Transcript: Richie Hardcore

My interview with the retired Muay Thai champion, educator and public speaker

Lean Out is back from our holiday break, and we are resuming our interview series on the challenges facing modern men. My guest on the program this week is someone I’ve been wanting to speak to for some time. He’s a former martial arts fighter who has spoken to tens of thousands of men — and he has some insights to share on how to forge healthier ideals for masculinity.

Richie Hardcore is a retired Muay Thai champion in New Zealand. He’s a coach, and an educator and public speaker on masculinity, sexuality, and violence prevention.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here. This podcast series is dedicated to Marc Antoine Jubinville. May he rest in peace.

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TH: I've been wanting to speak with you for a while now, and our series on the challenges facing modern men seemed like the ideal time. For listeners, you bring an interesting perspective to this conversation. You are a retired Muay Thai champion. You have worked in family violence prevention, and as a community worker in drug and alcohol harm reduction. You did a Master's thesis on hip-hop and masculinity, and you were a radio host for 15 years, including doing shows on mental health. You're an educator, an activist, a public speaker, and a coach. There's so much to get into today. Let's start, if you don't mind, by talking about what drew you to the masculinity conversation. Why is this a topic that you care deeply about?

RH: Hey, thank you. Yeah, I guess like a lot of people in my space, it starts quite personally in that I had a dysfunctional childhood. My father struggled with alcoholism and — I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time — mental health and depression. Which, through years of coming to understand why my life has been the way it is, [I’ve found] runs through my family history. I have a great-grandmother who was put in a mental institution. I have a great-grandfather who went to the first World War. Then on my mother's side of the family, there's an immigrant story. My mother's family is part of the diaspora from Lebanon. All these sorts of things come down our family lines and shape us. My dad who grew up in an era where men didn't talk about their feelings. They just worked hard and drank heavily. He really suppressed a lot of his negative formative experiences. As it turns out, that has become what a lot of men do, if you go into the research and data. That showed up in my life with the police coming to my house, and my dad in and out of rehab, and some degree of family violence and family harm. I don't hold any of this against my dad. He is a man who was doing the best he could with what he had at the time. But that really has led me on a journey of personal self-discovery. Then that underlays my professional work, because my story is far from unique, sadly. We're at this interesting moment in time where we are discussing masculinity publicly, which I think is where some of the hope lies.

TH: Absolutely. You had a unique experience in that your father took you into a local gym as a boy and said, “I'm going to need some help raising my son.” Suddenly you had this community of men around you. I'm curious about what that experience was like, and what kind of role models you were then exposed to.

RH: I'm always grateful to my dad for doing that. I actually asked him as an adult, when I was in my late thirties: “Why did you take me to Taekwondo to start with?” He said he told the instructor, “I'm not doing the best job as a dad. Can you help me out?” I wasn't a hood rat or anything. I just didn't have a lot of self-esteem. I was pretty shy and retiring. To [find] a space that I got positive reinforcement for my effort just instinctively felt good. I liked the structure and discipline that came with martial arts. I started at 13 years old. Around me was a lot of chaos, in my family but then also the kids I gravitated towards. I bumped into an old friend on a walk the other day. A lot of our friends are dead, or they are in mental institutions, or they are drug addicts. She lives in an ashram. She's a yogi. We all find our things. But some of the things we find are really destructive. The people around me did a lot of drugs and alcohol, from a young age. There was a lot of fist fighting at parties. So, to find a place where I could put all of my confused adolescent energy, that rewarded me for hard work, but also gave me structure and discipline — a place to be cathartic in a non-destructive way, in a constructive way — just really resonated on a deep emotional level. The logo for my gym is “fighting saved my life.” Because, again, my story is not unique. I've met people from prison, as much as I've met people from the world of business, who love what martial arts brings to their life. I moved from Taekwondo, which is a semi-contact martial arts, to Muay Thai — this was before the popularity of mixed martial arts, like you’d see in UFC — because it was that much harder. It was, “Alright, how do I test myself? How do I forge myself?” I was pretty angry underneath all my insecurity, and I had a place to put that that didn't make my life worse. It made it better and bigger. You mentioned that I went into academia and I did a Bachelor's degree, an Honour’s, and a Master's degree. I learned how to work hard through sport. I mucked around at high school because of what home life was like. But I was naturally a booksmart kid. I liked learning, but I didn't do homework or study or apply myself. I would often get kicked out of class for making jokes at the teacher's expense, because that made me popular in my peer crowd. Getting told to shut up or you're going to get a bloody nose from someone that had earned my respect, as a teenager, was like, “Oh, there are times when you need to apply yourself.” So, I took that skillset from sport and applied it to academia — and then applied it to everything else in my life. I think there are lots of transferable skills in martial arts that are really good for young people, boys and girls, men and women. For me, it really has been the bedrock for everything else.

TH: At some point, you changed your name to Richie Hardcore — that's now your legal middle name. For listeners wondering, what's the story behind that?

RH: Yeah, so hardcore is this whole musical culture. It came out of the punk rock scene in the United States. It was more of a stripped-back sound. A shorter, heavier, faster, more aggressive sound. Bands like Minor Threat, or you might know Henry Rollins. They popularized this sound, and the subculture. I came into hardcore in the late 90s, and it was more metal-influenced. I grew up as a 10-, 11-year-old listening to Metallica, and then I got into hip-hop, and then I found hardcore. There was a band called Earth Crisis, and Strife, and Shelter, and H2O. These bands had a really heavy aggressive sound that I resonated with emotionally. But they were really political, and they were really encouraging you to be involved in the world. So before I did a degree in politics, I listened to politicized music, and it made sense to me. There was this whole other aspect of the hardcore scene called Straight Edge, where they made it cool to not do drugs. It was like, “Don't drink, don't smoke, don't do drugs, don't be promiscuous” — that was part of it. There's a whole other element of veganism, and exploring animal rights. Then it was exploring environmentalism. All of these things really captured my youthful energy, and my youthful passion for change. I really leaned into it to the point that I started doing radio and playing hardcore music and then interviewing American hardcore bands over the phone. And then when they toured New Zealand, they’d come on the show. It was alongside Thai boxing and Muay Thai. It was an awesome place to be. We would go to shows. I'm in my forties now. There used to be trestle tables with fan zines, self-made magazines, and people would have their favourite bands. People had to write letters, and send off for merch, and get their favourite T-shirts sent to them. Or people would DIY-print their own shirts. It was just really cool. I was a terrible musician; I played bad guitar and screamed for a couple of bands. Really awful. Terrible musically. But we made a couple of CDs and connected with bands in America. I went to New York when I was 19 years old. I turned 20 in New York City. I'd go to CBGBs and be hanging out with these older, cool, hardcore guys who played in bands that I looked up to — because the barrier between fans and musicians was not what it is now. It was really this DIY ethos. Older, cooler guys who encouraged me and supported me and made not drinking and doing drugs cool. When I got older and I had become a national champion of Muay Thai here in New Zealand, people would call me Richie Hardcore because it was my ring name. I did this radio show, Viva la Hardcore, and people would be like, “Yo, it's that guy, Richie Hardcore, the fighter or the radio guy.” At 26 or 27, when I changed my name, I just thought it was funny. I was like, “I'm just going to be Richie Hardcore for real, so I can say ‘hardcore’ is my middle name.” Now at 44, as a sex and consent educator who talks about pornography, I have to explain that I wasn't ever a porn star or anything like that. [Laughs] But yeah, sometimes I'm like, “It might sound funny as I get older, but it is a huge part of who I was.” I consciously worked hard to be more than where I came from, and to change my narrative, and go from a kid who spent a lot of time by himself in his room feeling lonely and sad and watching rom-coms and thinking I'd never kiss a girl and feeling like the odd one out all the time — to being a public speaker. I talk to big audiences. I talk to thousands of people at a time. And I guess the name change has been part of that personal journey.

TH: You raised hip-hop. I come from hip-hop as well. I started my career as a music journalist. You wrote your Master's thesis on hip-hop. I also wrote my Master's thesis on hip hop. I think we might be the only people I know that have done that. [Laughs]

RH: That's amazing. What did you write about? I'm curious. 

TH: It was 20 years ago now, but I wrote about the lyrics of hip hop as poetry. I was in English Literature. I was looking at it as you would analyze English Literature, trying to give it that same sense of seriousness — looking at all the historical influences, the religious, political, and economic influences. Yours was about masculinity. With the hip-hop conversation, there is a lot to unpack there. I know from interviewing rappers that the masculinity of hip-hop can be very limiting. I know a lot of men that I talked to felt quite trapped by it. And there is an issue of abuse of women in that culture. However, it's not all so-called “toxic masculinity.” There's a lot more to it. There's a lot of strengths. If we could just focus on the strengths for a moment, what did you see as the strengths of the brand of masculinity that hip-hop was putting forward?

RH: Well, that's an interesting one, right? Because you're right in that there are lots of strengths presented in the masculinity of some hip-hop, but not in a lot of commercially popular hip-hop. When I did my analysis, I looked at the most listened to songs from 1990 to 2021, based on iTunes and Spotify playlists, the biggest playlists. I wanted to know what most young people were listening to. Within that, there were no conscious rappers. There were no Dead Prez or A Tribe Called Quest, or anyone really talking about much outside of their trap life. So, while there were occasional references to more positive aspects of masculinity, most of it, as you might imagine, was either very real storytelling about one's life from disadvantage … Which is really valid and necessary and artistic expression. It's positive in a way that fighting was for me. A lot of young men get out of trap life from hip-hop music, or things around it, and it's a protective factor. But at the same time, it does glorify guns, drugs, criminality, disrespect of women, emotional repression, using substances to repress your emotions. Think about how many songs there are about Lean. And so, my findings were that the most popularized hip-hop actually demonstrates a really negative, limiting ideal of masculinity, which they call the Cool Pose. I don't know if you know Thomas Chatterton Williams? I'm a really big fan of Thomas. I devour everything he puts out. We talk a little on Instagram. I'm kind of this fanboy. I feel a bit like I'm the annoying kid who's hanging around for an autograph. But he wrote a book called Losing My Cool, and he talks about how he came of age on all the stuff that I talked about. He is mixed race. The African-American kids that he hung out with really glorified that lifestyle. But he stepped away from that. I think that's actually quite a powerful body of work, that he presents around that. Unfortunately, that is not true of everyone. Doing the work I do now, I meet young kids. In New Zealand, we have a big Polynesian diaspora, and we have our Indigenous people, who are the Maori. A lot of those kids take their identity from American hip-hop, or Australian hip-hop, or the UK Drill scene. A lot of these kids are carrying knives and joining gangs. I've literally asked young men like, “Why are we carrying a knife? How did you end up stabbing this guy?” They say, “We were listening to this or that artist, and we just thought it was cool at the time.” Historically in New Zealand, gun violence is negligible. Whereas now it's at an all-time high. I think we'd be amiss to say that culture is not part of that. We have made it normal to carry guns and shoot each other now in the gang scene — and in economically marginalized neighbourhoods or communities where there's more drugs and alcohol. I work with those communities. I work with a lot of gang members in rehab, and we use Muay Thai and kickboxing as an entry level space from which to talk about mental health and drugs and trauma and sex and consent. But yeah, hip-hop has played a negative role in that. As one of my friends said, “Everyone wants to be a Drill artist now.” Which is a whole scene of music that glorifies the stuff we're talking about. It's a shame because if you listen to hip-hop like Dead Prez … I don’t know if you know Dead Prez?

TH: Yeah, I've interviewed them a few times.

RH: Get out! I love Dead Prez. I heard them when I was doing radio. My friend passed me the CD and was like, “You might like it, Mr. Political Guy.” I was like, “Yes!” They are rapping about martial arts and sobriety and fighting oppressive structures. As a young man, I really gravitated towards that. Actually Stic Man wrote this book, which I use with some of the work that I do. We do readings of Stic Man's book because it's relatable for the men I'm working with. I think hip-hop does have the possibility of being a really powerful influence for the good, but most of what we produce and glorify isn't — and it's a real shame. I think commercial interests have really co-opted what the positives of hip-hop could have been. That makes me sad. And it makes me sad that even to say that in some spaces, as a fair-skinned person, is off limits. If you think about Standpoint Theory and a lot of the stuff that’s popular in social justice discourse, I'm not meant to be able to critique that because hip-hop is like a Black art form. But again, look at who is popular, like Eminem or Jack Harlow. Lots of white rappers present the same imagery, and the same ideal masculinity of violence and disrespecting women. That influences people, irrespective of their skin colour. I've met Russian kids who are like, “I wanted to be Tupac.” I think we are a little amiss to think it's off limits to critique such a powerful cultural driver of masculinity.

TH: When I was a music critic, I went to Japan and I went to Thailand, and I went to other places where hip-hop was very popular — and it is hugely influential. The one thing I heard all the time from young men, though, was that it was inspiring that there was a music of people who had really struggled. They took what they had been through and turned it into something beautiful. They turned all that pain into something remarkable. That drive to succeed, to overcome, was inspiring to be around.

RH: I agree with that. I mean, for all my critiques of what we're talking about, I like aggressive songs about life from struggle. Because on an emotional level, despite the huge distance between myself and Los Angeles or New York, I really relate to that. And so do a lot of my friends, or the people I work out with, or the people I work with. It is an inspiring message. But at the same time, it can be a limiting one if you think that success as a man is only about how many women you can sleep with, how quickly you stab or shoot your enemy for disrespecting you. There are Twitter beefs that lead to violence now, Instagram beefs that lead to violence. We need to be mindful of that. Two things can be true at the same time. The music can be inspiring. It can show overcoming adversity; you can come from here and end up here. The UK grime artist Dizzee Rascal raps about that a lot. I really like that. That's part of the reason I like Dizzee Rascal. He hasn't just stayed stuck in this narrative of “this is my life and it's always going to be like this.” He has some quite inspirational tracks, which are not as commercially successful. But they're PSAs to young people: You don't actually have to carry knives. Or: There's more to life than The Ends. And I think that's really cool. I think we can critique it, but at the same time recognize what you're saying is true, Tara. I think that's probably the problem with the modern world. Everything is black and white, and everything is binary. It's all good, or all bad. I actually think everything's crazy and grey, and it's very complicated. And yeah, I think you can critique something but still enjoy it a lot of the time. That said, I do think we need to do a much better job with our young people, frontending them with education and critical media literacy. So they are not just ingesting such powerful and intoxicating and cool messages and then recreating that. Because it can lead to real harm.

TH: I'm glad you raised education. You are a sex educator as well, and you do talk to young men about porn. This has become a huge issue for young boys. They are exposed at such a young age. And just to be clear, the kind of porn we're talking about here is men spitting on women, calling them ugly names, choking them, slapping them. How do you think this distorts young men's perception of a healthy sex life?