Episode 424 - Guro Joseph Marana

Guro Joseph Marana is a martial arts practitioner and instructor of Filipino Martial Arts (FMA).

I had known all of Filipino Martial Arts but I hever seen anything like that. I watched them do hubad, and I watched them do all these things out of hubad... And I finished watching the tape and I was super hungry for that information after that.

Guro Joseph Marana - Episode 424

Just like most of us, Guro Joseph Marana started to like martial arts movies growing up from Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal to say a few. Guro Joseph Marana started training taekwondo in Maryland and then he eventually found his way to Dan Inosanto's academy in LA. Today, he is part of the Inosanto Academy where he teaches FMA and he is a podcast host of the Lakas Filipino Martial Arts Podcast. Guro Joseph Marana has a lot of experience up in his sleeve so listen to find out more!

Guro Joseph Marana is a martial arts practitioner and instructor of Filipino Martial Arts (FMA). I had known all of Filipino Martial Arts but I hever seen anything like that. I watched them do hubad, and I watched them do all these things out of hubad... And I finished watching the tape and I was super hungry for that information after that.

Show Notes

You may reach Guro Joseph Marana through the social media & website links below: facebook.com/lakasfmainstagram.com/lakasfmatwitter.com/lakasfmalakasfma.tumblr.comwww.lakasfma.com

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hello, everybody! Welcome, this is whistlekick martial arts radio episode 424. Today, my guest is Guro Joseph Marana. My name is Jeremy Lesniak, your host of martial arts radio. A founder at whistlekick and you can see everything that I've sent the last few years working on with our wonderful team at whistlekick.com. One of the things you'll find over there is our store with uniforms and gear and apparel and more and if you use the code PODCAST15 that will give you 15% off every single thing in the store. Of course, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com is where you're going to go to find show notes for this and every other episode and all of the back episodes. If you want to find the episode sorted by where the guest is from or the style that they train in, you can find that there. The links to their social media, their websites, you can find that there. Quotes, photos, videos, you can find that there. We’ve got a ton of stuff. We bring you two shows a week and we give you everything we can to help you enjoy and learn as much from those episodes as possible. Martial arts is a journey. We know that. We talk about that in this show but a journey where? It's a journey that can take you in so many different directions and for today’s guest, martial arts has been multiple journeys. It's been a path towards understanding heritage. It's a path towards personal development. It's been a path that’s been useful professionally. Martial arts has infiltrated, and I mean that in a purely positive way, the life of today’s guest. You'll see what I mean so let’s welcome him to the show. Guro Marana, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.Joseph Marana:Thank you for having me. It's very nice to be with you.Jeremy Lesniak:Hey, it's nice to have you here. Listeners, we’re laughing because, I think the first time in 400 and whatever episodes, I stumbled over the guest’s name and I'm horribly embarrassed. I said your last name the whole day. I actually struggle with that Filipino title because I'm aware Guro it's not that. I know it's not that so I try to be authentic but that’s not a syllable that comes off my lips well.Joseph Marana:You know what? To be honest, it's not super fluid for me either because I usually pronounce it more like guru like g-u-r-u even though it's spelled g-u-r-o and I think that’s just because growing up in the US and being in American culture, that term is much more familiar like a guru like a wise man which I am not as opposed to the Guro which is more like a Filipino title as well as just a word for teacher.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah and I have the same challenge if it was guru and I've known plenty of people who take that title with the g-u-r-o spelling and they pronounce it guru probably for the reason that you just said. It was something that enunciates better for a lot of people.Joseph Marana:Yeah, more familiar. Maybe it's actually phonetically, maybe it actually is easier.Jeremy Lesniak:Maybe. It's funny how different syllables work well in different languages. There are plenty of things that we pronounce in English that other cultures, other languages don’t have. I find phonetics to be interesting. Not interesting enough I'm going to research it. interesting enough that I learn Spanish or something.Joseph Marana:it's interesting and I will go on some tangents so please pull me back, Jeremy, if I go too far but when I was in my younger days, I used to be very interested with painting graffiti so people would pick names or pick, yeah, usually like a name or an alias as their name to spell and to write and as much as people like certain words, let’s say Kali or something, the actual way that the letters are constructed and the order that they're in, they don’t really go well together unless you're trying to write a certain style on a wall with some spray paint or some aerosol paint so like the K and the A is kind of some weird interesting thing and then, the L and the I, there's so much space between one part of the L and the I itself and it's not really balanced in some kind of way so, truly hypothetically, if someone were to write Kali and try to use that as the name, although that’s kind of a cool name, it's not the best one that actually comes to the aesthetics and the construction and the balancing of how things look all together so even though, something like guru versus Guro may seem like there's not a huge difference, there's actually could phonetically, there actually maybe be a huge difference.Jeremy Lesniak:It's funny that you use that example from tagging of Kali, the K and the A because I've a few tattoos and one of them is for somebody who passed away. Her name is on my arm and the name is ‘Katie’ and the font that it's in, the kerning if we have any font nerds out there, the kerning of its letters but it's imperfect and that’s part of why I like it.Joseph Marana:Yeah, yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:Well, that’s a fun way to open the show. Talk about a lot of things that are not related to martial arts but that’s what we do, right? So, it just kind of sets the tone. It's all uphill from here and when the listeners get to this point, they get a pretty good sense of what they're in for based on this type of conversation. Do we jump right into it or is the guest let’s get down to brass text sort of a business person or are they happy to talk about anything and everything and I've got the sense that you're the latter.Joseph Marana:Yeah, I definitely am.Jeremy Lesniak:Well, good. Now, I know we’re going to talk about a lot of things but we do start with the foundation. I like to get a sense as to what kind of a martial artist we’re talking to so let’s start with that. How did you first find martial arts?Joseph Marana:How I first found martial arts, I mean, to go really far back, I think probably like most people, I have seen it in movies, stuff like that. I was born in the late ‘70s so I wasn’t a teenager when Bruce Lee movies came out. I really came up on a lot of movies like Chuck Norris but then, more so, of like Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. Those are the kind of action stars that that time that I really gravitated towards and then there's more like Jackie Chan and things like that so when I was young, I always painted around and there was always plenty of martial arts, especially Taekwondo schools in our area, so a very good close friend of our family who ended up, his family ended up being, well, his family is close with my family and later on, he ended up being one of my instructors. This person, his name is Sifu Chris Bangston, was always involved in Chinese martial arts and Kung Fu, specifically Ken Chin Pai and some other things and so I had always seen him around and he was sort of a big brother to us so we kind of admired him, slightly feared him because he’s also big brotherly in many ways but he had always been involved with that and he, growing up in Baltimore, especially around Baltimore city; actually, this region, there's not a lot of racial or ethnic diversity so we would be like in grade school or middle school and we’d hear about all these stories and we’d see him after he had been in street fights and stuff like that, dealing with people who had said racist things or whatever and so, that was always sort of on the radar and then, at some point, there was a school that opened up not too far from [00:08:16] that’s a Taekwondo school and my little brothers were super interested in learning Karate and so, somehow, my mom met the teachers, so the owners. Actually, she knew the owners from before but the main instructor of that school she ended up meeting, he was a Filipino guy and we signed up in Taekwondo and so, when I was in, I guess, right as I was starting high school, I started with this, teacher’s name was Mr. Victor Batang, and he was a Filipino Taekwondo master. He had been involved with the Kim’s Karate Organization that was very prolific and popular around here at the time and so we started with him and he’s at that school that was actually owned by a family named the Patalinghug family and they're a very well-established martial arts Taekwondo and Eskrima family in the Baltimore area. In fact, the main school where I later ended up going, just celebrated yesterday, yeah, just yesterday, it's 30thanniversary which is phenomenal for most martial arts schools and so, they’ve always been very popular and always promoting the art and so, I started in Taekwondo at sort of like their satellite school and then, I got to know them and I had seen Eskrima there. I saw them doing things with sticks and the way they teach Doce Pares Eskrima and so, some of the structure of their curriculum involves forms and patterns and so, I’d seen some people doing some stick twirls and different, basically, forms with these sticks and I didn’t know anything about it and honestly, I wasn’t super impressed. I was in high school and people that I thought were tough that I knew of were fist fighting and kicking butt on the streets and doing all kinds of stuff so I didn’t have any sort of appreciation for what I was seeing but when we, I guess, close to when I tested for my black belt in Taekwondo, I somehow…actually, I will tell you. I was very interested in trapping like I had seen some Jackie Chan movies and different kinds of things and somehow I have seen the little bit in the Bruce Lee movies because he doesn’t do it to too much trapping. I have seen something. I don’t remember what it was and I learned that the thing that they do in Kung Fu was called trapping and like many other people, I was an avid Black Belt magazine reader and I would always see these ads called Paul Vunak would always have these like old spreads, he looks super tough and he was with his Navy SEALs and I convinced my mom to order some VHS tapes because there was no internet and I guess she probably has to use his credit card over the phone. I'm pretty sure I didn’t call. I don’t remember what it was but I got these tapes and he had this one. It was like from his ‘80s Panther series. It was on…I think it was called JKD Trapping and so, I'm watching the thing and he was doing his whole thing about the different ranges of combat and hand-trapping and shoulder, it was super impressive. One part of the video, it cuts to black like the transition and on the screen it just said Filipino Energy Drills and I will tell you, it was like time stopped and I was like what in the world? And then, he starts going and he talks a little bit about chi style and how it's partly it may be hard to convey or teach in a video so he was going to hubad and I watched him do hubad and I couldn’t believe it. I never really, I had known of martial art, Filipino Martial Arts, but never seen anything like that. I watched him do hubad and I watched him do all these things out of hubad. Going across, doing some sort of lock and I finished the tape and I was super hungry for that kind of information after that so I start to look wherever I could, including my own school so I started in Doce Pares Eskrima. This is probably around, I guess, ’97 or ’98 is when I started formally in Eskrima and then, I did that and then, did that for a couple years and then, at some point, I was interested in knife-fighting because, at that school, there was not a heavy emphasis on knife-fighting. It exists in the curriculum but it's not taught until one of the intermediate batches and I was in college and so, a lot of my time and energy was directed then towards socializing and attractive people at my school and stuff like that so I wasn’t the disciplined perfect attendance student at my martial arts school which is Kick Connection and so, at some point I was interested in knife-fighting and I guess, this was now getting into 2002 or something when the internet started to get more popular. I had a job, actually. I had finished college and finished grad school and I was… I think I was looking to get back into martial arts and I happen to come across the site of Kali website which was a super massive website at the time. There were forums, there's tons of information about martial arts and then, around 2002, 2003, I reached out to the instructor that was in our area in Baltimore, Guro Bob Shin and I started in Sayoc and 2003, I got married so we moved out to LA and that’s where really I spent a lot of time really delving much deeper into Filipino Martial Arts so, my goal, really, initially was I just wanted to drive to the Inosanto Academy and just meet Guro Dan in person. I had met a lot of rappers and musical artists when I was the college DJ, college radio host and I had always grown up reading about Dan Inosanto in magazines and books and things like that so when we got to LA, I mean, there was 2 main things. I wanted a lot of good LA hip-hop and I went to a lot of shows and met a lot of DJs but I also wanted to meet, just meet, Guro Dan Inosanto so I drove to his school. I think I called and then, I found out where it was and I drove to his school and found out he used to be teaching classes so I drive there. I remember it was a Thursday morning and I was like oh, I'm early for class. We used to live about 16 miles from his class so in LA, that can be anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours of a drive so I was waiting in the parking lot and I see him drive up in his, he used to have this bike, Pan-4 Runner and he drove up and I was oh my god, that’s him! He gets out of the car and I was probably like some, like many other weirdos that go up to these popular people or well-known people and I went right up to him and I was like Guro Dan, my name is Joe Marana, I'm a student of the Patalinghug family and I just really didn’t know what to say. I was like, I've always read about you in magazines. I just wanted to meet you and shake your hand or something like that and he’s a very humble person and he’s not, he doesn’t really bask in the attention so he’s like, oh, nice to meet you. Yes, I know the Patalinghug family and yeah, nice to meet you and he started to like get his gear and stuff like that and he was like are you going to be taking class? I was just like uhm, er, yes. I’ll be taking your class. So, I go inside. I'm in this class. I remember my first training partner; his name was Atticus. He’s actually one of the staff instructors at the academy now. He’s a massively big man who was super strong and has these super heavy sticks and I remember the class just being a completely different beat and tempo. Like going from surface street to highway and I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was really fast. I felt that I had some competence and skill and this kind of was outside of my comfort zone and it was great to see him and to listen to him but I was really overwhelmed with the class but in the coming years, I became a regular student and actually, my first job in LA, I chose because, in part, because it was just maybe like a mile or two from the academy. My thought process being if I could just go out here and work here, then it'd be a short commute to go to the academy so I ended up working at Loyola Marymount University for a little while as a counselor because I wanted to be close to the Inosanto Academy and then, at that time, I also reconnected or I connected with a Sayoc Kali group out in Long Beach and then, in the coming years, they also brought out the Atienza family and their Atienza Kali system so I trained with them also and then, because I was still looking to stay connected in Doce Pares in some kind of way, I found a Doce Pares instructor who is Doce Pares but then he did many other things too and his name was Guro Ramon Rubio. He was actually married to Eva  Cañete so he was close of the family with the entire Cañete family but he did both the Corto Kurbada of Doce Pares as well as some multi-style, the Grandmaster Junie style and he also was big into an older style of Doce Pares called San Miguel and he had learned that directly from Lolo Momoy Cañete so there was a time, I guess right before our son was born, where I was very, I was like, it was like martial arts buffet. Well, to me, buffet is heaven so martial arts heaven and so, I was getting a lot of training in lots of different systems and really, pretty much every night of the week was going to different class and not really spending a whole lot of time at home with my wife and then, when I was, I would come home and I’d be like you got to see this thing that we learned and I’d take her down and she didn’t appreciate it but I did quite a bit of training at that time and then, through those years in LA, where our children were born and that tapered off and so, these days, so for a time, I was very, very involved and committed to multiple systems but these days, I'm pretty much doing mostly the Inosanto system and I still see Guro Dan regularly either going out to Los Angeles or seeing him when he comes up for seminars. Probably like the great, great bulk of the curriculum that I teach with my own group is the Inosanto method, Kali and Silat and some JKD. Sometimes, I’ll throw in a little bit of Doce Pares and, of course, everything that I do is influenced by everything so I cannot unlearn the concepts and lessons from the Sayoc and Atienza family. Those are always infused in although I'm not actively teaching as an instructor so I don’t actively teach that curriculum. So, that’s pretty much my martial arts journey. I don’t really do as much Taekwondo anymore but I had such admiration for it. In fact, a good friend of mine, Dr. Mark Tang, just tested for his 1stDan black belt in Taekwondo so I'm always still so impressed by the people who promote that art and do so much for it so, yeah, that’s pretty much my martial arts journey, more or less.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, and obviously, you're not going to distill decades or even years into 15 minutes. So, I want to go back because there are moments that come through in anybody’s conversation and tell me that there's more there or there’s something to unpack and when you talked about those VHS tapes and the moment where you saw Filipino Energy Drill, Filipino Martial Arts Energy Drills, what was it that you saw? What was it that struck you so powerfully?Joseph Marana:It was a combination of things. I think one of them was that here is something that I felt like I think tapped a little bit to my heritage and culture and identity so my parents immigrated from the Philippines to Baltimore, to California and then to Baltimore, in the ‘70s and growing up here, there was a small and close Filipino community but we didn’t grow up and the people that would be like my cousin because they were, we were all kids of parents who had immigrated here. We didn’t speak Tagalog or any other Filipino dialect with each other. Some of them did at home but we didn’t. In my family, we didn’t. Part of it was that my parents, in the ‘70s, had a few poignant times of racism where people didn’t serve them or try to run them off the road or they had a very good friend who wasn’t allowed to marry his wife in Maryland at the time so he had to get married in Virginia so there's a couple things who are, for my family, they really, my parents, they really felt like they wanted to acculturate us as much as they could to being American and, I have to say, for my mom, she was always very good, before it became sort of a popular or more commonplace thing, she was always very good to talk to me and my brothers like you’re Filipino-American. You're Filipino and you're also American so there's this duality of that and so, we were always proud of this culture and heritage but frankly, it was seen second or third-hand through the eyes of my parents or through our friends or through our relatives so, for me to see something like Filipino Martial Arts in that format, here is this well-known Jeet Kune Do guy who had VHS tapes under Panther Productions in Black Belt magazine and here’s this guy is doing Filipino Martial Arts energy drills that is like trapping but it's not Chi-style and it's not some secret hidden Chinese thing that I would never learn unless I spend decades at a Kune or some other school. This guy is doing very cool things and he’s doing it in a way that, I think it just resonated with me and just the motions and movement of hubad. I could probably speculate but I would probably say that it just tapped into something deep inside me that really resonated on many level, one of them being me being proud of my culture but also being kind of discovering that like oh my gosh, there's this wealth of knowledge, there's this intricate thing that exists that’s part of me even if I haven't learned it, even if I hadn’t developed that connection but I also feel strongly about things in our lives including Kali and including Filipino Martial Arts that exist in a way that we can tap into that’s outside of just a curriculum that you learn in the school so, not quite this idea of like collective intelligence but maybe. Maybe on an energy level so I think it just really, it just was amazing to see it, to come through that avenue and also to know that that connected something deeply that I had yearning for to connect to myself and my identity that I had no context for so like I didn’t live in the Philippines, I didn’t speak Tagalog and I don’t prefer Filipino food but I always have had this longing to try to reconnect and have some sense of identity which is why things like genealogy and all these things these days, your DNA, things that people do, I think are so fascinating to them. I think on a similar level, that was me but it's probably like if you discovered if you went back in your generation and you found out that you're related to someone that came over from the Mayflower or the one that did this. For me, it's this oh my gosh, there's this connection to culture and identity that I'm still trying to learn about that’s so involved and so advanced in martial arts. It really was one of the few times I was in a meeting recently where someone’s talking about rarely do we recognize the weight or the gravity or inflection of points that are significant to us as they happen but to me, this is a time where truly, right at that moment, I was like man, this is changing how I'm understanding and viewing things and that really was one of the things that open up. There's many, there were actually several moments like that in my martial arts career but that one was very poignant. I remember like where I was, I was watching it, I was by myself. It was crazy but yes, that was one where the course of my life changed direction at that moment.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, we’ve had guests on the show who have used martial arts to help their culture, their identity and you talked about your family coming over from the Philippines in the ‘70s via California. What were your parents’ thoughts on you finding and really embracing in such a deep way Filipino Martial Arts? Did they have an opinion?Joseph Marana:You know what? I don’t know if I've ever talked to them very specifically but I know there's this multi-layered in a way, very textured in a way. Like so, my group name that I have for my martial arts group now is named LAKAS, L-A-K-A-S. I'm sure that’s not really the best pronunciation because I don’t really even speak Tagalog or Filipino but that was named as [00:26:32] suggestion from the Sayoc Kali group because that connects to something in my history so my dad’s father was in the Philippine constabulary which was sort of like a military. It was a military, a little bit like the police so in the initial American occupation pacification of the Philippines, the Philippine constabulary’s created as a way, probably similar to what we might do to Iraqi forces and things like that to try to help pass by, subdue other insurgent groups in the Philippines and so, his role he became, I guess, very successful in his career and he was tapped to start like this secret group. It actually was very cool and my brother found out about it, he found it out almost by accident, and he found it in the U.S. army archives so our grandfather, that we never knew, was tapped to start a secret group that was supposed to infiltrate an insurgent group similar to maybe like Al-Qaeda or something like that but not as established but a smaller group called Hukbalahap and so, his start was to infiltrate this group and try to use their identity and customs and languages and dress attire and get as much information as they could. So, he handpicked his man, it's this big secret thing like G.I. Joe who I also loved growing up and that group was called Force X and, although that’s a very cool name for his group and a cool name for X-Force, the comic, wasn’t the greatest name for my martial arts group but LAKAS is a Filipino word for force or for strength but the thing is, so he was very successful and he had this, the emblem of his group was like the skull and bones, black flag, so they were kind of feared in the area but they also had a mark on them so what happened was they had this successful operation where they were about to be discovered or they got discovered and they preemptively attacked and they had several…they had several casualties but they also end up killing a lot of the Huks or the Hukbalahap but because of that, my grandfather got some, I don’t want to say notoriety, but got some attention so those groups hired sort of a, I don’t know if he’s a folk hero per se, kind of a Robin Hood-ish kind of figure but also mercenary to assassinate my grandfather which he did and so, that happened when my dad was only 9 years old so from my dad’s family, he had wanted to go into the army like his father but they really didn’t want him to go into that kind of life and because of who our grandfather was, at his funeral, the president of the Philippines came and I guess, a lot of people were there and there was a lot of attention and they told my grandmother to sort of thank her and thank the family for the sacrifice of my grandfather that they would send either one or all of her kids to college, whatever career path they wanted to do so, as much as my dad wanted to go into the military, they wanted him to go to med school and he agreed so my dad became a physician so my dad’s past took a turn from wanting to be in the military to helping people as a doctor. On my mom’s side, and actually to [00:30:36] said really this is the reason why I got into all this in the first place so when I was 3, my parents had immigrated here to the US a couple years before and they were without much means so they didn’t have the money to go back and forth like people might have now and my parents, my grandparents in the Philippines were very poor in my Mom’s side was very poor. So, they wouldn’t even have a phone. They’d have to walk to town and use a phone in some kind of store, something like that. What had happened was they lived in a poor neighborhood and kind of when people are poor, they kind of get desperate and desperate people sometimes do desperate things so there was someone that had knocked into their home and was in the process of robbing the home one day and when my grandmother came as a teacher, this guy was so enraged that he didn’t find any valuables or even money that he murdered my grandmother so, apparently, he stabbed her over 30 times and she bled to death in her own home and so, because of that and so, I never met my grandmother and my mom, I think, would’ve, I mean obviously, no one knew that this was going to happen but I don’t know if she had regrets but I think she always felt like she didn’t get to see her mom in the last few years before she got killed so, for my mom, my mom has been super hard on like with criminal justice but very anti-violence so she never liked the fact that I was always interested in butterfly knives or balisongs and stuff like that. In fact, when I was a kid and I wanted to get an air gun, air rifle, she really didn’t want that and so, both of my parents through choice or by circumstance sort of chose lives that were turned much more away from violent things and so, I don’t see Kali or Filipino Martial Arts as violent in particular. Although, they utilize violence, they were never, my mom especially was never a huge fan that I had swords and knives and things like that. I think my dad liked it. He appreciated it but it wasn’t something he was super familiar with. I think they do like the fact that here I am, this guy that loves McDonald’s chicken nuggets and G.I. Joe and Transformers and didn’t speak the language. There was something that was connecting to with our culture. My grandfather actually, I think, really liked it. He seemed very amused later on when I had instructor title of Guro because I think he liked the fact that I was embracing something from their culture and from their homeland.Jeremy Lesniak:Some powerful stuff in there and it's entirely possible, based on some of the things that we just heard, that you could’ve been conditioned from a very young age against martial arts, against anything that would’ve given you the desire to pursue this aspect.Joseph Marana:I think it's true. That’s a great point but I think, you know what? I think, not just with American history, heritage and culture, but also Filipino tradition. There's this long legacy and tradition of brave warriors who, now, I mean, people may contest it or have different feelings about it but most countries, like many, were born out of struggle and there's lot of heroes that sacrificed a lot of things which sometimes involved a lot of violence and conflict but through those things, we have what we have today whether it's identity or culture or freedom or whatever it is and so, I think, that’s a great…I've never really thought about that. that I could have been conditioned to be away from it but I think my parents are very proudly American citizens and very proud of their Filipino heritage and that certainly has existed whether it's the revolutionary war or whether it's the American-Spanish war, any of those things where there’s this proud tradition of warriors whether in conflict as military or whether as sports figures. In the Philippines, there's this long history, even though not everyone realizes, this long, of like famous Filipino boxers who did well in the world stage and things like that so I think I could’ve been but I also think, in my parents and in our society’s way to try to teach us about our culture and our heritage that inevitably would have come up. I would have never been or thankfully, I was not shielded or protected from learning those kinds of things but I also believe that there's differences in gender, men and women, I think a lot of ways are drawn to things like toy guns and army men and G.I. Joe and stuff like that. I also love Snake Eyes, there's the G.I. Joe figure, at some point, I'm pretty sure the martial arts would come in.Jeremy Lesniak:Alright, makes sense. I get it. Now, when you think of your cultural identity now, we’ll step a little outside of martial arts for a moment. When you think of who you are and how you relate to your heritage now versus, say, 20 years ago. You have this much deeper understanding of the arts that you practice and I would suspect that, at times, as you practice them, you think these are from where my family’s from.Joseph Marana:Yes.Jeremy Lesniak:Does that give you a different understanding of your art and does that give you a different understanding of who you are?Joseph Marana:Absolutely. I think what it does is it makes me feel that I'm connected to certainly something bigger than me but in a lineage and a tradition that has been earned and sometimes earned through a struggle of strife or blood so in the Sayoc Kali system, there's a saying that every time you draw your blade, 10,000 hands draw their blade with you. With it being that in order for us to have this information, the martial arts techniques, the curriculum, even the people that had shared it with us, there's a long lineage and line of warriors that came before them that some may have had to die in order for the information to get passed on. I don’t think that’s exclusive to the Sayoc system nor do I even think it's exclusive to Filipino Martial Arts but it definitely adds this gravity that what we’re learning is not something that some guy just made up here on the spot. This is something that was earned in the barrios or earned in the battlefield and passed along because of sacrifice or because, in the tradition of Filipino Martial Arts because it was always thought as a need to know, only as a need to know, usually from father to son or within the family that there was this precious secret that was passed on only because it had to be passed on. It adds value to that. In connection to that, because we have something in our history whether it's my parents or my grandparents or beyond or whether it's this culture, sometimes heavily intermingled with American culture that if I'm teaching or if I'm practicing something that I'm utilizing and partaking in something that has this long legacy and tradition and worth so many people before me.Jeremy Lesniak:We hear about the need to pass martial arts down and how that’s something that generationally happened up until fairly recently whether we’re talking about it in Okinawan traditions, Filipino traditions, Chinese traditions and I suspect, pretty much anywhere in the world, we’ve had folks talk about it in terms of Irish stick fighting, there's that familial aspect of passing down martial arts from, we’ll be gender-specific here, father to son because it's generally, how it went. It's something that most of us are never going to understand because we weren’t there but the aspect of needing it is something that, unfortunately, some of us will need to understand and reconcile. Have you had to use your arts in some way?Joseph Marana:I think, through the years, either I, myself who would do it with groups of people who are so interested in like Guro Dan, did you ever have to do this? Did you ever get into street fight or how was Bruce Lee when he actually had to really fight on the street? We would talk like friends or other instructors or seniors and things like that and actually, there's some awesome stories that I've heard. Some people that fought in the street here or did this situation there but I remember talking to [00:39:52] Atienza about something like using it, using Atienza Kali examples of how he had used it or something like that and at the time, he said something like sort of like, it seemed like, not disappointing but not quite what I was expecting but through the years, it's come to be, I've come to really resonate with it because I think it's how it is with me and it's come to be so true where he said something like you know, I've used my training and I've avoided, I've been able to avoid situations before they even occurred or before the exchange happened or something and basically, what he was alluding to with his training, he’s been able to avoid a lot of situation and I do think that’s probably how I utilize my martial arts training the most because whether it's feeling like I don’t think this situation is really safe, I think we should just leave or whether it's like recognizing someone or seeing something or kind of feeling the energy and knowing that something is about to happen. Bouncers would talk about it a lot but there's like a change in energy or movement that they see or they can feel so they’ll notice it before it actually, before the punch is thrown or before things pop off. I certainly have done that as a martial artist and as a nurse where I look at someone because it seemed weird and then, they fainted like a few seconds later and I just get a sense of something was going to happen so I feel like I've been able to use that quite a bit whether it's in preparation or whether it's in looking at situations or taking my family out of a…I've been recently, my family and I, we do service at a homeless shelter a few times a month and we stopped to get gas and it's kind of in a rough area of Baltimore city and as soon as I got out, the energy was just wrong. There was some people walking kind of weird way. We’re the only people in the gas station and we were really low on gas so not super good planning on my part but I just got right back in, I was like no, it's not right. We’re just going to go somewhere else so I feel like I've used quite a bit of that kind of thing. As far as other things in martial arts, thankfully, since I've gotten further into martial arts, I would imagine like this stuff for other people, we feel the need to use it less. I don’t really feel like I need to prove it a lot but I will say there were times when I was younger and not always through martial arts means that I had seen things or done things that later on, so that’s what that was or that’s what I thought or that’s what we did that were very poignant or that could inform some of our practice so the last time I've really used martial arts, it's just not going to be super glamorous. My oldest son has severely involved special needs and when he was younger, basically he has vastly quadriplegic cerebral palsy so it just means that he’s instead of being loose and flaccid and low tone all around, he’s very high toned so he’s always in extension and so, his arms will be straight and his wrist kind of curling and stuff like that and I would use wrist turn techniques to open his grip and to bend his arm because usually, you learn that if you try to control a joint, you should also try to control or you need to control the joint above and below it so if you're trying to control the wrist in general, you're trying to control the wrist and elbow or the elbow, the wrist and the shoulder, things like that and so, frequently, when he’s going to extension, I would use a lot of kind of joint locking or controlling kind of techniques to actually try to loosen his tone or break some of his extension so if I need to strengthen, open up his arm or open up his hand, I would use basic kind of Steven Seagal kind of wrist turn. Obviously, not with that kind of force ballistic nature of it but I would do it to try to do that or if I needed to bend his leg, sometimes I would put some pressure on his foot in a way, almost like a toe hold or something like that and I would bend his knee. I would use those kind of things a lot and I would. Completely attribute that to physical martial arts usage. There's a lot of stuff I had learned in the Sayoc system as far as preparation and planning things like that. I use those still quite a bit these days but as far as actually technique, it's probably been a long time since I've had to protect myself getting kicked or getting punched or something. When I was younger, there were times either myself or I was with other people and we’ve certainly done a lot of stuff that I would identify now as martial arts technique either offensively or defensively but I don’t think I have a super glamorous story these days. Interesting ones probably when I was younger but not too many as an adult with kids.Jeremy Lesniak:And that’s okay. Honestly, that’s how most people answer that. Now, what I like about asking the question the way that I did is martial arts, of course, is so much more than self-defense and you talking about your son. I mean, that’s the heart of it right there is finding a way to take your training and use it in life.Joseph Marana:Yeah, I absolutely agree.Jeremy Lesniak:So, I will often ask questions that are very vague kind of like that one, if you really unpack it, it's a vague question but the way that you hear it tells us a lot about you, right? That tells us you are not a fighter. You are probably not quick to violence and quick to boast because you didn’t go to those places. You were searching for those kind of daily life integrations but you weren’t sure if that was me asking the question the way I wanted to or that’s the way I meant to ask the question, there we go, words. Cool, yeah! Awesome. Alright, so, now that we’ve asked that question that way and now that I've kind of given away the answer, let me ask you that question again. How do you use your martial arts outside of your training?Joseph Marana:I think that I'm very intentional when I teach and when I practice and also, one of the most valuable things I've gotten out of my training, especially with the Sayoc and Atienza systems is this whole idea of awareness and understanding context and situations so we can all sort of imagine in our minds or picture ourselves in a fight where someone’s throwing a punch and we need to cover, slip, or parry or whatever it is that we do but those kinds of exchanges usually are starting way before that point so before ground zero or point zero, there's a -1 or -2 and so, what is actually happening when someone is stepping into my reactionary gap when they're getting into a range, are they doing it to set it up? Was there something that I said or was there something that I did? Was I just not aware and did I walk into a situation or park in someplace? So that kind of training, I use all the time. We’ll be careful about where we park, we will look a lot about before driving up to a restaurant or a store. Where we park and how we face the car, one we’re looking inside, who’s inside? What other cars are in the parking lot? Are they also facing out? What kinds of people are around? I used to play a lot of games with my kids where you're very vulnerable if you're by yourself and you have kids and you're strapping a child into the car seat because your back is facing out. Usually, the doors open. Usually and you're occupied with something. You're trying to put on seatbelts and whatever it is and kids move around, whether they're small or big, it just seems, for some reason, it's way more complicated than it should be to strap a toddler or a baby into a car seat but I used to play a lot of games with the kids and say tell me who's around. Tell me who’s at the back. I actually just tell them, Tell me if there’s a bad guy coming so I can see and then, I would talk and bring those scenarios back to my instructors and say like you know, there's this situation and I felt just really exposed and then, there's this situation, there was something dangerous about that and they would break it down and they’d say like well, this is what you can do. In your minivan, get in and close the door so when you are strapping your kid into the car seat, you don’t have your butt sticking out and the door opened. They're inside, you can lock the doors, you can do all those things so there's a lot of that back and forth and actually, recently, I still pick opportunities to train some of my students in the little ways that I can about observation and things like that. I asked one of my students, actually, so I manage neonatal intensive care and pediatrics at one of the busiest hospitals in Baltimore city and frequently, we would do exercises to test sort of our security including the possibility of someone that might be trying to abduct the baby which is probably one of the scariest thing that could happen. We can't really use familiar staff so I used one of my students and asked them to volunteer as a roleplay actor and we dressed them up and we tried to see if he would come in, get past security, get on the floor and possibly take a baby doll. We’re not going to actually take someone’s baby but do something close and actually, while he was, actually the staff were right on top of it and they did great but since he was here, we did a lot and we walked through the hospital campus and we talked a lot about watching your surroundings, looking past your normal circle of view so if you're walking in a city, there's kind of a certain distance that you would look at and not really see beyond it. Not because you can't but only because of the attention that we place into it. Maybe it's in the block but you can see 2 or 3 blocks further than that, you just have to look at it. Where’s your line of sight? How can you use reflective surfaces to look behind you if there's someone, I mean, you can just turn around and look behind you. How can you change your view to see from a different perspective because kids will often see things that, as adults, we don’t see and so, what are you doing? Are you tying your shoe? What are you doing when you're going to an ATM or if you're with your wife and she’s at the ATM, what are you doing? Are you just facing the ATM too and if someone came up behind both of you then neither of you is watching? Does it have to be like that? Could one person actually look out? Could my own kids be the lookout for me? How can I teach them observation because the other thing, the other side of it that goes outside of martial arts techniques is so where is this person’s hands and how are they standing and what are they doing with their hands? Cops have it all the time where certain gestures that someone may do especially in a stressful situation will trigger something, an alarm for them, and they identify a potential draw of a firearm or something. Before it happens, ideally, so they could get a jump on the [00:51:39] in that decision cycle and so, how can we try to do some of those same things in our martial arts training too? it is great and still hard to learn your parries and blocks and strike and counterstrike but it's equally important, if not more so in my opinion, than to be able to spot those things maybe before they happen. Ideally, before they happen and how can you problem solve before it even becomes a situation. Not too unlike how things will be in the hospital. I tell my nurses if you can spot a patient starting to act up or go downhill or whatever it is before it gets severe, that’s the best. That’s actually where you want to be. You don’t really want it to escalate into this code situation and everyone is just massively complex life and death situation, if you can identify something early on, that’s huge, that’s better. If someone would be good with money, would be better if they can identify trends early on or spot something as opposed to hoping last minute we’re going to have some windfall cash or be in massive death so, to me, that spectrum of situations as early as it can possibly start, I think that’s support important. It's just that it's really hard to teach in an hour class so in the classes, we talk a lot about, especially in Filipino Martial Arts, anytime we talk about weapon training, I always make it a point to, and I get this from the Sayoc system, that we would always talk about carry and deployment as an essential part of it because if someone’s walking down the street and they have a big stick in their hand or they have a knife in their hand, you absolutely should not, and you don’t know them, you absolutely should not let them just walk up to you and certainly, not stand around and be close to you. If they're walking down the street, you should be going to the other side of the street or doing whatever you can soon and you can spot that soon. If you're not doing that and most people would not be doing that, then they're going to have to have it from some sort of carried or concealed position. Now, they can conceal it in their hand and you can watch that too. Harder but you can watch that too but if they're concealing it behind their back or inside their jacket or things that are in their backpack, those are things that you can watch for. It doesn’t mean, if someone reaches in their back pocket to get their wallet that you need to punch them in the face but it does mean that maybe if they do that, that you shift your position, take a step back or maybe if someone is standing close to you at an ATM, you just ask would you mind not standing so close or whatever it is so that component or training, I think, will be really, really useful. The other side of it and one of the things that I'm really drawn to in Filipino Martial Arts is this idea of kind of gross motor motion habit or movement pattern so I may use the same movement offensively that I do defensively and probably most martial arts are like this. Can I develop motion habits that will help me whether I have two weapons, one weapon, empty hand, can I do those things so it's built in as a motion? So that’s an eye jab with my fingers or parry and slash to the neck or maybe just to parry and cover to prevent myself getting hurt. How can we spot things early and be as efficient as we can in our motions and movement that will serve us across multiple platforms so not unlike, I mean, the goal I think of education is that you take your physics class and your chemistry class and your biology class and you're learning all these specific things but if you really start to understand buffers, for instance, that’s the length between things like biology and chemistry and understanding, well, yeah, that’s why your body does that or the things with physics and healthcare. This is why you’d have this lift in doing it this way. This is why you carry this patient in that way and so, I utilize training and my martial arts, I think much more than in the martial sense these days, thankfully. Thankfully, I live a life where I'm not required and have to engage people in overtly violent ways all the time but hopefully, I've been able to use or I feel like I've been able to use a lot of my training and awareness to avoid violent situations or see them as they happen and also to extricate myself from them if I need to.Jeremy Lesniak:Absolutely, and there's one thing I want to go back and I just want to make sure that we underscore because you talked about it and it's something that we’ve talked about on this show and not a whole lot but it's something that’s been on my mind of late. You talked about this notion in self-defense where you see someone with a stick, don’t let them come up to you and all too often, people get that feeling in their gut. Something’s off, something’s wrong but they're so afraid of being embarrassed or embarrassing someone else or making someone feel bad that they won’t take that action. They won’t cross the street. So, in business, there's a term that a lot of people will have heard of before called opportunity cost so opportunity cost is a way that mathematically we can kind of figure out a decision. If there's a 5% chance that that person with the stick means you harm and a 95% chance that you are wrong and you will embarrass them and make them sad, unless the value of your life is so low that 5% of your life is worse less than 95% of their embarrassment, it is an overwhelming decision to cross the street.Joseph Marana:Absolutely.Jeremy Lesniak:And you brought up another wonderful example, someone standing behind you at an ATM a little too close. I once had a guy who was breathing down my neck while I was punching in the PIN of my debit card. I turned and said sir, can you please back up? The chance that he was going to try to mug me later and take my card and as he already had my PIN, incredibly slim, I'm very aware of that but I don’t care because even that slim chance, I’d rather embarrass him or embarrass myself. Was I able to speak that easily? No. It was weird for me, it was hard because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings but I also wanted to protect myself and my sense of self-preservation was stronger and I think there's a lot of schools out there and I'm glad that you're bringing this up, there's a lot of schools out there that teach self-defense and they teach the physical aspects and they're starting to get better about teaching the psychological aspects but this is the Number 1 principle that I think if this is taught, this is what everyone needs and this is what we will use 99% of the time so thank you for giving me that.Joseph Marana:I mean, there's a lot of things, even in the physical sense, like if your distance management, stuff like that, I listen to a lot of podcasts including yours but I listen to a lot of podcast and just yesterday, I was listening to a Jeet Kune Do podcast and they're interviewing Paul Vunak, the person whose videos and VHS tapes I watched.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, that’s so fun!Joseph Marana:So, he was talking about how, when he was much younger, he was having a lot of trouble with boxing and he had the opportunity to do like some private training with Guro Dan and so, Guro Dan had him gear up and pull on boxing gloves and stuff like that and he’s like just go ahead and box me like you do with everyone else. Let’s just start off with that and he talked about how he could not, he just could not even literally touch Guro Dan. It's not that he wasn’t fast enough but I think what he was alluding to was that Guro Dan was just so good at managing his distance that this guy was always outside of it and vice versa so, in the reverse, that Guro Dan can touch him whenever he wanted and there's a lot of, it's awesome to do like a double knife hand block or to do some sort of parry or things like that but like, it's also super awesome when someone is super good at their distance and evasion or timing that you just can't even touch them. Now, it doesn’t look spectacular. It can. You can watch people like Lomachenko do some awesome things from the boxing ring and now, you can see some cool things that Tony Jaa is doing or whatever in some movies but people like to see in their entertainment like a block or technique and that’s actually in the kind of learning spectrum, from I think, people may need to understand that before they can even understand or appreciate things like evading or distance management but it's absolutely right that we’re talking about self-protection, physical self-protection but a huge component of that is more than just your physical skill so yeah, I think you're right. people are starting to get better at it but, to me, I think it may be the most important thing but at the same time, it's hard to teach and people want to go to a class because they want to learn how to punch hard or kick high and it's probably off-putting if they come to a class and you're talking about how to deal with social norms and how to be self-aware and that’s a lot of it like our social norms and our customs, there’s a…I can’t remember his name…there's this guy that wrote these books on fearJeremy Lesniak:Rory Miller?Joseph Marana:No, not Rory Miller. Oh man, it's a book that I quoted so many times in the past. Oh, it's called like The Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker. He’s the author that talks about the gift of fear and it's a very good book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker and he also wrote a book called Protecting the Gift and the Gift of Fear is basically is this book about how all these examples of success and examples of unfortunate things where people, but mostly women, have listened to their intuition and been able to avoid situation or escaped situations and people who have not and made some sort of consequence for that act but in the following book called Protecting the Gift which I think was super valuable to me, it talks about how you would do that with your kids and there's a couple real life examples he gives of people who, moms that were with their daughters. There was a mom with her daughter and she’s in a movie theater and this guy kept looking at them and making chitchat conversation and she did not like it. She thought he was a creepy guy and when they left the theater, they're walking to their car and she looks behind and this guy’s walking behind them so they start to pick up the pace and the whole time, she’s like I'm just being crazy, I'm just being paranoid. They end up running to the car and as soon as they get in, as soon as they, she gets her daughter in the driver side, so she crawls over into her seat and as soon as she’s in, the guy’s trying to open up the passenger side door and he comes around and she ends up sending him off. She kicks him a bunch of times and digs her keys into a space, his eye or something, but she talks about and Gavin De Becker wrote about if he would’ve paid more attention to those social norms and just said something early on or made a different decision or moving with friends or something that maybe, I mean, who knows? But that was an important thing for her to pay attention to. He also writes about this one example of this mom that was shopping in some department store and she was busy and she had a 10 or 12-year old, probably 10 or maybe younger who kept asking her questions, a typical, she was trying to shop and this kid was trying to ask her these kinds of questions and that he was bored and he didn’t want to be there so this guy starts talking to them both and was like hey, I have a son just like you and he’s talking and so, this mom is trying to finish whatever it is that she’s shopping for and she thinks that it's weird but this guy keeps talking to her son and she kind of had a feeling about it but she’s like uh, what’s going to happen? We’re in this department store and so, she’s shopping, shopping and minutes go by and she can still hear them talking but at one point, she gets a panicky feeling because she can’t hear them talking and she starts to look around and I'm sure many people with kids have had this situation. You lose track of your kid even for a second and there's a panicky feeling and that’s what she had. She starts to look around now and kind of like walking around quickly, calling out his name. She finally sees him but he was at the end of the store at an exit and she sees this man and her son going out of this exit to one of those service corridors so she sprints and runs, she gets there and they're exiting out of the building through one of those corridors. She sprints and runs, opens it, does not see him, never saw him again and she had, I guess, talked to Gavin De Becker years later, 10 years later, whatever and with all this regret about if I had only listened to it, if I had only just thought to myself like you know, this isn’t super comfortable but I'm going to have to tell this guy you know what? Stop talking to my son or so and so, just stay here with me and I know he’s going to be a big pain in my butt and he’s going to complain but those kind of things are super important, I think, for us to listen to. There's also a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. He talks a lot about it with fails but he talks a lot about, and we as humans always have what we call as the fixed action pattern. We do something, something happens and we do something automatically and it's super important to pay attention to. Really, the book is like how do you use influence and how are you aware of influence. How do these scammers do it or these multilevel marketing people do it and how do you identify that or how can you do things for yourself to put yourself in better positions and he also talks about how there's all these social norms that you just have to be aware of for whatever reason, they hold so much weight. You actually felt something appropriately about not wanting to tell this guy who’s breathing down your back like can you just take a step back? Simple thing but we’re so influenced by our social norms, by our expectations and how we perceive the world. Our fixed action patterns for things actively but also a fixed action pattern in not doing things that sometimes we don’t do things because that’s just what we have learned and instilled for ourselves so those kinds of things. The other thing is maybe you're not comfortable saying to the person but you can just cancel the transaction and just leave. That happens too and sometimes people don’t want to do that but whenever people do and they explain it, it actually, it seems however small, sometimes it's kind of an empowering thing. I have someone, a very good friend of mine, she was in a job interview and not even halfway, early on the interview, she just interrupted the person and said you know what? I don’t think this can be a good fit and she just left. Super uncomfortable for her or for the interviewer but sometimes, those little things, man, that’s great. That’s great that you just didn’t waste the whole rest of the day. Meanwhile, I have another friend that someone dared her to run a marathon, she didn’t train or anything for it. She finished a marathon because she was too embarrassed to exit the race. I mean it's sort of amazing that she finished it but, I mean, can also speak to our capacity, our physical capacity but she was just too embarrassed to leave the race so she ran a marathon. She was in like an ice bath for days afterward but it's so interesting how these social norms and these cultural things can really guide us much, much more than we realize.Jeremy Lesniak:The only thing we can't get back is time. I love that example of the interviewer. There's so many things that people feel obligated to finish up and I've never looked at it that way so long time listeners to this show know that one of the most influential things in my life was Joe Hyams’s book, Zen in the Martial Arts because I started reading it when I was 7 and there's an anecdote in there. I'm going to butcher it. I don’t remember much but Bruce Lee talks about how he cut off something like that because he and Joe Hyams asked, what are you doing? Well, I don’t get that time back. I'm not going to waste that time. I'm going to go spend it doing something else. My time, my life, is more important to me than that person’s time and so, when people ask me, oh, you don’t have to do that. If I'm doing something, it's because I want to do it. I'm doing this show because I wanted to. I'm talking to you because I wanted to talk to you and there are things that happen in, I'm sure, all of our lives that we do because we want to and some other things that we don’t want to do but if there's things that you don’t want to do, find ways to get rid of them or to minimize them or pay somebody else to do them. Whatever it is, there's always the choice. There's always a way. Might not be a good choice. It might not be the best choice but there is a choice.Joseph Marana:It's interesting that you say that, that quote in particular, because just yesterday, I wrote my staff, every once in a while, I’ll write these sort of overly sentimental things to my staff with little bit of things that I think are important or valuable and I don’t even know if most, actually, I know most of them don’t read it but it was something that [01:09:55] shared with us. We used to have these instructor weekends at his house and so, there’d be a small group of us and through the weekend, you’d share a lot of the art but also, a lot of his thoughts and how he would develop us as people and as instructors and he said something that was super poignant and he said, just like what you said, time is the one thing that you cannot get back. All these other things you can get, you can get your money back and you can do this, you can even get skills back, you can get your physicality back but you can't get the time back. So, because of that, time is our most precious commodity and so, if there's people that are important in your life, you want to give those important people your most precious asset which is time and you also don’t want to give away your time to people that are not important to you or that maybe negative or whatever it would be so the other thing is inevitably in our lives, with whoever it is, whether it's a friend or family, relative or child or parent, our past will no longer be connected. Not in a physical sense. It's inevitable whether they stop training you as a student, whether they move away or whether they pass away and so, there's not, you should try to not be super upset when things like that happen. Even if we miss them, even if we’re upset or we feel betrayed or whatever it is. It's not the time afterwards that we should spend a lot of our energy and emotional content on but really, really live and relish and cherish the time that you have. Really appreciate it while it's there because we all know with everything, almost everything, it will not be forever so the time is something that we can consciously make a decision to use and give to people that are important to us. We can make a conscious decision to not give it to people or situations that are for us and also, when we have it, to really be grateful for the time that we have knowing that it won’t be there forever.Jeremy Lesniak:Great stuff. See, we were right. We talked about this earlier. I could talk to you all day and we’re bumping up the time that I had asked you for so I want to be respectful of that. Now, for the folks listening, if they want to find you online, social media, website, stuff like that, where would they go?Joseph Marana:Pretty much if you type in LAKAS FMA so LAKAS Filipino Martial Arts, you’ll find me so I have the typical, I tried my hand trying to be active on social media and I do okay sometimes but I'm probably most active, I have a Facebook page that I try to share stuff on. Actually, the thing that I probably share most things on is my Instagram page so if you just search for LAKAS FMA on Instagram, you’ll find it but I also have my twitter, Tumblr and I have my website so my website is just www.lakasfma.com and actually, I have my own podcast and so, there's episodes that are there but I also try to share pictures or different kinds of things. Sort of the mission of LAKAS Filipino Martial Arts is surely to educate, support and promote Filipino Martial Arts as a whole and whether it's kind of like through movies, whether through individuals and whether it's going physically, me going out, I attended [01:13:26] Filipino Kali Academy Grand Opening this weekend, however I can do it or have my students come and support something, I am very much about trying to bring some awareness and education to Filipino Martial Arts in a cultural sense as well as a combative sense and more recently now, I'm very, very inspired by a lot of my colleagues and classmates in Inosanto Academy that are doing a lot to promote the health and wellness side through Filipino Martial Arts and through Kali. I like that very much and so, I'm interested in them. I will support all of them as much as I can so however it is, those social media or internet resources are there. I do teach a weekly public class which I had not for a few years and I do…I have some private students but I don’t take private students without having already trained with them for a while already without establishing some sort of relationship so really, if people are trying to find out information, they can do it that way. If, any time that Guro Inosanto is in the area, usually in Virginia or Pennsylvania, rarely he’s in Maryland these days but even in New York, I will always try to go so a lot of people will, I’ll meet people in some of those events or seminars and I'm always happy to share whatever insight and information that I have. Sometimes, those seminars can be a little bit daunting and there are a lot of material that people can be sort of overwhelmed by and I'm always happy to partner out with someone or to train side by side with them so they can help understand some of the information. So, anything that I can really, regardless of the system or style, I am always trying to support and help promote and grow the art as a whole.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s great and certainly appreciate anyone who is working towards similar goals, supporting the martial arts whether it's Filipino Martial Arts or Karate or all martial arts, doesn’t matter what it is. I suspect that we’re in the same page as far as the general broad benefits that martial arts provides to everyone and how one can be and of course, folks, if you're listening, maybe you're new to the show, you don’t know. We’ll drop all of the links to everything that we talked about so you don’t have to risk life and limb to have these things down if you're driving or something, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com is the place to go. We’ll link all of the social media and everything there. Well, I really appreciate you coming on. I had a great time talking to you and hope that we get to do it.Joseph Marana:Jeremy, it's been a pleasure.Jeremy Lesniak:One more thing! As we fade into the sunset here, some parting words for everyone listening. Let’s see if we can send them out in grand fashion.Joseph Marana:There’ll be three. One of my favorite quotes ever. Two of my favorite quotes ever. One is just a good quote but they're both from Guro Dan and because of Guro Dan, he probably would acknowledge that it came from somewhere else but one of them is that repetition is the mother of all skill or repetition is the mother of skill so I have always liked that as a quote. Another one was, there was one time we’re at the academy, it's like a perfect weather, it's surreal and Guro Inosanto’s explaining some sort of technique, I don’t remember what it was. Ironically, I don’t really remember what it was that we were watching and he suddenly stopped and looked at us as a group and he said, do you guys see this? You see what I'm doing? He’s like I'm giving you a gem and there's a lot of sort of silence and I guess expressionless faces and he’s like I'm giving you a gem, if you don’t see it, this is another piece of glass but I'm giving you a gem and I thought that was super profound to me. I wrote this down right away so that’s the last thing. I think in martial arts, a lot of times we’re like oh, I'm going to learn this awesome kata or this awesome two-minute set, whatever it is, I will never forget this. This is the most awesome thing I've ever learned. I will always remember this technique or this seminar and then, you know what? 6 months down the line or 3 years down the line like damn, I learned this really cool thing and I just don’t remember it at all. I just remembered that I learned it so the last thing, the wisdom that I’ll say is try to get into a habit, however it is, of taking notes and I do think that the note-taking is important. It's good to have the video and the recording and stuff like that but I do think of the actual writing, even if it's typing on a computer, I think that kind of scribing and that’s relevant also from the Sayoc system. It's super important. It helps with the growth. It helps for the trying to recall information, it helps to archive and lock into history sort of like the things that you did. I think, it's one thing I try to tell my students. I think a lot of them are yeah, yeah, we’ll do it but it's super important and I think it's often neglected so developing some sort of note-taking or documenting system, I think, if I could do it all over, there's so many things I wish I had notes on like tons of things and that’s something that I can't get those experiences back but what I can do is for the future, when Guro Inosanto says something like if you don’t save this piece of glass, absolutely, I’ll write that down and I’ll always have that so, that actually is my thing that I think is very important for martial artists to have.Jeremy Lesniak:I’m always happy to have other podcasters on the show because hey, if nothing else, they generally know how to carry on a good conversation but here, with Guro Marana, we had so much more than just a good conversation. We talked about a ton of great stuff. You probably noticed, or at least if you look at the clock now, this is a longer episode than we’ve had lately and that’s because I was so deep in listening that I didn’t shut it off. I had a great time! Honestly, the only reason that I ended this episode when we were talking was we tried not to go longer than the 90 minutes we asked our guests to reserve but I had a lot of fun, I learned a lot and I truly do hope that I get to talk to him again. So, Guro, thanks for coming on this show. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for being so open. Listeners, I hope you got as much out of it as I did. Go check out whistlekickmartialartsradio.com, episode 424, find the show notes, find links to Guro’s social media and websites, to his podcast, photos and all the other stuff we’ve got going on over there. If you go to whistlekick.com, use the code PODCAST15, that will get you 15% off everything and if you want to help us out, leave us some reviews. Google reviews, Facebook reviews, Apple reviews, Google podcast reviews, basically if there's a place you can review us, please leave us a review. It helps. You’d be surprised how much those help. You can also just share an episode. Help us grow. Help us reach more people in the martial arts community because why are we doing this? Why do we do this show? Yeah, it helps get our name out there but at the same time, it's impactful on its own. I hear every day from people who are impacted in a positive way from this show and I'm going to keep doing it even if all the other stuff fell away at whistlekick, this show would continue so thank you for your support. Thanks for everything that you do. Remember our social media is @whistlekick all over the place. My email address, jeremy@whistlekick.com. I'm going to sign off so until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!