The Sword Guy Podcast

 

Guy Windsor 

I’m here today with Jason Kingsley, OBE, co-founder and CEO of the games company Rebellion Developments, which also owns 2000 AD, and the man behind the YouTube channel Modern History TV, starring Warlord, which goes into depth of detail regarding many aspects of medieval life, most notably combat and horsemanship, but also aspects of daily life. He is also the author of a new book Leading the Rebellion. Of course, his main claim to fame, as he will surely admit, is his first appearance on this show back in episode 81. So without further ado, Jason, welcome back.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Thank you very much for having me again.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s nice to see you. Of course first question is not actually on the list, but how’s Warlord?

 

Jason Kingsley 

Warlord is fine actually, like us all he ages and is getting a bit creaky so I have to be a little bit more careful with him, and me; my knees are going a little bit when it when it comes to doing lunges and activity but he’s very happy. He’s in the field at the moment. He’s having probably a bit too much grass at the moment. Because of the rain we’ve had the grass has grown like topsy and he’s very happy. It’s probably a little tubby.

 

Guy Windsor 

Right, so basically a grassy field for horses like a candy store for us.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Absolutely. Yeah. It’s weird because in the spring, obviously there’s a flush of growth. And in the autumn as a flush of growth and usually the summer because it’s so dry. You don’t get so much grass. So they’re kind of munching away and horses are bulk feeders as well. So they just need a lot of volume. But if the grass is too juicy, it can give them digestive problems and a thing called laminitis. Yeah, it’s a horse form of diabetes. Very odd. Nobody really knows the details behind it. And it makes them have sore feet.

 

Guy Windsor 

Hmm. So juicy grass is not so great for horses because it gives them a kind of diabetes, which gives them a kind of sore feet.

 

Jason Kingsley 

That’s right. Yeah, the hooves get really sore and they end up lying down a lot more. So they are sometimes in a lot of discomfort with too much food. So you have to manage them. They’re daft creatures, sometimes, they can eat themselves into pain. Mind you, so can we.

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, yeah, we put men on the moon, and we can still eat ourselves into pain. Just put me with an unlimited supply of sushi and you could just watch me do it. So how are the castle developments coming along?

 

Jason Kingsley 

Coming along nicely. It’s been a long build. Back in the day they’d have had 1000s of men working on a castle. I’ve got a handful. So it’s taking an equivalent time. It’s taking years but yes, it’s coming along nicely. It’s getting towards the end, I would say, and it’s been six, seven, maybe even eight years since I got planning permission for it.

 

Guy Windsor 

For people who may not remember our conversation some time ago. You’re converting an existing house to be a lot more castle-like, is that correct?

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, I call it a fortified manor house. That’s the idea. So it’s not a military castle, but it’s a fortified enclosure, a courtyard with stables inside it, a gate house, the house, and a small, a modest tower.

 

Guy Windsor 

And it has crenellations right?

 

Jason Kingsley 

It does have crenellations. I am still trying to find out whether I need permission from the crown to crenellate.

 

Guy Windsor 

I don’t think the SAS would have too much trouble dealing with your fortified manor house. I don’t see why crenellations would cause a problem.

 

Jason Kingsley 

No, no, but it’s one of those things, isn’t it? It makes me go slightly hot and cold thinking is there a form I’m supposed to have filled in to request the permission to crenellate, or am I going to be flung into the Tower of London in due course?

 

Guy Windsor 

Okay, but just think what the publicity would do for your book sales.

 

Jason Kingsley 

That’s true. Yeah, so probably a good thing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Modern knight Jason Kingsley flung into the tower for building a castle.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Perfect publicity. Yeah, it’s not so good for going for long rides in the countryside afterwards.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, true. True. I mean, particularly if they’ve shortened you by a foot.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, yes. Tower of London. What a historically awful place and wonderful, amazing place.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, it does strike me as kind of odd how a place where literally people were tortured and murdered is now a tourist attraction.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, and that ghoulish thing of “This is where somebody’s head was chopped off,” and go and have a selfie next to it. It’s a weird one. I sometimes liken it to when you watch wildlife programs, and a lion grabs a zebra and starts eating it, and all the other all the other zebras have been running away and they turn around to watch one of their mates being disemboweled alive by a lion and I just think that’s revolting. I don’t really want to see that. But people seem to want to. They’re attracted to the macabre, I suppose.

 

Guy Windsor 

I think there’s maybe a bit of that. I think maybe for the zebras, it’s more like, okay, are there any more lion? No, that lion is clearly happy and not going anywhere. So the immediate danger is past. Let’s keep an eye on that horrid lion.

 

Jason Kingsley 

So we can all relax. Chill out now dudes. It’s all over. Bob’s dead.

 

Guy Windsor 

I don’t have to run very fast, I just have to run faster than you. Okay, now, when we last talked, your best idea not acted on was writing the book. And I know you are relatively busy. Not least four hours a day of looking after horses, in addition to running a company and all the other stuff. I assume you occasionally eat and sleep. So as a busy person, how did you make the book happen?

 

Jason Kingsley 

I tried to write it in small chunks. And when the Muse took me, so the structure of basing it on the chivalric code was quite useful, because I had a chapter on gluttony, a chapter on sagacity, a chapter on bravery. And that kept me quite focused on there’s a little bit to write, there’s like a small book to write on wisdom, and how it applies. And I went through it and through it, and through it. For me, the key for writing is to get the first draft done, is to not worry too much about the first draft, because once you’ve got the thing down on the piece of paper or digital file, in my case, you think, right, I’ve got to the end, now. It’s dreadful, I’ve got to rework it. But the reworking somehow is a competence thing, it then becomes an editorial job and you go, that’s terrible, I’ll rewrite that, or there’s a big section here that needs adding to it. Here’s a little anecdote that I think might fit in, but didn’t quite fit in there, it might fit in in another chapter. I would describe it as writing and cobbling things together as well. And then rewriting and editing. So, it was a very interactive process for me.

 

Guy Windsor 

So you broke it up into small chunks, and the chivalric code gave you, like the structure for those chunks. I had the same thing with my Advanced Longsword book, where I knew what the book should be. And I knew what should be in it. But I didn’t know what order it was going to be in, so I couldn’t write it. And then one day, it just hit me, we have a form called the syllabus form, like a kata sort of thing. I will just take each step of the form, and each step of the form will be the chapter in the book, and I’ll just order it like the form. And that’s fine. I mean, later on, if you don’t quite like the order, you can reorder it, but it was just as soon as I had the structure, the book was written three weeks later.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah. I didn’t quite do it in three weeks.

 

Guy Windsor 

I don’t run a huge company with hundreds of people working for me and that sort of stuff. I mean, it was my day job.

 

Jason Kingsley 

I’ve tried to write fiction, I might have another go in due course, as well. But one of the problems for me with writing fiction is I often start with it with an idea, but I don’t know where it’s going. And then I kind of fizzle out after a couple of weeks’ work on it, thinking I actually don’t know where they’re going now. And then I never revisit their adventure, I never come back to it. And I think maybe what I need to do is, almost my first port of call is to plot out, the adventurers start here, they go to this village, they then go to this castle, they then go to this dungeon, or whatever it might be, in the broadest possible brushstrokes, so that you actually have a map of the territory you’re going to cross and then you can start filling it in and then you can start correcting it. But sort of wandering the landscape, not knowing which direction you’re going in in a metaphorical way, doesn’t work for me.

 

Guy Windsor 

Several of my novelist friends start with the last chapter. They write the final scene so they know what the end point is, like, I don’t know, the hero kills the villain, or the villain escapes, or the villain kills the hero or, or the mother is reunited with their child or whatever, right? And then knowing where it’s going and knowing where it’s starting from, they can then put in the pieces in between.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Right, right. It’s interesting, because I’ve always thought writing was a sort of stream of consciousness that you put down and writers were terribly clever and it just sort of happened. But I think good books, factual or fiction, are mostly constructed. I think they have to be. I think this idea you can you just randomly set off in writing. I’m sure there are a few authors that do that. But I feel I need to structure because especially if there’s an awkward section. So for example, looking at the rules of chivalry for me and how it applies to modern business and my own life were to do with chivalry was a masculine thing. It was a male thing. How does how does that apply to non-men? How does it apply to modern men in different circumstances? There’s an awful lot in the knightly code about well, in the Christian side of the knightly code about killing and slaughtering foreigners, which is really bad. I address that, these parts of it are not relevant for modern business at all. But I tried to sort of boil it down. And some of it perhaps, was a little more forced than I wanted it to be. But I’m pleased, I’m pleased with the results. People who’ve read it seem to think it’s quite good. And that’s always nice. I’ve got a few mates and colleagues who are okay at telling me something’s garbage, which is always nice. Nice to have a few fools in the court, if you’d like.

 

Guy Windsor 

My feeling is that the opinions that actually matter are the opinions of the people who’ve bought the book. So if the people you wrote it for buy it and like it, then it’s good. If somebody then gives it a one star review, is because you’ve sold a book to the wrong person. That’s a marketing problem, not a writing problem.

 

Jason Kingsley 

That’s an interesting perspective. Yeah.

 

Guy Windsor 

But if one of your target readers, emails you and says, actually, Guy, what you say here about this, that and the other is wrong, or you need to flesh that out a bit, I didn’t understand it, or you’re missing a whole section that the book really does need on this, then I pay attention to that. You ran a Kickstarter for this, didn’t you?

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, yes, I did. Yeah, I ran a Kickstarter. I was already on the way with the book. But I thought my audience on Modern History TV, had all said they wanted signed versions. And I just thought, you know what, there’s a great opportunity here to do special editions for people if they want them. Let’s see what happens. Because I’m already going to do the book. I have a publishing company. So it’s not that hard for me to sell the rights to the publishing company, here, you’re making this happen. And that’s always a little nerve wracking. Because as the boss, you know that you can get things through that might not be good enough quality as well. And I always think that’s a good and a bad thing, a double edged sword in a traditional sense of the word. It cuts both ways. And I didn’t want to put something out that wouldn’t have hit the bar, had I not been in a position of power. And luckily, my editors thought it was it was good. And I think it was genuine. It wasn’t like, oh, we better say it’s good because it’s the boss, they actually enjoyed it. So I’m quite proud of that achievement. It is difficult sometimes when you have a position of authority to get genuine feedback about something. It’s a little bit like comments on the YouTube channel, or whatever it might be. I absolutely love getting positive constructive comments from people that know what they’re talking about. There are those comments from people that haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about, and they’re sometimes amusing, or you can dismiss them. Or sometimes they’re just abusive. I think as creators, you and I both, that comes with the territory, we absolutely get that kind of thing.

 

Guy Windsor 

Finding the right feedback is super hard. And so what I’ve tended to do, is I allow pre-orders of a special edition hardback or something. So the people who are very much the target market will buy the preorder, I then give them the current draft, which is as close to finished as I can make it by myself and ask them what else they would like to see in their book, or how anything that doesn’t work for them in their book. The thing is, they have just paid me for it. And so they have the rights of a customer. And that, I think, flips the power thing on its head. Because now, look, I paid you for this thing and it’s broken, you need to fix it. And they don’t come across like that, but the underlying mechanics have now changed. And so they are entirely free to say, well, actually, the book needs this. And that I find that super helpful because that is my target readers, who have paid for the book who are telling me things that how it could be improved before it goes out to the wider world. So then when somebody gives me a bad review, I know it’s a marketing problem. I’ve sold a book to the wrong person. And that does happen occasionally. And then I go in and I fix the blurb or adjust the targeting or whatever and hopefully that problem goes away.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Hmm. That is interesting. I think genuinely though, if you make stuff, you’re not going to be able to please all the people all the time. Some people will just have a bad day or don’t like the way you speak or the voice you use in your writing or whatever. There’s a million different reasons why human beings can just not mesh properly with something that’s being creative. I mean, personally, if I watch something, and I don’t like it or read a book, I choose not to comment on it. I just move on. I got asked recently. I don’t tend to review things on the channel. But I did get asked recently, somebody sent me unannounced some swords. And they were, I won’t say who it is, but they were poor. I didn’t want to review them. I said, do you want to join them back? Because I don’t review things. And I’ll only promote somebody who I think is genuinely good. But I also didn’t want the negativity of saying bad things about something. Because I thought that’s unfair. Maybe it’s fair, I don’t know, I had a bit of a kind of thought about whether I actually have an obligation to say whether something’s bad or not.

 

Guy Windsor 

No, no, I don’t think so. My view is, I will recommend things that are good for my readers, my listeners, my people. So if somebody sends me something, and I can’t recommend it. And this has happened several times, books, for example. I say that I’m very sorry. But I don’t think that this book will work for my readers, so I’m not going to review it. If they have asked me for review, if I can’t give a positive one. I don’t give anything. So I only promote good stuff to my people. I don’t see it as my job to warn them against the rubbish. Because there is so much rubbish out there. I would spend my whole time doing nothing else.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah. And you can then create a very negative cycle because this thing is garbage, this book’s rubbish,  I don’t want to be spreading the negative message, I want to spread a positive message of can do, try this. You know, we’ve all got a practice whatever it might be. And yeah, constant negging of things. It just brings you down as well, yourself.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, yeah. As my grandma once said, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

 

Jason Kingsley 

I think that’s quite right. Wisdom. Yes, absolutely. I think there is a slight corollary, that if there’s somebody who you respect, and they do something, you don’t have to go public with it. But if they ask you for private feedback, then I think you should try to give constructive feedback, don’t just say, it’s garbage. You say, well, this didn’t work for me or this part of the book I found a bit boring, or I’m not sure you got the facts right here, but you maybe need some more research. I think that’s an obligation, especially for friends and colleagues.

 

Guy Windsor 

That’s a whole other thing, you praise in public and criticise in private. That’s standard decent behavior, I think. And also very true for historical martial arts instructors too. When a student does something, well, you tell everyone, and when it does something wrong, you take him into the office and have a quiet word.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes. Because I imagine in your area though, in my area as well, the sort of historical side of it, you get very strongly opinionated people who don’t have the backup to have that opinion and martial arts in the broadest sense seem to attract people that really, really want to be martial artists but actually aren’t.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yes, just a little bit. And people who are quite happy to tell you that well, obviously Fiore’s stupid, because he doesn’t know anything about swords or how to fight, any of that stuff. I mean, they just named a street in his hometown after him. He just commanded the artillery at Oudinet, I mean, doesn’t know anything about fighting. So yeah, at one end of the scale, we have impostor syndrome. And at the other end of the scale, we have the Dunning Kruger syndrome. And I think particularly in martial arts, there’s a lot of Dunning Kruger, people who think they are really, really good, and they’re not good enough to realise how bad they are. And that is partly because the honest feedback of the smack in the head hasn’t been made available to them at the necessary point in their career, which it has been to me I must say, I’ve been hit in the head many times when I thought I was better than I was. And it was very useful.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, physics is a great leveller. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. Do you think there are other areas of human endeavour outside the sort of areas we’re familiar with that have a similar? Do you think sort of Formula One drivers?

 

Guy Windsor 

Anything. There’s a t-shirt I should get, which says, “But you didn’t.” Any time you go around an art gallery, and you see some piece of usually modern art someone goes, “Oh, I could have painted that in five minutes.” But you didn’t. Or I’ve watched fencing bouts of various kinds and martial arts encounters of various kinds, MMA or whatever, “He was wide open for a shot to the ribs. Why didn’t you take it?” Well, actually, having done enough sparring, I know that when the fists are flying, you may just not see that shot or you may see it, but you may not be in a position to take it or you may just be distracted by something else or whatever. It’s hard. I’m not a huge fan of Theodore Roosevelt. But his essay Man in the Arena is worth a read. Are you familiar with it?

 

Jason Kingsley 

No, I’m not, I’m familiar with some of his comments.

 

Guy Windsor 

Basically, it’s about the person in the arena actually doing the thing is subject to all sorts of pressures and challenges that the spectators have no idea about. So it’s not a “don’t criticise.” It’s more a, “If you don’t know what it’s like to be there, you should probably shut the hell up.”

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are famous boxers who said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit in the face the first time.” And a friend of mine who does a lot of door work in Oxford. Hello, Jase. And he once told me that one of the things he did for training, when he trained people was teach them to take a punch. How did they behave when they’ve been hit? He said, because most people don’t get punched very much in their life, understandably. And for a lot of people they do a lot of training until they get hit the first time and then they freeze. Or they do weird stuff. He said, in his opinion in a street fight one of the things is you’re going to get hit. Can you shrug that off? Does that do anything to you to actually stop your progress towards, in his case, trying to get drunk people out of the pub. And I thought it was a really interesting observation. And I think, a certain amount with the mounted combat that I’ve done, because you’ve got a partner, you’ve got a dance partner when you’re doing mounted combat. Your riding needs to be instinctive because you’re flailing around, you got to take a hit or take a buffet, you’ve got to be able to move that horse without thinking right rein down, left leg on. You can’t engage your conscious behavior, you need to do it automatically. And I imagine footwork is the same in your area, you can’t stop and go right, I better step back with my left foot now because you’re so far behind the action.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, actually, there’s an exercise I was taught on a knife fighting course about basically, the effects of having been hit, or the effects of having been thrown or whatever. And so you’re disoriented. And what we had to do is you extend your finger like you’re pointing and you wrap your other arm underneath, and then you point at a spot on the ground, and you spin round and round and round and round and round until you’re staggering. And then while you’re staggering about because you’re so dizzy, you had to pull your knife out and hit the target. Yeah, it’s hard. But it’s a really useful exercise. It doesn’t have to be done with knives. You could do it with swords or anything else. But basically, when your brain is disoriented, can you get enough control to make the strike and make it actually work? I mean, I think punching people in the head, you have to do it more than a couple of times it’s maybe not the best solution for that kind of training. But the spinning around thing simulates, it doesn’t have the shock value, but it has the disorientation value.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, I think I think training for combat is intrinsically a hard problem. Because real combat is quite different. So I’m led to believe, because I’ve never been in what I would call real combat. I had fights at school and you can argue that jousting is as real as it gets as a martial art because you are hitting people and there’s no defence and so perhaps you could argue I have been.

 

Guy Windsor 

Not really. The otherguy is not trying to kill you. I’ve never been there. But we’re social creatures. And I think, and no one’s ever tried to kill me that I’m aware, of a large part of the missing piece is, whatever we’re doing in a training environment, nobody is actually trying to kill us. And as social creatures, the thought of somebody actually trying to kill us is a huge part of the problem. If something happens by accident, then that’s a completely different psychological experience to somebody doing it to deliberately.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes. So how can you train for that? Or is that what the idea of becoming a veteran means? Is that you know, seeing the elephant and is that what it means?

 

Guy Windsor 

Well, the closest I get to it is I have many friends and students and colleagues who are veterans of actual warfare in the 21st century. And I run stuff by them for training purposes. And if they tell me, it’s bullshit, I drop it. I have no interest in actually acquiring the necessary experience to be an authority on that subject. That’s way too hardcore for me. I’m quite happy to defer to other people’s experiences on that one.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Because people asked me occasionally in comments, would you like to be on a medieval battlefield? And my immediate answer is NO, in capital letters. I would be fascinated and appalled and terrified and,  probably traumatised for the rest of my life. I don’t think it’s something one should wants to have happen. If it happened, then one would work out perhaps ways of dealing with it, or not, I don’t know. You don’t know until you encounter these things. But it’s interesting, the reality side of training you talked about, because one of the things with horses is, especially with stallions, they’re not pretending. Everything a stallion does is for real. So if it’s going to bite you, it’s going to bite you quite hard. If it’s going to kick you, and I’ve been kicked by many horses, they don’t hold back, they kick really hard. You just have to sort of try and get out of the way. My mule kicked me so hard when I first had him. I turned my back on him and I got proper mule kicked and I had a dead leg for three days. And it was one of those injuries, hit me right on the gluteus maximus. And it was a funny injury, but it was quite a serious injury. You know, I was hobbling for three days, but it was also funny. The lads working on the castle said what are you doing? Why are you hobbling like that? I said, I’ve just been kicked by a mule and they all laughed. Which is fine. I’m fine with that because some injuries are just intrinsically funny. But I was trying to do some research about sword combat and stuff. Obviously, your stuff is right up there. But I also stumbled across this area of martial arts where they debunk martial arts styles. And you know, there’s some Grandmaster of no touch kung fu. And it’s like, oh my god, there’s an old man. And it’s like, what are you doing and then somebody punches him and he falls over, and you think who’s fooling who there, what’s going on? But the reality is, there is a lot of garbage, even in instructors in martial arts across the world, it seems.

 

Guy Windsor 

Rory Miller wrote an excellent book on this called Meditations on Violence. Where basically he describes the problem in some detail. And yeah, I mean, the real problem is that we don’t get to pressure test our interpretations in a way where if we screw it up, we’re going to die. I mean, I have done some things I wouldn’t repeat now that I’m a parent to test interpretations. Because if my interpretation had failed, I might well have been severely injured or killed. But that was long ago. And I had to be sure. And so I tested it. And it worked. I didn’t start with that test. I started with, oh, this seems to work at a nice, slow, choreographical pace. Now does it work a bit faster? Now does it work a bit faster when he’s really trying to hit me because I’m all geared up? And now does it work at full speed with sharp swords? And now does it work with an enormous log being swung at my head? But again, I don’t think for most historical martial artists, that that level of testing the interpretation is even appropriate, because the students we’re teaching or not depending for their lives on what we’re teaching them. It’s a bit different when you’re teaching a survival skill.

 

Jason Kingsley 

I see what you mean, yeah, or teaching a squaddie how to shoot and take cover, because there’s this finite possibility that they will be in that situation, and that will save their lives or they’ll lose their lives.

 

Guy Windsor 

And pilot training is similar. I’ve been training to fly small aircraft for a little while. And if you make a mistake, a critical mistake, at the wrong height, then you’re going to die. And the level of instruction you get is all organised around not dying. It is really, really clear. There are people who have been killed in completely preventable crashes. Because at three points during the pre-flight tests, you go through this checklist of these various things you do before you even turn the engine on. And then after you turn the engine on, and you’re trundling about, and there’s three times you test whether you have whether your control stick is actually working properly. Three times. Because there’s a control lock that goes in when the plane is parked, and you need to make sure that it’s all you know that you have full freedom of movement. And people have died. Because skipping through the checklist, they haven’t checked it. And they’ve left the control lock in. And when they’re charging down the runway, they can’t rotate, they can’t pull the stick back. And so they end up crashing into the end of the runway and dying. So you’re given a checklist and you go through it step by step by step, and I’ve been in the plane when I have skipped a step. And my instructor has let me skip the step because it wasn’t fatal. So that I would learn from experience that it is good to do everything on the checklist. But with my instructor there, he’s not going to risk his own life, he’s certainly not going to risk mine either. And there are ways of letting the student fail that are not critical.

 

Jason Kingsley 

But you allow them to fail and have the emotional response to I really cocked up really badly.

 

Guy Windsor 

And one instructor of mine when I’ve made a particular mistake when flying or whatever, or we’ve just discussed something that could go wrong he showed me the recovery procedures, and you know, basically 90% of flying is not get lost. And the other 9% of the rest is what to do when your engine catches fire. And then 1% is normal flight. So he will send me air crash reports for this thing we discussed when you do it wrong. This is what happens. And three people died because they did this. Because they flew into cloud without being certified on instruments, for instance. So I’ve been using the flying training to get this kind of perspective in how you teach something, where the consequences of a simple mistake is you die. And it’s been fascinating. I mean, I love the flying anyway. But just that aspect of it of, okay, this is a skill, which will keep you alive. And if you make a mistake, then you are likely to die. In these circumstances, you can make this mistake up here, but you can’t do it over there. It’s scary as hell to be honest.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah, you have to like heights as well, I suppose.

 

Guy Windsor 

I’m scared of heights.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Why are you flying then?

 

Guy Windsor 

Because I’m scared of heights. I also go rock climbing.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Pushing you out of your comfort zone.

 

Guy Windsor 

Again, because there aren’t very many sword situations that are truly frightening. And it’s because I’m the person creating the sword environment I know what the parameters are, I can keep it reasonably safe. So it’s actually difficult to get properly scared in a sword situation. But I need to be able to deal with mortal terror and remain calm and act in a reasonable fashion. And so flying is good for that, climbing is good for that. And it also it gives me insight into how to help the students who are really frightened of swords, but it’s still really attracted to them.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, I suppose both of us are so familiar with them as a tool, that the idea of being frightened by a big sharp piece of steel is almost familiar to us.

 

Guy Windsor 

Being swung at you by somebody. People aren’t usually frightened of the sword on a wall, but when it’s swung at your head, it should be at least a little bit scary, but it often isn’t because I’ve had swords swung up my head thousands and thousands and thousands of times and it has always been fine.

 

Jason Kingsley 

What’s the most difficult problem you’ve had to deal with, with a total newbie? Is it somebody holding the sword or just not even wanting to get close enough to the other person?

 

Guy Windsor 

Honestly, the biggest challenges by far come from people who are big and strong and malicious. So some people will show up to a class because they want to show you up or they’ll show up to a class because they want to bully other students. I mean, that’s not their conscious, that’s usually an unconscious motivator. But the way they behave in class makes them dangerous to others, either physically or psychologically or both. And heading that off before it happens, is the best thing. And that’s a question of culture. But also, dealing with it, when it occurs, it can be really difficult, because they can dress up what they’re doing as well, I’m just doing the drill. Now, I know you’re on a slightly tight schedule. We haven’t really talked about your book yet. You can always you can always come back on and we can talk about it, but we do need to talk about your book. So how does the knightly code of chivalry square with running a business? What’s the relationship? How does that work?

 

Jason Kingsley 

It’s about ethics. Really, the heart of the book is a thing on ethics in business. And one of the problems with the media’s portrayal of business is that often, billionaires and successful business people are portrayed as the baddies, often it’s the corporate entity that is trying to destroy the world. And I think that’s actually quite often true. But it is not exclusively true. There are very ethical businesses, there are people that will turn an unethical deal down, including myself, because it’s not worth doing. I want to try to help people understand how I run a business and see whether they can get any value out of doing the same sort of thing. And so, for example, as simple as paying people on time or even early. I know that sounds trivial, but lots of people spend a lot of energy, the economy spends a lot of energy, chasing legitimate payments and trying to get them. And so if you can afford to pay people for the job they’ve done and pay them early, they can then pay their people they’ve got to pay earlier, and the money circulates faster. And apparently, there’s this thing in economics called the velocity of money. And so unless the money gets put into a savings account somewhere, most people are spending the money you pay them on living. And so that money goes to somebody else, and it circulates. Money’s taken out of the economy by very wealthy people putting it into investments, because the money doesn’t keep flowing. But ordinary people paying for services, paying for food, paying for lodgings, whatever it might be, that money circulates and keeps the economy going. So I’m a great believer in, if you can, paying people on time or early, especially smaller scale people, you know, if British Gas gets paid in 30 days, I’m fine with that, but if I was to buy a sword from a sword maker, I try and pay for it by return, especially if I trust them. Because they can then deal with that money. And things like planning for the long term as well, businesses, often, especially public businesses, and massive companies run on a quarterly basis. And doing anything in three months successfully, trying to trying to get better at fighting in three months is going to be difficult, you can probably improve, but you’re not going to be a master at it. And I’m concerned that this short term thinking is often to the detriment of medium to long term success of a business. So at Rebellion, we’ve always thought where do we want to be in 10 years? Where do we want to be in five years? If we do X is that going to further the long term ambition of the company? And if it isn’t, we won’t do it. Is this an ethical and ethical area of business to be in? So a lot of people are talking about the death of NFT’s at the moment and how everybody saw that they were dodgy.

 

Guy Windsor 

It was a bubble. I stayed the hell out of that one.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Well, people are going who would have known? Everybody knew at the beginning and everybody knew in the middle and everybody knew at the end. Now there is some value in the sort of algorithms used for data security. So this is there’s definitely an underlying value in some of the technology but the whole buying something and having a certificate to say you own it and then trading that, is short term. That’s what I’m saying, it is short term and unwise. But lot of people made a lot of money because they got in early. And they got out early.

 

Guy Windsor 

Yeah, yes.

 

Jason Kingsley 

And so really success in that kind of bubble market, it’s about timing. I talk a little bit about timing. And timing in combat is an important component of it, the same move done too late is no use at all, and businesses are like that. And it’s really hard to judge the timing. But I talk about trying to be wise, think of the long term value of your company and what it what you’re trying to achieve. And if you go on, I often use the term ‘quest’ as well. So a quest doesn’t have to be looking for the Holy Grail. We all know those classic quests. Great quests are written down in literature. But a quest can just be improving your health, getting a better job, writing a book, these are all personal quests. And as we said earlier, if you break it down into smaller steps, you don’t just put your armour on, get on your horse and go find the Holy Grail, you have to go to a mystical abbey, you have to go to a lake, you have to find an old person who tells you a clue to get through the caves of despair or whatever it might be. These things always have a series of tasks to achieve before you achieve the big thing. And I liken personal development to that as well in that you can’t just get healthier. There are a series of steps. Do you eat a little more healthily? Do you take vitamins and minerals? Do you exercise a little bit more? You won’t suddenly one day wake up and be a really good rider or a really good fighter. You might start a bit better than some people, but you have still got to train, everybody has to train.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s incremental progress. And instantly, that ties into what we were saying about writing fiction, starting with the last chapter. If you go on a quest, you have a goal. The goal is the last chapter.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah, that’s very true. I talk a little bit about business planning as well. Spreadsheets are dead easy to do. And everybody’s business spreadsheet always goes up in a nice exponential curve, and everybody’s very happy. Reality is not like that everything takes probably twice as long as you think. Certainly a lot longer than you thought it would take when you started on the journey. And I think optimism plays its part. Optimism balanced with realism is a valuable task. But some things are worth taking time over. And that’s what I talk about. And then I talk a little bit about things like moderation, and people get very confused about what moderation means and I don’t mean, don’t drink wine. I mean, don’t drink too much wine to the point that you fall over and your liver fails. There’s a balance and it’s a very personal choice about where you sit on that spectrum. I like a nice glass of wine occasionally. I used to drink a lot more. These days because I’ve got a family and horses and I’m so bloomin’ busy, I almost don’t have time to drink booze. Literally that’s my excuse. It’s not that I don’t want to it’s just like, it’s 10 o’clock. I’ve just finished feeding the horses. I’m really knackered. I need to eat now then go to bed. So your lifestyle can get in the way. So talk about prudence and bravery. How does bravery work? Because most of us are not going to be on the battlefield in armour with a sword and a horse. And what does bravery mean? Well, bravery mean can mean confronting your own personal demons, your own challenges. You talked about bravery. You talked about your fear of heights, and flying and climbing, directly addressing a thing that you don’t really want to be doing, which is going up high. That is brave. That is bravery. Because if you didn’t have a fear of heights, climbing wouldn’t be the same challenge because you just go who cares? I just like climbing. I have no fear of falling. And there are people like that, there are people that don’t seem to have fear of these kinds of things.

 

Guy Windsor 

Ry friend, Ross’s kid, Zac is an amazing climber. He’s like 12, but he will climb stuff that I can’t even approach because he’s very, very brave. And also he’s smaller, which kind of helps with the mass to strength ratio, but it’s mostly, honestly, he’s just a lot braver than I am. He is a lot less fearful than I am. He is not frightened of falling, at all.

 

Jason Kingsley 

And so I talked about bravery. It’s not brave you don’t even know there’s a threat or you don’t even know that you shouldn’t be doing something. It’s just your job. You know, it’s what you do. And so I talked about bravery. How does that map across business and sometimes that can mean literally starting a business for the first time. You know, the first step, as Tolkien says, careful, your first step outside your threshold might take you on a really long journey. And he’s right, a journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step. And businesses like that, most businesses never get started. And the hardest thing is actually not coming up with the idea. I mean, coming up with good ideas is hard. But the idea itself isn’t the hard bit, the hard bit is going great, I’ve got an idea. Now, what do I do to fulfill this idea? How do I make a training book on swords? How do I write a book on chivalry and how it applies to modern business life? Because if you start you can fail. If you never start, you’re never going to fail. Well, you won’t succeed either.

 

Guy Windsor 

Some people are more afraid of failing than they are of pretty much anything else. And that’s one of the things that we have to do when training is you’ve got to give the students opportunities to fail in a way that isn’t fatal. Same with parenting, parenting is all about letting the kids fail, so they can learn, but making sure that the failure is safe. So when your child is learning to walk, you don’t wrap them up with cushions and stuff and hope they don’t hurt themselves. You just let them walk and they fall. And sometimes they cry, and that’s fine. You just make sure that they’re not staggering about next to a pit of crocodiles. That would be wrong.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, you’re right. Because personal experience is so important. Telling a kid that a candle is hot, and it’s going to burn them is important. And then if they want to touch it, fine. Touch it. And then then learn ouch, it hurts.

 

Guy Windsor 

But you don’t give them a lit candle and let them go play near the curtains.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Exactly right. Yes, you control the exposure to the threat. So you get the personal knowledge, and the personal emotional feedback, which is so important to us. And you’ve also got to expand people’s horizons. It’s funny, it’s interesting, because in games design, which is another area, we haven’t really talked about it. But I’m very involved in games design for our games, and one of the games we’re working at the moment involves exploring. And I said to the lead games designer, the first three places you explore in this game, there’s nothing to find, you’ve effectively trained the player that there’s no point exploring in this game, because they done what they think they should do go and explore those rooms, there’s nothing to find they’ve gone oh, well, maybe that’s just random. Go on to the next one, nothing to find on to the third one, nothing to find, you’ve literally told them these are just decoration, you need to put rewards in all three of those places. And then subsequently, can ration it out over the game, because you’ve got to train them that we want them to explore this game. And not the other way around.

 

Guy Windsor 

It’s the same when demonstrating with martial arts, if your student hits you, you must, when you’re demonstrating, you must praise them. The whole point of martial arts is you get good at hitting and not getting hit. So if your student hits you, that is always a “Good shot. Well done. We’re not quite doing the drill this way. I want them to see something slightly different. So could we do it like this?” Always, well done, good shot. Because if you punish them for doing the thing that you’re supposed to do in martial arts, what they learn is you’re not supposed to hit.

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yeah. And they learn at a very deep level sometimes as well, because they haven’t consciously decided I’m not supposed to hit, they just think I’m not. I was punished for that. Therefore, I won’t do it again.

 

Guy Windsor 

So my final question, Jason, you’ve acted on the thing you said you wanted to act on in the last interview. So clearly, this is a good question to ask, what is next? What is the next best idea you haven’t acted on?

 

Jason Kingsley 

I am going to try to write some fiction. I think it’s very useful to know you’re now under social pressure to get something delivered. Now I’m going to have a go at doing some fiction, I’d like to do a cookbook. Some of my videos on medieval cooking have been very successful. And it strikes me that there’s an area that’s very entertaining to look into. Especially somebody who doesn’t consider themselves to be a particularly skillful cook. I can cook but I don’t qualify myself as a cook. I think that’d be quite a fun area to explore. I’ve got tons more videos to do. I’m doing one at the moment about medieval food. And some of it sounds delightful and some of it sounds truly awful. So that’s quite an interesting video coming up. Yeah, so fiction. I think it’ll be quasi-medieval, but I don’t think I necessarily want to go down the historical route. I feel like fantasy is an area that I’d be quite comfortable with, because I’ve always loved the idea of dragons and wizards existing. And of course, they can exist in fiction.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent. Okay. So let me just remind you what Yoda said: “Do or don’t do. There is no try.” So you’re going to do some fiction?

 

Jason Kingsley 

Yes, I am.

 

Guy Windsor 

And then you’ll come straight back on the show to tell us all about it.

 

Jason Kingsley 

I will do, absolutely. Probably won’t be a few months yet. But a good few months, I’ll possibly try to get most of it done over Christmas, as the as the evenings draw in, and as I’ve got less time to be out and about in the landscape and it gets muddy and colder, then I’ll probably retreat into writing a little bit more.

 

Guy Windsor 

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Jason. It’s been lovely talking to you again.

 

Jason Kingsley 

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.