Episode 498 - Mr. Richard Bejtlich

Mr. Richard Bejtlich is a martial arts practitioner and student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at Team Pedro Sauer

I don't want them thinking that they need to cut my head off in order to prove how good they are. I need a different sort of culture.

Mr. Richard Bejtlich - Episode 498

When you thought as a kid that your friend is a ninja, you would want to become one as well. Mr. Richard Bejtlich's fascination with martial arts did not materialize until he was a cadet in the Air Force Academy. He started boxing and then got into judo, karate, and the rest is history. Mr. Bejtlich is a distinguished I.T. guy and he holds a lot of white belts on different disciplines. Listen to this episode if you want to know more about Mr. Richard Bejtlich's journey and how he ended up with a lot of white belts

Mr. Richard Bejtlich is a martial arts practitioner and student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at Team Pedro Sauer I don't want them thinking that they need to cut my head off in order to prove how good they are. I need a different sort of culture.

Show Notes

In this episode, we mentioned former guest Stephan Kesting, legend Bruce Lee, and the book A Killing Art by Alex Gillis[gallery ids="8353,8354,8356,8358,8359,8360,8361,8362,8363,8364"]

Show Transcript

You can read the transcript below or download it hereJeremy Lesniak:Hey there, you're tuned in to whistlekick martial arts radio episode 498 with today’s guest, Mr. Richard Bejtlich. Who am I? I'm Jeremy Lesniak. I'm your host for the show and founder here at whistlekick and everything that we’ve got going on is in support of the traditional martial arts. If you want to know more about what that means, go to whistlekick.com. That’s our online home. That’s the place for our store, our projects, our products, everything that we’ve got going on, you can get to it from there and one of the things there is the store, the place where we sell stuff and if you use the code PODCAST15, you'll save 15% off anything. If you haven't been to the website lately, now is the time to check it out. if you want to see stuff related to this or to any other episodes of martial arts radio, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. The show comes out twice a week and the purpose of the show is to connect, educate, entertain traditional martial artists throughout the world. If you want to help this show, if you want to help us towards our goals, there are a number of ways you can do that. You can share an episode, if you make a purchase, tell a friend, follow us on social media, pick up one of our books, leave a review or support our Patreon, patreon.com/whistlekick. That’s what we’re talking about. 5 bucks or more gets you more content, more podcasts, more videos, more, more, more. To those of you who have contributed to the Patreon, there are quite a number of you out there, thank you. We really appreciate it. Helps offset the cost of running this show which is, as you might imagine, quite expensive. I've known about today’s guest for a while. He’s been part of our community. He’s been following the show and one of the more active commenters in the martial arts radio behind the scenes Facebook group. I've come to value his feedback greatly and when we took a step back and started looking at who from kind of internally we could invite to the show, he was the first name that came up so here we are, my conversation with Mr. Richard Bejtlich.Richard Bejtlich:Hey Jeremy!Jeremy Lesniak:How are you?Richard Bejtlich:Good, thanks. How are you?Jeremy Lesniak:I'm great!Richard Bejtlich:Sorry, I was a couple minutes late. I was trying to figure out the audio here. Does it sound ok?Jeremy Lesniak:Sounds great.Richard Bejtlich:Oh good!Jeremy Lesniak:You know, it's funny. When I had given your name to Leslie to reach out, I realized why did I not talk to you like 3 years ago? I have no good reason.Richard Bejtlich:I thought you were going to say, we’re going to need to figure out how to say this guy’s name.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh, we’ve had harder names. When you submitted the guest form and you spelled it out that way, suddenly I realized oh, that absolutely makes sense. What's the heritage?Richard Bejtlich:It's Polish. There's no ‘wicz’ or ‘ski’ at the end but it is Polish and there's lots of people in Poland and actually, in Germany too with that name. It's one of the toughest two-syllable names you'll encounter.Jeremy Lesniak:It's rough, yeah. As Leslie and I talked about you, I think I ended up with 6 syllables for your name but I know the pain, I guess, not really, it's not that traumatic, I guess, of having a Polish last name that nobody can pronounce.Richard Bejtlich:You hear all kinds of things. I guess one good aspect of it is if you want to be found on the internet, it's pretty easy and my dad has the same name except for the middle name so there's only one of me in the whole world as far as I can tell. I'm sure, at some point, there’ll be another Richard but at this point, I'm pretty easy to find online.Jeremy Lesniak:Is that a Polish name? Because my father and grandfather did the same thing.Richard Bejtlich:Maybe, yeah? My dad, he’s Richard Chester and his father’s name was Chester Lewis, I think from his, I don’t remember where that’s from and then before that, it's just Polish versions of all those names.Jeremy Lesniak:It's funny, years ago when I was in IT., I had a client call me up and say your last name is Polish. I said yeah. Do you practice any names with Polish traditions and I said I don’t know what any of those are so I must not be. She was very sad.Richard Bejtlich:One of my daughters really got into being Polish. At their school they had International Day and so both girls, actually, decided they want to dress up in Polish costumes and we didn’t really even know what that meant so my wife did some searching online and found these no kidding made in Poland traditional girl costumes so they were very, very into it and as a result of that, we sort of got reintroduced to one of my great aunts who’s since passed away but she was like 95, 96 and we visited her and she’s very, very Polish. That’s the generation where their father and their older brother came from Poland like in the early 1900s so yeah, that was pretty cool and then, I met a Polish girl in my Krav Maga school and I knew right away she was Polish and even had a t-shirt with the Polish flag on it and that was the lady I ended up writing the stretching book with so yeah, it's funny.Jeremy Lesniak:Oh cool! Is that the one that’s on my desk? I figured I sent that to you. I have the book right here on my desk.Richard Bejtlich:There you go, yeah! You won’t see me in there except, I think, at the end of the bio shot. I was not the guy you want taking pictures on showing you how inflexible I am but yeah, that was a fun project.Jeremy Lesniak:How did you end up doing that?Richard Bejtlich:I got really burnt out in cyber security several years ago and I wanted to do something different so I basically took a year off and during that time, I thought I would like to work on a project that has absolutely nothing to do with my former life. Well, maybe not nothing to do because I had written books before. I had published books before but they have been with established publishing houses and they had been on cybersecurity so when I had met this lady, Anna Wonsley, her Polish name is [00:06:09] she said hey, I always wanted to write a book and I know how to do stretching because that’s one of my therapy expertise and I was like oh, I've written several books and I'm actually looking for a new project so yeah, you really know how to do this? Yeah, of course. I don’t know anything about stretching but I know how to write books, I know how to take care of almost everything else. My wife, she’s not quite a professional photographer but she’s certified, she’s taken classes and all that. She can take the photos and the stuff we don’t know how to do, we’ll get some help and it took about a year. It was really difficult having 2 people work on any project. As you might imagine, you can extend the timeline quite a bit but at the end of it, we wrote this book and it's one of my favorite projects of all time just because it was a break from what I've been doing before that was something completely different that I wanted to try.Jeremy Lesniak:You just kind of exposed something that I find really interesting in the martial arts and I don’t know if listeners caught it or not. You mentioned that you are not terribly flexible and you wrote a book on flexibility and as martial artists, we tend to think that the ability to do something is a one to one correlation with your ability to teach it and of course, if you go to anything that’s not martial arts, you realize that it's not true at all. Go to any gymnastics club and look at who's coaching and you'll, quite often, see a big discrepancy that kind of invalidates that one to one correlation so was it an asset in this project because you weren’t flexible?Richard Bejtlich:Yes, there's a couple of lessons I've taken away from the book writing process and I learned these with my cybersecurity books early on. There are very few readers who are experts. Always by definition, most readers, the people who are buying books or instructional or other educational materials, they're trying to learn something so they're most likely going to be beginners so when you're writing, unless you're writing for a very, very narrow audience and that’s generally not going to be at a level of a book. That’s going to be more like some kind of academic paper or specialized presentation, most books are written for more of that beginner mind so if you as the author don’t bring the beginner mind to the project, you're going to lose your audience right away. I've tried to sort of work my way through that where some of my earlier works I've said this is the level of knowledge I expect you to have because I'm not just going to repeat the words to get you to this point. Read these other 5 books before you read mine but definitely from the stretching book, I was not the subject matter expert. Anna was. She knew. She’s a NASM certified trainer, she had all these routines, she had worked with clients. She’s like ok, I want to do this. I just don’t know how to write. I am Polish. I speak English but my English is not going to be as smooth as a native speaker and I had the organizational skills, I had the photographer. I even converted my basement into a studio. That’s what you see in the pictures. We bought professional lights, all that so I provided, not only sort of the infrastructure to get the writing done but also that beginner’s mind of are we going to provide what someone is looking for some help needs? Is this going to speak to them?Jeremy Lesniak:And you mentioned earlier that working on projects with someone else can often extend the timeline and I've certainly found that to be true. I think if anybody thinks back to doing group projects in high school, they would remember that. How long did this book take?Richard Bejtlich:It took about a year.Jeremy Lesniak:It's thick! It's thicker than, I think, just about any non-academic book on stretching I've seen is and the photos are great. Listeners are going to think you’ve paid me for this.Richard Bejtlich:I appreciate that. It's not a giant book compared to the ones I've written before. My first book that I wrote, I was approached by a publisher in 2000 and they said we want you to write a book on cybersecurity and I said I'm not ready. I've only been in the field a few years. There's a lot more that I want to say about a certain topic. Let’s just keep in touch. 3 years later, I said, I think I'm ready. I've been doing consulting, dealing with a lot of different types of intrusions. I said I think I'm ready. They had to cut me off at just over 800 pages because they said we got to get this book out, right? So, what I did, I said fine, lets cut it here and the next 10 chapters are going to be my 2nd book which came out exactly right away afterwards. It was kind of like the 1st book was the constitution and then the 2nd book was the bill of rights. That’s what I kind of thought of it because I had so much to say and in the process of writing, you learn a lot. My approach has always been if I were new to the subject, what would I want to know? If I wanted to learn about this subject, what are the topics that I need to understand and what you find when you're writing something is you don’t know all the answers. You have to go out, either find them or you have to discover them yourself in the process of research and experimentation and all that and I've always been more of a practitioner type of person. I'm not very big on theory and sort of other aspects of writing so I've taken that approach with all the books and when we wrote the stretching book, we said what are the things that we want to cover? Ok, these 3 topics. What are the things that people need to know about these 3 topics? A, B, C so once you have the outline, I don’t want to say the book writes itself because it does not but you get a much better idea of where you need to go and that, I give that advice to many aspiring authors, to people who are working that I talk to. I don’t do it as a profession or anything like that but people who say hey, I always want to write a book on this, what do you think and that’s some of the advice I give.Jeremy Lesniak:It's funny because that’s my process too. I've written a number of books and started a bunch of outlines and it starts with a topic and then what are the things you have to say and it just becomes an outline with more and more and more subsections and if you really, if you follow it down as far as you want to go, the deepest ones become the sentences and you just write and write and those are your headings and there’s your book.Richard Bejtlich:Isn’t it amazing that the process that hopefully many of us learned in grade school actually can work?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah! There aren’t a whole lot of things from elementary school that I think I use today. Long division doesn’t come out very often, fractions, my multiplication tables aren’t common but how to write something in a convincing, if not compelling, way certainly happens often.Richard Bejtlich:I think if we had educators take more of an approach, and I think this happens these days, when I was in school decades ago, I don’t think this is the case but if they took more of an approach and said we are trying to equip you with tools to interact with the world, it would make it easier for me to understand why I was doing something so that process we just talked about for writing, this is a tool that you'll be able to use to organize your thoughts so that later on, if you need to express them whether in a presentation or to prospect an audience, whatever, this is the tool you have. Calculus, on the surface, is exceptionally boring but it is a tool to interact with the world to describe a certain set of conditions like if you need to find this answer, this is a tool we can use. That was never ever the way it was presented to me. It was here’s the way to do an integral, here’s the way to do a derivative and it just meant nothing. It's a process and I think there's an actually interesting parallel with martial arts. If you say this is a tool that we’re using to interact with the world, whether that’s a combative situation or a stressful situation or an area where you should be situational where these are tools that you can use as opposed to this is just something we do here and if you want to be part of this community, you have to emulate it.Jeremy Lesniak:I think that’s a great point for me to poke at a little bit because one of the things that I've come to learn about you and listeners, I don’t remember how long you’ve been around but as long as I remember back in doing this show, I remember seeing your name in the comments. Either you snuck in and made such a splash and I forgot you weren’t there at some point or you’ve been around for a while. When did you find the show?Richard Bejtlich:I got back into martial arts as a thing I was doing a lot in 2016 so my guess is, with that initial surge of I want to learn everything I can about this topic, I found your podcast and started bingeing. Any podcast I decide to jump into, I don’t start with wherever the author is, I go right to episode 1 so that’s what I did. It took me several months to catch up to where you were and been here ever since.Jeremy Lesniak:So that would mean somewhere around a year and a half after we started the show and your comments have often been almost academic in the way you look at things and I've come and I'm going to be completely transparent here, I've come to learn that if I get a notification that you’ve made a comment on something, it is often going to be critical but not in the negative way that we’re used to on social media.Richard Bejtlich:That’s cool. I've taken a lot of what you’ve said to heart and I think in my late 40s now and earlier 40s as well, I've chilled out quite a bit. I think in the early days of, I can say, in my 20s when I was, you know how you're trying to make your way through the world and figure out who you are and what you stand for, there's a sense that if you're not out there saying what you think then you're not sort of defined as a person, I think that’s what it comes across a lot especially in young people’s comments. I think they're trying to define who they are and they treat any difference to that as a threat and so, I mean, my early days at security, I would say this is the way it is and if you don’t believe this, I can't understand, I was very strident about that but these days, I'm like well, listen, people have different points of view and the world isn’t going to end. It's interesting, though, in the age of coronavirus right now, some of these consequences can be life-threatening but that’s also a lens you can use to compare to everything else where you just say look, chill out. It's not the end of the world.Jeremy Lesniak:And I think that that’s my perspective on you and why I want you to have you on the show is this interesting ability to express yourself in the way that I actually really appreciate because you'll comment on something and it makes me think and anybody that’s long been listening to the show, that’s really the entirety of the goal here is to get people to think, to think for themselves, to listen what these guests say. I bring on guests that I know are going to say things I disagree with because I don’t want to live in an echo chamber. I want to hear what people think about martial arts all over the world, different experiences, different styles because I believe that makes me better and I would assume with people listening more than a few episodes that they're finding similar, if not the same, value that it's making them better as martial artists by considering these things and you add to that conversation by making me and anyone else who see your comment consider things so it doesn’t surprise me. I didn’t know until we got on today that you were in information security. I didn’t know that you're yet another of these IT martial arts intersections we’ve had so many on but it makes sense now, in hindsight.Richard Bejtlich:Yeah. I think part of it to is I have had an exceptionally broad exposure to different martial arts styles. I don’t know how many white belts I've had but it's probably on the order of a dozen and that is the result of one, being in the military and two, just moving so I have to be at different locations and try different styles and so, I haven't tried every style, I'm not Guro Dan Inosanto who is a black belt at every style. Like I said, I'm basically a white belt at everything with the exception of a few that I've managed to stick around for a few years in but as a result of that, many times when people are talking, I can think oh yeah, I've tried that. I remember in my very first Shotokan form or I remember when I tried Filipino Martial Arts and yeah, I do know that some people call it Arnis, some people call it Eskrima or Kali and it basically depends from what part of the island you come from so a lot of these things I've tried a little bit so I can sort of put myself on those person’s shoes and even if I haven't, say, Aikido, I know guys who do Aikido and they're good guys so why jump on that bandwagon on people who say bad things about Aikido. Now, there are a few that I haven't tried and I don’t really know how effective they would be but at the end of the day, you made this point very well, Jeremy, I think we should influence people’s point of view. What is your purpose for training and Sifu Smith, TW Smith, he says the same thing. People have different objectives for training. If you're training simply for the community, if you just want to be part of a group, who cares really about how combat effective it is or if you're going to get slaughtered in MMA or if you're training for fitness. As long as you stay in shape, then that’s good for you. If your goal though is, let’s say you're in the military or I've trained with people who are, what are the…the air marshals. Their skillset, what they're looking for is completely different and they might not care about community or whatever. They need to know things that will keep themselves and their passengers and such alive so if you keep that in mind then this person who's making a comment,  they're coming from a perspective of this group versus another, then we can all get along.Jeremy Lesniak:Well-said. 12 white belts.Richard Bejtlich:Something like that.Jeremy Lesniak:I think we got to roll back here. Let’s go back to the beginning. What was the 1st one?Richard Bejtlich:When I was a kid, I wanted to do karate because my friend Paul, I thought, was just a ninja. I saw him fall backwards off of a deck when we were playing some outside games as kids and he landed on his feet and ran away and I thought wow, this is amazing, how did he do that and I asked him and he said oh, I do karate and so I talked to, I think I was about 4th grade I had learned about this and I talked to my parents and they said you have one choice. You can either, you can only do 1 after school activity of any kind and I was a cub scout at the time and really like scouting and I ended up staying with that so I didn’t really do an organized martial arts until I was a cadet at the Air Force academy in 1990 and as a cadet, you have to box your freshman year and I ended up boxing intramurally as well, my sophomore year because I was the only guy who was scrawny enough to fit into one of the weight categories. I can't remember which one it was but it was ridiculously low and that was a bad experience. We also had to do combatives so the Air Force version of early combatives, we did that, and then I took, for gym, I took judo and I made the mistake of bringing, well, let me just finish, but I also took as just after school club type thing and it was karate and it turned out to be Shotokan karate and I mentioned earlier judo. I took judo earlier as a gym class and I made the mistake, this is how green I was, I made the mistake of thinking I can use my karate gi in my judo class and after a few rips and tears, I realized well, this is not the right thing to do so I borrowed a gi like everybody else did but that was how I started back then at the Air Force academy, 1990, 1991 doing those 4.Jeremy Lesniak:Cool. I've actually been out to the Air Force academy. I was part of a work group in class and probably the only person there out of 2 or 300 high school juniors who had no intention of going. I was just like you're putting me up for free, I'm going to come hang out.Richard Bejtlich:Did you go to the, was it the summer scientific seminar or was this something else?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, yeah.Richard Bejtlich:Oh it was? Oh, neat! Wait, what year did you go?Jeremy Lesniak:That would have been summer of ’96.Richard Bejtlich:Ok, that’s cool. Some of the kids who were younger than me probably were showing you around because I graduated in ’94 and I went to that same program in the summer of ’89.Jeremy Lesniak:I think the last thing I’ll share because you'll get this and it's a fun anecdote for the listeners, I don’t think I shared this before, I was very small. I was probably 40 pounds less than I am now and dorm Olympics were a thing and the way they presented that was this was something that all of you did at some point and I was the smallest person, of course, in the group and I was the one strapped with a helmet for the not PC of a term now but the midget toss. They actually pulled out all the mattresses, lined the hallway and 4 of the largest boys picked me up and hurled me down the hallway for distance. It was a fun day.Richard Bejtlich:It is amazing what people will figure out to entertain themselves when you're essentially, I don’t want to say quite a prisoner but you're almost a prisoner for 4 years because you basically can't leave or your ability to leave is very limited and the years we’re talking about are all pre-internet with maybe 1 phone call a week. I never participated or had that sort of thing but we had plenty of other similar activities that we, young people, come up with when they have nothing else to do in their dorms.Jeremy Lesniak:You come out of the academy with experience in boxing and combatives and karate and judo and then what?Richard Bejtlich:Yeah, so I went to a Master’s program at Harvard right out of school which is really awesome because it gave me a chance at a civilian education experience after spending 4 years in the military setting and the Kung Fu TV series was being shown on reruns in TNT and I watched one of the episodes. I didn’t see it in the early ‘70s. I was too young. I was alive but just, I was a baby and I watched Kung Fu and I thought this is so awesome! This is amazing! So, immediately I went to the yellow pages because again, the internet wasn’t that big a thing yet and sure enough, place where I'm living, there's a Kung Fu school right down the street, a couple miles away and I still remember I called up this school and I spoke with Sifu Michael Macaris and it was Michael Macaris Kung Fu academy in Billerica, Massachusetts and talked to him on the phone.Jeremy Lesniak:I know that name.Richard Bejtlich:Do you really?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, yeah.Richard Bejtlich:He would be a fascinating guy to have on. You know you have your question of who has influenced you the most and you know you're not supposed to say a teacher because he’s not my teacher now but this is a guy who I've only trained with for 2 years and yet, he has had just a profound effect on the way I see martial arts. He’s a traditional Kung Fu teacher. It's basically forms, a little bit of kickboxing but his philosophy and his outlook on life and the way he tries to live is just so inspirational and so yeah, I train with him for 2 years, I went to his school and I went all in. I trained as a student. Eventually, I was helping to teach, help teach the kids’ classes which, if you ever had to teach, I know you had but listeners, if you ever had to teach 4 and 5-year olds, you know what I mean, what that’s like. Quite an experience. Yeah, that was a wonderful 2 years training at that school and once again, I had to move because I finished my program and I had to go to Air Force Intel School in San Angelo, Texas and I went there and again, I looked. Ok, what can I train here and there was basically, really, I seem to remember only one choice and that was Mr. Baker’s Taekwondo school. I can't remember what exactly it was called but I called him up and sure enough, he’s like yeah, sure. Come on by, we’ll see what you think and he was an ITF taekwondo instructor and I remember thinking this is completely different but it's a little bit like karate so I think I can do this and I remember the first time sparring with him and he was just a quiet guy. He had a goatee. He was very nice but I remember sparring and thinking this guy has a power in him that I have not seen and then I felt a brush of air against my left temple and I looked at him and he could tell by the look on my face and he said, yeah that was my right foot. I thought oh my goodness, this is so completely different than what I had experienced with the Kung Fu school.Jeremy Lesniak:It was your own Billy Jack moment.Richard Bejtlich:Yeah, it was just off the charts! I just had no idea that anybody can even move like that because my Kung Fu sifu, he was more like a kickboxer type, very heavy in the boxing and this guy was with the feet, I just couldn’t believe it but also at his school, he was learning Arnis, modern Arnis, the Presa system and so, he had integrated, he had separate classes for mostly double stick in a little espada or a little stick and knife and so I picked that out and I got the little vest and I started doing that kind of stuff which I really loved but again, I had to move after a little less than a year and I moved to San Antonio, Texas. I looked for my styles, none of them were there or the ones that I found, they didn’t really seem that good but I found a Wing Chun school and I think at this point, I went through the period that everyone does in their early martial arts career which is the Bruce Lee adulation phase and I remember learning more about Bruce Lee and hearing Wing Chun was the art that he first learned so it must be amazing and I went to Wing Chun school and this was my first encounter with a bad teacher and there were signs that it took me awhile to recognize but not that long, maybe a couple months before I was out of there and the signs where things like whenever an attractive woman would pass by outside the school, the instructor would stop class, leered at her and then resume teaching which I had never encountered before. That was bizarre. The other thing he did quite a bit that I remember to this day was he would strike the students really hard, like really violently and even groin-type striking the students and people just accepted this as this is fine, this is proof that you need to improve your pigeon toe stance, whatever that is, that you're doing and I realized this is not the place for me. I don’t know what's up with this guy and by that time, the internet was like a thing and you could do research and I did research on who his instructor was and who his instructor was and there was a history of ambushes of other Wing Chun instructors and crazy violence and I thought this is not in line with what I want to study so I found another school but this was an American Kenpō school and I tried that and totally different. The instructor was a guy, he raised dogs on his farm outside of San Antonio. He was just a good guy and the other instructors were cool and he would bring in people from the outside where we had, we actually had Ed Parker Jr., the son of the founder, show up and teach a seminar. We went out to dinner with him. There was a mix of that community but also the other things. He’d had a kickboxing fitness class that I took just to stay in shape. It was all working pretty nicely there but again, I had to move because I actually got out of the Air Force at that point but when I came to the Northern Virginia area, I looked for a couple schools but I didn’t find anything I like or the instructors that I thought were teaching in a way that I wanted to so I ended up taking a break and that break lasted 15 years.Jeremy Lesniak:15? Really?Richard Bejtlich:Yeah, I think I kind of lost myself, honestly. I got into a new job. I started to have health problems around 2006, 2007 and foolishly, I thought well this is what happens when you start to get old like I was in my high 30s approaching 40 and I thought well, I guess this is what happens rather than saying there's probably a medical condition here and eventually, I basically self-diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis. Thank you, WebMD or all the online medical stuff but it was true. I ended up seeing a rheumatoid doctor, an RA specialist and she did the test and she said yeah, you actually have this. She said basically figured out what you have and it took about half a year before we found a combination of medications to give me some relief and that was in 2015 so by 2015, I had gotten myself back together and my joints didn’t feel like they were eating themselves all the time and at the end of that year, I decided, I sort of did some introspection and I said what's the thing that I really enjoyed in life that was sort of the thing that I did? It wasn’t related to my family, my kids, my wife, what is it that I really like to do and I listened to that small still voice that we all have and is often drowned out by the noise of the world and even our other parts of our mind and I remember thinking I really like martial arts. That was something I really like to do. Why don’t I try that again and this is, you're probably not going to believe this but I think I ca thank Master Ken for finding my system that I went to next. I think it might have been because Master Ken was on your show or I don’t remember how but somehow I looked at Master Ken and I saw some of his videos and I saw an act he did at a Krav Maga global ceremony in the UK and I thought, this is funny obviously, this guy’s hilarious and I recognized immediately he was a Kenpō guy by the way he moved and everything but then I said, what's this Krav Maga and I heard a little more about it through popular media become popular with the Bourne movies and all that and so I looked at it and sure enough, there's a Krav Maga school a few miles away. Maybe not a few miles, maybe a half hour away but definitely within driving distance and they did something very smart which I recommend anyone who’s a martial arts instructor out there. They had an 8-week trial program. Not free, you pay for it. As a consumer, you say this has to have some value. Not to say if it's an 8-week program that’s free, you don’t value it but it cost money and you're expected to show up for the 8 lessons and this and that and because it was 8 weeks and maybe think if I don’t like this, I don’t have to continue. I’ll just try the 8 weeks. I did the same thing several years later with a Kendo program. I said I would just like to try kendo. It's 8 weeks, twice a week and if I don’t like it, when it’s done, I just won’t go back so I did this 8-week Krav Maga program and I loved it right away. It was exactly what I was looking for. It had a good instructor, heavy fitness component in Krav, I like the motion. Emphasis on fighting which later on I would decide I didn’t like so much but it seemed to check all the boxes and even the universe was conspiring against me to not have me go because I signed up for, in January of 2016, right in the middle of winter and I got into a car accident driving back from class one night because I decided to go even though it was real snowy out and the people around here don’t know how to drive in the winter like those of us from New England. I was rear-ended basically but I still kept going and after that, I signed up and I ended up studying there for 3 and a half years.Jeremy Lesniak:So for 3 and a half years, there's another transition?Richard Bejtlich:Yeah, there's one more.Jeremy Lesniak:Keep ‘em going!Richard Bejtlich:Along the way with Krav, I realized a couple of things. One of them was it's very much kind of an aggression based system like short, sharp violence to deal with the problem and extract yourself from the situation which has its place. The situational awareness aspect is great, the de-escalation aspects, the specialized training, all of that is really wonderful but at the end of the day, that’s really not my personality. I'm not confrontational. Whenever I spar, I don’t want to be aggressive. I'm not like I'm going to kill this person, that is not me. That’s not in my DNA. Second aspect was whenever we did the ground parts of it, initially, I thought I would never do this because we didn’t do a whole lot of newaza in judo so I didn’t have a lot of ground experience. I did like wrestling in gym class like everybody in new England does when you're a kid but when I ended up doing it in the Krav class, I thought oh this actually pretty cool and I had a lot of friends who were into Brazilian jiujitsu even with some guys who would eventually be at black belt levels that takes 10 years or so and so I realized, there might be something to this. I should probably check this out and there were a couple of, there was a school way far south of me that had these 5-hour intensive seminars and they had one of them that was all BJJ, 5 hours just come 6 AM to 11 AM and just do this so I went and I tried it and I was like you know what, I could do this and it turns out, I ended up seeing Professor Pedro Sauer’s video on YouTube from 1994, 95 or so where he had one of these Gracie challenge matches against a bodybuilder who is known as Mr. Utah, Lance Bachelor who outweighed him by 100 pounds and I watched the video and I thought this guy is my size. Professor’s 150 pounds, 5’9”, 5’10”, same as the size as me and here he is fighting this guy who just, by all accounts, just destroy him and he didn’t and I've seen the UFC when I was a kid, when I was younger and I remember watching UFC 4 with my dad and just marveling at Royce Gracie but it never clicked for me that this is what this is but I realized Professor Sauer was a mile from my Krav school. His headquarters for his entire 150 academy affiliation where he personally teaches is within walking distance of my Krav school. I should at least see who this guy is as a fan of the martial arts, I should check it out and I went over there and I think it was January 30th 2017, I took my first class. It was a Gracie combatives lesson because they teach that there in addition to Professor’s style and I said yep, I'm going to try this. People were chill. You were not fighting to the death. You were not, if you turned on the aggression that was not the approach Professor takes. He is very much roll for life type person. I think he’s going to be 60 this year or may already be 60 and he tells us all the time, if you fight like fight to the death all the time, you're going to end up with Rickson with a bad back, Professor like with no cartilage in his shoulders. This is not the way to be. Don’t make the same mistakes we did when we were in our 20s and 30s and change the way you train so you could train for longevity and you can enjoy the art when you're old and so that was the message I needed to hear as someone who was at that point was 46, I think. If I'm going to be rolling with a 20 year old, I don’t want them thinking that they need to take my head off in order to prove how good they are. I need a different sort of culture and that’s not to say, every gym is different. Every martial art school is different but when you find the one that fits what you're looking for, that’s what will keep you around and so, that’s where we are now. I ended up, once I got my graduate rank in Krav, I switched because it was very difficult for me to keep both systems in my head at the same time, honestly and I switched just to jiujitsu full time and I’d be training now if it weren’t for coronavirus but because of my rheumatoid arthritis, I can't train or even if they were open, I wouldn’t train because I'm considered that vulnerable population. It may be months before I ever go back but I will one day.Jeremy Lesniak:When we talk to people who have trained in a number of different styles, one of two things happens. Either, and this is me, the first thing you train becomes the lens through which you see everything else or you tend to search, hunt, try to find that thing that resonates. Is it fair to say that BJJ is the thing that resonates for you?Richard Bejtlich:I think so. Here’s the thing, Jeremy, I am not particularly physically gifted. When I was in high school, I was an athlete who, the reason I could be an athlete was I could run in a straight direction for a distance. That was my skill so I was captain of the track team but again, that was because I could run. I was not a good runner. I eventually became a good runner but it took me, essentially a year before I could do that and that’s actually something I'm really proud of. I was the most improved cross country runner because I was dead last of 60 kids and I was 3rd fastest by the time I was a senior but that is the only thing I had done really otherwise beyond the martial arts so when it comes to learning all these different styles, I was just not that physically gifted and I, it took me 3 years to get my blue belt in BJJ. Part of that was I took some time off to focus on Krav because the grading for the G1 test was really difficult for me but I am not the type of person who's going to fly through the ranks based on skill or learning ability. It probably took me a year just to be able to watch the instructor teach something and to be able to turn around and at least try to replicate what I saw. It sounds like, there's some people who can just do that very, very instinctually or they even know what to do, really but for me, I'm very good with sort of normal academic book testing and such but when it comes to integrating that physicality and turning it into something, it took me a long time. I mean, only this year recently or only in the last 6 months when I've been rolling have I been able to pull off some stuff and only really from a defensive perspective like when I'm rolling with a purple belt or even a good white belt or blue belt, I can stay out of trouble now. It took me a long time just to be able to protect myself from getting submitted repeatedly so I just don’t have it from these other arts. A lot of the things that I learned in other arts just don’t translate into a grappling art especially a ground grappling art so I had to learn everything and because I'm a slow learner, it's just taken me a long time to be able to put any of that together.Jeremy Lesniak:How did you end up running track then?Richard Bejtlich:Oh, so when we talk about the different reasons you do martial arts, one of them is community, I did it completely for community. I decided during the end of my sophomore year that I wanted to change who I was in school. One of my goals, and this is really kind of I don’t even know how to characterize it, it's really amazing when I think back on it, was there was a table where kids sit together who were basically the captains of the different sports teams and all of the kids I admired were sitting at that table and I remember thinking I wanted to sit at that lunch table one day and so I said I need to reinvent myself. I need to find new friend, not that my old friends were back or anything. They were doing some stuff that eventually turned into bad things, I'm glad I wasn’t involved in that but I just decided I wanted to reboot myself kind of and I thought what's one way I could do that? I thought well, maybe I should join a sports team and again, I looked and said what skills do I have? I can run in a straight line. Ok, I will join the cross country team and it was grueling and the best part of it was when it was over but I was on a team and being part of a team, you're invited to things like hey, you want to join us to where we’re going out or whatever? Whatever stupid thing teenagers do and so that’s why I joined the sports team, the cross country team and I did indoor and outdoor track too and it turned out that was very, very helpful later on when I applied to the Air Force academy because if I have not had that athletic base, I would have had a much more miserable time in basic training and survival school and all that kind of stuff. The funny thing is it's cool to see my older daughter now. She has gone with the same exact process. She’s joined her high school wrestling team. It's a co-ed team and she went to the sports night or it was club and sports night and she was just walking around in the big gym and a kid walked up to her and said hey, you look athletic, have you thought about trying the wrestling team and she had never thought, there was even such a thing possible for whatever reason she said I'm going to try the wrestling team even though she had done swimming when she was a little bit younger and it was the best thing that happened to her. She’s on this team now. She has a whole new group of friends. She made it into that really difficult part of being a high school freshman and she even enjoyed wrestling and I worry much less about her knowing that if anybody threatens her or whatever, she can put the hurt on them and they're not going to expect it probably so if you're anyone who's in high school, if you might be listening, join your wrestling team. I think it's great for many reasons. The camaraderie, the mental attitude and so forth, of course if you're on an abusive or a bad wrestling team, you don’t want to be a part of that but if can find a good wrestling team, then it's worthwhile and it's one of those things, you really only have a small window of opportunity to do, basically high school and college.Jeremy Lesniak:And wrestling is a just phenomenal discipline just for overall health. I've met high school wrestlers that their knowledge of their body, their strength, their endurance even years later not having done anything for 5 years, just in incredible shape.Richard Bejtlich:Yeah, I think for girls, it’s really wonderful. I think a lot of people were surprised when women’s no gi jiujitsu took off like it did. Many people thought well, maybe like gi jiujitsu, Stephan Kesting has talked about this quite a bit but no gi just took off and I think wrestling is just the next level of that and it's for younger people and you're seeing some crossover. There's a young lady in my daughter’s team who did judo for many years so she goes in there and she takes down her opponents with judo and then she’d go straight into kesa gatame and pins them which is great. She wins matches in some cases in seconds. We have another young lady who is I think she is the first or she is the first from our region to ever win at a state level in a boys’ tournament and she got to that point because she’s been studying Brazilian jiujitsu since she was 4 or 5 and her body awareness and her strength and her ability is just unbelievable and her brother is also the same situation. She’s a junior, he’s a freshman and so, the same story. They have these skills, they have this attitude and it's definitely good. The thing is if you’ve missed that window like me, I missed all that, it's ok. There's something out there that’s good for you at whatever age you're at. You can't join an MMA gym at age 50 or 60 and decide you're going to become the next Conor McGregor or whatever but there's other things you can do so if you ever thought about trying it, I would suggest go ahead and just find the right one for you.Jeremy Lesniak:I want to go back to that break, that time off that you took because you said it was 15 years and that’s a lot longer than most people. When we talk about people taking breaks, it's often and we’ve got a decent sized sample set now from this show. We’ve talked to people who maybe they hit 12, 13 and they step away and they find it college maybe shortly after so almost 15 years or you get people who train into their 20s and then, family happens and they start doing it with their kids so that might be 8, 10 years when we hear some of them but what strikes me as interesting and the way you talk about it is even though you’ve had that time off, the way you talked about going back, there wasn’t any, not hearing any apprehension, no tentativeness in the way you talk about it. Where you anxious about starting again or did it feel like the right thing like destiny?Richard Bejtlich:I was definitely anxious and this is a story that the others of the Krav school tell people sometimes. I had just had surgery on my back in December of that year and when I say back surgery, it wasn’t like structural. I think I had something on my back and the skin was taken off and so I thought ok, well, shoot, I had this surgery. The doctor said I'm not supposed to basically do anything but I'm starting this class on January 6thor whenever it was so I remember I asked the doctor, what really do I have to be careful of and he's like be careful of stretching, lifting, these various activities so I thought ok, maybe I can find a way because I didn’t really know anything about what Krav Maga will be like but I thought eh, I’d just be careful. I’ll take care of myself, I’ll be alright so I go to the class and I'm waiting to participate and I'm seeing what people are doing and I'm thinking oh my god, this is way more active, this is way more aggressive than I've ever imagined based on any of the styles I had done. There is stuff on the ground and my goodness, am I in the right place and I remember, I actually stood up and I started walking towards the door because I had decided I need to come back later and the school owner intercepted me and she said oh, Richard, hi or are you Richard? Here’s your card for class. She didn’t know I was leaving but she unconsciously kept me from leaving or subconsciously kept me from leaving and so I said ok, fine and wouldn’t you know it, the first thing we do when we got on the mat, Krav Maga, at least the Krav Maga global system, most everything starts with a warmup and a game of some kind and sometimes the 2 are combined and one of the games that we’re doing, Touch the Shoulder so it's supposed to teach you awareness and a little bit of blocking and again, it's just a warm up type thing but what are people doing? They're reaching over and grabbing your shoulder which is basically where I had my whole back was taped up so I had a really great incentive to protect that right side from all the people who were trying to touch it but I made it through. I made it through the class and that was fine. I went the next week and everything worked out.Jeremy Lesniak:What was the emotional situation getting back into martial arts after so long?Richard Bejtlich:It was euphoria. I was so pleased to find this thing I had missed and I had kind of knew I missed it but not really. Not until I was there did I really understand wow, I really missed this and I had experienced something like that a little bit with ice hockey because being from New England, everyone learns how to skate. Maybe not the best like myself but you learn something and you play with your friends on frozen ponds and all so I had played like pick up hockey and a little bit of men’s hockey in college. Not at the school but like men’s league outside the school and then when I was back in Massachusetts, I had played some men’s league hockey and even played some men’s league hockey in Virginia here as well and so I had experienced that I really enjoy this, I look forward to it. I try to find ways to improve myself. I did some camps, that sort of thing, but until I had not been doing anything physical because of the issue with the arthritis and also, I've had some surgeries in my right shoulder for injuries that I had incurred as a cadet that I didn’t even realize and never been fixed. I just lived with it forever so you're probably hearing at this point that I had this tendency just to suffer in silence and that’s only something recently that I have decided no, you don’t need to do that. If you have a problem, you can go out and try to fix it. It's not your burden to just carry these issues but once I had gotten back to martial arts, I realized wow, I really missed this and I went through my normal blitz of are there any books about this topic? Are there any videos? Podcasts? I found your podcasts and I just sort of immersed myself in it and now, with my martial history team, I'm looking at sort of a different take on all of this but I do sort of get really caught up as sort of part of my personality.Jeremy Lesniak:Tell us about martial history. What's going on with that?Richard Bejtlich:Anyone who’s trained in the martial arts will hear stories like if you're in Chinese martial arts or some type of Kung Fu, Kung Fu is 5,000 years old and was founded by Bodhidharma who took it from the East. He taught the Shaolin temple and the Shaolin monks, the originator of all martial arts, whatever or if you hear Krav Maga, you'll hear Krav Maga was invented by Imi Lichtenfeld in the 1950s in Israel and he taught everybody else or if you're in Brazilian jiujitsu, you'll hear the Gracies learned from Mitsuyo Maeda who’s Count Koma and they invented it and whatever. These are all these stories that we tell each other and when you sort of try to look for history like documentation or anything that’s reliable about those topics, you learn that it's very, very different. The question is how do you know what's reliable and what's not and so over the course of the last 4 years or so, I have been slowly acquiring a library of books that I find to be useful and it occurred to me that I could probably be of service if I were to share what I have learned and what I continue to learn and continue to research with people who have the same question so is it true that those 3 stories I told you, are any of them true? And it turns out we’re at the point, generally like over the last 10 years, more and more credentialed, reliable researchers are producing works that examine this sort of thing and a perfect example that you're well aware of because you profiled him on this show was Alex Gillis, A Killing Art, about the history of taekwondo. That book, I read it and it blew my mind. I had studied taekwondo and on ITF with General Choi and all that. When you read what happened, it's just amazing! It's not at all what you're told in class and so what I'm doing with martial history team is first, I'm doing a literature review so I'm just trying to find out what's the best sources we have out there on various topics. Initially, I was sort of concentrating on the Japanese arts more directly on the grappling arts because I have more interest and experience with that but I've also expanded it beyond that like basic jiujitsu led to judo which led to jujutsu, the original. I've expanded now out into the historical European martial arts and while I'm interested in sort of what's available in documentation, I'm particularly interested in the grappling aspects of it because you'll even encounter some people in the Japanese arts or the Asian arts who believe well, the European guys, any grappling they may have, they just learned it because when the Dutch and the Portuguese send their traders to Japan in the 16th century, they just observed what the Japanese are doing and they took that back to Europe and that’s how they know how to grapple. The myth of the single origin is alive and well so there are various topics within the history of martial arts that I'm paying attention to and my goal is to identify and promote the best sources we have out there. If I were to have a stretch goal, if at some point I'm able to have any kind of financial association with this, I’d like to have grants and awards for people who could write either papers or even better yet, books on some of these topics. I would love to see somebody like Alex Gillis or Matthew Polly who wrote the wonderful Bruce Lee biography which is another one of this like here’s the truth about Bruce Lee, whether you like it or not. This is who this guy was but I’d love to see people like that write like the story of the Gracie family like what really happened with the Gracies. There’s been some stuff that out there but to have a professional biographer write about that would be really interesting so at this point with the martial history team, there's a Facebook page and I sort of produce regular content there, little bits of things that I'm looking at, things that are a little bit more in depth, I put on the associated blog for Martial History Team like last night, I just wrote a little article about the American College of Physical Jiujitsu. It's something like that. It's this grand title that was essentially assigned by 2 gentlemen who lived in Boston in the early 1900s and they wrote what you might consider to be the first infomercial for jiujitsu, complete with pictures of a guy with a big belly who apparently after 15 weeks of my special jiujitsu course available by correspondence now has a trim figure and it's just hilarious and they have a picture of this building and it's actually been photoshopped so that the title of their school is printed at the top and yet, you'll find the building today on Boylston street in Boston and there's, you could tell there was never a sign there so it's that sort of thing. I'm trying to bring a solid research with sourced references based on documentation and what we can actually learn about the history of these arts and let people read it and see what they think.Jeremy Lesniak:And how about those 3 examples that you gave? Bodhidharma and…Richard Bejtlich:You want to hear the stories on these?Jeremy Lesniak:I just…are you willing to share? I'm wondering if you'll give people the cliff notes on the truth or not.Richard Bejtlich:Oh yeah, if you want the Bodhidharma story, there's a couple of really great references. One is Peter Lorge and his book, Chinese martial arts. The other one is a guy named Meir Shahan and his book is called The Shaolin Monastery. You read those books and these are both academic. Actually, what's kind of cool about this field is you can both be an academic and a practitioner so Pete, he’s done martial arts but I think most recently, he’s doing jiujitsu and Shahan is similar. He does Japanese art, I believe but in both those cases, what you learn is that to the extent that Bodhidharma existed. He probably existed but there's very likely no chance that he brought physical arts with him but he can be credited with introducing Chan or Zen Buddhism into China and that’s what he should be remembered for and it's not to denigrate him but to say, no, it's important. It's just that he didn’t sit in a cave, stare at a wall for 9 years, invent Kung Fu and teach the shaolin monks. That’s basically not…they go into it very extensively in their book so that’s what I’ll just say with those guys. With the Gracies, the Gracies should, in my opinion and the opinion of the few people who are actually doing really decent work on this and Roberto Pedreira, his books Choque and Craze are the best resources on this. There's also a paper that was just released in the martial arts research network scholarly journal that just came out by José Cairus and the basic conclusion with the Gracies is they took judo newaza and they preserved it as a specialist art because they were not very good at throwing. When they encountered Japanese judokas who would throw them relentlessly, the Gracies could not compete with that so they specialized in newaza which, although newaza is part of judo, it was not the specialty of many of the judoka who were encountering the Gracies unless you talk about something like Kimura and you saw how that match went. The Gracies probably did not learn their, essentially, judo from Mitsuyo Maeda. They probably learned it from one of his students and when they opened up their academy, it did not open in 1925. There was no Gracie Academy in 1925. It looks more likely that the first academy was opened either in 1930 or 1931 and it was opened by one of Maeda’s students and the Gracies were the assistant instructors and within a year, that person would open that school, I think his name was Dose Perez or something like that, he had moved on and the Gracies assumed control and that became the Gracie Academy in, say, 1931. They should receive credit for preserving their style of art as a distinct art from judo because pretty much everyone else turned to judo because it was just becoming more popular and eventually it was in the Olympics and so forth and then, Rorion Gracie, Helio’s oldest son, he should be remembered as the guy who invented the UFC because prior to the UFC, jiujitsu wasn’t even a thing that big in Brazil. Jiujitsu took off in Brazil after the UFC because it was seen as a way for people who are practicing jiujitsu to have a living like they could actually do something now. They could teach, they could become fighters, they could make some money, and people saw the UFC and they want to learn and so forth and finally, what was the 3rd we talked about? Was it Krav Maga?Jeremy Lesniak:HEMA, HEMA and grappling.Richard Bejtlich:HEMA and grappling, yeah. There is no evidence that the arts that are practiced grappling-wise in Europe are derived from Japanese arts. It's simply falling for the myth of the single origin. In other words, if people punch, the idea that everyone learned a punch from one person or if people know how to do a hip throw, it's because everyone learned from that single person. As you and many others have said many times, we’ve all got, hopefully, we all got 2 arms, 2 legs and a torso and a head so the things that we can do with that skillset or that physical set are defined and the fact that you can look at 4,000 year old artwork from Beni Hasan in Egypt and see people doing many of the techniques that are around today in wrestling does not mean that people in Egypt spread that are across the world. It simply means that they documented the wrestling that they knew at that time. Now, that’s not to say that in recent years, things have not been transferred from place to place but the question is is it even possible to answer that questions. In some cases, we can. The Takenouchi-ryū school in Japan has documentation stretching back to the founding of the school in 1532 and they are the oldest continuous existing martial arts system that we know of so that’s basically to the middle of the 16th century and they have records going back to that time. They have a complete lineage. They have contemporary documents at each point of their existence so that’s an example of a system you could look at and say yes, this is how it has been in comparison to something that is much more recent, really. Most martial arts, the way we understand them, the way that we think about them with a gi and a black belt with all that, that basically dates to Jigorō Kanō and the late 19th century. He invented judo in 1882. The colored belt system which often is erroneously attributed to a gentleman who introduced it in France, he actually picked it up in London when he visited there in the 1920s and we have documentation from the Budokwai school in London where they talked about rewarding colored rank in their minutes of their school meetings. It's really cool when you start poking at these things, no, we actually have some documentation that says this existed at this point in this time and in other cases, we just don’t know because people didn’t write it down.Jeremy Lesniak:Super cool! The Bodhidharma stuff, I dug into that a little bit. The other two, I wasn’t still sure of so thanks for sharing that.Richard Bejtlich:I find it fascinating. The 2 big themes I often hear is that things are much newer than we expect them to be. Most martial arts are very recent. At least, the way we understand them. That sort of blows my mind like every time you hear, and I think the reason people want it to be older is because there's this idea that, a very Chinese idea actually, if it's older it must be better and it's been a cultural aspect of the Chinese mentality that in order to have something now be seen as good, you have to link it to something very old which is sort of the antithesis in the United States where we kind of prefer fresh, new, hey, this is a new thing, you need to try it whereas in China is if I could link this to something that is much older, that sort of gives it a grounding and a foundation and people are more willing to accept it and I think that’s why you see a lot of these arts that have Chinese derivations or association, this idea that I need to show that it really does stretch all the way back to the 5th century AD because that makes my art better than yours which is only 50 years old.Jeremy Lesniak:It's silly and I'm fully expecting that we’ll get some comments, maybe some emails about what you're saying here and people refuting one of the things you’ve said so I look at it and I find it intellectually interesting but completely irrelevant to my training.Richard Bejtlich:That’s the other thing, right? Some people will say who cares? Just train and that’s fine. I don’t worry about who invented, I mean, I've got pictures of Carlos and Helio, Rickson Gracie and Pedro Sauer at my school and I don’t care what, who actually invented whatever when I'm trying a technique. It doesn’t make any difference to me because all that matters is I'm able to do it, whether it works and so forth. It might matter sometimes if people say they want to be authentic, whatever that is, like I want to be the way it was, the way the master taught it so it's just your personal preference.Jeremy Lesniak:Let’s talk about the future. So, you’ve talked about where you’ve been. We’ve talked about where you are. Where are you going?Richard Bejtlich:I think, at some point, I would like to separate myself from the information security world. I think I'm setting myself maybe for a 5-year timeframe. That would have put me at the, what do I say, 27-year point or something like that which would mean I’ve spent roughly half my life in information security so I kind of like to get out of that as a fulltime job and I would much rather do something, I think, with the martial arts. If I can do that with martial history team, that would be great. If not, we’ll see what's available. I don’t know necessarily if I would be able to teach. Like I said, I'm not very physically gifted. In 5 years, I would probably be a high purple belt in jiujitsu because I'm slow and it takes a long time to get rank so I'm not going to be at a point where I get to open a school at any time but you’ll never know. Maybe I can help teach or contribute in another way and I think that’s kind of interesting too is that if I'm able to work a little bit with martial history team, maybe by that point I’d be helping people write books. I've shown that I can do that before so maybe I could assist with that and maybe have a little publishing house so…I don’t have any sort of set goals as far as where I want to be but I do have some ideas of things I think would be rewarding and enjoyable.Jeremy Lesniak:Great and if people want to find you?Richard Bejtlich:If you search my name, I'm the guy you're going to find. There's only one Richard Bejtlich. Sorry, Dad. My dad is very quiet as far as his presence on the internet. If you want to see any of the things with information security, if you look for TAO security and yes, my first book was called Tao of Network Security Monitoring because Bruce Lee had wrote Tao of Jeet Kune Do so I did name it that way but probably more interesting for the audience, the martial history team. If you search for that term, martial history team, you're going to find our Facebook page which, I think, is just Facebook.com/martialhistoryteam. There's a blog, martialhistoryteam.blogspot.com. I tried to follow your example, Jeremy, I tried to get all the social media accounts. Twitter is limited to certain number of characters so it's just @martialhistoryt. I think we’re @martialhistoryteam on Instagram as well but probably the easiest to track is the Facebook page because that’s where all the content come out regularly with pointers to anything else that’s interesting to the audience and if you do have other opinions like no, I have documentation that says Bodhidharma did this or this is the true story of the Gracie family, send it my way. I'm a scientist in this perspective. If you’ve got a hypothesis, if you’ve got other data that refutes it or proves it, I'm totally interested in that. I'm just interested in what's provable and what's knowable.Jeremy Lesniak:Spoken like a true researcher. I like it. Well, you know what comes next. It's the end so how do you want to close this out. What final words would you have for the listeners today?Richard Bejtlich:Two pieces of advice. The first one is listen to that small voice. Everyone has it but most people, I don’t think most people know about it or they dismiss it and it really only comes when you're quiet, I think, so maybe for some people, it's very loud but for me, it's a very small inner voice so take the time to listen and say little voice, what do you think I should be doing or what would make me happy or what is the right thing to do here? Listen to that and then the second one would be once you find whatever it is that that little voice is telling you to do is to pay attention to it and to, I use the term be devoted. One of the authors of a judo textbook I was looking for. I contacted him directly and we were texting back and forth. This was a gentleman who is a retired judoka and I was talking to this guy via text because he put his phone number on his website and when he sent me his book, in the front page he signed it and he wrote in Japanese some characters which I didn’t understood what they meant and so he wrote in small characters, look on page 31 so I turned to page 31 and he had written that the motto for his practice was be devoted and he had those same Japanese characters that he had written by hand and I thought what a wonderful message for the start of the martial history team project so I thought be devoted. That’s just a good way to live. Once you figure out what you want to do with your life, be devoted to it.Jeremy Lesniak:What a great conversation. Really enjoyed my time and it's just god to finally connect to people. You ever had people that you know of, maybe you know a little bit and you just want to know more? That’s about half the guests that we get on this show but in particular, talking with Richard. Had a great conversation and we had a great conversation even after the show ended so thanks for coming on. I know we’ll talk again and I'm glad we finally got to do this. If you want more, head to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. That’s where you'll find photos and videos and links and social media and more for this and each and every episode we’ve ever done. If you're willing to support us, go to the store, make a purchase, use the code PODCAST15 or consider one of the other many options. Sharing an episode, leaving a review, telling a friend or contributing to the Patreon, Patreon.com/whistlekick and if you see somebody out there wearing a whistlekick hat or something, talk to them, say hi, tell them that you listen to the show. Tell them that you're also a traditional martial artist. Maybe you can have a good conversation. Maybe you can have your own impromptu martial arts radio episode and share some stories. If you’ve got guest suggestions, we want to hear them and we would love to have you follow us on social media, @whistlekick everywhere you can think of. My email address, jeremy@whistlekick.com. Email me, I’ll write you back. Now, until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!