Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Dr. Marie Meservy, who is a neuro radiologist, a psychologist and historical martial artist, sword mom to the Noble Science Academy and the organizer of Frau Fecht, which is the only American women’s event west of New York. So without further ado, Marie, welcome to the show.
Marie Meservy
Thank you.
Guy Windsor
So whereabouts in the world are you?
Marie Meservy
I’m in Reno, Nevada, and that’s Northern Nevada near the California border, and about 30 minutes from Lake Tahoe.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so not Las Vegas at all, which is the only bit of Nevada that most people have ever heard of.
Marie Meservy
Right. Geographically, we’re closer to Northern California. I’m two hours from Sacramento, about three and a half hours from San Francisco. We’re about seven hours from Vegas if you’re driving fast. So it’s so far away that we actually have a separate branch of the Noble Science Academy down there, who we collaborate with and mentor remotely. But we don’t see them all that often because it would take the whole weekend just to drive back and forth.
Guy Windsor
Right. Yeah. Seven hours is quite a long way even by American standards.
Marie Meservy
Yeah. Where are you? Nobody ever asks you.
Guy Windsor
I’m in Ipswich in the UK, which is about 70 miles north east of London. So, yes, it’s about 15 minutes from the coast and a nice, fairly small town. So yes, you’re right. When you say no one ever asks me that, do you actually listen to the show?
Marie Meservy
I have listened to a few.
Guy Windsor
Glad to hear it. It’s nice to know that some people are actually listening, it’s hard to tell.
Marie Meservy
I think you have a much larger audience than you think I’m sure.
Guy Windsor
It’s difficult to track it. Because, officially, we recently passed 100,000 downloads. So that’s something I suppose and at that point, we have 153 episodes out. So it’s not actually that many downloads per episode.
Marie Meservy
And you get like some idiots like me that download it three times before they finally get it working.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, some of that goes on. But also, not every listen is recorded. So for example, if it’s streamed on Spotify, for example, I don’t think that counts as a download. So there’s no really good way to measure it. Other than, like, if I ask people to go and do something like email me about the transcripts, for instance, then how many people actually do that? It’s very difficult to really assess how much impact we’re really having. But it is nice that these days when I approach people to come on the show, they’ve usually heard of it. If they’re in the sword world, obviously. So how did you get started with historical martial arts?
Marie Meservy
It’s such a funny question. It’s such an integral part of my life now. It’s almost strange to think of life before HEMA. And the cool answer would be that I’ve always liked swords. The truthful answer is that I have a lot of hobbies, but I really wouldn’t have picked swordfighting out of a hat. However, my husband chose HEMA. And I chose to support my husband. We’ve been married almost 14 years, and in our early marriage, life kind of had to revolve around me, because I knew that I wanted to be a doctor. And in the US that required 15 years of schooling and training after high school. So here, I was dragging him all over the continent as I was accumulating degrees. So we’ve lived in Montreal, Nevada, New Hampshire, Arizona, and now we’re back in Nevada again. And turns out all of this moving around was pretty disruptive to him trying to climb any kind of ladder. He has been really supportive of my career. And so it was really important to me, to provide him with that complete support also. But as it turns out, we’ve lived in a series of very small to midsize towns, and almost always had to start new clubs from scratch whenever we moved, so there was a lot of sacrifice. Like in the beginning, it was us living on a pretty tight budget, so that we could save up any extra and buy wasters. Or I would just show up to practices and sometimes it would just be him and me and one or two other people. And then it was sending him off to the UK to get his master’s degree in medieval history. And even nowadays, it’s like I hold down the fort and solo parent most of our evenings while he goes off to teach or he’ll go away for a weekend to coach his students in tournaments. And I’ll hold down the fort at home. So we can say from experience that it’s not glamorous being married to a medical student and it’s not glamorous being married to a HEMA instructor.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, my wife would definitely agree with the latter part of that. Yes, I was a historical martial arts instructor before we even met, and it won’t change. And yeah, it’s a lot of like evenings and weekends. But I did mean that when my kids were little, I was home for most of the day with the kids doing various things.
Marie Meservy
And yeah, that is actually true.
Guy Windsor
So you know, getting the kids off to school in the morning and all that kind of stuff, that tended to be me.
Marie Meservy
It’s interesting, because like, yeah, one of you works a swing shift. And so you basically pass like ships in the night, right? And you kind of you solo parent, in your own time. And then it’s very rare that you’re actually all home.
Guy Windsor
It wasn’t that bad, because I didn’t teach every night. And I didn’t teach every weekend. Because by the time that we met, I was kind of sufficiently established that I didn’t have to be working all the time. But at one point, when my eldest child was about two, I just casually mentioned that I hadn’t actually taken a holiday since I started the school nine years earlier. And this guy, who was the president of the association of my students, that time, he said, “Guy, your poor family, this is not acceptable. Come into the office.” So I went into my office at the salle, where there was a big wall calendar and he handed me a Sharpie and said, “Pick three weeks.” Okay. “You did not come into the salle.” Because in Finland, they understand family time, and they understand holiday time.
Marie Meservy
You know, honestly, what you’ve described kind of strikes me as like, if that ever happens to us, then we’ve made it as HEMA instructors. Because we haven’t reached that point yet. We just opened our most recent school in 2020.
Guy Windsor
Great timing.
Marie Meservy
Oh, yeah, we had a grand opening. And then a week later we had a grand closing because the entire city was shut down. And then we started, like hobbled along the next year or two or until like we really, you know, fully opened, and right now, like my husband just took a one week off last week. And it was the first time in a really, really long time. I’m like, I’m a doctor, but you’re the limiting factor in whether we can go on vacation.
Guy Windsor
There’s lots of things I want to unpack there. But firstly, just because I’m curious, what is a neuro radiologist? Do you study like X rays of the brain?
Marie Meservy
Yeah, anytime you get a medical imaging done, your file passes through the desk of a radiologist. I know on drama tv shows, they skip that part. And every doctor just has a radiologist built into their brain. That is not true. It’s another doctor looking at all of the imaging and providing an interpretation. And then the doctor that is facing you kind of synthesizes that information and makes a treatment plan and goes from there. So a neuroradiologist is brain, spines, head and neck. Anything adjacent to the brain itself.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so would you be a good person to talk to about concussion preventive strategies for historical martial arts?
Marie Meservy
Prevention less so than diagnosis. I’m behind the scenes on the back end, right, like I see your head CT, once you have suffered a fracture or bleed or something that is detectable. But I will tell you that in our school and in tournaments we run we’re very adverse to causing injury and so we’re much more productive than others may be inclined to be.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me that most people are using for their primary head protection a modified sport fencing mask that is fundamentally structurally designed to handle foils, epees and sport fencing sabres. It would make a lot more sense to me if we started out with something like a medieval helmet and sort of engineered from there.
Marie Meservy
But also even before we get to protective equipment, how about we make our rulesets…
Guy Windsor
And our training culture. Absolutely. But I think when it comes to the concussion thing, just simply not belting each other in the head as hard as we can is a good starting point.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of poise to have the power to be able to kill someone with a blow, but then like, not apply it. Because we’re not here to fight to the death, we have careers and families to get back to.
Guy Windsor
But also, even if you were there to fight to the death, you don’t want to over commit to a blow because if you miss, then you are overexposed, and your chances of recovering in time is minimal. I think especially serious martial artists need to kind of cultivate that control. Okay, so getting back to neuroradiology for a second. This is not something that was on the list of questions I sent. So a little bit out of left field. Okay, reading a scan of a brain is all about spotting patterns and structures and things not being where they are supposed to be.
Marie Meservy
Yes, I’m like a glorified art critic.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so is it not the case that an AI could be trained to do it faster and more reliably?
Marie Meservy
That’s interesting that you asked that. We have been looking into it, we’re very, very interested in AI. If not taking over, at least, like making our jobs a little easier. And so far, AI is not there for interpretation of medical imaging. And I honestly think that everybody thinks that imaging is the low hanging fruit, because you have like, all the data fed in to the machine, it’s actually not the lowest hanging fruit, I would think that a primary care physician, or an ER nurse, would be replaced much easier, because you can have a kiosk talking to a patient, and they can input their symptoms and then feed into an algorithm, right? Like, that’s the low hanging fruit. Image interpretation, I don’t know, for some reason, because you have to be able to take the 2d image and construct it in your head and make a 3d picture. Somehow, at least the things that we’ve had so far, hasn’t even begun to approach. Like there was a guy who said, you know, I will come and personally wash your car, if you can create an algorithm that can recognize the human adrenal glands. And this was like back in the 70s, and still hasn’t washed any cars. It’s something so simple. There’s just a lot more to it than we give it credit for.
Guy Windsor
My intention is not to disrespect your professional expertise. But it just, it strikes me because you have a finite dataset of all brains are supposed to have the same sort of structures inside them. I’m guessing, it’s probably easier to see something that doesn’t have any anomalies. It strikes me that like, they did this in Chicago with heart attacks, where they had a simple, like, four or five question thing, which the answers got fed into a simple algorithm. And it determined whether the patient should be sent home or admitted to the hospital.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, something basic and algorithmic like that. That sounds beautiful.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that works a lot better than actual doctors.
Marie Meservy
The problem is with medical imaging, it’s not binary, whether this is normal versus not normal, right? Normal has such a huge range and variety, because every person is built slightly differently, we have to understand what is the range of normal.
Guy Windsor
So it’s not actually a finite data set.
Marie Meservy
Right. And then also, the clinical context matters to our interpretation of the image. We’re not just in the black box, just going normal, abnormal, normal, abnormal all day long, we have to take into context, certain things may appear the same on imaging, but the diagnosis depends on everything else that we don’t see in front of our screen. So a lot of times that includes calling a colleague who is looking at the patient, and kind of having a chat about okay, so what’s really most likely based on the clinical scenario, and all that. You kind of have to be the total package.
Guy Windsor
Okay, interesting, because it’s an area of medicine that I’ve never really even thought about. Because on TV Is this they slap an x ray up on the screen?
Marie Meservy
They’ve got it upside down. I have to say.
Guy Windsor
Yes, probably. There’s always super obvious what they’re looking at. Yeah,
Marie Meservy
And it’s not. They make it sound like it’s obvious. So they should make a medical drama about a radiologist, it would be super exciting.
Guy Windsor
Probably wouldn’t actually. I guess all the fun is happening on the inside. So why did you pick that particular branch of medicine?
Marie Meservy
Many reasons. I actually really liked physics. And I liked the kind of reasoning that goes on in radiology, like you’re using pictures and what you can infer from a series of shadows, to put into a clinical context and make a diagnosis to help a patient. And I found that part really intellectually stimulating. And also I realized, later on in my medical training, that doctors rely on imaging a lot. And so without radiology functioning, most other doctors cannot be what they are, and do what they do.
Guy Windsor
It is a linchpin job. Okay. Interesting. So, what area of swords have you gone into? What kind of swordsmanship do you do?
Marie Meservy
I started with long sword back in 2013. And I did that for a while, and then my HEMA career was actually cut short, because I took on too much head trauma, actually. It’s interesting, because, like, it’s this thing that like, I think nobody really knows about unless your career kind of depends on your vision, but I am prone to retinal detachments, because I’m highly nearsighted. And it takes a very small force for me to actually to detach my retina. And in one of my routine eye exams, my optometrist saw some scarring in my retina. And he said, he said, have you had any symptoms where you just like, couldn’t see out of a part of your eye or anything like that? I’m like, No.
Guy Windsor
I think you’d go to the doctor straight away.
Marie Meservy
He said, this is pretty kind of maybe far peripheral in your retina, maybe you didn’t notice, but I had to have a laser treatment to get it reattached. And it had already been some time, because they had been scarred. And I said, okay, wait, I am a radiologist, I need to be able to see. What can I do in the future to prevent this from happening? And he was like, nothing really, except that you just can’t get hit in the head. So I said, okay, my HEMA career has just come to an abrupt end.
Guy Windsor
Fair. Okay, so I mean, you could do smallsword.
Marie Meservy
Can you guarantee not getting hit?
Guy Windsor
No, you can’t guarantee it. But you can’t guarantee not hitting your head getting out of bed in the morning. But in smallsword, the face is not usually a target. And you can reasonably specify no head hits when you’re fencing someone. But most critically, you can fence with a much lighter, much more flexible blade. A lot of training smallswords are quite close to real smallswords. And the blade is a lot more rigid than a modern foil, for example, but you can absolutely do smallsword training with foils, because that’s what they used in the 18th century. And if you get hit in the face with a foil, or you’re wearing a mask and you’re hit in the face with the foil, the chances of it is a much, much lower level of impact.
Marie Meservy
Our school has recently started a smallsword program. So maybe I will.
Guy Windsor
But insist that your opponent has a foil. And check it for bendiness before you fence because you want maximum bendiness in your opponent’s foil to save your head and specify no head hits. I mean, I love smallsword. It is absolutely brutal, nasty, vicious. It is the kind of thing that makes you want to betray your friends and drink too much. Evil weapon when you do it right.
Marie Meservy
I make tennis that when I play tennis. A non-contact sport.
Guy Windsor
Why do you think sports psychology, I mean, I’m not saying I disagree with you. But why do you particularly think sports psychology is important in historical martial arts?
Marie Meservy
I think that psychology is helpful in most things in life. I use it every single day in seemingly unrelated endeavors. Like parenting. People in the US will argue that doctors don’t, or shouldn’t have to have an undergraduate degree before medical school. But I would argue that everyone should be required to have a psychology degree, whether they’re doctors or not, because understanding how the human mind works, should be requisite to being human. A brain is a really powerful piece of equipment. So why should we just blunder about through life operating it without any instructions?
Guy Windsor
That’s a good way to put it. So I guess the issue would be that psychology is an enormous field. And it’s one where a kind of, there’s really hard science psychology at one end, where it basically blends into neurology. But most psychological experiments are very difficult to make definitive. Right, it’s very difficult to collect data in a reliable way.
Marie Meservy
There’s a lot of subjective measurements. And there’s a lot of variables.
Guy Windsor
So what aspects of psychology do you think this compulsory undergraduate degree in it should take?
Marie Meservy
Well, I don’t even think you need to have a whole degree. I’m just being facetious. But I think that you can probably break down like human motivation, group relations, and interpersonal relations into like, probably two or three courses, just even understanding that we have cognitive biases, a lot of people are not aware, right?
Guy Windsor
Definitely a module on cognitive biases, they are so useful to know about.
Marie Meservy
Or just like, even limits of perception, and cognition. People are not aware that that your brain is not just taking, like subjective input from your eyes and just constructing you know, what is reality. Like, there’s usually multiple realities based on where you were standing at the time, and how the conversation unfolded or whatever. But as it pertains to sports, I’ve been interested in sports and performance psychology for decades. I’m a musician, myself, and I spent my high school years wondering why in the world, I could never perform my solos as well as I practiced them. I play violin, and I’m also a singer. And then also, like, in the process of training to be a doctor, I took literally hundreds of exams. And I always wondered why I couldn’t score as high on the exams, as I did on the practice exam. And it’s like I have to build in like a buffer. Like, if I wanted to score 80%, I needed to make sure my baseline was 90% or higher. And I just expected that my performance was going to drop on the big day. And I would just chalk it up to external factors like not sleeping well, or being distracted by noise in the exam room, or the temperature was too cold. So I just routinely gave away 10 to 15% of my performance, to factors outside of my control. And it wasn’t until much later that I realized I could actually control a lot more than I thought. And I could regain those performance points, and really do justice to myself and my level of preparation.
Guy Windsor
So what did you do that was different?
Marie Meservy
It mostly comes down to anticipating the exam conditions, and just factoring that in. Because the reason we don’t perform as well, when it’s the real deal, is because we’re surprised by how different things are. So when you traveled to a HEMA tournament, you’re in a new city, you didn’t sleep well in the hotel room, you didn’t get to eat your favorite breakfast, or whatever. And you’re probably putting a bunch of external pressure on yourself going, okay, this is it. This is it, this is it. And what you need to do instead is simulate as much as you can, what it’s actually going to look like, on performance day. And then just tell yourself, this is like I practiced, I got to do what I practiced.
Guy Windsor
Right. Yeah, it reminds me, the British Cycling Team, which became amazingly good a while ago, one of the things they do is like, when the team travels, it has a van with mattresses and pillows in so that every athlete is sleeping on this. Anything that can be made consistent, is made consistent, and they’re maximizing the marginal gains that you can get from those little tiny tweaks, which add up to quite a lot or performance difference over time.
Marie Meservy
Because you spend a lot of your mental energy thinking about little things that you don’t have control of that day. And I don’t mean by this, that you should always train at maximum intensity, as if you were in a tournament to the life or death. I just mean that, obviously, like a marathon runner is never going to run multiple marathons preparing for a marathon, right? But they’re going to simulate parts of it, and kind of build up their endurance so that they can perform at peak when it matters. And I think that’s what I mean, when it comes to controlling your mind.
Guy Windsor
And also making themselves familiar with the course. It’s like, whenever you travel to a new place, whenever I go somewhere I’ve never been before. It’s very stimulating. It’s very enjoyable. But it’s much more tiring than going somewhere I’ve been before, because everything is new. Also there’s simply the ability to handle the extra pressure.
Marie Meservy
And I think that visualization is a tool that is used a lot in sports training. But I think that people don’t utilize it to the fullest extent when they’re visualizing a perfect day. Like, I showed up. And I got every hit on my opponent, and every call was made in my favor. Well, that’s cool. But what are you going to do when that starts to not happen? And you do fail, right? Because what you need to do is envision everything that can go wrong, and envision yourself responding beautifully to that going wrong.
Guy Windsor
This reminds me of a podcast I listened to where there was a world class weightlifter, who was saying that one of the things that made the difference for her is she visualized and trains what happens when the judge says that she did some technical error in the lift where maybe her hips are supposed to go below her knees, and the judge says they didn’t even though she knows they did or whatever. So she rehearses that in our heads so that when that happens, or if that happens, it doesn’t derail her, it is just this is just like practice,
Marie Meservy
There’s always so much more left of the game, that if you kind of have a meltdown in the beginning, you’re losing the ability to recover and do so much better and still do the best you can given the circumstances.
Guy Windsor
Do you have any particular practices that you do based on your study of psychology?
Marie Meservy
So we mentioned visualization, that’s a big part of it. And I think in my mind, I kind of allow myself to have the appropriate, like my natural response to a situation, but I make it fit the time at hand. So if I only have 10 minutes to have a meltdown, I try to give myself the space, like okay, then I’ll set the timer for 10 minutes, I got to be composed in 10 minutes from now and keep going. But in this time, I’m going to let myself just have it out. So that I can go through the process of reacting to whatever just happened, but not letting it take all day and derail whatever else I have planned for the day.
Guy Windsor
Once you allow the meltdown to occur, how do you stop it?
Marie Meservy
You got to do it in a controlled fashion.
Guy Windsor
It’s kind of counterintuitive, yes. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown, but in a controlled fashion.
Marie Meservy
Yeah. Because you got to make it productive. You have to go through the emotions, but you have to have a way of reining yourself back in so that you’re composed for the next thing. Because you don’t have all day. So basketball players will do something really simple. They’ll just dribble the ball a couple times before they take that penalty shot. It’s not because the dribbling matters, but it’s a centering practice that kind of refocuses their mind, they’ve trained it that way. You know, I used to be a basketball player, you always do the two dribbles before you do the penalty shot. So you put your mind, you trigger that response of like, okay, now I’m going to do the next thing.
Guy Windsor
You ramp up to like a predictable lead in to what you’re about to do.
Marie Meservy
It’s all about making your performance match what you practiced. And so if you’ve got a little tiny routine, in your head, and in your body that you go through, you go through these motions, and then your body is ready for the next motion. And in HEMA, it can be really short and may have to be really short. And I like to have the mantra of next exchange, I’m ready for the next exchange, as opposed to analyzing what happened in the past.
Guy Windsor
I’m going to tell you mine. Okay, Annie Lennox did a solo album a long time ago. And there’s a song on it called “No More I Love Yous”, which for some reason, a long time ago. I had it on in the salle, and I started doing our longsword syllabus form to that song, but like, completely camped up, like, swaying my hips and just doing the whole thing. And it just made the students laugh until they practically wet themselves. And it begins with dooby dooby doo doo doo, right? And it’s just like the silliest little noise that it takes me from whatever I’m in at the moment. dooby dooby doo doo doo. I get this kind of silly, fun, happy.
Marie Meservy
It’s like a palate cleanser. It clears your mind and gets you back to that next thing.
Guy Windsor
I freaked my flying instructor out doing it, as I was coming into land with a crosswind and I was feeling I was feeling a little bit tense and like oh shit, I’m going to crash the plane. I was going dooby dooby doo doo doo. He was like, “What the fuck?”
Marie Meservy
Your mind has these like rudimentary primitive circuits that you can access through, like, either smells or auditory stimuli, or whatever, that can trigger a different mindset way faster than you can reason yourself into it through your higher functioning like cerebral cortex.
Guy Windsor
Exactly. It’s having a shortcut to a state of mind. Okay. And incidentally, for anyone listening, there are no circumstances in which I will actually video what we call the Annie Lennox form and put it on the internet, that is not going to happen. Because it would trash my reputation as an instructor for all time. So, no.
Marie Meservy
You shouldn’t have brought it up.
Guy Windsor
I’m quite happy for people to imagine it. But there’s no way I’m putting it on the internet, because it wouldn’t do my reputation any good. You’ve had a lot of experience helping to set up clubs as you’ve moved around. Presumably, when you start to set up a club, you have some idea of the direction in which you want it to grow. So what you do at the early stages for that helps you keep that direction or create the direction that you want?
Marie Meservy
Honestly, I don’t know that. Would most people who start clubs from scratch say that they have, like a grand vision from the very beginning? Because in the beginning, you’re just hoping that more than two people will show up, right? In the beginning it’s just like me and my husband in a park.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I mean, I don’t mean, like some grand plan for taking over the historical martial arts world. What I mean is, like some idea of the kind of club you’re trying to create. Are you trying to create, I don’t know, something that feels like a medieval guild? Or are you trying to create something that feels like a sports club? Or are you trying to create something that feels like some colleagues that have got together to discuss and play with the things they’re interested in? Or is it going to be more hierarchical? Do you want a teacher who supposedly know what they’re doing and students so there’s more of a formal teacher student relationship? I mean, there’s lots of options that you could be going for. And basically, I’m trying to dig into the question. You’re a psychologist. And so presumably, you have some idea of how people work. And so basically I’m trying to pull out of your head, the stuff that I think is going to be most useful to people who are currently thinking about starting a club, have started the club, are running a club, and maybe things aren’t going quite the way they wish they were going.
Marie Meservy
That’s good. Okay. Yeah. So, the way we have done it, maybe not the way that I would like, engineer how to do it. So like I said, when we first start out, just he and I go out to a park and we start swinging swords and we’re having a lot of fun people walk by and, and they’ll maybe ask us, what are you doing? Or yeah, if we’re very lucky, someone will come up and say, hey, are you doing HEMA? And we’ll be like, yes!
Guy Windsor
We have had people calling the cops when we’ve done that before. Cops showing up with submachine guns. Okay, so not actually people with swords trying to kill each other, actually it is historical fencing group. Oh, great. This is in Edinburgh in the 90s.
Marie Meservy
They should know because we’ve got protective gear on we’re not playing with sharps, like this was totally different. Right.
Guy Windsor
The problem wasn’t the police. The problem was the was the people misinterpreting walking and getting a bit confused.
Marie Meservy
So in the beginning, it’s just like having a strong intro lesson that you can give to somebody to kind of interest them in what you’re doing and put the sword in their hand as much as possible. And don’t just lecture on history or treatises or whatever, right, like, give them something practical, here’s a sword, here’s how to use it now go whack each other for a bit. So I find that the earlier you can get people actively doing it, the better success rate you have of converting them. And we’ve actually, in our clubs, we have had close to like 50% women a lot of times, or at least like 30%. And I think part of it is that when we’re starting out, there’s a woman there. I’m 50%. If we’re just starting out.
Guy Windsor
You’re not suggesting that representation matters, are you?
Marie Meservy
A little bit. I think that like having the women there helps both women and men be more interested in joining, honestly. And so I think just if you have a bunch of people, and they’re having fun, and they’re learning, and they’re using what they learn, I think that’s a good start. And then, obviously, like over the years as we’ve grown, now, our Reno school has, like 50 people. And we’ve clearly had to refine a lot. And I mean, this is like, this is the stuff that my husband and I stay up late talking about every night, is like our school, the future of HEMA, how we can tweak our curriculum or pedagogy or the culture to help our students. I’ve become really fond of the members of our sword family, who turned out to be our primary group of friends now. And I’m heavily invested in their lives. And I care a great deal about their progression as fencers and as individuals. And so everything that we do as a school is kind of centered around empowering our fencers. We built our whole culture around giving fencers everything they need to succeed and find joy in their practice of HEMA.
Guy Windsor
What are those things?
Marie Meservy
So we’ve determined that this is most effectively done with a two pronged approach. Number one, the system should be set up to focus on outcomes. And number two, the fencers should be trained with a focus on process. So I will elaborate on that.
Guy Windsor
Yes, please do. I know exactly where you’re going and it is music to my heart, but I don’t want to interfere with your exposition. So yeah, go ahead.
Marie Meservy
Okay. So starting with the outcomes based system, you have to have a good curriculum, you have scholarly projects, and mentorship in place, so that there is a progression starting with good passive learning. And then you are expected to engage in interpretation or curriculum development, and then you get to be responsible for training someone else who is less experienced than yourself, because teaching is ultimately the most effective learning tool. So my husband, Michael Forrest is a historian and a linguist. So he reads manuals in their original language, and he bypasses some of the inadequacies of the available English translations. Now, I recognize that this part is not necessarily easy to replicate in any given school. So we’re just kind of fortunate, but when we have the material in place, we try to make our classes brain friendly, so that we can maximize efficiency of learning, so that however many hours someone may have to devote to HEMA, those hours can be well spent. And then we have personal trainers tailoring exercises to individual body mechanics. And then the whole school has a feedback mechanism where we monitor our outcomes and adjust the process for better outcomes. We have a leadership team that meets regularly and discusses what’s going on, and what is going poorly and how to make things better. So the team is comprised of instructors and senior students, but also less advanced students who just happen to care a lot. And we even have one who hasn’t even practiced HEMA for a while, but just kind of feels like she belongs. So the input should come from multiple viewpoints. And the solutions are not just top down.
Guy Windsor
So when you say feedback mechanisms, you mean, basically this leadership group, the members actually expressing their opinions about what they’ve seen and what they think could be done better?
Marie Meservy
Yeah, I mean, ideally, everyone should feel comfortable enough with a head instructor that they can come to the instructor and say, this is not going well for me, but if not, there should be a lot of other ears in the club.
Guy Windsor
I know from experience that many of my students in the past have felt like a bit that they don’t really want to say it directly to Guy. But I have my senior students sort of milling about and whatever. And one function of school parties, everyone has a few drinks or whatever. And actually, some of the most interesting feedback has come from when someone has got a bit of Dutch courage in them, and has a quiet word with one of the senior students who then passes it on to me. Yeah, it’s all very kind of low impact, if you know what I mean.
Marie Meservy
And it’s important as the head instructor to take that. Not be like, oh, you’ve challenged my ego.
Guy Windsor
It doesn’t make you a bad person if your school isn’t perfect.
Marie Meservy
No school is perfect. No school is perfect. And we find this in medicine actually a lot. It is very hierarchical, but the leaders who can never be contradicted are the worst, because they may be doing something terrible or wrong and nobody has the guts to tell them and they’re just going to perpetuate their errors. That’s the worst.
Guy Windsor
Have you read The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande?
Marie Meservy
Oh, I love Atul Gawande, but I have not read that particular one.
Guy Windsor
It’s fantastic. It started out with an operation that went wrong in the UK, where a woman died in surgery because they didn’t intubate fast enough. And when they were trying to intubate, it didn’t work. And they spent eight minutes trying to shove a tube down her throat instead of doing a tracheotomy. And the senior nurse was there basically telling them to do a fucking tracheotomy already and they didn’t listen. And this woman’s husband was a pilot. And in aviation, there is a very clear process when things go wrong, there is a very thorough investigation to find out what happened. The same isn’t really true.
Marie Meservy
It’s becoming more and more true, because actually, medicine has started to model after the aviation industry.
Guy Windsor
And this was the spark of that. Aviation is dominated by checklists. Everything has a checklist. I’m learning to fly planes myself at the moment. My life is just one checklist after another, it’s fantastic. Then they started applying the checklists in hospitals in Britain. And basically, if you’re running down a checklist, then if the chief surgeon, 40 years’ experience and blah, blah, blah, which actually means his training is 40 years out of date, but never mind. I mean, slight aside, my grandfather was a doctor, he was a general practitioner, what you’d call a family doctor. And he graduated from Guy’s Hospital in, I think 1914, something like that. No, it must have been 1915, 1916, something like that. And I saw his records. We have like, scans of them. His entire training to become a doctor was two and a half years at Guy’s Hospital. And he was still seeing patients in the 1980s. Isn’t that a horrifying thought?
Marie Meservy
No, not necessarily, because he continued to learn throughout his career. I would assume so.
Guy Windsor
I would hope, because otherwise, he would have missed the whole antibiotics thing. Antibiotics came out when he had been a doctor for 25 years.
Marie Meservy
Yeah. I think that there’s no way that you go through your medical career and not have your approach modified, if not daily, you know, at least regularly because there were so many times you see something and it’s like, oh, I’ve never seen that in training. I guess now I have to look that up.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so basically going back to the checklist, like when they’re going through the checklist, if the senior surgeon with 40 years ‘experience or whatever, skips a step, anyone in the room could say, oh, actually hang on, we’ve skipped a step. Actually, I had a flight instructor who let me take off without my takeoff flaps extended. He let me do it, because it’s perfectly safe, it’s not a dangerous mistake. But then then when I got to the point in takeoff, where you go through the FELT check, which is flaps engine lights trim. Oh, I forgot my flaps! Yes, a good instructor doesn’t let you make dangerous mistakes. But they do let you make lots of mistakes so long as you can survive the outcome.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, honestly, a lot of being a good leader is just handing over what can be handed over. Because if you’ve got to micromanage everything, you’re stunting the growth of your students in the ways that you need them to develop leadership skills. If nothing else, you need to take vacation once a year.
Guy Windsor
Yes, after once every nine years. Yeah, the book, The Checklist Manifesto is basically the story of how checklists went from aviation into surgery, primarily, it’s a fantastic book. But, okay, so we were talking about your outcomes, your system is optimized for outcomes, and you have a feedback mechanism to make sure that the outcomes are what you want them to be.
Marie Meservy
And we’re constantly revising the system.
Guy Windsor
But then, the actual training is all about process.
Marie Meservy
Yes. So the next part is the process focused fencer, right? HEMA is a competitive sport. But healthy competition should not require you to hope that other people are going to fail so that you can succeed. Unfortunately, in our tournament world, it’s kind of a zero sum game. But we’ve tried to kind of structure our school so that nothing is a zero sum game. We use tournaments as a learning tool, we set appropriate expectations. And we define our successes in terms of a team oriented growth mindset. So for example, we happen to have at our school, the number one ranked woman longsword fighter in the world. That’s Rashelle DeBolt, she started in 2020. And she basically learned during lockdown. She began competing in the summer of 2021. She won her first medal in 2022. And since then, she has been basically unstoppable. She shows up, she wins gold, she goes home, right. But this year, at SoCal swordfight, which just happened a couple months ago, she lost her finals match, and she took silver. Now, in some schools, this may be a big disappointment, right? This is huge, and it may prompt a discussion about whether or not she deserves to be ranked at the top. It may cause her to reevaluate her whole life. But at our school, we saw it as an opportunity to make her even better. We were kind of glad that somebody found one trick that the other fencer pulled off against her right twice. It was a Zwerchhau after the bind, she did it twice. And that decided the whole match. Now everybody at our school can train against that technique, and we’re all better for it. So she didn’t win, but we all win.
Guy Windsor
And if you go through a tournament, just winning every fight, you come out of it with a bunch of medals, but you’re not learning very much.
Marie Meservy
No, no. And another example, we had a new fencer entered the beginners’ tournament, for cutting, beginners’ cutting tournament. We don’t even train cutting with sharps at our school, we cut with wasters and feders. And this was his first time ever cutting tatami, but he ended up taking bronze. So everyone at the school can take pride in his achievement, of course, because we all have the same fundamentals training that translated well to cutting tatami, and some of us may be motivated to try cutting tournaments in the future, right. I want to do cutting in the future because I’m not going to get hit in the head. So with that, we all win. We had another fencer who actually did a respectable performance. He was top quarter in his tier, but he realized during his tournament that all the training he does at high speed, high intensity wasn’t as helpful to his fencing as he previously thought. And he also decided that hand sniping just wasn’t worth it, because it just results in doubles. And he has since intentionally, he slowed down his training and just focused more on quality of technique. And everyone has appreciated fencing against him in his new approach. And so we’re really glad that this tournament experience helped him to change his focus. So he didn’t win a medal either. But we all win. So a lot of it is just framing your wins in such a way that the fencer gets something out of the experience of the tournament, and then we all get something out of it as a school.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, that’s true in every area, like my eldest child has her super important exam they take when they’re 16 now, and since they were little, it’s been “Oh well done, you did well in a test, well done. That’s nice.” Right? You know, acknowledge successes. But oh my goodness, you worked so hard for that. That was fantastic. We should do this, that and the other to celebrate how hard you worked.
Marie Meservy
That is the thing that actually builds someone’s character.
Guy Windsor
It actually gets better results. I mean, she’s upstairs in her room. So she won’t be able to hear this. So you shouldn’t really talk about teenagers, they basically want you to not exist when you’re not in the room. But, she’s not worried about the exams at all. Because if something goes wrong, and she does really badly, if she needs that a good grade in that particular subject, she can just take the exam again, at any point in her life going forward, I mean, you know, people sometimes take these exams in their 30s or 40s. Some do it just for fun. So we’re not focusing at all on the outcome. It’s all about the process. And we have a reasonable expectation of good outcomes based on her predicted grades and stuff. But even if we didn’t, we wouldn’t actually care particularly. It’s only a problem if there’s something she wants to do. Let’s say she wants to go to a particular university to do a particular subject, and she’s going to need these grades to get there, then those outcomes matter to her for this reason. But that’s the only reason we would take them seriously at all.
Marie Meservy
I’m not saying that the outcomes never matter at all. Like you said, they matter greatly sometimes, but focusing on the outcomes is not going to get you there. When you see Olympic athletes being interviewed after they won gold, they’re not they’re going, “Yeah, a lot was riding on this performance. And I needed to do it for my mom.” Like, that’s not why they did it. The most successful athletes, they’ll say in their interviews afterwards, I have done this 1000 times, I just knew I had to do it one more time. And they focused on doing the thing that they practiced,
Guy Windsor
Actually my fencing coach from years ago, told me a story about this fencer that he trained, who was one point away from winning the British championships, and he fluffed it, because in his head, he was like, oh, my God, I’m going to be British champion, I’m going to be British champion, and then he lost it. So as soon as you focus on the outcome, it all goes to shit.
Marie Meservy
Absolutely. Or even you start you start assessing your performance too early, right? You’re like, oh, I missed, I missed that. And now it’s all over, it’s a disaster. And you don’t recognize that there are a lot more exchanges left to go, your mantra to yourself should be, Okay, next exchange, next exchange, you should never be focused back on like, okay, that sucked, what am I going to do? I’m worthless as a person.
Guy Windsor
I had a student of mine years ago, who came for a lot of private lessons. And she was an airline pilot. And one thing I had difficulty with, we would do a thing, and then I’d ask her to review what we had just done. And she had difficulty doing that. I was like, so why is why is this difficult? She said, well, because we are taught not to go back and look what just has happened because you’re in a machine up in the sky, you have to be looking at what is happening and what might happen. You can’t be thinking about what did happen because that’s already gone. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s a really interesting kind of different approach. And of course, as soon as the plane is on the ground, then the aviation authorities come in and they do all the review.
Marie Meservy
And that’s what we do to our fencers. We’ll take video, I will be there next to the ring recording your entire match. And you will review it in your private lesson two weeks later. But we’re not going to talk about the last exchange, that’s not going to help you to win.
Guy Windsor
The way you expressed it, your system for outcomes. Can you just say that thing again. Like how you have a two pronged approach?
Marie Meservy
Oh, yes, the system should be set up with a focus on outcomes. Yeah, the fencer should be trained with a focus on process.
Guy Windsor
That’s genius. That articulation of it is genius. I wanted you to repeat it, because I wanted everyone listening to get that and drill it into their heads because it’s magic. Okay. Brilliant. So we should talk about Fraufecht. Why did you organize it? And what benefits does it bring? Also what is it? Might be a good place to start. I know what it means because I did the research,
Marie Meservy
Fraufecht, as the name suggests, is women fighting. It’s a HEMA tournament event centered around women. Like all the tournaments are women’s tournaments. All the instructors that we bring in our women, they’re the ones doing the ring judging, or ring bossing, I guess, like the line judges could be men. And, yeah, it’s just a great weekend where we get together every Labor Day weekend in the US and, and we fight. It’s September, the first weekend of September.
Guy Windsor
Okay, just because people living maybe France might want to come and they don’t know when Labor Day is.
Marie Meservy
Yes, please come. Our school had already been running a co-ed tournament, Battle Born. And we found it was a great way for us to build community to do our part. And we just felt that women needed a space in this male dominated sport.
Guy Windsor
Okay, just some specifics. Battle Born is co-ed. Pretty much every event I’ve been to has had at least a few women.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, it’s just a regular event. And we just felt that, you know, in this male dominated sport, there is not a good space that is carved out for women. There really hasn’t been much. At the time we started Fraufecht, there had been a couple of dedicated women’s events on the East Coast. And the rest of the US had nothing west of New York.
Guy Windsor
But Fran was doing stuff in the UK, though, at that time. Fran Lacuata. She’s had some women only events going on for quite a while.
Marie Meservy
That’s east of New York.
Guy Windsor
I’m not disputing your west of New York statement.
Marie Meservy
Just in the in the US there just hasn’t been much. I think it’s just young. The sport is young. We recognized that we needed more opportunities for women to gather and fight, to be featured as instructors and ring directors, and just overall to support each other. We’re very lucky in my school that we have a lot of women, and we really, obviously try to foster an environment that is welcoming for that. But some of the women who came to Fraufecht are the only women in their club. It’s hard. And another thing is, like all the other women’s events at the time only offered longsword, right? Most events nowadays will offer a variety of open tournaments, and then a token women’s longsword tournament almost like as an afterthought. So for the women who only competed in women’s events, they were really getting pigeonholed. So we were the first ones in the US to offer other weapons. So our inaugural Fraufecht event was last year and we included the first women’s broadsword tournament in the world. The first women’s Sabre tournament outside of Europe, the largest women’s rapier tournament ever held.
Guy Windsor
How many women did you have for that?
Marie Meservy
Something like twenty.
Guy Windsor
That’s not a huge tournament. For that to be the biggest women’s rapier tournament ever, that says quite a lot about the state of play.
Marie Meservy
Exactly. And this year, we’re adding in smallsword. We’re even toying around the idea of allowing men to participate with like a token open longsword tournament to sort of flip the script.
Guy Windsor
You could, you could.
Marie Meservy
We’re currently taking suggestions for all kinds of goofy rules that we can do for the Open tournament. It’ll be fun. We don’t want it to be like every other Open tournament.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Do you actually get a lot of men coming to the event as like for spectators or backup or whatever?
Marie Meservy
We have a lot.
Guy Windsor
Is there anything there for them to actually do in terms of like classes or tournaments or anything like that?
Marie Meservy
So they’re able to take any of the classes. They happen to be instructed by women, but they’re not only for women. And it turns out, so last year, we tried to have only women judging because we wanted to put women in the positions of authority. We didn’t want like, men judging women. But then it turned out, all the women felt like, we didn’t have a chance to fight enough because we were judging all the time. And this year, when we sat down with our new committee to organize this year’s event, everybody was like, can you just like make the men do the judging, because that’s kind of work, we want to fence. And so we’re doing that this year. But we actually were really fortunate, I think, that there were a lot of men who came in as like either just like hangers on but just like to support the event, because there’s a lot of staffing positions that that need to be filled, so that women can get out there and fight.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, I have been through an awful lot of events where there were an awful lot of male instructors, and an awful lot of women helping to run the event, but getting no particular authority or position. They were there basically as admin support, right? Yeah, I love the idea of having HEMA dads basically running the behind the scenes stuff and making sure everyone is fed and hydrated and has access to first aid and all that stuff. And it’s the women who are actually like judging it and doing the fencing. And that’s fantastic. So there will be people listening who do not understand why you feel it’s necessary to have a women only event and obviously, the idea of fills me with glee. But what are you trying to accomplish with it that you couldn’t accomplish with an open event?
Marie Meservy
That’s funny. It’s funny that we even have to ask this question in HEMA because it shows how much we’re a baby sport. And we’re constantly reinventing the wheel and acting like we’re just blindsided by civilization, right? To those who say that women’s events are unnecessary, I say, have you heard of literally any other sport? Because if we have women’s golf, or women’s basketball, or women’s tennis, and those sports are not played fundamentally differently by men and women, why shouldn’t we have women’s swordfighting? We even have women’s chess, though why do we have that is completely unclear to me, I must admit. But we often forget, in our baby sport, that in civilized sports, it’s not normal to have one big game where everybody comes. It’s not normal for season champions to play alongside novices who just began last week. If I’m new to tennis, and I sign up for a tournament after two months of lessons, I’m not going to be put in a pool with Serena Williams. But that’s what happens essentially in HEMA. It’s natural to see more and more segregation into niches, as a sport gentrifies and becomes more mainstream. So the future of HEMA is not only women’s tournaments, it’s Middle School tournaments, it’s short people tournaments, it’s over 65 tournaments, it’s left handed tournaments, it’s maybe physician, mom, craft or baker singer writer tournaments, right, but I’m here for all of it. Because I strongly believe that if we build these spaces, they will come. And as more and more people feel acknowledged, and included and represented, it will increase participation in our sport, and it will ultimately strengthen the whole community.
Guy Windsor
Right, that’s the thing that I think people often miss. Because what happens when you have these separate spaces, is you get more people overall. People who are not used to be not welcome or not used to being not the focus of attention can sometimes feel rejected that they’re not allowed to go to this particular tournament and I think they project that onto everyone else. And they will assume that if you have these segregated events that will basically just repel people and stop people from joining and stop you from wanting to do it, when in fact, the absolute reverse is true, as has been demonstrated in every sport that ever made it to the Olympics.
Marie Meservy
It’s so interesting in terms of like tournament participation, I’ve actually looked at the data from some of the largest US tournaments. And there’s this trend that almost twice as many women will participate in the women’s only tournament, as did in the open tournaments of the same weapon. So having that extra category increased overall participation, it makes HEMA more inclusive, not less inclusive.
Guy Windsor
I think we’ve made the case. I do understand the idea that you’re supposed to be a martial artist, you’re supposed to show up and, I mean, we really ought to have weight classes for a lot of it.
Marie Meservy
There’s so many factors that go into outcomes.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. My only real hesitation about the whole thing is, I think of tournaments as simply as learning opportunities. They are useful, they’re a useful stage in any fencer’s education. To me, they’re never the end game. Unless a student specifically requests it. I don’t teach people to win tournaments. I teach people Fiore’s art of arms of Capoferro’s rapier or whatever. And we adapt that for tournaments as necessary. But that is not my focus, my focus is on the actual historical art. But the problem with these tournaments is they are they are a blessing and a curse in that they are a thing that attracts people in because one of the first questions that people ask when I say what I do is oh, do you have tournaments? Yes, they do exist. But as soon as you start treating it as, okay, if you’re a sport fencer, you win an Olympic gold medal, everything you did is by definition, correct? Right? No one can argue with your Olympic gold medal. So if you didn’t actually cheat, all right, they can’t argue with it. It is, by definition, you have done the thing you’re supposed to do, right. Whereas that isn’t necessarily true if you’re trying to recreate a medieval art, what you’re doing in a tournament may be completely wrong.
Marie Meservy
Which is why it’s important in HEMA, and so many of us don’t want it to become an Olympic sport, because as soon as it’s in the Olympics, then there’s one rule set. It’s important for us to be able to have different rule sets to highlight different aspects of fencing that are important to different groups. That’s actually the main reason we got into hosting tournaments is because we wanted to have a say in the tournament rule sets.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Now, it does occur to me that one, I mean, I have no interest in seeing longswords in the Olympics at all. None whatsoever. The Olympics is where martial arts go to die. But I can imagine if you have, say 15 different rule sets. And when the fencers come on the piece, they are told which rule set they’re playing under right now.
Marie Meservy
Oh, randomize, you have to just be an all-round good fencer.
Guy Windsor
And it is a randomized thing. So you don’t know which rules will be allowed. You don’t know whether pommel strikes will be allowed. You don’t know whether wrestling will be allowed, you know, all the various things. They will have to standardize the equipment so you’re wearing the right gear.
Marie Meservy
I love that idea, because that’s life, but if standardized tests were under random rules. Every day, I show up to work. And I don’t know what kind of cases I’m going to get. I better have studied everything.
Guy Windsor
Right. That’s why it took 14 years, or whatever it was, as opposed to two and a half for my grandpa. To be fair, to be fair, there is more than seven times as much medical stuff known now, as was known then.
Marie Meservy
And so keeps exploding exponentially.
Guy Windsor
Exactly. Okay, so there’s a couple questions that I asked all of my guests. And one of them is what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Marie Meservy
So funny. You’ve actually inspired me to act on some of my good ideas in the last couple of weeks since you sent me this question. So I had to change my answer to this question as I’ve checked off things from my bucket list. So, thank you for this question. Actually, I undertook a research project for like a statistics based article on performance of women in open tournaments versus women’s tournaments. I wanted to study the data from multiple big gatherings and just see, because what I find is that in any given Open tournament, maybe 10% will be women. But then when you get to the cut for getting out of pools, then it goes down to like six to 8%. And then, as you go on, it just drops off disproportionately. And by the time we’re talking about medals, in most events in the last year, there have been 0% women attaining medals. And I wanted to look at that and see how strong of a trend that was. And talk about the factors that that account for this difference discrepancy between participation and outcomes.
Guy Windsor
So this is something you’ve done. You started it. Okay.
Marie Meservy
I have the preliminary data.
Guy Windsor
As soon as it’s done, let me know and I will send it out to my newsletter mailing list. Because it’s a fascinating idea.
Marie Meservy
It’s interesting to see the trend of women’s outcomes at the higher levels not representing their level of participation in the overall tournament. We have to be careful how we interpret that data, there are certain things we cannot conclude, we cannot conclude that women are inherently worse, that women are not working as hard. I think I know something about hard work. And based on all available evidence, I kind of have to categorically reject any argument that implies that the vast majority of men are training harder than the vast majority of women.
Guy Windsor
I think you’d have to be pretty stupid to make that assertion.
Marie Meservy
I don’t know, I think it can get made. Like I know women who train 15 to 20 hours per week, it’s hard for me to explain, then, why they’re getting trounced by the men who in their clubs who only show up one to two hours a week, we cannot just say that they’re not working as hard. And we cannot conclude that women would be able to outperform men, if they just trained more. Everyone has a different trajectory with outcome yield to effort. Everyone has a plateau or a peak. And there may not be enough hours in a lifetime for some of us to bring their performance to the level of some others. So it would be dangerous to just encourage women to keep pushing harder. It may incur unnecessary injuries and whatnot. And there’s a lot of factors that go into performance outcomes. Like there is, of course, the training, the years in HEMA, the hours per week. There’s also physical ability or limitations, maybe there are height and weight, upper body strength, muscle mass, speed, all of that. I’ve heard it argued that tournament rule sets are favoring the abilities of men, or that training and body mechanics are tailored for men. And that’s an interesting one I’d like to see more of.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it’s worth investigating, at least.
Marie Meservy
We have to look at the fields where there used to be a gender gap. And now there isn’t, like math. Or medicine is now over 50% women. There used to be a difference in expectations. And women were just kind of taught like, oh, yeah, women suck at math.
Guy Windsor
Which is why female mathematicians sent Neil Armstrong to the moon.
Marie Meservy
And I was raised, obviously, in Asia, where there is no gender gap. And there just isn’t, we’re not taught that we’re any worse at math. And we train the same way. And we are the same.
Guy Windsor
Where in Asia?
Marie Meservy
China. That’s where I was born. I actually grew up in the US, but that’s where I first started to go into school in like first and second grade. And to this day, I’m really good at math. But I wasn’t taught that I shouldn’t be. And so we have to look at the gender gaps in other fields that have closed and why, and it isn’t just demanding more work. There may be other factors and we don’t know. There could be psychological factors, right? Like women should not believe that they can compete at a higher level. I recently watched this interview with Brie Larson as she was preparing to play Captain Marvel. And she said she was doing all this physical training, but she was not able to lift more than 200 pounds. Until one day her trainer just lied to her and said, Okay, you’re about to break 190. And then she did it. And then she was able to exceed it only because in her head, she had this mental hurdle of like, I cannot break 200 pounds.
Guy Windsor
Right. Okay.
Marie Meservy
Definitely more work needs to be done.
Guy Windsor
But your investigation may shed some interesting insight as to what’s happening to prevent women progressing.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, maybe. Hopefully a lot of other people will jump on and investigate too.
Guy Windsor
That would be helpful. Yes, it shouldn’t just be the one person doing it. Brilliant.
Marie Meservy
So after everything I said, I should add that there is a huge value in continuing open tournaments. In addition to all the niche tournaments that I foresee coming. A lot of women competitors have told me that they would be really unhappy if they could not benchmark themselves against all comers, regardless of their own level of competition. This is important. It’s not only the top ranked women who say that they’re bored fighting against women. I think that they just see that there’s an inherent value to competing against as many people as possible. So I hope that people will not get the wrong idea that we’re wanting women’s tournaments instead of open tournaments. I think that we could be giving the impression that we’re double dipping here, because there are no men’s tournaments.
Guy Windsor
Okay, would you have any objection to there being a men’s tournament?
Marie Meservy
No, I wouldn’t, in addition to the Open tournament. And if you actually look at the data from ranked tournaments, where fighters are sorted into different tiers, based on their HEMA ratings, it actually becomes clear that tier A in any weapon is effectively already men’s anyway. So for now, what we’re doing is providing a similar opportunity for women to fight against only women. But hopefully in the future, there are so many women doing HEMA, that is not even considered a gender minority anymore.
Guy Windsor
Right. I mean, I may be a bloke but I have absolutely no hope against Serena Williams in tennis. I mean, she could have just broken her leg and be hobbling about on crutches and she’d still slaughter me.
Marie Meservy
And there are certainly women in HEMA that can trash the majority of men.
Guy Windsor
But at the very top level. I’m not sure where this has ever been done. But I would imagine that the same would hold true, for instance, in sport fencing, where if you put the men’s and women’s Olympic gold medalists in the three weapons against each other, I would expect the men to win most of those because they’re simply mostly physiologically faster.
Marie Meservy
Yeah. There was, I think, a match a few years ago, speaking of tennis, where they took like the 200th something ranked man. And he basically destroyed Serena Williams.
Guy Windsor
So basically, we have de facto male men only tournaments, anyway.
Marie Meservy
So that’s not providing an extra, like, double dipped opportunity. It’s just trying to provide somewhat similar opportunities.
Guy Windsor
Right. And, honestly, I don’t have a problem with the double dipping thing. It’s like, if you have an underrepresented group, you want to give them as many opportunities as possible to have a go.
Marie Meservy
As long as it doesn’t start to look like affirmative action, which perpetuates the perception that they need extra help, which we don’t want. As a minority, I really don’t like the perception that I was given extra help in attaining the things that I’ve attained.
Guy Windsor
Okay. Yeah, that’s a perspective, obviously, being a middle aged white dude, I hadn’t really thought of. Okay.
Marie Meservy
We want we want to highlight the merits that people have, and we want to give them opportunities to let them shine by their merit, I think.
Guy Windsor
Okay, but then here’s a thought for you. This podcast, I have a 51% female guest policy.
Marie Meservy
Oh, so you have a quota.
Guy Windsor
It’s like one of the founding ideas of the podcast is at least half the guests must be women. Because the idea is about representation to help with getting more women to do historical martial arts. And it’s just struck me as one way to do it.
Marie Meservy
That’s a very noble effort.
Guy Windsor
But it’s also affirmative action.
Marie Meservy
It is. And I would hate for someone to say, oh, you were interviewed by Guy because you’re a woman. I would like them to think that I was interviewed based on the cool things that I’m doing in HEMA.
Guy Windsor
Well, it can be both. Because the thing is, this is episode about 160 something. And I’ve had people on of all sorts of, basically, it’s an excuse to talk to interesting people, as long as there’s at least a plausible sword connection. So I’ve had people on here who don’t do swords at all, and people on here who just collect swords and people on who are historians.
Marie Meservy
And now you have me who teaches and doesn’t fight any more.
Guy Windsor
Well, yeah. But also, I’ve had somebody on who is in museums professional who’s got one year of historical martial arts practice. That was sufficient. Because it was really her expertise in the museum world that we were most interested in. Because it is related to the historical bit of this historical martial arts thing. There are 1000s and 1000s of people doing historical martial arts. Hundreds of those are women, I think.
Marie Meservy
To have actually have a fair representation, you may have 10% women, not 51%.
Guy Windsor
Right. But in my school, we had about 40% women most of the time. And I do know at least one club that has about 50% women. So we’re representative of that club.
Marie Meservy
And we’re not 50%. But we’re a significant percentage higher women and gender minorities than other clubs.
Guy Windsor
But then people will say, well, okay, you haven’t invited this person on yet. And you haven’t invited this other person on yet. They could go, well, actually, this middle aged white dude is a more logical choice for historical martial arts podcast, because massive 20 years of historical martial arts training or whatever, whereas this woman’s less. But then again, my point is not to offer a fair and open playing field for my guests to compete on, because my guests aren’t competing with each other. It’s just I get to talk to whoever I want to, because it’s my show. And I can invite anyone I like, some say yes, some say no.
Marie Meservy
I absolutely think that it’s a great way to gain additional perspectives and to have interesting conversations.
Guy Windsor
Nobody has yet said to me, I mean, I do have students and listeners who know me well enough to actually be able to say this if they thought it. Guy, you really shouldn’t have had her on. She wasn’t up to it. That has never happened yet.
Marie Meservy
That’s good. And this is where I think affirmative action, if you will, must be done really carefully. Because you are highlighting someone of a minority. You need to highlight the ones that are really strong, and would be a good model. You don’t want to highlight somebody who is weak, and then that’ll just perpetuate the stereotype like, oh, see? That’s the affirmative action candidate and they were weak. You don’t want that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. I think weak and strong are maybe not the best adjectives to use here. But like qualified, interesting. Relevant.
Marie Meservy
Sure. Not like a physical strength or weakness analogy,
Guy Windsor
Although there have been women on the show who could certainly deadlift more than I can. Is that sufficient for women’s tournaments?
Marie Meservy
I think that’s more than sufficient. You can feel free to cut out any of that that you want to.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, long is good. And, you know, people are driving long distances and maybe they’re driving from Reno to Las Vegas. And we’re going to get them maybe a quarter of the way there. Shall I ask you my last question. What haven’t you haven’t acted on?
Marie Meservy
I’ve been talking about doing a YouTube channel for my HEMA for Life content.
Guy Windsor
What is HEMA for Life? Tell us about HEMA for Life. I forgot to ask it earlier.
Marie Meservy
That’s okay. HEMA is aging as a sport. It’s becoming more sophisticated, as well, with a new generation arising that is building on the foundation of knowledge that old guys like my husband have had to acquire firsthand. The level of competition is rising, the level of scholarship is also rising. What happens in tournaments actually starting to look like what happens in manuals a lot of times. And all of that requires our athletes to be kind of the total package. So back in the 00s, you could win tournaments just by being brawny. Now, you have to be mentally fit, both intellectually, like knowing when to use which martial techniques in the moment, and psychologically, like being in control of your thoughts and emotions so that you don’t have a mental breakdown and throw away all the hard work that you did in your training. And furthermore, as HEMA kind of ages as a sport, we want our athletes to be able to age gracefully in the sport. We don’t want people to burn out or injure out in their 20s and 30s. We want them to continue to enjoy HEMA into their 50s, 60s and 70s and beyond. And that requires a certain flexibility and resilience. So that’s why the Noble Science Academy has launched our HEMA for Life program. HEMA for Life is an ongoing series of workshops focused on longevity in our HEMA practice. So I’m developing sports psychology exercises to help fencers process their fears, define productive and attainable goals, give and receive feedback, and overall pull off their best performance when it matters the most. We also have certified personal trainers, teaching proper body mechanics, corrective exercises, adapting training for overcoming injury.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. That’s an area I’ve specialized in myself.
Marie Meservy
That’s good. And then we also have my husband, Michael Forrest, teaching how to teach basically. So his most recent workshop was on ring coaching, and what to say and what not to say to keep your fencer’s head in the game. We’ve just gotten started within the last year. So right now, it’s like a blog and some workshops that we’ve given individually at various HEMA events when we’ve been invited to teach. But eventually, we’re going to gather all of this together as one resource, maybe instructional videos, when some of us have found the appetite for video editing, which so far haven’t. Or maybe a podcast if we don’t want to video edit. So that’s one good idea that’s been on the back burner. I can’t say that I haven’t acted on it, because at least I’ve like grabbed a YouTube channel for the content.
Guy Windsor
It sounds like you’re putting together a, like a complete package of resilience training for mental and physical training. I would imagine that you’ll find that some of it is best presented in book form. Some of it is best presented in video, some of its best presented in audio. I wouldn’t fixate on a particular medium at any time.
Marie Meservy
That’s a good point. I actually think that my psychology exercises can be like a guided journal, or something.
Guy Windsor
Particularly psychological factors are often particularly good over audio, because having a person explain it to you. I have online courses. I have the podcast. I’m not using the podcast for teaching purposes, really. But like, my last course, was How to Teach. And it is mostly audio.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, that was a good one.
Guy Windsor
You liked it? Excellent. Well, that’s nice. I never quite know what to say when people say things like that. It always surprises me that anyone’s ever looked at it.
Marie Meservy
You should never assume that people like know what you’re talking about. But yes, I’ve looked into it, and I liked it.
Guy Windsor
Okay. And some stuff is best in book form. Like I find presenting research into the treatises when it comes to, okay, Fiore says this in Italian, this is what I think it is in English. This is what I think that actually means. This is how we do it. All of that up to the point where you’re showing the movement is best in text, because then people perceive the details. Yeah, right. And they can match this word in English up with this word Italian. And see how you’re getting from one to the other and they can take their time over it.
Marie Meservy
A slide show, maybe
Guy Windsor
Or a book. So if I read that aloud, the language is coming at the pace of speech. But sometimes you want to go a lot slower, and sometimes you want to go faster. And then for the actual motion, and this is how I think this is done in practice, video is best. So these days, I’m putting links to videos in most of my books for that reason. So we’re not nailed down to one specific medium. And I think it has its own ideal medium.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, I think interactive eBooks would be really great for that, you can embed a video into your book.
Guy Windsor
Oh, I have done that. But the way I do it is rather than embed the video file itself, because firstly, it makes for an enormous eBook. Secondly, most eBook readers don’t play it. Or if they play it, it’s black and white, and it doesn’t work. And it’s very difficult to update it or change it. So what I do is I have what’s called a pretty link, which is like a redirectable link that goes via my website. And then I have a QR code for that link. And it routes to a video that’s on my Vimeo account. So somebody can point their smartphone at the page. And the QR code will take you straight to the video. And that way, let’s say my interpretation changes or I reshoot a bunch of material, I can update the video without having to change the printed book or the eBook. So yeah, that’s very, very handy. You know, eventually, we’ll get to the point where you can reasonably embed videos in eBooks, but you’ll still never be able to do it in print, I think. So for the idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Marie Meservy
I’ve got none, because I’ve started acting on everything.
Guy Windsor
That’s fine. And actually, a common thread with the people who say, come to my attention and get invited onto the show, tends to be they have acted on a bunch of stuff, which is how they came to my attention. Okay, so maybe bringing your HEMA for Life program from your local club and making it more generally available?
Marie Meservy
Yeah, I think everyone would benefit.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. All right. My last question, which most people know is coming, somebody gives you a million dollars or imaginary amount of money, big or small as you like to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide? How would you spend it?
Marie Meservy
Okay, so I’m understanding that there’s not a million dollars in an actual like, finite resource.
Guy Windsor
It’s just a way of saying a gigantic wad of cash.
Marie Meservy
A stupid load of money. With infinite resources, I actually would provide one on one sports psychology coaching for female athletes. But for the actual million dollars, that I should actually budget, I would love to develop AI to enhance the performance of judges in HEMA tournaments. There’s always opposition when we hear any suggestion of AI because we’re afraid that we’re going to be replaced, or that if a computer can do a skill, then humans are not going to learn that valuable skill. Like for example, chat GPT, is said to have passed the medical board exam recently, and there was this big hullabaloo, but what it means by that, is it scored 60%, which is just scraping absolute bottom. And the average human doctor performs much higher than that.
Guy Windsor
Also, average human doctors can do things like take your pulse and listen to your chest through a stethoscope.
Marie Meservy
Right. So there’s a lot more than generating text. But people seem to miss a real utility of AI by making these comparisons. If you have a machine that can perform at 60%, and you have a human performing at 80%. But what about if you give a human a machine to assist it during the exam, then that team can actually perform at 95% or higher, that is the real conversation we should be having about AI. So how this would work in HEMA judging, is I envision a bunch of cameras, just cameras everywhere, and paired with visual interpretation software that will determine not only who hit what and when, but proper edge alignment as defined by what you want, like what exact degrees you want the edge alignment to be. So it’s not only like perfect edge alignment, because then nobody would ever get it right, or degree of blade rotation or timing, who hit what first, if that matters to the particular ruleset. And all this information would get calculated and fed in real time to a human director, who then synthesizes the inputs and makes a final judgment call. So it’s like line judges on steroids.
Guy Windsor
It’s like driving a Tesla. I’ve been in my friend’s Tesla. And what it was doing was reading the road ahead and telling him all sorts of things, like there’s a car over there. And there’s something coming from the right and whatever. Thing is, though, my brother does a lot of research into tech companies and stuff and knows infinitely more about self-driving cars and AI and stuff than I do. And he thinks that Tesla will never get a true self driving car, using cameras, they need LiDAR, as well. So do you think that the software will ever be good enough to do it from a purely visual input? Or wouldn’t it be better to have some kind of sensors in the weapons themselves, or LiDAR, or that sort of stuff as well? We’ve got loads of money, we have the money for it.
Marie Meservy
My goal is really to enhance a human judge, and have the human ultimately make the final call. Because when you’re working with machines, and I do in radiology a lot, the human director has to be well trained to determine when the AI call is garbage, right? This is what we do every day in radiology, when we interface with our software helpers, we cannot just blindly accept what the software puts out. Because sometimes it makes really stupid mistakes. Even though the vast majority of the time, it’s really helpful by taking away some of the really tedious and quantitative aspects of our job. And we’re just left with making a judgment call, which humans are best for that.
Guy Windsor
You’re in the position of that HEMA judge assisted by AI when you’re at work. So you have these software helpers.
Marie Meservy
There’s getting to be more and more of them as time goes on. And I think it’s great because then we’re left to operate at the top of our training, and not just like, scanning really hard to detect pulmonary nodules when the software can do that really easily. And tell me how many there are and measure them for me, and then I can say, okay, this disease has progressed, which is really what’s important. So it frees me up to do what I’m really good at, and I hope for that for HEMA judges.
Guy Windsor
I’m just going to push back a little bit, wouldn’t the money perhaps be better spent training and paying HEMA judges? Because they’re not properly trained and they’re not paid. They still need to be trained.
Marie Meservy
I agree, they need to be paid. But how many HEMA judges are there? And how many tournaments are there? So filed that under like, obscene amount of money that that isn’t even achievable in HEMA right now, as opposed to an actual million dollars. So the problem is, HEMA judging is currently done poorly, on average. There are a few notable exceptions. And just as an aside, if we become aware of them, those judges are invited to come judge at Battle Born and they are paid a professional wage. But right now, a HEMA judge is great if they can get like 60% of the calls correct. But if they can be enhanced to like 80, 90%, then they would really deserve to be paid professionally at all tournaments. So I’m potentially creating jobs.
Guy Windsor
Sure, but okay, just thinking about how much it will cost for the cameras. So you need to have a camera setup, at least four cameras, probably more, right? For the kind of quality cameras you’re talking about. That’s a couple of thousand dollars. Plus maybe you can have software that runs on a regular laptop, and maybe you need a special computer, I don’t know. But let’s leave the computer out or assume that you can use a regular laptop for it. And those are fairly abundant. Given how many rings are running at any given event, there’s usually at least two, sometimes three, I’ve seen five, you’d need a separate camera setup for each ring.
Marie Meservy
So a couple of thousand dollars there.
Guy Windsor
And then those are like expensive, delicate machines. And then by the time you’ve been provided that for, shall we say half of all of the tournaments, that’s a lot of equipment for people to carry around. It is a lot of equipment for people to maintain. I think unless they come up with really cheap sensors, I don’t see how it would work.
Marie Meservy
Okay, so hardware does get cheaper over time. That is one thing. I will say too that by making that cost comparison, we are undervaluing the cost of humans, because we think that we can get humans for free at most tournaments. Which is too bad. Because I think that if you were to take a human and actually give them the appropriate training, and then that’s like counting their years of experience and all of their expertise, we’re not appropriately valuing their expertise, if we think that a $2,000 camera setup is less expensive than that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, but hang on. At the moment, let’s say you’ve got an event with 200 people, and you’re paying should we say 10, judges a couple of grand for the weekend each, right? That’s $20,000, that’s going to mean that just to pay the judges, each person, your maths is probably better than mine. It’s certainly better than mine, so that’s like, each person will be paying $100 entry fee just to pay the judges. That doesn’t cover anything else, the hall, the infrastructure, anything else, right. So it’s going to make historical martial arts events very expensive to attend..
Marie Meservy
That’s why it’s a passion project right now, for some of us. But I think that the investment in the software is a one-time investment that we just get really good. And really, a lot of people are going to disagree with me, but I think that judging is worth doing well. And it deserves to be paid well, if you do it well. And there are many reasons for bad judging, which many of which just relate to limitations of human perception and training, many of which can just be overcome by AI, right. So like the untrained human eye, and the brain doesn’t process visual stimuli fast enough to make accurate judgments in a setting where people are just beating the crap out of each other. Like I’ve seen beginning line judges who consistently called points for the wrong fencer, which is the basic task for a line judge. And that’s assuming that every weapon is just a baseball bat and not touching on edge alignment, or sufficient contact or anything like that, right? Just say, who hit what, and they were doing it wrong every time. I know that I’ve had to serve as a line judge under very dire situations. And even though I know way more HEMA than a lay person, and I was doing the very best I could, I was just making people mad left and right. And then also humans have physical limits, we need to eat, we need to use the bathroom, we need to rest, we need to mentally gear up for the fight that we’re going to be fighting in next. So we can’t be doing it all the time, up to that point. We have to try to not be biased towards our teammates, and all that and AI would just even all that out and make it much more consistent. And then also the knowledge set that you need to impart on a human, you can just like input into an AI. So like, we have to know the weapon and the movements to expect in a particular weapon to be good at judging that weapon. Like in radiology, I have this saying, you only see what you look for, and you only look for what you know. So that’s why even an excellent rapier fencer doesn’t do as well judging longsword, and vice versa.
Guy Windsor
They don’t recognize the pattern of what happens before the blow’s struck.
Marie Meservy
And so that’s why it can be really hard to come up with enough judges at tournaments most of the time. And then you also have to know the rule set. We’ve had good experienced judges make bad calls in tournaments because they weren’t familiar with that particular rule set. So that’s where AI would really shine because you can just input the rule set. And it would be particularly adept at switching between rule sets. And then we can even have randomized tournaments where we’re pulling at the last minute, what rule set we’re using. AI will be great at that, a human would be terrible at that.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so here’s a thought for you. They did something similar with sport fencing in the 60s and 70s where they electrified it, which basically took all of the guesswork about out of did that hit actually land.
Marie Meservy
In a very rudimentary fashion right? You have like a physical conductivity.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, but it’s very straightforward. The rules of those particular weapons was such that the sabre was the last one to be electrified, because it’s by far the most complicated. But foil and epee, dead easy, there has to be a certain amount of pressure on the tip. And in foil, it has to hit the right bit of the target. So you have a lamé jacket, which has the electrical conductivity. And the rest of your mask and sleeves and whatnot don’t have that on. So if it hits off target, it will register that it’s hit. But it will register it as off target. And the floor also you have these kind of metallic pistes, where if the point hits the floor, it registers as hitting the floor. So it’s a very elegant and sophisticated way to do it. And it completely destroyed the art of fencing as I see it, because it turned everything from you have to make this so that a human judge can see it, to you have to make it so that electrical circuit has been completed. And I’m not saying it made it worse. Well, from my perspective, obviously, it made it into a horror show that I had wanted no part of, but as a sport, it’s arguably a lot better. Because it’s a lot more objective.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, it’s more objective for sure. Here’s my question for you, though. How much say does the human judge have in overriding or kind of synthesizing what information the electrical circuit tells them?
Guy Windsor
Okay, it’s been a long time since I was involved in any kind of sport fencing thing, maybe coming up for 30 years now. But back then it was the case that the director or the president of the bout had basically absolutely authorities do a pretty much whatever they liked. I mean, if you’re fencing and one light comes up, that’s a hit, no one argues. If two lights come up, then there’s interpretation to happen. Now with epee, you don’t need that. Because if one light comes up, basically, the ruling that says you have to hit anywhere on the body or head, or arms or legs, basically anywhere on the person. And you have to do it two tenths of a second before they hit you. And so if they hit at the same time, both lights go off, and both fencers get a point, if I hit two tenths of a second before you, my light goes off, I get a point, your light will not go off because my life was off for two tenths of a second before that. And again, the floor is electrified so that if you hit the floor it doesn’t register. So in epee, basically, the President is there to make sure no one breaks the rules, or does something dangerous that they’re not allowed to do. That’s basically it. And to make sure the equipment’s working properly. And the President’s job is really just to tell the fencers when to go, tell them when to stop. And announce the score.
Marie Meservy
Right. So that’s not what I’m hoping for.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, with foil, there’s a lot more to it, because there’s the right of way thing. So, if one light goes off, then that’s clear. If two lights go off, then the President has to decide who had priority. So if I was attacking you, and you did a clear parry and reposted and hit me. And while you’re riposting, I angulated around and I hit you as well. That’s your parry and riposte takes precedence over my continuation of the attack, for instance. So in foil, the President has to interpret what they’ve seen to a much greater degree. Same is true of sabre as well.
Marie Meservy
So my idea is that you just have better data being fed to a human who ultimately interprets what happened, and makes the final call.
Guy Windsor
That’s pretty much what the electrification does for sport fencing. It makes it very clear, who hit who, where.
Marie Meservy
So why is that bad?
Guy Windsor
It’s not necessarily bad. But because of the way the rules were applied and interpreted, all sorts of things change to the point that what wins you Olympic glory now would certainly get you killed if the swords were sharp. Which is my objection, because I want fencing to be a representation of a real sword fight with sharp swords. But that is not that the sport of fencing has now become. It used to be that. But it’s no longer that. Electrification is what caused that.
Marie Meservy
I see. Okay, so I think that what happened was, they didn’t modify the rules to continue to encourage good fencing in light of how it was.
Guy Windsor
They tried over and over again to disallow this and, you know, for instance, they introduced a rule where you couldn’t cross your feet when you were doing sabre, so you couldn’t do any kind of passing attacks. Because things were going so fast, it was getting incredibly dangerous. Because, again, when you’re dealing with electrification, you just need to get that hit two tenths of a second with epee, for instance, two tenths of a second before your opponent.
Marie Meservy
To me, that is a problem of the ruleset to begin with. Because in HEMA tournaments, I have a problem even with after blows versus doubles, because like, I don’t care if you did it three seconds afterwards, like we know from if you chop the head off of a chicken, it will continue to flap for like 30 seconds, you have tons of time to deal another death blow after you receive one. And so in the rule sets that I have been consulted on, which is exactly one, that’s not a thing. If you hit someone in the head, and you get hit in the head, you are both dead. And it doesn’t matter who exactly did it first. But if you hit someone in the head, and they hit you in the finger, sorry, you’re getting points and the other person isn’t, and I don’t care what order particularly it happened in.
Guy Windsor
And there are rule sets that can certainly help. But the example we have from sport fencing of what happened when this much more objective way of deciding who hit who and when came in is they were unable to adjust the rule sets to the point where it didn’t destroy fencing. There’s a brilliant book by Johan Harmenberg. It is called Epee 2.0. And he won an Olympic gold in epee in the men’s individual and in the men’s teams in 1980. And he was the guy more than anyone else who was responsible for the kind of bouncy bouncy flicky flicky modern sport fencing, because he figured out how to win according to the rules with the equipment that they had. Right? He wasn’t trying to recreate proper fencing, he was trying to make that light go off in a way that would score him points.
Marie Meservy
That is the problem. Every rule set gets gamified if used too much and that’s why so many of us in HEMA are hoping to never see HEMA in the Olympics. Because we want there to be one rule set. We want everybody to try to highlight what they think is good fencing, and to have multiple rule sets that exist so that you have to be an all-around good fencer.
Guy Windsor
If you read Harmenberg’s book, there were all sorts of instances where, because they hated the way he was fencing so much the authorities did everything they possibly could to stop him from winning tournaments. To the point of not selecting him for the national team, even though he’d beaten everyone on that team 20 times. I mean, they really tried to keep fencing, not bouncy bouncy, flicky flicky. But in the end, the objective truth of who is hitting who and when won out.
Marie Meservy
Also just having it as an Olympic sport, also.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, the stakes are high enough. I am a fan of like, technical awards, like, some of them may or may not have won the tournament, but they did this beautiful technique. And it looks fantastic. And this is what we’re all here for. Absolutely have a technical award.
Marie Meservy
And have sportsmanship, yes.
Guy Windsor
I’m totally in favor of those. My concern with the AI approach is by prioritizing the absolute truth of who hit who, when.
Marie Meservy
But you can prioritize so much more than that. It’s so much more sophisticated now. You can even like you can define what movements make it more like the manual, right? And that’s because it’s a sophisticated visual interpretation software. And it’s not just like, oh, contact was made here.
Guy Windsor
Okay, but when somebody then does something that is good fencing in the sense that they’re in control of their opponent’s weapon, and they hit them, and they do it all with control and safely. But it’s not something that is from a particular manual, I think that should get the point. I don’t think that we should be doing sort of like figure skating you have like the technical and the artistic score. I don’t think that’s appropriate for swords.
Marie Meservy
But you can basically define a point or win any way you want with how sophisticated visual interpretation software is now. I think where you’re getting hung up is that the 60s and 70s Olympic fencing software was basically as rudimentary and stupid as it got.
Guy Windsor
No, it’s not that. I’ve not yet seen the ability to control the ruleset to be consistently capable of creating good fencing. The only thing that I think does do that is continually changing the ruleset.
Marie Meservy
Yeah, we could, in HEMA there’s no reason we couldn’t.
Guy Windsor
Sure. And also giving prizes for technical merit.
Marie Meservy
Yeah. And you absolutely still could do that. All I’m saying with this AI assistance is that we’re trying to do everything that a human judge is expected to do, and do it better. And for me, there is definitely merit to training fencers to be mentally immune to the randomness and chaos of tournament judging. But I do not see any inherent value in that chaos itself. Like we do not need to be making judging purposely bad. Judging is an art, a very important part of HEMA training. And it’s worth doing well.
Guy Windsor
Oh, absolutely. I think, back when I was doing sport fencing in the 80s, we were trained, from the very beginning, how to judge and how to preside. So how to look for the fight so the equivalent of a line judge or a ring judge, the one who basically says who hit who. And the President is the one who says, what actually happened and analyzes that information and decides what has just occurred. We practiced doing it and I do have my students do it. A fencing match takes seven people, you’ve got four judges, two fencers, one president, and everyone rotates. They learn how to judge, and they learn how to preside. And it is bad for fencers to have bad judging, because basically it creates an unpredictable feedback mechanism.
Marie Meservy
And doesn’t it also encourage worse fencing because sure, when you have to say, oh, I didn’t hit you hard enough, because the judge didn’t see that, I better hit harder next time. I got to be more aggressive. I got to make it really obvious that I killed you. That also inherently encourages worse fencing. And so I just want a more nuanced and more consistent feedback.
Guy Windsor
I think the only way to find out what the effect will actually be is to give you the money and let you build the system. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Marie, it has been lovely to meet you.
Marie Meservy
Thank you so much. This has been a blast.
