Episode 439 - Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 1)
In this episode, Jeremy brings us the inaugural Episode 1 of the Martial Arts Radio Live.
Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 1) - Episode 439
Today's episode is the first for the new Martial Arts Radio Live. Jeremy answers questions and reads stories from the listeners as well as giving out cool trivia. Listen to find out surprises and more!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hello everyone and welcome to the inaugural episode of martial arts radio live! This is the, I don’t know, convergence, I don’t want to say culmination, this the whole intersection of a lot of things that we’ve been figuring out between martial arts radio and first cup and now with who would win and just a bunch of the stuff that we’re doing and I thought, hey, let’s see if we can do this once a month, kind of bring some of the fun that we had with episode 2, 3 and 400 and just kind of lean into it. See what happens. As you can see, I am not in the typical environment that I don’t think I've ever recorded anything up here other than a few promo videos for products but we’re in the warehouse. We’re in the space that will probably ultimately become a small training space, I mean, I've done training up here. I've actually taught people up here. If you can see, what do you see behind me? We got spray foam. You have the world’s most expensive, awkward mannequin that has never been used because it's such a pain to put together. Anybody who ever, anybody who works at clothing stores and has to deal with mannequins? I'm sorry. This thing’s a nightmare. What do we got over my right shoulder? We got a rollout banner that I bring to events and what's on the table? We’ve got one of the newer products. This is an insulated mug. This is like your Yeti knockoff. Can you read that? It’s reversed. Caution: contents may encourage inner ninja then you got the logo but it's pretty rugged. You could probably kill somebody with that if need be so, thanks for joining. Thanks for joining!Now, we’re going to do some things differently than we typically do in a martial arts radio episode because it's live so with all the challenges, with all the challenges that come through with a live show, we’re trying to do some positive things too and here’s the first thing that I will throw out to you is one of the things that we’re hoping to do is to build some of the reviews. We’ve got iTunes reviews, we’ve got Facebook reviews, we’ve got google reviews, at the end of the show, we’re going to be raffling off 2 gift certificates for each of those 3 locations. Hi Frank! Hi Becca! If you leave a review or you’ve already left a review, you're in the draw and that will keep happening month after month because yes, we’re doing this the first Tuesday of every month. We’ll see how it goes and I’m really glad to make it as well and I want to start the show by giving a shout out to Gabe [00:02:49] Sensei Gabe who, behind the scenes, has helped put this together.As anybody who knows me personally or even, can just put dots together, you know that I am overwhelmed, overworked, there is a ton going on and I can't tackle these new projects without help so Sensei Gabe volunteered. We’ve talked on the phone, we’ve done a bunch of emailing and if you look at anything to do with the event, Gabe did it. It is going to end as a Monday or Wednesday episode, it can be Thursday but yes, the plan is we’re going to take this recording and then dump it out as a Thursday audio feed at some point. Probably also uploaded as video to YouTube. We’re not going to preempt a Monday episode.Speaking of Monday episodes, I recorded 2 today. Let’s see. One with someone, here, we’ll make this the first trivia question. I recorded an episode with someone today who is from a country that we have, I don’t know if we can call it a separate country. I recorded with someone from Scotland. This person was the person I've ever talked to from Scotland, on the show anyway, and then the 2nd person that I interviewed today, you may not know by name. You would almost definitely recognized and if I told you where they got their start in acting, you would 100% recognize that movie so…I'm going to be mixing in trivia. I dropped a poll in here. Where is it? I've got the computer, right? So, I can try to interact with people. That was one of the hopes. I can’t find it. Where did it go? I dropped it in a poll somewhere to see your answers to the question, who would you want to train with? So, if you listen to the show for a while, you know that…Frank’s asking, am I the only one not getting a clear picture? So, one of the things I'm not sure of, it's coming through okay for me but the internet out here is a little spotty. If it's a nightmare for everybody, I’ll do a different set next time but I shut a lot of things off so hopefully, it's okay. We’re just going to run with it because I'm not going to break down and set up another time. Andrew says it looks good so at least some of you are seeing it fine. So, yeah, you got the polls there. people are starting to respond to it. I want to know if you had the opportunity to train with anybody in the martial arts anywhere in the world. I ask that question on the show often. I want to know your answers. I want to know what you think so hit the Facebook poll, let me know what's going on.Now, we’re also doing a couple show-only discounts because we threw a bunch of ideas on the wall, see what sticks, see what people like, get some feedback, we’ll see what happens. So, 2 discounts. First one, are you guys seeing these? And are you seeing them in red? The red’s fairly new but these are the pursuit gloves. We call these as semi-contact gloves. They're not boxing gloves. They're not a pad glove. You're not going to take this and beat on the heavy bag for hours on end. They're not built to withstand that but maybe even more importantly, the padding’s not built for that but they are for more aggressive sparring. They're a great glove and during the show, they are only $29.99 with free shipping. If you use the code, LIVE1. Here’s another code LIVE2 is 25% off everything and again, this is just for the show. I’ll mention that a couple of times. This is not meant to be a horrendously commercial thing. Hey, Gabe’s here! Cool! Alright!Now, the whole point of this is the ability to interact. I want to be able to engage with all of you so keep the comments coming, keep the questions coming. Now, one of the things that we did, again thanks to Gabe, is we kind of preloaded some questions, some topics in here, some things to talk about and the one that I want to start with, this question came in from Andrew. Here’s the question: should black belt test be open or closed? How open or closed? Can Joe Schmoe off the street attend? Just other students? Only other black belts? Awesome question and the reason I like this as a question is because I've seen it done in so many different ways, really different ways. My original black belt test was limited to people testing and the people assisting in the test. That was it. no spectators. If you had earned the black belt prior, you will probably be… Hey, you're welcome, Andrew’s watching. You are probably going to be invited in to participate, to support, really to beat on a black belt candidate but I've also been part of tests where anyone can kind of come and observe where it’s more of an event and I think that there's value in both so when I think back to my first test, one of the things that was really valuable to me is how powerful it was. By not having spectators, you can do everything and you could push some of those limits and it's from having those limits pushed that that test meant a lot to me. I can reflect back on that time and I can really think about how I was challenged and I was able to overcome those things but then, when I look at subsequent tests and other styles, when I think about the fact that other people could watch, that families could all feel like they were part of this journey because, let’s face it, if you make it to black belt, there's a good chance that other people have been loving or supporting you whether it's a spouse or children or parents or grandparents, we tend to have others along for the ride so being able to have those people observe that test, I think, can also be pretty powerful. Of course, there's a big difference in those tests, right?You’ve got private tests where people are getting banged on and then you’ve got more public tests that, honestly, aren’t as, in my experience, aren’t treated as aggressively because you have people watching that may not understand what's going on. What a school should choose is entirely up to what a personality the school is. However you choose to handle it is going to affect the culture of the school. Every choice affects the culture and there's no right or wrong. It's just going to lead to different experiences and ultimately, different people sticking around and being part of that school.So, if I take a look, I got to refresh this. Here we go. We got a bunch of responses coming in on that vote and we got people writing in in the chat. Stacy, go respond in the poll.I was looking through some of the numbers for the show and one of the things that you probably don’t think about that I think about because I'm a nerd and I like numbers and data, I look at where the show’s downloaded. As you might imagine, we’re a United States-based show. The poll is, if you go into martial arts radio live, the event for today, if you look at the event and then, the sub-event, that’s today. I posted it in there. I can see it. It's just below the live feed. So, the US is #1, Australia, the UK, Canada and the one that I find interesting in the top 10 is that…is Iraq. Now, I'm guessing that there's some traction among deployed soldiers which is interesting because I haven't, I don’t get much feedback from soldiers in deployment. I talked to a couple over the years but not a lot there. Now, one of the questions I wanted to throw out, I wanted to throw a trivia question and if you're the first person to get this right, you're going to message me, you're going to email me and I'm going to send you a $20 gift certificate. There’s like 20 countries that have had 1 download. Just a single download over the last few years. if you're the first person to name one of them and you can only guess once, you get a $20 gift card to the store. I'm looking at a bunch of them. Some of them would make sense. Others, you might be surprised by so I’ll just watch the chat here and in between, you just got a whole bunch of downloads. We’re coming up on 500,000 downloads, a ton. A ton. Andrew is saying Indonesia. No. Indonesia’s had more than 1. I don’t have a full list in front of me because there's a lot of it in 250 countries. I don’t know how that ended up. Next topic and I'm going to watch. We’ll keep doing this.How do you deal with students who are forced to attend classes and there's an eyeroll emoji here and said parents? Great question. If you’ve ever ran a school or spent much time teaching, you know how difficult students who don’t want to be there can be. Generally, children, right? Adults don’t tend to do things they don’t want to do. There’s nothing fun in there. It's tea. So, how do you deal with that? You know the number one way that I found to deal with that? You got to make it fun. It's the same way that I deal with students who want to be there. I make it fun. I spend as much time as I can trying to make it enjoyable because if you're having fun and they're having fun, doesn’t matter if they didn’t want to come in the first place. They're at least going to be less distracting, less impactful on everyone else. Is that always easy? No, absolutely not and there are plenty of parents out there who see martial arts instruction as inexpensive daycare and that’s unfortunate because there's a good chance that if that’s the way parents are treating their child is that the kid actually needs martial arts. They probably need some of the support from the instructors. They need the life skills because it sounds like the parent might be handing that off to other people but you got to do what you can and sometimes, there comes a point where you got to say this isn’t working, there's the door.Funny stories? So, we got a few of these here. I'm not going to read all of them. Some were a little long. This one comes in from Gabe and Jenny. During a break at a Karate camp, I walked by a group of girls sitting together and overheard, “That’s why I was thinking of putting blueberries in his ears,” kind of want to know the rest of that story. Reminds me of Lewis Black, the end of one of his early albums. He had an album talking about and I would’ve made it through school if it wasn’t for that horse. I always remember that one.This one’s from Brad. My first day of Hapkido, an arm bar was being performed on me during sparring. The guy squeezed so hard, he passed gas really loudly right on my face. I accidentally called him an SOB. My instructor was kind of upset with me until he smelled it and then called him an SOB himself. I can totally see that happening. Honestly, one of my greatest fears in grappling is farting on my partner, has not happened that I know of. I would probably know.This one’s from Shell. Gi pants split and not a little but the whole seam was worn out. Hot pink underwear, just kept going like nothing happened and not one of the guys in the room said a thing ever. You’ve got some good training partners, Shell.This one’s from Sven. Saw a 3rd Dan black belt get so excited about taking a child student through their pattern, he accidentally coughed up a big loogie which landed on the kid’s recently washed gi. After looking around to see if anyone else noticed, he tried to quickly brush it off the kid before anyone saw it. Safe to say that only made the situation even messier. Oh god, that’s awful! Gross. Stephanie says, I put my helmet on backwards and didn’t notice so I left it like that until someone said something. I've seen a lot of people do that. A lot of people do that. Good stuff! Good stuff!No other guesses on the country? One person has guessed so if you're just joining us, I've asked everyone, there are about 20 countries that have had a single download of martial arts radio and if you can be the first one to name one of those countries, I’ll give you a $20 gift card. Also, we’re doing raffles at the end to wait for Facebook reviews, Google reviews, iTunes reviews. I have no, I'm not going to pretend about I have any shame for asking for reviews. I will throw you free stuff. Andrew, you're right. You can only guess once. We got a guess coming in for North Korea, no. South Africa, no. Madagascar, no. I would have guessed that one to be one of the ones on the list but it's not. Funny, huh? What else we got going on here? No, there's no other trivia question. We’ll ask that one later. Japan, no. Lots of it in Japan. Luxembourg, no. Iran, yes! Tommy, you're the first one to get it so go ahead, shoot me an email. I’ll send you a code for $20 gift card. Here are the others on that list: Egypt, Kosovo, Uganda, Nepal, Lithuania, Guinea, Paraguay, the Bahamas, Iceland, Belize, Colombia, Martinique, Tanzania, Fiji and Guam. Nice job!It is funny when I dig in and I look at all the numbers and see that the show really spread pretty quickly. It wasn’t like early on, it was all US. We started seeing international downloads really quickly. Some of that might be there weren’t a lot of martial art shows at the time. Some of it might be just the reach of the internet but one of the things that surprises me and this came through in the conversation I had with someone from Scotland today, that media in United States still holds some weight internationally. The fact that I was interviewing this person from the United States seem to make it more impactful which I found fascinating because maybe it's my own ignorance because I live in the US and have this very American-centric view of the world but if someone was interviewing me, I don’t know that I would see that as much different. Maybe I would, I don’t know. Has anybody from another country interviewed me? I don’t think so. I haven't been on very many podcasts. I’d like to. I’d like to do more. Actually, it's like…no, I wasn’t on Joe’s show. So, yeah, cool.Next trivia question before we move on to the next topic and I’ll let you guys think about this one because I don’t think you're going to get it. Top downloaded episode of all time. Here’s a hint: it's not Bill Wallace. That’s the one everybody guesses. It's not Bill Wallace. Let’s see how we’re doing with the training poll. Last I looked, we were up to 3 different responses. Oh, we’re at 5. Okay! Now, I started the poll by plugging in Bruce Lee because you would think, at least somebody would guess Bruce Lee. We got it started so we got guesses coming in for Episode 1 and we’ve got guesses coming in for Fumio Demura and no. Episode 1 does tend to get a lot of downloads in part because it's episode 1, in part because Master Alexander is well-known in New England and beyond, of course but no, no. One of the things that’s funny on the show is I have people write to me and they say, I just found your show 4 months ago or a year ago and I started listening and I've gone back to the beginning and I've made it through 242 episodes as of today. That’s a lot of listening to my voice. I don’t even want to hear my voice that much. Frank says Victor Moore. The Victor Moore episode actually has a lot of downloads but no, that’s not the top one and I think a lot of those people who are downloading, many of those people who are downloading a lot of episodes, it's because they drive a lot and they just chew through podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I don’t know if I can handle, well, let’s see. There are shows that I've listened to in the past that have been 5 days a week and I usually burn out from them. It’s this one that you can only guess once. I'm not going to throw a gift card at this one. We’ll do some other trivia with a gift card but no, you can guess more than once. I just want to see if you guys can get it and don’t just go through and list out all the episodes. That will be lame.People are writing to me, why are people writing to me? Got people writing in. Bas Rutten, good guess, but no, no, not that. So, right now, we’ve got Bruce Lee with 3 votes. [00:23:50] Joe Lewis [00:23:53] and Mark Shuey. Mark Shuey has been on the show. He’s a nice guy. I like him. Generally, see him at Sifu Allan Goldberg’s event in New Jersey and he has these absolutely beautiful canes that he makes. Really like them. Jesse Enkamp, good guess, no. No, the Karate nerd is not the #1 download. I should have put more tea in there. Oh well. There are dogs outside.So, the next topic that we can get into a little bit, competitions for, and you can use different words for this, I mean no offense if someone dislikes this but this was written in as competitions for the disabled. Frank says Brent Philpot, no. Andrew’s last guess…here we go, it’s back. Yes, I'm drinking tea. No coffee because it's not the morning and it's not a hundred episode so I'm not drinking alcohol. Where was the other comment that came through? There was a number 1 here. Jhoon Rhee, no, no. The Jhoon Rhee episode, I’ll be honest. If you haven't checked out that Jhoon Rhee episode, you should but it didn’t do really well and I think part of it was the subject matter. If you listen to the episode, excuse me, I like about the show and the way we do the show is that it gives the guest the freedom to talk about what they want to talk about and so, you get snapshots of people at certain moments of time. If we had talked to Jhoon Rhee 30 years ago, it would have been an entirely different conversation but this episode with Jhoon Rhee, it wasn’t Jhoon Rhee. I'm just riffing all that because that’s what I do. This episode was a lot about faith and philosophy for him and I would imagine as a man who was near the end of his life, in immense pain. If you listen to the end of that episode, he pretty much said, I got to go take a nap. It was abrupt. I'm trying to remember what he was facing physically. I think it was… I don’t remember what it was. Stacy sent this. She loved it.Anytime someone’s willing to be open and honest with me, especially vulnerable on this show, do the combined downloads of the two parts of the Tony Blauer episode count? No, because if I hadn’t split it, it would’ve been one. For a long time, that was one of the top episodes and it should be. It's a fantastic episode. If anybody is interested in, what's someone would call reality-based self-defense or kind of street…I don’t know how else to term it but I have listened to Tony Blauer on a number of podcasts, not so much now but he was really big in the CrossFit world. Most people would know me and know me from the show, in addition to martial arts, I'm involved in CrossFit and Tony put on a clinic, episode 108, if I remember correctly. He absolutely put on a clinic. 2 and a half hours, something like that and he broke down everything about his system and where it came from and philosophy. I think I asked him 2 questions. He just kind of went and it was great. I didn’t have anything to do other than watch and spin on it by the end, cross my legs, I had to pee. 2 and a half hours, it's a long time.So, I brought up this question here that was submitted or this topic, this discussion topic of competitions for the disabled and I kind of want to pivot on that a little bit in that martial arts is something that a lot of schools, at least, say they teach and value teaching those with special needs. I've talked to people who have special classes for folks on the autism spectrum and other classes. I know a number of people who've done some one on one stuff. I've done a little bit of one on one with special needs individuals and it's something that if you’ve worked with people you know how powerful martial arts can be, I mean it's powerful for everyone but for a portion of the population who doesn’t always succeed based on what is typically defined as success. Here, you’ve got something and you’ve probably heard me say this on this show, martial arts gives back what you put in. Doesn’t matter where you're starting from. So, you’ve got people who are used to putting in and not getting anything back because they can't meet what others are drawing as minimum standards. They try and they have fun and they learn, they progress. Maybe they're not going to be the next great competitor but it's still checking a lot of boxes. Clearly, I'm better at talking at length earlier in the day. So, if there are that many schools with that many special needs students out there, why are there not more special needs competitors? Now, I don’t have any answers for that. I don’t run a school.Not Shannon Lee though that episode ran very well in a short period of time.I don’t have ties to anyone with special needs. I have no agenda with this. I would just expect to see more special needs divisions at events. In fact, I have refereed and had special needs divisions on the roster that we were supposed to be doing and no one showed up to participate in and these aren’t massive tournaments but statistically, there should’ve been a few people and I can't answer why that is but I would like to see more. I would like to see more. I would like to see more people. I want to see more people competing in general. I want to see more people representing the full breadth of what martial arts is in competition and that includes people coming from special needs segments so, that’s my thought.Had a bunch of guesses and nobody’s got it.Where are we at on the who would you train with question? I'm assuming Bruce Lee’s still winning. No new votes. Guys, you got to get in there. Vote it up! What else you got? Tommy says Yang Sheng Fu. I don’t know that name but based on what Tommy trains and the name, I'm going to guess, it's some kind of Kung Fu practitioners.Stacy writes in, the USBA, US Breaking Association, and [00:32:14] Northeast Open Tournament Albany, shout out to Master Adam Grogin, Episode 5, do an amazing job with neurodiverse people in forms, sparring, breaking. It truly is inspiring. Oh, cool! Eric, you’ve missed a ton. I can’t catch you up. You got to be here on time.Oh! I don’t know what we’re going to do with this but I found this. I don’t know how long I've had this. This book is old and I don’t know if we’ll do it today but at some point, what's the date on this? It's ’96. At some point, we’ll raffle this off. We’ll use it as a giveaway because I don’t really read it again.I’ll say it again because we’re at the halfway point. Get these gloves for $29.99 at whistlekick.com with the code LIVE1 and if that’s not what you want, LIVE2, gets you 25% off, again, just for the show, so you got about 30 minutes. Buy yourself a hoodie or a mug or uniform. Oh, we just got a bunch more of the Olympic Taekwondo hands and feet in too so those are there. You can use those. There was something else I wanted to do…oh, don’t forget, leave reviews. We’re throwing out gift cards.I did miss that. Stacy says Lin-Manuel Miranda passed her way. That would have been fun. Yeah, the northeast open happens as the same time as another event and this is, so this is one of the challenges I get invited to a lot of things and even if, I conceded having any social life, which I don’t have much of one, even if I conceded my own training, which I don’t do that much, taking care of my home, all those things. I still wouldn’t be able to do those things because there are weekends where there are 4 or 5 things so I do what I can and honestly, I started to pull back on going to a lot of events excluding the stuff that I do with team whistlekick because I want to be in there supporting them, coaching them but I've pulled back because starting to find ways to reach out like this. to engage with a bunch of people, having conversation, reaching out to all of you and I get to go sleep in my bed when I'm done which is awesome. My bed’s comfy. I like my bed. Hopefully, you enjoy your own bed as well. Hotel beds, very rarely. Shape up or match up, there we go. Words! Words are hard.I needed more topics. We got a couple others on here but I'm not, so like I've got Karate Combat here and for those of you that don’t know Karate Combat, Karate Combat, all the questions coming in. That’s what I want to see. Karate Combat is a full-contact sparring league that I think they’ve had 3 or 4 of them and if you're following martial journal, Rob and Scott have talked about Karate Combat over there for a month and it's a cool idea and I've watched some of the footage but I just, I haven't gotten into it. Is it cool? Yeah. Do I want to watch it? Yes. Do I want to watch it enough that I'm not going to watch other things? Apparently not because I wouldn’t.Eric says would you be covering updates on the introduction of Karate in the 2020 Olympics in the show? At some point and yes, Eric said Bas Rutten is involved with Karate Combat. I'm waiting to see what's going on with 2020. It would be interesting to see what happens in the Olympics. I would love to say I'm expecting an overwhelming success. My gut tells me it's going to be a disaster and that’s not being negative. I'm not trying to be skeptical but there's just so much in-fighting around it.Lessie is waving hi from japan and so, I want to give a shout out to Lessie. For those of you who don’t know, she is also behind the scenes on martial arts radio helping to book guests and bringing her in to help with that was one of the greatest things that has ever happened so thank you, Lessie. She’s been getting great guests, more diverse guests and if somebody writes in that I don’t want to interview, I just blame her. That really hasn’t happened…maybe but no, she’s been a tremendous help and it allows me to focus on other things so, yeah. We may not run the line.I don’t know how much stuff we need for an hour-long show. I don’t do hour-long shows. I ask people questions for an hour and I do 15 minutes in the morning. If you're not watching First Cup, you're missing out on me and a bathrobe drinking a cup of coffee. Completely improvising everything. It's like this but on my couch and with less structure. As unstructured as this is, it's a less structure. Hard to believe, I know. I probably should’ve plugged my phone in. Hold on, I'm going to check and see how the battery’s doing. Oh, we’re good. 62%, plenty.Eric says Karate Combat seems too little, too late to the world of combat martial arts. Almost like it should’ve been what kickboxing was in the ‘90s. I can see that point. I don’t think there's anything that makes it truly compelling. They’ve done a good job of trying to position fighters with having personalities, they’ve tried to make it country versus country and that’s been helpful but it just, it doesn’t seem to be the magic sauce.Andrew says, how many requests do you get to come to events? I probably get 2 or 3 per month on top of this stuff that’s already happening so if you think about the martial arts circuits that are around, that I'm involved in, that team whistlekick is involved in across the course of the year, we’ve got probably 30 to 35 tournaments that we could be attending just from those circuits and then you’ve got camps. People invite me to teach. People invite me to their school so I just can't do it all. Frank says, lose an hour in the morning and you will spend all day looking for it, spend part of the hour watching First Cup. I want to give Frank a shout out. Frank makes sure I always have great questions to answer on First Cup because First Cup’s questions a bit. If you go back to before there were good questions, really before there were any questions, there would be times where I would sit there with my cup of coffee and go uhhhhh because I wasn’t awake yet and I didn’t have anything to say. I can ramble. Most of you know, I can ramble. I can talk all day about nothing, might not be interesting but at least I can do it but Frank makes me make sure I have stuff to say.Eric says also, Karate Combat can’t begin to compete with the eyeballs focused on the UFC. No, it can't but it also doesn’t have to. It has to deliver something different, something strongly different and I don’t pretend to know what that is. I have some ideas. There are plans that I hope to, one day, bring to fruition around revolutionizing traditional martial arts competition. I'm not going to talk about them because we’re not ready and to be perfectly honest, everything going on with whistlekick is about building brand reputation and cash flow so we can get to that stage because when you think about the boxes that I'm trying to check, bring more people into martial arts and make martial arts more respected globally, competition will do that the way that I'm envisioning this. Hosting a good competition is expensive.Barry says how about a WMAC Masters reboot? Who would be in it? When you think about the characters from that show, almost across the board, everybody that was part of that show is still more popular than what you would look at as today’s current crop of martial artists, martial arts actors that would step in and be on that show and where did we come to learn of those people in that show? We also learned about through competition. It's an interesting show if you haven't checked out WMAC Masters, you should. I don’t know that I've seen the whole thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen all of it and I've definitely seen some of it.I don’t know if you guys can hear that but it's raining and out here in the warehouse, it's a metal roof so hopefully, that doesn’t become too obnoxious. We’ve got a bad storm passing through and for all I know, thunder and lightning, I might lose you and if I lose you, I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do.Andrew says it was so bad, it was good and I will agree with that. If you could train with anyone, Bruce Lee has the win and it's no surprise. When I ask people that question on the show, who would they tend to say? Bruce Lee. In fact, it is rare to get through an episode, if you really think about it, without some mention of Bruce Lee and I find that fascinating. Here we are, 40+ years after his passing and he is still the most influential, recognizable figure in the martial arts anywhere and I think that’s pretty powerful.Remember Final Fu with Ernie Reyes, Jr.? No! Another show so bad it was good. Eric says WMAC Masters is on YouTube in entirety. There you go. So if you're looking for something to watch and you’ve watched every episode of First Cup and you’d watch Who’d Win? Episode 2, it's been sent out for editing and you’ve dug through all the episodes of martial arts radio, then you can go see WMAC Masters.Have we had any more reviews? I’ll check that out again. I don’t need to check that right now. What else? I think I had other stuff hanging in the hopper. No. We got through it all. I need more questions, I need more topics. Somebody help me out! Ask me a question. Martial arts reality show on MTV back in 2005. Wow, how did I not know about this? Do you think there's any benefit to training in regular clothes? Yes! Why? Because if you get in a fight, you're probably not wearing your uniform. You're probably wearing regular clothes. I love the tradition of training in a [00:45:28], in a gi or whatever you call it but I also think very highly of training in regular clothes. I would show up one day to CrossFit in jeans. I want to see what I could and couldn’t do. I tend to wear jeans with a little bit of stretch. I didn’t have any issues. If you’ve never trained with sneakers, you're always barefoot? You should train with shoes. You always train with shoes? You should train barefoot. Because you never know when something’s going to happen. True story, I almost got into a fight with an older gentleman in a locker room because he was being incredibly creepy while I was in the shower. It could’ve gone sideways. I could’ve had the, yeah, barefoot, right? Something to think about. No traction, tile floor. Actually, I wasn’t barefoot. I was wearing very cheap shower shoes but I don’t think they were going to provide much traction and I definitely wasn’t kicking anybody wearing those things. No point but the point is diversity in training and I think I did an episode on this.Diversity in training, whistlekick. No, not that one. Episode 261, diversity versus mastery is coming up. Let’s see. Whistlekick training environment, there we go. Episode 113. See, I knew there was an episode on this. talking about training inside versus outside, cold versus hot, who should you call if you hurt your foot? Frank, this is a joke. I don’t know. I would say the doctor but I probably wouldn’t call anyone.Alright, 10 minutes left. We’re going to start winding this thing down because I want to give stuff away. A toe truck. Frank, we’re going to find a way to incorporate your humor into something more regularly because you have a gift, my friend, you have a gift.Let’s look at reviews. So, what's the last review over on Google? Nothing?! Come on, you guys! No Google reviews. How about Facebook reviews? Don’t make me sad. Nothing! How about iTunes reviews? There were a 132 reviews and you guys stopped guessing. Yeah, prizes! Someone did guess Victor Moore. Nope. Still at 132. Not one review! That’s fine. Saves me money. Alright. Top episode of all time! Not going to be what you think but you ready? Sifu Tim Smith. TW Smith, host of Kung Fu Podcast. Now, the only thing I could think of is that he’s got it linked from somewhere and he’s got a great show. If you haven't checked out his show, you really should. He mixes it up. Guests, topics, just like we do and I really like his show.Carla says if you have to start over what martial art would you start with first? Let me make the disclaimer that I'm a firm believer that you choose the martial art based on the instructor and the opportunity, not the art itself but let’s say all those things were equal. Let’s say I've lived in a city and had time and there were wonderful instructors of everything I could imagine. If I was going to start over. I don’t know. That’s a great question. I don’t know. Here’s why. Here’s why I'm saying this.I found that whatever the first martial arts someone trains in substantially that that becomes their perspective on martial arts in general. Most people know I started with Karate and when I look at Taekwondo, I tend to see it as variations of Karate. I know Taekwondo people who have trained in other things and they tend to see things as Taekwondo that isn’t necessarily good or bad but knowing that, I don’t know if I would want to do things differently. I am fortunate in that the Karate background I had was very diverse and very open-minded and so, I think that, that breadth of experience was really important. Not all Karate schools are like that so I don’t know that I can answer that. It's a great question, Carla.So, let’s start to wrap up. Yes, new mortal combat movie is confirmed. Reboot. I don’t know if Chris Casamasa will be reprising his role as Scorpion but hopefully. If you listened to the Ludi Lin episode, you’d know that he is playing Lukang. Wonderful choice on his part of the casting. So, let’s start to wind down here. We’re going to do this show every first Tuesday so what's the next one? Next one is, where is it? I don’t know. I can't pull it up right now. First Tuesday of the month. 8 PM, Eastern but I want to make sure that this show grows and adapts and becomes more than what everyone wants but if you look at everything we that we do at whistlekick, that’s been a hallmark of what we do. First Cup has morphed, martial arts radio has morphed, a lot of feedback on the first episode of who’d win and so, episode 2 is going to be better and different. I want this to be the same thing. Gabe says November 5th. Thanks Gabe!Oh, there's an iTunes review. Thank you! I want your feedback. Leave your feedback in the discussion. Gabe will take it. Run with it. We’ll figure it out. We’ll continue to make it better and we’ll be back with more great stuff.Alright, let’s do this review thing. So, we need a random number generator because I want to make this fair. Random number generator for Facebook reviews, for Google reviews, alright. This one is for Suzanna [00:53:51] Suzanna says quality product, I wouldn’t spar with anything else. Suzanna, if you're watching, reach out! I will send you a, what did I say? A $20 gift card. Reviews on Facebook, alright. So, Stacy’s the first one. Only one to leave one today so Stacy, shoot me a message and let’s see, out of the rest of them, who’s in there? Man, I got to scroll. I'm scrolling. I'm scrolling. Alright, 1, 2, 3…and the next one is Phil Rivera. Phil, if you're watching, shoot me a message. $20 gift card and iTunes, bam! How am I going to do this? There's a lot of people. Lots of reviews in iTunes. Bunch of you killed it for me over there at some point. I appreciate that. Most recent. Alright, I don’t see any new ones there. Sometimes, it can take some time. Alright, random number, final one here.Will the introduction of Karate diminish or overshadow Taekwondo in 2020? Bottomline, I think, I think there is already too much to the layman in terms of combat sports in the Olympics. You’ve got fencing, you got judo, you got wrestling, you got boxing, you got Taekwondo and now, you got Karate. There's a push to get mixed martial arts in there, there are a lot of pushes. I think given the new Taekwondo uniforms which are utterly ridiculous, I think we’re going to see Taekwondo drop unless Karate botches it so bad that Taekwondo is not pulled out.Alright, so iTunes reviews…and this one says I study Bagwa and although there isn’t too much about the Chinese art, there's a review from 3 years ago, I still enjoy this podcast very much. I do have one critique though, Jeremy, try not to leave too much dead air between questions and answers. Keep up the good work! Well, that’s gotten a lot better. So, this is from [00:57:11] I don’t know who you are but email me and show me your apple login and I’ll get you a $20 gift card as well so throw in a bunch of gift cards.Alright, last couple things before we shut down, hey! 9 o’clock. You can get this mug for just 30 bucks. You can get these gloves. They're normally 45 bucks. Acting like the next 5 minutes code LIVE1, get them for 30 bucks. If you want something else, get them at 25% off with LIVE2. That will go for another, I had to set it to an hour block so I think you got like another 30 minutes on it so check that out. It's definitely, honestly, I'm not 100% sure when it expires. Definitely expires by the end of the evening, eastern. Eric says, always so eloquent. Thank you. I don’t know that I agree with that statement but I do my best so final thoughts: I want your feedback. I want your help. Let’s make this show something special. The mug does have a top. I think you can swap, so it doesn’t have the slide top which some people have asked me about. I believe you can swap out a Yeti one and I'm going to look into, we might be able to get some generic ones that will fit as well. I just want your help to turn this into something. This is a show that’s been in the back of my head for a long time and I appreciate you coming by. Everybody’s always so supportive. It means a lot to me. This community has been phenomenal so thank you. I'm going to press end now and I’ll see you around and I’ll definitely see you in a month. Take care. Peace!