Episode 469 – Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 4)
In this episode, Jeremy brings us the fourth Episode of the Martial Arts Radio Live.
Martial Arts Radio LIVE (Episode 4) - Episode 469
Today's episode is the fourth installment for the Martial Arts Radio Live. Jeremy answers questions and reads stories from the listeners as well as giving out cool trivia. Listen to find out a lot of surprises and more!
Show Notes
You can read the show notes below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Welcome everybody! This is whistlekick martial arts radio live. Coming to you the first Tuesday every month where you get the opportunity to interact with me, Jeremy, host of the show, whistlekick dude, #whistlepres so thanks for coming by. If you're watching this, you probably also see the chat. Please ask questions, contribute, the reason we give this show is so that I can interact with you and it's the one time a month that we do that. Probably this one episode is important and as great as that is, there's something fun about doing stuff for that. We got a lot of material to go through here. We got lots of great stuff. As always, shoutout to Gabe for putting this together, for helping so much in the back end. He’s great and I appreciate him tremendously.First thing we got to do because this just popped up for me in like an hour ago, I can't exactly ignore it. Some stuff going down right now. Stuff going around and I just want to send my prayers out to all the people involved. I believe strongly in not involving politics in business so I would not be talking about it anymore than that but I do want to acknowledge it.We got some people in the chat, we got it going on so lets start in on this. lets get into a recap of live episode 3 which was from December something. I don’t remember. Doesn’t really matter. Couple things, if you missed it, this is the 2nd episode from this set from in front of the wood stove which is not on today because it's not nearly as cold as it was and did people care that we were here? Generally speaking, it was well-received but I didn’t get the impression from the votes that it was a big deal. Stacy even said I’ll watch it wherever it is but, that said, it was nicer. Other notable things for episode 3: martial arts is not about quantity, it's about quality. I probably said all these things. A diverse martial artist is a better martial artist. Not just with what you know and what you do. I definitely said that. I'm not the person to teach you how to win a fight, I'm the person to teach you how to not get into a fight. That’s funny! I actually got an idea for a book based entirely on that and if you don’t know, I don’t have it handy, Martial Artist’s Handbook. It is starting to ramp up. We’re starting to get some moementum behind it so I'm really excited about that. Shoutout to the people who have started leaving reviews. I just put a pile of autographed books in the mail today. If you want to order one, whistlekick.com, what is it, $22.99 soemthing like that. Covers all of the shipping, we got the shipping here, we got to ship it to you, we got to pay for the book and I would find that I'm enjoying this whole book thing. It's kind of fun. I might say there were a couple more sales today. I don’t know. I never really sold a book, really. I never sold a book before. I don’t know how it's worth.On the topic of leadership in martial arts schools: Greg, in our dojo, students needs to learn how to instruct and inspire in order to lead classes. Stacy, learning to teach and inspire were core of my success in Zumba, Chair Fitness instructor. I don’t think there's any more important role for a leader than to inspire. You can be skilled, you can be competent, you can be articulate, you can be organized, you can be methodical but if you don’t inspire others, all of that is irrelevant. Now, of course, inspiring people without those other skills can lead to problems but if you don’t have some level of inspiration, if people are willing to trust you with their time; in the case of martial arts, with their body, you really can't help them.If the martial arts were developed today, what would the weapons look like? A single response there, Lauren said, selfie sticks. I don’t see anybody with selfie sticks anymore and I'm probably good with that. A lot of people really stretching their arms trying to take pictures. I clearly don’t have long arms so I'm not doing any kind of massive group shots but hey, if you want to use a selfie stick, do it. Somebody’s trying to mug you and you have a selfie stick, break it over their head.Material coming out of Facebook: what is your most memorable testing experience? Mindy, I have more than one. Two are the anticipation of waiting for my black belt sons and the other is the feeling when I got my brown belt recently. Oh, ok. I know Mindy. She has 2 children. 2 of them, 2 separate ones, the anticipation of waiting her black belt sons from the others and when she received her brown belt recently. She is not yet a black belt. She will get there soon. Shoutout to the entire family. Padme, wasn’t mine but my husband’s. I'm the sensei/owner. My husband decided upon himself that his test for yellow belt needed to be epic. There's a little bit of foreshadowing there. He took off on a nearly 20-mile bike ride before his test carrying boards to break so at the end of his black belt test, years later, which included the same bike ride was a Zumba class and then his testing, I gave him 2 rubik’s cube to complete. One was the basic regular colors but the other one was shades of grey and black. He was so wiped out that he could not separate what colors were which. That’s horrible! The idea of a rubik’s cube at the end of a test?Now, I can appreciate the idea of having to think in the midst of physical pain, discomfort, stress. In fact, there is someone, shoutout to the sky, that I used to train with. Not martial arts but generalized fitness things who loved making us think in the middle of workouts and you want to talk about adding in drills that encourage students to think logically and intelligently and calm. Quiz them. Quiz them on factual things. Stacy is giving a shoutout to Master Brogan and his selfie stick, he does. If you attend any of the 5 winning events in the Capitol Area in New York, you’ve likely seen Master Brogan. He’s the one running around with a selfie stick, getting shots of everyone. He’s a great guy. Shoutout to him and his little team there. Gabe says I’d never pass a test if I had this all in Rubik’s cube. I’ve never completed one. I had a friend who I watched pulled the stickers off and put it back on the right spots once but that was it. That was as close as I got to a complete Rubik’s cube.Here’s a poll: 3 old and equally wise masters lived on top of a mountain and offered advice to anyone that makes a climb but you can only talk to one. Who do you choose? The one who started with nothing, the one who never had any students, the one who is naturally gifted. The overwhelming answer was the one who started with nothing and we had a noble comment by [00:08:35] Jones, there's no need to choose any of them just to take advice if you know what to observe. Say nothing, ask nothing, just be present and I think I know where he’s going with that. Kind of with martial arts radio, I was quite fond of just observing and listening and sometimes asking questions. In fact, the very interview style that I bring to the show is not that foreign for me and I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot of information just by listening, let people talk. When people talk, you learn. Hello, Eric.Any favorite martial arts or martial arts school-related holiday traditions? Matt says I've made goofy holiday drills more for the kids. Doing kicks with the Santa hat on, trying not to knock it off or doing a spin kick trying to get it to spin off. I’d draw Santa with a bag on the mirror and give students stars. Do drills and trying to draw stars on the bag for all the good little ninjas. Nice, I like that. Chris says Taikyoku sho-hoho-dan. Taikyoku shodan is, in some schools that I've participated in, preceded pinan or Heian shodan for those of you who train in that. It's a very fundamental form/kata so when you ki rai, you shout ho-ho-ho so punch, punch, ho-ho-ho. I like that! That’s fun. Good times! Eric saying go Vikings! Spent my mronign working on all the color belt forms before work and my hamstrings hate me. Good job working on that stuff.We got a bunch of people in the chat. Glad to see some of you here. I really do enjoy doing the show. It forces me to do things differently because I need to get better doing video and we got First Cup. If you never watched First Cup, 6:30 Eastern on YouTube and it forces me to make sure I'm talking constantly. It forces me to be present and work the camera and to look at a certain space and I'm not great at that. I've never been good at that. I feel like I'm getting better. When we do the audio episodes, if you were to watch me record standard episode martial arts radio with a guest, I'm stepping back from the microphone, I'm fidgeting, I have a hard time spending 60 to 90 minutes with someone and looking them in the eye and doing all of that and if you watch me, you can see that that comes through. I'm not constantly staring at that camera right there. I'm looking around, I have a hard time doing that. Now, if you sat down with me, if you know me personally, you know I'm pretty good at making eye contact. I can show you that I'm listening and I'm respecting the things that you're saying. When you're not here to give me that feedback back, oh, it's tough. It's really tough.Got a question from John, how did the Sifu Nathan go? We don’t typically tlak about interviews prior to being released but Sifu Nate’s episode went well. I recorded with him at 4 PM today so just a few hours ago. John saying he’s a hidden gem in Connecticut, trained with a lot of people, great guy, doesn’t talk about himself much, should be interesting. Well, I would like to say he did a wonderful job. He talked about himself and he pulled some fantastic stories and I was disappointed to learn that we have been at the same place at the same time and just didn’t meet each other so now that we’ve had this conversation, that a goal that we established that next time we’re in the same place, I've got an idea where that’s happening, we’ll connect and maybe grab a selfie.This is a great conversation topic and I'm really glad Gabe wrote this in. Some of the polls didn’t get a lot of responses but I'm going to rant a little bit on this one. You're out in public and you hear and see a fight starting to break out, do you get closer, try to break it up or settle the dispute? Get out of the area as quickly as possible, watch from a distance maybe call a police? Or do nothing? There were a few votes for get closer, try to break it up or settle the dispute. There were no votes for anything else. Alright, so there was an episode, I don’t remember the number, somebody will probably drop it in the chat, we re-broadcast, we pushed an episode from Sensei Ando’s fight for a happy life where he and his wife were restraining, I think, someone in a parking garage and Ando was kind enough to come on the show, record a little bit of commentary, we had a little bit of discussion about it because the piece that I thought was really important for everyone to realize was that there were quite a few people, if memory serves, a dozen people, watching from afar. No one did anything to help. Now, I would like to think that those of us who have been training for a while are more likely to help others but I have watched plenty of martial artists who think they have skill, fall apart in even mildly stressful situations. Why do we bring this up? Same reason why we pushed that same episode from Ando out when we did. If you get into a situation and you think other people are going to come to your aid simply because it is clearly the right thing to do, you are sadly mistaken. If you're not willing to engage, whatever the situation is on your own? You should not be engaging. Plain and simple. What episode was that? Someone can drop it in for me. Got a lot of love for Sensei Ando. He’s been a really supportive person. He’s got a phenomenal YouTube channel. If you aren’t subscribed, you should, check it out, he does some great videos.I'm trying to think if there's been a situation where I've been in something like this and once I graduated high school, I don’t think there's been anything. I am constantly on the watch for situations that could go awry. Friends know, unless you want to take responsibility in watching the door, you better give me the seat that watches the door in the restaurant. I am known to carry knives or pepper spray or various things depending on circumstances, depending where I'm going, depending on what the little radar or my head is telling me because I will always choose to be overprepared versus underprepared. I know we can never be perfectly prepared and I am fully prepared that whatever circumstance I get into, I'm going to be in on my own. I am not going to jump into a fight expecting that hey, I'm going to lead the charge and others are going to help me. What's the first thing we started talking about? We talked about inspiring others. If I don’t have a relationship with other people, how am I going to inspire them to join me?I feel like we have 2 camps in the martial arts. We’ve got traditionalists who think they understand violence and self-defense and then we have others who are so mad at the first group for not understanding it that they go over the top in shoving it in everyone’s face to prove that they don’t really understand it and what happens when you shove something at someone’s face? They cover up, they back up. They're not receiving that information so I think there's a middle ground when trying to express that and show people that hey, yes, traditional martial arts techniques can be applicable if you understand the psychology and you reframe training et cetera to present it appropriately to the right demographics, the right circumstances and guess what? There's got a group to consider it. Lets move on.As we head into the new year, what is some of your favorite memories from your time training in 2019? Andrew says favorite training was whistlekick’s free training day! Thank you, Andrew. Lessie says getting my shodan, training at the Kodokan Judo School in Tokyo, whistlekick’s free training day which everyone really should come to next year. In fact, if you're not RSVP’d to the event, which has no dates yet so you can't be busy, there's a Facebook event so search 2020 Free Training Day, you'll find it. Sword Expi with Adrian Paul who was on the show, wonderful guest. Some great martial arts experiences this year. I completely agree and both Lessie and Andrew were new additions to the team in 2019 and have been wonderful, wonderful assets in helping growth within us, as well as Gabe. Yeah, we really added quite a few people. Frank, Stacy, we’ve got quite the awesome team. Eric is saying 2-minute martial arts has been great. Yeah, Justine. I forget about Justine because he's so self-sufficient. Justine and I are working on kind of a continuation of 2-minute martial arts, it's an at-home strength training program for martial artists that reuire zero equipment and we’ve worked out a framework and should have a draft done by the end of the month. Stay tuned!Jenny says earning my 2nd dan in taekwondo, now my 2 older sons and I all took home grand champion in our association’s annual tournament this year. That’s a lot of vowels. I apologize for all the yawning. I'm not really not that tired. I'm just not used to talking this much this late in the day. I have to caffeine up or something though I don’t think that will be a good idea. I don’t think anyone wants to see me at 8:30 at night on a bunch of caffeine. Get weird, could get really weird.One of Gabe’s favorite memories took place a month before his shodan test. I broke my hand at a tournament during the last fight of my division, which I won. I'm scheduled to fight for grand champion but the other guy was also hurt so he decided to bow out but since it was just the 2 of us and we were all good friends, the center judge wouldn’t let us. He made us play rock, paper, scissors for it and I won! After the tournament, I wore a brace on that hand and when people would ask how I broke my hand, I would just say I kicked someone in the head which is true and the looks I got were awesome. PS. I passed my shodan test with a broken hand. Congratualtions!Eric is suggesting caveman coffee to handle my yawning. Trying to think…free training day was definitely top of my lsit and that’s because the event requires relatively little work on my part. I get to see all my friends in a room, everybody training. I do some training. I'm running the event so I'm not comfortable doing a lot of the training sessions because many of them, interestingly enough, end up partner-based which is great because people get to work with each other and make friends and that’s awesome but it's kind of a jerk move for me to get into a group and partner up with someone and say oh, hey, I got to go and do that so it's only really the sessions where there aren’t partners that I step into and I’ll do a little bit and I love that event. It's great!Other memories, of course, travelling to Florida for the 3rd year in a row to train with Bill Wallace, with the Superfoot Crew, Terry Dow’s symposium which is in March, always loved that. Had a lot of fun last year in Atlantic city at Alan Goldberg’s event and in large part because I got to hang out with my friend Paul. Paul Millholen who has been on the show a number of times. We’re not going this year. We both have other things going on but there are people I will miss seeing that I generally see in that event. It's a bummer but can't do everything. One of the things that has been a lot of fun but also frustrating about whistlekick is that I am pulled in so many directions. Everybody wants me to come and hangout at their thing and fortunately, I'm not doing a booth setup anymore because that was even worse. Who was I talking to? I was talking to somebody today that across 2016, 2017, I was at an event every other weekend.Some weekends I was at multiple events and it's became, it's too much. It was not a profitable thing for whistlekick, it's not good for my health and my social life and it was fine temporarily. It did a lot of good spreading the word and sharing what we do but it was time to move on to different things like this kind of show.What else? What other highlights? You can drink something gross to keep you awake like kombucha. I actually like kombucha. I don’t know why you would want me to drink something gross. That’s mean.What are some of the other highlights? Just training. I got a lot of memories of training. Going to Maine for training, just train with everybody. It's a good time. Met a lot of wonderful people and met a lot of great people in my life that I've met because of martial arts whether that’s pre or post-starting whistlekick. I firmly believe that martial artists are, overall, better than non-martial artists in terms of the quality of their character and why would I not want to hang out with martial artists?Anyone who's participated in martial arts for any amount of time, those outside the martial arts don’t always understand what the arts are all about. That’s true. A few students and I were training at a park when we heard a lady refer to our staffs as ninja sticks. It's been an awesome inside joke ever since.What are some comments or funny examples of misunderstandings from a non-practitioner? I was asked if I would put that as a martial artist in my passport application by someone who was sure they had read that you couldn’t travel internationally without letting the authorities know you have been training in the martial arts. I’ll do the 2nd one here and respond because they're both kind of similar. Do we have to register our hands? I've been asked several times. Somebody was on the show, in the last few months, I don’t remember who it was, I wish I remember who it was and they pointed out that there was a magazine back in the day, 80s, 70s, maybe earlier where you sent in a few dollars and you could register your hands as deadly weapons and the joke of that got out of hand, pun not intended, and people started to believe that it was true. People are silly and people will believe just about anything, won’t they?Is this live? You can't tell. What's going on with the screen? There we go. I think we’re good to go. Because of the delay, it's really hard for me to tell whether what I'm watching is now or then because it really doesn’t change. The background doesn’t change. I'm not moving around that much and I don’t have the audio on because that will get really messed up.Other topics, and if you got something to ask, you got something you want to contribute, by all means, jump in. It's the whole point of the show. I want your contribution.Is it important to use the original language of your art if your style name has American in it like using Japanese in American karate? Does using the original language matter at all especially when we’re trying to understand the interpretation of form and movements? We’ve had some very conflicting opinions on this come up on the show and I think we even had this come up in the martial arts debates group and I'm guessing that’s where Gabe pulled it.I'm a firm believer that the more you do to understand your art, the better off you are whether that is travelling to the land of origin, traiing with people from that people, training with a diversity of people who are well-versed in that art, understanding the language, understanding cultural customs and here’s why: hows it going to hurt? If you wanted to understand for the sake of traiditon, lets pick an easy one, what Shotokan/karate is about? You’ve got a lot of books of Funakoshi, certainly has a lot of techniques, you have a lot of people you can train with. You can travel, you can understand what it was like to be Funakoshi as best you can and is that going to make you better at sparring or kata? No. Is it going to help you understand the nuance of the man who have founded the style? Maybe.It's not for everyone. Learning another language is not for everyone regardless of the reason but lets face it, it's kind of cool to be able to travel to another country and because the person teaching karate is from Japan or teaching the class in Japanese and you know enough Japanese even though you're in India to train in the class. I've learned a bit of Japanese and Korean through my training. I've not trained in a class where the entire class was conducted in that non-english language but I have friends who have travelled and who had done that. I think even Lessie even referenced that when she was in Japan and she went to the Kodokan. Everything was in Japanese. She was able to follow along, not great, she didn’t follow everything they were training but she was able to follow along based on her knowledge of judo and her knowledge of Japanese. That’s pretty cool and it's something that I'm not saying is high on my list but if I was presented with a good opportunity to learn Japanese at a time, absolutely! I’ll jump in. Or Korean or Chinese or, or, or.Welcome back everybody who is jumping in!I will say that people saying you have to learn the language are wrong. People who are saying there's no point in learning the language are wrong. Those are 2 extremes. Extremes are rarely true. In fact, if you were to go back and dig up all my philosophy writing from college, majority of it was around the objectivity of truth and how it was always in the center of any points f extremity.If you could be in a martial arts movie with anyone, who would it be? What kind of role would you play? I can answer this in a lot of different ways but I would love to do a movie with all of my friends and, in fact, as you might guess, yes, I have the rudimentary ideas of how that might go down. Not a whole plan. I have a little bit of a plan. I would love to do a whistlekick movie and grab a bunch of people and figure something out. it would probably be terrible, it would probably have some fun fight scenes but it would be a great experience and I would love doing that but if we look at something a littlee more professional, I would love to try my hand in some stunt work. I would love to see what I can do in front of a camera playing a character. I have no idea how bad I would be. Would I be kind of bad or would I be really bad? Why would I assume I wouldn’t be good? Because I don’t have any experience with it and I assume, if I don’t have experience with something, it's probably not some hidden talent that needs to pop out that I'm suppressing all these years but who would it be? Who would be in that movie with me? Top on the list would be Jackie Chan because I grew up watching Jackie Chan movies and I think he’s hysterical and I love his choreography and I love his charisma on screen and I think that will be a lot of fun. I think if it was a different kind of movie, because certainly Jackie Chan does specific types of movies, if it was a different kind of movie…I’d love to be in a movie with Bill Wallace.I've had the chance to get to know him. He’s a wonderful man. I've really enjoyed my time with him. He’s certainly made me a better martial artist and I just think that it will be a lot of fun to say I was in a movie with Bill Wallace. A lot of people say Superfoot’s kicked me in the head. I've been to a Superfoot seminar and there are a lot of us who have been able to say I've earned rank under Bill Wallace. There are very, very few pooeple who have been able to say they have been in a movie with him so that would be fun.Who else? Michael J. White. Utmost respect for him. He is in the shortlist of people who I would really, really love to be on this show. Keep working on it! Keep ending up in the same room with him, keep saying he’s going to do it, just can't get over the goal line. It will happen! MJW, it’s going to happen! Who else? Jet Li, he’s up there in my mind. I think, I'm struggling a little bit with the who because I look at it the same way that I look at training. I want to train with everybody. Everyone has something to teach and I'm looking at this idea of acting, there's a part of me as a fan of movies but moreso as, it's a realm that I've not been in so I've tons to learn so the more people I would work with, the more I would learn. We’ve got a bunch of people on the show, just last week, Samantha Win. Go make a movie with her. I'm sure she’d teach me a ton of stuff. Who else have we had? Daniel Wu. I’d love to do a movie with him. Just wonderful people and I have found that the vast majority of actros and actresses that we’ve spoken with have said yes to coming on the show and have been great people. Again, there's something about being a martial artist.Now, what kind of role would I want to play? I would want to play something that add in a little bit of comedy to the action. If I came into a fight scene, I’d probably lose because I wouldn’t be any big name on the marquee but I would want to lose in some kind of humorous way so I could throw a little bit of entertainment and a little bit of laughter as I'm getting my head crushed in or whatever.Oh wow, we’ve got things going on here. I missed them. Last time we talked about what weapons would look like if the martial arts were developed today but what do you think the uniform would look like? Oh! I like that. Great question! If martial arts uniforms were developed today, I suspect, they would be pretty similar to military uniforms. Yeah, I think it’d be very much like that. T-shirt, maybe something with a collar, like a polo shirt but more likely, long sleeves, pants, elastic waistband, button and we probably wouldn’t do belts. We would probably designate rank with, again, something military-like and it could be kind of like what TangSooDo does, the colored trim on the jackets. There's a lot of different things we could do and it would be fun to see. I think what I like about traditional martial arts uniforms is that they are so different to conventional clothing that you really can't tease each other.I grew up doing martial arts and going to school and being teased for the clothes that I have because we didn’t have money to spend on clothes. We had enough but it's not like I was rocking the latest outfits and brand names and even the “least cool” brand of martial art uniform, still looks pretty darn close to the nicest one. Moves as well, material may not be so good, may not last as long but it's an equal playing field and I like that.What do you call having your grandma on speed dial? Instagram. I love it! Stacy has an incorrect but honorable mention vote for gramophone. What's the coolest/craziest/weirdest award you’ve seen at a tournament? I'm not answering that one. Why? Because I either have to lie or throw people under buses. I have seen ridiculous things at tournaments and I'm not even going to…here’s the problem. I've seen some of those ridiculous things happen recently enough over the last few years, certainly within whistlekick time, that I don’t know that I can even hint at things without people speculating and I'm just not going to do that. I don’t like to talk ill of people. I have my ideas of what's right, what's proper, what's appropriate but not everyone shares this and that’s ok. It doesn’t have to be what I say. We’ve all got different ideas and that’s great. There's a snoring cat right there.Most of the general population has a great fear of public speaking. Yes, in fact, isn’t that often quoted as the greatest fear? Do martial artists share the same fear when it comes to teaching a class or giving instruction? Yes. It certainly becomes easier to speak to a group that you know so, generally, by the time you are asked to run part of class or take over a class or whatever, you know the people you are teaching for the most part so that’s not as nearly scary but I've known plenty of people, myself included, who the first few dozens of times, they were put in front of a room to teach martial arts who did not do well. You get better, you get a lot better and it's from that experience that I was able to step into martial arts radio and do a lot of these things I do in time. If you look at the way someone talks, someone who seems really confident in front of a camera, in front of a microphone, they're doing certain things to fill that time as their mind is catching up to what they're saying. You notice that I'm shifting the cadence of my words sometimes, I'm talking a little bit slower because I'm not quite sure what I'm going to say. There are times in martial arts radio that I start asking the question to the guest or responding to a question that they ask me and I don’t know what I'm going to say so I start very generally and my mind’s rolling and I eventually pick up on something. There are other times where I know exactly what I want to say so the cadence to my words is a little bit faster and you can tell that I'm more confident when I'm saying because there are less spaces in between my words. What do other people do when they're trying to fill that time? They’ll pause, or use a word like umm, hmm, uhh, like, but, uh, hmm, make noises. You go back to the early days of martial arts radio, I did a lot of that. I've gotten better. I've learned that it's better to slow down or to pause. Lightly, so has cropped back in. I've been working to push that one back out.It's scary talking to people. It's scary to be in front of one. It can be exhilarating. I've done it enough now that I don’t know if I care and a lot of that goes back to martial arts, not just teaching but competing. Competing on some decently large stages in front of bunches of people, in front of my high school. You get enough anxiety enough times, you just learn to roll with it. Doesn’t mean that it's not there, just means you can work through it.According to a few sources, the old boxer Joe Lewis, not Joe Lewis kickboxer, martial artist, was the one who started the joke of registering your hand as weapons. I did not know that. I would love for a source on that, Gabe, if you can find a source on that. Not because I disbelieve you but because it would be nice to finally, officially credit that.What drill/game or exercise should every martial arts school in the world have? Slow sparring. When I teach, when I travel, when I do seminars which, by the way, if your school wants me for a seminar, I'm cheap. Pretty much, at this point, as we’re rolling this part out, if you can cover expenses, I’ll be there.There's a magic in slowing things down. Doesn’t matter whether it's forms, doesn’t matter whether it's basics but the place where I've had the most success helping people is in combat situations. Sparring, self-defense, whatever and bringing it down to a speed where people can start to look at what's actually going on and their brain has the opportunity to move faster than their hands so they can really consider how they're moving.Going back to the beginning, not the beginning, but earlier in the episode, we talked about how people have these grand ideas about what's going to happen if they get into these self-defense situation and it actually happens and they are nowhere near where they wanted to be. Why? Because stress, et cetera, forces you to your lowest level of training. If you take your sparring and you're constantly sparring here, in a high level, you're going to do the moves you're most comfortable with. You're going to spar in a way that makes you feel most protected but if you slow it down so the fear, the risk is reduced, you can start to open up, you can start to try new things, you can start to take that wide range of techniques that you’ve been training for however long and start to incorporate those and better your own personal sparring style.If I had to pick a second one, I grew up calling it, because I grew up in a karate school, I grew up calling it Sensei says because it's Sensei Simon Says but what I like about that game is that it's super easy and you have people do anything and here’s a hint: instructors, if you really need to get through some basics and young students are being probelamtic, hey we’re going to play Simon Says and you just, maybe one out of 6 or 7 times, if you tell them to do something, you just twist a little bit, not say Simon says, they will pay much better attention really easy but what I like about that drill is that typically in martial arts classes especially when you're talking basics and really fundamental movement, people tune out and they just kind of collectively observe what everyone else is doing. If you're stepping down the floor and just punching bam, bam, bam, bam and no one person is leading it, it's just kind of this group thought, when you introduce a drill like that, now everyone needs to pay attention especially if there's penalties like penalty push ups or whatever, now there's a consequence. Now, there's going to be much more for observation of what's happening.The joys of live entertainment: they say not to work with animals or children, hello, Jeremy’s cat.Yeah, so Gabe has a link here to something saying that police were often on hand during press conferences to register boxers as if they're weapons. It was a publicity stunt that carried no legal weight. Interesting, good to know.Where are some good martial arts-related fundrasiers for schools other than kickathons? I think these are often overthought. Why does it have to be martial arts movements? Why does it have to be kicks? Why does it have to be…why? Why does it have to be that? I think, while there's some value there and I think there's some good publicity, some good press release stuff and it's great for kids, I think you can do more. What's to stop someone from saying you know what? I'm going to go compete at this tournament, I'm going to pay my way in but I want to do it for this cause. I'm going to raise money for such and such and I'm going to livestream it. Now, this is off the cuff, I didn’t read any of these ahead of time so is that a great response? No. But the idea of fundrasising having to be competitive, I was asked to sell candy bars back in school and didn’t, there are a lot of ways that you can support organizations that don’t involve kickathons.What about showing the community that martial artists are about more than just training? What about just going around, instead of raising the money and giving the money, what about donating the time? What about hey, find out from local organizations, nonproftis who’s in need, what do they need? Who needs their lawn mowed, who needs woods stakced, who needs leaves raked and just go help them. Maybe wear a school shirt while you do it.I think we look for these dramatic fundraisers because we’re focused on the wrong thing. We’re focused on the publicity part of it. Now, I'm not saying that it shouldn’t be there but I'm suggesting that if you focus on how do you help, not how do you help in a fancy way, the other stuff falls in line. The other stuff people see. Breakathons.Did you hear about the Keebler Elf got into a fight? Man, he’s one tough cookie.Has the pulication sale of the book, Martial Artist Handbook, gone as expected? I don’t think I really had expectations, to be honest. I had a feeling it will be well-received and that was because I shared it with a number of people for editing and it was well-received.It is too early to tell whether or not this is going to be something that sells a few copies a month or much more. It's very general in nature and it's been very educational and, in typical Jeremy fashion, I've got 7 other books ideas and it becomes a question of prioritizing them because the idea of writing a book and hanging it out there and it's selling and putting some money back into the whistlekick checking account, it's pretty exciting so if anybody has ideas for what the next book should be, I've got tons of ideas but if you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.You can always email me: jeremy@whistlekick.com. One thing I neglected to mention, we’ve got the Patreon. If you want to support the work that we’re doing here for as little as $2 a month, if you contribute $5 or more a month, you get extra content. In fact, today, I put up a blog post outlining, this is for anybody who’s on Patreon, follow the episodes we have in the can ready to go, all the episodes we have scheduled to record, the first time I’ve ever released that information so that felt kind of fun. There's some talk about doing a little bit of filming for the upcoming, or for the still kind of rolling J-Money life and times of Grandmaster [00:52:01] fiction video series, I don’t even know what to call it, fake reality show. That’s been fun but it's been really challenging. It's been hard work because I want to do it differently than the other thigns that we’ve done and it's meant to be yours and I'm hyperaware of what Master Ken is doing so I'm trying to do it very differently, got up some pages.Stacy says she’s on her 2nd copy of the book. Santa stole her 1st one. Well, I wasn’t aware Santa stole it but thank you, thank you for your support. Thank you for everyone’s support for the book, for watching, for listening, for all of it. It really means the world to me and I'm just happy I get to do what I do. I said it before, I’ll say it again. If it wasn’t for people paying attention, I would just be a crazy guy talking and I’d just be a crazy guy talking and an internet personality or whatever I am, people value it and if you're watching it, you value it in some way so thank you and I value you.If you want to check out everything that we’ve got going on, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com and whistlekick.com for the full complement of all the stuff that we’re doing and if you want to make a purchase in the store, you can save 15% with the code PODCAST15. That’s one of the ways you can help us out and get some stuff for it. We got an entirely new apparel planned for 2020 which I think I have time on Thursday carved out that I'm going to start working on that and there will be a blog post and newsletter announcing what we’re doing differently. It's about looking forward to that. If you want to follow us on social media, we’re @whistlekick everywhrer you can think of. I already told you my email address, Patreon.com/whistlekick so yeah. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching! I appreciate everything and Stacy says you're still a crazy guy talkling but now you have an audience and I can't think of a better way to close out the show so, until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!