Episode 832 - Dr. Kobey Shwayder
Dr. Kobey Shwayder is a Martial Arts practitioner and instructor at Brattleboro Yongmudo.
Teaching excites me and it makes me look really hard at whatever topic I'm teaching and not look at just from my point. Trying to look at it from someone else's point of view and in a way gives me a much deeper understanding of what it is that I'm doing. And a much greater understanding and enjoyment of what I'm doing.
Dr. Kobey Shwayder - Episode 832
Borrowing and integrating techniques from different martial arts is not a new thing. Dr. Kobey Shwayder is a strong advocate for cross-training in martial arts. He believes that by exploring other martial arts and learning from different instructors, practitioners can gain valuable insights and expand their skill set. Dr. Shwayder also teaches a self-defense class at Brattleboro Yongmudo, which he sees as a way to get people interested in protecting themselves and to introduce them to the idea of using their bodies in new and effective ways.
In this episode, Dr. Kobey Shwayder talks about his journey to the Martial Arts and why cross-training can give martial artists a broader perspective and develop a well-rounded approach to their training. Besides martial arts, Dr. Shwayder holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (2015). However, after facing difficulties in finding jobs in the ever-dwindling academic job market, he chose to leave academia to pursue his hobbies as a career. In 2020, he launched Vermont Vermouth, which makes craft vermouth using local ingredients. Dr. Shwayder is also passionate about cooking, baking, and playing the viola da gamba.
Show notes
You can follow Dr. Kobey Schwayder on the following social media platforms:
FB/IG @BrattleboroYongmudo
brattleboroyongmudo.com
Show Transcript
Jeremy Lesniak:
Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio episode 832 with today's guest, Dr. Kobe Schwayder. I'm Jeremy Lesniak. I'm your host here for the show, founder of whistlekick, and an avid, passionate, dedicated traditional martial artist. You've been around for a while, you know that, but maybe you're new. And if you are new, I want you to go to whistlekick.com. And even if you're not new, I want you to go to whistlekick.com because I spend a lot of time working on cool stuff with a great team who also works on super cool stuff and we put references to all of it at whistlekick.com. Maybe you think whistlekick is just this podcast. It's not, it's not even close. We've got everything from events and training certifications to at-home training programs, protective equipment, free content, books, lots of it. And if you find some stuff in the store you want to buy, use the code podcast15, gets you 15% off nice and easy. whistlekickmartialartsradio.com is the place to go or the website for this show, everything related to this show is over there. You can leave us a tip, sign up for the newsletter, lots of good stuff going on over there as well as every single episode we've ever done. Now if you don't want to do those things but maybe you want to support us in other ways, share stuff, tell people, review stuff, patreon.com/whistlekick,consulting services, lots of great stuff that we do to cover the bills and deliver even more value to all of you out there. Now speaking of value, we are bringing you a valuable episode, one that might make you think a little bit differently about training. Today, my conversation with Kobe, we talk about, I don't want to call it a unique style of martial arts, but an uncommon approach to martial arts that may or may not be rooted in academia and that sort of philosophy, but regardless, we have some great conversation. I enjoy picking his brain on things that I bet you'll all enjoy hearing this stuff too. Makes you think. And if you like to think, well, you're going to love this episode. Hey, Kobe. Thanks for being here.
Kobe Schwayder:
Thank you.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah. To the audience, you know, we just had a little bit of a technical stumble. We've talked about it, I don't know that we've talked about it on the show yet, but we're in the process of moving from Zoom to another platform and Zoom was being grumpy. So now we're on the other platform. So this is the first guest recording we've done on this new platform. So, if it makes it and people can see it and hear it, we did it right. And I guess if they don't, then they wouldn't know anyway. It is a frustration at times. How much technology do you have in your day-to-day life?
Kobe Schwayder:
It depends on the day. So there's some days where I'm doing, you know, lots of my computer and Zoom calls and other days I'm actually manufacturing things. And so I'm not actually looking at a computer all day, which is nice.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah. Yeah. You're manufacturing is the thing that I know about that you do, right?
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Which, you know, I have these theories about martial artists gravitating into certain fields. You know, we've got, there's a lot of guests on the show who are in IT. We've seen a decent number in medicine in some capacity, right? You know, let's break them and then heal them back together. But I think you may be the first person involved professionally in alcohol that we have had on the show. So I don't think that there's an archetype of martial artist there. Is there any synergy for you? Does your vermouth business correlate at all with your views on martial arts?
Kobe Schwayder:
That's an interesting question, man. I haven't been asked that before.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Good, coming out strong right off the bat.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, yeah. At first I'd say no, but now as I'm thinking about it, you know, there's a lot of sort of creativity within limits which, you know, martial arts is all about. You know you have certain rule sets or certain forms that you're doing that then you have your own sort of expression of in that. There's certainly, you know, the fact that I've been practicing martial arts helps me when I'm doing physical things, you know, manufacturing, you're doing lots of physical credit like understand that, oh, I want to be moving in this particular way and not that way so they don't injure myself. That's our stuff. And yeah, yeah. That's why I came up with that topic.
Jeremy Lesniak:
How does one get into making vermouth? It's so specialized.
Kobe Schwayder:
So there's a couple different strands of life story that go into that. So, I've always been a sort of flavor person. I like cooking and baking and making spice blends and home brewing and pickling and things like that. That's just sort of been something I've always been into. And as I was looking for something else to do with my life, so my initial track in my life was in Academia. I went there, I have a PhD in Linguistics and I spent several years doing a postdoc and sort of looking for a professor that just like wasn't happening. And I sort of banging my head against that. I had several friends who had things happen like one of them who was one of my cohort mates got her dream job and then ended up like hating it. She wasn't doing anything she wanted to be doing with it. One of my other friends was actually my head instructor down in Philly, was a professor, and didn't get tenure, not because of anything he did, but because the department decided they didn't want to give anybody tenure that year. And when you don't get tenure, you lose your job. It's not like, oh, try again next year. It's like you're gone.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Oh, okay.
Kobe Schwayder:
So, those sort of things happening around me with people I knew, I was like, huh, maybe like before I, you know, spend five more years, you know, doing this thing, trying to get somewhere I want to go that I might not like anyway. Maybe I should see if there's something else I want to do. And so in the meantime, my friends here in Brattleboro at Hermit Thrush Brewery, I've been good friends with the owners for many years. They had just started. They were looking for people, they knew I did homebrewing. They sort of knew me as a person. And so I sort of came up with them just to take a break for a while to like figure out what I wanted to do with my life and have something to do while I was figuring it out. And that got me more interested in sort of doing alcohol to production scale, sort of some training about like how to do alcohol as a professional scale instead of just in a bucket in my basement.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It's just a great visual. Well, I love the imagery there. Thank you.
Kobe Schwayder:
There's nothing wrong with that. And there's not a big, there's a little bit of difference and there's some, you know, large scale differences, things, but you know, a lot of the stuff is the same, just, you know, you're using large buckets instead of small buckets. Vermouth in particular, I got interested in I was making a cocktail at home, it was probably 15 or 20 years ago now. And you know, the recipe says put an ounce of vermouth and I picked up the bottle and looked at it and said, okay, but what is this? And so I took my academic training and started doing some research on what it was. And it's actually pretty secretive. The big companies are not very clear about what they're making, what they're doing.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Really? Oh wow!
Kobe Schwayder:
And I find a lot of people I talked to, like at farmers markets and things like that, don't know what vermouth is. And so I find that the sort of education is a lot of my job. So there's another connection to martial arts is the education side of it is very important to me. So as I was looking at, you know what I could be doing, it seemed like there might be an opening in the market for vermouth. We had a big boom in craft beer. There's a boom in craft spirits. Lots of people are doing craft cocktails and lots of bars and restaurants are, you know, they have really wonderful local food and get local produce. And they're starting to have their bar programs, pick up local spirits and stuff also. And there aren't very many, there's been a huge boom in vermouth in Spain, especially the last 10 or 15 years, and the rest of Europe for about five or 10 years. And as Seems like it's just starting to come over to the U.S. a little bit. I knew before the pandemic, I knew of another like 10 or 15 other small companies or small people that were starting up sort of small vermouth production. I don't know who survived the pandemic so far and what the scene looks like now. But that sort of got me started. So I started, I opened the files beginning of 2020. It wasn't supposed to be a pandemic business. I opened just before in February, right before everything shut down for the pandemic. So it sort of morphed into that. And so we're, you know, I'm still chugging along. We'll see how it does. I guess the business has survived for 3 years now so that's something I'm already going to do.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If you're still chugging along after what we went through over the last few years, I'd say there's a good shot. And, you know, we'll take a hard left here in a moment and talk about martial arts. Personally, this was interesting to me. But for the audience, what is vermouth?
Kobe Schwayder:
So vermouth is wine that's infused with botanicals, herbs and spices, and then fortified with a little bit of brandy. Beyond that, what wine, what botanicals, how much you sweeten it, that's sort of all up to the maker or which particular product you're making. So a lot of people have a particular idea of what vermouth tastes like because they've had Like Martini and Rossi, which is the biggest company in the world. But that's just one flavor. I like to say that's like having Bud Light and assuming that's what all beer tastes like.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There seems to be a little bit of judgment as in flavor. No, maybe that is the right word. There's a…
Kobe Schwayder:
No, there's a time and a place for it. Like there's nothing wrong with it. It's just, you know, it's one particular, you know, expression. So I guess the other quick thing I'll say about is a lot of people know, only know vermouth as sort of a cocktail ingredient or as an ingredient. They'll, you know, famously Churchill, you know, you look at the bottle of vermouth and then you pour the gin into the glass and drink the gin. And I think that comes out of people not having very good vermouth or having fruit that spoiled. It's a wine product. It will go mad eventually. It's not like a spirit that will last indefinitely. And so if you have an old bottle of cheap vermouth that's been at the back of someone's bar for 10 years, it's not going to taste good. And so, yeah, you're not going to want to put any in your cocktail because it won't make it taste good. But when you have really beautiful fresh vermouth that's delicious, you can do what the Europeans do and just drink it on its own as a pair of tea for digestive or, the classic sort of Spanish way is as a spritz. So over ice a little bit of soda water and like an orange twist or a lemon twist or something like that. It's a really nice, low-alcohol, refreshing cocktail that's complex. It's got lots of botanicals and flavors to it. But isn't going to kill you over the head with alcohol.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Speaking of complexity, here's a segue. I love when interview hosts always ruin their segues by pointing out that they're making a segue. And so I cannot help doing it because I find it funny. Anyway, we're here to talk about martial arts. That might be one of the longer nonmartial arts intros that we've done. I'm totally fine with that. But we are going to talk about martial arts so we can. Let's do this. We're not going to do what I normally do. We're not going to do the predictable thing because we haven't done that yet. So why, why change? What does your training look like now?
Kobe Schwayder:
My training now, I have three days a week of classes. So I have a Sunday morning class and then Monday and Wednesday evening classes. And I've got just a handful of people I'm sort of trying to grow my club here, but also as it's not my primary job, it sort of takes second sheet to things that I'm doing on a daily basis. So like, I'm kind of okay with the fact that it's a little bit small at the moment.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What are you teaching? What are you teaching?
Kobe Schwayder:
So I teach Yongmudo or Hapkido is the style. My particular school of it, we've been calling it Yongmudo, but it comes out of the Hapkido tradition. And we do a little bit of everything. I sort of like to say that I go around and I try other martial arts and I steal things from them and then bring them back and integrate them in. It was, we're traditionally, originally a combination of traditional Hapkido and Taekwondo and Judo and a couple other Korean, like Ssireum and some other indigenous Korean arts. But that was like in the ‘70s when Young Budo was being created. And now, we like to borrow a little bit from everything. So I like to say, you know, I also cross-train with, we have a great Jiujitsu program here in West Brat that I'm at the same dojo, we're at real holiday Taekwondo here. And they're right, they're one of their classes right after my class. So I often stay and train with them. So I bring a lot of that stuff back when I see something that's I'm like, oh, this is really cool. That like fits really nicely in here. Or, you know, I've cross-trained with a lot of other arts. I've done Aikido, Muay Thai, BJJ, Japanese Jiujitsu, a handful of things too. Especially since our young widow is sort of modern and doesn't like we don't have any of the traditional forms or things like that, we don't practice those. And so I like to, you know, sort of say that everything is part of this and there's nothing that's excluded. So it's not like I can look at something, oh, you know, that's taekwondo and not karate, and therefore we're not going to do it because we're a taekwondo school or whatever. I say, oh, no, like, that's cool, I can totally, I see how your little tweak on, you know, the way we do the shroud house kick makes it faster. And so if I wanted to do it faster that way. I'm going to do it, this little tweak on the roundhouse cake makes it more powerful. And therefore, if I wanted to do a more powerful version, I could do it this way. And I think both of those are great and useful and have their place. And so I like to incorporate lots of those. So yeah, I've got back to the training question. I've got those three classes a week that I do training and then I hang around with the jujitsu club also besides that. And yeah, that's what I'm doing. Currently, I did have a separate like beginner self-defense class that was on Sundays that sort of petered out, but I'm looking to start up another one actually at my gym, outer limits gym, which are our small local gym here owned by a local guy, which I like to support. And so we're in the process of like putting out fillers and seeing if any of the gym members are interested in what time that sort of thing. So it'd be great to have sort of a self-defense class. I like to teach those for people who aren't necessarily interested in continuing martial arts, although maybe I'll get them interested and they'll continue, but just like feel the need to like, oh, you know, there's been these things happening. I want to protect myself. And it's a great way to sort of get people to think that they can do things with their body or with other people's bodies that they didn't necessarily think that they could.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It can be a wonderful feeder and I know a lot of schools that run it in that way. Especially, you know, just in, I think we can throw that this out as a tip to other school owners, one of the nice things about self-defense programs is that they're often for a limited time, you know, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, whatever. And for a lot of people wrapping their head around something that it has a cut-off is a lot easier than I'm going to go do martial arts and it's going to be Monday and Wednesday for the rest of my life. That can be terrifying to some people. I want to talk about philosophically a lot of what you just said about the borrowing, you know, I'm used to, you know, personally, I mean, you know, some of the people I hang out with, you know, this is important to me. I like the borrowing, the sharing, but it almost sounds like that is baked into your style maybe even is too harsh of a term, your philosophy? Your stylistic philosophy? Definitely. I, I think so.
Kobe Schwayder:
Definitely. I think so. And some of it is because we do so many things. You know, we do kicks, we do strikes, we do blocks, we do throws, we do joint locks, we do groundwork, we do strikes on the ground. So it's almost like we don't have enough time in our curriculum to actually cover everything that we want to cover. And it is actually baked into our curriculum, at least has been for a long time that especially when people are starting to train for their black belt or their first Dan that they're supposed to go cross-train with somebody. Like, it's not like, oh, no, you don't, but it's like, no, like pick some aspect that you like or find a class that fits your schedule that, you know, we only have three or four classes a week. You know, you need to be training six or seven days a week for the next six months to get up to the level that we want you at. Like, go find a judo class or go find a jiujitsu class or karate class or whatever you want. And like, go there, learn from them, and bring it back to us. And so there's a lot of that sort of built in and just the knowledge that like, I'm never going to be as good at judoka as someone who spends all their time doing judo. And therefore I want to go learn from that person. They have much more, you know, insight than me, and then I can learn from them and bring back. And I'm never going to, you know, be as good a striker as someone who's doing Taekwondo all the time, but I can go and drop in on their class and learn stuff.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So is this the way your instructor taught you this sort of philosophy?
Kobe Schwayder:
Definitely.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Okay.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, there's a little bit, we're actually, we can talk about this more that our sort of national organization, Yongmudo USA is just starting to get organized as a national organization. And so we're having some debates about this between the different, there are only a handful of clubs around the country, but, you know, between us. But certainly, so I come from, I started training at Harvard and then at Temple, which is now PhillyYongmudo. And both my instructors at both places were very much of the opinion that they had also cross-trained other things, were very much of the opinion that it's very helpful and brings back in that there's more than one way to do things and different body types and different philosophies do it. And therefore, you should go learn about it and figure out what works best for you and if you're thinking about becoming an instructor, figure out how you can teach people who are different from you. So when you come, you know, I'm, you know, I'm average height, but you know, I'm relatively strong and flexible now. And when I have someone who's slightly shorter and less flexible than me, how do I teach them how to do a high kick? Or when I have someone who's taller and skinny, how do I teach them how to do a hip throw? You know, I've got to be able to adapt the way that I do it to at least show someone how to do it, even if that's not the way I'm going to do it myself.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Wow! I found this fascinating because it tends to be someone that goes rogue and they say, okay, I'm going to do what you taught me. I'm going to teach it, but I'm also going to do this other thing over here. I'm also going to train this other thing. I'm also going to encourage my students over here. So we now have this kind of like third school type, right? We've got the time you do what I say and only what I say and that's that. People know how I feel about that. You have what I think a lot, I don't know if I would say most, but at least very many schools do these days, which is while you're here, you do my thing. If you want to go do something else, that's cool. Just, you know, be aware that doing too many things at once is going to make it harder for you to progress at any one, right? Like that's a fairly balanced way of handling it. But now that we've got this third kind where, no, this is, you absolutely need to go and train in other things. How do you handle that within the context of class? I'm curious.
Kobe Schwayder:
So, I think it would be harder and maybe even not possible if I had larger classes, right? If I'm trying to teach 20 people at a time, then it's going to be more difficult to be like, oh, by the way, you know, the variant that John is doing over here is this sort of thing and the variant that Steve is doing over here is this sort of thing. And so I think that may be where there's some differences. Whereas because I have, you know, there's only four or five people in my class. Big class days. I can do that. I mean, like, hey, like I'm a lumper. I'm gonna lump all of these variations together into one technique but note that, you know, you're gonna like it this way because you're tall and you're gonna like this way because you're short and that's okay. And we can talk about those different to sort of have a little more individuation of what the techniques look like.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It sounds like there might be a higher than average amount of conversation in your classes.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yes, we're also super nerdy about it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I love it.
Kobe Schwayder:
I know there are lots of martial arts we're super nerdy about. I found that, especially Yongmudo because at least the history of the American Yongmudo, it comes out of University of California, Berkeley in the ‘70s. Where Dr. Min, who's sort of our founder in the U.S., came over from Korea and started the martial arts club there. So basically our little sub school comes from people who are at Berkeley in like the ‘70s through ‘90s. And then you're either still there or like got a professorship so, you know, they were undergrads in the grad school. They got a professor somewhere else and started a club there. So like, it's lots of people in academia. So we're already nerds about other things. And then we come into martial arts with it. So my instructor at Harvard used to say no Harvard questions because people, we would literally get questions we're talking about, I don't know, press kick. They'd be like, there must be an optimal angle for me to bring my foot up such that when I come down, it has the maximum velocity. Like, yeah, I'm sure there is, but I can't tell you what it is. You've got to feel it, right? And so, you know, sometimes we can go overboard with trying to analyze that too much, but we'd get a lot of this where, you know, people are looking at these very sort of in a very academic way where we want to do these comparisons and sort of figure out what is going on in a way that I find really interesting because, you know, I'm a big academic nerd, but, you know, that's me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And I'm the same way, right? And I think that it is likely that those of us who enjoy the research, the discussion, the comparison, that sort of intellectuals side of martial arts end up cross training simply because we're forcing ourselves, okay, it's like this over here. It's like this over here. I'm going to make myself have to reconcile the two of those in some way and I mean, look at what I do for a job, right? I have a, we're not training. We're literally just talking about martial arts. You're the second of three people I'm talking about martial arts with today. So I get it. Does this approach, I'm pretty sure I know the answer. Does this approach of academic and discussion and I guess adventure insightful? Are there people that come through the door in a few classes and they're like, I just want you to tell me how to kick. I can't handle this.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yes, I think sometimes. I think up to now, so this is my club here is the first time I've not been in an academic set.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Okay.
Kobe Schwayder:
It's always otherwise been, you know, extracurricular clubs at university. So I'm still sort of trying to figure out like, it definitely feels different. We do have Yongmudo does have a club in North Carolina that has been in a community center forward. They've probably been there 20 or 30 years now. And so I often talk with them about what they're doing because they're not in an academic setting and they're much more community based. And so trying to figure out sort of what they're doing and what I can borrow. Yes. So I do find people that come through and want that. And I can tell them, like I can teach them the way that I learned and that I did. And that I do that way, and that's okay. I find that less interesting. The thing I haven't run into yet, which I would expect to someday is to have someone come in who just wants to like almost wants the more traditional form, like I'm gonna teach, you know, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, here's step four, and we're just gonna practice that 20 times until you get it down. And I don't know, I find that boring. I get bored really quickly. So I'm always like, you know, here's step one, step two, here's an alternate step two, here's an alternate step three, here's an alternate step four. Like sometimes I try to get people to the place I want to go by going around the sides of it rather than just making them practice the same thing over again. So, my beginner's been working on forward rolls because following is one of the most important things I think we teach people. And I rather than just making them do what I'm going to consider basic forward roll. And again, we've been working on sort of other things like front arm only forward roll, back arm only forward roll, forward roll starting from a side, forward roll starting from the other side, forward roll with someone pushing you. So not that I necessarily expect them to get good at those peripheral things yet, but I think each of them will teach them a slightly different aspect of the normal forward roll that they'll hopefully then at some point they can synthesize back into them and make their basic forward roll really good that way.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So that kind of opens a question around progression, right? And I think that I've got a guess because this is also how I kind of like to teach, but a lot of folks are going to come in from a more rigid traditions. And I think the major argument that one could make against that is, well, they're not going to learn as efficiently. Is that what you found?
Kobe Schwayder:
I think it depends on what the goal of the learning is, and it depends on what you mean by efficient and over what time scale. So certainly if I had to…
Jeremy Lesniak:
We needed a definition section before we started our episode.
Kobe Schwayder:
Please decline. But no, so certainly it's like if I had two weeks and I knew that someone was going to get pushed off the back of a truck in two weeks and needed to roll out of it, I would teach them very differently than if it's just sort of, I have some time and what I want you to do is in a couple weeks be able to take some throws or, you know, fall out of some joint locks, something like that and I want to also sort of start getting your skills up in these other skills that will hit, will come back next year. And, you know, start doing more complicated falls and things like that. So, yeah. There's a different sort of mode of efficiency depending on your time scale. And I see this especially speaking of since I cross trained with the Grace Jiu Jitsu program here, they have their combatives program which is very much geared towards like, okay, we've got, I don't remember how many is like 20 classes, we have 20 classes to get someone from knowing nothing to like if they get in the street by tomorrow, they'll have a pretty good chance of surviving. And I think that's a really neat way of thinking about how they're organizing the information of what they're choosing to teach. One of the things I think it doesn't do, though, is it doesn't get people curious about other aspects because it says, okay, today we're working on this technique and tomorrow working on this technique. If we put all 10 of those techniques together, we've got a good solution for like 90% of the things you're going to see in or what we think you're going to see in a street fight. And I think it's totally cool and there's nothing wrong with that. But it means that, you know, now when they come back to it, if someone decides to stay past that program and move on with their training, we start to sort of backtrack and be like, okay, here's what the sort of theory behind this, or here's why we're working on this particular technique, or why we think this attack is important. And so, you know, there's an argument to be made that a lot of people walking in the door want that, but they're looking for the sort of the streamlined I want the three highlights, and that's it. But I said, I get bored with those just highlights and I want this sort of broader take. And I think that I find that in order to get better past, like, I don't know, beginner to intermediate level, you need to start cultivating some creativity in what you're doing. And the best way to do that is to expose people to lots of different possible techniques, even if they're not the ones that we're always working on. But you know, every time I try to expose, I try to add something new in or something interesting in and so that they start thinking to themselves about what feels best to them or work for them or what they're seeing when their opponent, when openings happen, rather than me saying, you know, you're always going to do, you know, front kick roundhouse is the combination. Maybe they want to do something else. Maybe they see a different opening.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Right. I'm hearing you actually leaning into a bit of the art of martial arts, right? What is art? I mean, we all have different definitions of art, but there's usually some manner of creativity involved. I don't know too many people that would have, we're I think we're roughly the same age. I don't know if you grew up with the paint by numbers, you know, they gave me the paint set and they're like, blue. Blue goes here, you know. That's not terribly artistic. We're being told what to do, or even the remedial version of that where you put your paintbrush simply in water, and the paint was embedded in the paint, right? Like you really couldn't screw that up. That's not terribly artistic. It might be fun, might lead a kid in that direction, but you got to have a blank page somewhere along the way if you're going to get truly creative. Do you have other places in life where art comes in for you? Where that creativity comes in?
Kobe Schwayder:
I mean, sure. I mean, going back to making the…
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, I guess the vermouth is.
Kobe Schwayder:
Vermouth recipe, the most fun part for me is coming up with the new recipes and so that's, you know, that's just, you know, playing around with different herbs and botanicals. Cause every time I put botanical orders from suppliers, I always try to buy a couple of extra things that I don't know, you know. Just cause, you know, if it's a couple of dollars, adding a two little sample packs of things, it doesn't change the cost really. But then it gives me, you know, something new to taste and I have a little, um, you know, thing that I do to, you know, try it in alcohol, food, try it in the water, see if that's a thing, just sort of figure out the flavor, and then start to figure out if, if I like it, if it's something I think will pair if it's working well and sort of, that's sort of the most fun thing is coming up with new recipes.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Right on. Okay. What made you want to start training?
Kobe Schwayder:
It's another sort of funny roundabout story. So, I…
Jeremy Lesniak:
Wouldn't expect anything else from you just by now, like already now I'm sure whatever else we get there will be circuitous.
Kobe Schwayder:
So I didn't grow up, you know, wanting to, you know, do karate or whatever. That wasn't sort of in my view. But what I was was a big Dungeons and Dragons and still am. And when I was, I think it was middle school, middle school, high school, my local community college had a fencing class. It was like, you know, two evenings or whatever. And so me and my friend, like, went to this because we just thought it was so cool to like learn to fight with sword. That was really neat. And so we just did that casually for a couple of years. When I got to college, they didn't have a fencing club, they had a fencing team, like varsity-level fencing team, but not just a club for casuals. And I wasn't, first of all, I wasn't good enough, but also I wasn't willing to, you know like I wasn't going to devote the amount of time that I needed to be on a varsity team to do that. And I was like, well, hmm, I should find some other activity to do that would be fun. And my roommates who I just met, we got randomly assigned roommates, one of them did Aikido and one of them did Hapkido. And so I just started going to classes with them just as like, oh, sure, I'll come check this out. And I thought it was really fun. I thought it filled some of the same itches that, you know, you know, doing some physical activity, doing sort of nerdy physical activity that wasn't just, you know. Now I've done a lot more just like running and lifting weights and that can get nerdy too but, you know, at the time I thought of that as just, you know, big meathead, sort of pick things up and put them down. And I wanted something that was, you know, the nerdy guys. All right. So I just sort of started doing that and then I ended up liking the instructors and liking going to class and it made me feel good and it was at a time, I can't, I think in college we used to have Hapkido class like 8 to 10 p.m. which seems ridiculous to me now. But at the time like that was too early for me to start doing homework, I was awake. Like what else was I going to be doing 8 to 10? So it was great to like, go get some physical activity and work out then. And so I just sort of, I'm a stubborn person of habit. So I just kept going and kept going.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That was going to be my next question. What made you stick with it?
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, it was fun. And you know, I made friends that way and so then it was sort of an obligation to be there. By the time I was done college, I was sort of the senior student there, so I was actually running some of the classes because our instructor actually had left Boston so she was only there every once in a while. And so I was sort of a person who was running the day-to-day classes. And she would pop in and like, teach us some stuff and then I would like, make sure we can review things. And then I think the next thing that really makes it was I was lucky that when I moved to Philadelphia for grad school that my instructor there was in Philadelphia already and already had started a club. And so it was really easy, even I was at Penn, he was at Temple. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like we're at the exact same school, but it was like, it was much easier for me to, you know, take the train across town to go train with him than it was for me to try to start my own club or switch martial arts or whatever. And so I started doing that and then that, you know, I was there for six years, seven years, maybe more than that. Yeah, it was like eight or nine years until I moved up here. So, you know, at that point I had been doing it for 15 years, 16 years, and so it was sort of part of what I was doing.
Jeremy Lesniak:
One of the situations I find interesting is when someone has been training for a while, and even, you know, as you said, you were teaching, but it wasn't yours, right? And so you come up here, relatively here to the audience, if you have not connected, Kobe lives a couple hours south of me. Not a ton of options, right? We have some pretty low, we have a low population, small population, low density here. So the fact that there's any martial arts, I think is awesome. The chances of you finding anybody who probably even heard of what you were doing, pretty slick. Was it a difficult decision to start teaching?
Kobe Schwayder:
No. I think part of that is just that I'm a, you know, I went through academic training to be a teacher. I was teaching myself to like I teach things while I do. And because I was now shifting away from my academic career to something where I wasn't really teaching a lot. Like this is what I get my teaching needs met is like I need to be teaching something to somebody. Otherwise, I'll go crazy. And so, it wasn't a big leap for me to be like I need to be teaching something that the harder part was figuring out like how and where and we're efficient again. I'm not doing this to make a living. This is sort of what I do for fun on the side. So it wasn't something I was going to put all of my mental energy to and like, okay, I need to rent a space. And it was, I'm really trying to piggyback on other people and be like, hey, yeah, you've got a martial arts studio. Can I, like, borrow some of your mat when you're not using it? And then trying to find people to come join that. So, and I spent my first couple years here, I wasn't teaching. I was at least not formally. I was just sort of going around to different martial arts clubs like trying to find some space. I ended up sort of really getting started when there was a club here called Sangha Martial Arts that went under for various reasons that we don't need to get into because I don't know all of them. But Matt, who was the head there, was looking for other people to teach, and I was like, oh, this is great, like, I like, you're a really good community, you already do a couple different, you know, they had a Sistema, they had a Karate thing, they had a Ludo sport, which is lightsabers there, which is really cool. So, like, they already had a couple different people. They had some open time slots. I was like, this is great. Like, this is exactly what I'm looking for community. People were like doing different things, interested in some other stuff. I can get in there. So, did that. When it was the hardest time to find new person, I started teaching at a local yoga studio. Hopefully, hoping to sort of piggyback on some of the self-defense stuff that maybe I'll get some of these people who shouldn't come into self-defense that didn't work so much as far as getting new people in. But they were very nice enough to host me for a couple of years. And then most recently, I was just, it's only been about a year that I've been over at the Taekwondo studio here and that's, you know, working out fine so far. We'll see how it goes and where it's going. But certainly, I like being there and the people that are great work. We're having good sort of cross-art pollinators so that's always how it goes.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Nice. Fun fact, the first professionally done video clips for whistlekick were done in that space.
Kobe Schwayder:
Oh, nice.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If you dig back, you can, you might go, I recognize that corner. You, how do I want to say this? You've talked about, I'm going to use the phrase scratching an itch, right? Teaching does, you know, is something that it's important to you. It sounds like it sustains you. What does it look like when you're not teaching, right? Like, if I heard correctly, there was a couple year gap where you were not teaching anything. And so you knew what life was like without that and said, I need to correct this. Well, what was that like? And before you answer, I want to tell you why I'm asking this question. Because there are people out there who are not sure if they should be teachers. And I suspect that what you say might be helpful for them.
Kobe Schwayder:
So for me, teaching excites me and it makes me look really hard at whatever topic or material I'm teaching. And not look at just from my point of view, but trying to look at it from someone else's point of view in a way that gives me a much deeper understanding of what it is that I'm doing, and a much greater understanding and enjoyment of what I'm doing. Because I'm seeing it not just from like, is it useful to me or is it nice to me, but like, how I might package it for somebody else to make it useful or interesting to them. And I get a lot of enjoyment and pleasure and excitement out of that and you know, for whatever. You know, whether we're talking academic pursuits or martial arts stuff, you know, it's sort of, I think I don't really understand anything until I've tried to teach it to somebody, and that's what I figured out, you know. Even if it's me doing introspective work, but okay, when I do this technique, I do, you know, I put my hand here and then I put my leg here and I do like sort of backtracking how I'm doing it just instinctually or how I was trained to do it without thinking about it, trying to verbalize that or at least come up with some sort of way of communicating that to somebody else. Sort of makes me then also question why I'm doing those things that way. Was it just because someone told me to put my foot not 45 degrees and that's why I did it or does it actually, you know, infer mechanical advantage or help me not injure myself and like that sort of trying to actually, you know, figure out what is. And then also, then I get questions from people like, oh, my foot doesn't like to be at 45 degrees. Can I put it at 65 degrees instead? And then I have to think, okay, is this, is it necessary to be there or is it just because someone's body likes it that way or not? And you can sort of start doing it that way. And that's, you know, my brain, I'm, you know, I said I'm an investigative pick apart, try to get into all the details, take things apart, put it back together for the person. So that sort of impetus from the teaching side to do that with whatever I'm doing is really important to me. And I find if I don't do that, then I often get bored with things more easily and I don't look at things and with the same sort of critical eye. And I also, yeah, I just, I get less excited about…
Jeremy Lesniak:
You were, I would imagine as I was the child that the adults found annoying because you never stopped asking why. You know, why this questions, et cetera. You wanted to understand everything at a deep level.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So here's a question. Yongmudo?
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, Yongmudo.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Okay.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If Yongmudo is this variable for people, how do you evaluate if someone is really good at yongmudo? How do you evaluate them for rank?
Kobe Schwayder:
So we have, there's sort of two different things that we look at. So when we do have sort of list of techniques that we look at for each given rank, that's a little bit variable.
Two different clubs have, you know, not quite overlapping or the same lesson. We're sort of figuring out how much of that we care if that's the same at the national level versus just each club has their own ranks. Obviously, we should meet up at some, in some way at some point, but what that is and exactly where is, is in flux. So some of it is that and it's sort of what techniques they know, but also sort of how efficient they are in those techniques. Can they demonstrate them in isolation? Can they demonstrate them in combinations? Can they demonstrate that in more real life, you know, either sparring or self defense scenario. And there's a sort of three different levels of proficiency. And then there's also what we call the personal delta, the change from the last test of this test, sort of how much that person has put in, how much they've changed. So, you know, I can a person, especially when we're talking sort of lowered intermediate ranks, you know, people with the same rank could have very different looking. We keep talking about four goals, four goals, but the fact that one person started out as a very coordinated athletic person and came in and basically did a pretty good forward role without training, I'm going to look for different things from them along the line. Then the person who came in was a total thoughts and didn't know their left side from the right side, and now they're rolling and that's like a huge improvement and that's great.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So I'm hearing a lot of, as many, if not most martial arts school do, it's very, it's subjective based on. What does that Delta look like for them along their path?
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, so certainly that's a big percentage of it and then, yeah, we've got, you know, we sort of have lots of categories of techniques and we have So we've got kicks, we have strikes and blocks, we have throws, we have joint locks, we have ground work. There are seven, I feel like I'm missing one somewhere, but anyway and so, you know, with each of those, we have sort of increasing difficulty or increasing, you know, I think of them almost as you get lower percentages and the techniques become maybe less useful, you know, self defense situations, but they become more interesting or more athletic or whatever as we get higher. So we sort of front load all of the. Most, you know, basic useful techniques. And then we sort of, so, you know, we have actual tests. We've been talking about, you know, how long ago, and I know there are some, some schools that will just, you know, the instructor will come in and when you think you're ready, you get the next rank. I like to have tests specifically because I think it puts the person under some pressure, both from like the learning side. It's sort of, they got a cram for the test and they actually might learn something from the fact that they have to spend a couple of weeks, you know, thinking hardcore about it. But also because during the actual testing, they're under a little bit of pressure, people are watching them. They've got a company and that is, well, we're not full on people attacking them in real life. It's, you know, one step more anxiety and more unsure of what's going to happen. And if people can perform when they're a little bit anxious and a little bit, that means that they actually know it better than if they could just do it when everything's calm. So, yeah, so that's how we evaluate people, and as I said, we're getting started as a national organization, and I'm actually on the Promotions Committee. So we're just now starting to talk about, like how do we want to organize, you know, what techniques where, do we care, that sort of thing.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Do we talk about that? The committee part? I'm going to. A large chunk of our audience has been part of some manner of association at some point along the way, and of those nearly all of them have seen at least some element where it was not beneficial, right? Even if they remain, even if overall they see this is a great thing, you know, it's adding another layer that can become political and can end up with favoritism and such you having spent time in academia, know that that happens there as well. Better than I do, right? I just saw from the outside. So you're choosing to become part of this. So, of course, I imagine you see that there's more opportunity for benefit than harm. And I just kind of like to hear you talk about, what it's like getting that rolling and the conversations that you're having, because I'm sure you're trying to avoid problems before they star.
Kobe Schwayder:
More like that strong onto it. I'm just high enough rank that I people expect me to be doing things at the at the political level, but not high enough that I could, you know, back out of it. But no. So a lot of our organization getting started is actually in response to some sort of more political and personality things that were happening. So up until we get going, which is hopefully this summer sometime is when we'll actually have some actual stuff done. Basically everything kind of went through Berkeley. Which then supposedly got sent off to korea to get stamped but like no one ever heard anything back from Korea So it was really just going to Berkeley and whoever was the head instructor. Like the head instructor Berkeley, was the person who you know was supposed to be in charge of this but what that meant in reality was that people who were at Berkeley who had daily contact with you know, the people who are making those decisions got promoted faster and got feedback on things like that, and people who were not there. Send stuff to them and we send money to them, you know, we put an application fees like that and we just never get anything, you know, if we were really lucky five years later, we get so like when I was testing for my third degree black belt was when I got recognition that I had been approved for my first degree black belt from that, you know, not that anyone cared and I was still functioning like it didn't actually matter. But there was, there was a lot of this stuff. There was also things were because Berkeley was sort of our, national head, they would set up things like weekend summer camp, but they wouldn't announce it to everyone until like two weeks beforehand. And so people on the east coast were like, I can't like, I can't buy flights and planned by two weeks from now around that, like we need bigger notes. So a lot of this sort of organization has been with the recognition that, you know, we're not all just one step removed from Brooklyn now, which had been true for 20 or 30 years. Everyone was there or, you know, was had been there at some point and was personal friends of people. I've never, you know, I know people there because I've now gone and You know, I've tested there a couple times and I know the organization, but like I don't feel like I'm part of the Berkeley club because I've always been on the East Coast. I've never been ther and yet I'm here. I am, you know, one of the few head instructors of a club like that. So it's sort of that sort of recognition that we wanted to, we wanted to organize in a way that was fairer to everybody that was part of our organization and not just everyone subservient to whoever was being in charge at Berkeley. But also we wanted a way to evaluate, especially higher rank promotions. So the way that we usually work it is, the sort of the traditional way, which I don't know if it's actually written down in any like bylaws anywhere, but the way that I understood it to work was in order to promote someone to a black belt rank, you had to have two people of two ranks higher than that and sort of on their testing panel and approving of them getting promoted. So if you're testing first time, you have to do third dans. If you're second time, you have to do fourth dans, et cetera. The problem is There's only one, two fifth dans and two sixth dans and one seventh dan in the country. So like, if I'm fourth, I'm testing for fifth, I'm like, where do I find two seventh dans to promote me? And, or how do we organize that? And so we wanted to come up with some sort of system that my instructor keeps calling it a college of cardinals. So we're now, we have this committee that has people from each of the clubs that in addition to sort of rubber stamping lower ranks, where we know that things we can, we can now sort of promote people without necessarily being hired because as a organization, we decided to promote them. So if we decide that everyone's moved up enough and we want you know, Dr. Link, who is our head to be moved up? I think it's eight dan now, but we want to move them up from eight dan to ninth dan or whatever. So that there's more space underneath for everyone to like, we will now have the power to do that. It won't just be him being like, all right, I guess I'm not dan now because no one has the power to tell me that.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Sounds kind of like making acknowledging okay. With greater numbers, there might be a cleaner way to do this . But I mean, we can certainly argue that even with that system in place in many places, it is not clean. But we could pretend it was that.
Kobe Schwayder:
I think it also takes out, hopefully, I'm absolutely always politics in it whenever there's one around. But it takes out at least the sort of cult of personality where there's one person who's in charge and if that person doesn't like you, then you don't get it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What I like about what you're saying is it seems, you know, it seems like it lines up very much with the philosophy of the style and the people that it has attracted. It sounds very academic. It sounds very, okay. Let's come to some consensus. Let's have discussion and agreement. And, you know, I would imagine these conversations are not meant to be, you know, every 10, 20 years, there's ongoing conversation. And if someone, if the group is feeling like, hey, you know, you're kind of you're not progressing and we need to acknowledge that like either catch up or, you know, we're all going to kind of have to leave you behind. And that there's something that seems dramatically different, but also very healthy in that.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, we can help you anyway.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Have you found other examples of folks doing it like this?
Kobe Schwayder:
I don't know because I don't know that much about the inner workings of other national organizations. So I know certainly like the big like competition sports. They have sort of national, you know, like judo has a national organization for that sort of thing. They have a much more like rubric based promotion system where it's like you get points for doing certain, you know, get points for winning competition. You get points for this long and ranked and sort of once you get to a certain point level, you then get promoted sort of automatically to the next rank. We had some discussion about whether we want to do that, but especially if we're not really competition art, it's sort of harder to figure that out. There are people where there have been young middle competitions and I'm sort of philosophically against that, which can be another topic if we have time. So, yeah, so I don't know if other people have the sort of group that are talking about this, but certainly since we're just starting, we're trying to figure out what our rubric is, whether, you know, how, even, you know, what techniques we're looking for, how we're going to measure them, who's going to, who's doing the measuring, that sort of thing. We have this opportunity to sort of come up with a system that we think will work, that hopefully we can also change in the future, but also that because it's representatives from all of the schools, we can sort of make it fair to all schools so that it doesn't feel like we're, you know, we're leaning more on the skills that people learn at one school. You know, Berkeley also, they have a very strong taekwondo program there that a lot of people question. So the people at Berkeley often are much, you have much more flamboyant and flexible kicks. Whereas like our North Carolina school, being in the South where wrestling is big, some of their teachers are actually like their high school wrestling coach. And so they do a lot more wrestling than say Berkeley than I do up here. And so we want when we like the fact that our organization can encompass all that we can learn. And then when we have, you know, seminars where he brings people in, it's a pretty natural thing for the South Carolina started to come in and teach some wrestling because it's something that we otherwise don't have or the Berkeley person to come and do some kicks because that's something we otherwise don't necessarily have. So, you know, we're trying to thread that needle between, you know, having an organization where we have certain benchmarks that everyone knows what they need to meet to get wherever the next rank is, but also have enough flexibility where each individual club or each individual person even has enough flexibility where they can progress and learn things, but doesn't necessarily have to be exactly the same as what someone's doing across the country but that's okay. Jeremy Lesniak:
This sounds like the implementation of Jeet Kune Do philosophy in a more, truer way than what it seems for me on the outside that most Jeet Kune Do implementations are. Most Jeet Kune Do implementations that I see are very, this is what Jeet Kune Do is. Or you get people who say Jeet Kune Do is whatever I make it. And it seems like this is a bit more in the middle where it's this, but the edges are fuzzy.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, and we have had some arguments about what we think the core is, you know, there's some people who think that some of the things we do are like, no, this is a new ground. I'm like, is it like, do we really care about that?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Can you offer an example of what's about that?
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah. So we have the closest thing we have to kata or forms are a set of partner drills that we call the 16 step. There's only 15 of them. There's a lot of stories about why it's 16 and not 15.
Jeremy Lesniak:
The number 13 is unlucky.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, exactly. Basically, attacker attacks with the right front kick, right front punch. And then there's a bunch of varieties of different defenses you do. Some are kicks, some are throws, some are joint lock sort of, in some ways it's sort of showcasing all the various different things that we do. And with that, that's all on that. Since like, that's great. However, for a while, that was in some ways the only thing that different schools of Yongmudo were doing that was the same. And so it became this thing where like, when you went somewhere else to test, they really wanted to see this. Because it was like the only thing they could evaluate really fairly against someone else. And so some people are really like, no, like we want this, this is sort of the court. It's the one thing we do that's different from other martial arts. Like that's like what should be our core. Whereas I look and I say, like, I spend a lot of class time wasted on this stuff and I don't think people learn a lot from it. And I'd rather them work, you know, sure, punch defenses are great, kick defenses are great, but like why this particular combination and the defenses are all a little bit fancy because they're like demonstration forms and they're fun to learn. But like, I'd really rather have a much simpler, more direct you know, defensive move if that's what we're trying to show off, especially if we claim to be an art that's centered around self defense. So, you know, we have arguments about it, but that's sort of the one place where like some people really think that's core to our identity and people like me. I don't know if I'm on the outside of this. I might be, um, they are like, yeah, I could take it or leave it. Like, I don't mind it, but it's not not my favorite thing to test me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I've never been part of these sorts of conversations. You know, I've heard about them you know, later, I've heard about them fourth hand, and they're fascinating because really, as you dig in, you're talking about what is important, what's important to someone philosophically about martial arts and the question of why, right? Like, why does this art exist? You know, is it primarily a self defense art? If it's a self defense art, then to what percentage is it a self defense art, right? If it's 100% of self defense art, that's a very different way of looking at these 15 slash 16 sets versus if it's 50% self defense.
Kobe Schwayder:
And you know, what does self defense mean to different people? To some people, self defense means, you know, learning to cage fight, and to some people it means learning to defend against getting grabbed by a random person on the street. And some of y'all means, you know, learning jujitsu because all fights are going to end up on the ground and like, those are all right, but also not all the same answer.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I think that's part of the brilliance? It's too strong of a word, but Mitosse's book, What is Self Defense, right? Like, just that is a title for a martial arts book, as I've always found fascinating. Because it's, there's what is self defense? What do we do? And what is self defense philosophically, right? Like, it's, there's some double meaning in there. I'm going to suspect that you not only spend time thinking about what you are doing, but what you are going to do or hoping to do and giving people flavorful things to drink while maybe the core of your focus, I can't imagine that you don't also think about what might teaching martial arts look like for me in five years? What might my relationship to martial arts look like in five years? So mind speaking to that?
Kobe Schwayder:
Sure. Yeah, I mean, so I'd love to, you know, expand my club a little bit and have a few more regulars and that sort of thing. Aand I'd also really like to see, um, our you know, dojo dojang studio come together as a more mixing pot of different people. So at the moment, there's basically like there's the Taekwondo club, and then we do have a lot more cross pollination between the Yongmudo and the jujitsu clubs. Partly because of the times we meet, we meet near each other, that sort of thing, where the Taekwondo sort of happens on other days at other times. But I think it'd be really great to get it more as sort of a center of all martial arts in the Brattleboro area, and get it going where people, you know, sure, maybe there are people who, you know, taekwondo is sort of their main interest. But maybe, you know, when they're starting to train for higher ranks or whatever, that, you know, they need to come across, you know, like the way that I do it where people need to go across and say, like, they need to come work with me for a little bit to like, just get a different look. You know, what does it look like when someone even if we're only going to do striking with them, because that's what they want to do. Like, I look different from a taekwondo person fighting because I'm not a taekwondo person. Or you know, get some, we've been doing this a little bit, but some of the people who are learning the jiu jitsu side, you know, I have a fair amount of experience. We also have, like I was trained there, who's a black belt in judo, he's not an instructor really, but you know, he knows a lot and he's certainly very good. And so often just, you know, when we have open mats or off time, you know, people be like, hey, like I want to learn more about these takedowns. And so we'll do some, you know, a little quick like judo practice sort of thing. And so I'd love to get that sort of cross thing where people may have an art that they like or that is the primary one they're sort of looking to promote in, but that we have this sort of open space where people can come in and learn other styles or just, you know, get a viewpoint from somebody else. And I should put in a side note that this is what I really like about the Andrew's monthly program with the over in Keene where he has the advanced martial arts program. So people who are high in the rank can come in so that we're not, you know, we can…
Jeremy Lesniak:
If we've talked about what Andrew's doing on this show. So for the sake of the audience, Andrew, who, Andrew, Thursday Andrew, producer Andrew, good friend Andrew, several other titles that we could probably find for Andrew in the context of whistlekick, does something that's really interesting. Once a month, he invites at least one instructor to come in and there's a group of advanced martial artists, I think he wants brown red belt, you know, like, so you can be a little bit of a little black belt, but not this isn't for beginners. And the whole idea is there's a group of people that simply love martial arts and they do a whole bunch of different things. And sometimes one of them, sometimes somebody kind of external to the group comes in and leads chairs for a couple hours, and it's awesome. Yeah, it's where we've been. It's a great group.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah, it's great. You know, each month is something different from a different person, and that's really cool. And it's fun both, you know, to see, you know, whatever different technique learning, but also from sort of a teacher's perspective, it's great to see someone else teaching and sort of figuring out how they teach and what I like and what I don't like about that. And so I can incorporate her or, you know, decide to discard that sort of thing. And I really sort of want to take that down, you know, not necessarily the teaching level for bringing it back down to, you know, other students, but that sort of philosophy where like someone can come in and show something and I want people who are experienced enough or interested enough that they can see it and decide like, hey, that's really cool. I want to start trying that. Or like you know, all right, I don't really like the rolling around on the ground part. I'm much more of a stay in the pick person. Like that's great but like some exposure to that gives you a better idea about the decisions you're making rather than just because that's the club you happen to walk into when you're 18 or whatever.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If people want to learn more about Yongmudo, or you, or contact you, or I don't know, buy vermouth, where do they go? How do they do all these things?
Kobe Schwayder:
So the Vermouth is Vermont Vermouth, and you can Google Vermont Vermouth and you'll find me. My school here is Brattleboro Yongmudo, brattleboroyongmudo, all one word, @gmail.com is the URL. Yongmudo in general, if you look up, I believe that's the University of California, Berkeley webpage for that. So you can find it some sort of background information there. Also @BrattleboroYongmudo is my Facebook and Instagram sort of thing. You can contact me or find out there.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You sent us a bunch of links. We'll drop those in the show notes.
Kobe Schwayder:
Yeah. If you are looking around the internet and you ever see people in green gee, that is the like, Korean, the international Korean, you know, they wear green uniforms to sort of other things.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I’ve never seen green.
Kobe Schwayder:
I came up where we were still wearing white. So I still do white because I think the green is sort of funny and I like having white as a sort of neutral power. I can go to other clubs and have my white and that's fine. But yeah, if you ever see demonstrations, especially if they're Korean demonstrations wearing green, that's sort of our international organization that we're affiliated with there and the Koreans do some pretty crazy demos. So they're sort of, you know, they're jumping over 16 people and kicking baseball bats and things like that. So, they're really, really fun to watch.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Awesome. I appreciate you being here. How do you want to leave this? What words do you want to roll out on for the audience?
Kobe Schwayder:
Well, we're all martial arts, so go try something new. Try a new martial art you haven't tried yet. Like do it once. Why not? It's fun.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Kobe, thanks for coming on. Audience, was that not a thought-provoking episode? The idea that martial arts curriculum can be a little more fluid than it has traditionally been is something that I've been thinking about myself and to hear someone who not only is implementing that but come from a tradition of that implementation is absolutely fascinating to me. This is one of those that I'm going to be thinking about and even listen to. In case you didn't know, I don't generally listen to the episodes because I was there when they were recorded. But this is one that I expect to go back to likely more than once, you know, bit of reference material in here. If you will. Kobe, thanks again for coming on. Look forward to talking to you and seeing you soon. Audience, support Kobe. Go check out all the stuff that he talked about. Check out the school. Check out his vermouth. Even if it's not something you're interested in. It's kind of neat that he's doing it. I think he's the first wine maker I think it does that we've had on the show. I know we've had brewers, but I think they've been home brewers. I don't know. We've had anybody doing commercial stuff anyway. Check out that. Check out the stuff that we've got going. Check out the Patreon. Check out our consulting services. Check out everything that you could imagine at whistlekick.com. Help us connect, educate, and entertain the traditional martial artists of the world. My email address jeremy@whistlekick.com. Our social media is @whistlekick everywhere. Until next time, train hard, smile, and have a great day.