WDP 173 - Why my focus has grown
An update on what has been going on on my end the last few months and some upcoming changes for the future. TL;DR: The self-defense and martial arts stuff doesn't go away; I just expanded my scope on it. The shownotes with links mentioned in this episode: https://wimsblog.com/173 Summary July and August are usually when Wim trains hard: public classes stop and client work slows while people are on vacation. That plan failed this year. Heat waves in Belgium started at the end of June, six or seven of them, and the attic office in an old house built to hold winter heat made the desktop unsafe to run. He worked downstairs or from the car and spent July restructuring the blog instead: a site that began in the late 1990s, restarted on WordPress almost 20 years ago, with problem plugins removed, old posts cleaned up, and older articles linked so they still work for search. He then fed the blog and the full podcast catalog into an AI archive he uses as a second brain and a sparring partner, not as a writer. It tells him whether he already covered a topic, with dates and links, pushes back on a line of thought, and recaps voice-mode brainstorms from the drive to clients. After a recording, it drafts a preliminary bio, summary, takeaways, and a link list he checks. The same pass named what he now calls the interconnected violence framework: six layers, from technical and physical self-defense up through psychology and physiology, relationships, community and institutions, societal and structural conditions, and geopolitics. The point is not a pivot. Martial arts and self-defense stay. The tagline is Understanding Violence: You, Society, World, and every wider layer is supposed to come back to the individual. Key takeaways The usual summer training block died in the attic office. The replacement work was backend: bad plugins out, old posts cleaned, older articles linked. Readers never see most of it, and the site does not function without it. AI is an archive and a critic. It does not write posts, arguments, or copy in his voice. Sources it offers get checked, and bad ones get dropped. Show-notes drafts are preliminary. He still verifies the links. The framework has six layers: technical and physical; psychology and physiology, including adrenal dump and fight, flight, or freeze; relationships, including domestic coercion and control; community and institutions, including gangs, crime, and policing; societal and structural conditions; geopolitics. A distant layer still changes the odds at the individual level. Women's self-defense talks, including the latest with Tammy Yard-McCracken, sit on more than technique. Pandemic and scarcity episodes with Toby Cowern, and wars from Ukraine to the Middle East and Iran, run the other way: start wide, then scale down to parking-lot fights, energy costs, and daily safety. Nothing in the training content is being dropped. The framework is a living project. Feedback is how he checks whether the wider lens still matches what readers came for. Support the podcast and get instant access to dozens of bonus episodes, HUNDREDS of exclusive videos, and much more: https://www.patreon.com/wimdemeere New book/video email notification list: http://www.wimdemeere.com/notification/ Website: http://www.wimsblog.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WimDemeerePage/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wimdemeere Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wimdemeere/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/YouAreNotAres Merch: https://wim-demeere-merch.creator-spring.com
