On the latest episode of the Built, Not Born podcast, Ryron Gracie said:
Anybody can go online and search techniques, and watch something that’s kind of complex and fancy, and then teach it. I could be doing that, and I could probably teach it pretty well, and understand it pretty well.
I think about this because I watch instructional videos and read books, but I’m afraid to teach anything to my students before I’ve actually tested it in live sparring. And it makes me wonder about certain social media personalities with no school or competition record, but have big followings, and whether they’re just regurgitating what they’ve watched on instructional videos.
I used to work in internet marketing. One of the biggest and most lucrative scams is people getting rich teaching people how to get rich. I’m seeing a variation of this in jiu-jitsu.
There’s someone out there, who copies and pastes John Danaher’s Instragram posts and sells them as Kindle books. There’s another that splices BJJ Fanatics videos with clips of himself talking about technique and he sells courses based on his summaries. These are just two examples. And they’re making money.
It’s funny to me how ten years ago, everyone hated on Gracie University (née Gracie Academy), yet it’s a lot of these same haters that are throwing money at actual charlatans.