How bad BJJ coaches trap you with rank

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back to Fighting Matters. I am Steve Kwan from BJJ Mental Models. I got my buddies, Stefan Kesting and Jesse Walker on the line. Stefan from Grapple Arts, how are you doing, my friend? Speaker 2: Very well, thanks. How about yourself? Speaker 1: Not bad, not bad. Jesse Walker, how are you today? Speaker 3: Uh, all things considered, things are pretty good, I guess. Speaker 1: All things considered. Well, good to have everyone here. Um, we actually had a topic that we wanted to talk about, not so much current events related, but jiu-jitsu related. There's a few people who had brought this up as a suggestion and someone, I think Jesse, you talked about this uh yourself and I thought, man, this would be a good topic. Um, belt blackmail for lack of a better term. It's not always blackmail, but the the coercive tactics that a lot of jiu-jitsu instructors will use to um either dangle a promotion in front of someone or threaten to withhold it for the purposes of trying to control them. Usually, this is for the purpose of retaining their membership, but anyone who's been training jiu-jitsu for long enough will probably have heard a similar story or gone through this themselves where they uh feel like maybe the gym that they're at is not a good fit for them, but they're afraid to leave because they're going to lose that promotion or maybe their instructor is trying to coerce or steer their behavior in ways that are unethical, such as getting them to teach free classes or something in order to to get them to justify that next step up to the promotion. This is one of the areas of jiu-jitsu that really makes me feel kind of gross when people use the promise of a promotion to try to extract something out of their students. Um but Jesse, this is a hot topic for you. So, why don't you explain your thoughts on this and and your experience with this in the sport? Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mean, I guess I have pretty direct experience with this uh from the standpoint of uh the person that gave me my black belt. Um, you know, I knew that we were never perfectly aligned politically, uh maybe even morally and ethically. Um, but I kind of stuck with him through the belt system. Um, and it we never really had any conflict. It was it kind of we tried to just not talk about it as much as we could. Um, but in my case, there was a there was a very specific event that happened. Um, literally 48 hours before I was due to get my black belt promotion. And something horribly racist was said out in public, out in front of uh, you know, Shelby, my spouse heard it. Um, and I was put in a really awkward position of, you know, what do I do? Do I tell this person to fuck off two days before my promotion? Uh, do I do I suck it up and just take the belt and, you know, you know, none of the choices seemed great to me. Um, and, you know, I slept on it and for me, I made the decision that getting that belt was more a representation of the hard work that I had put into it and that I was fine accepting it. Um, but that the relationship would go no further than that. And with the kind of understanding in my own heart that I'm like, I'm going to make sure that I use this black belt to to teach and do outreach to all of these people that he is hateful towards. Um, so, you know, the the way I justified it in my brain was, I'm going to take this belt and I'm going to do all the things that are really going to drive him fucking crazy with it. Um, and, you know, I I still to this day don't know if that was the ethically correct thing to do. Um, I mean, I guess it's turned out okay. Um, I I'm, you know, under Chris Houter now and and greener pastures. Um, but I got to tell you, that was a really tough period in my life. Um, because, you know, I was looking down the barrel like, I if I if I just put my head down and get this belt, I'm 48 hours away from it. But if I tell this guy to fuck off, I'm stuck in Rio de Janeiro by myself. I got to figure out how to, you know, get home and find somebody else to, you know, get me the rest of the way there. And in some ways, it was going to be kind of starting over, at least, you know, uh, inasmuch as building a new relationship and showing all the work I'd put in. Uh, so, you know, it was it was tough. It was tough. Did I do the right thing, guys? I don't know. Speaker 1: Uh, my thought is that people often um attach a lot more emotion to belt promotions than probably makes sense. We often feel like if someone gives us a belt, they've kind of put their stamp on us and we can never truly be separated from them and we are now part of their legacy and tied to their lineage. Um, I think that's all bullshit. I think that the whole conversation about lineage and the importance of that is um on one hand, it's an appeal to the traditionalism of martial arts, but it also can be used as a tool of control to convince people to stay within an affiliation, um where they where they it doesn't make sense to be. I had a similar experience, not at black belt, but when I started jiu-jitsu, the first gym that I was at, I mean, like many people, I fell in love with the sport at white belt. But when you're at white belt, the senior belts in the gym often are not paying that much attention to you and they're not spending that much time talking to you and getting to know you, right? It's only after you stay around for a while that people really start opening up to you. And when I got my blue belt, I realized that the instructor that I trained with was really not a person that I could align with ethically. I mean, he was quite clearly had had some degree of misogynistic belief. He was always complaining about the women at the gym, like it was always the women and he was ranting about the importance of loyalty and all of this stuff now that we talk about. Um, and I I left the gym and that was a hard decision for me even at blue belt. And part of it is because I put roots in this community, right? And they know that. They know that you've made your friends there and you set up roots there and it's hard to move on. Um, but also part of the logic was, look, I I know that even if they haven't dangled a belt in front of my head, I know that if I switch gyms, it's going to set back my promotion schedule and is that something I care about? The reality is, if you are training jiu-jitsu and you switch to a new gym, especially if you're coming from someone else or from somewhere else, the the new instructor is going to want to feel you out for a while to see what you're up to. So, you're just not going to get promoted at the same rate that you would get promoted at if you were training with the same person for years and years and years and years. When you switch somewhere new, that person is going to want to benchmark where you stand jiu-jitsu wise, but also they're going to want to benchmark where you stand as a human being because again, from the instructor's standpoint, if you put a belt on someone, you are endorsing them. And what kind of person are you endorsing? A lot of instructors really think about that. So, part of the reason I was hesitant to jump ship was because I knew that if I do that, you know, that's probably going to delay my progression belt wise by many, many months if not longer. Um and it did when I jumped ship, it definitely set me back a while, but in retrospect, it was the best decision I ever made. The new instructor that I trained with was infinitely better than where I was before. Um both as a human and also as a coach. And sure enough, after I left that old gym, I found out um a few years later that that gym had now been embroiled in all manner of scandals from sexual abuse to physical assault and most of the black belts had now departed and left the gym in protest. So, it was wound up being the right decision, but in the moment as a new blue belt, it was not an easy decision to make because I'd put so much of my time into this and, you know, the question is if you step away from a gym like that, what happens now? Do you lose all of your friends? Um it's a hard thing to do and instructors know this and they take advantage of this, right? In my case, it was not an explicit thing where someone was dangling a belt in front of us, but um I mean, we have mutual friends. I won't out them on the podcast, but we know people who have had that black belt promotion dangled in front of them and used as leverage by an instructor and it's a shitty thing to do. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think you two guys kind of encapsulate the the two ends of this. Right? I mean, Steve, you found out that the guy was a shithead early in your career. It's not like you had some kind of business plan or large plans riding on you becoming a purple belt. Oh, once I become a purple belt, I can do jiu-jitsu full-time. So, you got wind that this guy was a shithead quite early on. Jesse, you might have had your concerns, but you really only realized the scope of the problem two days before. So, I think in that case, that's a very different situation. Especially black belt and especially if I'm assuming that you wanted to go into some form of teaching. And I think the the model of taking the the belt that he's given you and then undermining everything that you don't like. I I I think that is the final absolution. So, inasmuch as it's up to me, you know, go forth and sin no more. I can play Domino's better than you. Uh go go free. Speaker 3: I did I did receive one of the he probably didn't mean it this way, but I I received one of the greatest compliments uh from him about a day after I got back from Rio. He sent me this just novel of a, you know, text message. And in it somewhere he said, you are very clearly a black belt, but you are not one of mine. And I'm like, I'll take it. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. I I think that the promotion thing certainly does keep people in schools that they're uncomfortable with. I mean, fundamentally, why does a white belt or a blue belt or a purple belt stay at a school? Number one, there is this promotion thing, right? There's no point in training unless you get promoted. I think that's a logical fallacy, but it is true. It is true that people feel that way. And they so much is made of the belts and dangling these in front of you that it it's not surprising that people then think that the purpose of training is to move up through the belt ranks. And secondly, you hit upon it, Steve, as well. There's the element of social control. There's the element of all your friends are here. And this is I mean, I'm not saying that every jiu-jitsu school is a cult, but the aspect of social control is incredibly important to cults. If you go join the Hare Krishnas or the Moonies or some super far crazy evangelical church or any other cult, there's a very strong, first of all, they shrink your social circle to members of the cult. Interaction with people outside of the cult is uh frowned upon or cut off actively. Now, some jiu-jitsu schools do that. I mean, there's certainly an element to it. If you're spending five nights a week training at a club, that's 10 to 20 hours a week that you're not going to visit with friends. So that it's shrunk your social circle a little bit to that institution, to that club, to that cult. And then if you leave, you lose a lot of that social network, right? If you get cast out. The the idea of excommunication is sometimes thought of in the Catholic Church, but I know people who've been excommunicated from very, very radical Protestant churches as well. And the idea is at least the idea was supposed to be, you are not allowed to hang out with anybody who goes to that church. You're not allowed to hang out with family members who go to that church. As it turns out, that's not exactly how things played out. But the dual investment of your time lost in your progression towards the next belt, plus the loss of uh of friends and your social circle. And then there's always the threat. You know, we are training a martial art. So at the back of everybody's head is like, man, what if I'm downtown and the instructor has shit talked me and talked bad about me and I run into the instructor and a couple of other people. Am I physically safe? Speaker 1: I I am aware of this happening where a a falling out between people that I know resulted in one of the instructors assaulting another in a parking lot somewhere. Like I I am aware of this happening. It's not unheard of. It is a a very real threat. And and this is a reason why um, you know, you all you often hear all of these horror stories, especially on the internet about like, what do I do? My what should I tell my instructor? And sometimes people give the advice that, well, just, you know, you should get up to them face-to-face and tell them what you think. And sometimes that's good, but that can also be incredibly dangerous. There there are a lot of really wildly unhinged people in the martial arts. And if you are, for example, concerned that someone might be sexually abusing their students and you go and confront them about that to their face, right? That that's not always a safe thing to do. So, you do have to be concerned about your physical safety when you deal with some of these people, unfortunately. That that's again one of those traps that people when they get into the martial arts, they never think about, but if they wind up landing in one of these gyms that's really culty, it's a lot harder to get out of it than you might have hoped, you know, when you first started this thing. You would never envision these kinds of problems, but your safety absolutely can be on the line in the wrong environment. Speaker 2: For sure. I mean, you have instructors who train in the martial arts and there's that saying that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We specialize in physical solutions to physical problems. It's not surprising that an instructor might think that a physical solution to a social problem or perhaps a legal problem is a valid thing. Plus, you have, you know, a lot of ego. And plus, how many instructors are basically in some mild form of roid rage all the time? Jesus and does change your your behavior. Speaker 1: Yeah, yep. I think you bring up Stefan too that this creates a different problem depending on where you're at in your journey. If you are a a student early on, mostly it's going to be the social control, the social pressure and the desire to to get that promotion that will hold you in an environment that you should probably leave. When you're at Jesse's level, it's a very different story because the reality is, like, look, we can sit here all day long and say that belts don't matter. That's easy to say when we're a bunch of old ass black belts, but I am well aware that if you are a brown belt and your dream in life is to open a jiu-jitsu gym, the business difference between opening a gym as a brown belt and as a black belt is huge. And it's stupid, but it's gigantic, right? From a technical standpoint, it doesn't matter at all. But from an optical standpoint and a marketing standpoint, all of the casuals out there, the muggles, right? Who want to start training jiu-jitsu and they don't know anything about it, they're going to see a gym run by a brown belt and they're going to go, uh, Hollywood told me that you got to be a black belt if you want to teach this stuff. Why would I want to learn from a brown belt? Now we know as people who have done this that honestly, like a brown belt is more than qualified to be a teacher. Sometimes better than a black belt, in fact. Um, but from people who don't know the sport and don't know what it means to be a brown belt, they're going to have that marketing checklist. They're going to look for someone who's a black belt and if you're a brown belt and the guy down the street is a black belt, they're going to go train there just on that basis alone. That's unfortunate, but when you are bringing business factors into this, it does matter what your belt rank is. So, I do feel terrible for this very common situation that Jesse's gone through because this this is where this often really comes up. People going from brown to black belt. Um because that's when the head coach really starts caring about who they promote and really starts thinking about it and they that's when they might start having requirements of you that were never disclosed earlier, right? Or you might start learning more about them. And really also thinking about it, you know, is this the kind of person that I want to get a black belt from? It's not an easy decision to make, uh especially if you start learning more about that person that puts you off. Speaker 3: So, what advice what advice do we have for people? And you know, and I think about it, you know, like Stefan said, kind of across the spectrum. You know, what do you tell the what do you tell the blue belt who, you know, sometimes thinking about while I was listening to you guys and kind of how much we know about the jiu-jitsu kind of industry and culture as it is. What if you're a blue belt in, you know, whatever mid-major city in the US and you're really unhappy there, but you've kind of learned enough about jiu-jitsu culture that you kind of assume that all the rest of the schools in the area are shitty too. Um, what do we what do we tell them? How do how do we guide them? Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think this is the less options you have, the more of a problem this is. If you're in Podunk, Iowa, and there's one school in town, well, then you really only have the choice of training there or starting your own training group. You know, and that that last one, you need mat space, you need a certain baseline technical level of technical knowledge, and you need some other people who are going to come and train with you and that's not always possible. If you're in a larger town, there's going to be gyms that are better and gyms that are worse. Gyms that are like ravingly maga and gyms that, you know, they might have some maga guys in it and the at least they know enough to keep their mouths mostly shut. You know, there are we don't want to have this absolute moral purity uh requirement. Now, that's coming from me and I'm pretty allergic to say, say we're talking about maga, but the same thing would apply to just racism or white power or whatever or homophobia. Uh, I am extraordinarily allergic to that stuff. So, I would but I also have but I have a different set of solutions now. I'm a black belt and I have the luxury of being able to call people up and saying, hey, do you want to train? How's Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. in my home dojo, right? It took a long time to get there. Um, if you're in a town where every single person is a a shithead, that's a tough situation. Train judo. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, at some point, you can, you know, if if you're experienced enough, you have the option of starting a gym, but that's probably not going to be the path for someone who's earlier on in their journey like I was when I went through this and switched, you know, as a as a blue belt. Doesn't make any sense to do that, at least it didn't for me. There are more options now. You can definitely find remote coaches. Not every coach is going to be willing to do this, but there are a lot of coaches who have figured out how to manage and promote people when they're not there with them every single day. That is easier to do further on in your journey because you know that the people that you're working with already have a base knowledge of jiu-jitsu. So, for example, if you are a brown belt or a black belt, um and you're looking for someone to kind of manage you remotely and promote you remotely, that's doable because at that point, um honestly, the the technique isn't even as important as the thing surrounding the technique in terms of why you would promote someone. If you're a white or a blue belt, it's a lot harder because at that point, the most important thing is, do you actually know the base level fundamentals that would justify a promotion? It is hard to do that remotely. But it is possible. I mean, you know, Hener and Hiran have done that. Um and although they got a lot of flack for that at the time, I think in retrospect, their method was probably proven correct. I don't think there's anything wrong with um promoting someone up to blue belt if it remotely, as long as you're very diligent about your instruction. However, the challenge is most coaches who are running a gym probably are focused almost entirely on the people in the gym. So, it's going to be hard to find someone who can do that remotely. There are options though. I mean, as an example, we've got at least one person in the Fighting Matters community who uh is transgender and isn't able to train where they are due to threats to their safety. They've been assaulted at gyms before because of their sexual orientation. And, you know, through our network, we can provide some degree of remote coaching and remote support. That is doable. Is it going to be the same as being in a room with a dedicated coach all the time? No, probably not, but some training is better than no training. Um there are a lot of benefits to doing things remotely. It is possible if you're dedicated and serious about it. There's never been more instructional content if you want to learn the material. It's not like you need an instructor to show you the moves. Um the main thing an instructor is doing now is providing you with a safe environment to train in more than anything else and some bodies that you can work with, um and a controlled environment where, you know, trust and safety are regulated. That's really the benefit of a gym. I mean, God, like if I if I had to start fresh and there weren't a gym around, the first thing I'd do is go to Grapple Arts, Stefan and grab some of your courses because the the information is not the bottleneck anymore. It's, can you find a facility and some bodies to train with? Speaker 2: The check is in the mail, Steve. Speaker 1: You're welcome. Speaker 2: Uh, thank you. The here's the thing. When I say, go start your own training group, I'm not just talking out of my ass. I've done this multiple times. I started jiu-jitsu before the first UFC back when we had two sources of information. Number one, the Gracie in Action tapes coming out of Brazil. We started doing this when Gracie in Action 1 came out and Gracie in Action 2 had not yet come out. And we also had a little bit of information coming in from judo and from Japanese shoot wrestling through the stuff that Dan Inosanto was teaching us. So, we had basic knowledge of submissions and we figured out that being on top is better than being on the bottom and that wrapping your legs around somebody if you're on the bottom is probably a good idea. We hadn't mastered things like figuring out that training with hair pulling is probably a bad idea. So, we were hair pulling, eye gouging, finger bending, fish hooking and rolling around on the ground. Speaker 1: Is that why all you old guys are bald? I'm just looking at the call here between you guys and Mahaffey whenever you're on the line. Everyone I know who trains jiu-jitsu and like Speaker 2: Hair is a weakness. I had long hair down past my shoulders. I looked like Jesus and I'd come home from training and I'd just like take a shower and my hair would be falling out of my head. So, maybe that did have something to do with it. But then when I moved to Vancouver, from that was in training in Montreal. I moved to Vancouver. Uh, again, I was trying to reverse engineer jiu-jitsu because now there was more of it, right? The USC had started. There were other, you know, world extreme combat and those sort of organizations. A little bit more information was coming out from California. If you were super rich, you could buy a set of 25 VHS tapes that showed about 26 techniques in total. And I was training. There was a place in uh it was uh called the Gathering Place in Vancouver. Basically, it's a place where kind of like a community center, but geared towards homeless people. So, a place where they could go shower, a place where they could go to the gym, a place where they could get a change of clothes, a mailbox so that if they needed to give an address on a job application that they could, you know, list that as an address so they didn't look quite as homeless. But they had a judo room and there was a guy teaching judo classes that was open to the public and my friend and I bought $5 memberships and we'd go to the judo room and we'd go and try and reverse engineer this, you know, crazy leg lock. This one where you like grab around the ankle, like, you know, like you're trying to guillotine choke and then you like wrap your legs around the guy's leg and then you like sit back and you pull. You know, straight ankle lock. At the time, it was cutting edge technology. Uh, and so we I've done this a couple of times. I had puzzle mats in a really shitty basement apartment. We were rolling around there and banging off the cupboards. So, I've done this two or three times and would I was I learning as fast as if I was training at AOJ or Marcelo Garcia's? No. But I was still learning. So, then when I jumped back into actual classes, you know, when a blue belt came to town and started giving classes as a blue belt, oh my God, there's a blue belt. He's, you know, a demigod in town. I had a fairly good basis just because I'd spent the time rolling around trying to twist people up and pretzel them. So, I do speak from experience and when you consider the challenges that we had at the time, learning techniques and figuring out training methods, man, there are so many resources out there now on technique. You want to learn how to do that crazy ass leg lock that I was trying to reverse engineer? It's a it's an embarrassment of riches. You could go and Jesse and I could meet up and our goal is to go through and do every technique on the on YouTube related to leg locks just one time. And we would never run out of material. We could work on that for the next 20 years and that's basically just doing one rep of one technique. He does one rep of one technique, next video. We could never run out of material. Speaker 1: Something that I I have talked about before is um, you know, I Jesse, you know I love a good paradox. Um, there's a a term that I've thrown around before, the paradox of abundance, uh which is that when you have more choices, more options, it creates a different set of problems. It can actually make it harder for you to get anything done. The most common example that I can give up, I mean, Stefan and Jesse, you guys can relate. I don't know if the youngins listening can, but I remember when I was a when I was a kid, if I wanted to watch a movie, right? You'd go to the theater and you had like three choices. And those choices were, you know, they were they were not cycling through these a lot. There were a few movies every year that came out that had your attention. And if you went to see one of those, probably all of your friends wanted to see them too because there just weren't that many choices. It's not like they could just go off and do their own thing. I mean, I've been a gamer my whole life. Um if you wanted to play video games, there would be maybe one noteworthy, two noteworthy releases a year. There just wasn't that much going on. You look now and we have absolutely the opposite problem. There is so much stuff out there, so much content being created that we have just a an embarrassment of riches. There's just an overabundance of stuff. And this creates this weird analysis paralysis problem where because there is so much stuff and there's so much good stuff, you can never possibly watch it all or consume it all. So, you have to be strategic about where you put your time. And that means that you got to think about it. And it's really easy to get into this trap where you spend so much time thinking about what to consume that you just never consume anything. Um, I mean, the example I often give is, have you ever had that that moment where you think, man, I got the night off. This is going to be great. Going to sit down, pop open Netflix, figure out something to watch. Next thing you know, you've spent a whole hour just scrolling through and trying to find something to watch and then you got distracted by your phone and then something else and you realize, shit, the whole night's gone. I the one thing I wanted to do, which is watch one movie on Netflix, didn't get to because I got so distracted by the options, I never actually picked a shot and took it. And I feel like in jiu-jitsu now, that is almost where we're at. I remember again, Stefan, to your example, when I started jiu-jitsu in the late 2000s, um which was already after kind of the first few boom periods, it was still at a point though where it hadn't exploded in terms of the information out there. So, if if there was a new hot technique that had been appearing somewhere, first of all, it would be hard to find information on it. Um but second of all, there wasn't that much other stuff going on. So, in 2008, if I started talking about the Marcelo teen, everyone would know, oh, the Marcelo teen. I've heard about that. That's this new thing and we'd all be going off trying to find it. There just wasn't that much new stuff happening now. Today, there is so much new content being created that not only do we not all have the ability to consume it all, but it's hard sometimes to know what we're all even talking about because if I talk to you about like the Woge lock, a lot of people aren't even going to know what the hell that means because that there's so much other stuff coming out at the same time. So, there's an overabundance of information now and you'll never master it all. You'll never master it all. Speaker 2: The Woge lock is old now. The Trend lock is what's in now. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I love this. just I man, if I were clear to train, like my only problem is I think I might be too fat to do the Trend lock, but I love the idea of it. Anyway, this is a perfect example of how much shit there is out there. Like, if you are trying to train jiu-jitsu without an instructor, the least of your problems is having an instructor. The most important thing that you need is a safe place to train and safe people to train with. And that doesn't have to be a gym. That can be a basement. That can be anywhere with a soft floor. You don't even need a soft floor if you agree to not throw or slam people, right? There's a lot of opportunities to do this. And um I think people are so attached to the idea now of I need a gym and I need an elite training room. Man, let me tell you, there's a lot of great athletes that are coming up outside of Atos or Kingsway or whatever the hell, right? You don't need to be in some world-class training facility to become a world-class grappler, even if that is your goal. Speaker 3: But and to your point, I I think schools, you were absolutely right in saying that they provide a, you know, a culture and a safe place to train. Um, but they also at this point are providing kind of a curated experience. The coach is there deciding like, there's so much signal that it has all become noise. Um, but but they can kind of carve a path through it to help you decide what's important and what's not. At least as you're getting started. Um, and I I think that's important. Speaker 2: It's been said that in a world of infinite content, context becomes key. So, you can't just sit through and look at Netflix. You have to say, tonight I want to watch a new science fiction movie. And then which directors do I trust or which studios do I trust to put out a good thing? Similarly, you know, if you sort of the the idea of following a curriculum or following a training methodology becomes more important the more content there is. Because, you know, as we've said, you can never do everything. So, now, how do we find a path? I mean, typically in my own training these days, I'd love to hear what you guys do. I spend three to nine months working on one area. Now, I don't think that's a good way for a white belt to proceed or a blue belt to proceed. They need a much broader, much shallower analysis. But I spent about nine months working on really only the Kimura. And before that, I spent about six months really only working on pin escapes. And this is what I enjoy and I can get away with it because I've got a fairly decent background across the different areas. So, picking one area and beating it to death is is super useful. What do you guys do or how would you uh advise somebody who's not a beginner to navigate their way through this world of infinite content? Speaker 1: My my answer to that is is suboptimal because uh unfortunately, I am in many ways the fire hose of content. I I would not suggest that anyone do what I do if they want to get good at jiu-jitsu. The the challenge that I have is because of the amount of stuff that we have to produce and the amount of people I have to work with to edit and publish the content. Um in many ways, I'm kind of at their mercy, right? I mean, God, I just, you know, as of this recording, it is Wednesday, November 26th. So, I think um uh translate to American for me here, Jesse, tomorrow is your Thanksgiving, I believe in the states. Speaker 3: Yeah, it's Thanksgiving Eve. Yeah, that's right. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Which is just a regular Thursday for us here in Canada, but Black Friday is still a very big deal in in Canada, right? That's the biggest sales day for a lot of us. So, I was trying to put together some sort of pitch for why people should join BJJ Mental Models Premium and I was taking a look at the amount of stuff that we generate. It's like, God, there there's so much stuff that we have to produce that it really gets in the way of me actually sitting down and focusing on something. But that is the right way to train. I mean, Stefan, what you're talking about, that's kind of the Josh Waitzkin method, which is you pick one thing and you go ultra deep into it and you just unpack it until you feel like, I got this. I've I've mastered this. I I've turned this into a diamond. I know what I need to do and now you can start building and expanding on it. Um if your goal is to learn jiu-jitsu, I I think that once you've got a basic foundation and understanding of all of the major positions and ideas, that's the best way to actually work on a specific skill. Um it's different if your goal is to be a gym owner or a content creator or something because then you have to switch gears and it's not necessarily about your own performance. It's about your ability to communicate to someone else and that's a very different thing. But for most people who just want to get good, my suggestion is, start with a broad education. Again, I Stefan is not paying me to say this, but I would say grab either um BJJ Formula 2.0 or BJJ Foundations from Grapple Arts. You will already have more information there than I had getting up to purple belt, right? That's more than enough to get a broad education. And then from there, it starts to become a game of identifying your weaknesses, which is real easy in jiu-jitsu because people will exploit your weaknesses and then just deciding, I'm going to laser focus on this thing until it's not a weakness anymore. And you can decide at that point, do I want to keep focusing on this and make this my A game or is this a I'm good enough here and now it's time to find another thing to work on. Um but I think that that approach of going deep on something, once you you get past that initial stage of like, what the fuck is even is jiu-jitsu, being very intentional about having an area of focus and study, I think really, really helps. But Jesse, I mean, you're you're a coach here. I'd love to know your thoughts on what you guys suggest. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I mean, I think that's I think that's all really well said. For me, um, I I do sometimes let it be technique driven, uh like Stefan. I mean, in some ways, I've been doing a deep dive on Omaplata and half guard since I was a blue belt. Um, but like, for instance, right now, my my area of focus personally and also just uh trying to convey it to the students is and it's something I think was inspired by, I think a friend of all of ours, Chris Payne's. Um, this idea of once I start getting a submission put together, um, trying to get the control so snug and, you know, all the slack taken out of the joints and so that when I start the breaking mechanics, I have to move almost zero. Um, so trying to get to a submission and and the amount of effort that I have to put in into the breaking mechanics is so light that I'm I'm barely doing any work. So, I'm trying to get all of it done on the front end so that the breaking mechanics are trivially easy on the back end. Um, and I think that's really been my area of focus for the probably the last six to nine months for sure. Speaker 2: To jump back to quite a ways back to something that Jesse brought up. This idea of you you're in a town and there's six different jiu-jitsu schools and you're convinced that pretty much all of them are shitheads. I I I paraphrasing that correctly, Jesse? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think that's fair. Speaker 2: I think there's an asymmetry here. Uh and this goes back to that post that I put on my Instagram about if you were trying to keep white supremacists out of your school and you you were serious about this, then hang a pride flag would have about a 95% uh chance of working. It would keep white supremacists out. Speaker 1: Yeah, you're the rainbow flag guy I keep reading about. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I found out that I'm certainly the the Facebook scraper sites jumped on that and black belts Speaker 1: We heard a lot about you, Stefan. I didn't realize that you were a trans jiu-jitsu instructor who only wore rainbow colored gees. This was all news to me. It was just Speaker 2: Yeah. It's also it's also news to me that I'm far left. Speaker 1: That was news to me as well. Don't even get me started on these like aggregator sites and the fucking basement journalism that they do, but anyway. Speaker 2: What do you mean by aggregator site and what's their role in jiu-jitsu, Steve? Speaker 1: Oh, I just said don't get me started. An aggregator is a site or source that poses as a news site, a journalistic outlet, but is actually not doing any news or journalism. All they do is take a look at what other people have done and repurpose or repost it in their own words, usually for the purpose of stirring up drama so that they can draw clicks to their own site instead of the original source. The reason they do this is because then they can load up their their website with garbage advertisements and make money. So, as an example, let's say that someone were to facetiously post on threads that, hey, if you want to keep shitheads out of your gym, put a pride flag up because then they'll they'll just self-select out, right? You post that as a joke. Well, someone, if they wanted to, could spin that and pretend that that's a news article and structure that to make it look like that the person is then suggesting that everyone do that and they could Speaker 2: demanding Speaker 1: or demanding it and they could post little rainbow flags and trans icons all over the website to try to stir up as much anger as possible from an already angry far-right community. The idea being, I'm going to direct them to my website and then they're going to see all of my shitty ads and I'm going to make money off of that. That's what an aggregator is. They're actually really dangerous because um in a world where it's getting harder and harder to have real quality journalism and thought pieces, it's easy for aggregators, content aggregator sites to slip in and act like and appear like they're actual journalistic outlets when they don't do any journalism at all. All they do is take other stuff that they've seen elsewhere, copy and paste it and then just turn the the the rage dial up to make it more clickbaity and then repost it. Um, these people are dangerous not just because of the misinformation and the rage baiting that they're doing, but also because they take eyeballs and money away from the real journalists doing their real work. Um, this is a huge problem, not not just in jiu-jitsu, but in pretty much any field right now. Um, happens a lot in sports. If you see some Facebook page where every post is about like trans athletes or vaccines or something like that, they're probably an aggregator site and my suggestion is always trace back to the people actually doing the journalistic work and make sure you focus on them, pay them and just block the shit in your feed that is clearly just there to stir up anger and misdirect because most of the time it's going to be um, you know, wrong at best or damaging at worst. Speaker 2: So, the reason I bring up the aggregator sites and I bring up that post is that there's an asymmetry in the sport. If you're busy posting call it maga stuff, conspiratorial stuff, Joe Rogan stuff, anti-vaccine stuff, the public backlash within the sport is relatively small, at least online. So, then whereas if you post something that could be perceived as left of center, as that, you know, now that being against white supremacy is far left, apparently. And there's such a backlash to saying that out loud that many people who are sort of call them in the center or at least not far right in the jiu-jitsu space, don't say anything at all political because there's such incredible backlash against speaking out that just doesn't apply on the other side. Yeah, people get mad at Jake Shields. Yeah, people get mad at Gordon Ryan. Their seminar business is is humming right along. So, I I guess this speaks to a possibility that you might make assumptions about the various clubs and the instructors. And maybe those instruction those those uh conclusions aren't bounded in reality. We're just assuming that since they're not saying anything that's easily identifiable as being as basic human decency that they must be shitheads. So, I I know there are some people who've surprised me in the sport who I was like, yes, for sure, we're far right and and shitheads and haven't been at all, but they stay quiet. Speaker 3: I mean, I I this is kind of what I was hoping we would dig into a little bit. You know, I you know, at the most extreme cases, right? Uh, you know, a woman joins a BJJ gym in a a major metro area. Um, and just happens to pick the wrong one, right? There are a lot of wrong ones out there, but she goes to one of the wrong ones. And within a few weeks, is getting harassed, um, and decides to leave and rather than going and looking for an alternative school, makes the assumption, I bet all the fucking jiu-jitsu schools are this way. Um, and that's heartbreaking to me. Um, for so many reasons. Um, and that I'd say it's an extreme case. I could completely understand why anyone that has had that happen to them walks away from the sport completely, right? I I can't begrudge them that at all. Um, but I I do think that in some ways, they're doing themselves a disservice if they really did fall in love with the sport because I do think that there are good alternatives out there. Um, we just have to do some due diligence to look and find them. Speaker 1: Yeah, I I agree. And unfortunately, the fact that Stefan, to your point, gym owners are keeping quiet about this stuff makes it even harder to identify who the good guys are. It would be a lot easier if people would take their lumps and just come out and say, like, hey, I I don't want Nazis training at my gym. You wouldn't think that's controversial, but if more instructors were willing to do that, it would signal to people that, oh, this is actually a a cool place to train. Um but I, you know what? I'm sympathetic because I mean, just doing this little podcast, which is a very niche podcast, God, we've gotten literally hundreds of messages from people who are extremely mad about what we say, um including straight up death threats, right? There's a lot of that that comes in. So, I understand why someone who's just trying to run a jiu-jitsu gym would not want that smoke and would want to try to just steer away from this whole thing. But I would say you're also if you do that, you're running the risk of getting lumped in with all of the bad actors. There was just an article in the New York Times today about jiu-jitsu, which is always a scary thing. God, every time every time the New York Times mentions jiu-jitsu, it's usually not good news. Speaker 2: It's never good, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, but this one was interesting because it was a piece on Craig Jones and it was talking specifically about his strategy of using shit posting and trolling to disrupt the far right and particularly Gordon Ryan, right? Something that anyone who trains jiu-jitsu for any period of time probably has opinions on already. Um and you I you know what? The example there is like there is a place for people who are willing to wear their morals on their sleeves and speak up for what's right and it doesn't mean it's going to be the death of your business. Um I I think that it's important that people yeah, I'm not saying that your gym needs to turn into a political activist outlet, but it should not be crazy to say, like, hey, if you're a neo-Nazi, don't train at my gym. That should not be a controversial statement. And the fact that people are trying to portray it that way is kind of a scary thing about today's society. Speaker 2: We do have to remind ourselves and remind ourselves and remind ourselves that a significant portion of the comments and even death threats that we're getting and that I've got and that we've gotten as a collective are bots. And who has the money Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not human. Speaker 2: A lot of them are not. I mean, some of them are and the ones that are have been heavily influenced by bots. And, you know, where is the far there's lots of authoritarian governments looking at Russia mostly who would really benefit from things like collapsing NATO, collapsing the EU and collapsing democracy in the United States and and the rest of the West, right? That's kind of a three-part effort. Collapse NATO so they can do whatever the hell they want with Ukraine and the neighboring states. Collapse the EU so that there's not an organized system of resistance and, you know, there was Russian funding for the Brexit campaigns. There's just yet another been yet another scandal in England about the Russians funding a British MP who was essentially under the guise of freedom of speech protecting Russian propaganda about Ukraine from being spread, making sure that it was getting spread. And uh and an authoritarian country is much less of a challenge to an authoritarian country like Russia compared to a democratic country. So, there's a ton of money going towards these things, right? I I have people in my life who run completely unrelated channels who've been and the only people who've ever offered them money are like the Second Amendment and maga types, right? Like, hey, play this 30-second advertisement at the beginning of your podcast and we'll pay you uh what was it? Like 600 bucks a month. That's the only big, you know, it's not big money, but that's the biggest money offer they've had and it it's comes and it was and it was terrible quality and it doesn't matter because the money behind the offer is what counts. It's part of flooding the zone and uh there's just, you know, so, we know that the Russians were funding Tim Pool. We know that the Russians were funding Jordan Peterson. I'm almost certain, I would bet my my house on that the Russians were funding Tucker Carlson. Where's the equivalent on the other side? A couple thousand bucks here, a couple thousand bucks there. It just doesn't exist. So, we got to remind ourselves a lot of these aren't real people. Speaker 3: You're not getting your George Soros checks? Speaker 2: I've been waiting. I've been waiting since 2020 when the first accusation came. Speaker 3: might have been clearing for years. I haven't been having any problems. Speaker 1: Oh. I I do get a kick out of when people accuse people like us of making content like this for profit. Like, Jesus Christ, people. We're if if there is profit involved in this, I I think they might be sending the checks to the wrong house. Speaker 2: We're screwing it up because Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. We are actually Speaker 2: talking about things that get basically demonetized on YouTube. Right? YouTube doesn't like political commentary. It doesn't like because the advertisers can say, no, I don't want to advertise on this. So, there's a whole bunch of things that can get you essentially on a shit list. So, the only kind of people who generally want to advertise on quote political podcasts are things like Black Rifle Coffee Company. Right? Uh, basically far right uh companies that that assume political means uh it's going to go in their favor. Speaker 1: Maybe we need to start selling uh $600 jiu-jitsu like sandals with political messages on them. Apparently that's a thing, right, Stefan? Speaker 2: Yeah, well, shocker that the uh toe hold flip-flop with $800 ostrich leather deal with Gordon Ryan fell apart. Nobody could have seen that coming. Speaker 1: I can't believe that fell through. No one could have seen that coming. Speaker 2: Shocker. And and while we're talking about George Soros, it's just astounding. I mean, Elon Musk is everything that George Soros was supposed to be. They don't need to meet the the billionaires controlling the world. Don't need to meet in Davos. You want a picture of them, finally exposed? Go to the US inauguration. They're all there. There's Zuckerberg. Oh, weird. There's Elon Musk. Oh, weird. There's Jeff Bezos. Oh, weird. Here's Billionaires Row right behind them. Uh, Davos is real if Davos is the billionaires who are running the United States. Speaker 1: Should we talk about how Elon Musk accidentally unmasked all of the foreign actors on Twitter who are pretending to be like American maga influencers and it turns out that they're a bunch of like Nigerian bots? I think that's amazing. I don't know if people saw this on the news, but they uh on X, they rolled out a new feature where you can see the origin of a a uh channel or a an account on there and sure enough, it turns out as expected that a lot of the far-right influencers who claim to be like pro-maga, American first, America first, they're all just fucking bot farms and actors overseas. Speaker 2: Maga Debbie from Texas is actually from St. Petersburg. Speaker 1: That seems like such an obvious self-own. I I'm still shocked that that that feature rolled out without any forethought as to what that was going to look like. Speaker 2: Well, they took it away almost immediately, so Speaker 1: Although I think it's back now. I think it might be back. But the the thing that has really surprised me about this fascist takeover is how fucking stupid these people are. I I none of them are bright. I mean, I came up in a time when we thought that, you know, the evil fascist overlords would at least be evil geniuses, but they're all a bunch of morons. Um and just the amount of self-owns is really we're very lucky that they're so stupid because otherwise this takeover of theirs would have gone much smoother than it did. Speaker 2: It's not over yet. And these self-owns, I think, there's this idea that I'd like to get into more, maybe for a future episode. The idea that you don't need to be that authoritarianism doesn't require consistency. In fact, inconsistency and these self-owns aren't a bug, they're a feature. Because when you get conflicting information, it really forces you to stop using your brain to try and figure stuff out and just go with tribal loyalty. Speaker 1: It's a control mechanism, right? It it's not about good information. And this is a a mistake that the rest of us are make a lot is we try to reach these people with rationality. Um, it's not about rationality. Part of the way that cults work is they will be unpredictable and wild and inconsistent and contradictory because it's not about being consistent and providing good information to the people that follow them. It's a loyalty test. It's a purity test. You are trying to condition the people underneath you to support you no matter what crazy bullshit you say. It's the reason why, you know, Kim Jong Il could shoot a hole in one every time he played golf. It's a reason it's the reason why Donald Trump is also an amazing golfer and he's never failed at business, right? By putting forth these incredibly obvious lies, it's not about trying to convince people. It's about trying to demonstrate that you can tell an obvious lie, but you're so powerful that people will follow it anyway, even though it's a clearly obvious lie. That's a classic control tactic that cults use, not providing quality correct information, but showing your power by showing that you don't even need to be honest. You can you can provide something clearly absurd, you know, you can the emperor can have no clothes and people will still march along with it even knowing that is wrong. That's a sign of authoritarianism. Speaker 2: Speaking of having no clothes, I'm going to get us completely demonetized and screw up all of our chances at YouTube. Speaker 1: Demonetized. We don't run ads on this shit. What are you talking about? Is someone making money off of this? I'm not. Speaker 2: The perfect example of this inconsistency that I that comes to mind is Jim Jones, the guy who ran the People's Temple in Guyana that resulted in the so-called Kool-Aid suicides of hundreds and hundreds of people. Towards the end of his ministry, because he was a Reverend Jim Jones, he was literally sodomizing men. He of course, he was sleeping with all the the hot young women in his cult, but he was also sodomizing some of the guys to show them that he, Jim Jones, was the only straight man in the world and that they were all gay. So, that is if you think about that for even a second, Speaker 3: Sounds like most of the Republican Party. Speaker 2: Except he wasn't doing it in a in an airport bathroom. Speaker 3: Hey, that was just a wide stance. Yeah. Speaker 1: Anyway, um this is believe it or not. I'm sorry for dragging the tone of the conversation down, Steve. Speaker 2: I feel bad. Speaker 1: No, this is where this is where the gutter where I live, my friend. Um but I think it's worth pointing this out because people in jiu-jitsu will if you've trained in a kind of a culty environment, you probably will have seen stuff like this where an instructor uh tries to assert some degree of cult-like control. I'd actually love to do an episode on that. Just some of the warning signs of a gym that's a bit culty because the challenge is once you're in a cult like that, it's hard to get out, especially when they're dangling a belt promotion in front of you or something like that. It's better to identify it and and avoid it at the beginning because once you get into it, extracting yourself from that situation, now you got to deal with cognitive dissonance, you've got to deal with social shame and rejection, you've got to deal with possibly losing your social connections, not even getting into the risk of losing a belt promotion. It gets way, way harder uh to escape a cult than it is to just avoid it in the first place. I guess if we were to tie this all back up, what are what are some of the things that you guys would suggest based on the learnings that you've had? I mean, we've been in situations before where we've trained in environments that we regret. What do we tell people now who are at the early stages of their white or their blue or even purple belt journey that we wish we knew back when we started to avoid this kind of problem and and not get into it in the first place? Speaker 2: Character matters. The character of your instructor matters. And pay attention to that. After you've been training there for a while, there'll be lots of signs. If you're willing to pay attention and even talk to the other people and don't try and write it off as, oh, that's just a Brazilian thing. Oh, that's just an instructor thing. Oh, that's just a little quirk. Man, character matters. You have spider senses for a reason and pay attention to them and as you pointed out, Steve, the earlier you change that situation, the the less sunk cost you'll have and the easier it'll be. Speaker 1: Jesse, how about you? Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the big one for me is you run into black belts pretty frequently that once they get that that black strap around their waist, they're all of a sudden a black belt in all life matters. Nutrition, finance, relationship advice, politics, you name it. And they're willing to share it in the last 15 minutes of class while they sit you down and give you all their, you know, their life lessons. These are all really big red flags. Uh, black belts are generally barely even black belts at jiu-jitsu. Uh, let alone all the other aspects of life. Speaker 1: Well said. I I remember I attended a Shanjie Habero seminar one time. And um at the end of the class or at the end of the seminar, people were asking questions of Shanjie and one of the questions that someone asked was, you know, what makes a black belt? What do you want to see before you give someone a black belt? And Shanjie's answer to my very pleasant surprise was character. He said, like, the most important thing for me, if I'm going to give someone a black belt is I want to make sure that they're not going to use that to take advantage of women or bring toxic shit into the gym. And I thought, God, fuck, thank you. I'm glad someone is actually willing to say it. Um, Speaker 3: Where's that been, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, I know. So it it that is important and I I mean, Stefan, you're absolutely right. People in jiu-jitsu gloss over this. I mean, how many times in the comments have we heard people say to us, like, keep politics out of jiu-jitsu. It's just about, you know, slap, bump, roll, every day. That's all that matters on the mats is the training. Don't bring the outside world in. Look, I'm sorry, character matters. This is the real world. Humans human beings need to have standards. We need to care about character. We can't just say, like, oh, well, you know, this this guy's a neo-Nazi, but his arm bars are really good, so we should train with him. If you bring that mentality into jiu-jitsu, you are corrupting the sport from the inside out. And yes, all of the aggregators can quote me on that. Like, that is a real problem that people are willing to turn a blind eye to clear deficiencies in character. I'm not saying we need to be purity police. I'm not saying that we need to start doing ideological alignment tests to make sure people vote the right way. I'm just saying that like some things should be considered beyond the pale and we all know what those things are. And if you can't enforce those as a martial artist, then what the fuck are you even doing here? Speaker 2: Amen. Speaker 1: Amen to that. Amazing. Well, I am going to try to get this bad boy out in time for Black Friday. So, let's sell some stuff. Stefan Kesting, sell me some instructional content. What's the deal? Speaker 2: Oh, uh, I'm putting Speaker 1: You put you on the spot here. You had no idea, did you? Speaker 2: If you go to grapplearts.com and use coupon code black, you'll get 50% off all my instructionals including the complete anthology where you get all my instructionals all at the same time. So, that's a pretty good deal and now when you get an instructional on the website, it'll automatically go to your app, the BJJ Grapple Arts Master app. So, you can consume it on your computer, you can consume it on your app and it's seamless now, which is that took a lot of work, but it's looking really good. Speaker 1: Amazing. Might I recommend the BJJ Formula 2.0 with Rob Bernacki and BJJ Foundations with Cal McDonald. If you are one of those people who is having to strike off on your own and you need a good foundation of jiu-jitsu information. Uh that kind of stuff is I wish existed when I started training. So, definitely recommend checking those out. Jesse, sir, if people are in Louisville, Kentucky, what are you guys doing? Give me the sales pitch. I know you got a new fancy facility. Speaker 3: Yeah, we do have a new facility. Um, so we've got a number of uh current member specials and new potential member specials going on. Uh, everything from buying packages that include uh, you know, free private lessons and that sort of thing. Um, all the way to huge discounts if you, you know, pay for a year of training. So, all that stuff will be on our website. Uh, if you're on our mailing list, all that stuff will go out to you. If you're not, reach out through the website, we'll get you on the list and get the information out to you. Uh, we also sent out a gift guide this year and both of these gentlemen on the screen with me are included in that. Um, both BJJ Mental Models Premium and grapplearts.com uh are just top-notch resources that not only my students, but everybody listening uh or watching should uh be participating in. I can't recommend them enough. Speaker 1: Amazing. My stuff's easy to find is at BJJ Mental Models.com for Black Friday and the week after, we're doing 50% off our memberships. That discount locks in for new members until April 2026. So, that's a pretty good deal. I will put all of that stuff in the show notes. I would also ask if anyone out there, um kind of likes the stuff that we do. I also want to make sure that people get a chance to shout themselves out. So, if you've got a cool deal or want to get some attention for yourself, drop it in the comments. I mean, I am I I don't I'm not sure I would call myself a capitalist, but I am capitalist enough that I want to see good people succeed. So, if uh you are one of those good people in the sport, I want to know about it so that I can promote and shout that out. Um but I think that wraps it up. Good chat, guys. Any closing thoughts? Stefan, Jesse? Speaker 2: Thanks for hosting, Steve. Speaker 3: No, just that, you know, if you are not feeling like you're in a good place, uh there are good places out there. Don't give up on the sport. There are good people in the sport. Um and even if it sets you back six months to a year, you know, whatever it is, take your lumps and and find a good path. They're out there. Speaker 1: Well said, my friends. Well, thank you. Thank you for this chat. Thank you to the listeners as well. We will talk to you in the next one. See you then.