LMA in the UK w/ Emmanuel and Sophie (Uncut + Transcript) (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

This is the first of a series of interviews with people connected to the LMA and Southpaw sphere.

Two facilitators from different red gyms discuss applying the LMA approach to their martial arts training programs that primarily serve LGBTQ+ and disabled participants.

Check out Fighter's Brew

Find Emmanuel's gym on IG @punchupbrum

Find Sophie's gym on IG @punchupftp

Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

I'm doing a series of interviews with people I've connected with through the Liberation Martial Arts Project, or people I've already known who are re-exploring their martial arts process with LMA in mind. This is the first of these interviews.

This is Southpaw. I'm your host, Sam. Today, I have two special guests. Can you two introduce yourselves?

Absolutely. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm Sophie. Uh, I live in Bristol. Um, and yeah, I'm part of a martial arts group. Um, I got interested in your work in liberation martial arts, um, maybe in the spring or summer this year. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Hi, I'm Emmanuel. Um, I'm, I live in Birmingham, um, in the UK. And I've been doing martial arts sort of off and on for most of my life. And I've known about Southpaw for maybe four years, three years. I don't know how long. Maybe before the pandemic even.

But liberation martial arts I only really paid attention to since maybe January or something like that. And that's when I started following the substack.

And then can you two maybe also tell us just a little bit, you don't have to get super specific, but a little bit about your activism work?

Yeah, that's a big question. I guess in the last few years since I've been living in Bristol, I've focused a bit on defendant and prisoner solidarity work and local community, political education and around often around sort of carceral or anti-carceral ideas I live well I'm being

evicted now but I live quite close to one of the universities here and I was I was supporting some of the like radical student movement stuff and like I guess like most people on the left in the last year or so have focused a bit more on Palestine and and supporting work around that

I think partly because of disability and so on, I tend to be more in a supporting organizing role than doing a lot of direct action these days. But I try and support people in my community doing more of that kind of work. But yeah, I actually got into activism through working around domestic violence. That's something that...

I've sort of carried through the various things as well. So yeah, that's some ideas about, but obviously everything's very connected and it's not, I've not been like, this is my issue, um, at any point, but, um, that's the sort of areas of work that I've been doing in the last few years.

Emmanuel?

Yeah. I mean, I guess, um, I've been doing like quite and quite activism for at least 10 years. I don't know when, um, in the last, since I moved to Birmingham in 2019 for the first I moved there to open like a co-op cafe with some friends.

And so I lived there for a while and then I got a bit burnt out and I fled to Barcelona. Um, but yeah, while I was in and now I've moved back and yeah, obviously like everyone, it's all Palestine these days, uh, for good reason. Um, and, um, you know, um, our,

our cafe, our space was a, was a, was a space, like an organizing space, basically. And lots of organizations, um, were hosted there. And so unfortunately it closed down when I was away. So, uh, I've been, I was finding, finding my feet again back in Birmingham without my base, but it's okay. Uh, gym is still going.

And so that makes me happy. We've been doing a, doing a self organized anti-fascist gym for, well, it started as an anti-fascist gym for about five years now. Um, And yeah, and I mean, there's lots of stuff we've been involved in. Uh, we did feminist free school and we did, um, the tenants union and that stuff.

So a lot of the stuff still exists, but

So radical training collectives are not new, but having a radical training collective or a space does not necessarily mean a radically different training approach. I was speaking with historian Gabriel Kuhn, who writes about leftist training collectives and gyms. And when I talked to them about an alternative approach to learning motor skill, so movement,

he was quite fascinated because independent leftist training projects have been more about having an exclusive space for radicals, but not necessarily about reinventing the wheel when it comes to training pedagogy or even thinking about pedagogy. People just replicated what they knew. You too are facilitators of martial arts training for radicals. There's also a tradition of this.

There's also a tradition of how martial arts are taught in general that exists in commercial spaces. There's a sort of training realism, just as there is for capitalist realism. It's just the way it's done. There is no alternative. So let's start there. What have your training and movement experiences been like?

I did high jump when I was younger. So for a while... I was training once a week, um, to jump over a bar and I liked jumping. I never liked, I never liked the competitions and I never, I think something I struggled with was just that like the goal is always to make the number go up.

The goal is always just make the number go up. And I found that quite tedious. Um, and that's something I really value about martial arts actually is like, it can never be about numbers for me because I'm just not on a level where that's even really relevant. So, And yeah, so I actually am not,

I'm coming from quite a different place from U2 in that I don't have a background in martial arts at all, really. I joined a radical martial arts gym maybe three years ago. So Emmanuel actually introduced me to martial arts at their gym in Birmingham. And so after experiencing that a few times,

I found what was sort of the equivalent in Bristol or the closest equivalent. And yeah, I guess I don't have like a big history of, um, a particular training approach to unlearn. Um, but I also don't have loads of knowledge and experience, um, of, of movement, um, and martial arts. Um, So yeah,

I joined a few years ago after, um, COVID after leaving a very unhealthy relationship and finding myself quite isolated and yeah, I found the community really wonderful. Um, but I would say our training sort of pedagogy, well, we don't really have a consistent or like defined pedagogy.

I would say our training, as you say, it's the radical, um, Element is more about defining who the space is for than it is about the approach itself. And I think that is a contradiction that I really welcomed you naming.

Well, what about physical education? Here in the US, we have something called PE classes. I think it's a little bit like the way your gym is run because it's rotational. It's like you do one thing and then you rotate to another activity and you rotate to another activity.

And then in a year, you do a bunch of different stuff. For a lot of people, that's their first introduction to movement. Do they have something equivalent like that where you grew up?

Yeah, yeah. We do physical education. Something I remember about physical education is it's very gendered. The boys do basketball, whereas girls do netball rounders in the schools that I was at. I liked team sports. I was lucky at that age to be quite physically able, but I was also always quite awkward in my body.

Are you just kind of thrown in there and it's kind of sink or swim? That's kind of how it was here.

I think a lot of people found physical education at school quite traumatic even. It was very, it's very like ableist. It's very like, you know, if you're not meeting a certain standard of physical ability and looking a certain way, then you're sort of grouped together as less than and like it's not very collaborative in those ways.

But I didn't have as bad experience of it as many people do. Survival of the fittest.

Yeah.

Emmanuel?

Yeah. I mean, I guess as a kid, I was like, I mean, I am just an incredibly clumsy person and always was really badly coordinated and very not athletic. But I did do judo. My mom's smartest moves in terms of maintaining me as a functional human being was have I go to judo once a week. Um, and,

um, fortunately, like at least the class, like the, that was like very, like play based for, and like all of so much of that stuff, my body can still do, even if I can't tell you any of the stuff. So it was pretty, pretty amazing when having like reflected on like the pedagogies I've had over the years.

But, and even then I was always like the worst cut kid in the class in like every class was like the least like physically able. And I was also tiny until I was 16. after I left secondary school, which I guess joining senior high in American terms, maybe, I don't know. And then at 16th, 18th,

I started doing a self-defense class that was happening at lunchtime that was run by this sort of crubby MMA instructor who had been a bodyguard and was a little bit of a lunatic, I would say. all about that I mean you probably know these kind of you call them chads right

like these these kind of people who you know back in the 2000s it was all like learn through pain and all this crap um so I did that for a few years and then I went to university and then I came back and did that for a few more years and then

I started trying to do other things with other people There were big gaps in my education, basically for martial arts. And I was never very, as I say, I was always, even in those classes, always the least good student. I learned the slowest, but I'm quite a dogged person.

So if I find something I'm excited by, then I'll just keep doing it, even if I'm terrible at it. The last four years was where half my training was in our red gym. And then the other half was I'd go to a local gym and just do kickboxing with them. But it was like,

it's incredible how much I've improved, how much faster I've improved since I started, even before I discovered anime, since I started self-taking on my own learning because I was leading a lot of these classes at Red Gym. So I was thinking about what I was learning, why I was learning,

what kinds of games that we wanted to do and this kind of thing. Whereas before that, I'd made so little progress over so many years.

So when you took your progress into your own hands, it started getting better.

It is hard to go to other gyms now. It's your fault. So you should know that.

But when you go to your own gyms, it's more productive, I find, because then you could be more self-directed. Because sometimes you're like, oh, I should get a notebook. I want to retain everything they're saying because you think it's all about those little details. But then it's like,

You can just forget about that and just be self-directed and just not worry about all that and just do the thing and have fun and build kinship.

Totally, totally.

Before becoming facilitators, what were your experiences like at a red gym? What was the approach like?

So joining Radical Gym was definitely daunting. Martial arts is not a space that I was expecting to find myself in really. And a martial arts gym is quite a strange place for someone that's not used to doing that kind of thing. But the people were lovely and it very quickly became clear that it wasn't a sort

of competition, that people weren't trying to size you up and see whether you were as good as them or anything. and so that sort of helped me relax The approach is quite inconsistent because we've had different blocks of different types of training. And I definitely would like us to think more about having a consistent approach in

terms of how we structure the training sessions. But I think we've always tried to center fun to some extent and play.

And for you, Emmanuel, what were your experiences like at commercial gyms and at red gyms?

So in terms of commercial gyms, as I said, I've trained at many gyms by this point. So I guess there is some variation. In terms of the red gyms, it's like it was completely self-organized and each week someone would have volunteered to run the class. And then we would replicate what you're used to doing.

And so you'd come up with... basically just remember classes that I'd done in the past and my favorite bits. And then we do that. And I'd always enjoyed the games, both in my judo class and my MMA club instructor from before James. And he'd always done lots of games with us. And that was always my favorite part.

And so I'd always do games and people loved games. when it was other people leading it, it would, yeah, you know, it's funny because I wouldn't have described it as in these terms because I didn't have any other terms to describe them in. It was like, yes, this is how a gym works.

You go there and then you hit some pads and then maybe at the end we do 10 minutes of swimming. And that's sort of how the classes work, except that at the beginning we would like do names and pronouns and tell people that they're welcome to sit down anytime they like.

And that was sort of, you know, people were nice and we would always encourage like sparring and so on. But it was also like, there was no system. It was just whoever was leaving generally thought it was sort of meant to be like, And then occasionally you get into these like long discussions,

which I would get pulled into and try to avoid making even more tedious than they were about self-defense. Yeah.

Sophie, you mentioned it felt friendly. They tried to center fun. It seemed a bit like physical education where it was kind of like seasonal, rotating through different things. So everybody got a taste of everything. And so probably a lot of people were fine with that. And also same with Emmanuel's experiences, right? That's just how it was done.

There is a long history of these type of gyms and that's just how it's done. So what made you two think to seek or even think about an alternative? Yeah.

A number of things for me, I think, um, firstly, I developed fibromyalgia, like I, on top of, you know, a decade or so of chronic back problems, I developed widespread chronic pain, um, and stopped training because partly like partly because, um, our gym was just struggling with capacity and struggling.

And I was finding it a little bit stressful feeling sort of responsible for things. Um, and. Physically, I just felt very unsure about what I could do with my body, how I could be in my body. And I was very afraid of causing myself more pain.

And I was just in a very fearful space because when you're kind of having... all these sensations of pain in your body and they're very varied and it's like in different places and no one can tell you like why or what's happening. I didn't know if I should be training apart from anything else.

So that was part of it. I think I also had felt for some time or had noticed that that people were afraid to spar. And I felt strongly that I needed for us to be using the things we were learning in dynamic situations in order for me to actually make progress.

But when it came to it, most people were afraid to do that. And so when I looked at the liberation martial arts approach, it seemed like a way that we could move forwards with that and we could develop safety and develop trust through games and play and through understanding that that's the goal. not necessarily the goal,

but that we want to have fun and play and that we actually, for people to learn, they need to feel safe and all of that. So yeah, I was getting frustrated with not sparring. I thought if we're going to start sparring more, we need to feel able to do that.

And I thought that LMA sort of made sense.

It seems like there's also a connection to your pain because the way you're describing it is that your pain is unpredictable, right? You don't know what it's going to be like day to day, where, how it's going to feel. And so precise prescription isn't going to work. Instead, I need a way to adapt to my ever-changing conditions.

And so a very static training wouldn't work for that. Whereas like, oh, the training has meant for you to move however you ought to move based on how you feel that day and the situation that affords you more flexibility because so much is out of your control.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I'm definitely not, in our context, I'm definitely not alone in struggling with disability. And, you know, a large proportion of our membership are people who face day-to-day like multiple oppressions, but also come into the space holding a lot of trauma in their bodies. And, you know, before even we talk about sparring,

before I'm even interested in getting us to a point of feeling comfortable sparring, most of us actually need to start by just learning to feel comfortable moving, whether you've got chronic pain or not, a lot of people, as you know, are holding themselves in really maladaptive ways because of, because of both wider traumas and,

and specific to their lives. So I think that's something else I noticed in, in our community is like people feeling very unsure in their bodies, even,

even without like necessarily chronic pain. And then for you, Emmanuel, what made you think to seek or even think about an alternative? Why wasn't it just like, oh, this is fine. This is how it's always done. Let's just keep doing that.

Yeah, I mean, I always knew that it was wrong. Do you know what I mean? Like I always knew what I was training wasn't the way it should be done. I mean, obviously it didn't help. I had like a guy who would try to cause his pain in order to somehow help.

He would like launch stuff at us across the room as hard as possible and we'd have to dodge them and stuff like this. Like, you know, I knew that was wrong. I couldn't tell you what was right. But like, I guess what happened to my brain was that I just started associating all the bad

things I thought about like the pedagogy to like Krav Maga. because it's like so popular in England as well. Oh, it's very popular. And, uh, in fact, one of my coworkers brought it up to me that just yesterday, um, I had to pretend to not to anyway.

Um, so I just sort of associated like that kind of like really violent, like, the outputs, like the way they'll talk about it, where it's like, oh, you've got to go hard as fast as you can, blah, blah, blah. It was like, oh, well, that has made people think martial arts should be like this.

Because in my brain, it was like, well, as a kid, I did judo, and that was quite gentle, and we played around a lot, blah, blah. So kids, junior judo, from the age of like six to 12, so probably as adults, hurt each other a little bit more.

But in my head, it was like, there's like a nice sort of orientalist way to do it. And there's like the mean, like Israeli way to do it. And I shouldn't do that way. Um, uh, but I don't really know what I should do because obviously I'm not, I'm not teaching judo and I don't know the whatever.

So it's like, for me, it was, it was like, I'm looking for, I would, I would go from gym to gym and I'd like see bits and pieces where I was like, Ooh, that's nice. That's a good idea. That's like, take that helps people stay relaxed and all of these things.

And I just like pick up gems, but sort of, you know, I don't know, almost more or less at random based on what I thought was like someone being kind and thoughtful rather than this is like actually bad pedagogy. It was just like,

I know that if I want my friends to train who are mostly queer and disabled and so on, that they need to be comfortable. And so I'm going to bring to a class what I think will make my friends comfortable, but I didn't have like a formal in any way,

like a systematized understanding of what was wrong with what there was. And then like while I was wearing Barcelona working as a doorman, like at one point I was like starting to get brought out my mind. So I started listening to like, listening to fighters brew and one headphone like on shift.

And obviously your ads just like you playing, even though I think I was already signed up on the, anyway, the ad keeps playing. And I was like, go on. And then like Gabriel Varga had like a course he was putting out. It was like 80 pounds. And I was like, I can give Gabriel Varga 80 pounds.

I can give like some comrades who are trying to do something similar 80 pounds and actually find out what it is. And that's why I actually signed up.

What are some of the challenges that arise when a gym's primary focus is on quote unquote self-defense?

Well, yeah, I think it's just a lack of clarity, isn't it? You're never going to be able to solve that problem. And I mean, you've explained this better than I could, but people are asking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And I believe that my club instructor also believed that.

So that was where he was good in some ways. He'd worked as a bouncer and a bodyguard in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. And they had all these horror stories, and he'd always be telling you, we're doing this, but it won't save you. And so I knew it was bullshit from the start,

but people, especially people on the left, feel like they need to be able to be physically capable in order to defend themselves because they feel under threat, especially people who do anti-fascist work. And the tools that were given for so-called self-defense have nothing to do with what we actually want as tools for anti-fascism.

And so if you start with the position of self-defense, you've missed the boat or you're starting with the wrong question. And so you get a lot of these conversations where people will argue based on whichever cliche thing they've heard said. with relatively little experience, but maybe lots of trauma or maybe some experience, like maybe someone who's like,

oh, I was in this like dangerous situation with knives and I did this and it worked out okay. I'm glad it worked. I'm glad you're here to tell me that story. But I don't think necessarily we should be saying that this is the way that we should all be training. Do you know what I mean?

This is how I broke my leg. And so you all need to prepare for this exact way that I broke my leg. as if there's only one way you can break your leg, when accidents are an infinite matrix. And likewise, self-defense is an infinite matrix of possibilities. And people want tricks.

Sophie, did you want to add to this?

Yeah, I mean, as Mani says, you've sort of said this better than I can as well, but that thing of every time there's a surge in far-right activity or an election or whatever it is, people start reaching out to us and asking for self-defense. And when they're coming to the idea of training from a place of fear,

it's not a good long-term motivator and a lot of it is talk. And very, very little practice emerges from it. Also, we've done blocks of training at our gym that are sort of where we've had a self-defense trainer come and sort of do what they would call self-defense training.

And ultimately, I can train a specific thing as much as I like. It's very unlikely that that's going to be the situation I'm faced with.

The theme of a lot of what you're saying, and I think it comes from your background, it comes from your positionality, is of unpredictability. All of us can just wake up tomorrow and be disabled. Something can happen, right? And then how that disability expresses itself every day can be unpredictable, the situations we're in.

Absolutely. And you're also touching on how those self-defense narratives are inherently disabilist and they're inherently sort of feeding you the idea that the problem with you is that you didn't know the right trick at the right time. And it's just absurd.

This narrative assumes the problem is you and you failed because you weren't able to replicate this scripted and static movement in an unpredictable and dynamic and high stakes situation. It assumes that self-defense will happen in some kind of predictable way. And I think especially for disabled people, nothing is ever predictable.

That is part of the challenge of navigating the world with chronic pain or disability.

Absolutely.

And I think that is like the unconscious ableism people have is because for them, the world is much more stable.

Yeah, absolutely. Something I've felt I've needed to learn is that I cannot predict the path ahead of me. I can't map out the terrain. I can't tell you what the storms will bring, what the sea will bring. All we can do is sharpen our ability to perceive the terrain or the challenges or

what's ahead of us and sharpen our ability to trust in our bodies and our experience and our histories and therefore act with decision and with speed. And that's, yeah, that's not something I can learn by repeating the same sort of, you know, I can't learn that by being like, oh, imagine there's a man behind me,

I'm going to elbow him. How many situations is that actually an appropriate response? And how many situations are there for me where that response, if I trained it and then did it, in a particular situation where that's actually going to make things much, much worse for me.

And I do worry about that when I see self-defense sort of 101 stuff that's like teaching you to throw a punch or whatever. I'm like, how many situations is that actually a good idea for someone like me?

Yeah. I mean, there's, well, there's like, I've been the victim of like, sexual and physical violence. And when I've been a victim of sexual violence, like after having trained Krav Maga and MMA and judo, did I use any of it? Of course not. If I'd been in a space where I could have emotionally,

where I could have used that, I wouldn't have been in the situation. And not to say there couldn't be other situations where people might want to and can use it. But it was just like, for me, it was like so clearly not helpful,

like so clearly not the answer because I knew in myself that I had in theory learned these tricks and it had helped me not one second. And indeed, in a sense, it further traumatized me because it's like, well, I could have overpowered that person. I knew how and I didn't.

Yeah, and that's the victim blaming. That's where the victim blaming and ableism comes in.

So with these type of like very defined scenarios, I think there's also something that you two were touching upon is because it's not just the scenario itself, but when you repeat that scenario, right, and you have to drill it over and over and over, not only is just doing the scenario traumatizing,

But now you're reinforcing that scenario to be fixed in your mind where now you're like, okay, this is the only way this can ever happen, right? Because the repetition kind of reinforces that memory in your mind. It's like, okay, this is all I'm going to prepare for going all in on that one scenario.

And so there's the problem of that. The repetition also reinforces these fixed ideas into your head.

Yeah, and it's actually not good for us to be constantly reinforcing the idea that we are unsafe. Like if we take self-defense seriously, then we take our health seriously. And I don't think it's good for our health to be constantly reinforcing the idea that we are unsafe and that there are these sort of people...

around every corner out to get us, I think there's a danger there to actually not only just make our training really ineffective because we're stressed and uncomfortable and triggered, but also just causing us more harm to our health. If we really think about self-defense as rooted in our health and our community, which it has to be,

especially if you're disabled, you cannot rely on your self-defense being your ability to physically run away for many of us. And so, yeah, I think like repeating me, putting yourself in triggering situations can be quite harmful.

It replicates the same harm of toxic, just regular physical culture, gym culture, right? It's not motivating to constantly remind people how unhealthy they are. You keep telling them how unhealthy they are, how they look, what's wrong with them. And then, hey, go hit the gym, go lift some weights.

Then it's like, wait, this doesn't motivate me to do that, right? So it's like kind of replicating that same thing to self-defense and martial arts.

Well, just for what you said, it's like, the reason I do martial arts is basically because I always needed some way to do exercise. And it's the only thing like, I, you know, my brain just wants to play games at all times.

And it's the only game I ever found that does a good amount of X or rather, it's the only kind of exercise I've ever did, that my brain gets excited about for the games enough that I do it every single day. It's the only motivational structure I ever found that worked.

And then anytime I couldn't do it, I'm really depressed and unhappy. And what I really needed was to be able to play and play be able to do it in like as bored a way as I wanted to and not feel like trapped by

all of these you have to do it this way and it's like oh but somebody else told me I had to do it the other way and I what should I do blah blah I'm constantly criticizing yourself when you're doing things that I didn't follow the drill

correctly like the kickboxing class there's quite a few autistic kids who come to that and every single time I'm working with them I notice that I'm They're constantly, not just the autistic ones, but they're constantly like, every time they don't follow the drill correctly, they're like, oh, I'm sorry, blah, blah. And that moment is so depressing.

When I'm working with them, I'm like, don't worry, you're fine. Just keep going.

When you idealize a movement, then it inherently comes with it that you could do it right or wrong, reinforcing perfectionism and harmful self-judgment and blame. Versus if it's more open-ended, it is not like that. Mm, yeah. Speaking to something Sophie mentioned about far-right cycles, I can only speak about the US.

But when Trump first appeared on the scene over eight years ago, The left was all about training. And over eight years later, they're saying the same thing again because they didn't get people to train or stick with it the first time. There's a lot of reasons why. And a lot of it could be personal.

A lot of it can be capitalism. But do you think the emphasis on fear and the approach itself, how they're teaching it, has been part of the issue of why we keep replicating the cycle of trying to get people to do something and stick with it? Because it doesn't happen.

Yeah, I do think so. I just have to self quit, basically, to some degree. Because now I'm doing classes where I'm trying to unteach the bad habits that I taught my comrades. It's quite depressing in some ways. I'll see someone correcting somebody's form, and I'm like, I wish they wouldn't do that.

But also, he's telling them what I told him. my fault. Um, and so then I'm like having to like constantly be like, you know what? There's a million ways to do everything. Don't worry about it. Just play around. Um, and yeah, so I do think that's a huge problem. I mean, I literally, I've been,

I haven't seen him really good enough, but I have a friend called Dave who, um, who I spent like three years trying to make him do a like tie roundhouse, you know, like properly pivot on his leg and blah, blah, blah. And David's built like a brick shithouse, as we say.

And he just couldn't do the rotation or didn't want to or whatever, right? But I wasted so much of his time and everyone else's time trying to help him get the technique right, when actually he was just more comfortable doing boxing and the occasional low kick, and that was fine.

And that's what he wanted, and it made sense for his build and what he wanted to do. But I spent so much time doing the whole thing. And sadly to say, he hasn't been back recently. So I hope he does come back sometime. But ever since I started reading your stuff,

I've had in the back of my mind how badly or what a bad mistake I made with Dave. So if you're listening, Dave, you should come to the gym. I won't do it anymore.

But that's the thing, right? You're never fixed in time. The process is never done. It's always just growing. And that's the way it should be, right? It's always developing. Sophie, did you have thoughts to add to that as far as like the cycle of far-right violence, which is always going to happen,

yet it's not like there's already a preexisting training practice, right? It's always like a call to arms again because people stopped doing it or never did it the first time or the last time around. And so do you think part of the problem is fear and the approach?

I do. I do think that's part of the problem. But I also think that our anti-fascist crew here at least have started to put in place a bit more like proper organisation, which I think is... also part of the problem with these cycles is that there's a lot of mobilization

and there's a lot of energy and people say, Oh, we want to do this. We want to do this, but there's no, no F them to go. And there's no like existing structures always for them to express that. Um, it's partly about de-centering fear and like re-centering community and fun and those things. It's also about organization.

So having structures, organizing is not a bad thing. It actually gives people a place to be like, okay, I have a watt. I have energy. I have a drive. I have motivation. So here's a place where you can organize that energy because when it doesn't have a place to go, it disappears,

which is why we keep replicating the cycle of a call to arms.

Exactly. Yeah. I think as well, it's like people go to the gym and like close. But what I noticed in Barcelona, where they have as many red, well, they'd say outdoor gestional, self-organized gyms in Barcelona is probably all of the UK has. And when they do, they're into clubs.

It's like they only invite groups in Barcelona and there's hundreds of people. And people come from beyond, but they didn't need to invite them because they wanted to come. I thought someone from Bilbao was great. But people go to the gym that's around the corner. you know, for the most part, there's some people who are like, Oh,

that's my crew from when I lived in that area from a couple of years ago. So I go there, but there's, you know, there's enough spaces that you can go to the one around the corner. Whereas in, in Britain, I suspect in California, um, it's like, you know, the spaces that are few and far between and the,

like, and the, and the, the clubs are even fewer. And so like the level of commitment necessary to make it happen, It's like there's just a higher barrier to entry. Whereas, you know, people want to go to a gym that's near the house and they want it to be a place that they can go regularly.

So if you're only doing it once a week, it's also, I've also found that to be a huge barrier that we've had that we haven't been able to shift it like multiple times a week. And yeah, it is hard to know what is the problem.

I'm in a positive way at the moment because our numbers are going up and more people are signing up and it seems to be going well and we've been going for a long time. But there's been periods where we've been struggling to get enough people to pay for the room that we're having.

We've still moved down to a smaller space. I'm hoping we're going to move back to a bigger space soon. So it is hard to think. And having a good structure where you have an organization that people are paying into regularly and stuff, helps because then you sort of have this gym membership and people do are like, well,

I'm paying, so it is good to go. And it's, you know, it's also an area, a place in which we're pulling resources. So it's also like a practical way of creating some kind of solidarity. So it does, it does bind us together in a really helpful way. But I do inform, you know,

if the goal is for people to actually improve the skills involved and become more competent, then it is hard to do if it's only like at most once a week.

So to combine those two thoughts, it sounds like there needs to be an infrastructure as well as a different approach. But for there to be an infrastructure... You need even more commitment than a commercial gym might need because you're trying to build something from the ground up. And so you need more people, more people.

There's more collectives, more collectives than you could go to a place that is close to you. And so for that all to happen, you also need an approach that promotes consistency, right? So it's all interconnected. But Sophie, can you talk to us a little bit more about navigating training for people, not just yourself,

but just comrades you've seen navigating training when they have chronic pain and disability?

Yeah, so I think for a lot of people with chronic pain and disability and neurodivergence in our community, something they need for training is to feel welcome and to feel like their bodies and their experiences aren't a problem for anyone. They're not in the way, they're not holding people back.

And I think that's something I really value about the sort of approach that we've been exploring is I think that it doesn't just say everyone's welcome. It doesn't just say disabled people are welcome in words. The actual pedagogy itself is grounded in the idea that we need diversity in our training.

And part of building diversity is having different training partners who are bringing different boundaries, who are bringing different preferences for sparring and things like that. And so it really welcomes those things. And I really like that. But yeah, it's still a challenge, of course. And it's a challenge to... you know, physically get to a place every week.

And it's a sort of mental challenge as well for people to overcome. I think a lot of the time I certainly sort of overly identify with disability in myself and allow that over-identification to start telling me what I can and can't do in a way that's not really accurate.

I think martial arts can be a really good way to learn actually what your body can comfortably do,

which is very healing. being included is not enough, right? Just being there is not enough. The training has to center diversity where it's already for everybody instead of like for a certain type of person. And then you get to be included in that, right? Inclusion and like being for everybody is two different things.

Yeah, but I don't think this is like a martial arts thing. I think this is a learning and one of the things that's just like very wrong with education as it's done like through the state or through this culture is it starts with the idea that you are wrong, that you're missing something, you're empty, you're lacking,

you're broken. And it tells you that there's someone here who's not broken or who's not lacking you know if you do what they say you'll gain what you need and you'll become full and I think a radical pedagogy tries to say no we're all whole we come

here full and valid and a disabled person will likely have different goals from a non-disabled person in a martial arts training space or in an education space and that's great we can all learn so much from different people bringing different goals and different experiences and preferences and those things.

Emmanuel, you talked to me about training at a bigger gym, and sometimes you notice people you work with weren't adapting despite you scaling, so they had a chance to adapt. But if you're always taught to memorize and do what the coach tells you, like a soldier who only follows orders,

You never learn to think for yourself during the movement practice. So does this type of training go against principles of self-determination and autonomy? And is this an unconscious bias even among some radicals?

Yeah, I mean, totally. And it's so depressing, really, the way that we spend so much time going to the expert to tell us how to do the thing that we do every day. I can find this at work as well.

Like there's like researchers will come to us and be like, this is how you should be doing the thing. And then everyone who works there turns around and goes, no, we're fine. Thank you.

What about the right way to do something?

You know, I've done lots of classes where people have told me what the correct way to do it is. And then I watch them actually fight and they don't do it that way because that's not actually, they don't actually do techniques or techniques at all.

One of the things I love about the class is that like you get the games going and then I sort of just like check that no one's hitting each other very hard and I just tell people to breathe. And that's sort of my role. And that's nice. I like that.

Actually, speaking of that role, how did you two end up becoming facilitators? And for listeners, can you explain what a facilitator does?

I am a teacher by training. Like I have a teaching qualification. Most of my work is at the moment private tuition because I don't really, even disability aside, I struggle a lot with the British education system. But recently, yeah, it's not really something I can manage. So I'm mostly doing private education and like community political education stuff.

So I guess facilitating learning has been part of my life forever. How I started facilitating martial arts sessions, well, I started by co-facilitating, which is something we have been has been part of our sort of model for a while is quite often we'll have an external facilitator who's maybe got a bit more knowledge and experience in the

martial arts. But one of us, one of our more regular members will co-facilitate. That role is more about managing how we hold the space and how we make sure people feel comfortable and what we do when, you know, when people... get triggered or, um, whatever other challenges get thrown up. So yeah, I started by more, um,

in a co-facilitatory role, um, and helping the facilitators plan their sessions as well. Cause oftentimes they're not the people that came to facilitate. They've been training a long time. Um, but they, they're not necessarily used to planning classes. So I helped with that.

And then it's only really since, um, I was introduced to liberation martial arts that I had, um, the confidence and that it seemed possible to me that I could facilitate on my own.

Yeah. I mean, I started, as I say, when I came to Birmingham, I knew this gym already existed because I was part of a political revolution organization called Plan C and they'd helped start a bunch of gyms around the country. And I was moving from a sort of smaller town to a big city where there was already

a crew and they'd already started this gym. Um, and yeah, as I said, when I started, it was just like somebody would be running a session because that person had some experience in boxing and Muay Thai. Um, and, and people would just volunteer at the end of each session to see who was going to

run the next one pretty much. Um, and so I got into it because I'd done training and other stuff and, and I was like, well, I'm happy to run some sessions. I'm not, I'm not the best martial artist. And that, for me, it felt like I had to admit, do you know what I mean?

I had to be like, I know I'm not very good, but I have been to hundreds of classes in my life, so I know how they work, which in hindsight may not be the, you know, maybe just gave me an even stronger bias against a healthy model. But so that's how I started training the classes.

And then, but what we do, and we would call ourselves like, we would lead the class, we'd usually say, rather than try to call it instructive. Because we were aware that there were things we didn't like about it. We just didn't have a model as to how to do it better.

There's still multiple people who run the class that are not there every single week. And so in other sessions, other people run it how they want to run it. And people do like the approach that i've been bringing but it's not like everyone's been like yes this is the way i'm

gonna do it like this it's just that i run you know probably half the sessions and so it has quite a big influence on the group and i hope over time it will have a bigger influence on the group but yeah so when it comes to facilitation for me it's

like i plan a session which is essentially like i block i split the two hours into into 15 minute blocks. The first 15 minutes, last 15 minutes are like set up and closed down. And so then it's just like essentially six 15 minute blocks where apart from where

we have like a warmup and then games for the rest of the block. And then in every block I have like a breathing exercise. So I do at the start of the block, either breathing exercise or a balance exercise or something that will like help people relax and be in their body in between every block.

every game and then also in between rounds we get people to do short breathing exercises and that's pretty much the whole classes and then recently we've also been doing WWE wrestling stuff which people have absolutely loved sometimes in the second half of the class and we're hoping to do an actual event that's going to be

the WWE wrestling but we haven't organized like that it's going to be in the new

year yeah we've done a bit of our own pro wrestling over here it's quite fun And it also teaches people how to move and get hit without getting hurt. Looks like we just lost Sophie, which these things happen when you're talking to multiple people across an ocean, across multiple time zones.

So Emmanuel, let me ask you this while Sophie gets back on. Did you find as a facilitator, what gets people in the door to your gym or your training collective and what gets people staying and continuing are two different motivations?

Yeah, totally. I mean, and one of, one of my, um, people I train with, um, was recently saying there's like a real problem in red gyms where it's like, there's a few people who really love to train. And then there's like a wider community of people who think politically and theoretically the gym should exist. And,

and so those people will like turn up occasionally and want it to exist, but it takes like the people who are like really wanted to like really want to come every week. Try and make it happen. And then it's like people come through the door with like conceptions of self-defense, like we've talked about.

And they'll come through the door thinking that's what they're going to do. Or they come through the door because they've done Muay Thai before. They've done a bit of boxing before. And they think, again, they think they know what the gym's about. And whereas what I do actually think makes us stay is that, you know,

what makes most people who aren't like obsessed in the way I'm obsessed and just enjoy it and glad exists and they're going to come whenever they can is like, it's the sense of, ah, these people have fun together and you know, we're, we're enjoying ourselves and it keeps me a bit fit. And most importantly, again,

it's like people feeling like, oh, it's okay for me to turn up and spend half of it sitting on a chair. I do think that has been the number one reason why a lot of people, a lot of disabled people feel like they can come to a gym. And that has always been that way. You know,

otherwise people come, they do two sessions, they get absolutely exhausted, they can't move for four days, then they don't come back and that's just terrible really.

Has changing up practice made it more enjoyable and sustainable for you as a facilitator and participant?

Yeah, I mean, it's been good for getting my ego to chill out a little bit as well, because, you know, it decenters the facilitator. It's much less work to plan a session when all I have to do is come up with six games and five breathing exercises.

I don't have to think about how am I going to teach this? How am I going to teach that? So it's incredibly easy to plan the sessions, really. My plans are like five words per 15 minutes. It's just like this game, this game, this game, this game. And then I just don't have to think about it anymore.

And I just have to go check what game we're playing next. And the other thing is that it can evolve much more organically in the classes than it used to. Because it's not so much me telling you that you have to do it like this. And if you meet it different,

then we're going to have to spend all the time explaining this particular sequence of moves. in a different way like you're left-handed so now we have to do a completely different sequence of moves do you know what i mean it's like um instead of that

it's like oh i we we renamed um protect the crown take the tiara by the way in order to get people to because we couldn't bring people to play a game called protect the crown like in this country we still unfortunately have a crown you know, the gems were stolen from India.

Um, and so, uh, I'm not going to protect that. Uh, so we played, take the tiara because, you know, it makes more game. And, you know, I tell people, you've got to focus on your soft gaze as opposed to your male gaze. Um, people love it.

Uh, so, um, yeah, we're all just playing these as silly as possibly named games. And, um, And yeah, people have a lot of fun. And it's been really good to make me see that we can actually organize it in a way where somebody wants to do this other thing and that's okay.

I was like, okay, well, just what rules would you like? And I encourage people to change the rules at any time. Just think about why they're changing them and how. And what I try to and sometimes remember to do is to ask people what they think they learned from a game. And I find that's quite interesting.

I mean, I've always done that. you know, you're playing like shoulder taps. I used to call them shoulder slaps and now I call it shoulder taps. You know, it gets you to rotate your whole body. What they just need to be doing is moving their body and training their eyes. It's the way I see it now.

And so like more and more, I'm like so frustrated when I see people like correcting or They're stopping the game that they were playing to be like, you're doing this wrong because they've got a preconceived notion of what right is. And I just bang my head against the wall, but have to gently smile and be like, oh,

you know, there's lots of ways and just sort of encourage the game to get going again.

Yeah, gentle is the way meaning like don't overdo it. Just gentle, just a little nudge, just a little bit. That's all you need. Don't overdo it. Yeah. So the way the left often frames training is as drudgery that you should force yourself to do because fascists are training or because if you don't, they will hurt you.

So despite not wanting to, you have to make yourself do it. And they often use comparisons and shame to push people into it as if it doesn't occur to them this can be something people can enjoy and fall in love with. This also sounds like toxic gym motivation.

So what do you think about this framing and how do you frame training and motivate comrades without using victim blaming or shame or comparisons or fear?

Yeah, I mean, it's easy to catch yourself doing it as well, you know. And there's a question of discipline where it's like, you know, if people are always turning up late, what do you do? You know, you want everyone to respect it. There's like an interesting question that we're like, I'm taught that as the instructor,

I'm now meant to be like, wait over there and I'll go do your press ups and do your, you know, I don't do that. I just like try and find a way that they can slot into the game that's currently being played.

And in terms of like the drudgery on work is like, well, basically we don't do any of that. We don't do anything that's boring anymore or like completely abandoned work. Yeah. It's just, you know, I get people to be a tree and imagine that a breeze is blowing through the room.

And then I open the window and now the breeze is going the other way. And then at the end of the class, I turn all the lights off.

That's what I love, all the creativity, right? It allows for so much creativity where you do things different from me, different from Sophie. It's like so much room to have fun, right? Be creative.

Totally, totally. I got the turning the lights off thing from a French Kempo gym that I was training at when I was in the south of France. At the end of a lot of their sessions, they turn off all the lights and get you to do belly breathing. That's the example of what I said earlier.

I pick up little things. I'm like, that seems like a good idea. Everyone should do that.

When you have a lot of moving bodies, a lot of things can happen. It's a lot to watch. How do you, as a facilitator, make sure things are safe?

Um, I, one of the things I do is try to always introduce one thing at a time is in games. I try to make the game. Yeah. Try to make the game as small as possible. Try to warn people of what the risks are that I can expect to see. But yeah,

I guess the only thing that's really has any substantial effect is just getting people to calm down as much as possible, like play, but in a relaxed way. And that is, yeah, that I think is like one of the like key things that I'm still like grappling with is like,

how do you get people to stay within that, like not bored, not stress zone where they're like, enjoying themselves but calm enough to stop themselves escalating and to see what's going on and to stay really, really gentle. Always reminding people to think about their partner, the difference between violence and play is consent.

And the reason you can do the thing that you're doing with your partner is because you've both agreed to it. So make sure you're actually doing what you actually think you've agreed to it. And I guess one other thing we do which is really helpful is at the start of every round,

I say put your hand up if you want to be in the round and then find someone with their hands up. And so that doesn't assume that everyone's going to be in the round. If anything, it assumes that you're not going to be in the round. And if you want to join in, you can.

And that's been really, really nice as well. So I try to sometimes, especially those new people, be like, if you want to stay with your partner, that's fine. But still, make sure you put your hand up so that your partner knows you're ready and that you want to go.

Okay, Sophie is back. Welcome back, Sophie. So let's talk about your gym. So your gym had some interesting challenges because of the space you all were using. You borrow a commercial gym space, which has its pros and cons. How important is the space you train in and how does it influence training?

I think it's both very important and it's probably also possible to do good training in a wide range of spaces. In some ways, our space, we're very lucky. We've got good safe floor and punching bags and equipment we can use and stuff like that. So we are very lucky in those ways.

I struggle a bit with our space because it's between two very loud roads and a very loud roundabout kind of situations. So I find the noise from the roads quite distracting often. One of the ongoing challenges that we have has been people from previous sessions that have booked the space just before us. I think within the gym,

there's possibly quite a nice culture of people hanging around and watching other people's sessions and trying to learn from each other and learn from each other's training but for our demographic and the kind of the kind of people in our group having unknown usually men usually very physically large and

dominating somewhat not not i'm not saying there's anything wrong with these people i don't know them but they're they hold themselves in a very confident way. For lots of our community, that's really, really distracting having strangers in the room, especially if they're sort of hitting a punch bag or something.

I've had so many conversations with these people where they just can't seem to grasp why it might be a problem for someone while they're trying to learn and they're in a space that's very like... not a kind of comfort space for them. Like a martial arts gym is not when a lot of these people feel most comfortable.

It's been absurd, the kind of conversations where these people cannot grasp that it might be a problem for people that they're hitting a punch bag or sparring. to one side and I'm like a lot of these people have experiences of violence of course there being two men punching each other in the corner of course like how is

that but yeah and I've been the responses have been not just not just bewildered confusion as to why it's an issue but also it then gets turned around that I'm apparently making assumptions about these men that they are violent or that they are

going to cause problems and it's very hard for them to understand that no I don't I don't know them I don't you know I don't know you I don't know you I just know that I I hear you punch that bag and I watch everyone in the room like their muscles

tense and and their eyes wander over to what you're doing And they're not in their bodies anymore. And they're not, you know, in the best, most unstartled, you know, agitated state for training there now. It's a threat to them, whether it's an actual threat or not. It's perceived as threatening and it brings up those responses. So, yeah,

that's been an ongoing challenge that we sort of thought we'd solved a bit by pushing our training later. which was a shame because that meant that we could no longer join the community dinner after, but we did that for that reason.

But then the other people just sort of push it further. And this touches upon something I was talking about earlier with Emmanuel about how to keep people safe. And that's something you're already doing, trying to make people feel safe or protecting people because psychological safety is part of safety.

So my question is, what are some of the other things you do? Because when you have so many moving bodies, it's a lot to watch. So what are some of the considerations facilitators have to have to make sure things are safe? Just like that might have been something some facilitators might overlook.

I think something that we try and remember is that I cannot guarantee everybody's emotional safety at any given time. And I can't guarantee that people aren't going to be triggered, that they're not going to experience distress, they're not going to, you know, any of those things.

What I can encourage is that we build a culture in which that's okay. I've had sessions where someone is maybe hit in a way that they weren't expecting or they've become overwhelmed and startled for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a change in how, you know, again, we're working with lots of neurodivergent people.

Maybe it's just a change of plan has thrown someone and now they're just not able to be in the room anymore, like emotionally and in terms of presence. And so we name that and we frequently remind ourselves that everyone's coming into the space with different experiences and different triggers and so on.

And I have a number of times had to take someone into a side room and help them reground and calm down again. And sometimes after that, they need to go home and that's okay. And sometimes after that, they're able to rejoin training.

or they're able to sit and enjoy and learn from the rest of training without physically being involved. But we can manage that. And I think some of the ideas around trauma-informed training can focus too much on the idea that we're trying to avoid anyone experiencing anything difficult. And that's not what I'm trying to do.

I'm trying to say we can safely move through those things. We're not going to try and create situations where people are startled and overwhelmed, but we can move through those things and we can ground each other and ground ourselves and learn from that.

And that's really helpful. You can over control it until you're just back to ableism again.

Exactly. Exactly. And it creates this idea that being triggered is inherently harmful. And it's not. I think it's about creating safety for people. us to unlearn you've talked a lot about um how much of learning is unlearning and how much of what people are embodying is body politics is I can't let my belly move

in and out when I breathe because then people will see that I have a belly like I can't I can't move my hip like this because my hips are inherently sexual and that means xyz you know um or there are so many ways that we've been told that movement and our bodies are unacceptable.

And yeah, so part of safety is safety for your body to be what it is and to move how it moves.

Something you mentioned earlier was naming it. For our listeners, can you explain what that means?

I literally mean that not every session, but every few sessions, every so often. At the beginning, we will... talk about trauma and we'll talk about how different people respond. We'll have discussions about what a trauma response might look like, um, whether it's someone seems zoned out, whether it seems like they're hyperventilating,

whether they are suddenly more aggressive or suddenly just defending that they've just got their gloves up and they're, and they're not moving or all of the different ways that, um, we might notice that our partner is um not in their best state for training and

then we you know we have we say okay if we notice that we pause we say pause if we can we try not to draw too much attention to the situation and then we um you know take that we suggest you know let's go get some water take the person to one side

and help you know try and get them back in the room try and do some breathing whatever whatever it takes and we try and like by repeatedly talking about these things they become less scary it becomes less like if someone gets upset that the session is ruined and something's gone terribly wrong. It's like, no, this is normal.

This is okay. I don't mean to say it's happening all the time. It's not. But I think for a lot of people actually hearing it normalized in that way is what can stop it happening. You know, it's not necessarily just people with experiences of violence that might get triggered. It's people can have experiences of, you know,

physical education when they were younger that were very traumatizing or experiences with, you know, certain sounds or the way a certain person holds themselves. You know, it can be anything. I'm not saying that it's only people that have experienced like physical assaults that might be triggered in a martial arts space. It's not at all the case.

As well, when you're like working with someone who's like getting startled, like it takes... It doesn't take very much to make them feel comfortable. It just takes acknowledging the situation. and just giving them a little bit of space. And often it's just waiting.

And one of the really nice things about the approach is that when you start telling people that they need to be partner-centered, and I say the same thing to people, if your partner stops doing anything back, then just stand there, check in with them. But also you can just wait.

Let them take the time they need to get back in the game and decide when they're ready. And that's all you actually need to do. You just need to give people a little space. And by naming it, as you say, they feel more able to do that.

Any tips for people running or starting their own collectives that you wish you knew beforehand?

Don't believe the hype about weekends being a good time necessarily. And everyone thinks that it's a good idea because you've got nothing in your schedule. You don't have anything in your schedule regularly, but you will have something in your schedule every weekend. It's a mistake multiple gyms I know have done, including my one,

and we've never really been able to break out of it because obviously once you've got people who come on a certain time, that's excluded everyone who can't come at that time, but at least it's included the people who are coming, if that makes sense.

And so then moving is difficult because now you have to find a place where everyone who's currently coming can do another time. And so we're hoping to move to a second day as soon as possible, but it's going to require a few more subscriptions. Yeah, a subscription.

Sorry, really, really boring, but I think subscriptions are really necessary, unfortunately. Not to say you shouldn't also have a... Our model is you pay what you can afford. We have an asked price. We've just raised it to £7 per session or £20 per month. by standing order.

I mean, it's pretty cheap anyway, but that's just our requested amount. But it's always been very clear. And indeed, long periods where you barely took any money, it's like pay what you can afford. And by having that subscription model, it makes it so the club can plan better and you don't have to worry too much.

But obviously that requires enough like committed like comrades who are going to have stable financial income to be able to put 20 pounds in or 30 pounds in whatever it is they're willing to put in. So that's really good. Having like a really having a small organization that just sort of functions is a good idea.

You know, you don't have to overcomplicate everything. The way we do it is that we have a signal chat that is an organizing signal chat that anyone's welcoming. We have a WhatsApp chat, which is just announcements where we literally just put in and we make a riser pad every single week.

That has our training agreement and it has the address of where we're training. And then it just has the date and who's signed up this week and who isn't coming this week. And then we post that in the WhatsApp announcements chat. We'll post it in the signal chat. We ask people to say whether they're coming.

And that's partly really functional because if we don't have enough people in the periods, especially some summers, when we've had many fewer people, it means we can cancel the session ahead of time and not lose money on booking the space if we know that nobody can come.

But also it just keeps it going throughout the week, if you see what I mean. You're thinking about it because you have to remember to sign up on the thing. And if there's too many people going to sign up, the room's going to be full. From the facilitator's perspective,

if you know this person is coming and last time they were having trouble with this thing and you thought of a game that maybe would help them with like, you know, they're having trouble checking kicks and so you wanted to come up with a checking

kick game for the next time they were there and you know they're coming in advance and you can plan for it. So that's really helpful as well. So yeah, we keep it like small and simple, but like sort of regular.

talk to people when, especially new people that arrive, you know, I've seen situations where there's a new person arrived and then a sort of group is forming of, of people that have been coming for a while and they're talking to each other. And this new person is sort of wondering about looking a bit aimless.

Don't, don't let that happen. Yeah, that's true. Talk to people and, and, and, you know, so much of comfort and emotional safety is getting to know the faces and voices and of the people you're working with. I think something I need to learn maybe is letting go of attachment to the

permanence of the project or just letting go of control a bit. It's probably something I need to work on in a lot of parts of my life. But the facilitator's role is one of guidance or structuring and organizing. It's not one of controlling or I obviously can get very frustrated if I feel like people aren't committed enough

or whatever, but it's like, that's not something I can control. That's not something, all I can do is provide fun and hope that people will want to commit.

And also I think important for all of us is their lives are not in our hands. Like we can't guarantee their safety. We can only do so much, whether in the gym or outside, something could happen to them. And it's like, that's not all on us, right? We can't have some kind of Messiah complex about it.

So I think that's a really great point. Yeah, of course. Definitely. All right. Thank you both for your time, especially with the time difference and technical problems. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much. Yes, thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. And other people should sign up for Liberation Martial Arts.

Yeah, honestly, no, thank you so much, Sam, not just for this conversation, but for all of your writing. Even if I never train martial arts again, for some reason, the approach is so much bigger than martial arts. And I've been interested in liberatory training learning approaches for a long time,

but I've never really come across something so tangible in terms of embodying a more liberated approach. So thank you very, very much.

Well, I really appreciate it. All right.

Thank you so much.