Episode 502 - Mr. Burton Richardson
Mr. Burton Richardson is a martial arts practitioner and instructor of self-defense at the Jeet Kune Do Unlimited
There is a certain confidence that you might have had and all of a sudden you're questioning; this doesn't feel like it did in the dojo, what's going on here? There's this psychological process that we go through when we're suddenly confronted with an assault, sudden violence, and threats, usually our first thought is is this really happening?
Episode 502 - Mr. Burton Richardson
When you say you will do martial arts for a year before college, others won't last and others will do it for life. Mr. Burton Richardson did the latter. Mr. Richardson, whose favorite TV character is Kato, trained in martial arts as opposed to studying his pre-med course. He both trained with Guro Dan Inosanto and trains others himself as well. Being abducted as a kid, Mr. Burt Richardson has a deep and personal motivation in teaching martial arts and self-defense. Listen to find out more about Mr. Burt Richardson.
Show Notes
In this episode, wee mentioned Guro Dan Inosanto and Bill "Superfoot" WallaceCheck outMr. Burton Richardson's school here[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvmLQ_Jjqmk[/embed]
Show Notes
You can read the show notes below or download it here.
Welcome, this is whistlekick martial arts radio episode 502 with today’s guest, Mr. Burton Richardson. Who am I? I'm Jeremy Lesniak, whistlekick founder and host for the show and everything we do here at whistlekick is in support of the traditional martial arts. If you want to know more about what we do, go to whistlekick.com. That’s the place to learn about all of our projects and products. It's also the easiest way to find our store and the code PODCAST15 is going to get you 15% off anything you find in there from apparel to gear to programs. There's a whole bunch of stuff there and it's growing every day. Everything for this show, martial arts radio, gets its own website. It's a whole different place on the web, whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. We bring you new shows twice a week and the goal of the show and of whistlekick overall is to connect, educate and entertain traditional martial artists throughout the world. If you want to support our work, there are a number of ways you can help. You can make a purchase, share an episode with a friend, follow us on social media, we’re @whistlekick everywhere, you could tell a friend about us, pick up one of our books on Amazon, leave us a review or support our Patreon. If you think our new shows that we’re releasing are worth 63 cents apiece, not to mention all of the back episodes you get access to, consider supporting us at $5 a month. If you do, we’re going to give you even more stuff, more content just for our Patreon subscribers. Go to Patreon.com/whistlekick to find out more. I had a wonderful conversation with today’s guest. Mr. Richardson was kind and open and it was a great conversation and I think that’s going to come through. here’s a guy that I've honestly known of for quite a while and it was in preparation for the show that I was trying to place his name. I'm digging around and I'm looking around and I went A-ha, that’s it! I recognized him from a magazine cover. I don’t remember when that was but it wasn’t recently and something about him and what I had read about him had really stuck with me and here we are, years later and I get a chance to talk to him. It was a great talk and I hope you enjoy it. Mr. Richardson, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.
Burton Richardson:
Well, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Happy to have you here. Listeners, we just had a great pre-show chat that you're never going to hear and that’s really sad but I'm really excited about it because I get to keep bits and pieces of these shows for myself and if the last 10 minutes or so that we had is any indication that this is going to be a great conversation, I'm really excited for it so thanks for making the time.
Burton Richardson:
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You’ve been around. You’ve done some stuff. I think that’s probably an understated way to put it. Is that fair? You’ve done a lot of stuff.
Burton Richardson:
Yes, you just called me old. Thank you very much. That’s a great way to start!
Jeremy Lesniak:
I did indirectly. I'm aware of doing that but we can't talk about breadth of experience without, at least, a little bit of a nod to the turns of the calendar. It's hard to be really good and 12.
Burton Richardson:
Absolutely.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We don’t have to unpack that one. I might just have offended someone but it's ok.
Burton Richardson:
No, it's true. You can get skillful, you can have gymnastics and gymnasts that are amazing and world-class at 12 years old but they don’t understand it yet. They don’t have the life experience so yeah, there's something about living for a while and I must say, it's a blessing. This is where you get perspective. You can't have perspective when you haven't lived a long time so it's such a blessing and to see some of my instructors who are a couple decades ahead of me and you look at them and you go wow, what's it like to be that age with that much experience and we really have to look to them and see what they're doing and try to emulate them so we can live like that as well so I started when I was 17 and that’s when I actually started. I’ll just give you a quick rundown. When I was growing up, so I grew up in Carson, California which is the neighbor town to Compton, California and it was an interesting area to grow up in because there were things happening in Carson and I was enamored with swords for some reason. There's a picture of me when I was maybe 4 years old and I have a plastic samurai sword in my hand and I used to go out and fight the rosebush. I just had a fascination and my favorite show is the Green Hornet, especially Kato, I love Kato. I didn’t realize for years later that that was actually Bruce Lee playing the part and that’s how I grew up. I’ll give you a little bit of information. I don’t talk a lot about it but the real driving thing, which I, again, perspective, I understand now which for a long time was just this really, really sore spot but yeah, still not great, but I have an appreciation for it now. When I was about 9 or so, I was coming home from baseball practice and that has shaped, I didn’t realize it for a long time, if it weren’t for that, I'm sure I wouldn’t be a martial artist now. I went to USC and was in Pre-Med. I was supposed to be a doctor and instead of going to medical school, I said I'm going to just, for one year, I'm going to do what I love. I want to do martial arts for one year and it's turned into forty-something but yeah, that abduction and all, I probably have thought of it almost every day of my life and that’s what gets me to go, you know what, when I'm training people, this better work. It had better work because someday, somebody I train is going to be in some sort of situation like that where they really need to deal with somebody much, much bigger, much, much stronger and so they can avoid going through what I went through. That’s what was the impetus and I was already interested in martial arts, interestingly enough, before that happened.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Where’d that interest come in?
Burton Richardson:
That’s the thing. I’ll tell you, there's a grandmaster named Leo Gaje who is a Filipino Martial Arts grandmaster and he’s renowned for his fierceness. I was fortunate to have went to a seminar of his. My main instructor is Guro Dan Inosanto. He was the one who is Bruce Lee’s training partner, ran Bruce Lee’s school in Los Angeles when Bruce Lee was doing movies and Guro Dan has many titles. I call him Guro because that’s what he prefers. Guro was going out to do a joint seminar with Grandmaster Leo Gaje and I expressed interest to the host who happened to be visiting Los Angeles. I ended up going out because he told me hey, if you can make it out here, you can sleep in the school, no problem because I had no money and so, when I actually showed up, he was so surprised. Man, everybody says they're going to come and you came. Why don’t you just room with Leo Gaje? What?! He put me in the room with this guy known for his fierceness and known for a little bit of volatile behavior at times and he puts me in there but he turned out to just be awesome and so nice and he was having a long conversation with me and he says at one point, he says, do you think of this all the time? I said yes, you mean martial arts? Yes and I said yes, I do. You just don’t know even why you do it. I said yeah, just, I have to and he looks at me and he says because it's in your blood. You have to do it and I think that was the correct answer and I just have to do it and wow, how wonderful we can actually do this and I happen to be able to make a living doing this thanks to the guidance of my instructors but that’s what I say is really what it is and a lot of people out there listening, it's in you! Why would you spend all this time doing martial arts? For example, sword. Why would you do Iaido? Why would you practice drawing the sword over again? Why would you do kendo, kenjutsu? Why would you do that? Because it's in you. It's something deep inside that you have been drawn to and in the end, I believe, it's because it makes us better. Makes us a better version of ourselves which is probably the reason we’re here anyway. That’s my take on why I do this.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I want to go back to that moment rooming with this impressive man, someone who you looked up to and the amount of shift that happened in, what's that, a few hours, 4 hours, 6 hours? You go from expecting you're going to be sleeping on the floor in the school to sharing a room with one of the presenters who poses this deep, philosophical martial arts question to you and in answering it, seems like it validates a piece of yourself, that maybe you hadn’t even spoken to anyone before?
Burton Richardson:
Yes, not at all. I hadn’t even thought of that and it actually took me a while to ponder that. I mean, I grasp this was important at the moment but then, as we went on, wow. So, just to give you a little inside into who he is. He is renowned in the Philippines. He came to America, Dan Inosanto recognized how exceptional this man was and so, they got together and Guro Dan started learning from Grandmaster Gaje and it was amazing! There I am, and I think I was probably 26 years old maybe and I'm going to go in and stay in the same room as Leo Gaje for the weekend. The first thing, I think, he did was make me comfortable which, because I was uncomfortable. Are you sure he wants somebody staying in the same room as he is? That’s pretty odd in Texas but he was just very welcoming and kind and gentle and then, he would get intense when he was explaining something and then, it was time to go sleep for the first night and he says do you have a sword? I said a live sword? He said did you bring a real sword? I said no, I didn’t. He said hmmm, ok and he goes in his bag and he pulls out this amazing Filipino sword. He says here, keep this under your pillow and then, I see him put his sword under his pillow like wow, this is the real deal. This guy grew up in a place where you need to keep a sword under your pillow so he’s also known for having, I don’t know if you just call it a temper but this guy is just so alive and vital and wouldn’t you know it? In the middle of the night, maybe 3 AM, there's a pounding on our door and you hear these loud voices out there and I remember I woke up, my eyes open and all of a sudden, I sat up on the bed and I looked over at him and he’s already sitting up and he’s looking at me with his eyes, his warrior eyes and he gets up and he nods at me, he pulls his sword, I pull my sword and he walks up to the door and he slowly opens it and he says yes? The sword is hidden behind his leg and the guy goes oh whoa, wrong room! Clearly, highly inebriated fellow and I'm thinking I'm about to see Leo Gaje cut somebody in half and instead, Leo Gaje just waits and then the guy finally goes away, he closes the door, he turns and looks at me and he goes, idiots. That was the end of that, thankfully, but I really thought I was going to see him in action for real, right there. So that was just one night of staying with a grandmaster which was unbelievable.
Jeremy Lesniak:
What an incredible man. I feel like that night would be the equivalent of going from white to blue belt in that 8, 9 hours. Just being around him and that intensity.
Burton Richardson:
Absolutely! The stories he shared and that little glimpse right there, all of a sudden, instead of, say, you're in basic training, you're in the military and it's one thing, you do all your training and then all of a sudden, you're in the battlefield. You feel like wow, I'm about to actually do this for real. There’s a shift that happens in your psyche because then you feel, you suddenly feel when you're lacking. There's a certain confidence that you might have had that all of a sudden you're questioning like wait a second, this doesn’t feel like it did in the dojo. Wait a second, what's going on here and wow, and a lot of psychological linkages is really happening. There's this psychological process that we go through when we’re suddenly confronted with an assault, sudden violence, the threat of an assault. Usually, our first thought is, is this really happening then if we decide it is, then ok, well, it is happening. What am I going to do with it or about it and when am I going to do it and those thoughts are very interesting to ponder because in our training, we really should answer those ahead of time. We should have our own rules of engagement made so before it happens, we can instantly go where we need to go instead of standing there questioning and the bad guy has a jump on you where you're there in your head instead of just responding to what's happening so I think that’s a very important part of martial arts is the, basically, the rules of engagement and if you notice in a lot of martial arts, that actually is part of it. I would say in a lot of kata when you're preparing, there's a mental process also. You're basically saying I'm ready to fight, I'm going to fight now so it's just good, for me, just being in a situation and I guess, fortunately, I've been in a lot of other situations and left the university environment and went off-campus in LA and lived in a very, very bad neighborhood where I have a lot of experiences where, ok, it's time to go or if they take one more step, it's time to go or I sure hope he’s going to put that gun away or whatever it is. We got some stories to go through if you want that has definitely raised my level that weekend and that reverberates until today.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There's a lot there. There's a lot of different directions that we can take as we follow but I'm wondering, because you’ve trained in so many different thing, because you’ve had a lot of intense experiences, did any of your other instructors have the same impact on you that Leo Gaje did?
Burton Richardson:
Yes, definitely. For example, first of all, Guro Dan. I started with him, I first went to his school in 1979 and then, I was able to join the following summer which was 1980 but a friend introduced me or took me over then I was training with a friend a little bit then I actually got to train because I just graduated high school and my father didn’t want me to do that until I graduated high school so I graduated high school, I was an athlete, I was a baseball player and getting ready to go to USC and play baseball there and study biology and I was in a 4-year honors program and writing literature as well and Guro Dan, to me, is the epitome of a real true martial artist. He is, first of all, a wonderful, generous person and I'm sure you know so many martial arts masters who fit in that same category. Very generous, Guro Dan is always, always researching. He’s always looking at different arts from all over the world because he wants to know more and he wants to provide more for his students. Now, that’s one way to do it. Another way to do it is to take a particular art and go so deep into it that you go through many levels of depth. Guro Dan, though, I must say, he takes an art and he does that because he trains so much. To this day, he trains, I think he takes 6 hours of private lessons every week to this day. I mean, him not giving privates but going out and seeking out people and taking private lessons from them and he’s 83 years old. Who can look at him and say, there's the example to follow.
Jeremy Lesniak:
I don’t know what I would do if Dan Inosanto called me up and said I would like to take a private lesson with you. I think I would hang up. I would have to assume it's fake.
Burton Richardson:
You're right! This can’t be real! And I’ll tell you, I remember, now he was only in his 50s at this time but he’s found someone from Malaysia to train bur silat, the Malaysian silat system and the guy was 22. He’s 22 years old and here’s Dan Inosanto asking a 22-year old to give him lessons but that’s Guro Dan. As one of my teachers and I ended up coaching him for Brazilian jiujitsu or submission wrestling, there's a guy named Master Barrett Yoshida. He’s amazing. Born and raised here in Honolulu in Hawaii on Oahu and I started training with him and he’s a world champion in jiujitsu and he’s very much into just training and training and training and training. It's a good insight to how some of these people get to world-class level. What Barrett would do is, and excuse me if I sometimes don’t use titles because a lot of the people I train with and such do not use titles so it's not disrespect, that’s how we call each other.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You train in arts that often don’t use titles and you train in, from my outside perspective, the place on earth that seems to be the least formal.
Burton Richardson:
Yes, that’s right. Not formal here in Hawaii, that is for sure. If I go into certain kojos and all, of course, we use a title. For example, there's a grandmaster, a great grandmaster here in the Filipino Martial arts who is also one of the luminaries in Kajukenbo and he was the first one to have an actual martial arts school on the island of Oahu and he’s in his 80s as well and he sees me and I say, oh, hi Grandmaster McGinty. Pah! What's that grandmaster stuff? He prefers Vince or hey, bruh? It's, like you say, very, very informal. Back to Barrett, what Barrett does is he would get to the jiujitsu, Gracie Jiujitsu from Relson Gracie. He would get to jiujitsu school early in the morning and he would start training and he would not leave until nighttime. He’d go get lunch or something but literally, he wouldn’t leave until the place closed and he would literally, if you're familiar with jiujitsu at all, the triangle choke which is a very, very powerful choke that you can do with your legs, he would have been rolling and sparring and he wouldn’t leave until he got 100 in sparring in that day so he’s rolling around, sparring with people and trying to get this choke that they know he’s trying to get and day after day after day after day after day, amongst other things but what Barrett told me one time which really told me refers to Guro Dan Inosanto is he says no prejudice. In other words, not being prejudiced against the styles. Knowing that there are other styles, that all styles have something to offer you and sometimes, when you're a certain age, you'll look at it and say, ah, that’s not for me then maybe later as you're older, you'll look and go, oh, hmmm, maybe and then you're older yet, you go oh I've got to do that. Now, I see the benefit so yeah, that’s something we, and actually, on that, because my main influence in functional self-defense, Barrett was asking me one day says now, do you do some of the newer jiujitsu things? These Berimbolos and all these complicated moves that are very, very tournament-specific. You would not want to do this on the asphalt. He asked me if I explore those and I said yes, yes, I do because there may be a piece of it that is very valuable and you end up in a place where you're 3 quarters of the way to a move, you just end up there somehow in the chaos and if you're aware of where you are and then you can take advantage and that’s where he said oh, no prejudice so I think it's an important point Guro Dan has really instilled in me and had a lot of instructors who instill that and truth of the matter is, we have instructors who are, we could say prejudiced or just have a, they look at other arts and say oh, it's not as good as our art. This is how I tend to feel it goes, not the instructor but honestly, a lot of times, people coming up in an art and then they end up becoming the instructors, it becomes like this. They start their training and they go oh yeah, my style is really good and those other styles are good too then it later becomes, my style is the best. Then it becomes, my style is not only the best, those styles aren’t even good. They have nothing to offer and that’s how just human nature, we like comfort, we like security that feeling of being the all-knowing sensei or sifu but it's not true. We don’t know everything. We’ll never know everything and to me, the journey is so much more interesting and try different arts. Again, I'm very functional self-defense based, and when I say functional, sparring-based. We pressure test everything, any technique, after we learn it, after my student learns it a little bit, then I say ok, go ahead, other person resist, don’t let them do it and we do it progressively. It doesn’t start 100% resistance and intensity. We go hey, resist, see if you can still do it and make it to learn for themselves what they can do and what they can't but with that said, that is my emphasis when I'm teaching seminars and I mainly do that, private lessons, it's whatever the person wants. For example, on Friday, I have a student in Japan and by skype lesson, we’re going to be doing juru #6 from Pencak Silat, Bakti Negara, an Indonesian martial arts style that I trained a lot in and we’re doing the forms. Juru is a form, a kata and that’s what we’re doing because that’s where he is in his journey and that’s what he wants and so, I think there's a lot of benefit in all kinds of traditional martial arts. It's clear. You wouldn’t do it if there weren’t benefits, right?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Hopefully. I want to go back to that phrase functional self-defense because I've got a feeling that that word functional is there for a reason. Now, I understand the logic of pressure testing and I understand if you're going to prioritize self-defense, you want to make sure it's effective but most people talk about being reality-based and those are the words that I hear being used the most but you don’t use that word. You use a different word and I suspect there's a reason.
Burton Richardson:
There is a reason. Well done! That’s very astute because what I found, there's a man named Jim Wagner and he is the one that coined the term reality-based self-defense, RBSD, and what a great term and the way Mr. Wagner trains is very functional and he was into pistol defense and knife defense and actually using pistols and such, long, long time ago and he’s really done a great job but what I noticed is a lot of people started using that term. Reality, reality, reality and what it turned out to be the way those people were training was they weren’t ever contesting the technique. In other words, we’re reality self-defense or reality, they would use reality-based self-defense because that’s Mr. Jim Wagner’s term, but they did say ok, this is reality training so we’re going to put on some camouflage pants and we’re going to put on some military guard and have a couple knives on my belt and so it became reality but actually it was just training in a nonfunctional manner in different clothing so that’s what it was. My base thing is honesty from my point of view and so…
Jeremy Lesniak:
I love it! This person you're describing has an orange training handgun on their hip too.
Burton Richardson:
You got it! You know that person! Exactly! That’s a level of training. To me, functional means, ok, here’s my analogy. You go to the airport, you're going to fly over here in Hawaii, we’re going to spend some time together. You're just about to get on the plane and you look out the window and you see the plane is very, very different than any plane you’ve ever seen. The fuselage is big and round and wide but the wings are very short, very, very short and there's not much of them and it just doesn’t seem right to you but it's like wow, that’s interesting. You happen to see the captain and you say wow, that’s an interesting plane. Yeah, isn’t that amazing? It's this and it's that, holds more people, takes less fuel and wow, you say wow, what's it like to fly it. I don’t know, I don’t know, it's the first time I'm going to fly it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
That’s the best analogy I've ever heard for self-defense. That’s fantastic!
Burton Richardson:
Now, are you going to get on that plane? No, I'm not. I'm not getting on that plane. You go fly that a little bit so the whole thing, it has to be pressure tested to really rely on it so what I do is make sure that I pressure test things and I happen to pressure test things and I happen to pressure test it at a very high intensity level with combat athletes. People that make a living doing combat so now, of course, when we’re doing that, we can't actually eye-gouge each other. We can't hit each other in the groin a hard as we can and such but we can simulate it but basically, it's like hey, I'm going to try this and you resist a 100%. We got to try it, for example again, Indonesian martial arts, silat. I'm going to try a silat takedown. Here, you try to stop me from doing and wow! For example, that really happened to me. I was using silat actually in combat, there's a group, I was an original member of it, it's called Dog Brothers. It wasn’t called Dog Brothers when I started but toward the end, it's real contact stick fighting with minimal equipment. Head gear and hand protection, maybe a knee protection and a heavy rattan stick and you fight all out and you're hitting each other as hard as you possibly can and I was using silat in there effectively then I was going to MMA and this was when MMA was just starting and it wasn’t called mixed martial arts yet. It was called no-holds barred and we start doing this and I couldn’t take my friends down anymore because they were wrestling and grappling based but later on, I realized by, adding the eye-gouges and the throat grabs or going to the groin, you change the posture enough like in judo kuzushi, you get them off balance and now you can do the throw but the point being back to the pressure testing is lets actually pressure test and so I would pressure test and I still, to this day, I still pressure test everything against really good strong athletes then I take it to class and my students all pressure test it at variable intensity so then I don’t say, ok, here hit him as hard as you can in the face or here, you outweigh your partner who happens to be female by 60 pounds, see if you can pick her up and slam her on the head. We don’t do that. What we do is we add progressive resistance and when they start feeling the resistance and they can deal with it then we look farther so that’s where the functional in functional self-defense comes in is it's not theoretical. It's actually proven to be functional and that’s why I do use the term pressure testing a lot because in the end, again, the airplane. You don’t want to get into that airplane that hasn’t been pressure tested and we all understand that uniquely that we need this thing if we’re going to risk our life on something, it better be working pretty well and have a good track record. A lot of times, it's interesting to me in martial arts, especially traditional martial arts, they “test” is the history. So and so used this 400 years ago and it's like wow, that’s great but sometimes, to me, it's like this. We’ll go to baseball for a second and just as an aside, I’ll get to it in a bit as a scientist. I actually literally finished biology at USC. I worked in a lab studying multiple sclerosis and how the canine parvo virus is similar but there's an actual cure for canine parvovirus but there isn’t one for multiple sclerosis. We’re trying to figure out since they're similar, how can we plan to cure it so my science background led me to all this pressure testing and making sure that it actually works under real conditions but what happens, though, is it's easy to look at traditional martial art, some techniques of traditional martial arts can say oh, come on, that’s not going to work against some MMA guy but when you actually get your sparring experience and you have fight experience which is in a lot of traditional martial arts, then you can start applying these things and it's not when you have a little experience, you have to have sometimes a lot of experience and then you say oh, I see how so and so 400 years ago actually used this for real. Yeah, I can see now how it applies so it's just such an interesting journey because it's very easy to just say hey, if it doesn’t work in MMA, it doesn’t work. Of course, people counter whether there’s eye gouges or groin strikes in MMA which is true but then, as a friend of mine said one time, he says people say oh, I’ll just use a finger jab and the MMA guys is going to fall down and cry but he goes, ok, so he puts that same guy and says let’s put boxing gloves on and they do a little boxing and the guy can't hit him at all. Well, you know, if you can't hit my entire face with a boxing gloves this large, how do you think you're going to put the tip of your finger into my eyeball under pressure and they said wait, good point but you know when you get the seasoning and actually can be calm then you can apply those things so yeah, it's just an interesting journey of training traditional, “not traditional” and then to me, the traditional whether they do, they fought a lot. There was a lot of fighting in the traditional martial arts and that’s how they develop these techniques so it all comes back to pressure testing to me if you want to call it functional.
Jeremy Lesniak:
If we were to step in to your school, what will we see going on during a class? Because you have all these different skillsets, would we see you teaching them individually or primarily in this kind of stew of depending on the context innately people are going to gravitate towards different skillsets?
Burton Richardson:
The first thing you would notice is there's a lot of laughter going on. People are laughing and having a…
Jeremy Lesniak:
Unsurprising!
Burton Richardson:
Yes, so! People are having such a good time and there's some teasing going on sometimes and it's just a good group so for the school owners out there, what I do, is I have to say I'm very, very fortunate that I teach in a place where, the way I teach, I don’t have a fulltime school which is often very surprising to people especially when they come to mainland USA and they're used to martial arts schools and they come to Hawaii and say wow, that Kajukenbo guy that I heard about who is renowned, he teaches in his garage. One thing, the rents over here are exorbitant. For example, a friend of mine, this was about 10 years ago, he had a gym, about 2,000 square feet so it's not a big place but a decent place, maybe 2200 square feet and upstairs, no signage from the street, couldn’t see it from the street, had to pay for parking, the whole thing and it was $8000 a month and then, he had to pay for air-conditioning, so electricity ended up another $2000 a month so yeah, he’s paying 10-grand a month 2 years ago for a space that nobody could see. Alright, so that gives you an idea why we do this. It's actually a Buddhist temple and they have a hall underneath the Buddhist temple that they use for luaus and other kinds of get togethers that we do here in Hawaii and so, it's a huge space. 3500 square feet, maybe but what I do and this is getting to what I'm talking about, the fees involved, since I don’t have to pay $10,000 a month, I can be even more selective with who I train so first, when someone calls, my wife, Sarah, who’s a phenomenal martial artist in her own right, she talk to them and if she gets a bad feeling, which sometimes is evident that they're not somebody that fits into our school, she sends them someplace else politely then if she thinks they may be good, they come in and they try the class and I make sure, very light, open hand, touch the top of the hand, that’s still sparring so nobody’s punching each other but I get to see how they respond and interact with our students and if they have a great attitude and they're helpful then I say ok, you can sign up and that’s our main thing. Main criteria is to be friendly and helpful to your partners because we’re all helping each other improve so the first thing you’d see is a bunch of laughing and nice people. I never told anybody to do this but I'm very proud that new people come in and several students would just walk up to them and introduce themselves and make them feel comfortable. Now, the training you're going to see, I currently teach 4 classes a night. First class is BJJ for the street so it's jiujitsu for the street which means, guess what, jiujitsu for the street. There are strikes involved and I think, this is one of my main pushes in jiujitsu which I'm trying to change is generally in the art of jiujitsu, it's tournament-based basically. It's tournament-based. When I first started, I must say I started jiujitsu in ’95 and at that time, pretty much anybody doing Brazilian jiujitsu was doing it with the idea of fighting. Probably MMA or no holds barred that time. It had a fighting base and so all the positioning, all the moves were really for, you're thinking about somebody punching you all the time. The very first lesson was with Rickson Gracie and we did mount defense, mount escapes because if you get mounted in a fight and he can punch you and the whole time he’s talking about punching and ok, so usually, in jiujitsu when you say self-defense, what they start doing is having the punches added basically and some headbutts so it's really vale tudo, the sport that they developed in brazil where you could punch, you could kick, you could do takedowns and usually, they ended up on the ground and they would punch and they would elbow and they would headbutt on the ground but for self-defense, the most dangerous thing, the worst case scenario that we should be prioritizing in our training is weapons defense because maybe you have a great guard pass, maybe you have a really good side control and mount and arm bars and mount, somebody pulls a pistol in the midst of a scramble and you are not looking for it, you won’t see it. You will not see it and basically, will deploy that and use that against you or a knife. There's so many actual situations where people have been stabbed. A friend of mine in high school, he said he got stabbed but he didn’t know it. He was sitting down after the incident and he said he felt something wet on his leg and he's like what is that? And he realized he has been stabbed. He thought he had been punched by somebody in the back like reached around and punched him in the gut. He actually was stabbed so if you are not actively looking for the knife or the pistol, you're not going to see it. You're going to go into tournament mode because you're just going to do what you’ve been trained to do and I emphasize that it's just not knowing. We could tell anybody, hey, in a street situation, you should look for the knife, you should look for the pistol first, primary and make sure your positioning accounts for that so if they do go to pull it, you can immediately stifle the draw and so, great, you know it but knowing it doesn’t mean it's actually ingrained as almost an instinct. It becomes second nature so that’s why it has to be in the training as well so in the sparring rounds, we have people suddenly pull out a pistol, pull out a knife so that’s often surprising. When someone does come visit to my school and they look in and their reaction is oh, look at that, Tuesday nights we go gi, Thursday nights we go no gi and they're watching guys roll around in gis and there are white belts and blue belts and purple belts and brown belts and black belts in class and all of a sudden, a pistol comes out of nowhere and like whoa! What's going on there? So, that’s something people would see that’s surprising. My second class is a JKD Unlimited class so I call it unlimited because that was the idea. If you look at Bruce Lee’s symbol for Jeet Kune Do, around the symbol, there's Chinese characters and it says, they translate in English to using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation thus unlimited so my point was, there are lots of times in the JKD world, it's very interesting talking about the mindset of ours is the best, this is the best. There are a lot of JKD guys who believe that what Bruce Lee did in his lifetime was the best. There's nothing better. You can't add anything to it to make it any better. Exactly what he did was nothing better which isn’t true, of course, because there's always something better. There's always things to develop too.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Seems like a contradiction.
Burton Richardson:
A total 100% contradiction! Isn’t it interesting?
Jeremy Lesniak:
I can understand the value of preserving what he taught as a curriculum because it's a tie to this man that so many look up to but to say that the development of something that was supposed to be, I've never trained JKD so my experience is from talking to people and reading but something that’s meant to be so fluid in its, even conceptual, form; to put such a hard edge on it, it seems bizarre to me.
Burton Richardson:
So interesting to me. You have not trained in Jeet Kune Do but you understand the essence of Jeet Kune Do and it's so interesting that human nature, in our quest to, I don’t know, to be superior or to be in this place where oh gosh, I don’t have to learn anything else, there's nothing more to learn, I've got it. That comfort zone that we tend to like so much and actually, you end up going a 180-degrees against what Jeet Kune Do actually is and I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who don’t even train martial arts. They’ve never trained martial arts yet they absolutely understand the essence of the philosophy, as Guro Dan once put it, research and development. It's research and development and you have to find out what works for you so yeah, it's such an interesting, just human, study. Earlier when I was talking about that thing and people are training and people are saying oh yeah, my art is good, the other arts are good too and then, mine’s the best, the other arts are good and then, mine’s the only one. I was talking about the people in JKD. That’s what I've seen that so often. It's just an interesting human nature so in my class, Unlimited, using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation and just to be clear and using no way as way means that we’re not stuck on the way we’re doing it. We’re open to any path. If somebody comes up tomorrow and says hey, that grappling you’ve been doing for so many years, for so many decades, look at this, this is the better way to train it, for example. I'm going to say thank you so much! We’re doing that now and I've done that a lot of times. Actually, for example, I have a friend in Australia named Ray Floral and he is phenomenal with a knife. He is a champion fencer before. He’s of Filipino descent, he’s trained with the masters in the Philippines. Some of the same masters I've trained with and he has a certain position that he does and I've totally, I understand why he’s doing that and so, I changed one of my basic structures and I'm using that now because it's better, for the most part, so anyway, that’s the idea and if I can just touch on the JKD that you mentioned and you said you can see the value of preserving what Bruce Lee did and I totally agree a hundred percent. There's Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do which Jun Fan, Bruce Lee’s actual name was Lee Jun Fan, there's Jun Fan Keet Kune Do, that’s what Bruce Lee did in his lifetime and then there’s Jeet Kune Do which is your personal expression and the idea of constantly developing yourself through the martial arts but back to my class, if you look at the Jeet Kune Do unlimited class, the second class of the night, you'll see we’ll start with a warm up which is you grab a partner and standing, each person is trying to touch the other person either on the top of the head with an openhand or down toward the groin so it's only hands at first and basically, they're sparring. How you warm up? You warm up with very light sparring and then, as we go on, we can add some kicks to that too and it depends on the level of the person. If somebody is at their very first class, then they do it but only one hand. Whatever the lead hand is, they just touch. Now, the openhand is because, that way, nobody’s going to get hurt and you get the essential factor that you don’t get without the pressure testing or sparring which is feedback. You get immediate feedback whether you're successful or not and it's the feedback that triggers our miraculous adaptive response in our body to adapt to that and start changing what we’re doing and find a better way. Our timing gets better and such and it's like you're out on the sun, you get some sun, your body feels it, the adaptive response happens and you start tanning a little bit so that feedback is incredibly important. You get that stimulus to actually start the adaptive response so they're playing the games then they go in for the clinch. I call in for the clinch and they go into the clinch and they're working close range where they're actually grabbing each other and they're throwing knees toward the groin. Not hitting the groin but throwing knees toward the groin to make sure that they are ready to deal with that and at any time, even if they don’t have a training weapon on them, they can act like they're pulling a weapon so they go in and they are always looking for the draw at all times. Always looking for the weapon, it's ingrained then one person goes down, they do a little something called rocking chair. One person is on his or her back and the other person is circling around and just keeping at their feet and the other person does it, that’s our warm up. So, we just did sparring in kickboxing clinch in ground ranges then we go into scenario. That’s something we don’t have in combat sports, say, if you look at mixed martial arts again. Sure, you go in there and you fight but there's no scenarios. In most actual street situations start with some sort of scenario where a person’s coming up to you, they're acting erratic or they're yelling at you or they're sneaking up on you, trying to coerce you to do something like hey, I'm hurt here. I need some help, can you help me and you can tell so we go through all these scenarios so that people learn when to take action at the appropriate time. Somebody comes up and go oh, hey, help me! You don’t start blasting them in the face. This is inappropriate so we have to actually get into a position where we can learn when to turn it on so that’s part of the training and then, we do kickboxing with groin strikes and finger jabs included. We do ground clinch techniques and we do ground techniques so that’s the JKD unlimited class then we have, now, we have an advanced jiujitsu class which is more tournament-based and just advanced portions of the art. I used to have a Krav Maga class right there but just people wanted the advanced jiujitsu so we went for that and then, the last class is about Filipino class so kali silat class so we do Filipino, primarily Filipino martial arts. Lots of weaponry, sticks, knives, swords plus the empty hand silat or empty hand kali and I also, sometimes, add in Zulu stick fighting which I'd spent, I made several trips to South Africa to learn Zulu stick fighting with the Zulus and the Zulu village down there which is fascinating and so, that’s pretty much it and one thing also, the JKD Unlimited Class, it is a combination of so many different arts but the idea is I will introduce things and then each individual gets to see if that fits into their particular psychology, their body type, the way they happen to move, sometimes it's age-related so I give a lot of different drills and techniques and such from Jeet Kune Do, from Filipino martial arts, Indonesian martial arts, Thai boxing, MMA, Greco-Roman Wrestling, Zulu stick fighting, South African knife, fist, whatever, karate, taekwondo, savate, anything! We work spinning kicks at times because what if somebody, this is Hawaii, it's really a different place. It's hard to find someone here in Hawaii that was born in Hawaii that hasn’t done martial arts quite a bit. It's just ingrained in the culture. This is a fighting culture here. As a matter of fact, to this day, one of the ways to handle a problem, they just go hey, you like beef? And so, not do you want to go eat some beef. That means are you going to, let’s go to the park and have it out and after they have it out, hand to hand, they call it up and up. You fight and then, ok! It’s done. The issue is behind us now and all you have to do is go on YouTube and google Hawaii fights or Hawaii street fights, something like this and you will see guys and wait a second, those guys are squaring off and the guy just led with a lead roundhouse kick to the head. That’s what he started with and they're using beautiful boxing and then they're getting into a clinch and going to the ground. There's very, everybody has good technique over here so yeah, we have to train for everything, for self-defense here, in case you run up against somebody who, they're going to be highly trained probably. Interesting place. It's just great. So many nice people, so many wonderful people but time to fight is serious business.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Right. When you look at this arsenal of technique and style that you have now, when you’ve made a decision to add something to that toolkit, how have you decided? Is it been that you were seeking out a style that you're aware of maybe a gap in something or you were looking for a particular type of instructor or just kismet, it just kind of fell onto your lap?
Burton Richardson:
That’s a great question. It's sort of all of the above, actually. If I happen to run into somebody and I think, wow! For example, I have a very good friend now. Obviously, wasn’t always my friend. A man named Mike Stone. Maybe a lot of you know who Mike Stone was. Mike Stone is, he was a great karate champion, contemporary of Bill Wallace and Chuck Norris. I mean, just an amazing, amazing fire and Joe Lewis and somehow, we ended up talking on Facebook and then, he was coming to Hawaii because he was from Hawaii originally and he lives in the Philippines. Living an amazing life over there of meditation and helping people, just incredible and anyway, we got together and I hosted him for a little seminar and we hit it off and we’re friends. We talk all the time. Every time he comes over here, we get together and it's always just a wonderful time but, for example, meeting Mike really helped me to have a better appreciation of his, it's just the timing and distance, timing and distance. It's interesting because, again, in JKD, when you're supposed to have an open mind, it's very common for people in JKD to look at Karate and karate, that’s no good and kata, look at that, how the hand on the hip and this and that. I’ll tell you a story. You know that Bruce Lee, who was very progressive, obviously and he did things in a certain way and he pressure tested everything which is really what caused Jeet Kune Do to happen. He didn’t really term it Jeet Kune Do until after he got gear and he went all out pressure testing things, that’s when he really coined the term Jeet Kune Do. He heard that some of his students in Los Angeles school were kind of making fun of karate and he said, oh, oh really? Ok, alright so when it came time to spar, what he did as they're sparring, he adopted a classic stance, hand on the hip and all and he just pounded everybody with it because he had the timing and the understanding of distance and he used inward block and reverse punch and just blasted everybody because he was trying show them. Hey, don’t be making fun of things you don’t understand so Mike Stone really, as we’re talking and seeing how his method and going back and looking at some of his fights and all, I said wow, this is really interesting. So, when I go to Japan, for example, so fortunate. I've been very fortunate for the last 5 years. I'm sure a lot of you will be envious. I would have been but I have the good fortune, I teach a 2-week seminar tour in Japan every year for the last 5 years. While I'm there, the host who is really a wonderful people, Shihan Hidei Mitsuoka, he introduces me to all these great masters from Iaido to Musashi style to karate to full contact people, I mean, one of the people I get to see over there every single year we spent time with and we don’t speak each other’s language but through interpreters and feel and touch and movement, we get to interact and share with each other is this amazing man who is Kono-sensei and he’s just a treasure in Japan. He walks around in traditional kimono. He has his bag with his samurai sword, his katana, in it all the time and I was able to meet this people through my host and because of that, it helped me to train and learn more so that’s an example of not seeking somebody out but when I get to meet them, I really want to see what their art is about and then I see how much value there is. Now, sometimes, like you were saying is finding a deficiency, when I see a deficiency and that happened over the years, it's like wow, we have no ground game, basically. I don’t know. I know a bunch of ground techniques but I can't actually apply any of them so I need to study with people who can apply it and then, later, the clinch. Finding out that oh, there's this whole world in the clinch. It's basically vertical grappling so I trained with Randy Couture who is a great Greco-Roman exponent national on the national team for 10 years in a row, UFC champion many times in the UFC hall of fame so I spent a lot of time training with Randy so yeah, some of it is that or I’ll be looking or I’ll be studying and just looking at different arts and I see that they're doing something and that’s the other portion saying wow, that would fit in with what we’re doing really well. I can see where that could really help us develop this area so it's basically all of the above. Trying to keep an open mind, not having that prejudice whatsoever and just being open to it knowing, always knowing that we can improve. We can always improve everything. I happen to be on an iPhone right now. This is going to improve. In 20 years, we’re going to be using an iPhone? I doubt it! Even though, right now, wow, this is amazing but we can always, always improve.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It's a great philosophy and it's one that I think, when we talk to martial artists who have really taken things far, who most would consider to be above and beyond the average martial artist, most of them seem to have that philosophy of a breath of training what I like to call white belt mentality. This idea that there's always more to learn and let’s keep learning.
Burton Richardson:
Yes, the idea of humility. We taught that in martial arts. Humility is important and you know? What I've learned is not let me be humble and then I will say well, I don’t know everything and let me maybe, if I want to, go out and look at other arts if that’s your path. It’s actually really training martial arts enough to realize, you have to be humble because there's no way you're going to know everything. It's just the way it is. There's always someone better. There's always somebody that knows things that you don’t know that can help you and really, to me, if you do the real martial path where you test yourself, you put yourself in uncomfortable situations, you expose yourself to people that do things that you don’t do and especially if you test yourself against those people in a friendly way. I mean, it can be very extreme like that Dog Brothers stick fighting or MMA fighting, it’d be very extreme and dangerous or even Zulu stick fighting, it can be dangerous. You just come to the realization and then, the humility comes from that realization so it's not fake, false humility. It's just the truth and to me, back to the science, in Science, the first thing you should say in science, before you're going to do an experiment, before you're going to do research, the first thing you have to say is I don’t know because if you knew, why would you do the research.
Jeremy Lesniak:
It's a great point. I like that.
Burton Richardson:
Scientists should be humble and come from a place of humility and of hey, I just don’t know. It doesn’t happen because, again, we’re humans and so, there's a lot of scientists who go hey, I think it's like this. I'm going to design an experiment that proves it's like this even though it's not a valid experiment and we’re going to all say, that’s what it is and that’s just human nature again but if we’re really honest, we’re truly honest which is the basis of good martial arts and why it's so beneficial to our lives is we can be honest with ourselves, know who we are and be happy with that. Always trying to improve but be honest with who you are and know that we don’t know everything and then you can drop that whole big burden of trying to be the invincible martial artist. Now, we can just be who we are and express yourself and be happy and pass along with others.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You hinted at a story before we went live with this, talking about another guest on the show, a past guest, someone that you spent some time, I think you said, rooming with as a roommate?
Burton Richardson:
Roommate, yeah! Not like hotel but yes, what? How did that happen?
Jeremy Lesniak:
So, if you could tell us that story because I'm excited.
Burton Richardson:
Yeah, the great Bill Wallace. Unbelievable guy, right? There I am, I'm at Guro Inosanto’s class in Los Angeles and he taught in 3 places at that time. He taught at the IMBA academy in Carson which is where I grew up. I started the Kali Academy and then, later went to IMBA Academy so Kali Academy, oh I'm sorry, IMBA academy in Carson. He taught 2 classes. This was twice a week at a local college, Harbor College, Community College and they were 1-hour classes. The IMBA classes were an hour and a half and then he taught at his school in Marina del Rey, the Inosanto Academy and he taught 3 classes, Tuesday and Thursday nights, I think it was and Monday and Wednesday, he taught 3 classes at the IMBA academy. He taught a daytime class at the IMBA academy and anyway, I was at every single class so, just real brief, I won’t go into it, after college, I was very poor, I was very depressed, I was very sick. I had an ulcerative colitis and I didn’t know it and so I was very, very ill and I was so beat up from dealing with that and college and being, basically a double major in college and playing on the baseball team. For the baseball fans out there, I played with Mark McGwire and Randy Johnson. Yeah, they're kind of good, I guess.
Jeremy Lesniak:
They're alright.
Burton Richardson:
They're ok, yeah, they’ve done, I guess, ok. So, I was a catcher and so I had to catch Randy Johnson and he did not know where the ball was going. He literally, all 6’8” of him or whatever it is, when he release the ball, he’s halfway to the plate and then he really didn’t know so I’d warm him up, I had to put on full gear because, one time we’re playing a game and he threw the ball, he threw a fast ball and it landed on the backstop about, literally, 20 feet up and I remember the batter looking up at the backstop and then looking at Randy with this horror in his eyes because Randy threw so hard, such a heavy fast ball and the guy literally backing all the way back in the batter’s box as far away from the plate as he possibly could. He’s scared to death. He’s afraid he’s going to be killed up there but anyway, yeah, good times. I finished USC, I was sick and I ended up living, I found the cheapest place I could possibly find to live because all I want to do is martial arts for a while and I lived in a little tiny camper trailer in a parking lot of a dog and cat hospital in downtown LA. I lived there for 5 years like that. I took care of dogs and cats at night and I didn’t have to pay rent so all I had to do was train and I was just making enough money to pay for my classes and food and fuel so I went to every single class Guro Dan taught. I think it was 18 a week and one day, he comes into class and I'm in my mid-20s, maybe 26 or so and he says hey, I'm doing this demonstration in England, in Birmingham, England in a couple weeks. Do you want to go? I'm shocked. He’s asking me to go with him someplace in Birmingham, England? What?! Do a demonstration? Of course, I accepted so I went. We did this big demonstration over there. It was Guro Dan, Cynthia Rothrock, Eric Lee, Bill Wallace, George Chung and some, I think that was it but that was quite the headline of names.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah, it's quite the roster.
Burton Richardson:
Make a long story short, Bill, being Bill Wallace, he starts teasing me, totally good natured, hanging around, telling me stories. Oh, I know, Tadashi Yamashita. That was the other one. He was there, Tadashi Yamashita. Unbelievable guy and so, just to give you, I'm about to go up. We each did 2 sections of this demo. There were 5,000 people there and I am nervous. Oh man, am I nervous! I'm going to go out and demonstrate with Dan Inosanto. We’re doing swords, like doing this drill, we’re smashing machetes together. We’re doing double sticks, empty hand knife stuff and all these and I'm in the wings, I know we’re going to go out in about 5 minutes and I'm really nervous. Apparently, it was very clear and Bill comes up to me and he goes, hey, you're feeling a little nervous there? I look at him and I didn’t have to say anything because he knew. You could see it in my eyes and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, Don’t worry, it's just the reputation of Dan Inosanto but you know, that made me so nervous that I was no longer nervous. It just knocked it right out of me and so I could go out there and perform really well. So, anyway, to make a long story short, after spending time with him and he was so good to me, we went back on the plane together. We played football in the aisles of the flight back, literally. We took the pillow, the in-flight pillow that they give you and we’re in the hallway and we’re throwing the football back and forth, he’s standing at the back holding his leg up over his head and all this stuff and we get there and we get our bags, we go out to the curb and he goes, Do you have a ride? I said no, I'm going to take the bus and he goes oh, you can ride with me and so, his wife picks him up and there we go so we kept in touch. He dropped me off and all at the dog and cat hospital. Somehow, we kept in touch and he, unfortunately, had to separate. He separated from his wife and he says hey, where you living? I didn’t even know where I was living but somehow, he said hey, I've got an extra room. You want to stay with me and so I ended up being roommates with Bill Wallace and that was, I'm thinking maybe 8 months and in that 8 months, yeah. Can you imagine seeing him every single day, him and my head every single day, talking martial arts, just showing me things. It was just…what is that? How does that happen? How does that happen that the house I grew up in in Carson was about a mile and a half from the original Kali Academy where people would come from the world over and try to spend 1 week of their vacation training at the Academy and I lived right there and then I happened to know somebody that took me over there. I'm telling you, my nickname in the Dog Brothers is Lucky Dog because, I must say, there are a lot of very fortunate or blessed things that happened I'm very thankful for like that so I got all this time with Bill Wallace. He’s the one talking about pressure testing that really got in my head. He said, I don’t know how many times he told me, he goes you can't develop timing or distance without sparring. Sparring is essential. If you don’t spar, you're not going to learn your timing, you're not going to learn your distance. He probably said that every single day to me and it finally sunk in because at that time, I wasn’t doing much sparring. We’d move around, he and I, it's just like, it was just not even funny how he could find the opening. It was so easy for him and I’ll tell you one thing, his demonstration in England, what do you do in a demonstration? You're going to. Throw some high kicks, you do some spinning kicks. You do something really cool. His idea of a demonstration was hey, let’s get a couple of the top point fighters in England and I’ll do some sparring with them. He was probably in his mid-40s at this time and at one point, his opponent there, threw a fast jab and I'm watching just from off-stage, threw a fast jab. Now, to slip a jab and be able to throw a jab yourself at the same time is quite a feat of timing. That’s not easy. It takes a lot of training to do that. Well, he slipped the jab and hit him in the back of the head with a heel hook kick as he slipped the jab. That’s what Bill did. What kind of skill like that? So yeah, I was very fortunate to have a lot of adventures with Bill and yeah, what a guy. What a wonderful person. Very generous. Very, very generous.
Jeremy Lesniak:
You’ve told some utterly amazing stories today and talked about how fortunate you are and I'm sure made every single person listening, including me, jealous of some of these experiences but nothing in your words have indicated that you have plans to stop or even slow down anytime soon so I'm curious, what's coming? What's the future hold for you?
Burton Richardson:
Hopefully, exactly what I'm doing now. Actually, a friend of mine asked me awhile back and he has a podcast and such and his question was in your life, what are you striving, basically what's missing right now that you would like to have and I'm happy to say my answer is nothing, nothing! We could all use some more money, we could all use a nicer car maybe or this or that but the actual, the important things in life. Oh gosh, I have a wonderful family. My wife Sarah, my daughter TQ who loves training. How fortunate that she happens to love training? We train together all the time. She sneaks up on me and starts hitting me with the pool noodles because she’s my Kato but that’s family life. Wonderful. I have wonderful instructors. I have such wonderful friends and students. I live in Hawaii. I get to train and explore martial arts. I get to travel the world and teach and what that means, if I get to travel the world and teach, I'm travelling the world, I'm learning also. I'm learning from people as I do this and I have to say, it's because Guro Dan led the way with seminars. Going out and teaching seminars. Do I have time to tell a quick story about Guro Dan?
Jeremy Lesniak:
By all means, please.
Burton Richardson:
I mentioned the generosity of Bill Wallace and if you notice, I think you'll find that most top martial artists are extremely generous and they give and they give. I had a thought, actually, I had a thought last night, came to right before I was going to bed is if we’re all in this together, it's like we’re all one in a sense that we’re all one spirit or being, in a sense, so every time we give to someone else, we’re actually getting back ourselves. Anytime that we can help someone else avoid some suffering, we’re actually helping ourselves alleviate some suffering and these top martial artists, that’s what you see in them. You see that they give and give and they give. For example, a few years after that first experience in England with Guro Dan on the demonstration. He approached me again and he said hey, I'm doing a seminar in London and it's a big seminar. My wife, Paula, is going with me because she usually, at that time would assist him in seminars. He said but I’d like you to come too because I think it would be helpful because there's going to be so many people. It might be helpful to have another person. Great! So, the host apparently, the host is going to pay for my airfare and hotel and all that stuff so great, ok. We go over there, we do it, I end up getting to stay a few extra days, I meet a lot of people. Bob Green was the host and Bob Green is an amazing icon of martial arts in the UK and great. Years later, I found out that no, Bob Green wasn’t the one that paid. He didn’t even know about this whole thing, it was Guro Dan, paid for my airfare and paid for my hotel accommodations and my food. Not so that he could have somebody else help him but it was so that I would be exposed to the community in England so it will help me in my future. Hopefully, I could go over there and start teaching eventually and that’s what he did. He did the same thing with Sifu Larry Hartsell. Some of you know the JKD grappling master Larry Hartsell who has now passed away. He’s one of my instructors too. Guro Dan took him on this 2-month tour of Australia which is a long, long tour and he took him. Turns out Larry made all his money, he was very pleased and such, turns out Guro Dan gave his money to Larry. Guro Dan didn’t make a cent off the whole thing and Larry never knew. Until the day he died, he didn’t know about that and that’s Guro Dan so you teachers out there, sometimes we have this thing like oh, maybe I shouldn’t show that, oh, I want to keep that to myself, oh, I should give it a little bit of a time, just always come from generosity. You come from generosity, you empty your cup and your cup is then refilled. It's a beautiful way to live your life. I just have a lot of joy in my life and I'm very, very thankful for it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Wonderful, wonderful stories. Now, if people want to find you, social media, websites, email, any of that, where would they find you?
Burton Richardson:
My website is JKDunlimited.com and then you can look me up Facebook, my regular one and there's another Facebook Business or something so if you want to, I post a lot of stuff. I post lessons, I post techniques and all and sometimes on Facebook, I’ll post things with the family too then on Instagram, I believe my Instagram is @jkd_unlimited but if you search my name, you'll find it and I post a lot of things there too. I often share techniques, sometimes just me moving, like moving the sticks around and moving knives around and doing some motion but yeah, if you want some extra things, I'm very accessible if you want to send a message, I'm happy to help.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Awesome stuff! Had a blast talking to you so this is your opportunity to decide how we can close up the show. What words would you want to leave everyone listening here today?
Burton Richardson:
I’d say my two go-to’s is pressure test everything and enjoy your training. Aloha!
Jeremy Lesniak:
When I talk to guests, I get this sense of who they are, how they train, how they teach, what it would be like to work out with them and quite often, as I'm sure you can guess, more often than not, much often than not, I wish I could train with these people. Of course, Mr. Richardson is no exception but I think more than training, more than learning what he has to teach and share, I would just enjoy getting to know him even better. Really comes across as a good guy and I suspect that everything he presented here today was nothing short of the complete truth so, sir, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing, thanks for your time. If you want to see more including the links and photos, stuff we talked about today, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. You can sign up for the newsletter while you're over there and if you're down to support the work that we’re doing here at whistlekick, we’ve got some options. You can use the code PODCAST15 to save 15% off at our store. You can leave a review, buy a book on Amazon or help with the Patreon, Patreon.com/whistlekick and I hope that if you see somebody out and about, wearing something with whistlekick on it, you'll go up, you'll say hi. Ask them how they became acquainted with whistlekick and who knows, maybe you'll make a new friend or a new training partner. I would love to hear your guest suggestions so don’t be afraid to email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com and remember our social media is @whistlekick. Thanks for joining me today. Until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!