Episode 504 - Kwang Jang Nim C.M. Griffin
Kwang Jang Nim C.M. Griffin is a practitioner and instructor of the Korean art of Hwa Rang Do in Cincinnati, Ohio
You think you know but you don't, you can't do XYZ. Sometimes it's good to let the student put their head in the fire and get burned. Professor Powell used to say, pain is a wonderful teacher because you will not forget the pain and you will always remember the lesson it taught you.
Kwang Jang Nim C.M. Griffin - Episode 504
Watching the Green Hornet as a kid sounds normal, but for martial artists, it was a treat. Kwang Jang Nim C.M. Griffin first saw Bruce Lee's Cato and he started to have a passion for martial arts. Trained by his uncle, his journey to the martial arts is not the easiest as he only had the chance to train full-time later in his teen years. Kwang Jang Nim C.M. Griffin also had to return to a white belt in the same style wherein he is already a black belt. Later on, he made a career in Television and Movies using his skills in martial arts. If you think it's awesome, listen to this episode and learn more!
Show Notes
In this episode, we mentioned Mr. Teel James Glenn, Grandmaster Victor Moore, Moses Powell[gallery size="full" ids="8444,8443,8442,8441,8439"]
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download it here.Jeremy Lesniak:Welcome, you're listening to whistlekick martial arts radio episode 504 with today’s guest, Kwang Jang Nim CM Griffin. My name is Jeremy Lesniak, your host on the show, founder of whistlekick and everything we do here in whistlekick is in support of the traditional martial arts. If you want to see what we do, check out whistlekick.com. That’s our digital hub. It's the place to find our store and if you make a purchase of one of those great things in the store, use the code PODCAST15. That will get you 15% off and helps justify all of the time and the money that we put into this show. Now, martial arts radio gets its own website and that’s whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. The show comes out twice a week and the goal of this show is to connect, educate and entertain the traditional martial artists throughout the world. If you want to help the show and the work that we do, you can do quite a few things. You can make a purchase, you could share an episode, follow us on social media, maybe tell a friend, pick up a book on Amazon, leave us a review somewhere or support our Patreon. If you think the new shows we release are worth 63 cents apiece, not to mention all the back episodes that you get continued access to, consider supporting us at $5 a month. Visit Patreon.com/whistlekick and sign up there and if you do, we’re going to give you even more content. We just keep the content coming. Today’s guest, like many of our guests is a referral from a past guest. Someone that we had such a great time talking to, we said who else should we talk to? That person said this person and so that’s how we get to Kwanjang-nim Griffin. Had a wonderful conversation, a funny conversation. Man, this guy made me laugh! We talked about everything from starting over to connections within the arts, the benefits of the art, just a ton of great stuff and I'm sure you're going to love it so here we go with our conversation. Kwanjang-nim Griffin, welcome to whistlekick martial arts radio.C.M. Griffin:Thank you, sir!Jeremy Lesniak:Hey, thanks for coming on. Thanks for your time and we were just chatting a little bit before. Quite often, when I bring a guest on, they don’t have a tech background. They don’t have to worry about this stuff but you and what you’ve got going on is much more involved than what we do. I mean, I've got 2 cords here and you’ve got cameras and plugs and I'm going to guess there's a video snake somewhere in there and all kinds of stuff.C.M. Griffin:Yeah, right now, I'm in what we call master control because I am the studio supervisor here and so in master control, when we check like 6 different channels and make sure everything goes on at the time it's supposed to go on when it's supposed to go on and also have to produce a number of shows and on and on and on and on.Jeremy Lesniak:How did you get into that? There aren’t a whole lot of people that I talk to these days that are in TV in the way that you or video or however you want to term it the way you're in it.C.M. Griffin:Actually, I went to school. I graduated from Syracuse University, Newhouse VPA back in 1980 and just to let you know how old I am and I majored in Cinema Drama, which is film making and just through trial and error and doing different things in movies and TV, I somehow with a wife, next wife, whatever ended up here in Cinci-damn-nati and ended up at the TV station producing shows, directing shows and then they needed somebody to oversee the entire studio and I was available so I said, you know what? Money is right, I get access to all this equipment so I can do my own projects and get to where I want to get to and boom, there you go.Jeremy Lesniak:Cool. As I'm sure the listeners have already guessed, because I would guess if I was them, there's probably some overlap in some of those projects with martial arts in there?C.M. Griffin:Oh yeah, now there is! Back when I was first starting out, a lot of people didn’t know that I did martial arts because martial arts was just something that I did. It wasn’t a hobby. It was just what I did and to work, I worked on movies and TV. I mean, I worked on White Shadow, I worked on Hill Street Blues, a couple other shows, I did other shows. MTV and did some music videos and what have you and that was completely separate to teaching and training in the martial arts and then, around, I’d say the early 90s, still living in New York, still living back home, everybody went on strike. The producers went on strike, the actors went on strike like they always do. I'm sorry, I shouldn’t have said that but it's cool. The actors were on strike and the directors went on strike so there was no work in television for me. There's no work in TV and film. New York, at that point, New York city, the hotels and what have you were like 30% occupancy. There was just no work. People were leaving, going through certain right to work state like Georgia, South and North Carolina and I couldn’t and sitting there and trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do. I'm not making money teaching martial arts working with my teacher and my wife smacked me upside the head and said why don’t you combine your martial arts with your directing skills? Of course, after I got up and dusted myself off from the smack and I was like she’s right, though I’ll never admit that to her ever, but yeah, she was right so I just started doing, actually, combining them. Going out and doing, I did some videos for the world taekwondo federation. I did videos for various people and then I started doing some of my own shows like I got a couple shows that are airing here in Midwest, From the Dojang. Well, actually I started doing those when I came out here so those don’t count, really, but yeah, it just, that period of time, it just so happened that there was nothing else to do, no work so we created work.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, everybody I've ever talked to who have some kind of content related to martial arts whether it's fellow podcasters I've spoken with or authors or video, whether that’s TV or movies or documentary, there tends to be this kind of discovery process. You go into it with your understanding of your art or your arts and the things you’ve trained and the moment that you start creating that content for other people, something seems to happen and I don’t know if I can put words to it but, because you’ve done it, I think you understand what I'm saying.C.M. Griffin:Yeah, it happened a couple of times to me. It's weird because, you had a previous guest on, TJ Glenn and TJ and I did a number of movies. Low budget movies and certain movies that you wouldn’t mention around your wife and same around your friends, your male friends, but you will never admit that you watch them but we did a number of movies doing stunts, choreographed a number of martial art fights, did stuff with my teacher and just doing that opened up a certain, I don’t want to say was a door but it just opened up certain things that I didn’t take into account and then, the first tape that I did on my own, I did it for a gentleman who just passed away who was in the Kuroshi-Do system, a jiujitsu system, name of Papa San Canty and Papa San is also the man who introduced me, reintroduced me to Moses Powell but doing his tape, it's like wow! This doesn’t work. This will work. How come they do this? How can I change that for the camera? How can I do it? Wait a minute, my art does this but they, that whole combination and, for lack of a better word, confluency of everything smacking together and fighting for control of your attention. It happened a few times.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, there's an interesting depth that seems to come out when you have to, because when you have to present your arts in as content, you have to think about what it's like to experience that as someone who hasn’t trained or hasn’t trained in the way you have and it forces your mind into this alternate perspective that I don’t think most people ever really experience.C.M. Griffin:No, if you haven't done it, yeah, you're absolutely right because you're looking at, let’s see who put it to the fact that if you're a, let’s just say you're a former football player and you played pro for a couple years. Now, if you’ve played in the NFL, that meant that you probably played in high school. You definitely played in college so you played pro but now, you're no longer playing. You're going back and now you're going to try to coach. It's a completely different mindset and you see things that you may not have been aware of because you were too busy playing or too busy doing and then you notice what other people are doing. I acquaint it to something similar to that. You just don’t see those things when you're doing it. You may be more myopic, for lack of a better term.Jeremy Lesniak:Absolutely. Go ahead.C.M. Griffin:Oh, I'm sorry. I interrupted you.Jeremy Lesniak:No, this is your episode. This is your show. My job here is just to facilitate your stories and your conversation.C.M. Griffin:One of the things I did want to add in was that I just did a piece called So You Want to Get into Television? From Tournaments to TV and I talked to TJ and a couple other of my buddies and one of the things that we all agreed because we all had some degree of martial arts training, one of the problems that happen with a lot of martial artists when they try to get into TV and they try to get into film is that they think that their art and what they do is the be all and end all of everything and they quickly find out that it's not. You can be the biggest, baddest, toughest guy to ever walk in the dojang, they're going to make statues of you, Bruce Lee is going to bow down, Jackie Chan is going to give way because that’s how magnificent you are, the wonderfulness of your technique is great but it just doesn’t work on TV. You got to learn a completely different way. You got to learn a completely different thing which means you have to open up your mind to what someone else is doing and that’s part of the beauty and also the aggravation of working in this industry. It's like I got to be able to be open to see what everybody else is doing.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a great point. That’s a great comparison. I've not been on film. I've not explored that side of martial arts but we’ve had quite a few guests who have and they talk about that similarly. This idea that what you do, how you feel, it doesn’t always work on camera. In fact, some of them have gone so far to say it usually doesn’t work on camera.C.M. Griffin:No. Real martial arts, again, not trying to promote anything but I did a piece also called Why You’ll Never Ever See Real Martial Arts in television and film and that’s a documentary. For a number of reasons, one of the simplest reasons is if you're a fighter, you're trained and taught to hide or disguise your techniques. Well, if you disguise and hide your techniques and the audience can't see it so the audience doesn’t know what you're doing so the audience isn’t going to watch anymore.Jeremy Lesniak:Makes for some boring television.C.M. Griffin:Right, right. Real fighters, I hate working with real fighters. I've said that years ago. I do not like working with real fighters. I’d rather take a dancer, a gymnast, train them for a couple of weeks, let them see how to do certain things and boom, they look like they're as good as Bruce Lee. Hey, look at Jean Claude Van Damme.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s a great point. Absolutely and this is why, I think a lot of us as martial artists, when we see someone who has 6 or 8 weeks of martial arts training and they're starring in this film, they look pretty good but I don’t know, I can't speak for everyone, but I get jealous! I've got all this training and I want to do that. I want to be the guy out in front making millions of dollars on screen.C.M. Griffin:Right, right. It's possible but you have to alter what you do. You have to simply alter what you do. The fact that you know how to throw that beautiful sidekick, oh yeah! You can get your body into 6 o’clock position and lock it there? Oh, that’s wonderful! Now, can you do it in a way that makes the audience think that you got power and you knocked this other guy out and the other guy that you're fighting against make the toughest thing he may have had to fight was sleep so he doesn’t know anything about. To him, a dojo is the place that he go downtime to get some sushi. He doesn’t know anything about anything so you're going to try to do your techniques to him, somebody’s going to get hurt and trust me, producers do not like it, especially when their stars get hurt because that closes down the set but you still got to pay us anyway so they lose money so yeah, you got to alter what you do. You got to change what you do for the camera. I tell a lot of real fighters and real martial artists, think of it as if you're learning a new martial art.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, you mention when you got into TV and film, at that time, martial arts was something you did. That the 2 were separate at the time so how did you first get started with martial arts?C.M. Griffin:I am part of that generation that was watching TV on a Friday night and sitting down in front of this little black and white television and this little guy in a black uniform standing next to a taller guy and I guess was a green coat but this little guy and his black chauffeur’s uniform was beaten the schnoogies out of everybody on screen in a way we hadn’t seen before. Now, yeah, Fred Flintstone had his judo chop and Captain Kirk did some kind of lord knows what he did but he did it but no, we’d never seen that before and then we found out this guy’s name was Bruce Lee and he was doing this thing called Kung Fu though other people were calling it karate so at like 8 or 10 years old, try to find a place. You bug your mom to do that but there weren’t a lot of schools around back then so I had an uncle that had. Just gotten out the military and, I guess, to shut me up and to stop my mother from knocking my head into something, my father from kicking my ass, he decided to start training me a little bit and he trained me in, for lack of a better word, let’s just call it military jiujitsu and I did that for a while and then, he introduced me, he actually took me to Tiger Kim’s Taekwondo School on 14th Road and it's pretty much where it started though Tiger Kim was not a good experience. My father was not for it. I got a funny story about that. After I left Tiger Kim’s, after I was kicked out of Tiger Kim’s, looking for another place to train and there was this school that opened up a couple miles away from the house. It was right on, to me it was easy because all I had to do was take the train 2 stops and boom, I was there so I went in and I looked at everything and the sensei told me, I got to come back with my dad. My mom signed me up. OK, my father, God rest his beautiful soul, was a World War 2 veteran. He was part of during the Depression so he didn’t like all this stuff. He called martial arts fancy street fighting. He wasn’t for it at all but somehow, I guess, between my uncle and my grandmother said, take that boy down to that school so my father came in from work. Had his suit on, we went down to the dojang and it wasn’t good. It was not good at all because this guy was one of those, in retrospect, one of those I am the be all and end all of martial arts. You know the type I'm talking about and he had a class. This is like 1971, maybe? 70, 71. This was before Bruce Lee. I mean, before Enter the Dragon and Fists of Fury and that stuff and so, he had a small class. Maybe like 6, 7 other people in it so we’re over in the corner and he’s convincing my father that they should sign me up for the classes. My father’s not believing him and he tells my dad that he’s one of the best because he’s a 4th degree black belt and my father was like what the hell does that mean? I turned to dad because I know martial arts. I've been reading the magazines, Black Belt and all that other kind of stuff and I know martial arts and training with my uncle so I tell him, Dad, that means he got 4 black belts. That’s how long he’s been training. That’s how good he is. He’s got 4 black belts. My father said that doesn’t mean a damn thing so the guy said Mr. Brown, what I can do here is I bet you, I can kick you in your face before you can lay a finger on me. That was the dumbest thing to ever say to my dad so my dad said really? Took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, tucked his tie into his shirt and said OK. I'm getting embarrassed. I'm looking around. Everybody’s looking at me and I'm thinking oh my god, my dad’s going to get beaten up by this guy and I got to explain it to my mom. Mom is going to beat me because I let Dad get beat up and so, they stepped out on the floor and my father was nice. He took off his shoes, didn’t take off his socks. Thank God he didn’t take off his socks. My father got horrible feet but anyway, he’s standing there and the guy takes a traditional karate stance. My father just got into a regular old 1940-style boxing stance. The guy went to throw a kick, my dad threw a left and a right, dude was on the ground. All the students run up and it’s like going oh, what happened? He’s on the ground and I'm embarrassed. Damn, Dad just punched out the teacher and then, my dad in his unique style, takes his jacket, fixes his tie and everything, walks over to the guy and says, I swear to God, my dad says you got 4 black belts, I got 2 black fists. Let’s go, son and I'm thinking oh damn, I guess I'm never going to come to this school, not realizing that why the hell would I want to come here for? My dad just knocked the guy out! I have to say it was like 70, 71, like that but I eventually went on and went back to other schools and then, when I was in college, I got a coupon. You know when you go, at college freshman year, sometimes they give you these coupon books for local businesses? They gave me one and pizza and beer and all these other kinds of stuff and there was one for like $5 a month to join this Korean martial arts class called Hwarang-do. $5 a month sounds good to me. I can afford that. I'm a typical poor college student. I ain’t got no money. Went down there, signed up, master there was Master YS Kim. It was very different from the time that I walked in because Master Kim did not act like one of those I am lord of all that I survey. He wasn’t like that at all. He wasn’t even one of those coaches because I had some football coaches that were just worse than General Patton but he was concerned, we talked about school, we talked about my major, how was I going to get to class and then come down and train if that was going to be too much to do, blah blah blah. We talked for a while and I said I got to come here and I started training there and back then, the training was very different than it is today and I've been in Hwarang-do since then, since 1976. I haven't left. Master Kim, he went back to Korea. Well, after I graduated in ’80. I went out to Los Angeles, actually I went out to LA to work on the White Shadow and that’s when I met Dr. Ju Pan Lee and I trained out there for a couple years and then, came back to New York. There was nobody in New York to really train with in Hwarang-do so I had to go down to train with Master Kim in D.C. like once a month. Actually, it ended up being once every other month because that train ride to D.C., that’s kind of expensive and then, we got together and we got Master Yum, my current teacher. My father, he came and we did the whole thing and this was ’86. Yeah, ’86. He came to New York and I helped him start Hwarang-do classes on the east coast but I had a problem in that, because of all the football I played, it stopped me from playing football in college, I had to rip my groin muscle 3 times and being a young idiot, I never let it heal properly so after, giving up my scholarship because they weren’t going to pay for it, I found that there were certain things that I just couldn’t do and I wasn’t training properly. That make sense? And Master Yum, now Kooksunim Grandmaster Yum said I know you love Hwarang-do but if you want to stay in Hwarang-do, you got a choice. You can drop back down to white belt and start all over again because you got a lot of bad habits because of your leg or you can keep your current rank and just don’t do anything with us. I went back to white belt after already being a black belt so I started over again.Jeremy Lesniak:We’ve had plenty of people on the show who have cross trained. They stepped out to do another style and they happily put on a white belt and learn new things but I don’t know that we’ve had anyone who went back to white belt in the same style. You say it like it was an easy decision but was it?C.M. Griffin:No. It took me about a month, maybe a little longer because one of the things that, looking back on it, looking back on things, nostalgia, what have you is a wonderful, wonderful tool but it was a lie. It was my ego more than anything else. Why was I going to go back? I was a black belt. Why am I going to go back to white belt? But if you really love what you're doing and you're not doing it properly, why not? There's no reason why not. A belt can't fight for you. A belt is just a symbol of your knowledge at that particular point or your supposed knowledge at that particular point. If your supposed knowledge isn’t accurate or correct, it's worthless. You want to go to somebody, you want to go to a doctor that has all these degrees on his wall and now he's going to perform surgery on you but he’s not up on the latest techniques and in fact, he holds his scalpel the wrong way? Hell no! Go back! Knowledge, skill and experience, as I tell all my students, knowledge, skill and experience are 3 things that are truly yours. In this universe, you may not have anything else but you have those 3 and nothing and no one can take those away from you so it doesn’t matter if I went back to white belt. I still had all these experiences I had previously and for some people that try to test me because they thought I was a white belt, they learned the Bronx way. Don’t step to me. Don’t be stupid. I’ll get off my soap box now.Jeremy Lesniak:No, no, stay on! Stand tall!C.M. Griffin:Yeah, it wasn’t an easy decision but when I made it, I was not, even looking back on it, I think I did make the right decision.Jeremy Lesniak:Did you have moments where you second guessed it?C.M. Griffin:Oh, hell yeah! Oh, hell yeah!Jeremy Lesniak:Can you talk about that?C.M. Griffin:I'm a white belt in a class with a bunch of other people that never took it up before in their life and I was already a black belt and I had to slow myself down and then, I end up helping them and I'm like I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be a black belt and then when I was a green belt, we went to a tournament. We don’t usually go to tournaments. Hwarang-do really isn’t a tournament system. We started going to tournaments because in this society, you don’t go to tournaments, you don’t have any students. Nobody knows who the hell you are. Really, you can have a nice private school but you want to get students, your happy ass better go out and promote yourself somehow and the best place to do that is tournaments so Kooksunim relented and I had already been to a few tournaments and I knew a bunch of people and here I am, suddenly showing up, I'm showing up to this tournament in Brooklyn, seeing a bunch of people that I knew or hung out with. Saw this young lady I used to date and I'm wearing a green belt and they knew me as a black belt. That didn’t go over too well. That didn’t feel right.Jeremy Lesniak:Did they think you were trying to game the system?C.M. Griffin:Say what?Jeremy Lesniak:They think you were trying to game it, trying to cheat coming in as a green belt?C.M. Griffin:Yes and no because I didn’t enter anything. The other guys were competing and I didn’t feel right especially when, I'm not going to say her name but she came up with her current boyfriend, that jackass, but she came to me with that current boyfriend who’s like oh, I thought you was a black belt, what happened blah blah blah. You know how women can do so yeah, that didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel good and then, Rico Guy and a couple other masters, they were looking at me like wait a minute but I told them, no, I'm not going to compete and I'm here supporting these other guys. I'm not competing and then, a couple years later when I entered and got my black belt back and I entered into tournaments, they were like OK, OK. [00:30:35] Shihan actually gave me an excellent recommendation to a couple people and even Professor Powell and I'm not jiujitsu. I've been a Korean stylist almost all my life and he gave me a glowing recommendation because he said, what I did, I didn’t compete. I waited until I got my black belt again. Took a couple years but I think it was worth it. Got some insight on some certain techniques.Jeremy Lesniak:I wonder, and this isn’t a fully fleshed out thought but you seem like the perfect person to bounce it off, I wonder if there's benefit in that. We’re constantly told our basics are important and we’re always refining but we see a lot of these martial artists that we look up to really reiterate the importance of basics. Do you think there might be value in, maybe not formally setting down your rank, your black belt, however many stripes may be on it in favor of a white belt but pretending? Spending 30 or 60 days as a lower rank and really experiencing that stuff?C.M. Griffin:I can say some, it's a hard ego thing to do but I know like out here in Cincinnati. Well, first of all, there's 2 things. One, Kooksunim, Grandmaster Yum Ki Nam, whenever we had black belt classes and our black belt classes are 2 and a half, 3 hours long was really white belt. We spend a lot of time on white belt and I agree with him that really, the difference between a beginner and a black belt is a black belt understands those techniques that you do in the beginning and they look sharper because your white belt techniques don’t look good, the hell are you trying to do all these advanced techniques? Or so-called advanced techniques? It's like you're trying to build a skyscraper but your foundation is weak. This skyscraper is going to fall. Out here, a very good friend and mentor of mine, his name is Woodrow Fairbanks. Grandmaster Woodrow Fairbanks. He was a student of Victor Moore and Victor Moore is a controversial man that fought Bruce Lee.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, he’s been on the show.C.M. Griffin:Oh, Victor Moore?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.C.M. Griffin:OK, well yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:Episode 20, if anybody’s listening.C.M. Griffin:I trained with Victor Moore out here and like I said, his student Woodrow Fairbanks is, I call him my mentor out here. Whenever we get together and whenever they have a black belt class, you take off your belt. You take off your belt and you work. You work with whatever basics and fundamentals that was selected for that day. It's not about, I mean, there's about so many ways that you can throw, when you analyze it, there's a bunch so many ways when you throw a kick and a punch. It's about how your body reacts to it but if you don’t have proper fundamentals, your basics are not there then, forget about it.Jeremy Lesniak:How do you respond to people who, it tends to happen around, that brown, red belt, that phase where they're not black belts yet but they’ve, in their eyes…?C.M. Griffin:Grown up, yeah.Jeremy Lesniak:They’ve mastered all that non-black belt material and they're really good at it and they're ready for more and those of us who’ve been around for a while see gaps and they see where things could certainly be better, how do you address that? How do you have that conversation to say hey, I put down my white belt to start over. You have no, you're in no position to say that you're King whatever.C.M. Griffin:I, honestly, I'm a rotten person to ask that because I take it on a subjective level depends on the person like when my students got to that particular point. One really tall guy that I can think of that you’ve had on your show, he was really bad at it and different things, you do different things to different people. Him, I had to show where you think you know but you don’t. You think you can do X, Y, and Z. Sometimes it's good to let the student put their hand in the fire and get burned. Professor Powell used to say pain is a wonderful teacher because you will not forget the pain and you'll always remember the lesson that pain taught you so letting them see, like I said, I did subjectively because everybody’s different. You're not there yet. You think you are but you're not. Sometimes, it could be something as simple as yeah, well, then do this and they don’t know what you did or they can't do it. Other times, it could be like oop, yes. See, I thought you were ready for this? How come I smack you upside your head? Just depends and I guess, I take it subjectively because I know what that feels like. The first time I went through it, it's like wait a minute, why am I still here when back then we only had 6 or 5 belts? Why am I here at this damn red belt and that guy is a black belt and I know I look better than him. I can do more pushups. My kicks are sharper. Well, my attitude wasn’t there or whatever. It's subjective. I saw that with students and I will not tell any other teacher what to tell their students because they should know. Again, I'm going to jump on my soapbox. That’s why I'm against these mega schools. How the hell are you going to be able to teach somebody? You don’t know this person. If you got 300 people in your school, yeah, you know that person named Frankie Jones? I don’t think you do so you have no idea who he is or what he’s going through so how you going to help him make martial arts a part of him because there's more to just kicking and punching. There's more than that and if you can't combine those 2 for that person? Just go out and be a sports teacher. Don’t say you're teaching martial arts. Say you teach sports.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s an important distinction.C.M. Griffin:Yeah, I think what the kooky one is doing now is just bad. I think they're heading to the same road that China did when they got rid of Kung Fu and called it Wushu and had this whole thing. OK, whatever. Now, let’s do the Hanmadang. Hanmadang is great! Let’s get rid of sparring. Well, wait, why? First of all, you're just doing kicking each other and you do have these things on your shoulders called hands. You should block every now and then but hey.Jeremy Lesniak:I want to shift gears for a minute. You brought up Grandmaster Powell a couple times and his name’s come up before but I don’t know if we’ve had anyone train with him on the show and I wonder if you might take a couple minutes and talk about him and your experiences.C.M. Griffin:Professor Moses Powell was an enigmatic legend. He was one of the first black men that, when you talk about martial artists, you had to look to him. He’s the one that everybody’s looked at. Words couldn’t do him justice. You had to see him. Picture somebody just maybe like Mike Tyson. Picture that kind of body, maybe a little bit bigger. Picture him moving so fast being able to do one finger rolls and he could be like 5 feet in front of you and when you blink, next thing you know, he’s got you in a joint lock and you're like how did that happen? Smooth, enigmatic, charismatic. Professor Powell was a unique individual and again, unique to the 60s. I think, there's so many rumors about him and I don’t want to spread falsehoods. He passed away about…Jeremy Lesniak:2005, if I got my date’s right.C.M. Griffin:Yeah, around then, it was him and Oliver and somebody else passed away in about that same period. You know how they say they pass away in threes? But I went to him, I interviewed him a couple of times when I was writing for Black Belt. I did a couple articles for Black Belt magazine and Inside Karate. For a couple other magazines, I did some articles on him and I got the opportunity to train with him and one of the beauties, a beautiful thing about my teacher, Kooksunim Yum is that he has no ego so he wasn’t the type of man that say oh, you train only with me. That’s it! No one else! Never said that, never did that. He would often say, you have questions, sometimes go out and look at other martial arts step, maybe it will answer your questions. Now, I had a question about some of the joint lock applications that we have in Hwarang-do. Somebody my size, what I did, it just didn’t feel right. Kooksunim was a lot smaller than me so I couldn’t get my body to do what he was doing plus I also had the problem with my leg so I went to Professor Powell through mutual friends and started training with him for a couple of years. Opened my eyes and everything I did, I brought back into Hwarang-do and I remember I was teaching a class at, wasn’t Hillside, it was in Union, teaching a class in Union and Kooksunim came up, smacked me in the back of the head. Why is everybody smacking me in the back of the head? I don’t know. Anyway.Jeremy Lesniak:I have the same affliction. I don’t know what it is. We share it.C.M. Griffin:That’s why I wear glasses. Everybody’s smacking me at the back of the head but he said good! Now, instead of doing it like this, he just made a slight adjustment to what I picked up from Moses Powell but Professor Powell, he was just, if you can picture walking into someplace with Miles Davis. Miles Davis is at his prime and you're going to get lunch and everybody knows who Miles Davis is, Professor Moses Powell, I’ll say, was an absolute genius of the martial arts. He was Mozart. I never saw him repeat himself but he's just an incredible man to train with. I will say one flaw, if you're a beginner, and again, I’m training with Professor Powell in the mid-90s and in my opinion, when you're a beginner, you really couldn’t pick up what he was saying. You couldn’t grasp his principles so a lot of beginners, people who didn’t have the Um style or the softer style or understanding about joint locks and flow and stuff like that, if you were a bang-bang hard and linear, you’d have a hard time picking up his techniques but if you did understand it, it would open your eyes and you’ll walk away going damn. Professor Powell’s a unique individual.Jeremy Lesniak:There are a handful of people that I'm sad that I’ll never get to interview and he’s definitely on the list.C.M. Griffin:Professor Powell, he was a fun interview too. He’s giving, he’s open. If you're a martial artist, god help you because if you ask him about a technique, he will demonstrate it and you don’t have to ask and you'll be like can somebody please hand me a new hand because I can’t?Jeremy Lesniak:I'm laughing half because of the story, half because I've experienced this. It gets to a point where you say hey, you over here, lower rank, do you understand that movement? No, not really. Oh, you should ask him. Ask him about it so I learned to work the system so I could get the information without the joint strain but interviewing him, oh god, oh man.C.M. Griffin:In the 90s, I joined the Dragon Society also. I was one of those guys who didn’t believe in pressure points. I didn’t believe in pressure point science. To me, it was some kind of ghost crap. Some mythology that people made up to enhance their own legend and then Kooksunim started showing us things saying this is pressure points. In fact, I even started taking acupuncture. If 9/11 didn’t happen, I was signed up to get a degree in acupuncture from the school out there on 28th Street but anyway, so I started having acupuncture done so I started understanding a little more but acupuncture, to me, pressure points, no! These are needles, these are things piercing your skin. You're pushing it and what happens if you wear a coat? That’s not going to make sense. My younger brother, Chris Fox who himself is an incredible martial artist. Chris trained with Professor Powell. Before that, he trained with me and he also trained in Kyokushinkai and now he’s training in traditional Okinawan Goju but Chris was no joke because he was thinking about combining Kyokushin, hardcore full contact with Professor Powell’s theories and yeah, Chris was no joke and so, we went, we paid for it, I don’t know where that one was going to go. We went to a Dragon Society seminar and we met Professor Munshi and they were talking about pressure points. This was gall bladder 33 and this is mirror 90, do this and do that, understand it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever and he went to do a technique and asked Chris. He already knew Chris and Chris threw the punch and it looked like Professor Munshi barely touched him in 3 spots and Chris went down on the floor. Now, like I said, I know Chris. Chris and I were brothers for a bunch of years and Chris is no joke with Kyokushinkai, Professor Powell, Okinawan Goju. I mean hardcore Okinawan traditional sanction Okinawan Goju, you know what I'm saying?Jeremy Lesniak:I do.C.M. Griffin:Big black dude that now crumbled up in a heap on the floor? Nah! Well, I kind of did the dumb you don’t do this at seminars, you should know better thing like idiot me because next time I hear a dumbass say, excuse me! Can you do that on me?Jeremy Lesniak:How’d that go over?C.M. Griffin:Well, thank God in Hwarang-do we do a lot of Ki energy and Ki power training which helped so he didn’t knock me out because my energy was up but I could feel weak like if he wanted to smack me around and reach in and grab my wallet, I would have had a very, I wouldn’t be able to really defend it. I wouldn’t be able to defend it and like, what is this and then he started talking and then we went off to the side while some of the other students were talking, him and I were talking, he said this is a pressure point. This is this and this is that and I'm like this is some of the same stuff that my teacher was telling me but I wasn’t paying any attention to it.Jeremy Lesniak:Because you didn’t think it worked.C.M. Griffin:No and then I realized what it is and how it works. It's not how people think. It's not like I'm going to magically touch you and your body is going to explode. No. It's not like, what was that anime, Fist of the North Star, where I'm going to touch you in a couple of places and your butt’s going to explode and your penis is going to shoot across the room, no, it's not that! It's whether you want to call it pressure points from an eastern perspective where you're going after meridian points on the body or you want to call it from a western perspective, we’re hitting cavities and nerves. It's essentially very similar and so I started really getting into that and applying that to all my techniques but it started with me being dumb and saying hey, yeah, you just knocked him out. He’s on the floor crumpled up. Do that to me! I got to admit, if I could have gone to that point, I’d have smacked myself at the back of the head.Jeremy Lesniak:All I can imagine is Chris Tucker coming out of nowhere. You know the line. It's suddenly going to be Friday if the audience isn’t able to follow along.C.M. Griffin:You got knocked out! Put a V in front of there. In fact, they tried to do it at a show for someone. I think Disney has it now because ABC was bought by Disney and the director for this piece where they're trying to do some of these stuff and it's hard to get on camera because it just doesn’t look real no matter how many times I rearrange the cameras, it doesn’t look real so I had to end up telling him, there's nothing I can do about that. I don’t think any director and, I think I'm a very good director, can make this look other than some kind of hocus pocus. It doesn’t look right. You have to see this and experience this and of course, you got all these charlatans that are going around saying yeah, if you lift up your big toe and you wink your eye 5 times, you're not going to feel it all that kind of crap but it's real. Just take the esoteric garbage out of it, for lack of a better word, and you can put it in actual western terms and it works.Jeremy Lesniak:I've experienced some of it and I know what you're talking about. It's not magic and there are people claiming it's magic and that puts a false light on the rest of it, on the reality of it.C.M. Griffin:Magic is science of the ignorant because it ain’t magic. There's a science to it, you just don’t know it. That’s what I keep telling people but then, at the same time, I'm like you know what? You don’t believe it, that’s fine. That’s for me and my students to keep doing.Jeremy Lesniak:Doesn’t matter that I think the world’s flat, doesn’t change anything.C.M. Griffin:Ey, keep thinking if the world’s flat and I ask you this question, if the world’s flat, look at all these cats? How come they had not knocked all the dishes off the world yet?Jeremy Lesniak:You mentioned some time writing and interviewing people. How did you get there? Writing versus videography, I mean, it's a completely different medium but I'm guessing somehow that they're related.C.M. Griffin:To me, everything was the media. Even as I was working with Marvel and DC, I didn’t think of it as oh, this is comic books. I'm thinking this is me honing my writing skills and I got to write a script even if I still don’t know how to write a comic book strip. I write a half-hour television teleplay, it's all a part of media and a buddy of mine, Bobby Draven, Robert Draven who is excellent Kung Fu. First guy, I don’t know if this is going to come out right but that man, Bobby, he was the only white guy that I know in the 80s that was asked to come down to Chinatown off of Pell Street, I forgot, anyway, he was asked to come down there to teach Kung Fu. That’s Robert Draven. Bobby’s a bad boy but Bobby was already writing for Inside Kung Fu and somehow, we got to talking and he suggested that I put out an article on Powell because I told him I was doing something with Powell and he said I should send it in to write it up and send it in to Inside Kung Fu. They didn’t take it but Black Belt took it. That’s actually how I did that but I was already writing because I had written a number of scripts, I’d written a number of teleplays. TJ and I wrote a bunch of teleplays that I still maintain other people stole that’s why you see certain movies like Lethal Weapon.Jeremy Lesniak:How did you meet him?C.M. Griffin:TJ?Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah.C.M. Griffin:I just came back from Los Angeles, moved back to New York and I ended up working at the studio on 23rdstreet called, at the time, it was called ETC studios on 23rd street and Park Avenue and there was a show there called Comicbook Quiz. [00:56:44] Comic Book Quiz, it's like a local access show. This was back in the day when Access was…you know. Access was access because we had, I also worked on a show called the Robin Byrd Show and a couple other shows with, again, people that if I say their names, you might go Oh, I know, but you know, while your girlfriend’s around, you're never going to admit that you know them. I bet you your left hand knows it but anyway, so I was working on this show and Bob had this guy that he said was a stuntman who wanted to do a commercial for a comic book store back in magazines and I'm looking at him like a stuntman, really? Alright, if you say so and then comes TJ and first thought I had in my head is this guy can't move. What kind of stuntman is he because I’d never, even out in LA, I had never seen a stuntman his size because TJ’s big. TJ’s about 6’7”. About a good 260, 270, 280 and I'm thinking this guy can’t. Really? He gon’ get hurt but he did his James Bond type fight scene and I'm like dude’s pretty good and then we started talking and became friends and then we started, we had, what I’d like to think, is the first nerd show that took things seriously. We came up with a show called Comics Fantasy Forum and do you remember the old Siskel and Ebert shows? And the other shows on art and things like that on PBS? Well, we took that approach to comic books and fantasy and basically, now they call it geek culture and nerd culture, whatever but in the 80s, it wasn’t such an accepted thing and god, that makes me sound old, but anyway, we did that. We had it on PBS for maybe a year before we had some financial difficulties with the studio. We had some pretty interesting guests like from comic books and movies and it’s a couple martial arts. Stunt people came in and yeah, that’s how it is. TJ and I have been friends and then he started training with me and we did a couple of movies together, did some TV shows and just kept on from there.Jeremy Lesniak:And listeners, if you don’t know him by his initials, this was Teal James Glenn who was on the show, by the time this comes out, it will probably be about 3 months, 2 and a half to 3 months.C.M. Griffin:I keep forgetting, back then, he wasn’t known as Teal. Everybody just called him TJ.Jeremy Lesniak:That’s fine. I mean, a guy that big, I would call him whatever he asked me to.C.M. Griffin:Believe it or not, when we went places, which I never could understand but you could check with him on this. We went to some place and people would swear I was his bodyguard. I'm barely 5’11”. Yeah, I'm about 240 but TJ, like I said, he’s like 6’6”, 6’7”, 280 something, look like Errol Flynn and I'm his bodyguard? You got to be watching Spencer and Hawk a little too much.Jeremy Lesniak:You might have had a bit of a Leeroy Brown vibe walking around.C.M. Griffin:I don’t know but I'm like OK but people swore I was his bodyguard.Jeremy Lesniak:That was a fun conversation. I enjoyed talking to him.C.M. Griffin:We had some fun.Jeremy Lesniak:I'm sure, I'm sure. Now, you’ve talked about a lot of things, a lot of work that you’ve done. Scripts and video and everything, is any of the stuff available for people to check out?C.M. Griffin:Yeah, current stuff you go to YouTube unless you live in the greater Cincinnati area and you can catch it on local TV but otherwise, you go on YouTube. I learned how to use YouTube so don’t laugh. I have a channel called From the Dojang and another channel called The Warrior’s Realm TV. From the Dojang is more concerned about overall martial arts things like I even did a show about top comic book martial artists and things like that and The Warrior’s Realm is interviews with various martial artists. We interview them and then they get to show some of their different techniques and perspectives on techniques and how it compares to other things and things like that. Those two are on and hopefully, things keep going and maybe in 2021, we might be able to have some stuff on Netflix, Hulu. I have a couple of half-hour, hour long dramatic shows with lots of action in it.Jeremy Lesniak:Sign me up! Always looking for good martial arts on TV.C.M. Griffin:Yeah, because in my opinion, there really isn’t. I was watching, I don’t want to talk about it but man, buddies of mine I know are working on Disney’s Iron Fist and then, they wouldn’t tell me anything anymore and I'm like what's going on and then I saw it and I'm like oooohhh. Oooohh yeah. Not good. Why didn’t you take the actor and actually have him train in Kung Fu for a while so he could actually get into a stance? His horse stance look like he was about to take a poop.Jeremy Lesniak:I had a theory on Iron Fist and you being someone who’s been in the industry, I'm curious. So, I read a little bit saying that they really had to accelerate, trying to remember the actor’s name.C.M. Griffin:Finn Jones.Jeremy Lesniak:They really had to accelerate his martial arts training and condensed it down to just a few weeks. My guess was they had a time table for filming so they could get The Defenders out because that was the last piece of the four so they could do Defenders and they just, they couldn’t wait. That was my guess.C.M. Griffin:It's a bad excuse, bad teachers. Bad teachers. I'm sorry. I can tell you, TJ and Ross and a bunch of other guys I know, let me tell you, I've had people especially somebody with Finn Jones’ background, with his work on Game of Thrones where he has the physicality, where he has a dance background, nah, he could have looked better. All he had to do was take different time. Show him the things that he needed to do. If you have him walk around, have him actually work out in a school so he can understand the mentality, the thought process. My teacher had a guy in there for 3 days and we only had him for 2 hours a day. The guy was a dancer and he was able to move on so I think they just blew the pooch on that.Jeremy Lesniak:What did you think of Into the Badlands?C.M. Griffin:I couldn’t watch it. I didn’t think it was very good. I thought the choreography was, again, I'm not, this is just my humble opinion but…Jeremy Lesniak:I value your opinion.C.M. Griffin:I thought the choreography was staid. I thought the choreography looked like bad 1980s, 1990s, Saturday morning television choreography. I could tell, I knew what the actors were going to do before they did it. I just thought, no. I think I watched, I may have watched the entire first season. I can't get into this. You're copying. Did you see the last John Wick?Jeremy Lesniak:Yes.C.M. Griffin:What did you think?Jeremy Lesniak:Violent. I'm not a big fan of fight scenes that take the violence to that place. Just emotionally, I don’t dig that. I prefer, like my favorite martial arts film of all time is Crouching Tiger so that gives you an idea about what I really enjoy.C.M. Griffin:OK, well, the last John Wick, I thought, was not good because I thought a lot of choreography, especially Halle Berry’s choreography and that long overdrawn fight scene was completely redundant. She did the same thing like 24 times and OK, she’s going to shoot behind her, she’s going to roll now and she’s going to climb up on the guy and get him in that lock and OK, now she’s going to roll over, shoot, get the guy’s legs, roll over on him and do that again. Come on, you're doing the same thing. You wonder if they had time constraints where you could do something else and why did it have to go on that long? You didn’t have enough storyline? I was really disappointed in the last one. I like the first one. I think the first one was interesting and this is OK. The second one, alright but that 3rd one, I'm like man, who choregraphed that? What happened? What happened?Jeremy Lesniak:Did you see Warrior, Cinemax, Showtime? The Bruce Lee inspire show that came from Shannon Lee?C.M. Griffin:No. I didn’t really.Jeremy Lesniak:I think you should check that out.C.M. Griffin:I saw one part of it and I'm thinking, and I know this is going to offend a bunch of people, I looked that plot up and I saw how, back when we had cable because we cut the cable because it's too stupid but I can say the same thing for streaming for a lot less money. I used to have these free weekends so I saw Showtime and I saw, all I saw is that one episode, it was a bad episode. I enjoyed it because I like watching naked women walk around. I can't have one in my living room but I'm sitting there watching and going oh, she’s naked. Oh, this young lady’s naked too. There's a lot of naked women. OK. This is fun! This is from Bruce Lee? Is this from Shannon Lee? OK, I wonder…okeydokey, a lot of naked people. Oh, there's a fight! Oh, there’s more naked women. OK. I felt like I was watching Spartacus or something like that.Jeremy Lesniak:The fight scenes, especially the choreography, especially the deeper it got into the show, in my opinion, it got really good. It was really creative. We had, one, two other guests, one of the two actors came on as guests and we had some fun talking to them but you could tell that the choreography was an important piece of the show as opposed to a lot of shows and movies where it's an afterthought.C.M. Griffin:I did want to see more of it but I don’t mean that in the puritan way but, I just didn’t have Showtime and a friend of mine was comparing it to, I don’t know if you ever saw the Netflix Marco Polo.Jeremy Lesniak:Yeah, I watched a bit of that.C.M. Griffin:The first 6 episodes of Marco Polo, absolutely horrible but then again, traditionally, when you're working on a TV show, TV series, the first 5 are not that good. Crew doesn’t usually, cast and crew don’t usually jell until episode 6 so sometimes they’ll put episode 6 on as the first episode if they can do that but the first 5 or 6 of Marco Polo, I'm like all of this, again, naked women walking around which is kind of nice to see and I'm not watching porn so I'm not going to get in trouble with anybody and then, all of a sudden, episode 6 they had a plot, they had a story and I'm like OK. I forgot the British actor’s name. I think he played Hundred Eyes or whatever his name is. They unleashed him and I'm like whoa, this is some interesting choreography. This is a little different. He’s doing things that you don’t usually see but it was a little different. I'm like OK and I really like what they did with a lot of the fight choreography and trying to just do something different. The Korean film called The Man from Nowhere where, not only is the storyline good, the fights, even the gunplay is a little different. It's like OK, it's interesting. I hold to that whole thing, if you're going to do a martial art film, you should first have a good story. Once you have a good story and you figure out a good way to make it exciting, have the martial arts in it whether it's a martial artist or not, like some of Jackie Chan’s movies because Jackie Chan really doesn’t do, especially after Police Story, he doesn’t do a lot of traditional martial arts. It's more Chan Fu if you want to call it, anything, but it keeps your interest but you need to have a good story and then, don’t skimp on the fights. Each fight should tell a story. Within a fight, there has to be a story. There has to be beats, there has to be a rhythm. It's not just kick, kick, punch, punch, throw. OK, next guy, kick, kick, punch, punch, throw. OK, next guy. There has to be beats, rhythm, even though we might think of it in another way. If you watch pro wrestling, yeah, the bad guy is fighting the good guy. The good guy is winning then all of a sudden, the bad guy’s winning and now, the bad guy looks like he’s going to take over and beat the good guy. Something happens, now the good guy wins. That should happen in the fight. Each fight that you tell should be a story. A small story, there should be beats in there, rhythms and even, I think one of Bruce Lee’s best movies was Fist of Fury or actually it was called The Chinese Connection because one reason why I absolutely think it was great was because Bruce Lee wasn’t a superman. He could get hit but there are beats and rhythms in that where it looks like, oh, wait, this guy’s going to hurt Bruce? You know what I mean? Jackie tells that beautifully. He does that beautifully and if you're going to have a fight, unless you're saying it yes, this is Superman or this is Hercules and Hercules is going to like, with old Steve Reeves movies, Hercules is going to come and knock everybody over so you're not really focused on Hercules, you're focused on everybody else, alright but let me see a good story within that fight. Keep my interest and unfortunately, a lot of these movies and TV shows don’t do that. Don’t just say you look like you're watching an interesting school, a particular school’s interesting demonstration or exhibition and that’s not what you should see on a TV or movie screen.Jeremy Lesniak:What's your favorite fight scene? Do you have one?C.M. Griffin:I have a few. I love the fight scenes in the Princess Bride.Jeremy Lesniak:Not the first time we heard it mentioned on the show, actually.C.M. Griffin:Again, Bruce Lee in the Chinese Connection. I love watching Hwang Jung-Lee. He might not be a household name but back in the day when you go down to Chinatown on 42nd street and you watch some of the movies, if we saw his face on the lobby cards, we’d go in. We’d fall asleep in the movie and his fight scene would come up and back then, we go on three movies for 75 cents and it was the 70s and his fight scenes were always interesting. In fact, like a bunch of idiots, we went out and bought his tape, High Impact Kicking, tried to do that and ended up hurting ourselves but his fight scenes, he just brought a quality of acting to it that was what the fight scene should be. He even had a way of making people who weren’t good fighters look good even though they were nowhere near his quality so, I had a couple. I just couldn’t think of, like I said, the Chinese Connection. Oh! Oh! Donnie Yen and Sammo Hung, that final fight scene in, I think it's, Sha Po Lang. I forgot the American name of it but Donnie Yen is a cop.Jeremy Lesniak:Kill Zone?C.M. Griffin:I think that’s what it might be called in America, Kill Zone. Sammo was a gangster and Donnie is a cop trying to bring him to justice. Yeah, I think it was called Kill Zone. That, oh my god! And here you got 2 choreographers. Sammo’s choreography is Jackie Chan excellent.Jeremy Lesniak:Yes, yes. Sammo Hung is the most underrated martial arts actor in my opinion.C.M. Griffin:Yes, and Sammo Hung is like he’s a patron saint of us bitter guys but yeah, that fight scene and again, everything that I'm talking about, the rhythms, the beats, the story that it's telling within each fight sequence. Donnie is winning, Sammo is winning. Donnie is doing something else, now Sammo cheats or does he cheat, what's happening? It's a story within a fight and it keeps you going because you have no idea who's going to win. That was good. Some of the Ip Man fight, oh and Ip Man, was it 3? The fight scene that Donnie Yen has in the elevator? Yeah, that was good and for long form, I like The Raid. I like those hallway scenes in The Raid. I even enjoy that scene in Daredevil. I thought that was good, though. Unfortunately, we knew what was happening. You could tell which was the actor and which was the stuntman but when I said that, a lot of people can't but like, you said, myself, TJ, Ross, we’re stunt people. We’re looking at oh, there's the stunt guy. Oh, there's the actor but that was a good scene but yeah, I got to say Sammo and Donnie Yen. In fact, that was an excellent fight. In fact, when a buddy of mine was asking me to do a seminar in fight choreography for martial artists, I played that. I played that scene. I shouldn’t have because everybody’s trying to outdo each other and no, these guys were sub-doing. They didn’t get it but you know.Jeremy Lesniak:Sometimes, less is more.C.M. Griffin:Sometimes, less is more, yes.Jeremy Lesniak:This has been a phenomenal conversation and as I’d hope, we went places I didn’t expect. That’s always the fun is where is this going to go and you told some utterly wonderful stories and we end in the same but different way each time and that is that I ask the guest to decide how we go out. What final words, what wisdom, advice, whatever you want to call it, what would you want to leave people with today as we finish up your episode of martial arts radio?C.M. Griffin:Well, if you send 12.99—no. Honestly, I think whatever it is that you do, especially if you're talking about martial arts, if you do martial arts, understand the art and understand what you're doing. Understand the principles. Understand the principles of what you're doing. It's not just the flashy kicks. It's not just those wonderful punches and throws. What are you actually doing and why are you doing it? Get into the principles and the fundamentals of what you're doing and you can translate that if you want to move on to something different, if you want to get into television, if you want to get into movies, a great way to do that is to be a stunt person. Keep in mind, if you're going to be a stunt person, you are not the star. Take the kick, take the punch. Your job is to make the star look good and due your due diligence with everything else. Understand the fundamental principles, the fundamental principles of being in television and film is being dependable and reliable. Not so much oh, this person’s a great talent but be dependable and reliable. Fundamental principles of doing your particular martial art, what's your body position? What's your kinesiology? How are you going to execute these techniques? Same thing in transitioning into something else. Martial arts is something that can put fingers into almost industry or anything you want to do if you understand the fundamental principles, you'll do good or you'll do well, if there's any English teachers out there. That’s about it.Jeremy Lesniak:Now, hopefully, everyone sees what I mean that this was a funny conversation. I laughed more in this episode than I have in a long time, so, sir, thank you for the gift of that. Thank you for the gift of that laughter, the gift of your time, your conversation. Had a blast. Hope we get to connect in person sometime soon. If you want to see the show notes with photos and a whole lot more, go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. Every episode has its own page with even a transcript, maybe not the day it comes out but pretty soon thereafter and if you're willing to support us and all the work that we’re doing, you have lots of options. Make a purchase at whistlekick.com, use the code PODCAST15 to get 15% off, leave a review, tell a friend or contribute to the Patreon, Patreon.com/whistlekick. I hope if you see somebody out there wearing something with whistlekick on it, you'll introduce yourself. Who knows what will happen? Of course, I’d love to hear your guest suggestions, email me, jeremy@whistlekick.com and don’t forget to follow us. We’re on social media, @whistlekick. Until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day!