(Note: Much of this revolves around intermale aggression, male power fantasies, and the paleolithic kabuki of male dominance rituals—but the message at the end is good for everyone, I promise.) Human societies are fascinated with strength and power, especially obvious personal power: height, musculature, and a hair-trigger willingness to do violence are eternally impressive to […]
There is nothing sexy about beating a man to death with a claw hammer. Okay, let’s rewind a little bit. Once upon a time I had two very different (and yet not so) conversations about what it is that we do. The first one involved a grandmother and her very young grandson who just happened […]
Sane, socialized people see resorting to violence as the unique purview of the frustrated simpleton, the enraged id unleashed, and the insane. By saying you are willing to use violence as a survival tool you are also saying (in the layperson’s mind) that you are a card-carrying member of one of those groups. Sane, socialized […]
Note: Another one from 2006, so the argument is rough-hewn. I make the same points better, later—but this stands as a hopefully interesting artifact showing the genesis of my thought process. Violence and How It Relates to Its Social Children: Martial Arts and Combat Sports Violence is eons older than polite society. It […]
Every now and again something gets stuck in my craw, jammed in there so tight that the only things that are going to get it out are a tire iron and a liberal dose of bile. Here’s some of both for three things that got stuck in there recently—lies I hear people tell themselves, and […]
No sane person wants to be involved in violence. If you did, all you’d have to do is run outside and punch the first person you saw in the neck as hard as you could. Getting involved in a violent act is easy—the fact that you don’t go looking for it is a testament to […]
“What should I do?” This is far and away the most frequent question I get when people find out what I do for a living, and what they really mean is, “What technique should I use?” My answer is always disappointing, because techniques are as useless as buying a gun and not training with it, […]
Note: Though I originally wrote this in 2012, it’s turned out to be a timeless reminder that is even more appropriate today. I was walking toward a store, thinking the everyday thoughts we immerse ourselves in when we tread familiar ground, blindly, when I suddenly became aware of the person in front of […]
(Title quote from the inestimable Johnny Cash.) One of the truths about studying violence is that it makes you really uninterested in being involved in it. Dramatic ass-kicking, on the other hand, is attractive—mainly because of your perception of increased social standing. “Teaching someone a lesson” makes you a badass… and who doesn’t want that? […]
If you have the nose for it, it’s more obvious than cartoon stink lines. One of our Master Instructors, Dave S., went on vacation to San Francisco. A great thing about that city is that unlike most west coast cities, it is almost entirely walkable. He spent a week there with his wife, sans car […]
“What did you do today to prevent being sexually assaulted?” Jackson Katz, a social researcher, asked the men in the room that question; they laughed. Then he asked the women. Image credit: Jennifer Wright The data is telling: Women live in a very different world than men, and, on balance, already know the preventative measures. […]
For want of an injury, the solution was lost. For want of a solution, the intent was lost. For want of intent, the initiation was lost. For want of initiation, the target was lost. For want of a target, the body was lost. For want of a body, the mind was lost. For want of […]
We don’t sell hammers—we teach hammering. Search the google-sphere for framing hammers, you’ll see everything from a $345 all-titanium super-hammer to the good old fashioned $24 generic California framing hammer. Nothing too dissimilar from the rock our ancestors tied to the top of a stick to help accelerate a hard object into another object to […]
…the work continues without pause, unabated. We train and teach violence as a survival tool constantly, never off the mats for more than two days in a row. We are in classes three days a week, with six-hour Saturdays every month (seventeen in a row so far). We continue to hold multi-day seminars, both public […]
Unless you’re a jerk, and then it’s your own fault you just made it personal… The unfortunate thing about the experience of consciousness is that we are, each of us, the star of our very own movie. The story is all about you, it happens to you, and you have screenwriter and director credit. (Of […]
“Violence is the race for the eye.” — Master Derrick Farwell When he was a young Marine, Derrick sought effective hand-to-hand combat training, going where stories of ass-kicking and dread reputation led. One night he ended up in a dingy karate studio; the instructor was a Vietnam-era Marine from Okinawa, a compact, no-nonsense man […]
That’s the question that has kept me sweating, bleeding, training — teaching — for 28 years. Whenever I’ve considered hanging it all up, I just thought of the last person who used it, who needed it, who would’ve been found by a corpse-sniffing dog in a ditch if they hadn’t known how to turn the […]
The brain can only go where it’s been before. When it comes down to it, all you will have during your attempted murder is your experience — not your motivation, your strength, or even your training — the only thing you’ll have is what you’ve done with your own hands in front of your own […]
During a training in Dallas, I visited my parents who live there, but whom I rarely get to see on account of living, working, and training in San Diego most of the year. While relaxing at their house between extended training sessions an incident occurred that got me thinking. We had all decided to sit […]
You are a mid-tier predator; your ancestors ate everything below them in the food chain, and were eaten by everything above. Big brains and fire dramatically altered that equation; we picked up a rock, then put an edge on it, then put that sharp rock on the end of a stick — and as that […]
We have a very simple dress code for seminar training — baggy, loose-fitting blue jeans and a heavy-duty, plain white T-shirt — and yet this generates a surprising amount of pushback from clients. They want to wear yoga pants, tactical BDUs, board shorts, anything but blue jeans; they show up in cute tops, T-shirts festooned […]
In the 28 years I’ve been teaching, the most common question I’ve heard is: “How is what you do different from self-defense, self-protection, or fighting?” (The question is usually about specific schools or popular styles, examples of which I refuse to list for reasons you’ll find at the end.) The simplest answer is: “Injury. We’re […]
In nature, everything takes from something else. There is no evil and there is no innocence. The relationship of predator and prey is a fixed equation, but the variables can be fluid. One day you are predating on a blueberry bush, the next day you’re lunch. So all animals, even apex predators like grizzly bears, […]
“Effective human incapacitation results from physiological phenomena.” † The goal of life-or-death violence is complete and irrecoverable incapacitation — to remove, entirely, the person’s ability to think or move. (Preferably both.) We are not attempting to communicate, or reason with, or change the mind of the person we are breaking. We are not trying to […]
Unlike most physical endeavors, ours has no target demographic. It’s not possible to tell whether or not our training will resonate by just looking at someone. I’ve seen young, smart, athletically-gifted people miss the point entirely and fail out of the first testing cycle; at the same time I’ve watched out-of-shape, “least-likely” people (who I’ve […]
