About two and a half years ago, while I was jumping country to country trying to escape lockdowns, I found myself in Sao Paolo, Brazil. For a long time, I’d had BJJ or some kind of martial art on my “list of things to do” but as we all know, life gets busy and unless you make the time, it shall be filled with other things.

I managed to do some classes back then, but left to Costa Rica b4 I could get into it seriously.

Fast forward and in August I joined a local Dojo, and convinced the master to allocate the classes from Sao Paolo to my record so that I could get my stripes faster (I’m travelling again soon and wanted to get some combat in beforehand).

In our dojo, you need two stripes on your white belt before you can actually roll. Each stripe is 30 classes of basic fundamentals, which takes about 6 - 8 weeks of regular attendance, unless you really come to extra classes. It took me about six weeks to get both stripes with the prior classes boost, and last night was my first roll.

Little did I know that Friday night classes, being the last of the week, were not the usual “intermediate” class. Instead it’s the one where all the advanced guys come to kick the shit out of each other one last time before the weekend. I walked into 2 x three-stripe blues, 2 x three stripe purples and a brown belt.

My teacher was kind enough to guide me on the first roll, and immediately, you realise that “this shit isn’t as easy as it looks”. You spend weeks learning basic moves with people in the fundamentals classes, but in those, nobody is fighting back. You can complete a move and practice it again and again. But here, in a combat scenario, the other person is moving and countering your moves.

You are literally wresting just to hold on and exerting yourself just to claim a position of dominance, and when you get it (the only reason of course in my case is he went easy on me for training purposes) you forget all the moves and thing you’re taught! I remember getting a side control and then thinking… “now what the fuck do I do?”

This is life. This is where you realise intelligence is not just in the brain, but is more importantly, in the body.

This is why I am fundamentally opposed to modern brain-in-a-vat theories and ideologies. These nerds view the body as just a meat suit, and they are so far from wrong it’s not funny. The body is as much a part of the “mind” as the brain is. One cannot exist without the other. You ignore the body at the expense of the mind.

Wrote a piece on this here: