DES MOINES, IA — Braden Osmundsen, a 31-year-old residential real estate agent and two-stripe blue belt at Keystone Jiu-Jitsu, has spent the past 14 consecutive months erecting a seven-foot tripod at the northwest corner of Mat 2 for every Wednesday and Saturday open mat, recording every round that occurs within the device’s 114-degree field of view, and uploading the resulting footage to a personal Instagram reel feed which now contains 341 individual videos. The vast majority feature training partners who have not been asked for permission. Forty-seven feature training partners who have been asked for permission and declined.
He has removed none of them.
“I film for the culture of the sport,” reads a business card Osmundsen hands to every new Keystone member on their first class, printed with DES MOINES REALTOR WHO ACTUALLY TRAINS on the front, a Venmo QR code in the lower right corner, and the word “Bradenbjj_official” — his Instagram handle — written diagonally across the back in a font that three separate members have described, without being asked, as “the one from the Joker poster.”
Current Keystone members confirm that Osmundsen has never once discussed the filming operation with his coach, Professor Dennis Halverson, a 47-year-old third-degree black belt whose own face appears in 31 of the 341 videos. Halverson appears in one titled “GRAND MASTER SESSION,” in which he is visibly eating a Clif Bar with his back turned to the camera. The video’s caption reads, in its entirety, “Professor focusing.”
Halverson has also not been asked.
“I guess I’m in some of them,” Halverson said in an interview conducted at a coffee shop two blocks from the gym, while glancing over his shoulder with what two witnesses present described as “a kind of soft, ambient surveillance anxiety.” “He sent me a link to one of them once. The video wouldn’t play on my phone. I assumed it went away.”
It did not go away. It has 2,100 views.
The tripod, purchased by Osmundsen in January 2025 from a Des Moines camera store that has since closed citing “unrelated business factors,” stands at a deliberate height of exactly seven feet, approximately one foot above the tallest member of Keystone Jiu-Jitsu, a Hungarian-American heavyweight named Laszlo Perkins who is 6’8” and who has asked Osmundsen to stop filming him on four separate documented occasions. Perkins appears in 19 videos.
Perkins did not respond to requests for comment.
Members interviewed for this piece described a workflow that is, according to one purple belt who asked to be identified only as “someone who just wants to train,” both “extremely visible” and “somehow still deniable.”
“He doesn’t sneak around,” the source said, while wrapping a wrist in KT tape in the Keystone parking lot. “He walks in carrying the tripod. He unfolds the tripod. He puts the tripod right where you’re about to roll. You can see him see you see him. And yet every time somebody brings it up, he looks genuinely confused, like you’re the one being weird.”
Postroll analysis of Osmundsen’s Instagram feed reveals several patterns. Every thumbnail features Osmundsen’s own face, despite the fact that Osmundsen himself appears in only 89 of the 341 videos. Of the thumbnails where Osmundsen is pictured in a sweep position, 61 are screenshots from sweeps that do not actually occur within the video they are promoting. Of the captions applied to the videos, 237 begin with the word “Bro,” and 114 end with the phrase “stay humble stay hungry.” Four of the videos are tagged with the location “Bali, Indonesia.” Keystone Jiu-Jitsu is located in a strip mall next to a Great Clips in Clive, Iowa.
The single most-viewed video on Osmundsen’s feed, at 4,700 views, depicts a brown belt named Evan Marchetti having a dislocated fibula reset by an on-site EMT following a heel hook in a Saturday open-mat round in November of 2025. Marchetti has submitted three separate written requests that the video be taken down. Osmundsen has not replied to any of them. The video is currently pinned to the top of the grid, where Osmundsen personally placed it.
The caption reads: “This is what warriors look like.”
When asked by this publication how the video came to be pinned, Osmundsen replied: “The algorithm decides.”
When asked whether he is aware that Instagram users manually select which of their own reels to pin, Osmundsen replied: “The algorithm decides.”
When asked a third time, Osmundsen said he had to go move his car.
Keystone Jiu-Jitsu has lost two members in connection with the filming operation. Priya Raghunath, a 34-year-old accountant, quit in April after discovering that her own white-belt tournament debut had been re-uploaded to Osmundsen’s feed with the title “WHITE BELT CHAOS (she has NO idea what she’s doing).” Tom Kwiatkowski, a 29-year-old welder, quit in July after determining that three of his rolls had been cut together into a single montage scored to a cover of “Remember The Name” performed by a Christian metal band based out of Spokane.
A third member, 42-year-old mechanical engineer Candace Bryll, has filed a formal written complaint. The complaint currently sits in a manila folder labeled “MISC / FOLLOW UP” in a drawer beneath the front desk. It has been in the folder for 11 weeks. No one has opened the folder in that time. The folder is not labeled in a way that suggests anyone will.
Osmundsen’s own competition record, which he does not film, and which does not appear on his Instagram feed, consists of one win and nine losses across four calendar years of active competing. The one win was recorded at the 2023 Heartland Grappling Series Open, where his scheduled opponent failed to appear for the match after being flagged at weigh-ins for what event documentation describes only as “a skin situation.”
Osmundsen refers to the match, in his Instagram bio, as “undefeated in qualifying brackets.”
Reached for final comment outside his Kia Sportage in the Keystone parking lot at 8:47 PM on a Wednesday, with the tripod disassembled and slung over his right shoulder and an iPhone still actively recording in his left hand, Osmundsen was asked whether he had ever considered, even once, asking a training partner if they wanted to be filmed before filming them.
“I film for the culture of the sport,” Osmundsen said.
At press time, the tripod had been reassembled.