We've gone deep on yoga communities infected by conspiracy theories. We've looked at essential oils and supplements influencers peddling in misinformation. There are channelers and astrologers and chiropractors. But there's another world we've only mentioned in passing: martial arts practitioners, which turn out to be another influential vector for disinformation. This week, Stephan Kesting, longtime BJJ black belt and instructor (and so much more) joins Derek to look at the conspiratorial frame of Joe Rogan, Dana White, and many other figures peddling misinformation in the arts.
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We have actually submitted the book to our publisher and we are now in the process of editorial oversight and editing, which will take A bit of time as it happens.
We will be back together on the podcast in two weeks.
Next week Matthew has an essay that he wrote that I'm very excited for everyone to hear.
I'm not going to give anything away.
Moving forward, we're going to be going with some different formats, mixing it up, which we've always done, but some of the podcasts will be the three of us, some two of us, some solo.
We have about 10 interviews booked between us right now, so lots happening in the coming months from the podcast.
But again, in two weeks, we're going to do a big picture overview slash decompression after the book to explain our process and what we're going to be doing looking forward.
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That would be very helpful.
Conspiratuality 106, Conspiracy Dojo with Stefan Kesting.
Over the last two years, we've looked at how conspiracy theories flourish in a number of environments, including yoga studios, essential oils communities, and the unregulated world of supplements downlines and the influencers who promote them.
We've also touched upon astrologers and channelers, yet we really haven't looked at another hotspot for conspiracies—martial arts circles.
Sure, we've talked a bit about Joe Rogan, who, as the face of the MMA, as a commentator, is a major vector.
But he's not the only one.
So we'll get into some of the figures, including Bryce Mitchell, Tim Kennedy, and Tito Ortiz, with today's guest and longtime friend of the pod, Stefan Kesting, in a few moments.
First, a brief personal note.
The first martial art I practiced was Taekwondo.
It was the mid-90s, and there was a dojo not far from the Rutgers University campus where I lived.
Now as I've mentioned before, I'm a movement and exercise mutt and I've been that way my entire life.
And I was taken by the adrenaline and dopamine rush of punching and especially kicking, which has always been my favorite part of the arts.
And I found that in a small studio on George Street in New Brunswick.
But like most everything else I tried in college, it didn't stick.
So, years later, I'm not sure how I found Capoeira, but it was 1999 and I was living in New York City.
And I really took to this Brazilian dance martial art form with much more fervor than I had with Taekwondo.
I fell in love with the methodical movements of Angola, as compared to Hijinal, which more Americans are accustomed to.
Like in the classic video game Tekken, for example.
Ijinol is explosive and fast, while Angola is meditative and measured.
Though, to be fair, it can be quite explosive.
Sort of like how you see Tai Chi very slow and then all of a sudden can erupt at any moment.
It's sort of like the alap before the raga.
You take your time before the full landscape of the song emerges.
And yes, I'm shorthanding the art form a bit, but suffice to say the combination of the birimbao and the hand drums and the chanting and the inspiring community that was built around Maestre Joao Grande.
At the time, the studio was on 14th Street and 6th Avenue, though now it lives in Harlem, though I see mostly And then I started taking yoga seriously.
pretty amazing considering that the maestro is 89 years old.
All of these different factors drew me in, along with the actual movements, of course.
And then I started taking yoga seriously.
At the time, I was dabbling in modern dance, capoeira, and yoga, and I had to make a decision.
If I wanted to pursue capoeira, I could learn Portuguese and the instruments and songs and really commit to the Or I could learn the asanas and everything else involved in yoga.
And it wasn't an easy decision.
They both offered different things for me, but given the chronic pain I was suffering from due to numerous injuries at that point in my life, I chose yoga.
It just made my body feel better.
It was a little more therapeutic for what I needed at that time, and that's the path I went down.
So ever since, for the last two decades plus, I've only dabbled in martial arts.
I taught Budokan for a year at Equinox, which is a fusion of Taekwondo, yoga, and meditation.
And then after moving to Los Angeles, I practiced Eskrima, Muay Thai, and Jeet Kune Do at Dan Inosanto's studio in Marina Del Rey for a while.
And if Jeet Kune Do sounds familiar, that's because Dan was close friends and sparring partners with Bruce Lee, and he continues the legacy of that style even at the age of 85.
So, you know, there's something about these martial arts and the people keep going with it.
It's amazing.
So here's what I love about martial arts.
It's really the discipline.
Not only the dedicated practice, but of bowing in and out every time you enter the dojo.
There's something to be said about the hierarchy of respect that's paid in martial arts communities.
It's humbling.
It's inspiring.
It reminds you that you're part of a lineage, and that to enter and leave that space, you pay respect.
Honestly, it's the type of respect that I think would serve us as a society, and it would also combat the every-person-is-an-island style of sovereignty that we're currently living through.
And of course, studies have shown that martial arts help people build confidence, and lastly, self-defense, which it's mostly marketed as, and it's very important to know how to defend yourself, but there's so many other factors that play into it.
But it's not all love and light, or even just self-defense at all.
So as with many Gen Xers, I was influenced by The Karate Kid.
And no, I've never watched Cobra Kai, so I won't be commenting on that.
Nothing against it, I just never got into it.
So sure, the notion from the original that cleaning floors wax on wax off would lead to a form of satori that led to victory.
It's a very Hollywood feeling.
But honestly, we could use a few more Daniels to knock out the Johnnies of conspirituality right now.
And the thing is, just like in yoga communities, I'm pretty sure that most people who practice an art feel the same way.
But as we know in the age of social media, they're just not the vocal minority who dominates the conversation.
As I'm in middle age now, most of my friends practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which I've done a little bit of, and I just moved to Portland, close to a BJJ school, so I may take it up seriously.
It's less flashy, but way more functional than a lot of arts, at least if you think about sparring arts in competition.
I don't mean actually grappling and getting into it with people if you have to fight.
And from BJJ, I remember the chess aspect that was really appealing to me.
I start the conversation with Stefan about that.
And the length of my levers gave me a natural advantage in that sport, too.
So I was fortunate in that respect.
Most of what I've seen out of these spaces, all martial arts spaces, is community, respect, and health.
And these are the pillars you want to see in the martial arts.
But Johnny's still around, the tough-talking bravado of an overgrown child who just wants to beat people up.
But that manifests now in martial artists wielding AR-15s on their Instagram feed while talking about sovereignty and strength, or the fact that men are no longer men.
And of course, yes, there is a lot of anti-vax and anti-mask rhetoric.
Now whereas the yogi markets themselves as having super immune systems, these MMA accolades are just testosterone-fueled junkies peacocking for the camera.
The hierarchy of respect only points back to them and their band of warriors ready to defeat the imagined deep state regime coming to take their guns and force needles into their skin.
So yeah, not that different from our usual beat.
Only louder, if that's possible.
So one of the first people to reach out to me when we started this podcast was Stefan Kesting.
He wanted me to come onto his podcast, Strenuous Life, to talk about the similar themes and crossovers that we're going to discuss today between what we were talking about in Yoga and Wellness, and what he was dealing with in the martial arts communities.
So Stefan is the inventor of the heel hook, and he's widely knowledgeable about a range of martial arts, though his current focus is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
His latest online program, which you can find at grapplearts.com, is called BJJ for Old Fucks, and maybe that's really my next move.
Here's a fuller bio.
Stéphane is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt who's been practicing martial arts for over 30 years.
He's certified in Eric Paulsen's Combat Submission Wrestling, he's a black belt in Kaju Kembo Karate, and he's an instructor in Dan Inosanto's Jeux Enfants JKD, Mafalindo Salat, and Filipino martial arts programs.
And forgive me for the words that I just murdered with my Jersey accent.
But he's also studied Japanese Judo, Russian Sambo, various Chinese Kung Fu systems, Brazilian Capoeira, Muay Thai kickboxing, and many others.
So a bit of a mutt in him as well, though again BJJ is his main focus.
Now, interestingly, Stefan holds a Master's of Science degree from UBC, which really explains his constant pushing back on social media to the anti-vax, anti-mask, and science disinformation peddlers in the martial arts community and beyond that.
And yeah, he's actually lost a bunch of followers due to his not towing the conspiratorial line that many others in his field have pursued.
Now finally, Stefan works as a firefighter, which we get into during our talk, and so much more.
So I'm really glad that I finally got to get him on the podcast, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.
It was very informative to me.
Stefan, thank you for taking some time out to talk today.
It's my pleasure.
I'm so glad to be able to talk to you after all the work that you've done on your podcast.
It's just incredible.
It's been a beacon of shining light in a cesspool of darkness.
That's probably not too strong a hyperbole.
I don't think so.
We're recording this before we're running it.
We're recording it just after the Alito leak with Roe vs. Wade, and there's a conspirituality pivot into that now.
So no, I think cesspool is very accurate.
We first connected very early in the podcast, actually.
You were one of the first people to reach out, and I was on your podcast, and I know Julian came on as well.
So we've been in dialogue for a long time in terms of this scene, but your scene specifically, At least part of the scene is martial arts, and that's going to be the topic.
But I want to pull back because there's three distinct Fields that you work within and I'd love for a brief Overview of let's start with martial arts since that's a topic How did you get into the martial arts and you talk a little bit about your career there?
Well, like every kid who grew up in the late 70s.
I wanted to be a ninja it seemed like an entirely reasonable career move and Like the mother of every kid who grew up in the 70s.
She didn't think it was the best idea So it took me a long time but I and some Some threatening and some haggling and eventually I managed to rope her into letting me do judo.
So I was 12 years old when I finally started in judo after having read every book on the topic of ninjutsu and having to train that on my own.
And that set off basically a lifelong passion and enjoyment of it.
I mean, initially, of course, the goal was to be able to kick some ass, right?
Defend yourself and the prototypical vision of, you know, walking down the street and somebody jumps out and attacks you.
And you quickly dispatch them with 3-4 moves, and everybody goes through a stage like that, I think.
And now it's mostly a tool for... I mean, of course the self-defense is still important, but it's mostly a way to hang out with friends, get some exercise, and really play a game of physical chess, to borrow a term from Joe Rogan, who I suspect is going to make a reappearance In a less favorable light later on in this discussion, because he's one of the central people just spreading massive amounts of misinformation through the martial arts space.
Yeah, so I started in Judo, went into Kung Fu, did a bunch of other systems including Indonesian Salat, Jun Fan JKD, Bruce Lee's system, Thai Boxing, Capoeira, Then I started getting more and more into the grappling aspects and the grappling sports.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu is probably the most famous, but there are others.
There's shoot wrestling, catch wrestling, traditional wrestling, judo.
And I just really enjoy that.
And I hope to be able to continue doing that into my dotage. - There is something about, I remember Anthony Bourdain famously talked about when he started jiu-jitsu, and it was something at his age, in his 50s, he was able to accomplish.
I know from my own limited experiences, if I were to return to a scrim or Thai boxing, or when I was younger, capoeira, now, it'd be a lot more difficult than jiu-jitsu, Not that Jiu-Jitsu is easy by any means, but I think physical chest was the perfect way of explaining it because, at least, again, from my limited experiences, there's such an intimacy because of how you're with someone.
It really is more intellectual.
Let me rephrase that.
It's as intellectual as it is physical.
From my understanding.
Yeah, I think that's fair, especially if you're doing... I mean, there are various axes that we can look at the whole martial arts experience or the systems of martial arts through.
And one of them is whether that martial art spars or doesn't spar.
And as soon as you get... I mean, if you're not sparring, if you're just doing hypothetical martial arts, theoretical martial arts, we could sit and argue all day long whether a strike to liver 17 On the Meridians, preceding the strike to Spleen 4 is more deadly than first hitting, I don't know, I'm running out of Meridians, Spleen 1.
The old Spleen 1, Spleen 15 combo.
And we could spend all day arguing about that and whether it's better to make a fist like this or make a fist like that.
The thing about sparring, the thing about jiu-jitsu, the thing about mixed martial arts,
Boxing is you find out pretty quickly what works and what doesn't there's a very very short feedback loop to if I think I've got the perfect technique to take you out Derek and I go and try it and You just blow past my living on the ground say you blow past my legs and you choke me out like okay that theory just was the bug that just hit the the windshield of reality at 50 miles an hour and it's time to rethink it so
That, at least, is very empirical, which I think is another thing that we need to tie into our conversation here.
But yeah, I would describe myself as a dedicated and enthusiastic practitioner of martial arts and, even at times, evangelical.
Well, that's a perfect segue because testing theories is perfect for your second career, your Masters of Science degree.
Can you talk a little bit about what, you know, so maybe mom got to you, you weren't going to do martial arts at first, you go to school.
What drew you to science?
I ended up with a couple of degrees in biology.
I did an undergraduate at McGill, honors undergrad.
Then I worked in research, I ran a mass spec for a while, I helped as a research assistant, and I ended up getting my Masters of Science at University of British Columbia and working in the field.
With regards to the pandemic, it's not that I studied virology or epidemiology, it was more general biology.
degree, but what it allowed was a basic understanding of the statistics, the experimental design, and the terminology to then go and read the actual papers.
So when people were yelling and screaming at me, like, do you believe everything that mainstream media says?
Like, well, mainstream media is just a starting point.
If they say new study shows that vaccine efficacy is dropping over time, which it does, It allows me to go and read the actual journal published in Nature.
It allowed me to go and read the history of mRNA vaccines that had been published in Nature.
So it just gave me the grounding there.
I wouldn't call myself a specialist in molecular biology, although I have done a lot of advanced molecular biology courses.
So yeah, that was a whole different trend of my life.
And that was from the 90s to early 2000s.
I did about 15 years in the field, researching and studying.
And then you make a pivot.
Well, I don't know if that's when you made a pivot, but you're a fireman now, correct?
Yeah, I'm a fireman.
I'm a firefighter and have been since 2000.
1999, actually.
And yeah, I was getting sick of the fieldwork lifestyle.
I was really enjoying the actual fieldwork, the actual research and just hating Spending hours and hours and hours in front of a computer writing it up.
And it was actually the martial arts that led me to firefighting, in part because one of the things I really liked doing was the ability to train to do something and then to go and do that thing.
So, you know, in martial arts we do that all the time.
If I think I've got a way to avoid your round kick, I can train to do it, and then I can try to do it, and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, and the feedback loop will be there.
Same with firefighting.
We can train how to set up ventilation on a house and get the smoke out and go and put the fire out.
And then we can go do it.
I've specialized since 2006, so for the last, oh my god, that's 18 years.
No, that's 16 years in hazardous materials.
And so, you know, it's amazing how many times you set up some kind of hazardous material training scenario, and then later on in the day you get a call for just that.
And that's very rewarding, because it makes you feel like your training is not in vain.
And so that's the third strand, really.
I'll say the pandemic was this horrendous confluence, and I never wanted to be at the center of it in my little world, between martial arts, first response, and science.
The Venn diagram of those things in my world, there was a very strong overlap.
And I ended up right in the middle of it.
Right.
Before we get into that, did you ever read Shop as Soulcraft?
I have not.
No.
Oh, because your story kind of mimics that.
It's by a man named Matthew Crawford, who studied philosophy and then got into a think tank in Washington, D.C.
and worked there for a while.
And same thing happened.
He was like, I am my life is being sucked for me thinking about how to make people more money.
And so he left and became a vintage motorcycle repairer.
Man, basically.
And he creates his own parts for these vintage motorcycles, and he's a writer because he's a philosophy background.
I also read his second book, the name is escaping me right now, but it's very similar.
The theoretical aspect just wasn't feeding his need for physical engagement with the object of what he called work.
It wasn't work to him in the same way.
I guess he read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I read the Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee.
The small initial perturbation sends you off in completely different directions.
That's a very good illustration.
So this confluence happened.
When did you notice?
Because there has been talk that conspiracy theories have existed in martial arts.
In some ways, martial artists were primed for it before the pandemics.
So there, I remember for years, there's been Conor McGregor, you know, didn't fight, you know, put his all out because, you know, all these theories come in, but it definitely was an uptick.
So talk to a little bit about the beginning of the pandemic and what you started noticing in your community.
Well, ironically, one of the first notifications within the community came from Joe Rogan.
It was Joe Rogan.
It's not where I heard about it first.
I was following the media, and then I started reading the preprints that were coming out on the various preprint servers and taking those with a huge grain of salt, but still trying to get some information.
Initially, the big debate was around infection fatality rates, and I dove into that for about a month.
I mean, Rogan had, I think, Michael Osterholm on in early 2020, and had another guy as well.
And both of them were fairly serious epidemiologists, and both of them took it fairly seriously.
And that, I think, was the first notification to the community, plus the stuff in the media.
And I think a lot of people took it seriously initially, and that whole two weeks to lessen the curve thing was taken to be two weeks to get rid of this damn thing entirely.
So a lot of places shut down.
I think I was the first or the second person in the community to say, like, we don't know what this is.
It sounds really bad.
It's probably irresponsible to stay on with business as normal, at least if you're training.
You should probably hold off and not train for the time being.
I hope we get a handle on this soon.
And there wasn't a ton of pushback for that message initially.
I want to say it's like March-April of 2020.
But very quickly this pivoted.
Very quickly, the major influence... and when I'm talking martial arts, my default martial art that I'm talking about is sort of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu slash mixed martial arts community.
I think that's an important distinction to make.
And we can talk about that later.
But that's the primary community that I'm talking about.
And very quickly things began to pivot.
Places began to open up fully.
And places began to... Influencers and club owners and big teachers started to find the dissenting voices.
Ah, this is only, this is 99.9997% survivable.
Thank you, Tucker Carlson, for not being able to convert a decimal to a percentage.
Yeah, I bet you're still hearing that now, like two years after that bit of crappy math was foisted upon all of us on Fox News.
And people would, out of the hundred pieces of information out there, they'd glom onto the one that allowed them to open up.
And they did.
And then that set off a huge battle within the community.
But really, it was most of the people following the mainstream narrative.
Most of the people saying, no, this is real.
No, we should probably wear masks.
No, social distancing is probably a good idea.
Hey, and then that evolved into vaccination.
Stayed pretty quiet about it.
Because they would get shouted down.
They'd get Yelp bombed.
They'd get ostracized within their communities.
I know that that whole Yelp bombing thing happened as well in the yoga community.
that there were yoga studios that were insisting on vaccination policies in 2021 but they kept quiet about it because if they put it out front and center all of a sudden they'd get you know 100 one-star ratings from people in Florida who were like I will never train at this place ever again and have never trained at that place once.
You should read this podcast's one-star ratings.
I find some very enlightening conversations happening on Apple Podcasts sometimes.
So what were the main conspiracies proliferating?
Did you see anti-vax early?
Did 5G get in there?
One thing I'm seeing a lot of now is this deep state operative Tim Kennedy sort of vibe going on a lot.
But earlier on, what mostly was the pipeline into all of this?
I heard this term today, the monoculture of freethinking.
The freethinking monoculture, where basically all these freethinkers have the exact same idea and the exact same talking point all at the same time.
Which is kind of surprising if everyone truly was a freethinker doing their own research.
But yes, you can see each of the trends come and go.
With lab leak all of a sudden every jujitsu and MMA guy was posting about lab who was posting on this topic because not all of them were But the people who were posting were all this was like a lab leak week that the carrier pigeons had gone out and everybody Who was a free thinker?
everybody who wasn't a deep state shill and All of a sudden felt compelled to talk about the lab leak this week.
And it paralleled perfectly the trends that you were seeing in the yoga space.
You know, I was listening to your podcast and like, oh, I did see, I did predict the anti-vax pivot.
I wasn't happy to see that I was right.
But by early, by mid 2020, I was like, oh, they're just adopting every conspiracy theory.
And the 5G, that's another one.
General hatred for Fauci.
It really was the clown parade of all the theories everywhere else.
With perhaps a little bit more emphasis... I don't know if you can distinguish conspirituality from pure right-wing conspiracism, but I'll say the jiu-jitsu space and the MMA space does tend a little bit towards the right.
There's lots of people In the center and on the left, too.
But those people weren't saying much.
What role do you think masculinity plays in that?
Because there is, you know, not everyone in martial arts does it for the testosterone booster because they have to prove themselves.
But that is obviously very there in a lot of the characters we're discussing here.
For sure.
Does that play a role as well?
Yes, I would say so.
And the necessity to project You know, masculine energy and kind of in the Joe Rogan, if you're if you're fit, if you take vitamin D, if you work out, then you'll be fine.
Mom, I know lots of fit guys who take vitamin D who ended up not being quite so fine and ending up with not many people dying, but sure, a shit ton of people with long COVID.
So, yeah, I think the masculinity puts a certain spin on it.
The whole if you're afraid, go hide under your bed.
I can't count the number of times that got thrown at me.
I really did try to engage, not so much to talk to that person, because if they insult me more than twice in a comment, or more than once in a comment, it's basically impossible to reach them.
But I did try to engage for all the sideshow people, everyone else watching.
I have taken, objectively, a fair amount of risk in my life, but I'm not a fan of taking stupid risk.
And I'm also not a fan of taking risk that the consequences of which fall mostly on other people.
I think there's a big difference between, to pick an example from my life, jumping in a canoe and paddling a thousand kilometers by yourself and ending up in polar bear country on the shores of Hudson Bay.
Yes, if I died, my family would be sad.
But if I die, it's not like all the members of my family are going to die.
The risks fall mostly on myself.
Similarly with firefighting, if I really screw up, I can kill myself.
But I'm probably not going to kill other people, or at least if other people die, my being there was probably a net positive and they had a better chance.
I mean, I thought about this, you know, we all watched Alex Honnold, the climber, climb the Don Wall, and like, oh my god, he's gonna fall!
Even though, you know, he doesn't fall.
How would people, and then people were saying he's crazy, but it's admirable, blah blah blah.
Imagine if he'd climbed the Don Wall with his little kid and a baby Bjorn.
If he falls, not only does he die, but his kid dies.
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been taught in Ethics 101 since the beginning of time, but it does begin to undermine the whole, if you're scared, go hide under your bed.
How about, if you give a shit about other people, take some measures?
I have seen you post before about losing followers.
Oh, yeah.
You have a sizable following and but you've you've you've taken a hit on that.
What were some of the you can do earliest or we can catch up to now some of the most memorable memorable.
Do you remember the phase when everyone was saying mRNA vaccines change your DNA?
Yes.
That was kind of the week or the month that everyone was saying.
I mean, it's the It's fundamental to biology that, except in some insanely niche situations, that does not happen.
It's like saying taking a photocopy of a cookbook to make the recipe in the kitchen changes the cookbook.
It just does not.
It really is the fundamental dogma of molecular biology that that doesn't happen.
So, I went and got my first vaccination, I think, and I had just been hit with about a hundred comments on multiple platforms, mostly Instagram, a lot on Facebook, a bunch on YouTube, that, you know, this poisonous vaccine changes your DNA.
So, I posted a video of me getting vaccinated.
And then went into a rant about the basic molecular biology of how you have DNA, and from DNA you make mRNA, and from mRNA, working together with rRNA and tRNA, you make a protein.
And that's the basic flow of information and product in the cell, and putting mRNA in your system does not change your DNA.
And oh my god, I posted that on YouTube, as well as Instagram.
and within I want to say 10 minutes on a 10 minute long video there were 100 down votes and there were so many negative comments and the only way this could have happened is if somebody somewhere in some chat room said hey Here's the video to attack.
Or, you know, unleash the bots.
Because I have a pretty good sense for the rate at which likes and comments accumulate.
And it was just such a non sequitur.
It was so heightened, the negative response.
And eventually the positive responses did drift in organically.
But there's no way that that initial attack was organic.
It's still, I don't know, I haven't looked at it in a while, but it was still my most hated video ever.
It's the first video I've ever posted, and I've posted thousands of videos where I had more dislikes than likes.
I mean, normally it's 99% likes.
Yeah, so I've lost a lot of followers.
Stuff like that has muted my YouTube signal because people were subscribed.
Now they don't watch anymore because they're pissed off at me for having said that mRNA vaccines don't change your DNA.
Incidentally, In the intervening year and a half, when there's been no good proof that vaccines do actually change your DNA, none of them have come back and apologized to me.
It's kind of weird.
You'd think that eventually they would have come to, being free thinkers and all, that they would have eventually said, well, you know, if we've vaccinated billions of people, then surely somebody would have done some DNA sequencing and noticed that there's this little DNA sequence now that wasn't in there before.
You'd think that would happen.
Strange.
Maybe it'll happen.
Or the one this week, you know, the Johnson & Johnson warned about blood clotting.
We've known this for a long time.
Turns out that out of 100 million plus doses, nine people died, 60 were, you know, afflicted by it.
And which is well within on the low end of what is expected with vaccine side effects.
And I'm getting hit now in the DMs with, here it is, here it is, told you.
And I'm like, why are you pointing out the nine people?
It sucks.
It's terrible.
It's part of it and it's terrible.
But why are you putting out the nine people and you never bring up the hundred million plus doses that did not cause that?
Put a hundred million shots of tequila on a super long bar table and march the population of the world by it.
Everyone takes one drink.
I wouldn't be the population of the world, but... And you'll have more than ten dead people at the end of it, because some people will have died just from heart attacks.
One in a hundred thousand will be allergic to alcohol.
Another five won't understand, you know, will hate tequila so much they'll kill themselves.
Like, it's... the basic math is completely lacking.
I think more importantly than the social media, I think financially, because I sell instructionals.
I sell how to leg lock somebody, how to pass someone's guard.
I sell apps, DVDs, streaming videos.
That was an 80% reduction in profits for 2020 and 2021.
And it's fine.
I knew it was likely to happen.
I went into speaking out about the science, defending the science behind this, knowing that I'd piss some people off.
The number's a bit larger than I would have liked, but it's understandable in the context that if roughly half of the people in the space are conspiratorially minded We're all right-leaning, and roughly half are what I would call sensible and following the science.
The half that were sensible and following the science said, I'm not going to train for now.
I might come back to this.
Seeding the field to the vocal minority, who were then all pissed off at me.
So really, what did I expect?
I'd say that's a pretty major hit in revenue.
I'm not an expert in anything.
My job has been that I talk to experts and I try to find people who know what they're talking about and then I write about them and then release it.
As Bill Moyers would say, journalists get educated in public and I love that about it.
But I know, not being an expert, but knowing, having a basic understanding of biology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and the sciences that I focused on in my career, how mad that I have gotten over this time when people just post nonsense and just say you don't know what you're talking about.
You are an expert in these fields.
But you know a lot more than the average person.
You have degrees in it, so you can explain the mechanisms.
How do you deal with this emotionally when you're explaining why the vaccine does not change your DNA, and then someone goes, what do you know?
I found it very difficult, but I developed some coping strategies, which are not necessarily in order, but step one was deleting Facebook from my phone.
Facebook was definitely close to the biggest cesspool, consistently, so I would post, but I would not check it on my phone, and it would get me away from that, you know, I don't know, checking your phone, feeling of rage, and it occupying your whole time.
Secondly, When I would post about something, especially on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I would pretty much write off a day to try and respond to as many comments as I could.
It was like, OK, this is going to eat my life.
I will.
I've gone out and said this, you know, controversial and air quotes thing.
I now need to defend it against the trolls.
So that helped, like just knowing in advance that you really want to post this.
It's going to eat, you know, call it one day of your time.
After that, I would pretty much ignore it.
I became much more liberal with blocking people.
I realized that a lot of this was people simply trying to hijack my platform to spread their message.
So if it was a legitimate question, I would try my best to answer it.
I'm not saying I answered everybody's question, and I'm also not equipped to answer everybody's question, but I would give it a try.
But if there was more than one, like you, you quickly get a sense of, okay, this guy True believer.
He's a Alex Jones disciple.
If he weren't ranting about this, he'd be ranting about the school shootings being fake.
And I would just block them.
Occasionally, I think once or twice, somebody emailed me and said, hey, why did you block me?
Like, I was legitimately asking this.
And in one case, I unblocked them.
But just becoming much more liberal with a block button made my life a lot better.
Especially on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube, I've got a pretty large platform.
If it's a disingenuous conversation, merely meant to provide some troll with a platform to spread his misinformation, I became much, much less tolerant of it.
And just blocked.
Now, when I first contacted you about specifically doing this podcast and you replied that you've you said almost like this map of styles that could hint at what might draw you to a conspiracy theory versus not.
And you said you said you prefaced it by saying it's not perfect.
And there can be again, we could do episodes on each one of these.
Let's talk a little bit about this because I found it fascinating looking through it like you start with traditional versus modern martial arts styles.
So just talk a little about your mindset behind like how you think about what arts draw the more conspiratorial mindset toward them.
I've given this a ton of thought.
Initially, I thought that perhaps the more, we'll call them woo-woo martial arts, right?
Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Bagua, Xingyi, The internal martial arts, where you're talking about moving chi, and I've trained in most of them, would be especially susceptible.
To it, for the same reason that yoga would be especially susceptible.
It is, to some level, magical thinking to think that you're moving your chi from your Dan Tian and projecting it out through your hands.
And there are certainly some hilarious videos online of martial arts masters who spent their whole life doing, you know, remotely manipulating their cooperating opponents, finally getting in the ring.
And getting punched in the nose and just standing there in absolute disbelief that their magic chi shield didn't work and that their, you know, their monkey waving a fan technique didn't work.
Because they bought into it, which is amazing.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I understand how the master can be crazy.
It's just how everyone else supports that.
Like, there are crazy people in this world.
And if you have enough people telling you that your shit doesn't stink, You will eventually start believing that your shit doesn't stink and you can get away with anything.
Again, like so many yoga gurus have, and that's been very well documented on your podcast.
So that's that'd be the internal martial arts versus the external martial arts or the more traditional martial arts versus the more modern martial arts.
But honestly, the the real big axis that I found that defined whether or not people would buy into the conspiratorial stuff Was how much motivated reasoning was there?
How much did they have to lose by going to one camp or the other?
You know, there's a whole lot of people teaching Aikido and Judo.
But most people teaching Aikido and Judo.
So Aikido is an internal martial art.
Judo is an external martial art.
Both are semi-traditional.
Both are Japanese.
There's a whole lot of people teaching them.
But by and large, we'll call it 90% of the people teaching it are engineers working a day job and going essentially to volunteer at night to teach Aikido.
One of the highest ranked Aikido masters in Canada, where I live, used to work for my father as a graphic artist.
I forget if he was an 8th dan, 10th dan.
He was super high, super highly ranked, had trained with the founder of Aikido.
By day he was a graphic artist, by night he taught Aikido.
And that's fairly common.
There aren't that many judo people who are making their money teaching judo.
There aren't that many karate people teaching at the YMCA.
That's not going to make or break.
That's not going to pay their paycheck.
That's not going to pay their rent.
It's not going to buy them lunch.
So, it was really the full-time martial artists who seemed to be most susceptible to this.
By and large, that was people, you know, in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there's this sense that I have a black belt.
I won some competition in Brazil.
I won some competition in the States.
I am now entitled to make a living, forever and ever, based on my having a black belt.
And there are many people that do follow that path.
And 2020 certainly put it, you know, was a bit of a derailing there.
Also, mixed martial arts.
The, you know, if you think of the fighting that's going on in the UFC as a martial art, I really do think that the UFC and mixed martial arts is a very distinct and very, very, very popular form of martial arts.
A lot of those people teach full-time.
A lot of those influencers teach full-time.
And if you include Joe Rogan and Dana White as influencers, some of the biggest influencers in the world have very strong financial interests in business as normal.
And really take a hit when it's not business as normal, when there aren't live events.
And just watching how that went, I wasn't, for example, it didn't surprise me when Tony Robbins started spouting conspiratorial nonsense and COVID minimization.
Because, of course, he makes his money at big events, just like Dana White makes his money putting on the UFC.
Just like Joe Rogan really likes stand-up comedy and performing stand-up comedy in front of large crowds, just like Professor Rodriguez.
That's a Spanish name.
Professor Rodrigo, down the street, really likes teaching full-time.
I don't blame them, but that did seem to split the community.
If there was a financial interest, people found a way to To locate the beliefs and the podcasts and the Facebook groups and the Instagram accounts to justify their decision to go back to business as normal as fast as humanly possible.
You did just bring up Rogan, but I actually want to address Dana White because I don't think as many listeners would know about his role.
When Don House comes and wears a QAnon badge, and Dana White defends him because they're friends, and Dana White speaks at the 2016 Republican Convention as a Trump supporter, how much does he influence both the UFC, but also beyond that, like martial arts aspirants globally?
Well, he is the face of the UFC, and the UFC is a giant multi-billion dollar industry.
You pointed out that he spoke at the Republican National Convention, I believe minutes before Donald Trump was announced the Republican nominee in 2016.
There are more photos of Dana White with Donald Trump, even more photos of that than there are of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
Those two guys, Dana White and Donald Trump, I mean, Dana White's been at the White House.
Donald Trump, when the UFC shut down in early 2020 because of COVID, and then reopened, I believe in May of 2020, not in New York where it was initially scheduled, but in Florida, guess what?
Florida opened its doors and said, hey, come on in, we'll have a mass spreader event right here.
Donald Trump appeared by videoconferencing to give a message about how great the UFC was at the first UFC.
He's appeared at other UFCs, been brought in as President of the United States.
Dana White is very, very central.
Obviously, it's in his vested interest to To host these giant events, he makes a ton of money, and essentially since things have, well, I would argue that things started to reopen by middle of 2020, if you were in Florida, if you were in Texas, there's been a whole series of events, mostly in Nevada and Florida, that have really proven to, you know, it's part of this whole, COVID is over, look, the UFC's happening.
They did a good job of managing it for a couple of months.
Initially, when it was completely unknown and no state would open, they went and created a fight island in the Middle East, I think off the coast of Dubai, where you'd be tested, you'd fly in, you'd finish your fight camp there, and you'd train and fight there.
That actually was a fairly elegant solution, but clearly didn't make enough money and thus was abandoned pretty quickly.
Well, let's get to Rogan.
I mean, we've covered him.
I'm sorry to go back there.
Well, no, it's important because it's from a different perspective.
I listened to him for a long time and I would tune out when I was like, whatever.
I didn't listen to the Fight Companions because I like martial arts, but it's not really something I follow closely.
With all sports, I'm like that.
If I have a chance to play them, I will be there, but if you want me to listen to them, I don't really care that much.
You mentioned earlier that he had two epidemiologists on very early, and then we know what happened more recently.
And then pivoted super hard by, I want to say April, May of 2020.
like a couple, one month, two months into it, just 90 degree pivot and off he went.
Yeah, of course you can't tell what someone, you know, why, but from your perspective and especially both, both what you think happened, but also the impact that had on the martial arts community.
Yeah, it's huge.
I just want to take a second.
For people who might not watch the UFC, they've probably heard of the Joe Rogan podcast.
I think that's fairly safe to say.
What is it, a million downloads a month?
No, 11 million an episode.
All right.
Well, that's way... Oh, so that must be like a billion a month.
I must have missed three zeros.
All right.
I think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, 11 billion an episode.
11 billion.
100 million billion trillion.
11 million.
Downloads a month.
Fuck!
11 million downloads per episode.
That's a huge reach in and of itself.
But he's also the face of the UFC commentariat.
When he's ringside, he does a pretty good job commentating on fights.
He's very, very photogenic because he makes these ridiculous faces when somebody gets knocked out and there's always a screenshot of like, you know, like, oh my god!
And of the various commentators.
Who sit ringside and comment on the fights as they're going on.
He's the most popular, the highest paid, the most successful by far.
So that's another way that he spreads his reach.
A lot of people don't realize that he is a jiu-jitsu black belt, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, and also was a very high level striker.
I believe it was Taekwondo and competed a lot in that.
It's interesting to note that his Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt comes from Eddie Bravo.
And Eddie Bravo, who's been on a show like five times, is basically a sponge for anything conspiracy.
He's the world's most gullible skeptic of everything.
I mean, there aren't that many legitimate flat earthers in the space, but Eddie Bravo is a flat earther.
And of course, with COVID, it's every single conspiracy all at once, all the time.
So there's already a long pre-existing connection to... I mean, before COVID, Eddie Bravo and Joe Rogan would agree that the moon landing was faked, and they would fight about whether the Earth was flat.
So that's your fair and balanced debate.
You know, somewhere between the moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat lies the truth, boys and girls, because we're having an open discussion showing both sides of this.
Listeners won't be able to see this, but you're standing in front of a map right now, a world map, and it looks pretty flat to me.
Well, that's just a shibboleth or a head nod to my aspirations to be a globalist.
And take over the world and force everyone under my thumb.
So yeah, there's a long history.
I mean Joe Rogan basically never ran into a conspiracy theory that he didn't love.
Then he would have some, quote, expert on, you know, Graham Hancock.
I think he's one of the most frequently invited guests.
And then like 10 episodes later, put a little disclaimer, you know, or publish his retraction on page 12.
Yeah, I don't believe in the flat Earth.
But you just had some dude talking about flat Earth.
Or, yeah, the moon landing probably was real.
After having 12 guests who told you that the moon landing was fake.
Alex Jones has been on Joe Rogan a disgusting number of times.
Joe Rogan has defended him publicly many times.
There's a whole bunch of defences.
He's my friend.
He's my friend.
Well, I understand.
We all cut our friends a little bit more slack than we do some random person.
And we all put up with a little bit more from friends and family.
We do give them that extra leeway.
But, I mean, it's Alex Jones.
It's the craziest conspiracy theorist out there.
It's the guy who sent people packing automatic weapons to go liberate the children out of Comet Ping Pong Pizza.
It's the guy who was, you know, interdimensional aliens were smuggling children to a moon base to abuse them.
I'm muddling about 12 different theories together.
He had Alex Jones on during the pandemic.
And claimed, well, his defense was, but I fact-checked him.
I fact-checked him in real time.
And that is just completely impossible.
If you've ever had the misfortune of hearing Alex Jones speak, it is a firehose of disinformation.
To fact-check one minute of Alex Jones would probably take 10 hours of like, okay, Let's break this down.
There's a fundamental, humongous asymmetry there, and by having either somebody who's crazy like that, somebody who's lying like that, or somebody who is motivated to spread crazy theories for hour after hour after hour, as long as you let them speak, is so incredibly irresponsible that, you know, he's my friend doesn't begin to cut it.
Who else?
Like I'm thinking like Tito Ortiz has been pretty conspiratorial.
Bryce Mitchell.
Yeah.
Who else in your sphere do you think is pretty egregious spreading these theories?
There are a ton of people, certainly in just the jujitsu grappling space.
It's really unfortunate.
But the single best grappler in the world, a guy called Gordon Ryan, has been super vocal.
I mean he's in his mid, he's in his 20s, trains all the time and has just never run into a culture war slash conspiracy that he didn't love and share.
It's very unfortunate because he's undeniably super dominant and I don't see how he's gonna lose anytime soon.
He's the Michael Jordan of Jiu-Jitsu right now and unfortunately He's gone down that path, probably because he couldn't train for a little while.
I don't know for sure, but initially it was when the shutdowns happened.
They were in New York City.
And the clubs had to shut down.
And they found that really offensive.
Like, how does this measure to protect normal humans apply to me?
I'm superhuman.
And they all moved down to Puerto Rico.
And then came back and of course they settled in Austin, Texas.
Craig Jones, one time his team member, now his pretty severe rival, is posting videos of him and Alex Jones going to shoot guns.
They're not related.
One guy is Craig Jones, really good grappler.
Again, it's just...
Terrible that something with that much skill in one area has chosen to embrace a complete disregard for science and a complete embrace of conspiracy.
There were some guys who were doing it right for a while and then just I guess they started listening to the wrong podcast.
Keenan Cornelius, another really good jiu-jitsu guy who's gone the wrong way.
Henzo Gracie was one of the original gangsters in the sport.
I mean, he's also a huge Bolsonaro supporter and that's another connection between Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu slash MMA and the right wing, even if they weren't Trump supporters, they were a lot of the original Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu community in North America.
It's not for the most part, I grew up poor and on the streets.
I came from a pretty wealthy family that allowed me to say, hey, Bernardo, you don't have to train.
Sorry, you don't have to work.
You can just train.
Just focus on your athletic career.
It's a little bit like, I don't know, people who become professional horseback riders.
You know that they come from money.
So if in Brazil you can just focus on training for six hours a day, and I'm gonna travel over to Sao Paulo to train with this guy, or I'm gonna travel here to train with that guy, you probably come from money.
And if you come from money, you're probably a Bolsonaro supporter.
And the fact that Bolsonaro was so conspiratorial, dismissive of vaccination, dismissive of any measures at all, basically the cult of the strongman.
You know, I'm too macho to get COVID.
Whoops, I got COVID.
I'm too macho to die from COVID.
You know, whoops, even if I have a long COVID, I'm never ever going to admit it because that would undermine my myth.
So there's certainly a ton of people in the Jiu-Jitsu space.
I mean, just to jump back to Henzo Gracie, like, if I had accidentally shared a quote on Twitter by Heinrich Himmler or Goebbels or Adolf Hitler, and I hadn't realized it, I would then turn around and apologize for it.
Like, hey, I had no idea that Adolf Hitler said this.
Sorry.
It's not actually that hard.
I was going to say, was it Heinrich Himmler that Henzo was quoting?
It's unfortunate if you already have all these other attributes of proto-fascism and now you're quoting actual fascists and you don't apologize for it.
It's beginning to look an awful lot like a pattern.
One of the Gracie brothers was Provax, I believe.
It's a big family.
It's a very big family.
In part, it came from the original Carlos Gracie had this shtick going where he was channeling ancient Peruvian spirits, and it basically tried to form his own religion.
And guess what?
The religion allowed him to take multiple wives.
So if you look at the Gracie family tree, he had three kids with this woman.
Then he had four kids with her sister.
Then he took the wife of one of his supporters, who was supporting him financially, impregnated her.
You know, it's just a complete mess.
It's behaving like so many religious leaders have before.
And part of the thing was like, hey, we get more boys this way, and with boys, we can spread jiu-jitsu faster.
So it's both.
There was this efflorescence of Gracies, and of course, anybody who was vaguely related to a Gracie ended up changing their name.
Ah, it's my mother's second cousin was a Gracie.
I feel the sudden urge to change my name.
So definitely there were sensible people in the space and they would do things like host, you know, vaccinated only classes.
I think that at some point that was a reasonable Middle ground.
Somebody taking it seriously, or at least catering to the people who took it seriously.
And in the MMA space, it's just rife.
I mean, there's Tito Ortiz, who was hunting in Beach City Council.
It's just...
Arguing with City Council or posting long Instagram videos of how he's like on a three-hour flight, you know, with his mask down over his jaw, you know, just drinking the whole entire time.
Man, that pissed me off.
Even if you think it's a joke, maybe the person next to you doesn't think it's a joke.
And I guess just being a Canadian, there's an inherent bias towards politeness and taking care of other people.
Perhaps.
It's a good quality.
Again, this isn't going to run for a few weeks and things will change, but we do see a trajectory happening right now with abortion and where that could spill over.
So even in this early time, a few days after hearing about the leak, are you seeing any comments in the community toward the abortion?
And what are they?
What are you seeing?
There's a lot of people making what I think are fundamentally false comparisons between, you know, the libs freaking out about abortion, Yet, all of a sudden, they care about body sovereignty, but they wanted everybody to get vaccinated.
So there, they didn't care about body sovereignty.
I do think that is a false comparison.
I'm sure you've run into that as well.
To some extent, yeah, there's a similar argument with gun control.
Well, how did that go?
If we make gun control illegal, that's supposed to stop guns?
But if we, you're here saying that if we make abortion legal, that back alley abortions are still going to happen, so therefore if making abortion illegal isn't going to stop abortion, then making guns illegal isn't going to make guns, you know, school shootings, isn't going to prevent school shootings.
I'm seeing a fair bit of that.
I don't think it's really gelled yet.
I think it's people casting around.
And I think we may see a bit of a split here because there probably are more people in this space who are pro not paying child support than they would otherwise be.
If you make abortion legal, there can be a lot of people paying child support.
And the people with money may end up, and especially athletes, may all of a sudden discover a newfound love for the ability to terminate pregnancies.
Unless they get rid of child support as well.
Unless that's the next push.
But I think they're going to go through gay marriage first.
And probably contraception.
Contraception.
Yes.
Which is... Well, hopefully by the time this airs in a month or so, this will be a moot point and it will all be Pointless speculation as to what's going to happen.
That snarky comment and I don't think it's a fair comparison to say we want people to be vaccinated so that it doesn't spread everywhere and that we protect other people versus we want abortion to be especially I mean there is of course a legitimate Concern about late and difficult moral issues with late-term abortion.
I don't think anybody denies that even quote the libs on the left In fact, I think Roe vs. Wade could be wrong about this, but I think Roe vs. Wade only protects Protected to the end of the second trimester didn't say anything about the third trimester.
So this argument like You want abortion to be illegal until the day the child is born?
That was never part of Roe vs. Wade.
Well, one thing that we're looking at with the book at the end is what do these practices, for us it's been yoga, meditation, what do they bring us?
And coming out of the pandemic and through what we've gone through, what is the value?
And I want to end with you.
with that question about martial arts.
Like, you can either take it, what does it do for you, or what do you think it could do for people in general?
But what is it about the arts, minus the conspiracies, that you think is very valuable and you can mine something from?
I think it can be taken in a number of levels.
I mean, there is a certain power in being able, having a fair degree of confidence in being able to protect yourself.
And at its best, the ability to take care of yourself means you end up in less fights, not more.
Because it means you can de-escalate situations calmly.
You don't get so ramped up.
I've been in numerous, let's just take the fire department, confrontational situations.
You've got a person who's high on drugs.
Usually it's high on drugs.
Or having a psychotic break while high on drugs.
And by knowing that, yeah, I could choke this person unconscious means that you don't have to choke that person unconscious.
So I think the self-defense aspect of it is very real and actually in its best light means that you fight less, especially once you realize how bloody dangerous fighting is, the negative consequences that can come from it.
I think it's also a fantastic way to push yourself, right?
Some people push themselves by running marathons.
Some people push themselves by, you know, doing silent retreats.
Some people push themselves by kicking tie shields till they puke.
Or tie pads till they puke.
And I think as a way to push yourself, kind of with a purpose.
It's not just randomly going out and pushing yourself.
There is a purpose, and that's to get better at something.
I think that's a pretty cool modality of it.
People might come for the self-defense, they might come for the fitness, they end up staying for the community.
And thus, I think you can't underestimate the importance of finding a good community of people to train with.
Going through that shared and voluntary ordeal of hard training, year after year, or day after day, month after month, year after year, does create a bond that's hard to replicate You don't see it very often.
You see it with, you know... Soldiers have been to war together.
Firefighters have worked a long time together.
People who have suffered together.
So it's a voluntary... It's a form of voluntary group suffering for a cause.
I think that's a very powerful thing to develop.
Of course, it can be totally harnessed for evil as well.
And that's, I think, the caveat.
Becoming a better fighter means you might fight less or it might mean you might fight more.
Working out till you puke in search of a cause, well, what if that cause is a bad cause?
What if you end up forming bonds with a whole bunch of bad people?
These are all potential downsides.
So I think really going into it and taking a very, very careful look at who you're committing to put your life and your limbs in the hands of.
