Does the world really need yet another self-defense blog? This is the question I asked myself after some students and interested laypeople again suggested that I start a blog of my own. They reassured me that lots of people would appreciate and benefit from easier access to my opinions, methodologies, research and experiences. While flattered, I had never been too keen on the idea and my next question was: “do normal adult people actually waste their time reading those things and worse yet, take that internet nonsense seriously”?
You see, I am kind of an “old school” sort of guy and a university educated professional self-defense instructor (is that an oxymoron?), so I take my credibility a tad seriously. Furthermore, I come from a time and educational background where you were obliged to be able to support your claims with actual facts; strange as that may seem. Opinions had to be logically defended and if you wanted anything you wrote not laughed at, you had to reference your sources and supply documented evidence. In other words, (now this is going to come as a shock to many bloggers and readers so prepare yourselves), you had to actually know what you were talking about and be able to prove anything you said! More importantly, anything you wrote for public consumption had to be accurate and verifiable. The internet put an end to all that silliness.
We now live entangled with a strange new parallel universe of, shall we say, “Intellectual deregulation”. Any rube with a keyboard, (assuming he has a spell-check function and a paid up Hydro bill for his Mom’s trailer), can spew his cerebral diarrhea into cyberspace and be able to share his penetrating insights with, and connect to, millions of other like-minded individuals.
We are talking about the kinds of people who otherwise might have kept their slack-jawed, resin stained mouths closed (not to mention, their Meth induced twitchy key board fingers quiet) out of the fear that if they expressed such things more visibly and less anonymously then their character, mental faculties and missing teeth might be revealed.
I hope I wasn’t being too subtle or understated in my characterization of the internet “opinions” mill so let me make it clear for you; I thought of the internet as the epitome of the term: “lowest common denominator”. Like Tim Ferris wrote in THE FOUR HOUR BODY, “Ah the Internet. How far we haven’t come.”
Did I really need to be part of that? For me the fun began when I started to conjure up mental images of what it would be like to have to combine the faceless “intellectual dream world” of the internet with the weird and wacky “ego fantasy land” of the martial arts. I was having visions of being obligated to deal with the kinds of personalities and intellects you might produce if you forced mental patients to drop acid. Did I really want to spend my precious time and energy writing meticulously researched articles and fact based “posts” supported by hard data, all for an audience that would probably hate and malign the stuff because it was…well…meticulously researched, fact based and supported by hard data?
I could just hear the responses and rebuttals to my painstakingly written and cogently argued personal-protection power polemics (try saying that five times fast). I thought most of them would sound something like this: “You don’t know anything! Because my chi power is so much greater than yours!!!” (Yea, read that line out load while doing your best Darth Vader voice). Or: “My instructor said you are soooo wrong and he is the ultimate authority because he is my instructor and he said so and he could never lie to me or to his other three students.” (This one works best in a whinny ten-year old girl’s voice). How about the classic: “How dare you insult my style, the name of our system is not spelled ‘Moo Wang Doo Doo Suk Bang Po’ but rather ‘Moo Wang Doo Doo Suk Bang Poo’ and you would know that if you knew anything about the martial arts”. My personal favorite: “If you don’t stop telling the truth I’m going to pummel you!” (I like to do this one with an Arnie-esk Austrian accent while pounding the table). And finally: “I love your latest post” (OK, that one would be from my sister).
You see, while a little bit of an exaggeration (and I do mean just a little bit) I have suffered through multiple versions of all these conversations and worse over the years. Therefore, it did not sound like a very gratifying experience or best investment of my time to be fielding thousands more of the same while being driven deaf from the keyboard cacophony. I mean what hard-working professional wants the aggravation of having to deal with all the martial arts loonie tunes in the numbers the internet could generate? Man, think about it, on the internet every one has an opinion (and it seems the more moronic the more forcefully they regurgitate it) and in the wacky world of self-defense and martial arts, every one is an expert.
Oh, did I forget to tell you? I am not the biggest fan of my own chosen martial arts profession. I’ve been compelled to be extremely critical of this martial arts/self-defense industry, as I believe you should be, and have been rather outspoken about it for many years. I started out as a young, very idealistic student and instructor and it took me a long while to finally realize that the martial arts world and the self-defense industry by extension, was largely and apologetically, a “pseudo profession”.
Yes, a completely deregulated pseudo profession in the same way that astrology is a pseudo-science. It is all most an anti-profession in the sense that every one markets “self defense”(because that is what people want and need) but the industry is actually in the business of selling you everything else but.
To be perfectly honest, I have often been ashamed to be involved in my chosen profession and have encountered more flakes, phonies, charlatans, pretenders, sycophants, toadies, weirdos, whack-jobs and just plain old-fashioned scammers in my martial arts dealings, than I have in all the other aspects of my life combined; and this was just among the high level guys and leaders of the industry!
Thus, I haven’t always been very popular in some martial arts circles. Basically I was the kid saying “look the emperor has no clothes!”(at least none that fit over his huge belly or swollen head) . Or less metaphorically : “Your great master instructor is grossly obese and looks like a slob who hasn’t worked out in years because…well…he is an obese slob that hasn’t worked out in years.”
Or how about: “yes, I am leaving your ridicules Karate organization (after having devoted years of my life to it) because you gave a guy a 5th, degree Black Belt for swinging a wooded stick around.” In other words for doing one staff kata( and this was the same guy who got a 4th degree black belt just the year before even though he had forgotten some of his kata on that occasion.) Yea, it was probably a good idea to just have him do one kata to avoid the embarrassment of him screwing up again.
I sure didn’t need the aggravation, it didn’t sound like a very gratifying or productive undertaking. It had been bad enough at my personal Academy where for years I had to deal with these types that wandered in or I had been forced to do business with and I had a large degree of quality control. I was not looking to have the opportunity for the thousands more that the internet could promptly supply.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite, the internet is indispensable for a lot of stuff but it is also the perfect place for certain kinds of people and things. It may be perfect for things like porn sites, slanderous gossip or semi-illegal products and services but I didn’t think it was right for me. In other words, it’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to blog there.
However, this attitude began to change when I was approached by a company that wanted to bring my methods to a much wider audience. soon after the launch of my basic self-defense APP (THE TOP TEN MOST COMMON STREET ATTACKS program) in 2012; it quickly rose to become the #1 bestselling self-defense APP on the Apple network. I was told that this meant it was #1 in 35 countries, which basically meant the world!
It wasn’t Bruce Lee, Dana White the Gracie’s or any other high-profile source, it was little o’l me and that was pretty cool and much unanticipated. What was even more unanticipated were all the phone calls and e-mails literally from around the world from sincere, well-meaning and sometimes knowledgeable people who were interested in and appreciative of the material. This was quite gratifying and a far cry from all the negative flakes, slanderous weirdos and malicious self-proclaimed guardians of martial arts truth that I had anticipated and that the internet is woefully full of. I was pleasantly surprised that there was so little of that.
The more normal decent people who I dealt with, and who were just trying to navigate through the same bizarre self-defense world of bloated bellies or bloated egos, that I was- the more my sense of responsibility grew. I’m a pretty conscientious guy and I was using up a lot of time, energy and racking up quite a phone bill returning all those long distance phone calls, often to relay the same kind of info as the call before. I started to think that there must be a more efficient, not to mention less expensive, ways to keep in touch with those people, update them without compromising my intellectual and ethical standards and be able to just share data and quality information…thus, for those people, like the old beer commercial says… “this blog’s for you!”