don't do that here. We are inclusive. Speaker 3: You know, Actually, to pick up on that, there was just CBC coverage this week of a meeting of far-right and white supremacist groups. Guys like the Wolves of Vinland, Second Sons of Canada, Diegelon Associates. I mean, people who actually have swastikas and SS logos that they tattoo on themselves. Some of these guys have religious ceremonies with candles and swastikas, okay? So, I mean, apart from resurrecting the Waffen SS in person, this is as close as you're going to get right now. And these people were meeting in Vancouver. And the crazy thing about it was how many of them were MMA affiliates. And for how many of these groups, they use MMA as a a very important strand of membership or recruitment. And there's a bridge there to the Active Club phenomenon, which has also been well documented in Canada. And so, it's not just that martial arts guys are listening to, you know, Gordon Ryan and Eddie Bravo and and conspiracy theories and and sort of authoritarian messaging, but it's that down at the slightly less visible level, there's a whole lot of this really virulent stuff, and it's growing. And one of the comments that the journalist doing the coverage had made was, these groups used to be much more fragmented. They used to kind of fight amongst themselves and they had different goals and they didn't get together much, and that's changed. So, this was a massive kind of the guys attending it described it as alliance building movement. And MMA tends to be a common feature that all of these different organizations have. I I was reading about the Wolves of Vinland, which is of course started out in in in the US. And they brand themselves as sort of a, you know, part motorcycle gang, Odin worshipping, they're sacrificing sheep out there in the woods to Odin, but also MMA training is absolutely critical to be a member of their tribe. And so, we see MMA being used as a critical identity strand or as a recruitment model. And so, to say, oh, well, you know, MMA isn't political is nonsense. Speaker 2: What was I think great about that CBC article is that it didn't just expose sort of known extremists, like, you know, Paul Wagner is the is the person that was there speaking. You know, gym owners and gym coaches, local people in the area that went to that. So, it sort of exposed the connection. These aren't just outliers of people, you know, fighting in sheds. These are people who are in our community, going to our competitions, hanging out with gym owners and coaches. I like, Stefan, I like your term influencer class. You know, it's like they're all these people are all connected. And so, ultimately that connection, if it's connected to people in the influencer class, those messages are no doubt going to sort of filter back to our community. Speaker 3: Well, actually, one one of the guys there was a guy called Carl Stornus Bliss, who was operating out of the Mission BJJ Club and had been working as a coach for kids in the BJJ program there. Now, after the embarrassing footage of him attending came out, he was on record as denying it, but the journalist said, well, here are some photos of him with his distinctive tattoos at the event. This is the same guy. So, he's telling us he he didn't attend, but he's lying. And so, Mission BJJ came out and said, okay, well, we've told him to take a hike, which they kind of have to because of the publicity. But here you have a guy who's involved in teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to kids, and he he's a guy with with an SS tattoo on his stomach. So, if you think it's not happening in a community near you, you're probably delusional. Speaker 4: Yeah. I think it's important to recognize that the CBC piece, it could be fairly characterized as being very Canadian in nature. But this is not just a Canadian phenomenon. I would argue that the situation, you know, if you include things like the Proud Boys and the straight-up Klan in the states, it's a much bigger problem in the states. That being said, it's it's the shifting of the Overton window. Right? It used to be and this is why something like the moon landing conspiracy is so dangerous. If you accept the fact, you watch too many YouTube videos and you accept that the moon landing was fake. Blah, blah, blah, Van Allen belts. I don't really know what radiation is, but these Van Allen belts sound pretty bad. I don't know anything about photography, but these photos that I saw and had somebody describe to me look fake. And you you buy into that whole Joe Rogan moon landing was fake. What about the telemetry data? Okay, whatever. If you buy into that, that in itself is not a far-right wing or a neo-Nazi thing. But if you buy into that, you have to accept that NASA is lying to you. You have to accept that the European Space Agency is lying to you. You have to accept that the Russian Space Agency is lying to you. You have to accept that the Chinese Space Agency is lying to you. You have to accept that all the governments of the world are lying to you. And once they're all lying to you, and once truth, this idea of objective truth gets eradicated, then you can start filling people's minds with complete bullshit. And if we're in this post-truth era, and we've destroyed sort of critical thinking and this idea of the relative validity of different sources, now you can start filling it up with anything. And that tends at the moment to be much more right-wing oriented. So, it will shift a giant segment of the community to the right. It started with the moon landing, and now we're on like they're lying you about everything from vaccines to lizards controlling the world. Now, all of a sudden, these guys practicing pre-Christian European pride movements, you know, it's not that outlandish anymore. It's shifted, you know, they're just a bunch of European cultural enthusiasts. They're not Nazis. It it makes it less of a fringe opinion. So, even the people who aren't full-on Nazis, who are just indulging in this wild conspiracy thinking, and in, you know, question the narrative thinking, and in, you know, the mainstream media is lying to you from top to bottom thinking, and the only person you can trust is Grokopedia and Jake Shields on Twitter. Well, that's a bad example because Jake Shields is an out neo-Nazi. Some crazy dude on Twitter. If that's now equivalent to a piece in the Guardian or a piece in the Atlantic, then you've created an environment in which this extremism can really thrive. Speaker 3: Well, actually, that's that Overton window and the sort of normalizing of what would be previously unthinkable statements, I think has a lot to do with accelerating that shift. Because if you've got Jake Shields who can be out there talking about, you know, Hitler wasn't such a bad guy, or, you know, one of my role models is good old Adolf. And if if you can say that and then continue to get press and and continue to get matches and be treated like a normal person, the message that is being sent by the organizations that continue to work with this guy and promote him is that that is acceptable behavior. There's nothing wrong with that statement. And so, that galvanizes everyone else in that ecosystem who's who's now going, oh, okay, well, if if Jake Shields can can say that and that can be all over, you know, broadcast everywhere and that's a thing and he can just carry on with his life, then so can I, right? So, so it normalizes this. And we can continue right along. So, I I think that that galvanizes a lot of other people that are in that ecosystem who now think, oh, well, you know, it's no longer a taboo to say that maybe Hitler was right and maybe he didn't finish the job. And this kind of stuff. And we can hear it. Like there's a level of speech, particularly around Hitler and Nazism and white supremacy that we haven't seen as openly and as frequently as as what's going on, I would say, in the last five years. And that's got a lot to do with organizations that continue to platform these people and thereby send the message that this is okay. We don't actually have a problem with this. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: One thing that's happened that's really important, it's probably an entire episode in itself, is that there has been a deliberate effort to change the language around white supremacy. So, there's not so much explicit, you know, hateful language being used. It's all sort of coded behind things like saying folk and European culture and heritage. And everyone knows the dog whistle and what it what it means. And it's they're using this language intentionally to create some sort of arm's reach deniability to the white supremacy when it's convenient for them. So, internally, you know, they have no problem saying these things. If, you know, you mentioned the Stormfront forum earlier, you know, if you go on that forum, there's sort of it's almost like instructions on how to do this, you know, in terms of the language. And so, it's a deliberate effort and strategy. So, you know, going back to something like the CBC article, all the people that were mentioned have this pathway to deny that they're racist and involved in anything because everything is sort of shrouded in this flowery language that we all know what it means, but it's it's strategic enough and coded enough that there's sort of arm's length deniability. Speaker 4: Sometimes it's coded, and sometimes it's not even coded. I mean, let's deliver some receipts. We have Renzo Gracie quoting Himmler, right? Tweeting things. This is this is like 10, 12 years ago. My loyalty is my honor, right? And then also later on taking a jab at Macron in France by talking about how his entire generation was soft and it's basically they let the Nazis. There's no wonder why you lost to the Nazis. Okay. Then we've got Josh Saunders, right? He's not an MMA guy, he's a Jiu-Jitsu guy. Fairly well known. He's, you know, doing multiple things like, I can't tell you who my favorite historical person is that's taught me the most. And then he hits a Hitler salute. And this has happened more than once. I've got the screenshots to prove it. And he still has his BJJ Fanatics instructional series out. Apparently, nothing that you can say or do gets your BJJ Fanatics account canceled, except for taking a run at their golden boy, right? When Andrew Wiltse had his very unfortunate psychotic break, one of multiple psychotic breaks, he was posting hundreds of Instagram stories a day. Hundreds. It it was terrible to watch because he was not in a good space. It was a terrible condition. So, this guy who's off his rocker starts attacking Gordon Ryan. Poof. His BJJ Fanatics instructionals vanish. So, if you attack one of the golden boys, who's an incredibly right-wing golden boy, you can be canceled. But, you know, hitting Hitler salutes and talking about Hitler, literally being your favorite person that you've learned the most from, Josh Saunders. No, that's fine. We'll keep him on the platform in the name of free speech. Who else? Jake Shields. I mean, Jake Shields is interesting because people will defend him to high heaven. But it's it's a disingenuous defense. If you're busy questioning the the doors of the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and could this really have done like, you're basically engaging in Holocaust denial. Not basically, you are engaging in Holocaust denial. So, you're not a Nazi, but you're engaging in Holocaust denial. You're not a Nazi, but you've platformed David Duke on your podcast. David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the KKK. So, that's not very subtle at all. I'm trying to think of other extreme extreme examples. Speaker 2: I know, let's not I don't think everyone may know who Jake Shields is. So, you know, there's a lot of people if you're new to the sport of Jiu-Jitsu or even MMA in the last two, three, four, even five years. I don't think he's competed since maybe 2018. So, a lot of people in our space who are post-Jake Shields in terms of his career. I mean, he was a Strikeforce welterweight champion. He fought for the UFC title against George St-Pierre. At the time, George St-Pierre was the MMA star in the world, right? So, he was on, you know, center stage, center octagon with the top guy in the sport. He has fought in ADCC in in 2005. In Jiu-Jitsu, he's fought on Polaris, he fought against Craig Jones in 2018. So, this is a guy who's fought on every major Jiu-Jitsu and MMA stage. At one point, he was probably considered one of the best American grapplers there was. You know, early 2000s, there weren't a lot of American grapplers winning competitions and doing well. So, this guy is is mainstream as it gets on our sport. And to your point, you know, he's an outright white supremacist, you know, promoting Nazis. You know, David Duke is I don't think he's the current Grand Wizard of the KKK, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, but he's sort of probably one of the most well-known people in the country in the white supremacist circle. He's written lots of books. To the point I made earlier about changing language, he sort of led that movement in terms of changing the language around white supremacy. You know, you said Nick Fuentes, who's probably one of the most, you know, outspoken neo-Nazis on the right right now on his podcast. But he's also had John Danaher on his podcast, and John Jones, and Gordon Ryan, and Nate Diaz, Mikey Musumeci, Chael Sonnen, and Rampage Jackson. I mean, people who are just well-known in Jiu-Jitsu and MMA. So, you know, the the the worst things that we can discuss, Jake Shields has promoted all of those things. And all of the mainstream people in our sport have sort of circled the wagons around him, maintained their relationship, including, you know, you mentioned BJJ Fanatics, including BJJ Fanatics. Speaker 4: Well, let me turn this around on you then, Ben. Yes. Ben, you mentioned a number of people, but you also mentioned Jon Jones. And I'm not saying Jon Jones is a good person, but he's a black person. And Quinton Rampage Jackson is also a black person. Therefore, Jake Shields has had black people on his podcast. Therefore, he can't be a racist or a Nazi. Checkmate, liberal. Speaker 2: So, this is a loaded question you're passing to me. A lesson I learned when I was young, growing up in, you know, sort of poor, rough neighborhoods is that, you know, the the kid you sit next to in seventh grade social studies class who's your friend isn't going to be your friend if you see him on the street when he's hanging out with his buddies, you know. And so, we have these sort of, you know, like micro interpersonal relationships and dynamics that may exist inside a gym or inside of a social circle that don't necessarily exist in broader communities. And the way that we see ourselves and our connections, there's just inconsistencies with the way we see sort of broader identities. So, I I can't get into the mind of a Jon Jones or a Rampage Jackson or any of the other people we've mentioned of why they'd want to associate themselves with someone who is an open Nazi. But to your point, it happens a lot. And I think that there's a whole conversation that can be had, probably a whole series of podcasts about race and why race is and how it's sort of a social construct. I mean, you know, one of the things that we're talking about Active Clubs, we had a whole episode on Active Clubs. We've talked about it in this in this conversation. You know, right now, Latin America is where some of the biggest growth in Active Clubs are having. One of the biggest growth in white supremacy is happening in Latin America. So, our sort of understanding of race, it's I think much more nuanced and broad than what at least in this country, in the United States, maybe even in Canada, where we have our own racist sort of past and history and that's built into our society. So, we're looking at things through that lens. It's a much more complicated topic and conversation. But it's certainly not a defense. I mean, it's it doesn't matter who your friends are. You know, saying these things is defenseless. And I think a lot of people use sort of free speech as this sort of blanket get out of jail card. For me, it doesn't make sense. You know, it's a card that shouldn't be played. Speaker 4: Yeah. I think that what's in it for Jon Jones, what's in it for Quinton Rampage Jackson to go on to a on a Jake Shields podcast? It's pretty simple. Clout. They've got a large platform, they're reaching a lot of people. They're staying relevant. A certain percentage of Jake Shields' followers won't care that he's black. He's just cool. And what's in it for Jake Shields or whichever podcast we're talking about? Again, it's a big name and it's clout and it's also potential deniability. I can't be racist. I had a black guy on my podcast. Let's get out of Jiu-Jitsu and MMA. Let's just talk politics. Piers Morgan, I think it's undeniable, is a reasonably right-wing figure. He's had a dog's breakfast of left-wing people on his show. He has Destiny, the the streamer turned political commentator on his show all the time to act as a foil. So, it it'd be like saying, Piers Morgan can't be right-wing. He's talked to Destiny. No, he's brought him on as a foil. And it it's mutually beneficial because people will tune in to Piers Morgan because Piers Morgan fanatics and I'll watch Piers Morgan because Destiny's on it. So, this is not a plausible defense of a position. You know, a Nazi can have a black person on the show if they're trying to either chase clout, if that black person's famous. And a black person will go on a Nazi show, either he doesn't know, or he doesn't care, or he's not so bad, or Jake Shields was nice to me when we talked. You know, these people can be charming when they turn on their charm headlights. And you kind of get caught in their crosshairs. And it's still a large platform, right? When I was promoting my book, I told my agent and I told my publisher who were brainstorming about places to go and talk about it, that I would not go on Joe Rogan. Right? I I'd drawn a line in the sand. This is stupid, right? It's there's a point of principle though that a line that I'm not willing to cross. Also, as it turns out, going on Joe Rogan used to sell a whole lot of books, and now going on Joe Rogan sells far fewer books and that there are much smaller podcasts that sell more books. So, that tells you a little bit about Joe Rogan's audience shift over time. But a lot of people would just swallow their principles. Man, I'm going to sell another 500 books. I'm going to sell another thousand books. And then I can have a clip of me on the Joe Rogan experience on my website and automatically it's this benediction, right? Oh, he's been on that podcast, he must be a somebody. So, it there's a lot of people who who don't care about that. Speaker 2: There's another athlete that, you know, he's in the news relatively recently, at least to the recording of this podcast. You know, Bryce Mitchell was, you know, openly supporting Hitler. Dana White, I think, uncharacteristically was sort of forced to respond. A lot of times he just ignores this stuff. And some people praised Dana White's response. I thought it was pretty disappointing and almost the lack of accountability was pretty disgusting. He basically just said, he's an idiot, but free speech. You know, if you don't like him, you come watch him get beat up, you know. But this is even since then, he continues to post things that are, you know, racist. There's a term in the in the white supremacist community called remigration, which really references sort of forced expulsion of races, you know. So, he, you know, posts things about remigration, which may sound innocent if you don't know what it means. And now, you know, he he made a comment, he got a response from Dana White. The news is almost more about Dana White having to respond than Bryce Mitchell making the comment. Bryce Mitchell continues to make the comments and it almost doesn't get any attention. And it's it's interesting to me because there's a huge press around MMA and the UFC specifically. And it should be their responsibility to some degree to follow up on this. So, why is the press just sitting there and not asking these questions and making sure that these things stay in the headlines? So, at what point is the sports press and MMA like partially responsible for letting this go? Speaker 4: Humongously. I think the only person in the MMA sports press who does any kind of job of holding people accountable is Luke Thomas. And Luke Thomas has divided his channel. He's got a Luke Thomas News, which is talking about, you know, who beat up who and, you know, whose jab was better, because he does boxing as well as MMA, and whose training camp was better designed. And then the Luke Thomas gets political podcast in which he leaves no room for the imagination as to who he likes and who he doesn't like. So, other than that, but but it's, you know, was it just today Trump was calling for the execution of members of Congress, the hanging of members of Congress. And we're so inured to right-wing, to call it right-wing is not technically correct, but for simplicity, we'll call it right-wing insanity. It's just another Thursday. Could you imagine if Biden or Clinton had called for the hanging of Republican members of Congress? This would have been 24/7 coverage for the next five years. Now, it's a Thursday, and by tomorrow, there'll be something new. So, there's just a general lack of accountability for anybody on the right for saying anything. And again, I don't like the right-left divide. I think it's much more an authoritarian versus liberal or democratic divide. But we'll leave the the typology of political affiliations and allegiances for another another day. If I say right and left, it may not be correct, but we all know what we mean. Speaker 2: I think about the press angle that is interesting to me is that it's very tightly controlled by Dana White. If he doesn't like you, you don't get press credentials. And so, you know, can people go into the press room and ask these questions? Is you know, is Dana White, is that sort of authority that authority structure even allowing for these things to be discussed? And if you're a media journalist and you want to keep your job and have access, you're not going to want to push the limits. Do you just not bring it up? There's other things to talk about, right? So, Speaker 4: But free speech. But free speech. Free speech for me, not for thee. Speaker 2: The irony in free speech is that, you know, the First Amendment talks about a few things. Free the press being one of them. And then you have a guy who is controlling the press and access to the UFC. You know, people like Kareem Zidan, who we've had on our show, has no access to the UFC. He can't get press credentials. And this is years ago, and your fans probably may not even remember this, but Dana White sort of famously went after Loretta Hunt, an old UFC journalist, sort of attacked her, called her a lot of ugly names. So, you know, he's very aggressive and controls this space very tightly. So, sort of any free speech argument to me is sort of eliminated by the control of the the MMA media that surrounds the UFC. It's just sort of a fake argument to me. Let's talk a little bit about you've sort of opened this door for us already. I wanted to talk a little bit about like the business of Jiu-Jitsu and how it normalizes the things we're talking about. So, BJJ Fanatics, to me is sort of the elephant in the sort of extremism normalization room. It's a if you don't know what BJJ Fanatics is, it's an online instructional platform. It's, you know, probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, there is in the Jiu-Jitsu community. And everyone is on there, you know, including people who have nothing to do with political extremism. You know, a lot of people are going there to sell their instructionals. But it has Jake Shields on there. It has the Gordon Ryans on there. It has the Josh Saunders on there. And BJJ Fanatics doesn't just sort of platform, they promote, you know, that's sort of part of the deal with BJJ Fanatics. So, Jake Shields goes on Twitter or goes on his podcast and praises Hitler, and then the next day, BJJ Fanatics is, you know, pushing Instagram ads for Jake Shields' instructionals. Do you think that there is a responsibility, whether it's BJJ Fanatics or other companies in the space to sort of draw a line and say that we can't do this. You know, we have integrity, we can't support racists. Speaker 4: 100% yes, and it's fucking pathetic that people are choosing to make a few extra dollars without taking a stand. I mean, I've put my money where my mouth is. I've not going to mention who it was, but I've killed more than one instructional after paying for the entire instructional, paying somebody money up front, which is a different model from BJJ Fanatics. And then had to kill it when that person went completely batshit and started saying horrific things, things that would have been a legacy and reputational death sentences 10 years ago and it's just completely normal now. So, I put my money where my mouth is. But yeah, it would be really nice to see that there are in fact red lines, that you can't be hitting a fucking Nazi salute and talking about how Hitler's your favorite person and still have a BJJ instructional product. Josh Saunders. Or be active in hiding sexual predators and getting them out of the country and still have BJJ Fanatics instructionals. Thank you, Cyborg. I mean, I wouldn't platform Gordon Ryan, but certainly, you know, is he as bad as that? No, but he's got a much bigger reach. So, if you quantify the total damage done by somebody like Gordon Ryan, if it's damage or horrific level of horrific statements or horrific deeds from 1 to 10, multiplied by reach, he's right up there. It's like Rogan. Is Rogan a full-on fascist? I don't know, but he's got such a gigantic reach that when he says something that's five out of 10 shitty or promote somebody who's six out of 10 shitty, you multiply that by 100 million downloads. So, I think it's 100 million downloads a month. That's a massive amount of damage. So, who else? Speaker 3: So, I'm I'm going to ask a chicken and egg kind of question here, because when we're talking about to what extent do these companies have a responsibility not to platform these people? I mean, I think that's a fair question for sure. But one of the reasons they're platforming these people is that they know they're going to make money on them. So, that bounces the question back uncomfortably to the customer, which is, why is it that we make it profitable for BJJ Fanatics to run an instructional with this guy? Why is it that there are so many people who are willing to take out their wallets and say, you know what? I don't care what he says about Hitler or this or that. He's got a sweet armbar, and so I'm just going to buy this instructional. Because any company is going to be driven by profit. And so, I don't care who you are. If BJJ Fanatics goes, yeah, you know what? You know, doing a thing with Jake Shields or whoever is going to be a liability for us. People are not going to buy it. They might not buy some of our other stuff as like a boycott protest. So, we're not going to do it. Like and so that's that's the one side of the argument. The other side of the argument is, when you have BJJ Fanatics or whoever, Dana White and MMA platforming these people, to some extent they're normalizing this behavior in the martial arts community. So, that people go, yeah, well, you know, maybe he said that crazy thing, but what are you going to do? This is everywhere. So, like I I'm just curious about where the personal responsibility of of individual consumers is, and to what extent you can blame media platforms and influencers for shifting what we regard as normal and acceptable. Speaker 4: Well, I'm very eager to pass judgment on call them media platforms. You know, whether that's the UFC or BJJ Fanatics, they're essentially media platforms. But yes, I completely agree with you, Eva. I think that the individual consumers are also culpable. And I think that, you know, we should boycott the UFC. And I think we should boycott BJJ Fanatics. But the fact is that if you're just completely cynical about principles and values, then you're going, oh, great. Josh Saunders has made a giant stir. He's going to sell a lot of instructionals relative to the rest, but I can expect a pulse of people who follow Josh Saunders to be buying that instructional tomorrow. It's a little bit more money in my bank account. So, ideally, if you just wanted to make a ton of money and you don't give a crap about any kind of principles or behavior, you would have everyone on, right? You'd have the Jiu-Jitsu instructor for the Shining Path guerrilla group. That was a Maoist communist terror group out of I believe Peru. And they they they were committed atrocities like slaughtering children. Yeah, we know that this guy Luigi, it's not a very Peruvian name. I don't know. Give me a Peruvian name. That Luigi massacred a bunch of children with a machete, but, you know, free speech, we're going to put his instructional on BJJ Fanatics. And we know we've got these crazy neo-Nazis, and we're going to have their instructionals on BJJ Fanatics. And that's just, you know, that's just free speech. No, I think you've got a moral responsibility as the producer of the content, as the media platform, as the UFC, as the whoever, to say, no, no, no. We're drawing the line at whatever. We're drawing the line at having massacred children in a little mountain village in Peru, and we're drawing the line at idolizing Adolf Hitler publicly. Similarly, the public, the consuming public should also vote with their dollars. But the bottom line is, you know, and that's part of why this podcast exists. Many people have no clue about what's going on. They don't know. They they, you know, oh, that Sean Strickland guy, yeah, he's pretty funny. You know, I I like following him because he, you know, he's not a pussy. He'll just say it the way it is. Well, oh, wait a second. He was talking about like white rights, and he was talking about anti-immigration. And, ah, whatever. I this I don't even really know what remigration means, but, you know, he's funny. And I like when he fights. So, I I obviously I would like it if the public were more informed and voted with their feet and voted with their dollars. But to some extent, the UFC has decided that rather than trying to appeal to everyone, they're just going to appeal to the MAGA and the right-wing crowd and the people who don't care. Right? You can't watch a UFC and watch Trump get paraded in there, or watch Dana White at the inauguration, or watch Dana White at was it CPAC or was it the Republican National Convention, the RNC, and not realize that this is a heavily skewed political thing. So, I think the UFC has gone all in on the right. We don't care about the 10% of viewers who are busy out there marching against the genocide in Gaza. We don't care about the 10% of viewers who care about LGBT rights. Screw them. We want to attract 100% of the shitheads on the right. It's kind of like the Rush Limbaugh strategy. Rush Limbaugh wasn't trying to appeal to everyone. He was just trying to appeal to 100% of the 40 to 50%. Speaker 2: You know, someone who's spent, you know, a significant chunk of my life and lots of time and energy trying to teach the sport, teach the martial art, grow it, define it, hold it up, put it in a positive light. You know, our culture as a sport is defined by us. It doesn't have to be defined by anybody else. It's defined by the sum of our own behavior, the sum of what we accept. And so, as consumers of products, as consumers of information, social media, I 100% think that we have a responsibility. And at some point, we have to collectively sort of, you know, look in the mirror. This is maybe tough love, but we have to look in the mirror and just stand the fuck up and stop putting up with this stuff, you know. And it's doesn't have to be complicated, you know. This comes down to integrity, character, not hating people. I mean, you don't have to shroud this stuff in mystery, you know. So, I think that a lot of the responsibility falls on the people in the community. And to your point, Stefan, I think a lot of people who don't know what's going on, maybe, you know, people are busy, people have lives. I also think that in martial arts, there's a sort of like almost like a mystique that martial arts is its own thing. It's sort of pure and above the fray, you know, sort of above the fray of cultural politics. It brings everyone together. It's sort of this unified force. But we know that that's it can't be true. I mean, white supremacists are in our gyms and in our competitions, and our community is supporting these people financially. We're not above the fray. We're very much so can contribute to the problem with what we accept and what we participate in. So, it's not going to be hard, you know, if you're at a gym somewhere, some rural community and there's one gym in your town and your coach is a jerk and you see him online making political statements, what do you do, you know? I think as a community, we have to help come up with solutions for that, whether it's how do you have that conversation, how do you navigate those relationships, how do you continue to engage in the martial art our structures within our martial art. It's not set up for that. And so, moving forward, we have to think about that a little bit more. So, kind of to that point, I had a question for you that I've been thinking a lot about affiliations, you know, so, you know, affiliations for if anyone's listening that doesn't know what an affiliation is, it's sort of a mix between a team and a franchise. You know, people sort of pay into these teams. You know, there's a contract involved, annual dues, stipulations. It gives you rights to the team, the logo, maybe some support from the team, possibly access to people on the team, like successful fighters, you know, getting seminars from these guys, etc. So, you have a scenario where you have someone like an Eddie Bravo or Renzo Gracie, who you mentioned with who knows how many schools are directly or loosely affiliated. Hundreds of schools, probably thousands and thousands of students. Like those students are not going to be comfortable or even in a position to sort of speak up in those environments without leaving. So, the the idea that we have to keep politics out of sports, the primary, some of the primary people in our sport have injected it into our community. And we function with a business model as a community that puts everyone in this sort of like hierarchy of authority for our learning, for our progress, for our longevity of our experience, which makes it very difficult for us to navigate. Which leaves like a challenging question as far as structure. I mean, do you think that it's feasible for us to create a different model in martial arts away from this affiliation model that allows us to kind of separate ourselves from this challenge? Speaker 4: Yeah. This is something I've thought a lot about, Ben, and I don't yet have an answer. Why do people stay with a shitty instructor, right? Let's just say you're in some small town and both of the clubs that are in town are what I would call morally bankrupt. Okay, cool. Why do people stay? Well, they stay in part because they want to train. There are no other options. They stay in part because if they did leave and go somewhere else, how are they going to get promoted? And now, you know, it's kind of hard for a black belt to see it. But if you're a blue belt, you're getting up and going up in rank really does mean a lot. And the easiest way to go up in rank is to stay at the same school. Finally, there's a cult type dynamic. I'm not saying that all Jiu-Jitsu schools are cult. There are cult-like elements. One of the big things that cults do, you know, whether it's the Moonies or some crazed evangelical church, is they limit your social sphere. You're only safe in here and you're everyone outside is dangerous. And thus, if you leave the church or the the cult, you you have to abandon all your social connections. Now, again, I'm not saying that Jiu-Jitsu schools are that bad, but there is an aspect to it, right? If all your friends are there, then you're not necessarily staying for the instructor, you're staying for your friends. And that's why when I think of some big breakups and like dissolution of teams that I can think of that I've experienced firsthand and heard about and read about, it's it tends to be a nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everybody leaves all at the same time. And once you get a critical mass of people leaving, it's like, well, my two best friends that I used to train with are gone. I'm going to leave as well. So, they they tend to implode or explode very suddenly. In terms of what alternate model to provide, again, I don't know. I've thought about this. Like, do you create kind of an explicitly, I'll call it woke affiliation? That's one possibility. Right? Hey, don't bother signing up here if you don't believe in these certain shibboleths. For example, do we believe in inclusivity? Whatever that means. I think that's one pretty good metric for seeing what the political affiliations of an affiliation or a school are. I did a social media post a while ago, a couple months ago, musing about the idea of if you wanted to keep white supremacists out of your club, you would post a pride flag and this would take care of 90% of the problem. Of course, this quickly got spun into woke far-left liberal instructor says every school must have a pride flag, which is not what I was saying at all. And then, you know, Gordon Ryan jumped on this, and then Tom DeBlass jumped on this, and, you know, it was a usual mob attack kind of scenario. But there there are certain certainly you could create kind of a distributed affiliation network where you're providing information, instruction, and promotion to people who might otherwise not have a home. And so that's one possibility. I mean, another possibility, if you're in a shit town with shit instructors, but you can't leave, I don't know, your parents are there, and you want to train Jiu-Jitsu, and you're not worried about the promotion thing too much, and you've got a couple years of training under your belt, man, start a training group. There's so much information there on not only techniques, but also training methods that are out now, that you can make some really good progress out of a garage. And creating a small little training group. And that's how a lot of bigger clubs began. I can think of quite a few clubs that started out as an informal training group and then like, hey, this thing's growing bigger, then then we can control. We're going to need to actually rent a space here. So, do I have an answer? No, not yet. I don't know if there is an answer. Those are some of the things I've mused about. Do you have any brilliant ideas on how to fix this situation? Speaker 2: I don't, although, you know, I, you know, I look at other sports and they don't have the problem, right? I mean, there's always politics in every sport and in terms of internal politics about, let's say, internal politics in judo, you know, about rules or something, you know. But you don't have the same sort of like outright extremism that exists. It's a it's a cultural difference to me. And you have conversations about, you know, sport versus martial art. I think to some degree, Jiu-Jitsu is, you know, we're not regulated, sort of an ungoverned space, and always has been. You know, there's a whole topic that we haven't really touched on much about Jiu-Jitsu because it's not directly politically related, but there's a long history in Jiu-Jitsu with just sort of bad actors, you know, sexual harassment. You mentioned sort of these cult-like figures who are abusing students, a lot of unhealthy toxic environments. And that stuff has gone on for a really long time. And it's a sort of a culture of acceptance. And so, I think that culture is sort of primed to allow these political extremism to come in because there wasn't this sort of mechanism of standing up for things. Like, no, that's not acceptable in our sport, that's not acceptable in our culture. Because we were just letting a bunch of crap slide anyway. So, I think, you know, to your to the question about we're consumers, are we responsible? I think culturally, we're also responsible in terms of what do we, who do we respect? What do we accept? Can that change? It's a big question, right? Like you're talking about the entire sort of financial, promotional sort of infrastructure of our sport and how it's been for decades and just shaking all that up. I don't think there's an easy answer. Other than to say that I know that there's people like myself included who are willing to help, right? Like if you're in that small town and you don't know what to do and you just want to train with your five friends in a garage, like there's people that will help you, you know. It's just a matter of connecting, trying to find a way to connect with those people. So, some of the solution I think maybe just information and networking, like getting that message out. You know, remote coaching is a thing now, right? You know, people in the BJJ Mental Models community are very familiar with that in terms of the community we have on the Discord and the coaching services BJJ Mental Models. That's one avenue. So, you know, there's a way to do this. It's just a matter of, you know, putting it on paper and putting it out there and people taking the first step. But I, you know, as much as I say we need to stand up, you know, I've I remember being a brand new white belt in training on the mats and a new student had joined the gym, also a white belt, but, you know, three or four stripes, which at this time period was like the king of the crop, you know, there was no Jiu-Jitsu in our area at the time. We were rolling at the end of class and he had a gi on and it sort of came undone. He didn't have a shirt on underneath it and there was a swastika tattooed on his chest. And I sort of froze, like, what do I do now? Like this guy can literally just beat the crap out of me. Like I didn't know what I was doing at the time. So, at the end of class, we lined up, I go home and I was like, I can't just let this slide. This is I'm not going to be around this guy. So, I called my coach. I had no idea how my coach was going to respond, but I just remember being so nervous about that phone call. Like, is he going to tell me to F off? Am I going to have to quit the gym? Like, you know. Speaker 4: Are they going to come to my house and kill me? Like, you know. Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know, you know. So, you know, my coach called, you don't know what the level of insanity is when you started the club. Yeah, you just don't know. So, my coach ended up kicking the guy out. So, that was like good, you know, it was a good sign. But I tell that story to kind of say that, you know, I can relate to the challenge, you know, that feeling of like being in an environment and not knowing what to do, how to do it, what to say, being nervous about it. So, what I can say now with more experience in Jiu-Jitsu, more experience just in life in general, sort of dealing with these things is there is a way to address these things. There are words that can be, you know, constructed. And there is support for you if you're in that space and you need to try to find a way to get out. So, some of the solution I think maybe just information and networking, like getting that message out. You know, remote coaching is a thing now, right? You know, people in the BJJ Mental Models community are very familiar with that in terms of the community we have on the Discord and the coaching services BJJ Mental Models. That's one avenue. So, you know, there's a way to do this. It's just a matter of, you know, putting it on paper and putting it out there and people taking the first step. But I, you know, as much as I say we need to stand up, you know, I've I remember being a brand new white belt in training on the mats and a new student had joined the gym, also a white belt, but, you know, three or four stripes, which at this time period was like the king of the crop, you know, there was no Jiu-Jitsu in our area at the time. We were rolling at the end of class and he had a gi on and it sort of came undone. He didn't have a shirt on underneath it and there was a swastika tattooed on his chest. And I sort of froze, like, what do I do now? Like this guy can literally just beat the crap out of me. Like I didn't know what I was doing at the time. So, at the end of class, we lined up, I go home and I was like, I can't just let this slide. This is I'm not going to be around this guy. So, I called my coach. I had no idea how my coach was going to respond, but I just remember being so nervous about that phone call. Like, is he going to tell me to F off? Am I going to have to quit the gym? Like, you know. Speaker 3: I actually have have a comment about this, which comes from a strange place because while I was doing the background reading around this kind of far-right stuff going on with with MMA in Vancouver, I I got sucked down this article about the Wolves of Vinland. And I I found something quite fascinating, which is that they're using a really what I would call a thick description of MMA. So, I already mentioned that they use MMA as a core principle in their practice. They have daily sparring matches that all the guys are supposed to be involved in. It's it's not an optional thing. But part of their sort of ideology is to fuse the practice of martial arts with a sense of identity and belonging. And I'm saying this because of what Stefan was was saying about why do people stay? Well, my friends are at this club. Well, this and that and the other. So, when people have a sense of community, and even more strongly, when what they're doing with those friends and that community aligns with a deeper sense of self, that is a really potent mix. So, here's what I'm saying. The Wolves of Vinland, you know, have this theory that modern men are quote, greedy, lazy sissies, and that they've been victimized by capitalist consumerism and feminism. And so, that's their diagnosis. And then their their solution is come to the Wolves with us, you know, deadlift trees, practice MMA every day and sacrifice sheep to Odin, and you you too can reclaim your masculinity. So, what I'm suggesting is, perhaps people who aren't far-right crazies have neglected a very powerful tool in the toolbox, which is by using just a thin description of Jiu-Jitsu or martial arts and saying, it's just about techniques, you know, we're just here to perfect our Kimuras. We're just here working on the Omoplata and and that's all. I don't care what your ideas are or where you want to use this Omoplata or why you're studying it in the first place. We're just going to work on tightening this up so you can get it, you know, really precisely, really quickly, really reliably. That's fine and all. But it's also a little bit removed from the origins of a lot of martial arts, which originally were about a deeper sense of identity. They were about character building. It wasn't just technique for the sake of technique. It's what are you training for? And what larger purpose does this serve? So, the neo-Nazis have gone and filled in that gap with their own sense of higher purpose and we'll give you a community and we'll give you an an identity and we'll give you techniques and help you become physically strong. They're going to offer you the whole package. It's a terrible package intellectually, and it's got terrible implications, but they're not wrong about how compelling it is to have more than just technique for technique's sake. And so, what I think is missing is a thicker description of what is your community about? And what are the larger principles, the character principles, the other things that this serves? Because if we're just a bunch of people who like to roll around and do techniques, that's fine. But you're not going to be able to compete very well with someone who's offering this much deeper sense of bonds that are beyond the tighter choke, you know? Larger purposes and things that we share. And so, I think using words like inclusivity is a super bland, non-compelling kind of language. It just sounds very very milk toast, very flavorless. I think you have to be a little more explicit. I think you have to be a little more colorful and and just like Speaker 4: Fuck Nazis. Speaker 3: Exactly. Right? Like this is what we're about. This is these are the goals we're chasing here. This is what our community is for. Because by by just kind of having bland so-called inclusive language and let's not talk politics and let's not talk anything that's very objectionable, you leave the door wide open to these people who come in selling a thicker, more compelling description and recruiting in your club. And they can do a choke just as well as you can. So, but in addition to that, they've got a whole other story. So, it's pretty hard to compete with that if you're just selling technique. Those are my two cents. Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, one of the buzzwords of the last year was that the left needed its own Joe Rogan. So, we're kind of talking about the left Jiu-Jitsu sphere needs its own Gordon Ryan. Speaker 2: Is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you think is important to this conversation? Speaker 4: I think this idea of voting with your feet and your dollars bears repeating. Right? A lot of this, you know, whether it's supporting a fight organizations who have bankrupt morals, supporting instructors of clubs or virtual instructors who are morally bankrupt and doing objectively horrible things or associating with objectively horrible people. You know, we have to think about this. These people to some extent are famous because they're successful and they're successful because they make money off this shit. So, if we can rile up some percentage of their income and have some kind of financial consequences for the media platforms that host them, then that's a start. I I it's not the complete solution, but, you know, vote with your feet, vote with your dollars, consider moving clubs, you know, make new friends, consider training with a small group of people. This will grow. There's never been a better time in the history of humanity where a couple of people training together can get pretty damn good. The belt will eventually take care of itself, I promise. Speaker 2: Well, Stefan, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate your time and your willingness to speak up about these issues in our sport. To be frank, it's not easy. There's always backlash that comes when stepping into these conversations, but they need to be had and you have always been a reasonable voice that hasn't been deterred from speaking out. Thank you to our audience for joining us for this conversation. We appreciate your time as well. Stay tuned for our next episode where we'll be sitting down with the historian Daniele Bolelli and talking about Jigaro Kano and where all this got started. Have a great day, everyone. Speaker 1: This has been a BJJ Mental Models production.