Episode 70 - Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke
Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke - Episode 70
And I think that's where I've learned the greatest lesson is... you know, my ego should have stayed outside the door. And if I'd have kept it outside the door, I think I would have been able to process things better.
Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke
Today we're joined by Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke. Mr. Duke is a practitioner of taekwondo & hapkido, an author, and a truly passionate fan of martial arts and martial art culture. We had a great conversation that wandered all over the map, just the way I like them. Rather than trying and give you an index for our chat, I'd rather just let you listen...~jeremy
Show Notes
Movies - The Real Miyagi, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Perfect WeaponActor - Sho KosugiBooks - Zen in the Martial Arts, Winning Tournament Karate, You Can Not Lick Your Elbow & Daily Affirmations - both by Mr. Duke.Mr. Duke's Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & Website Mr. Duke operates the US Kukkiwon website, a great source of information regarding official rank through the Kukkiwon in Korea.We talked a bit about the great Fumio Demura during the episode. Below is a video of Demura Sensei using his belt as a nunchaku.Below is the trailer for the documentary film on Fumio Demura, The Real MiyagiDuring the episode we referenced our podcast episode on tournaments.[WpProQuiz 5]
Show Notes
You can read the transcript below or download here.
What’s up, everybody? It’s episode 70 of whistlekick martial arts radio. The only place to hear the best stories from the best martial artists like today’s guest, Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke. My name is Jeremy Lesniak and I founded whistlekick but on martial arts radio, I'm your host. Whistlekick, as many of you know, makes the world’s best sparring gear as well as really great apparel and accessories, all for practitioners and fans of traditional martial arts. I’d like to welcome our new listeners and thank those of you tuning in again. If you're not familiar with our products, why don’t you head on over to whistlekick.com and take a look at what we make. We have a number of different t-shirts, from the technical to the comfortable, for before, during and after your training and every other occasion you might think off. Now, if you want to see the show notes, those are on a different website, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. While you're over there, go ahead and sign up for the newsletter. We offer special content to subscribers and it's the only place to find out about upcoming guests for the show. Just like with our last couple of episodes, this one features a quiz so, after you’ve listened, head to the website, go to the show notes page, take that quiz and see how you stack up with others on the leaderboard. Today, we’re joined by Mr. Aaron Wayne-Duke. Mr. Duke is a practitioner of Taekwondo, Hapkido; an author and really, a passionate fan of most aspects of martial arts education and culture. We had a great conversation that wandered all over the map just the way I like them to go. Rather than try to give you an index for how our chat went, I’d rather just let you listen. Mr. Duke, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Hi, Jeremy. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure and I appreciate the time.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Absolutely! I appreciate your time. It's going to be a lot of fun. Listeners will notice there's a difference in your audio quality versus a lot of the guests that we’ve had. You got some professional audio and musical work in your background and we’ll probably touch on that but you’ve got a great microphone. Your microphone’s better than mine and I bet we’re going to hear that in post that you sound a little better than me.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I promise it wasn’t on purpose that I was trying to show you up. It's a, as I said, my background lends a little bit of credibility to having some of this equipment and I’ll be more than happy to share that information with your listeners if they’re looking to improve the quality of their podcast recordings or things like that. It is important.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It is! It is! You know what? You should be showing me up because this show isn’t about me. It's about the guest and this episode is about you so, by all means, maybe I should downgrade my microphone so all the guest sound better. Who knows?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
You do what makes you happy, Jeremy.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Hey, whatever the listeners want, that’s what makes me happy but, of course, we’re not on here to talk about audio gear and podcast and things of that nature, at least not principally. We’re here to talk about martial arts and you, as a martial artist, have an origin story so why don’t you take a minute, take us back a little ways and tell us how you got started in the martial arts.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
A great story, hopefully, I’ll be able to keep it very short. Like many children, I was inspired by things that I saw, things that I read. Kung Fu Theater was something that I embraced early on. Any type of action movies. The James Bond movies and things like that even as a child, I grew up primarily in the ‘70s so things like Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, those things were on the air so you were seeing some action compared to what is being put out today. It's pretty tame but it was a great influence seeing those type of things. I love comic books and comic book heroes for a long, long time but fast forward, I had the downtown paper route in Galesburg, Illinois which I lived and have grown up here in Midwest and there was a small school that was right across the street from our public library and it was one of the final stops that I delivered papers to on a Monday through Saturday basis and I would walk by and just be so drawn and fascinated but Mom wouldn’t let me. Can I do martial arts? No, you’ll become a bully. Can I do martial arts? No, we can’t afford it and I had a paper route but it's…you have to have your parents’ permission, obviously, when you're 12 or 13 years old but fast forward to that, one day, it's the middle of winter and it's cold. The windows are all fogged up and they're all kicking and punching and Ah-Ya! And doing all that fun stuff and I stuck my nose into their window. Completely disrespectful, but didn’t mean to be, it was just I couldn’t see what was going on and I had so much interest and so I stuck my face on the window and it didn’t take more than probably a few seconds, the door kicks open and there is standing, the late great Bob Zefo and I say that because Bob was a black belt in the Kuk Sool Won Organization. Very well-known around this area and very well-known in that organization and in that martial art but Bob was the very first martial art blackbelt that I ever met and he knew I was the paperboy and he basically said, hey, you want to come in and watch us do some stuff? I came in and he talked to me for a few minutes. Of course, I went home that night and I was all excited because he’s a black belt that talked to me. I thought he was going to kill me because I put my nose print on his window. Asked Mom, can I take lessons? No, you can't. So more time goes by, one day my uncle shows up in my mom’s house and says, hey, I'm working in this restaurant and this guy that they just hired as a cook is throwing kicks on his break and he’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff and he says he teaches martial arts, do you want to meet him? I said yeah! I literally get in the car, we drive out in the mall here, takes me inside the restaurant and I say, are you Kevin? And the guy, yeah, yeah, I said, you teach martial arts? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said how much do you charge? $25 a month. I said, great! What’s your address? So he takes an order pad from one of the waitresses, writes down his address and phone number, gives it to me and I go home, I tell my mom and she says fine because I think she was just tired of hearing me say it. okay, fine, whatever so I got on my bicycle and I drove, probably, 8 or 10 blocks away to this gentleman’s home who was just teaching in his garage and walked in, had my first lesson with Kevin Clevenger who is still a great friend and mentor to me and that’s really how I started. It was just kind of a fluke. He had just come back from the army. He had moved back to Galesburg, my uncle met him and the rest is history. The organized school in town, I didn’t join. I ended up joining this class and this guy’s garage and I stayed with him until he stopped teaching and I moved away to college and then we’ve reconnected and stayed very close for many, many years but, like so many people’s story, it was not extravagant, didn’t train in a huge, gigantic dojo or a school, it was just a garage with some carpet and there was no heat in the winter and there was no AC in the summer.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Very barebones, very minimalist and I know that we’ve got some listeners out there that…
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
You have to want to be there
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, yeah and I think there's something kind of special about that because of the people that you end up training with when you go to a, maybe a, fuzzier, a warmer, cooler, depending on the time of year, martial arts school makes it a little bit more approachable which is great especially from a business side but I think we all had time training with people that maybe didn’t quite want to be there, that, if it was 5 degrees warmer, cooler, on one side or the other, depending on the time of year, they may not have been there.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
One of the things that I always find interesting, for me, is when I left, I moved away from Galesburg and I remember the first time I walked in to the studio and they had mats and I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t mean that to be ignorant but this is really before the internet which is showing my age but I really…I hadn’t seen that before. I didn’t know that that was a possibility. I didn’t realize that people didn’t just train on concrete and the first time I stepped on the mats, the real honest thing that happened was it threw my whole game off. Just throwing kicks was completely different because the surface was different than what I was used to. I was used to just one thin little piece of carpet over some concrete and I used to do things like grip with my toes and things like that when I throw kicks because you kind of have to because once that carpet got wet and it's just concrete underneath and then you're on your tailbone and then I was like wait a minute, this is spongy and soft…what? You guys take break falls on this stuff? this stuff is like falling on a bed and I just kind of laughed at the simplicity of my understanding of the rest of the world of martial arts because that garage, to me, still is almost like a sacred place, a holy place because so many memories and so many things happen but I didn’t need a matted floor. I didn’t need air-conditioning. I didn’t need a dressing room or a shower. I just needed a place to go and learn so…
Jeremy Lesniak:
That’s great and I can imagine myself there with you, of course. I've trained on a whole bunch of surfaces. Concrete, hardwood, pavement, gravel, fortunately not too much gravel, but yeah, I had a similar response the first time I trained on mats too and honestly, I still don’t prefer to train on mats but that’s a whole different story. We’re not here to tell my stories. We’re here to hear yours and now, it's time for us to really start digging into some of the things that you’ve experienced through your time in the martial arts so we’re going to kick that off by hearing your best martial arts story.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
The best martial arts story. That is such a challenge. The one that comes to mind almost immediately when people ask me, tell me a story about a training experience whatever, at late 1990, I was in the Quad Cities, a lot of people know Davenport Moline Rock Island is just a bunch of cities kind of collectively in Iowa and Illinois just off the Mississippi river and I went to a seminar with Benny Urquidez and Nick Tarpin, Tarpin Sensei who is very well-known around that area and around that area was the host of that seminar, and I was just getting ready to move to Anderson, Indiana to attend a small school there called Anderson University so I attended the seminar. I got a chance to train with Urquidez Sensei which was a lifelong dream. Just such a huge fan of his presence and his energy and just his knowledge and just love Urquidez sensei and you can't be in a room with him and not be motivated but I at the seminar and we got to talking afterwards, Urquidez Sensei and I and Mr. Tarpin and they were asking me, hey, you mentioned that you're going to be moving away, where are you going to be moving? I say I'm moving into this little town in Indiana called Anderson, Indiana and they both just kind of stopped and looked at me and I got, almost that uncomfortable feelings, like did I say something wrong? And they said, you're moving to what many people refer to as the Mecca of martial arts and I just kind of looked at them and I just…Huh? What do you mean? And they said, you're going to the homeland. The land of Bill Superfoot Wallace and Parker Shelton and you're going there, Glen Kinney and Ross Scott and they just continued to throw these names out and I knew them all because I read all the magazines. I bought every magazine that the grocery store would carry that cover martial arts but I guess I hadn’t put two and two together that all these guys were from Indiana or had spent a lot of time there in Indiana so I find myself moving to Anderson to attend school and I'm buzzing around. I had a small apartment in Muncie with a few other guys that were college students and I'm flipping through the yellow pages there in Muncie and I'm like Okay, yeah, that looks alright and I flipped to this advertisement and it says Ron White’s USA Karate and it says on the ad: Former USKA World Champion. I thought that sounds awesome, I'm going to go meet this guy so I called him up and I met Mr. White and signed up immediately and first night, I get there. I think they were kind of testing the waters with me. Hey, you got sparring gear? Yeah, I got sparring gear. Alright, make sure you bring your sparring gear. You got a mouthpiece? Yeah, I got a mouthpiece. Alright, make sure you got a mouthpiece. You got headgear? Yeah, I got headgear. Make sure you got your headgear and the more they kind of were inferring that I should have protection, the less confident I was getting about my decision because I was starting to get the impression that maybe I had a challenge coming up that I didn’t necessarily want to partake in, if you know what I mean. I felt like I was going to be hazed but I don’t want to say that it was a disrespectful type of haze, I felt like they were really were like, well, we need to see what this kid’s about and so, we get in and we start sparring and there were some great guys at that school at that time. Andre Eccleston who was a PKC kickboxing state champion and went on to the, I think, regional title and lost at Nationals but many people know Ron White through the USKA. They call him Whirlwind back in the day, him and Johnny Linebarger and so many great guys from the USKA. He’s just a great guy and a great mentor but long story short, my first sparring session, I stand in front of a gentleman by the name of William [00:14:28] they called him Mr. V and he wasn’t a tall man, just kind of a gruff…everybody knows a guy like this. Let’s put it this way: he wasn’t tall in stature but he had a heart and a spirit the size of a mountain, if you can picture that. So we’re sparring and I'm throwing roundhouse kicks because I was a taekwondo guy so I can throw those high kicks and it wasn’t a challenge to kick him in the head and I think I kicked him 4 or 5 times in the head and we’d kind of break off a bit and then square off again and he was smiling and I just thought, this is not going to be a problem at all. I'm going to show these guys that I belong in this black belt class. In about the 6throundhouse kick, I throw one and he throws a straight front kick to my groin and when he does, I drop, of course, like a sack of potatoes and just on my knees in front of this man and he puts his hand on my shoulder and with the straightest of faces says, welcome to Indiana, son; and it was such a surreal moment and time but it was so necessary and I know that it sounds crazy, if you're listening, I needed that in the biggest way because it, not only, humbled me but it actually gave me an immediate revelation of where I was going wrong with my training and my mindset so William [00:16:01] is the guy that I always tell everybody. That was my welcome to Indiana: a front kick to the groin.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I don’t know that I've been to Indiana but now, I don’t know that I want to go.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
It's a great town.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If that is the greeting…
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
For me, it was and maybe they saw something that I didn’t but that’s how I got welcomed in to Ron White’s USA Karate in Muncie, Indiana in 1991.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That’s a great story and thank you for sharing it.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Thank you!
Jeremy Lesniak:
Now, of course, martial arts is threaded through your life for quite a while now and you’ve had quite a few experiences, we’ve just heard about a few of them. We’re going to hear about quite a few more but I’d like to roll back a little bit, back when you were delivering papers, when you were begging your mom to join a martial arts school and she was telling you no and let’s pretend that individual at the restaurant wasn’t there or somebody didn’t tell you about it, whatever it was, something happened, you never made that connection. You never started training. What do you think life would look like today?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Boring. That would be the first thing that pops up. Wow. To me, that’s like trying to imagine my body without my arms or…oh, goodness, what would my life look like? Honestly, I think I would probably be involved in something creative because I think the martial arts was definitely a creative outlet, for me anyway. Wow. I would probably bet that I would probably have concentrated more on music and performance. I think that’s probably where I would have went, though the two loves of my life, as far as passions and things I enjoy, have always been martial arts and music so, I would venture to say that if I couldn’t or didn’t do martial arts, I would probably be more heavily involved with music.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Nothing wrong with that and, of course, listeners know, that is a question that most of our guests struggle with and as we get deeper into this show, I am coming to a belief that there are people that truly are destined to enter the martial arts and most of our guests have been those people, that they can't imagine what life even could be without it.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I’ve heard that, Jeremy, that many times and maybe you’ve heard it too, I've heard it a lot of times over the years, instructors or just people I've been trained with seminars or just visited with schools or worked out with some guys at the YMCA who was just visiting in town, I feel like martial arts chose me. That I didn’t choose martial arts. It's almost like a hard to explain, sort of this weird cosmic thing where it just chose me. I don’t really know how to explain because I don’t know that I was really looking for it but it found me and I'm so happy and grateful for that because it really did change my life in so many ways and it has for so many other people as well, I know, we all have triumphs and tragedies through the years. we all have moments where our hands were raised and we had moments where we go home with nothing. There’s moments where we have sprains and broken bones or we tear an ACL, that type of thing but I think for me, that’s how I leave it to, the martial arts chose me. I did not choose the martial arts and, like I said, just so happy and grateful for the opportunity and experience for what martial arts has given me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That’s great. Wonderfully put and thank you! So, lets come back, we’re back in reality now. You did get to start training and we’re back to where we are but if you look back on your past, we all go through stuff, challenges, rough points, whatever you want to call them. Think about one of them that maybe ties to your martial arts training or things that you experienced in martial arts and tell us how you overcame it.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
The challenge that comes to my mind immediately is just last year. My father died, February 1st2015, few days after that, I got a call from my mother and my other dad was diagnosed with cancer. Shortly after that, we had three people who were, at one point or currently a part of our school, our studio here in Galesburg, two young men that were killed on car accidents. We lost another student through complications of a stroke. My dad’s dog had to be put to sleep. May not sound like a tragedy or an emotional challenge but it just seemed like last year, every single day, something was happening that was just emotionally upper cutting me. It felt like Mike Tyson at his prime was beating me up emotionally and I was so lost and I was so frustrated and I was just ready to quit and just stop and I remember the exact moment. I turned to my wife and I said, I'm done. I don’t want to teach anymore, I don’t want to do martial arts anymore, I don’t want anything to do with this and I think that it was just part of the mourning process where you don’t want to do anything. You're just angry one day, you're sad the next, you feel better and then you feel not better but I was really angry, for some reason, at martial arts and I don’t know why because martial arts is not a person, it's just a thing. My dad helped me with my dream. He helped me start the school and he wrote a check for $600. He’d kind of gotten tired of hearing me say things like I don’t know what I'm going to do next or I don’t know what I'm going to do when I grow up. I was in my thirties and he was just like just shut up and go do it already and he literally wrote a check, $600, I’ll never forget it, slid it across the table and said, either go do it or shut up but I'm tired of listening to you and I was like, oh, so, for me, to keep that school going and growing it and keeping it on track meant a lot to me because I wanted it to be successful because he had taken a chance on me, he’d believed in me and my mom and my other father were very supportive and helped. I didn’t have a lot of money and they didn’t have a lot of money but they kind of just planted the seed for the dream and, lo and behold, one of my other instructors, a friend, a colleague, reached out to me after my father’s death and they said something that I really wasn’t receptive to and he said, you need to get back and you need to get training and then I said, I don’t want to train right now and he said, I know you don’t but you need to get back and train and he said, you will work through this if you will work it out, if you will work out, that was his words, I'm sorry, if you will work out, this will work out and I thought about that for a little while and I kind of was like eh, whatever and slowly and surely, I started to head back to the studio when it was quiet and I would stay late after classes and a lot of times, I would just stand there and cry in front of a bag and just punch it and kick it and just be angry and frustrated and just punch and kick and just…and then it just literally felt like it all started to lift. My students, the parents at the school, my family, everybody just kind of rallied around me and I realized that the martial arts, this was something that I was supposed to do and that I needed to continue. I didn’t want to say owed any of my students anything or that I owed my father anything to keep the school going but I guess, I had an epiphany that it was my turn to raise up the next generation of leadership. To pour everything that I had, everything that I knew, skill-wise or other, into these people and let it go because I think I came to the realization that it became all about me and that really shocked me when I made that admission to myself. I said the school has become all about me and it should never have been that way. It should’ve been about the people in it and I had to step back. I started to rely on other people, give other people chances to teach classes, to fail and make mistakes but if I hadn’t had martial arts, it is a scary thought about where I might have turned to try to get through that. That last year, it was just a brutal year emotionally. Just talking about it right now has got me to that point…I don’t know, Jeremy, I really don’t know what I would have done without having the school and other martial arts friends and just the martial arts.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Sounds pretty overwhelming and I appreciate you being so open with us as you were kind of going on to rattling off that list. That’s quite a list of things to experience in such a short period of time.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Oh yeah, and I got audited by the IRS, I forgot about that. Not just one year, but two years, so that was another fantastic, wonderful thing to go through as well and it was fine but when you get a letter from the IRS that says hey, we would like to talk to you?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, okay, so we just piled on more and, not that you win, not that anybody out there could say, well, I've been through this and nobody wins in those comparisons but I think we’ve all been through challenging times where things kind of stack up and it might not be as traumatic as what you're talking about, there might be people out there listening that have dealt with, even more, but we don’t know but at the same time, it doesn’t matter. Where I’d like to close out this question, though, is what advice would you offer if someone is on the front side of that? Being that you’ve gone through it, how would you suggest they might tackle or, maybe to say it differently, if you, knowing what you know now, had to go through it again? Maybe what would you do different?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
The first answer I would say is I would, hopefully, if I had to go back on a time machine, what I would do, is I would definitely embrace humility and as guys, we get told, don’t cry, don’t be a sissy, suck it up and I cried a lot. Every day, it felt like just overwhelmed with emotion because so many things were happening continually and I was fortunate. I’ve had all my parents. I grew up. I hadn’t lost a parents, I haven't lost any siblings. Grandparents, obviously, but it was such a profound personal impact but I got to tell you, I've had a little bit of an ego. I think my ego had gotten built up a little bit or I built it up myself and I somehow had become more important than the people who are in the building. I felt like, well, if I'm not here, this thing closes and then when I thought about it, I thought well, if I'm not here and this thing closes, I've done something wrong. This is about an inheritance, this is about a heritage, this is about giving someone something that can last and then continuing to give back as well so, humility is the first thing, I would say. Don’t be afraid to cry. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your mentors, your instructors and even your students and let them know you're authentic. You're a human being and you do experience tragedies and challenges and sometimes, you do fail and sometimes you make mistakes but let them know that you're human. Remind them that you're human because, for many years with my instructors, I put them on pedestals. You train with someone like Benny Urquidez, even for a day, and they just become like, again, a superhero but he’s just a man and I think that’s where I learned the greatest lesson and that is my ego should have stayed outside the door and if I had kept it outside the door, I think I would’ve been able to process things better. I think I would’ve been able to get through that a lot better but my ego really did prohibit me from being authentic and honest. Not just with my students and the parents and my other martial arts colleagues but even my family. I'm a martial artist. I'm tough guy! You know what I mean? We break stuff, we fight, we spar. I don’t cry and I was a mess but that was a very difficult lesson to learn through the loss and tragedy and challenges that humility always makes it so much easier to get help and support because people want to help people who are being genuine and authentic and humble.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I just kind of want to hone in on that one word: authentic and I think one of the places, I'm going to step briefly outside of martial arts, one of things that I also do a lot less than I use to is teach marketing and teach social media to people and if I can boil off the successful versus the unsuccessful marketing that I've seen that I've worked with, it all comes back to authenticity. People can smell a fake and, if you’ve been training in the martial arts for a little while, you can smell a fake within the martial arts. It doesn’t mean being a fake is not…let me say it a different way…just because you're not a great martial artists doesn’t mean that, say, teaching is to be a fake but to misrepresent who you are or to try and be something else, it's just not worth it.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
And this day and age, it's been very difficult to maintain that façade and I think we see it a lot more now. Back in the ‘70s, ‘60s, I mean, you sit and have conversations with people like Bill Wallace. You have conversations with people like Ron White and people that were around when martial arts was really formulating and just growing still in its infancy back in those days, people built reputations for being good fighters and good competitors because the results told the truth. You really don’t want to sit and question was Joe Lewis a good fighter? Was Bill Wallace a good fighter? The results speak for themselves. They both had great success but they did it. they put themselves on the line, they win out and they competed. Now, we have the ability where everyone can be an instant celebrity. Hey, I created a YouTube video and I’ll tell everybody I’m a 93-black belt and I hate Ru. I always make that up. It sounds good and hey, send me a $100 and I’ll certify you and you, too, can be a black belt. I don’t want to get into the, whether people should distance training or anything like that but you know what I'm saying? It's so easy for people to present something now on a much more, as you said, marketable level and not be authentic. There’re people out there that are teaching no one. They have no students except the people who watch their videos or buy their DVDs but they don’t have schools. They don’t, even, interact with people and for some people, that’s fine. Some people will just make and enjoy having a great living teaching seminars and things like that. You ask Bill Wallace, why do you continue teaching seminars? Because I love it. That’s it! He loves what he does but he’s authentic. You cannot train with Bill Wallace and go, I don’t know if this guy’s really as good as they said he was. I will absolutely challenge anyone out there to find a 70-year old who kicks better than Bill Wallace.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Right, yeah, and as we were talking before we started, I was with him in some of his black belts this past weekend and had an absolute blast but I would go even farther and say, at 70, Bill Wallace is a better kicker and a better martial artist than 99% of people will ever be at any point in their life. So, you can only imagine, and obviously, there are plenty of people out there who have seen video, I mean, there's video out there of him at his prime during the ‘70s. You can watch, you can see how great he was and still how great he is. There's no need to fake that.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
You can't fake that.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Exactly.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about, Jeremy, right? You can call yourself the greatest kicker in the world. You can. Anybody has the right to say I'm the fastest guy on the planet, I'm the greatest kicker in the world. It's another thing to put your money where your mouth is and then say, I’ll prove it by being authentic. I'm going to show everybody how good I really am and I don’t know…it's a badge of honor, most of us who have been to seminars with Bill. If you get kicked in the head by bill, it’s kind of like yeah! It's a club. There should be a patch: I get kicked in the head by bill Wallace. It should be a club. We should get laminated cards because, I mean, that’s what makes Bill so great is hey, Bill, what’s your favorite thing to do? Kick people in the head and he’s got such a great story and he’s had such a storied career anyway with the movies with Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan and his work with celebrities and all that but he’s authentic. He is who he is and he can do what he says he can do and I think that we, as martial artists, really could learn because, I don’t want to say it because it sounds like I'm acknowledging that guys like Bill won’t be around forever, but they won’t be around forever so we can learn anything from those people: it is be the best version of you, you can be and let everyone else make the acclaims for you but we have far too many people in the martial arts world right now, piling the claims on themselves with no results if that makes sense.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Makes all kinds of sense and rather than aside go down this road because I know where we’re going to end up when we go down this road.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
We’ll beat the dead horse and I don’t really want to do that either.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Not so much that but just from the conversation you and I have had so far, I can tell that we’re on the same page and one or both of us is going to get fired up on this and try to be…
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I know how your listeners are so…I don’t want you to go in to feel the Bern mode. I don’t want you shaking and screaming at me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
No, absolutely not, I’ll leave the political references out of the show. That’s not really where we go.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
It's just a joke, folks, it was pre-show banter.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We had a good time chatting before.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
We did, thank you for that.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We have tractors in common. There are tractors that drive up and down both of our road so, yeah. If we think back, you moved to the Mecca, you’ve trained with some incredible people and maybe it's something in the water there, maybe we should look at piping that water over to Flint, Michigan, maybe we can, not only help those people drink better water but create a community of martial artists at the same time, some kind of great mass superhero origin story, but if you were to think of all of the people that you’ve trained with, who do you think you would identify as the most influential on your martial arts career?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
The most influential on my career? I would say, if you would have asked me in my twenties, it would’ve been Benny Urquidez. I just can't say enough good things about him as a martial artist, as a person, his energy, his abilities, I mean, goodness gracious, his willingness to stay humble and continue to learn and just amazing experience and person. Later on, I guess…I guess, I'm going to take a cop out answer but a lot of people are probably going to say this but I'm going to say Chuck Norris and I’ll tell you why. Just simply reading his book, the first book, I recall it because I know he put two out, but the Secret to Inner Strength was his first book where he basically told his story and I must’ve read that thing a hundred times and when I read that Chuck Norris failed his black belt test the first time, it truly did change my life. I can't even begin to tell you how much that story just changed everything for me and I think that his authenticity and him being honest within that book really helped me and shaped me in a lot of ways because all you see from people like that who have been very successful is you just see the success but when he opened up his life and said, yeah, I've had all kinds of failures, I made all kinds of mistakes, here they all are and it was like Chuck, I can't believe it! You failed your black belt test? That’s impossible. So, I would say, Chuck Norris, first and foremost, someone that I haven't trained with but was so instrumental in my martial arts upbringing because of him simply sharing his story. It just really had a profound impact on me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There's a tie there, certainly, back to something you were saying earlier, that these high-level martial artists, they're just people. They all have their ups and their downs and there’s something in there about persevering through. We just spent about several minutes just talking about Bill Wallace, who most people, if we voted would identify as the greatest kicker of all time or at least the greatest kickboxer. His record basically says that 23 and 0 and he only had one leg to kick with. I mean, you don’t…you don’t get there with magic. It's not just a lucky roll of the dice, it's hard work and if you talk to him, you know that. we’re not going to turn this into a Bill Wallace episode but there's something, I think, that comes from extensive martial arts training around perseverance for our taekwondo practitioners out there. It's one of the tenets of Taekwondo.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Well, it goes so far beyond the art that you study and any of us can look around and see people that we’ve trained with and maybe it's you that you can look in the mirror and go, I've been through a lot but I persevered and we all know, as martial artists, that you don’t accomplish anything in martial arts without perseverance so if your goal is just to get to black belt and I was obsessed with it. I was like I’m going to get it, I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it so I thought about it and I meditated on it and I just pored over the idea of being a black belt and the day that it happened it was almost like, oh my god, I'm here! Now, what do I do? But we all started training for a specific reason. We all stayed with the training because we are special and people don’t like to acknowledge that. Martial artists are a different breed. We absolutely embrace challenge because that’s why we continue to train because there's always new challenges and when you think about, even your own personal life or you look at other people, I've trained with…I've got a student right now, spina bifida, has no use of his legs, one arm, I would say, has a small ability to use…his left arm has maybe 20% usage of his hand and his arm, basically, he has one arm and he will roll out in a wheelchair and he will work joint locks with us and he will punch the bag and everything else and if you're having a bad day or you're feeling sorry for yourself, it's pretty tough to look over and see Michael there. You know what I'm saying? It's one of those things where you don’t find that on a soccer field, and that’s not to say that kids that maybe have a physical challenge couldn’t do soccer, that’s not what I'm saying; but you don’t see kids in wheelchairs playing soccer with other kids who are not in wheelchairs and martial arts is so unique in that area.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I agree, I agree and there’s nothing to add so we’ll move on. All this has been great stuff and I'm looking forward to some of these other things that we’re going to get into so let’s talk about competition. You ever spent any time in the ring?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I have spent some time doing some competition and I was not…all I ever wanted to do is spar. I was one of those guys; didn’t want to do forms. I did my forms because I knew that was my next belt so I was like yeah, I'm going to do this form. Didn’t care about breaking but just wanted to spar. Spar, spar, spar, spar, spar and my competitive nature just was always bruised because it seemed like I always ended up at second place. It didn’t matter where I went, I travel around Illinois and Iowa and even in Indiana and competing and it was like, oh man, second place again? I just always seem like I was always half a second behind the other guy or man, they didn’t see that point, they should’ve called it and that’s what I enjoyed. I enjoyed that aspect. I enjoyed that sparring competitions. Won some trophies, no national titles, no state titles, no, nothing to get super excited about but the thing that it really did is it allowed me to meet some just wonderful people so for me, as a tournament promoter now, that’s what really what it is about, for me, is just trying to get people to come out and networking. Yeah, I want people to compete and you can win a trophy or belt or whatever but, I guess for me, I never really wanted to try to be like George St. Pierre. I didn’t really have any desire to try to be something like that. I enjoyed sparring and I enjoyed working out with people but I definitely never really saw that as a path that I want to take like big fans of Benny Urquidez, Bill Wallace, all of those kickboxers, Don Wilson and so many of those great kickboxers from the ‘70s and ‘80s but trained in that style and had some matches but it just wasn’t something that I felt like I wanted to do long-term because it's a commitment that most people just don’t understand. If you're going to be a fighter, and I'm talking about like in the ring, if you're going to be a kickboxer, there are a lot of guys who would just show up and they work as a plumber, Monday to Friday, and they trained in a school somewhere and hey, Saturday, you got to fight and they're okay and then, they're putting out their Marlboro Red in the parking lot and then they go and take a fight and then you see people like Benny and Don Wilson and Bill, people like that, who took it seriously and who trained and they trained hard and they trained long and they trained to have a longevity in their career and I, honestly, I think I was just too young and there were a lot of pretty girls and there were a lot of concerts and things like that that kept me not focused on trying to be the next world champion.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There is a path in the martial arts for all of us and yeah, what you're talking about, the difference is lifestyle. Those big names, the names that we know, they didn’t get there, again, through a lucky roll of the dice, they got there from a lot of hard work for making it their life and for most of them, it's still their life. So, we heard about your respect, your admiration for Chuck Norris so this might be the answer to this next question but I don’t know. If you had the opportunity to train with any martial artist that you haven't, be they alive or dead, who would it be and why?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Easy question for me. Fumio Demura and some people might go, wait a minute, you just said, yeah, oh you're talking about Chuck Norris. I just watched The Real Miyagi on Netflix this week and I have not been as motivated and inspired in a very long time with a martial arts movie or documentary and watching this documentary on Demura Sensei absolutely just hit me to the core. I don’t know if it's just where I'm at in my life. I'm in my forties now, and I'm starting to look at things a little differently. Got kids, I've got students, I've got black belts under me but I'm going to tell you right now, I can't even imagine what that guy would teach me. He has been everywhere and done everything from stunt coordinator, to doing stunts to really, honestly, probably, the guy that introduced the nunchaku to the United States. He really was a pioneer and I watched that documentary, Jeremy, and I just wanted to crawl through the screen and give him a hug and I just wanted to sit and listen, more than anything. I don’t have any questions, I would not have any questions for him. I would just love to sit in this presence. I would just love to sit and watch him teach a class because I would bet that it would be a lesson that would last me a lifetime but if you ask me today, if there's anyone I can train with, living or dead, I would love to spend a couple of hours with Fumio Demura. I think that that would just be an unbelievable experience.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And as you were going through some of who he is, I absolutely agree, but what’s funny, I don’t think I've considered that answer before. I don’t think we’ve had that as an answer before.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I'm sorry to not go with the flow. I'm sure a lot of people would say oh, Bruce Lee or this guy or this guy but man, I'm telling you, after I watched that documentary, I knew of him. I was aware of his work and his influence and then watching the story of the man, I went wow, that is a guy that I would love to spend 2 hours with.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, and our answers on this show are, I don’t know if it's quite 50-50, but it's somewhere close between people like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan who have had a lot of cultural influence and people like Shimabuku or Funakoshi who have had traditional lineage influence and I would put Demura more on that side but, of course, he’s had a lot of influence. All the videos that he put out, I mean, I would say he’s kind of the father of modern Kobudo in the United States.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Absolutely and that’s what I took from that documentary. Now, I'm not arguing for or against but I think that we have evidence proving that he was doing things far ahead of most other people or, at least, he was able to get recognized for doing it but the other thing that really struck me is I forgot how entertaining his demos are and were. He really did! He was trying to show people, you can have fun doing this. Because killers train in this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and they showed some of the demos that he did that he has done in the past then you start to realize why he is so popular to bring to martial arts events and to bring to tournaments and things like that because no one does a demo like Demura Sensei and I don’t think anyone ever will. I think many people have tried but his demos are just unbelievable. His power, his speed, his precision and the entertainment factor. When you watch him do the demo, even with some of those old reels that they included, you want to do martial arts and I'm a martial artist and I wanted to get up and start doing martial arts after watching what he did so I think, there's a huge testament about his influence and maybe it's gone widely unrecognized or acknowledged but I think that he is just as important to American martial arts as Robert Tris. I hope people aren’t offended by that, if they are, too bad but I think Demura Sensei is just as important as Robert Triss. I think he’s just as important as Chuck Norris, as Bill Wallace, all these people that are widely considered as pioneers at par. He is just as important, if not more important, because you look at what he was up against. A Japanese man coming to the United States after World War II and hey, I teach martial arts! I don’t speak the language, you know what I mean? What he was able to overcome and what he was able to accomplish was just mind-boggling but that’s a martial artist. Mind over matter. What they believe, they can achieve.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That’s right. Now, of course, we’ll link to that documentary from The Real Miyagi, we’ll link to that on the show notes, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, for those of you who might be new to this episode and I’ll be sure to find a demonstration or two from Fumio Demura to link over on the show notes as well so those of you that haven't seen him before can see how incredible he really is. Now, our next question is about movies and I'm going to guess just from everything that we talked about, that you really love martial arts movies. Would I be wrong?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
My wife would tell you that our Netflix account, if you log into our Netflix account and you saw Aaron’s List, you would see nothing but action movies. It's just the way it is. I love action and I love comedies but I love action movies. My favorite martial arts movie may be another surprise. I think the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the very first live-action movie that they did is my favorite.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Wow, okay, why?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Why? Two things: one as being a fan of the comic book and just the idea that turtles mutate and they learn ninjutsu, what kid with an imagination doesn’t think that’s cool? You’d look around and go I wonder if the dog can do a jump spinning kick, that’s kind of what happens but I had such a tremendous amount of respect for the martial artists that were involved in that movie and the stunts because if you look at what they had to do, the guys wearing the turtle costumes? Oh my gosh! I mean, it's one thing to put together a fight scene that’s believable in a normal movie but to wear these suits and they have to do the things that they did, the action in that movie and the choreography in the very first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action one is amazing. What those guys were able to pull off, it was really an entertaining film action-wise. The martial arts stuff that they did and were able to pull off is just amazing and I know that’s probably not a popular answer, well, it's turtles or guys that dress up as turtles, yeah but they were real guys in those suits. It was not CGI-ed and I think sometimes that people forget that. these guys had to learn to do these things with all of that stuff on and they have huge respect for me and again, who doesn’t love turtles who do ninjutsu? That’s kind of a tough one. I love Bruce Lee and I love Enter the Dragon and I love Jeff Speedman’s Perfect Weapon, another movie I really, really love and enjoyed but man, you just can't beat four turtles that eat pizza and do ninjutsu.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I completely agree. That’s one of my favorite movies as well. Lotta strong influence, a lot of validation for me as a child. I'm a little bit younger than you but growing up through the ‘80s, early ‘90s and having these cultural references to validate the things I'm always spending my time on, I'm always going to hold the Ninja Turtles in a very high regard but yeah, learning how to do martial arts with, what must have been tens of pounds of foam rubber, if that’s what those suits were.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I cannot even imagine.
Jeremy Lesniak:
So, the next question and I'm going to exclude the turtles from your answer but do you have a favorite martial arts actor?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Yeah, I do and again, it might surprise people. Sho Kosugi is my favorite martial arts actor of all time. I love so many of the guys that have been in the action genre. I appreciate all of the actors who have done movies from very, very low budgets to big budgets but Sho Kosugi was a guy that, back when I was a teenager, seemed like every other week was like Enter the Ninja, the Ninja Re-Enters Again, the Ninja Goes Away, Comes Back and Opens the Door. There was a ninja movie coming out every week and it seems like Sho Kosugi was in every one of those but I just loved Sho Kosugi. I don’t know what it was about him per se but I just really enjoyed all of the movies that he made and then, when he came back for Ninja Assassin, I was so excited because I hadn’t seen him in anything in so long and he was brilliant in that. He just played that guy where you’re like oh ho ho, man, this is not a good guy and you can make fun of the Enter the Ninja and Return of the Ninja movies and the other campy and canon films but if you go back and look and see what he had to work with and what he was working with and the amount of time they gave him to work: brilliant. He was just brilliant and I was really excited because we had, we finally had another Asian actor who was given lead roles and it wasn’t that he had to speak perfect English and it wasn’t that he had to be a specific stylist, he just seemed to be able to do so many different things but hats off to him! I'm still a huge fan of Sho Kosugi and if you haven't, if you're a martial artist, that’s like a completely insane statement say that you don’t know who that is, or you haven't seen his movies, go back and watch them! Really, today and even though, they might be campy and you might see something that are kind of silly, he deserves a huge amount of credit because he was a huge star in the martial arts world in that genre and propelled, really, a lot of the ideas forward for people like Jean Claude and Steven Seagal and all those guys that kind of came after. I love Sho. I think he’s a fantastic martial artist. I think he’s a fun guy to watch so I would watch anything by him at any time.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And I have to admit, I'm not familiar with his work. I don’t think I've ever heard his name so I have some homework to do.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Good! I'm glad, yeah!
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, thank you. Definitely going to do some homework and watch some films. I mean, oh god, I have to watch martial arts movies. What a terrible thing but again, link to some of the stuff that I find over at the show notes. So, that closes up our digital media section of the questions. Let’s get a little more analog. How about books? Are you a reader?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Bam! The minute you said books, martial arts books, Joe Hyams’ Zen in the Martial Arts. Short read, I could read that book every week. It's that good and if you haven't read it, you need to read it and if you don’t know who I'm talking about, I'm not going to give it away; just read it. It is short and sweet and you'll be a better person and a better martial artist if you read that book. It has nothing to do with technique but it is a great, great book and I don’t know how many copies of that I've loaned out and not gotten back over the years. Little short book but it is probably my favorite martial arts book that I've owned or read other than Chuck Norris’s Secret to my Success that he told his story. Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams, great book.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It is a great book and listeners on the show know we’ve been getting a lot of recommendation for that so, if you haven't read it, go read it. It was my first martial arts book so holds a special place in my heart. As we move on, as we start wrapping up here, what is it that’s keeping you going? A lot of us have goals, a lot of us, there's something in our training driving us forward. You're teaching, you're promoting but what is it that gets you out of bed and gets you to train everyday?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
A Labrador Retriever. I'm just kidding but that’s partially true. Having mentors, having people that have experienced more things in life that have faced things that I have not faced and survived it and been able to climb the mountain, it's so important to have mentors because that alone helps you stay motivated and helps you stay inspired because I think that when you have good, positive mentors around you, or people that you work with or you network with, they keep you on your toes. I mean, if you don’t look good enough to wear the belt that you say that you wear and one of your mentors pulls you aside and says hey, that form looks like garbage, what happened? And I've been read on my forms, you know what I mean? And, as an instructor, what happens to a lot of us is we teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, and then we don’t practice as much as we use to when we were students so I like to train with anybody and everybody when I can so I do seminars. I'm going to be heading out in April to go to Evansville, Indiana and train with Damien Asante, looking forward to that. That’s a bucket list training for me. I’ll go up to Jolliet and train with some of my friends and colleagues with the international Combat Hapkido Federation. I’ll look for opportunities to keep training and every time I do a seminar, I learn something new and it helps keep me motivated but, for me, it's just being a goal-oriented person. It is taking the black belt mindset, keeping that in everything I do and that is: this is what I want to accomplish and now, what do I need to do to accomplish it? And I, every day, wake up with a notebook and I write down everything I want to accomplish and some people might say gosh, that sounds like it might take a lot of time and sometimes, it does but right now, I have about 17 goals that I write down every morning and it's just a great reminder. I write them down, I look at it and okay, we got some work to do today because it's kind of haunting and taunting when you spend time writing down your goals and looking at them and when years gone by and you haven't accomplished a single one of them. You need to make some changes so, for me, it's just keeping the mindset of a black belt. Always learning, always setting new goals knowing that the learning never ends. Knowing that I can always be better, keeping mentors in my life, some of my instructors have retired or stopped but I just keep plugging into other people and sometimes, they're outside of my style or system but I want to learn and I want to be with other people who know more than I do or to teach me something or could share something with me or just help me in any way, shape or form so that’s what keeps me going. That and my family. I think I'm so blessed and I probably say it a lot to people. I'm so happy and grateful for everything that I am and everything that I have because without my family, I wouldn’t have any of it so they support me and they always have. Good times and bad times. Through good decisions and bad decisions. They’ve always had my back and they're always pushing me to keep going and keep going and the last thing is just simply knowing that I have the ability to interact with students on a daily basis and that I have the ability to help someone have a great day by teaching the best possible class that I can teach by lifting them up and encouraging them and sitting beside them or working a form or a weapon kata or whatever it is we’re trying to work on and getting sweaty and helping them and say, hey, let’s work together, let’s do this together. It's always easier, that two cords are better than one type of thing but yeah, my students too. Family, students, I know I'm kind of rambling a little bit there but it's easy to stay motivated when you can accept the love that surrounds you.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Wow, there's a motivational poster quote right there if I ever heard one.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
I’ll split it 50-50 with you.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Alright, alright, half a zero. So, now it's your commercial time. What do you have going on if people want to reach out to you. You mentioned you're a tournament promoter. What kind of stuff you got going on that you can tell us?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
In December 2015, I published my first children’s book and right now, it's currently on the top 100 at Amazon for kindergarten and pre-school age groups and it's called You Can't Lick Your Elbow and it just…it's not going to teach kids how to do their taxes, it's kind of a silly book but it has some factual-based stuff in it. It’s just a kids’ book and with someone like my personality who loves Dr. Seuss and have loved Dr. Seuss for years, it's just really me kind of going hey, thanks, Dr. Seuss. Here’s my very humble offering to kids but it opened up doors and it also was a great thing for me to do because I think it also showed many of my students that you can be more than just someone who kicks and punches, if that makes sense. I'm more than a martial arts instructor or a school owner or a promoter. I have other creative abilities and I have talents and gifts so that’s out right now. I've been doing signings and things and kind of on a regional level. My latest book is out right now called Daily Affirmations: Growing the Garden of Your Mind and that kind of takes people kind of how I was able to get out of 2015 with all the challenge and the tragedy that I experience and that my family experienced. I kind of just say hey, this is what helped me get out of the funk and the depression and that’s out and those are both available on Amazon and then, I've got another book coming out in April and that’s one that my son, my 8-year old son, who is on the Autism spectrum. Him and I sat down, I interviewed him and we wrote a book and he explains to people what it's like to live with Asperger’s and that’s supposed to be out on April kind of in conjunction with Autism Awareness Month and I'm excited for that because he’s going to get to see himself as a cartoon character in the book so he’s super excited. A novel scheduled to be released this year. I'm working on a couple of other projects but doing some speaking, doing some seminars. We’ve got our tournament here in Galesburg in the Midwest coming up, April 23rd, have a podcast that I am slowly and surely putting things together. Not completely martial arts related but just trying to write, trying to promote the things that I have out and stay busy. I can't sit still. That’s the one thing that my mom would probably want me to make sure that I interjected is I'm kind of like the energizer bunny it’s like where’s he off to next? What’s he going to go do here and there? I just like to stay active. I just like to try to create and do things but if people want to stop by my website, it's aaronwaynesworld.com, I don’t even know what my website is and that’s my personal website. You can get in touch with me there. There's a blog that I try to post several times a month, different topics but it has some information about my books or if you want to book me for public speaking of martial arts seminar, you can do that as well and then I also have a website, the uskukkiwonassociation.com where we assist people, qualified individuals, who are looking at obtaining their Kukkiwon Dan or Poom Ranks so if you want to hook me up with a little shout out there, we can talk to people and help them through that process or maybe you're a school owner who is maybe a first or second and you're trying to figure out how to get your students tested so they can get their Dan rank through the Kukkiwon, we’re there to help and we’ve helped hundreds at that, if not thousands, so that’s kind of where I stay busy: aaronwaynesworld.com and theuskukkiwonassociation.com are the two things that really kind of keep me focused and busy.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Great and of course, we’ll link to both of those over on the website and once that podcast is out, by all means, please make sure to let me know and we’ll go back and update the show notes.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Yeah, we’ll have to have you on.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Okay! Hey! It’d be fun to be on the other side of the microphone.
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Absolutely! I’d love to talk about your products and your line because I'm fascinated by that and your stories so we’ll have to definitely make that happen. I would love to have you on.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Consider it done. Happy to. But now, it's time for us to, at least, start saying goodbye. This has been a lot of fun but can’t go on forever but we want to end on the highest of notes. Do you have any parting advice for the people that are listening?
Aaron Wayne-Duke:
Yes, I talk a lot. I love to talk. I was on radio. I'm one of those kind of bouncing around and animated guy, talks with his hands and things like that. if you're a martial artist and I don’t care what age you are and you're listening to this podcast, listen very carefully to what I'm going to say because it's probably going to seem a little silly someone that enjoys talking a lot telling you to listen. Listen more than you speak. If you're in the martial arts, you will waste amazing knowledge and opportunities by talking. Listening can create an amazing, wide open, a gold mine, if you will, of things but you have to be willing to listen and I think one of the things that held me back for so many years as a young martial artist is I have a black belt. I already know how to do that. You know what I mean? I know how to do that, I know how to do that, I know how to do that and I never really worked on becoming a good listener until I came across some instructors that told me to shut up and I'm not trying to be funny. It's exactly what they said. Shut up! Listen. Do what we’re asking you to do and then, if you have questions, but don’t question while I'm trying to teach you, and it wasn’t that I'm trying to be disrespectful, I'm just a curious cat. I want to know why and how but I learned how to listen and when I go to seminars now, I sit in the back and I listen and I watch but I listen and when I listen, there are things that I have been able to take away that have changed me more than the physical techniques that they may have been displaying and just listen. Just be a better listener and watch what happens in your life. It will get better.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Thank you for listening to episode 70 of whistlekick martial arts radio and thank you to Mr. Duke. Head on over to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com for the show notes, the quiz, couple of great videos of Fumio Demura including one of him using his belt like nunchaku. We’ve got another one of the video that we talked about on Netflix, The Real Miyagi, and the trailer for that. Check that out. Great stuff! Now, if you like the show, please subscribe or download one of the apps so you never miss out on a new episode and if we could trouble you to leave us a review, wherever it is you get your podcast, we’d really appreciate it. Remember, if we read yours on the air, just email us and we’ll get you a free pack of whistlekick stuff. if you know someone that would be a great interview for the show, go ahead, fill out that form at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com or if you just want to shoot us a message with a suggestion for the Thursday show or some other feedback, there's a place to do that on the website too. You can follow us on social media. We’re on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, pretty much everywhere you can think of and our username is always whistlekick and remember the products you can find at whistlekick.com. Our great line of t-shirts including the comfortable ones, the technical ones and really just the great-looking ones but that’s all for today so, until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!