LMA in the Encampments w/ CC (Uncut) (Patreon)

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New Guy from CC joins Sam to discuss organizing, campus uprisings, and the role of play-based martial arts.

Transcript

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

This is Southpaw. I'm your host, Sam. Today, I have a returning guest. We lovingly call him New Guy, despite him being part of the Southpaw Discord from almost the beginning. When he was on last, he was helping us break down some MMA fights. But he's not just a combat sports enthusiast.

He's also a community organizer and an activist. But this time, he's here to talk about CC, his LMA-inspired training collective specifically for organizers and So welcome back, new guy. Thanks, Sam. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. So before we get into CC, can you tell us about yourself, your positionality, like your family background,

where you grew up, how you got involved in organizing?

Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Los Angeles. My mom's Chinese. My dad's white American. So basically started organizing and In 2021, a little bit into the pandemic, I'd always kind of, ever since high school, been sort of politically minded. But as the years went by and various worldly events happened, I sort of

came to the decision that, you know, just having those opinions, just sort of being of a certain mindset or, you know, self-identifying as some kind of like radical or leftist or communist or Marxist or whatever wasn't really effective, or at least like it wasn't effective in the way I wanted to be. So, yeah.

I started organizing with an org called Leong SoCal, which is a regional branch of Leong USA. And what Leong is, is it's a local to global advocacy group that... works with our community partners in the philippines to just basically amplify their calls to action um so we do a lot of educational work we do a lot of

fundraising work for various community orgs that operate in the philippines um and they do work relating to uh indigenous advocacy, environmental protection, work to benefit landless peasants, just a whole range of issues, work relating to indigenous women. So I started getting involved in that in 2021.

And honestly, you know, I didn't really even know that much about the Philippines. But some of my friends and comrades uh basically just welcomed me into the group and through organizing through the work i learned a lot about the struggle in philippines but also struggles all

around the world in the congo latin america etc and um yeah ever since then it's kind of just been a whirlwind of organizing kind of trying to stay with my finger to the pulse of whatever's happening, both locally and abroad and across the nation. And it's also how I, you know, stumbled onto the Southpaw project.

You were on Southpaw before 2021, right?

Yeah, you're right.

So you were already a radical. I think a lot of us, we were just doing stuff, nothing too committed, doing a lot of mutual aid stuff. But it sounds like from just being a radical or somebody who considered themselves far left, you realized, okay, just doing mutual aid or going to protest wasn't enough.

You needed to take more action, right?

So yeah, let me rephrase that. I... I'd been a radical for many years. That's what brought me to the Southpaw podcast, um, brought me to the Southpaw discord, got me in conversations with lots of people there. Um, but it wasn't until cause I must've joined Southpaw in like 2020 or maybe late 2019.

Um, and it wasn't until a little bit after that, that I joined the young. So yeah, I had been kind of involved with, at least like radical thought, left thought, before I actually started organizing.

And also joining Southpaw was very specific, right? Because a lot of people were kind of recognizing how reactionary martial arts and combat sports was. So that could be kind of like a different thing from something like organizing.

Yeah, I mean, actually what happened was this was right after, not right after, but a few months after the murder of George Floyd, a couple of months into the COVID-19 pandemic. And I had been doing jujitsu for some years prior to then. And that year was sort of like a major mask off moment for... well,

people all over the country, but especially in the martial arts community, especially the jujitsu community, especially within the jujitsu community that I was part of. Um, so, you know, I saw a lot of my training partners, coaches, friends, uh, from jujitsu, from martial arts, kind of going down a very, well,

not kind of just definitely going down a very, uh, right-leaning, fast-leaning path, saying a lot of things online or in person, whether it be denying the efficacy of vaccines, denying the existence of COVID-19, various pro-cop things, pro-whatever things. And so, you know, part of the loneliness of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic also came with being...

sort of estranged from this community that I had kind of grown close to over the years previous to that. So finding Southpaw was kind of like this light in the dark. I'd stopped talking to so many people that I had spent multiple days a week with for the past couple years and finally had a community of

like-minded people or at least people experiencing something similar to me, experiencing a similar kind of mask-off moment in these United States. Really, I call it a mask-off moment, but I didn't learn until later that actually a lot of these figures like the Henzo Gracies and, um, whoever, you know,

had actually been pretty like on the nose with their opinions for years before that.

They weren't crypto fascists, right? They were just fascists all along.

They were just straight up fascists all along. And, um, so it you know also caused me to do some introspection and ask myself you know how many times had i looked past this kind of behavior how many times did i look past you know people around me saying these kinds of things having these kinds of

opinions and you know why did i look past those things so it was also just sort of um a moment where I question my own liberalism, right? Like my own willingness to look past these kinds of things.

And it's sort of like found family. We all found each other and we got pretty tight, especially during the pandemic. We were just like talking all the time, having a good time watching stuff together, just enjoying each other's company. And it's lasted. We've created a lot of bonds since then.

And then we've seen kind of the Southpaw diaspora or greater community go off and do a bunch of their own projects and And also, we've also seen a lot of things come and go. So we'll have to get into that as well. But you've been a part of the Liberation Martial Arts Learning Lab since its inception.

What's your experience been like doing the Liberation Martial Arts approach? And how would you differentiate it from commercial gym approaches or even other radical approaches you've encountered over the years?

Coming out of the pandemic, uh, or at least as people started relaxing about pandemic restrictions, not that the pandemic was ever really over, I had already quit jujitsu. I was years out of... doing jujitsu. And actually, to be honest, I was kind of relieved with where I was in terms of my training and my journey

about martial arts. Because when I was doing jujitsu every day, I sort of had like I don't know if this is the right word, but kind of like an addiction to going to jujitsu. Like I would go to jujitsu, I would come back and on the days where I couldn't go,

or maybe I was injured or sick or whatever, or, you know, when the pandemic first happened and we couldn't go, I would actually get like depressed. I would get, um, kind of angry, frustrated that I couldn't go. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Some of that was like negative self-talk, whatever. Um, um,

But being a couple years out of it, I was actually just really happy that I didn't have this pining need and urge to go do this thing. A, because it costs a lot of money, it causes a number of physical injuries, nagging injuries, some of which I still have today. But I still missed having a physical practice.

I work at a computer mostly. I work as an assistant editor at Hollywood, film, television, whatever I can get my hands on. So I'm a pretty sedentary person without having a physical practice. Now, obviously, I've been in conversation with Sam, with the Southpaw community for some years. And by this point, you had started...

publishing uh your lma curriculum online but um we never really had an in-person day until i guess it had been like a year or two into you publishing that curriculum so most of what i had read and done was just kind of self-study using the curriculum and what i already knew about martial arts right and um

you know, that's good because I can go, I can do it, but without having like a community to practice with, with other people to practice with, I think my discipline and just the amount I would go to train, um, sort of just, you know, it, it wasn't where it used to be. Um,

so fast forward a little bit to when you opened up the learning lab, um, you kind of offered it to me and, uh, basically said, you know, we're going to try these in-person sessions out. We're going to start it very slow. There's kind of some new concepts,

new ideas that you may have not really experienced in like a traditional commercial gym experience before. One of the biggest differences with LMA and the LMA approach that I noticed right off the bat was how much focus there was on creating ease and comfort and a feeling of safety. Yeah. A lot of gyms,

they sort of select for people who are already tough, are already strong, are already brave, or at least say they are those things, or can at least demonstrate they are those things. It's not that they won't take people who aren't those things. They'll take those people because it's a commercial gym and they have to make money

and keep the doors open. They want everyone to come in. But there isn't this heavy focus on... you know, broke conditioning or drilling or... There wasn't a focus on drilling. There wasn't a focus on conditioning. It was a lot of just... creating ease within my body and listening to my body, which was the total,

it's the complete opposite of what you get, um, at like a Carlson Gracie jujitsu school that just wants you to like grind, grind your body into the ground, grind your opponent's body to the ground, you know, grind everyone just through the paper. A lot of what we did for the first sessions especially was just breathing exercises,

vision exercises. And I learned a lot of things actually that helped me in other areas of my life. One of the first things we did at the first session was box breathing, right? Where we focus our eyes on something in the room and literally just take time to control our breath and deescalate ourselves.

This is something I would end up using on my way to work, on my way to just see my parents, just any kind of situation where I would anticipate being stressed out. And... It was just so different from anything that we did in a commercial gym because I feel like in the commercial gym,

the expectation is for you to build comfort by just getting better or getting stronger or whatever, just getting better at the thing they're trying to teach you how to do. But with LMA, the comfort comes before the skill development. And it became very obvious very quickly that placing the emphasis on building

comfort and building ease was actually more effective than what I had experienced in these commercial gyms, drilling, and trying to do these things that, you know, we're supposed to just build the skills that our coaches were prescribing for us. Even though we didn't necessarily work on specific skills in the sense that we weren't drilling combos in LMA,

we weren't, you know, hitting the bag or hitting pads, a lot of those skills emerged for me just because we were able to create a situation, an environment where I felt comfortable to just try those things out. The only real instruction that had to happen in terms of explicit directions was just,

this is how you do the thing. This is how you throw the kick without hurting yourself. And then everything else was kind of just... left up to the learner. So I was given as much leeway as I needed to kind of experiment with what I wanted to experiment with.

And I mean, fast forward today, I would consider myself a kicker. I went from the beginning of where we started going from just like, I don't even know how to throw a kick to now where we've competed as a team, and I'll go and compete on like a week's notice and be kicking my opponent,

which is really kind of funny. There's a lot of ways in which LMA is different from the commercial model. You could write a book on it. I mean, you kind of have written a book on it. It's just online. But that's what really stuck out to me. I kind of assumed when we first started that, you know,

learning to kick, learning to kickbox, learning to strike would be very similar to like what I saw in those Muay Thai classes or what I saw online with people hitting pads, right? Or drilling on the bag or something like that. We've spent zero time doing that. I mean,

out of all the probably hundreds of hours that we've trained, like maybe not even hundreds of, just out of all the hours that we've trained, we've never done any of those things. Um, And at first I was kind of doubtful because I'm like, okay,

how am I going to learn this if we aren't doing combos on the pads? Isn't that what these pros are doing? Isn't that what these people in the commercial gyms are doing? But it wasn't until I really started seeing my skills develop that I really bought into it, that I really felt like, okay,

Sam's on to something here. One way that I can break it down is... that I think a lot of people will understand, especially if they go to a commercial gym or if they've spent time in a commercial gym, is just breaking it down by what we spend time on in a typical LMA session versus

how time is spent at the commercial gym. I'll speak from a jujitsu perspective since that's what I spent the most time doing. But in a typical jujitsu class, you show up, you do the warmups, and then the instructor shows the technique of the day.

You pair up with a partner and you take turns drilling back and forth that technique, right? Where you're letting each other do the thing. So out of that one hour, roughly one hour of class, you know, you're only really sparring like 15, 30 minutes.

Or sometimes no sparring time, depending on the class.

And the rest of the time, you're expected to develop skill by doing the drills, maybe something in the warm-up, some of the exercise that you're doing is expected to build whatever skill. But the only time you're actually getting dynamic rounds against a resisting opponent is about half or even less.

From what I understand, a lot of Muay Thai gyms, a lot of kickboxing gyms, It's even less than that if you're sparring at all. In LMA from day one, you're doing something dynamic. And now we call it sparring. And I think a lot of people might hear this and assume that, you know, sparring might mean like,

you know, what you're seeing like Takaru or like Gervonta Davis do and like sparring wars. But to us, sparring can be anything from that to doing like a no touch game where we're just moving around each other. But the point is that it's dynamic. It's not scripted. And so right there,

I just think you can see in the amount of time that you spend doing something dynamic, you just get more of those dynamic rounds in our system. Obviously, I have my opinion about what is effective or what's more effective. But even without everything else that you talk about,

if you just break it down in terms of time spent doing what, you can maybe start to see how we get the results that we get.

let's get into CC. What is it and what was the impetus behind it?

So CC originally stood for, I guess it still stands for this, Community Combatives. And Basically, I had been training with you for a while, and some of my comrades, some of the people that I organized with, some of my friends, they had expressed wanting to learn martial arts or wanting to train or something like that.

And for a while, it was always one of those situations where it was like, okay, well, let's pick a day in the park and let's do it. And people have their schedules. People are busy organizing, busy with work, busy with their lives. And it was just always hard to like pick a day, let alone, you know,

a consistent day that we meet week after week to get any of these people to come train with me. Um, and they were sincere about wanting to come train, but it was just, it was very difficult to schedule. Um, Concurrently, within our org, we had sort of decided that one of our quarterly goals,

we have quarterly goals as an org, was to do alliance building with other local orgs. So obviously, we have our community partners in the Philippines, but there are many radical orgs in Los Angeles and the Southern California area. And what we had identified was that, you know,

there were lots of people who might be sympathetic or in agreement with our cause, but who didn't know about us. And maybe we didn't know about them. They have actions, they have orgs that do events and what have you, but we just don't know about them. And it's not that we wouldn't want to participate in those things,

not that we wouldn't want to help them out or form an alliance with those groups, but just we don't know each other. Um... So I decided to form a weekly training session, just one day a week meeting at a park. where people could just come train. And the idea was, you know, anyone can come.

It's for everybody in the sense that, you know, any level of experience, any body type, whoever can come. But the one qualification was that you had to be actively involved in an org or at least adjacent to some kind of organizing. Um, so notice that doesn't mean just any leftist or radical, right?

So you can't just come and be like, oh yeah, you know, I'm a Marxist. I'm a leftist. Can I come train with you guys? Like, no, you actually have to be doing the thing, or at least you have to express some desire to want to do the thing. And the idea was, um,

We'd come together, train together, do something fun, use our bodies. And really, we'd just use the group as a way to learn a new skill, a sportive skill, have fun doing it, and really just defeat the burnout that comes with organizing and living in these United States. Right? It was never really intended to be a self-defense collective.

It still isn't intended to be that. And we'll talk about this later, but that's one of the things that I have to really fight against, especially with new students and a lot of the people who kind of hear about us or want to join.

But the primary goals was to bring organizers together and have fun and defeat burnout. And, um, we started in January of 2024. So we just passed our one year mark. And, um, It started with just me and a couple of the people in my org. So we had a group of about seven people.

And now I think we have over 60 people in the group. Attendance fluctuates, but we're able to really reach a lot of people. And we have representatives of a lot of different orgs, orgs that I didn't even know about before who come out and train with us. And it's been really cool because...

having this group and holding time and space, um, for all these different organizers and radicals and activists has allowed me to just, A, learn about their orgs and their struggles, but just get connected with, you know, so many different things happening in the LA area, um, that I just, I wouldn't have known about otherwise. Um,

And yeah, I mean, I think people get really excited about it. People get really excited to have something that, you know, they can look forward to once a week and even more that they can kind of fuse with something that they're passionate about, which is whatever they're organizing around, whatever they do.

It sort of made sense from the get-go since I was already training with you to just sort of make LMA the guiding principle of the org. Um, I think when I was writing our statement of purpose, our manifesto, I wrote it, I wrote kind of all the principles and our goals and what we're trying to do and

what we're not trying to do. And, uh, I went back to an old article you wrote, which was like, I forget the title, but, um, it was like making a red gym or like writing a manifesto for a red gym. And I was like reading the points and I was like, Oh,

it just sounds like I just plagiarized this from Sam, um, which is, you know, kind of true because I had just been, you know, in the Southpaw discussion space for so long that I think a lot of those things that, um, you wrote about back in like 2020 and 2019 just became kind of like obvious to me

as guiding principles to run the group with it's been a lot of fun i've met some of my favorite people that i've met in the past couple years through this group um and just through training. And on another level, you know, when we go out and we're at actions,

it really changes things to know and be familiar with the people that you're around. Before, you know, when I would go to protest, when I'd go to actions, I would know the people that I'm with and the people in my org. And even though I know that, you know,

maybe a lot of the people around me are on my side, so to speak, I didn't know them, right? Like I didn't have that familiarity with them. I didn't train with them. Now it's like, we'll show up to a protest and I'll see like, dozens of people that I've trained with, that I've worked with,

that I have some kind of bond with because we are in a community together. And furthermore, the community has helped some of those people get connected with other orgs as well. It hasn't just benefited me. So it's something that gives me a lot of gratification. gives me another free training day, which I always like,

and just is really, really valuable, at least for me, and I think for some of the participants as well.

So taking the community building that naturally happens in martial arts spaces, I mean, this is even how reactionaries get together, right? But it's taking that, something baked into martial arts and then applying it to radical spaces and we're radicals because we are supposed to be about community building and kinship with each other anyway.

But having this as like a vehicle for that just actually delivers on that promise in a way that a lot of other things don't.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We were called to action during the encampments that were happening, protesting the war in Palestine. And when we were called to action, what the call to action said was, you know, we need... big people who are comfortable with confrontation and who can fight, right?

And we were just a couple months into CC, so the group wasn't really that big. It hadn't really grown past the org that I work with, Leon. But when we went there, What I mostly observed at the encampment, obviously with some exceptions,

was that a lot of the people who answered that call were not big men who know how to fight and have experience in martial arts groups. It was a lot of smaller femmes, disabled folks, not really that demographic of big burly men that you'd expect to come and possibly do something physical.

Another thing we observed was that there was a lot of conflict resolution and de-escalation that had to happen in the encampment on our own side. Right. I'm not talking about having to deescalate like fascists or Zionists or cops that were yelling at us. I'm talking about having to deescalate people from within the encampment were

yelling back or taking their masks off or trying to do this or that. So when I looked at that, it kind of made me realize that. That, yeah, you know, there was a need to do this kind of like community building and community strengthening on our side, on the left,

because all these people can get together for some kind of action. But if we're spending all of our time deescalating ourselves and, you know, trying to get people on our own side to not go out and get in fights and stuff. It's actually taking away a lot from what the organizers of the actual action are

trying to accomplish or trying to do.

And also, you're all in the same physical space, but that doesn't mean you all know each other.

Yeah.

You all came together, right? But you don't know each other. So that's why there's also so much mistrust and suspicion and anger towards each other because it is ultimately strangers. You want that solidarity, but... that's not a great place and it's not a great time to get to know one another.

Whereas training, having fun, that is a great time to get to know each other. And then when you go to that protest, go to that action, you're not strangers. You don't have mistrust. You have trust towards each other. So it's also so much better that way.

that you already got to know each other beforehand before something like this happens. Because even when you do bond at places like that, it's kind of a trauma bond. It's not the same as bonding over kinship or liking each other or respecting each other or actually getting to know each other, right?

Really building a knowingness of each other, right? So it's like, you can't expect to do all that and do all these other things. So it's like, good that something like CC exists so that you could do that beforehand because that is when it should happen beforehand.

Yeah, and I think I like the word you use, trauma bonding. I think that's a really good way to put it because you're bonding with each other out of fear for what might happen or what will happen or what you speculate will happen or whatever.

And that's not the same thing as having a relationship with someone out of love and gratitude and respect and true care for that person. And what's funny is that a lot of the people that I would meet for the first time at the encampment

would show up months later to cc and we'd realize uh there at training like oh no no we we met together when we were being like assaulted by zionist cops um and it's this kind of funny thing because it's like oh yeah we we share this trauma um but

one of our members uh who i met at the encampment and now is like a regular attendee at cc you know this person is um They were one of the few people who showed up to the call who actually was big and strong and could fight.

And I remember when we first met them, a lot of people around me looked up at this person. They're quite tall. And they're saying stuff like, oh, yeah, something happens. I'm really glad they're on my side. Like if something happens, I'm going to get behind this person. Right. If like a fight breaks out,

I'm really glad that this big person who's like plus six feet can, you know, protect. Um, and then even training people will come in and be like, Oh man, I'm really glad this big guy's on our side. Um, And that reaction is out of that expectation for something bad to happen. It's out of trauma. It's like, oh,

well, you know, if something bad happens to me, I don't actually care about this person's well-being or if they'll be okay or maybe if they'll be the target of that violence, I'm going to hide behind them.

I care about them out of utility, out of a fear.

Exactly. This is one of those things that, you know, we try to address because we reject the notion of self-defense, but most of the people who come to the class or come to the session for the first time, especially if they're less experienced, but also a lot of more experienced people,

their primary motivation is to learn how to defend themselves, right? They are fearful. They have experienced some kind of trauma. They're aware that there are fascists and police and what have you that may want to do them harm. And so they come from this notion of self-defense. So obviously, we have to address what is self-defense?

What is community defense? And what do those things look like? And so that's a really important thing is like, you know, if you think that community defense is just hiding behind the biggest person, you know, then what is that person getting from what we're doing? They're just getting turned into a human shield. Um, so yeah, I mean,

it's, it's something that needs to be addressed and that we do try to address, but it's hard. Um, Me personally, I come to the martial arts from a sportive angle. I like watching UFC. I like watching various combat sports, boxing, whatever. So I have a lot of familiarity with what we're doing that comes from watching a sport,

watching a game. A lot of the people who come to the class who are organizers, they don't watch combat sports, right? So they aren't familiar with the terminology. They aren't familiar with... various rules of different sports. Like they, they can't tell you the difference between kickboxing and Muay Thai and boxing and UFC and MMA, right?

It's all just defense to them. Um, so one of the big challenges of the group is actually just, you know, how do I take these people, a lot of whom are coming with their own traumas and actually expecting for those traumas to be evoked as a part of the class?

And then how do I get those people to kind of just chill and have fun so that they can actually get better at the things that we're doing? And that's really where like a lot of the things that we learn in LMA come really, really in handy.

Just to piggyback off of some of the things you were saying, right? Whenever there's like a big action or something happens, There's immediate fallout. There's good that happens. And then you talk about the reactionaries and the police and things like that. But then also after all that, after the dust settles,

then you see a lot of internal drama, a lot of things amongst the people and the participants who were there or people who were just kind of watching and they have so much shit to say about each other, right? And say about others. Yeah. Why? And it goes back to this whole point because they're all strangers, right?

We want it to be all solidarity and everybody's close, but that's not a great place to do that. So you're all together. You're all bodies showing up. But the drama that unfolds afterwards and all the muckraking and mudslinging and the mistrust all make sense if you realize these are all strangers.

Yeah.

And so it's really that solidarity and community building has to happen before these actions so that when you show up, you're like, oh, hey, there's so-and-so. Oh, hey, there's so-and-so. Oh, hey, there's so-and-so. And so solidarity has to happen before. It's really hard to build it during the action. And we see why.

Like all the drama and all the... Chaos that happens from these things and all the mudslinging, it all makes sense if you realize these are all strangers and they don't know each other and they don't know if they like each other and they don't trust each other. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. They don't trust each other.

Like we come from a place where that makes sense. It's a survival mechanism. And so these are byproducts of that. And so the remedy for that isn't to try to do something then. It's the ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. You got to do it beforehand. You got to solve it beforehand, right?

And so projects like this, like having fun, that is important for radicalism because if you have fun, that's when you build a kinship. That's when you get to know each other. And so when you do go to the action, then it's like, hey, I know you. I know you. We met at this. We met at that.

Okay, cool. I can trust you now. So already going there with trust is so important. And then that is so key to building massive magnitude, like coalition building, power building, base building. We need trust. And so trust needs to be built beforehand. I'm not saying fun is the only way,

but you need things that are not such high stakes, such high urgency. It's like trying to defend yourself from FASH isn't the best time to build kinship. You got other pressing matters.

Yeah. You have your own safety to worry about.

Yeah. There's other priorities.

And to kind of go back to a previous point, which was kind of the goal of CC to begin with is burnout. You know, when you show up at these actions and you have your own comrades trying to fight you or just like you said, all the mudsling, all the drama that creates burnout. And

From what I see in a lot of these orgs and my org, but also just these other orgs that I've become involved with since starting CC, is burnout is one of the biggest impediments to the work that we do. People are tired because we're suffering under capitalism. The work that we're doing as organizers is not paid work.

It's things that we are doing on our own time in addition to our economic work. And then to go to some action and get screamed at for no reason by some person who doesn't even know you and is just kind of engaging with you in bad faith, it contributes to that burnout.

And to piggyback on another one of your points, you mentioned the importance of just kind of having fun for community building. I think it's also kind of on a personal level. So many of us involved in organizing who kind of have a conscience around the things that we see both domestically and abroad,

whether it be the genocide of people in Palestine or murder of unarmed people in the United States. We could go on. I find that a lot of the people that I know in these circles are sort of stop giving themselves permission to experience and feel and do something that is joyful. And it kind of makes sense, right?

Because it's like, okay, well, if these people abroad are dying and suffering and being killed, especially on my tax dollars, what right do I have to go train in park and have a fun time with my friends? What right do I have to go and, you know,

feel this emotion of joy that these kids are being robbed of in Palestine, along with their lives and their families and their land? And so having an activity... Where you feel like you can give yourself the permission to actually experience joy from that activity and to actually feel like it's not taking away from what you're

doing in terms of your work as an organizer or what have you is actually really important. Yeah. Because maybe you are justified on some level of refusing to allow yourself that joy. Maybe you do have a sound argument for why you shouldn't be allowed to

experience joy, whatever, but it's going to have an effect on the work you do. You know, you're going to get burnt out. You're going to lose focus. You're going to, it's, it's going to, it's going to harm your life. It's going to harm your livelihood. So I think it's also just important, you know,

to create these community spaces where people can have this experience of joy, experience of doing something freely in their bodies, reclaiming their bodily autonomy, but doing so in a community that is safe for them that they actually want to contribute to. Because that's the other thing. A lot of people, once they identified, like me,

once they identified that their jujitsu community, that their martial arts community, that their whatever community was actually deeply rooted in the fash, you don't really want to contribute to that anymore. So, yeah, I think it's important to find ways for you and your community to just, you know, lighten the mood every now and then.

Just so that when you do go and do the work, you, you know, you have something to look forward to. You have something that brings some light to your life. Yeah. For me, that's martial arts. It's the one thing I do every week that really brings me some level of joy. As I've gotten older,

a lot of the things that I used to do for joy when I was a teenager, when I was young, when I was in college, they just don't do it for me. They don't I don't experience joy while doing those things. You know, I don't really... I studied film in college.

I don't really go out to movies that much anymore. You know, I don't really look forward to, like, the next blockbuster. That's partially because a lot of the movies are really bad, but it's also just, you know, a difference in myself. So, yeah, I think it's important to be aware of those things in yourself,

and it's important if you find yourself... just not experiencing joy in something, in anything that you used to do, you need to question that. You need to ask yourself, you know, why that is and if there's something that can be done to kind of counteract that.

What is advice you would give to people who are thinking about starting their own collective? Because you started CC with very little overhead, not even an actual physical space. Yeah.

Yeah, we still don't have a space. We... basically just meet in a park. We've switched the park since then because the first park that we went to got vandalized by Zionists, who noticed we were training there. But I would say that a big piece of advice is first identify your goals. Why do you want to train?

And what are the goals of the collective? Beyond just... what you're actually doing, which is training, right? Beyond just like self-defense. Do you want to create a community? Do you want to strengthen the community? My goal was to bring organizers from all these different orgs together so that we

could learn about and see each other and learn about what we're all doing together. Um, other people, you know, who I've talked to in the Southpaw, uh, discord, they've established training collectives with goals that are completely different, but that fit their region or the place that they're in that are applicable for the place that they're in.

So for instance, one place, their goal, um, relates a lot to the food security, you know, securing stable food and just like basic material resources for people so that they can have the capacity to organize so that they can have the capacity to train. So I'd say, you know, identify where you are,

understand the kind of environment that you're sitting in and create a goal, you know, create a goal and think about how your actions help you achieve that goal. Don't just go through the motions of training for nothing. And I think that goes for both establishing a training collective, but I'd say that advice can also go for,

you know, just how do you train? Like, how do you get better? Are you just going through the motions that your instructor gives you at the beginning of the day and expecting to get better after years and years and years of just going through the motions? Or do you have a goal,

like a specific goal in mind and then a specific strategy on how to achieve that goal? I would say that advice also goes for organizing circles. One thing that I realized when I started being involved with all these other orgs is that not all orgs do the thing that our org does,

which is constantly analyze how our actions relate to our goals. You know, whenever we are planning an action, a fundraiser, educational event, whatever, and Leah and usually someone will type in and say, okay, what is the actual objective of this? How is this going to accomplish that objective? How does that relate to our quarterly objective?

And that way it's focused. That way you're not just sitting in your organizing meeting for two hours talking about a million different things. You're talking about this goal. And I think a big criticism that a lot of people have had of various left spaces or

the Occupy movement or whatever is people show up to an action and it's not clear what the demands of the protest is or what the goal of the action is. So I think just being clear on goals is... really really helpful and the way we did do that is by writing a statement of

purpose right we just literally write it out and that way anyone who joins you know you don't have to give them the same spiel of like oh yeah well you know we don't really do self-defense here we're more of like a sportive martial arts collective

you just have them read the thing if they don't agree with it they don't have to join you know um so i think Writing down your goals and your objectives and how you plan to accomplish those things in a statement of purpose is really, really important and vital.

Because like we established, people hear martial arts and they think so many different things. And it might not really have to do with what you want to do. Also, as a collective... the collective might be interested in things other than just training martial arts, you know, um,

maybe they want to turn the collective into like sort of like a mutual aid work, you know, maybe they want to just use the people power of people being together to go to actions to do whatever, you know, but it's really important just because also that way you're not, um,

You're not forcing anyone into anything that they haven't agreed to ahead of time. So that would be one thing. Having a space is awesome, but if you have a public park, just be mindful of what the limitations of your space are. You know, like I said, the first park we went to was vandalized.

And so something that we kind of figured out along the way is that even though we're all kind of politically minded people, we're outspoken about our beliefs and what have you, when it comes to training days, you know, we try to not, I tell people, you know, don't wear stuff, don't wear the kafia,

don't wear clothes with the political slogan on it because we're actually not trying to get as much attention as possible. We just want to look like, you know, people training in the park for fun. We don't want a bunch of undue attention on us unless there's a goal behind it, right? Unless we're doing an action.

When there's a ton of people, right? Doing that is some kind of call to action. Whereas if there's not that many of you, then you just become a target.

Yeah. And it's like, you know, you might be very well-intentioned, obviously, to support Palestine, to support whatever. But just in that context of showing up to the park with the keffiyeh or whatever, you might be, you know, putting a target on your back or the backs of all your comrades.

And maybe you're comfortable with that for yourself, but... The people that you're with might not be comfortable with that. And it might screw things up. It might cause you to lose the location that you're training out of. So just things to think about. You also have to understand that if you are training as a collective,

what you do and what works for you and what doesn't work for you and how you go about things will necessarily be different from how a commercial gym goes about things, right? Yeah. Because your goal is probably to get better as a group, improve everyone's skills, in addition to whatever goals you set for the collective.

If you assume that that is the goal of a commercial gym, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what a commercial gym is. It's a commercial gym. They have to keep the doors open. They have to make money. So a lot of the things that you do in a class...

are formed not necessarily because it's the best way to get all the students better at the skill. It might be because, you know, people come to the gym and they just want to hit stuff. And you have to cater to that. It might be because people come to the gym and they have fitness goals that are

separate from learning martial arts. And you have to cater to that. So instead of having, you know, one hour of skill building, you might have like 30 minutes of just kind of like boot camp style fitness training. And then 15 to 30 minutes of skill building.

So just be aware that what works or what you see in a commercial gym isn't always what's best for your training collective that might be meeting in a garage, that might be meeting in a park,

that might be meeting wherever. They're just trying to maximize dollars per square inch ultimately, right? So it's like the best way to maximize it is like you also want a certain number of people to pay in that show up. You have to have that.

Yeah, so you want it to be kind of uninviting, but at the same time, like you also want it where you want people to sign up. So you want this mix of like signing up, but not everybody show up at the same time.

And you also want all the classes to be really easy to run rather than prioritizing everybody getting better or learning. So it's about just like these slots of times that could be run by anybody. And it's just about memorizing what happens in every like 10 minute block or five

minute block or 15 minute block where anybody can do it and try to maximize how much dollars you can make per square inch. So a lot of it might be like doing stuff so that you could cram in as many people as you can in a small space and giving them just busy work.

So they feel like they're doing something per minute. They're there, right? Yeah. burning calories per minute, right? And then if they leave, like sweating and, you know, you had them do something the whole time where they never had a chance to consolidate information and learn anything, but they're really tired and every second was like them breathing hard,

then it's like, okay, they think something got accomplished. But was learning accomplished? Maybe not. Was making money accomplished? Yes. Okay. Exactly.

And also, I'd say don't assume that just because you don't have the commercial gym space or the commercial gym equipment or you aren't doing the same things that they're doing, don't assume that what you're doing isn't effective because it might be more effective.

And from what we've seen just from our results in the learning lab, it's super effective. We see... People in their 40s with chronic injuries competing a year later and doing pretty well. Doing well against people who go to those commercial gyms and are young and athletic.

Train 10 times more often.

Yeah, maybe you've been doing it for 5, 6, 7, 10 years. At this point, we've seen the results. It's not really speculative anymore.

And we're very transparent, right? Unlike other, even not just other radical collectives, but other just even commercial gyms, we're much more transparent. We just put it all out there and it's like, hey, here's where we were just starting, you know, and people saw what that looked like. Dynamic,

but very far from what you would say is spirited training or sparring or competition to, you know, posting those competition videos and showing some of our more spirited training what it looks like now. So we put it all out there. And so it's like open source, right? You see the thing, right? Analyze it, scrutinize it.

Other people have to use secrecy because they don't want you to scrutinize it because they don't really want you to know that it's not that good. Whereas we're proud of it and we're confident.

I don't think there is an online curriculum with that much information. We literally just put it out there. Whenever you make a post, you'll get the odd person who's like, oh, well, that's not how we do it at our gym. That's not... And it's like, okay, come show us. Our scrimmage days are when they are.

We're training at the same time every week. And those people never come out to show us that we're wrong.

And fortunately, as we've been more transparent and showing more and more things, we don't actually get as much of that pushback as we used to. So I guess it's like... becoming hard to deny the results. So that's good, right? It's like there's evidence. So people are reluctantly proportioning their beliefs to the evidence,

at least to the point where maybe they're not signing up, but at least they're not criticizing it anymore, or at least not as much openly.

The criticism that I see a lot of the time is either It's two opposites of the spectrum. It's either like, oh, this is some soft shit. We're going to war in our gym, and this isn't how you learn. Or people are looking at our scrimmages or some of our sparring, especially some of our competitive sparring,

and going like, oh, no, this is scary. This is too hard.

It's Schrodinger's training. It's all of it at once.

Yeah, if we're getting criticized for both being too soft and too hard, then what does that mean? What is actually happening? It means we can do both and benefit from both and do both with comfort because we've developed that level of comfort with each other. It can be whatever you need it to be.

And if you've been at the same gym for five, six, seven years, and you still don't have that level of comfort when it comes to sparring or training, maybe you have to ask yourself, what's been happening all that time? Or what is it about the environment that you're in that hasn't led you to develop those things?

If we can do it in the space of under a year,

and get results. A lot of people, and we've seen this, you know, you know this from jujitsu, where even if they've been training like 10 years, they're a black belt, they only know how to go hard, right? Or somebody else, they might only know how to go soft and they don't know how to go hard.

Like you rarely find somebody who's gotten to a level where they could do both well, right? Go hard and go light. Whereas the thing about LMA is we want everybody to have such control over their movement and be such good movers, they can do that. They can do both. They can go hard or soft.

They're not any one kind of person, right? They're multitudes. They could be whatever kind of training partner you need them to be.

and more to that point um you know when we're training as part of the collective at cc at cc when we get a new member that has experience right that has been going to the gym that has their own martial arts practice whatever um it's often those

people i've found that need the most coaching on how to go light on how to spar with control um on just kind of how to chill out and pace themselves and not train out of this like trauma response. So like they know all the moves, they have good form and everything,

but I have to take them aside more often than not to get them to lighten it up. Whereas the person with like no combat sports experience at all, I tell them like, okay, kick, but like place it and don't make a sound. Don't, don't, you know, go light. And they understand what I mean, you know?

but it's people who bring their experiences from their commercial gym or their trauma or what have you that I actually need to spend more time with, even though they have more quote unquote experience. And so what is that experience really? That experience is just trauma.

Like it's just trauma that where you also happen to learn how to like throw a punch and a kick, but you're still not comfortable doing the thing. And we'll also see people, they'll come and train with us. We'll start doing these, these rounds whatever sparring game we're playing that day and uh they'll get tired

really quickly you know they'll get tired really quickly and i'll watch them a lot of the time they'll be like oh you know i'm out of shape i'm like i just gotta get back into shape it's hot out here whatever um but really it's like they're in fine shape and we're not going at a pace that uh

should really cause them to be like super out of breath. Um, not to mention they already have experience, you know, doing this thing. A lot of the time I'm watching people get out of breath and tired because there's some level of anxiety there, you know, because they're like working themselves up. And that could be a combination of,

you know, evoking trauma or like kind of thinking about a fight while they're training or even just social anxiety of like being around new people. So it's, it's a dual prong kind of thing.

or feeling like they're being watched.

Especially being watched, yeah. I mean, so many of us, we're not used to using our bodies at all, or we're just far removed from using our bodies. Now, take a bunch of people who you don't know, and they're watching you in a park, right? It's not just the people that you're training with.

It's all the other people in the park, and they're watching you, and they're seeing you sweat, and they're seeing you get tired. it can be very nerve-wracking, even for people who have experience competing and doing all that. And then the flip side of that is people come, they train with us, and that anxiety,

I think that anxiety goes away as they build that comfort. And part of it is just getting to know everyone, but also just seeing that like, okay, yeah, I can come and train here and I don't really have to worry about getting hurt you know i can get those productive rounds i can get rounds with like

some level of intensity but i'm not this person's my comrade i don't need to hurt them and nobody's judging you and no one's judging you and A lot of the things that I would worry about in a commercial gym or that you see coaches spend a lot of time worrying about in a commercial gym,

like regulating how hard their students are sparring or stopping fights or any kind of this machismo behavior, because of the demographic that... the collective is open to being you know organizers a lot of people already understand uh what things like consent are right so a lot of these things that i

kind of anticipated being big problems um just have actually like never really been problems because the group of people that i'm training with for the most part, just kind of already know to like respect someone's consent and to check in with each other and all that.

In speaking about CC, and the reason why we're calling it CC is because, well, I'm calling it CC because that's what you call it. And that evolved over time because you didn't want to call it community combatants anymore because you wanted to pull away from people thinking too much about self-defense, right?

And sometimes you call it community care. So I wanted to get into that. And you've already mentioned this because a lot of radicals think martial arts only exists for the utility of self-defense. and can't imagine it actually being fun. They see it like a necessary chore. So you've been talking around this. So how do you handle that?

Really, I try to address it as soon as I can. So when I meet someone and they're interested in joining the collective and they're like, oh, I want to come to your self-defense group, I try to just hit it right there just so you understand this is not a self-defense group.

And I try to explain to people kind of what is self-defense? Self-defense is just this infinite web of a million, billion different things that could happen to you, right? That could happen to you because, well, you can imagine it happening, but might not really be how it goes down in real life. There's a lot of assumptions that

occur in a typical self-defense class. You've talked about these in depth on your podcast, but just to name a few, one assumption is that you won't know the person that's assaulting you, right? The other assumption is that it'll be an engagement where unarmed tactics can even

work or where you even have the ability to fight back without incurring worse consequences. Um, so I try to kind of just stress this onto people and stress very much that, you know, what the goals of our, or of our collective are, um, that we're practicing a sport of art, sport of skills. Um,

and that our goal isn't really to be like the leftist Avengers or something like that, or to like create like a team of, um, vigilantes or anything like that, just because it's not really... Even if I wanted to do that, it wouldn't really be the best way to go about that. And truthfully,

when we're talking about community organizing, there's a lot of things that harm the community that can't be fought with punches and kicks. There's a lot of things that you can do to protect people in the community that don't involve... fighting or really even like your physical body. Um, it could be, you could,

you could do more to defend your community by organizing a food drive than by teaching 30 people how to fight. Um, so I try to just emphasize these things and I try to emphasize the goals of the org, but I also, you training i try to really emphasize that all the techniques we do all the techniques

that we learn in practice are contextual right and they're contextual in a sporting context in the same way that self-defense should be contextual right even though when it's taught it very often isn't taught in any kind of context sort of like devoid of context devoid of like real world uh of reality. Right.

Um, and so, you know, some people take to it, some people take to it less. Um, I kind of try to just, you know, avoid people who are on the, uh, really big like oh like all leftists need to be training because a fascist is doing

push-ups right now and you know you also need to be doing push-ups and to be honest like a lot of the people who are really really on that they don't even show up to training when the day comes around anyway so it's like it kind of takes care of

itself you know um most of the people who say that online don't train either though

yeah they don't train at all so it's just like okay thank you for your opinion

Ultimately, I think the simple way to explain it is self-defense means scripted because self-defense means a series of techniques or like things that you're supposed to practice and memorize, right? So it's very scripted where danger is unscripted. So that's the problem, right? So you actually have to learn to be very open-ended from the beginning so that you

just learn things very open-endedly, dynamically rather than using memorization because memorization isn't going to help you. And so even if you wanted to get good at self-defense, You don't want to do self-defense because actual self-defense requires things to be unscripted and improvisational. And you make your reasoned decisions right there in the moment quickly.

Because if you're thinking about it, if you're trying to recall, it's already too late.

Yeah.

Self-defense does everything the opposite. It is an actual pedagogy that tries to teach you based on memorization and simulating exact specific pinpoint scenarios they think you'll be in. And then you basically role play and you practice these things. And that's the problem.

I had a new student show up just this last weekend and I actually... basically plagiarized, uh, a very similar point that you made previously in, uh, an old post, uh, or maybe it was a, an episode or an interview or something, but, um, you know, I basically plagiarist plagiarize this directly from your lips. Uh,

isn't it basically just pro wrestling, right? If it's scripted and we're both agreeing to this thing and we're just kind of going through the motions of practicing this scripted sequence of events, even though we call it self-defense or maybe we call it drilling or whatever we're doing, aren't we really just practicing pro wrestling if we're doing that?

And, you know, this person heard that and was kind of like, oh yeah, I kind of didn't really think about it like that. But the point was made. They were in agreement. It was a very easy way to kind of make the point. And that's not to bash pro wrestlers either.

I mean, pro wrestling is way cooler than self-defense.

Pro wrestling is a thousand times cooler than self-defense. And this is another thing I try to tell people in the class is to check out pro wrestling. But, you know, generally people understand, even people who don't watch combat sports or pro wrestling, they have this understanding that pro wrestling is quote unquote fake and

self-defense is quote unquote real. When actually pro wrestling is more real than the self-defense. Yeah.

Pro wrestling ultimately still requires a lot of improvisation, whereas self-defense is a series of techniques. And what are these techniques, right? How do you decide what are self-defense techniques? So you group them all, right? And then you take out all the things you don't think are important. And then what's left?

It's only things that you would role play and do in some fantasy scenario where you're fighting an unhoused person or you're fighting a predator who is black-coated. Even radicals will do this. They will unconsciously group all these ideas and techniques and assumptions. And what is self-defense is ultimately that things you do when you're fighting an

imaginary on house person or a black coded predator. And that's why it's ultimately reactionary. And that's why we don't do it.

And every self-defense class, it always starts off with this cooked-up scenario from the head of your self-defense instructor or their instructor or the nightly news or wherever. That's always like... You're at an ATM and some guy approaches you and he doesn't just want your money, he wants your life and more.

And you need to do everything you can to survive that situation. And just the reality of assaults is that that is almost never... what happens you know the reality of assaults is that most of the people who are getting assaulted are being assaulted by someone they know and someone they maybe

care about maybe someone that you know they don't want to do like the full krav maga lethal move set on because they they care about that person's well-being and just maybe want to de-escalate them or just get out of the situation you know

I follow so many radical collectives on Instagram and other social media. And so sometimes they'll post snippets of their training. And it's like every day I see one of them posting some kind of thing where obviously the scenario is a person fighting a stranger. The scenario is always a stranger. And so that's the point.

Like, who is the stranger that you don't know? And it's always them coming towards you. So who is the stranger that is coming towards you in a situation that surprises you, right? Because the thing is, like, if it's somebody you know, and those are the type of assaults that often happen is they already have proximity on you,

right? So you don't start out with them like 10 feet away. But who is the person who's 10 feet away walking towards you, right? And so what is baked into these assumptions, these kind of scripted scenarios, right? They're very problematic. And you see radicals replicating this just unconsciously. They're replicating a lot of oppressive and reactionary fascists,

like fascists in the way liberals can be fascist kind of assumptions. So I actually wanted to touch on that because We're talking about CCE and how you're adapting LMA to it. And there's a lot of things we're talking about that people might not be fully clear on as far as what they mean.

So let's first outline the commercial gym approach and what that means. The commercial gym approach to learning. So from the framework of Paolo Freire, who is an anti-colonial Marxist education theorist, He called the colonizer's model of education the banking model, where you're supposed to be like a piggy bank and just memorize, repeat, drill, regurgitate.

But since no one uses piggy banks anymore, I'm sure like my kid might not know what that is. It's better to think of it now as a hard drive. So like a factory worker or a soldier or an enslaved person, your own thinking and decision making is removed from the process.

You just pull stuff out of your piggy bank or hard drive someone else put in. You let someone else do the thinking and you just follow orders. You just put it into your hard drive and pull it out as you need. So that's the standard commercial gym approach to martial arts.

And there's not just Freire who's written about this. And actually there's other facets of this, other theorists like in philosophy, like just greater philosophy is really important. I feel like if you want to understand all this stuff, there's a lot of great people. Like you don't have to read their actual words.

It's more about understanding their philosophy, which is like the formula of analysis. So with that in mind, You've mentioned how people sometimes show up wanting to implement what Freire called the banking model of education to CC. And I'm sure they're thinking the banking model is helping, right? It's kind of like, this is how everyone is doing it.

This is the status quo. Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you conforming? Yeah. How often is it anti-authoritarian radicals promoting this top-down banking model? Pretty much all the time.

When it does happen, it's pretty much always someone who's very anarcho-leaning. The irony. It's not that it happens with every single person who comes through the group, but you do see it quite a lot where people kind of are trying to push us towards...

Doing what we do a little bit more like the commercial gym or a little bit more like the military. Some people have suggested that, you know, we run like boot camp style conditioning. And, you know, of course, these people making these suggestions almost never actually never show up to the

actual sessions when we do meet up once per week. So it's like. You know, they'll say this and everyone's like, who are you? You know, like, what are you talking about? To be honest, it's just like, I think when people come to the session for the first time and see what we do and how we do it,

they figure out pretty quickly that there's just no way that that would even work, even if we tried to implement it. Um, and it certainly, I don't, I mean, it certainly wouldn't work as good as, or as well as what we're doing now. Um, firstly,

just because a lot of the things that we would be doing and spending time on with a kind of like prescriptive model like that, where the, the teacher, the instructor decides, you know, this is the technique of the day, this is what we're working on. And, um, this is what everyone's going to do.

And we're all going to drill this thing. it works on the assumption that like that thing is going to be equally valuable for every single person in the class. Um, when we work from a bottom up model, uh, when we work from an LMA model, a more horizontal model, um,

We can identify skills that we need to work on on an individual basis, right? So we all do the same thing in that we're playing a sparring game or whatever, but we can look at each individual person and say like, okay, well, this is what you need to develop. This is what you need to work on.

This is something that might help you, right? And it's not something that they need to do. It's just like, hey, you know, here's a helpful suggestion that might kind of expand your game a little bit. But yeah, I mean, you know, we've gotten all sorts of suggestions from the boot camp thing, which is just kind of,

you know, I've seen this in other leftist spaces where it's like, okay, yeah, we need to start doing like boot camp style conditioning because the fascists are training. And it's like, for that type of exercise to even be beneficial, like you have to be doing it, you know, a couple times a week consistently. And it's like,

most of the people in the group barely show up to train to just work on skills once a week. So now expecting those people to come and do some crap that, you know, isn't even fun that they might not be physically able to do and might not even be useful for them as people because, you know,

they're not in the military is just kind of a, it's a weird assumption to me, you know? Um, Also, it completely ignores what the objectives of the goal might be. A lot of these people, they're just doing something for fun. And if you're just doing something for fun once a week,

why would I have you do the same exercises and drills that someone in the military does or a professional does so that they can compete at the highest level? If you have no goals to compete, why would I have you destroy your body doing all these conditioning drills and

when you're not only are you not making money off of it, like you aren't even getting personal gratification from competing. Yeah, it doesn't align with your goals. Even if you are competing at an amateur event or something like that, does it make sense to do that kind of exercise? Are you training enough for that to make sense?

Do those things that you're doing in that boot camp style conditioning, do they even apply to what you're doing? Could you be spending your time doing something else that is just more practical or more beneficial? And could that something else just be nothing? Like,

could it be that just sleeping and resting might be more useful to that individual than like 100 sets of push-ups and running 10 miles and whatever, whatever? Maybe. I mean, I've found, especially, you know, since moving out of jujitsu where I'd go multiple times a week to now where I only

really train like once or twice a week, my body feels so much better. You know, I'm so much happier, so much less stressed. There were so many things that I was doing at the commercial gym, basically because I saw professionals doing them. And I was like, okay, well, if the best people in the world are doing this,

then if I do the same thing, then I'll get those results. And that's just not really sound, right? Because we don't have the same goals. So yeah, I mean, it's back to your point, you know, We see a lot of people come from sort of like anarchist schools of thought,

very anti-authoritarian schools of thought who for some reason want to train in like the most authoritarian way possible, like the most prescriptive way possible. And then, you know, we're over here just being like, well, I actually want our students to do what they want to do and have fun and keep coming back. I mean,

that's one of the biggest challenges of the collective is encouraging people to have regular attendance and to be consistent. Because I don't put any requirements on it. People are free to show up when they want to show up. But it strengthens the collective. It helps them get better faster if they show up consistently.

And I just don't think that if we spent half of every session... running up hills and I don't know, doing like burpees that, uh, it would encourage people to show up week after week, you know? Whereas if we do something fun and people can see that like, wow, in the space of this hour, I actually improved.

Like my footwork got better. I got maybe a little sharper. I learned some like defenses or whatever, uh, just in this short time. People like that. People think about that and they want to do it again. One of the people who actually got me into organizing,

they came to a session for the first time while they were visiting in town. They live in Philly now. The Leon comrades told them, yeah, come out to training. They messaged me beforehand and went, oh, new guy. I really want to come. It sounds really cool, but you know, I have asthma, um,

I have all these like physical things that make me worried about coming. Like, will I be able to do this? Is it going to hurt me to show up and participate? Am I going to be able to keep up with everyone else in the class? And I'm like, don't worry about any of that.

Like, we're going to scale to you. It's going to be fine. They show up to class. Sure enough, they're having a great time. They're kicking, they're picking up the techniques, just big smile the whole time. You know, months later, They're back in Philly. They messaged me. They've started practicing Muay Thai.

They have their own practice just because it was so fun. It was so gratifying to them. Having these lifelong disabilities, what they told themselves and probably what other people told them their entire lives is you can't do something like Muay Thai. You can't do something like a combat sport because it's too rough. It's too hard. But,

you know, if you just know how to practice it in a way where you listen to yourself and you can scale to yourself and other people, it's actually like a very safe and easy and fun and gratifying thing to do. And I think that's something that people never really assume about combat sports. You know,

something we always say together that we always joke about in Learning Lab is like, you know, we have... sparring partners and friends who are injured from other sports like rock climbing, soccer, lifting, whatever. And the joke is always like, oh, well, you know, they got injured doing that dangerous sport like rock climbing.

Better do a safe sport like Muay Thai. Better do a safe sport like boxing or MMA, you know, which is obviously, is it a safe sport? You don't really assume it is. But the way we do it, it's like we're never getting injured doing this, you know.

People come in like you have come in hurting and then you train and then you're like, oh, I feel better.

Yeah. No, there will be days where I'll come in. I have a reoccurring neck issue where I'll come in feeling my neck just like almost in tears, like not just in tears because of the physical pain, but like, oh, man, you know, I wanted to train today and I woke up with my chronic injury just inflamed.

Now I don't get a train. And we're able to figure out ways to train and to get good rounds in that are considerate for a person's injuries or whatever they might be dealing with. So in that way, you know, you can get a lot more people participating and just benefiting from the sport than

you would if you were just going hard in like a boot camp style model that kind of sorts for people who, you know, are already athletic.

And also bootcamps are very accessible, right? So what do they need you to do a bootcamp for? There's only you doing CC in all of LA. And then there's not only just bootcamps everywhere, there's also just free bootcamps all over town at parks and stuff. So if people wanted that, they'd already be doing it.

So it doesn't even make sense to say, oh, the reason why we must not be doing it is because you're not offering it at CC. And it's like, dude, like, come on. Especially in LA, like how popular bootcamps are here as far as workouts. Like if people wanted that, they'd already be doing it.

It also goes into how people understand the collective as a collective versus a resource, which is a class. We had a kerfuffle in the group chat because we decided to start collecting dues, basically, just to pay for the expenses that... the collective incurs, right? You know, I provide masks for people. Um, there's obviously like transportation costs.

We'd like to get gear for some of the people who can't afford it. Um, and so we talked about the possibility of collecting dues. Um, not for me to like, um, take personally but literally just to be recycled back into the group and um you

know someone brought up like i wouldn't want cost to be a prohibitive factor to this community resource and they called it a community resource and i'm like by community resource like you do you just mean my time every sunday you know um yeah you're their resource

Again, this was a person who showed up once like 45 minutes late to a session. So it's like, it'd be one thing if it were a person who shows up every session being like, this is a community resource because like they're contributing into the collective with their presence. But then, you know,

you see a lot of kind of the anti-authoritarian anarchists leaning contingent of people who, you know, we accept into the group if they're involved in organizing and With this idea that this is just a resource for them to benefit from when they feel like it, which isn't really the same thing as a collective, right? Very individualist. Yeah.

And to be fair, not being able to pay, we would never turn someone away for lack of funds. We were just saying like, hey, if everyone could... donate a little bit of money every month like we could actually do really awesome things we could have more equipment we could have mats maybe we could like rent a

space it's also all about what the community wants right if they want that they're like yeah yeah let's do that right it's like a discussion and that's the thing is i

mean completely aside from like any discussions on like anarchists or anti-authoritarians martial arts and combatives in general um Although it's introduced me to some of the most awesome people I've ever met in organizing spaces, it also attracts sus people, sus bad faith individuals who don't really want to do any kind of organizing beyond the

Let's form a militia or let's do whatever. So you have to be prepared for that too. You have to be prepared for people who just come at the org in bad faith or come at the community in bad faith.

So speaking of that, you're engaging and interacting with a lot of radicals. And so you get in touch or hear about a lot of other projects or maybe things they're involved in. So have you heard of any other radical training projects? And if you have,

are any of them doing anything interesting as far as pedagogy or teaching models?

Yes, I've heard of other training projects, but a lot of them are kind of just doing, aside from the ones that I know about through the Southpaw project and through LMA, pretty much all of the radical training groups that I see are doing a very prescriptive model, very similar to what you'd see in a commercial gym,

or show up, do a warm-up, you know, drill copy pasta. Yeah. Very, very, very copy pasta of like a commercial gym model. And the people leading the groups will usually, you know, have a lot of years and one of those commercial gym models, um,

there there's also been a few groups that have come basically like directly out of uh you know the organizer coming to one session at cc um someone shows up they like what we're doing they're like hey you know i i have experience like i have i can teach i'm gonna start a collective as well um

And I think, you know, some of those groups as they do what they do and as they just kind of go through the motions of meeting week after week, they're coming to the same, some of the same conclusions that we would come to just because they see, you know, what's working and what's not working, right?

If they really have like a real sincere desire to just see their students or their members get better. A lot of them see like, oh, the stuff that we're doing in the commercial gym, like actually just is not getting these people better at all. But we've encountered some radical groups.

I mean, I've even encountered some, you know, groups that I had only heard of like, in years years previous who maybe i had read their zine or something um who kind of got like plugged into our group just through like the sphere of radical organizers

and stuff and um there's no one that's really doing it like we're doing it i don't see a huge amount of like theory or intention or objective in a lot of these groups um and that's not to say

like what they're doing is bad i mean they're just taking a bunch of things they heard from a bunch of different like probably reactionary outlets and commercial outlets and just making copy pasta training out of it right and sometimes copy pasta training zines out of it and telling people to do everything that's in it.

And you see also a lot of justification for basically using like fascist methodology. And the argument is always the same. It's like, well, you know, these fascists are good at violence and we know because we've experienced violence from them. So if we want to get good at violence,

we should be doing what they're doing because they have the monopoly on violence.

And violence also means from our perspective right like anti-consensual so also it's like why do we want to do anti-consensual stuff to each other as part of training

no and i mean some of these zines you read it's like it reads like a someone who's just like a ufc fan just bleed yeah it's like very just bleed like it's problematic so you see yeah you see a lot of that kind of like machismo deification um even in like radical circles right um which is unfortunate

and i think it also just puts a lot of people off to training um because what a lot of people say especially people who don't come from the martial arts what they'll say you know after doing their first session is like Things like, I really like that we listen to our own bodies.

I really like that there's an emphasis on consent. I really like that what we work on is very materialist in the sense that we decide what to work on based on what we observe while we're doing other things rather than just it being prescribed by the master or whatever. And what people, you know,

no one comes to me and says like, oh, I really liked how, you know, we just like grinded our way through these exercises. I mean, we don't do that. So like they would never say that. But like, you know, no one's coming to me really valuing like the machismo thing. hard-nosed aspect of martial arts.

Like people want to develop skills and really see how those skills like apply to their own bodies, which exists in their own communities, you know? So yeah, I think to go back to your question about, you know, advice for people trying to start their own collective,

be aware that like some of the things that you do that you might bring to the training space that come from MMA, that come from martial arts, that come from whatever you're doing, might actually be off-putting to people that want to come train with you or who are new to the art, who are new to training.

And if it's off-putting to them, it might not be their fault for being uncomfortable around that.

It might be because what you're doing is wrong. Something you mentioned earlier, which I wanted to touch upon, is burnout. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot. I've posted a few times about it. Trump's first presidency was over eight years ago. And since then, it's been nonstop organizing.

And you had COVID, Black Lives Matter, anti-Trump protests, and pro-Palestine protests. You also had these encampments that you mentioned where a lot of people, people who might not have even known each other, had to spend a lot of time in very close proximity with each other continuously

while trying to work together with high urgency and stress and stakes while constantly being attacked by fascists, while constantly being scared, constantly in fight or flight. It caused a lot of friction. Not everybody who came out of that ended up liking each other. There's a lot of dislike that came out of that. Anger turned inward.

So eight years ago, Trump kind of galvanized the left. It was also right after Bernie Sanders. So there was a lot of energy and a lot of new young radicals. Now everyone is a grizzled veteran. So watching it now and having lived through and having organized through it, it's different this time, this Trump presidency.

People are tired and angry. And I feel like The honeymoon period is over. Something we talk a lot about here in our conversations that we've been having on this podcast when it comes to martial arts and politics is power. and why we need to build power. And the people who have been on, who train, all get it.

But it feels like this is one of the few places that's talking about power. Because now, eight years later, a lot of the left is anti-building power, just anti-organizing, just anti-everything. They're fed up. They don't see hope. They don't see the point. And they have a lot of unprocessed resentment towards the left and themselves,

which they take out on everyone else. They don't want to be a reactionary, at least not yet. But at the same time, just as how you can get more mad at your own family or give them less grace, They're more angry at the left than they are at reactionaries because of proximity and because of expectations.

So there's a lot of mistrust right now of organizing and power. Because yeah, eight years later, things aren't better. But I did not really see what some call ultra-left behavior eight years ago. I mean, I did see it, but they were outliers and no one listened to them. Now, the most angry and loudest and the ones...

who every day are tearing down rather than building up, gain a lot of clout and followers because other people are angry. It would be better if these folks just walked away from the left, but they stay because they're fixated and want to fuck shit up.

They're still angry, and the more they feed into that, the angrier they get. Maybe this is how 60s radicals ended up becoming reactionaries today. We'll have to wait and see. But you've been on the ground floor of campus uprisings. You work directly with campus organizers. You're running a project that's trying to help manage burnout and energize people.

So what are your thoughts on building power and if you've seen that antagonism against it and what are things people can do to prevent burnout because you're still organizing and you never seem like you're ready to burn it all down?

I'm not ready to burn it all down, but that's because, you know, what we're talking about is like what we've built with my comrades and people that I care about that I know that I work with regularly, you know, and I think something about

maybe like this social media kind of era that we live in is that it's really easy to be a troll and like you get rewarded for being an inflammatory troll on the internet. Whereas you can't really get away with that kind of behavior in an in-person space. Now, the problem is, obviously, we've gone through a pandemic.

A lot of the work that we do in many organizing spaces is just online. It's on the Signal Chat. It's on a Discord. It's on a whatever. So you have a lot more of this opportunity. And let's face it, people who are kind of raised in this era of trolls being rewarded on the internet.

And so I think... With that situation, it becomes really difficult to build power because you always have or you frequently have this person that is willing to, like you said, just tear it all down for just for, you know, the sake of being right on the Internet. And they'd rather tear everything down than, you know,

work with a group of people and build it, build that thing into what they want it or need it to be. now on the importance of building power I think you know we as like a left movement, we need to acknowledge that compared to the right, compared to fascism or to the police, Zionists, whoever we're talking about,

we have like relatively little power and, um, few resources. So that's all the more reason why we need to come together and build power and understand what that power looks like and what it can look like. And, um, you know, how, how we can achieve that. But, um, The problem is, you know,

if you have these kind of bad faith individuals or the groups are always open to these kind of bad faith individuals is that type of discussion just always. It slows down, you know, what we do and what we can accomplish, and it's also it's not. based in any kind of unified objective it's what that person individually thinks

should be happening individually wants individually needs just based on their own ego a lot of time um and sometimes these are you know smart people who are well read who have all the college degrees um but if you're not working with other people and you're not having those conversations

and you're not willing to have your own opinion be checked, it becomes kind of hard to work with you. And it's also, you know, we're in an age where people can be so visible for being like quote unquote leftists without ever actually having to step into an organizing space,

whether that be a physical one or an online one. keyboard warriors yeah yeah i mean there's a lot of like keyboard warriors i'm happening there's a lot of you know especially seeing in these like broad coalition groups i'm in there's people who kind of just like they just want to fuck shit up because they're mad i

And I don't mean to say that to like diminish their opinions or their experiences or anything, but like they come to the group and their only goals for the group is to get together and just like fuck shit up as much as possible. And they don't really want to like unify or organize or for any goal.

Or complaining about everybody. Or complaining about everybody. And while I sympathize with that, because I have all those feelings too, and I get burnt out too, and I get frustrated with my comrades and people that I organize with and people that I actually respect a lot. I get frustrated with these people sometimes.

You have to learn how to put your own feelings behind you for what's best for the collective. And if the collective agrees upon a course of action, You need to understand that sometimes it's better to... go with that course of action to try to achieve those agreed upon goals than to

just go behave as like a free actor. Because a lot of the time, even though you think you're just behaving autonomously or whatever, what you're doing could actually lead to other people getting hurt. And maybe you don't care about yourself getting hurt in your own body, which is your right to do so,

but you shouldn't bring in other people to potentially get harmed or martyred themselves for something that you decided upon. I like to think that the group is winning small victories in the battle against bad faith actors just because it's really easy to be a troll on the internet. It's a lot harder to be a troll

to the people that you see every week for you know boxing training so then let me

ask you this when do you know it's time to take a break from organizing or walk

away from it completely how would you recognize uh that maybe your burnout is causing you to do more hard than good um when should you take a step back from organizing um it's sort of a question that's like deeply rooted in, you know, your own awareness of your own emotions and your own behavior. Um,

but if you find that, um, you basically have nothing to contribute to a collective in the sense that, um, maybe you're just too tired. You can't like stay awake during the meeting. Right. Um, you can't, uh, you can't, you know, come to any actions, you can't do whatever.

Um, it might be time to take a break for the purpose of building capacity for yourself, right? Building back your own capacity, right? Um, I think a lot of the times with like hardcore organizers, the kind of mentality is like, you know, no breaks, like we're doing this all the time, full time, forever for our lives,

which is respectable. But it's not really practical for a lot of people. You know, like I said, a lot of us, we are organizing as something that we do in addition to our full time jobs, our lives, our families, what have you. if you no longer have those things in your life,

like if you no longer have a life because you're just organizing all the time, you might want to consider how sustainable that is in terms of just like your emotional well-being. Because it's a lot better to take a short break and just get off signal for like a

week than to get fed up and frustrated and have like a falling out with your comrades or with just the other people you're in community with and then be out of organizing forever. So in terms of how do you know, it's different for everyone. Everyone is... they know their capacity in their own unique ways. But, um,

what I would say is that if you feel like your capacity is just being overfilled, right? Like you don't have, you don't have the energy or the time or the whatever you need to do basic things for your life. Like, you know, just do your laundry, eat meals. Um, you're losing sleep, right?

Some of us, you know, um, The burnout doesn't necessarily come from the amount of work we do, but just the amount of straight-up traumatizing material that we'll see on social media. Some of the most dedicated organizers that I know who got me into organizing, who are strong people who do an incredible amount of work,

who are just incredibly dedicated to their causes. The most burnout I've seen them deal with was just seeing images constantly of children being killed, of brutal gore, violence that we've seen in the last year in the Israel-Palestine conflict. With them, the burnout wasn't

so much related to the work they were doing it was related to like the media they were consuming and so the break that they had to make for themselves wasn't just around like the work they were doing it was about like literally what they're

consuming every day um so i'd say you know you have to be aware of what's causing your burnout because it could just be something that you know isn't really about the frequency of what you're doing. It could just be that like something that you're doing isn't really, you know, it isn't really right for you.

Um, there are some tasks that my org Leon, uh, will, you know, ask us to do that. I personally am just really bad at. I'm not really good at going out and asking people for donations, asking people to give up their money to donate to some cause or whatever.

So when we have fundraising, I'm usually one of the lower performing members of our group. And it's something that causes anxiety for me to do. But that doesn't mean that there aren't other things that I can be doing for the org, for the collective that don't drain my capacity so much.

So I think people just need to understand that we use this word capacity a lot to just mean your amount of ability to do something. And it could be related to the time you have to accomplish certain things. It could just be related to

you know, the, the space you can afford in your brain to like, think about all these things. Um, but you need to, as you start organizing, as you continue to organize wherever you are, as you're listening to this, you need to identify what builds your capacity and then what really, really,

really hampers your capacity and then take that and do with it what you will. You know, I, it's hard for me to be prescriptive to everybody. Cause again, like people are just so different. I know people who, you know, get burnt out doing things that are just easy for other people and other people who

have things that are easy for them that are like impossible for everyone else.

And, uh, this is the problem with prescription.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's, um, it's really about like listening to yourself and, Being aware that it's okay to take breaks if it's for an objective. There's a difference between taking a break and just taking a bunch of time off and being on a forever vacation versus taking a break so that you can build capacity

for yourself later. And that's probably the best advice I can really give without getting into a specific situation or anything like that.

So along these lines, like the debate between organizing and anti-organizing, another debate is about theory and whether you need it or not. But when it comes to movement practices, like physical movement, motor learning, the learning of movement, or just learning in general, theory is great because it's flexible. Rather than memorizing a specific way to do something,

if you understand the theory or a concept behind it, or understand the why, you can make up your own way. If you and I both know the theory behind something, we are both free to interpret it our own way to what suits us, and we do.

You and I have very different movement styles, and we're both applying the same theories. And the nice thing about sparring is it's objective reality, unlike arguing online. So we get to see and feel how well this works. And everyone at the LMA Learning Lab, including yourself,

have all gotten good quickly without training every day or even three times a week. Being anti-theory doesn't make you less authoritarian, but more so because whoever is teaching decides what everyone is memorizing. People think just doing this nicely makes it anti-authoritarian. But even if you take turns teaching, it's taking turns leading top-down banking model.

So can you speak to theory and why it's the alternative to rigid memorization? I think people who think no theory means more open-endedness when it's actually the opposite. It leads to rigid memorization and prescription.

Yeah. And I think people think no theory and what they might not realize is even if you're doing something without a specific theory attached to it, that doesn't mean that there isn't a theory attached to it. It just means you aren't explicitly saying it.

So it's like those commercial gyms that we criticize, there's a theory to how they work, right? There's a theory to how they work and there's also a theory to what makes them sustainable as like a commercial venture as a like a business right um so understanding that there is theory theory applies to everything that we do whether

we like or not so it's your choice whether you want to be conscious of it or not I think it's a good idea to be conscious of it. I think a lot of people on the left think it's a good idea to be conscious of theory,

and especially the theory that was developed by people who've done it in the past and who have failed or succeeded doing it in the past, because then we can learn from their failures and successes. But also, this was a project that... was made as an offshoot of my organizing and our organizing and our orgs.

It was to bring our orgs together. And those orgs operate under theory, right? Even if people within those orgs call themselves like anti-authoritarians or anarchists or whatever, they're like, screw theory, screw reading, reading is authoritarian, blah, blah, blah. There's still principles and theories that guide our orgs, that guide the organizers that we look up to,

the organizers and activists that we look up to from history. So to acknowledge that there's theory in those political spaces and then not apply theory to something that we're doing, like martial arts, just kind of seemed wrong. And also, I mean, not only did it just seem wrong, but

I can't really imagine operating this collective without having the experience of like working with my org and actually seeing how the org operates. And the org operates the way it does because we're informed by theory, right? We have community partners who write, who write about their experiences, write about

the theory of why their experiences went a certain way or didn't go a certain way. There is, you know, like a political model and a whole, like, there's a set of political education that we have to go through as organizers to do the work that we do. And we don't just do it for fun.

Like, it really actually does enhance our ability to accomplish and recognize our objectives. So if you don't have theory, you have no methodology, you have no pathway to accomplish your objectives. You're just going through the motions, right? And if you're just going through the motions, it's kind of like what you said about the boot camp earlier.

There's a thousand YouTube videos of high-intensity exercise routines that you can just do, but they aren't going to teach you how to be comfortable in a fight. If you have a theory of pedagogy that builds that comfort, well, now you at least have a pathway. Even if it's wrong, even if it's not effective on the first day,

you have something that you can modify, like a model.

You have a starting point.

You have a starting point, precisely. You're not just... trying to figure out what works from a blank slate. And why should you? Why should you do that if there's so many people that have done it before you? And succeeded or failed. You need to learn both. You need to learn why people are failing.

Because we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in if the history of organizing and activism was just a bunch of successes. It's actually, especially in America, it's actually been a bunch of failures. And, um, that's not to disrespect any of the people that come before me far from it. Right.

It's not to disrespect any of the martyrs far from it. It's just, um, we have to be honest. We have to be materialist about like, are we doing this because, uh, you know, we're trying to like pay tribute to someone or are we doing this because like it

will work in theory based on what we have observed in the past and what we know to be true. Um, So yeah, I mean, it's, it's hugely important. Um, I think theory, even, even, you know, like a boxing coach, uh, a martial arts coach who's completely separate from any kind of like politic or like organizing or whatever,

they have their own methodology and theory of how they get their students better. They aren't just showing up and being like, all right, I mean, maybe some of them, you know, if you can keep clients like that, but, uh, Are they really getting results? I don't know.

You take something as simple as the theory of push and pull and think about how many different martial arts or techniques that came out of that, even like boxing, which is a grappling base, has ideas about push and pull. You could even apply that as an approach to life, as a theory. So that's the beauty of theory.

It's super flexible and it can be used in so many useful ways. and be used in so many successful ways. It can be successful in so many different ways. Whereas if you gave something super specific, well, that's the problem. It's too specific to ever work, ever. So with that said, I want you to finish this sentence.

My life without martial arts training would be?

Very boring. Like, I don't know... At first I was thinking, you know, it's not that it would be meaningless. I would still have lots of meaning in my life, but it would be, I think the meaning wouldn't be something that makes my heart beat faster, you know,

that I can do and look forward to week by week and sort of like how you said and like apply to the rest of my life. there's a lot of, you know, a lot of what you learn about, you know, yourself, um, about your own capacity.

I learned from doing martial arts in some capacity, you know, even before softball, like, really like one of the biggest things jujitsu taught me was that you know you don't need to tap out to every like uncomfortable situation that you find yourself in right because there's a point where you know you start jujitsu and someone puts you

in like an uncomfortable position not really a submission not really a choke and you're uncomfortable and you just tap out right away and um you kind of learn that there's ways to like move through these uncomfortable situations, these extremely unideal situations that are possible, you know, that you can figure out in the moment, right? Martial arts,

it's really something that I primarily do not to defend myself or even to stay in shape, but just because it brings me a huge amount of joy to do it. And it's always been that. Even when I started jiu-jitsu and martial arts,

and even in the back of my head where I had some notion of maybe self-defense or being a fighter or something like that, what really made me stay and enjoy it and find meaning in it was just... showing up and having fun and having fun with other people and finding that, you know, it's not so hard to,

like, socialize with these, like, people I don't know really that well or, you know, it's just not that hard to get out of your comfort zone and that you can actually be out of your comfort zone and still be, like, safe, still be okay and still be able to, like, navigate the waters.

I might change my answer later, but... And you're free to do that, right? Yeah, yeah, totally.

You're free to change.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Sam. I'll see you this Sunday.