Episode 834 - Mr. Jay Cooper

Mr. Jay Cooper is a martial arts practitioner and instructor at HAVOC JKD in Canada.

It's not about fighting anymore. Unless you are in a violent profession or you're a violent man, you're not going to get involved in fights all the time anyway. Self-defense is far from being one of the most important things that a martial art will give you.

Mr. Jay Cooper - Episode 834

Martial arts and pop culture have a unique and intertwined relationship that has captivated enthusiasts for decades. From the epic battles of Star Wars to the discipline and honor of the samurai, these two worlds have influenced and inspired each other in countless ways.

Mr. Jay Cooper talks about when martial arts were first introduced, it was almost a privilege to be able to practice. Now, it's much more accessible, but that accessibility has also led to a decrease in the specialness of being able to study martial arts.

In this episode, Jay Cooper talks about the overlap between martial arts and nerdism, specifically the influence of the Samurai on Star Wars, especially the Jedi. Jay Cooper, an Englishman turned Canadian, is a martial artist and host of the YouTube channel, Reality Check With Jay Cooper. He has a deep passion for martial arts and has been involved in various styles throughout his life.

Show notes

You can follow Mr. Jay Cooper on the following social media platforms:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RealityCheckWithJayCooper/about

Show Transcript

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio, episode 834 with my guest today, Jay Cooper. I'm Jeremy Lesniak. I'm your host here for the show, founder of whistlekick, where all the things that we do, all the many things that we do is in support, are in support, here we go, of traditional martial arts worldwide. It doesn't matter what your style is, doesn't matter why you train, how, where, et cetera, we just appreciate that you train. We think it makes you a better version of yourself. That's why we're all doing what we do here at whistlekick. And if you want to check out all the stuff we got going on, go to whistlekick.com. It's your best place to start. If you haven't been there in a while, check it out. I think you'll be impressed with what we've got going on now. Everything from listings on events and projects we're involved in. Lots of free content as well as our store. You use the code podcast15, that's going to get you 15% off everything from apparel to protective equipment, to training programs, to all kinds of cool stuff. So go check that out. Now, we also have a Patreon. So if you love what we do here, you probably would love our Patreon. If you listen to all these episodes or watch all these episodes and think, you know, kind of wouldn't hate if there was more, well, for 5 bucks, you can get more for 10 bucks, you can get even more and it goes up from there. But there's even a $2 tier. If you simply want to say, hey, you know, Jeremy, I appreciate what you all do. Here's 2 bucks a month. We're even going to tell you who the guests are coming up. It's the only place that we put that out publicly. So it's all about constant deliverance of value, constantly delivering value, there we go. This is one of those raw, authentic intros where it gets a little funny, but we're just going to keep it because I want you to know I appreciate all of you and I don't mind being real from all the time. Speaking of real, today's guest is about as real as they come. We get all kinds of good stuff coming out of this conversation and I know you're going to love it. Anytime I get somebody on the other side of the microphone who has experience podcasting, it allows me to kind of let my hair down a little bit. And of course, that's figurative if you know my hair situation. But Jay was great. Loved having him on the show. Had a super good time. And I think that comes through. And I hope you dig it.

Jay Cooper: 

Good morning.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Good morning. How are you, Jay?

Jay Cooper: 

I'm fine. I'm fine. Audio check on this. I'm actually using my son's gamer headset.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

That sounds okay. Sounds fine to me.

Jay Cooper: 

Good. I'll have to drink on this side.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Look at you with the pop culture. That, you know, that movie, I've never seen that movie, but I…

Jay Cooper: 

Oh, I got my Klingon tankard with my orange juice in it as well.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

If I had known that we needed to throw the nerd cred around, I would have grabbed.

Jay Cooper: 

Seriously, I've actually, funnily enough, one of the guys that reached out to me after my reality check stuff…

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah.

Jay Cooper:

I sent him a video message back and he saw I had a picture of Boba Fett in the background and he was like, oh dude, he said, you like Star Wars too. So I actually showed him what I had, which was three Tsuneo Sanda prints…

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Oh cool.

Jay Cooper: 

Who's an amazing artist. So I've got Fett, Vader, and Yoda, and they were like group prints, some number proofs. And he was like, oh man, I like that too. I like, really love Star Wars stuff. I said, oh cool, what's your collection like? And then he showed me his basement. He's got like a full set of Boba Fett armor that he's 3D printed himself. And it's like dude, I just want to turn in my nerd card now.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Wow. That's nice.

Jay Cooper: 

I can't even touch that. You know, my original collection of 1970s Kenner figures looks a bit lame now.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And yet, you know, it wasn't that long ago that that was the pinnacle right? When I was a kid, if you had anything beyond the figures, if you had any of the ships, forget about the Millennium Falcon, if you had a light, a speeder bike that was intact, you were the coolest kid.

Jay Cooper: 

And it's still the same cause I mean, I've got downstairs, I've got my rebel transport. I've got the star destroyer. I've got the falcon, obviously, I've got the outside. I've got the snow speed. I've got the X-wing. I've got the sand crawler. I've got the snow turret probes. I've got all low, all my stuff from, you know, back in the 70s, I still have my originals.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Oh cool.

Jay Cooper: 

And a lot of the time, people say oh man, do you still collect it? And I'm like, yes and no, because if I go for the vintage stuff now, it's a lot of expense and I don't have the memories attached to it. It's cool, but I don't have the memories attached to it anymore so.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure.

Jay Cooper: 

I don't know, that's probably my issue.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

No, it makes sense. I can absolutely see, you know, there are things in my house that have a lot of memories attached to them and maybe they do, maybe they don't have financial value, but then there are other things that, you know, I just bought them because they were cool. You know, Johnny Lawrence Funko Pop, right? It's still in the box. It's on the shelf. It's cool. I bought it two years ago. It doesn't really have meaning to me.

Jay Cooper: 

No, sometimes things are cool because they're cool and sometimes they have meaning. It's a dichotomy of thought processes when you like, you kind of mix and match the two. There we go. Slightly less like a mirror at a fairground there.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

There you go. Why is there so much overlap between martial arts and let's say nerdism?

Jay Cooper: 

One of my main theories behind that, because I've actually, we've become obsessive about martial arts the same way we've become obsessive about some pop culture icons and things like that. We're all geeks at the end of the day.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

For sure.

Jay Cooper: 

It's just that we choose our geekdom. Because even the guys that are like, the jocks and the geeks, if you want to use such an arbitrary distinction. They're geek about football. I can tell you the stats about their favorite player, what championships they won. Oh man, remember when that game and that, it's all the same stuff. You just geek out about different things. So it's the same when people talk about addictions, you know, you can't choose to be an addict. You can just choose your addiction, whether your addiction is exercise, drugs, alcohol, women, cars, whatever it happens to be.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure.

Jay Cooper: 

So with the martial arts world, because the nature of a lot of the times how we get into martial arts, and this might be something we explore later on, the same things that you get from the pop culture appeals to it. So like, most of us, and I know I certainly did, we got into martial arts because, you know, we either got beat up, or we were afraid of being beaten up, or we didn't want to get beat up. So we come from these positions, and so we want a superpower. We want to be safe, we want to feel strong, we want to be all this sort of thing. And then, when you look at the geek culture, you've got these larger-than-life superheroes, you've got, you know, the Jedi Knights, you've got, you know, Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, pick your hero choice, and they all appeal to something that we aspire to be or we want to be. We, if, man, if I could solve all my problems with a Batarang, I'd totally do that. Batman's badass, or all the stuff. It doesn't work, they're really hard to throw, by the way, Batarangs.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah, they seem quite unbalanced.

Jay Cooper: 

I've got a couple, the replica Batarangs. Yeah, they're horrible. They look cool.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Did you make them or did you buy them?

Jay Cooper: 

Oh, no, no, no. I got them. They were props. They look great. They really do. But it's like, yeah, it's like ninja stars in general, you know, they're not really good. They used to dip them in poison and dung and all that sort of stuff and it would infect the wounds.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

That makes far more sense.

Jay Cooper: 

It's not like you go, oh, Ninja Storm, fall down. But they were infected and things. If you want to actually hurt someone, get a dart. You know, like the darts you get in bars.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah, yeah.

Jay Cooper: 

Sling one of those at someone, you'll do far more damage than you would with a Ninja Star. I'm not advocating that by the way.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

No, no, no, no. We do not advocate violence here.

Jay Cooper: 

I'm not throwing darts at people.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Unless they really deserve it. Or they step in front of the board.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah, that too.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I always find it fascinating that you know, darts only exist in a context where people are drinking.

Jay Cooper: 

Yes.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It just seems like the most, it seems so counter, don't drink and drive, don't operate heavy machinery and drive, but sharp airborne projectiles? Absolutely.

Jay Cooper: 

True story. Actually. There was a court case that they had to present darts as a game of skill, not gambling. When they were actually going to allow that to be in public houses and things like that, because of prohibitions on gambling dens and that sort of thing too, as well. And dart was originally seen as a game of chance and they had to actually have a court case to have it recognized as, no, there's skill involved in this. It's a cool, cool little nerd fact there on darts.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I like that. I didn't know that. That's cool. Well, if you're good, we can just keep rolling.

Jay Cooper: 

I'm good to roll, man. Yeah. See, I find the organic nature of conversation sometimes brings out the best stuff when we get these things.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

For sure. You are clearly a bigger Star Wars nerd. We already put that word on the table so I can say it. No, I'm not. You're clearly a bigger Star Wars nerd than I am. So you likely know that George Lucas built the Jedi, at least to some degree on his, at least understanding of Japanese samurai.

Jay Cooper: 

Yes, which it was, actually, it was a combination of a couple of factors really. Flash Gordon which was a huge influence on us, the sci-fi aspect, but he was influenced heavily by Kambara, cinema from Japan. Specifically, as a film called The Hidden Fortress which is, if you haven't seen it as well, we've seen it out and it's proto-Star Wars. It's just set in, you know, in Japan with the samurai and things involved. So there was a big influence from that on that. So yeah, he drew the essence of Star Wars. And, oh, sorry, that's my dog barking. He drew that essence from that film. And that was like the bones. Then he added the sci-fi elements from, excuse me. Oi! Pack it in. Silly dog. And then he added the sci-fi elements to it, and he also added the idea of the Chi, Qi, you know, energy thing as well, which is basically what the force was. So yeah, the fingerprints of that culture are all over it. Now, one of the big ironies, if you look at that cinematic exchange that went on there, is you have the same thing with Akira Kurosawa. When his films got remade into Westerns, so The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven. And then you had Yojimbo and all those other ones as well. But then, of course, Kurosawa himself was influenced by the Westerns.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah.

Jay Cooper: 

And so he brought the Western sensibilities to the Japanese cinema, but then the Japanese cinema fed it back to the Western sensibilities. So there's this wonderful cross-cultural feed that has been going on forever. And yeah, Lucas with Star Wars was another example of that.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Interesting. Which came first, your interest in martial arts or your interest in Star Wars? Or did they draw up in parallel?

Jay Cooper: 

Sorry, I missed the question. Let me mute my phone. I'll have to put this on. Do not disturb. Oh, you know what? If it happens again, I'll just, you know, flick it up. Star Wars was first for me. Because I watched it when it very first came out. So I was born in ‘74.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Okay.

Jay Cooper: 

At the beginning of ‘74. So it was, you know, bloodline. If I'd been born like literally three days early. it'd been in 1975, 1973. So for me, when Star Wars came out and I was a young kid, bright lights, lasers, spaceships, aliens, all the good stuff that went along with it. That's of course what I'm going to be into. My dad, I can still remember the town I grew up in Hyde Royal One. The little movie house we had there and there's queues round the block for ages to go and see this film. And as soon as I was there, Star Wars Fan for Life, it hooked me. It just, everything about that film just pulled me in. And I just found the whole endeavor just absolutely fascinating. And it was a universe that just, that opened up. And I think most kids of a certain age growing up, we used to draw the X-wings, we used to draw the Death Star, Darth Vader always got drawn quite a lot as well. Although strangely enough, my favorite was Chewbacca. All these cool things.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Okay. I can't say I've bumped into too many people who found Chewie their favorite.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah. And I accept it's odd. I can't really give you any justification for it, but Chewie was always my favorite. I just thought right from an early day, it was the very first figure I actually bought. So when the film was out, I remember we went on holiday to Scotland the same year, we're actually not too far off the shores of Loch Ness, staying in a little cottage up there. And we went out and there was a toy shop we went in, in a local area, and there was this Chewbacca Star Wars figure, and that was my gift from that holiday. You know, I basically blew all my pocket money on this one figure, and I regret it.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You still have it?

Jay Cooper: 

I still do. Yes.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Oh wow.

Jay Cooper: 

And his crossbow. So I've got another one. I've got two Chewbacca figures, but the original is still the one that's got pride of place in my collection, and it's the only if I had to give up everything except one piece, that's the one piece I would keep because this day it's still the first figure I ever got. But yeah, so Star Wars for me has been just into basically part of my DNA growing up with it. And I think, not to divert too much, but if you look at the way things are with a lot of the modern films, The Force Awakens, and you look at, The Phantom Menace and all those ones, we forget that we are not five-year-old kids anymore, or four-year-old kids, or seven-year-old kids, or whatever. We're adults now, and we're almost trying to recapture that moment, that spark that we had when we were youth, and you're never going to get that again. You can't. And so as long as you can look at the newer films with the eyes of a child, you can enjoy them just as much as the other ones. The problem is, of course, that the universe within Star Wars has got so much bigger now as well, but so has the cinema universe. A blockbuster movie was a big event. You know, Jaws was probably the first one and, then Star Wars, when that came out, a Star Wars movie coming out was a huge deal. Now, there's a blockbuster movie out each month. They're trying to compete for number one at the box office. And they're trying to outpace each other. So, the game has just changed so, so much that that's taken the magic away as well.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah.

Jay Cooper: 

You know? And I think that's with toys. Same with toys. The toys and things. Every film has merchandise about it and there's no toy craze anymore because, you know, you can get any number of toys on any number of things. There's nothing special anymore. That's why, of course, things like the Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars, they're so collectible now because they were so rare at the time. Now, every film, every TV show, they have a limited run. They have a ton of merch and no one cares because it's landfill.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Absolutely.

Jay Cooper: And ironically, I found martial arts tends to reflect similar things now. We forget how rare it was to be able to do martial arts back in the day. And I wasn't even close to being a first generation of people to start in martial arts. When you got access to it, it was almost like a privilege to be able to do it. So you went there and you paid your fees and you know, you, I'm sure you remember this as well. When class ended, there was a rush to get the brooms. You wanted to be the one to help sweep the floor.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah. For us, it was the beginning.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah. Oh, so yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

We swept the beginning of class.

Jay Cooper: 

Well, when we got there, it was clean already when we got to, because we actually, the first dojo I trained at back in Hyde, it was, we went into the church to clean it and then, you know, we swept the thing at the end. But we do, but it was an honor. It was a rush to the brushes. And if you didn't, you wanted to show sensei that I appreciate what you did and I want to sweep the thing. And you paid your fees. If you were going to miss a class, you let them know when you were apologizing, you tried to do the makeup classes and, and you know, you'd better be nearly dead or in another country if you're going to miss a class, you know, because you'd have to be explaining why and you didn't want to have to explain that. And it was a rare privilege, you know, the training was arduous, holding stances for 15 minutes at a time and, you know, testing you focus by giving you a quick pop in the guts and things like that. And I used to joke, I'm like, well, I still do joke with my students. Like if I did to them the way I was trained, I'd be arrested and probably banned from teaching ever again.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But you can't do to adults what they did to us as kids.

Jay Cooper: 

No, you can't. You can't. Now, I'm not even saying it was better that way. But you can't deny that it produced a generation of people in the martial arts that You know, we don't often see that type anymore, certainly not within the more traditional systems or the non-competitive arts.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Right.

Jay Cooper: 

The competitive arts still have that element to it especially when you start to get towards the boxing, the Muay Thai, the MMA, the BJJ, etc. Because they have an inherent quality check to them. I can claim to be a 10th Dan in Japanese Jiu-Jitsu or Karate or whatever it is, and outside of watching me perform something, there's no metric really attached to that. If you're claiming you're a boxer, you're a BJJ guy, you're a wrestler, or whatever, at some point, you have to prove that. So, there's an inherent quality control metric to that, which is missing from traditional systems. Now, of course, the traditional systems, their quality control metric used to be, I'm still alive. Which is a pretty good one. I mean, if you want to actually gauge a system's effectiveness, keeping you alive is a good one for it. But, now we're in a position where they're almost a sport or a pastime alongside football, tennis, you know, stamp collecting, quilting. And people see it as a commodity and they see us as a commodity as martial arts instructors. I don't necessarily like that, but it is the nature of the world we're in. It's the nature of the way things are. So, like everything, we evolve, we adapt with the times. And what I've found is you give everybody exposure to the arts and the ones, the cream will always rise to the top. So, the ones that would have survived back then. Are the same people, same types of people that you're seeing now? It's just there's more people around that are now able to get the training because they don't have to go for that arduous nature of things anymore. And that's probably positive. For all the negative, we look at martial arts getting soft or becoming commercialized and all that. How many more people are now being exposed to something that they wouldn't have been before? They got a chance to become more, to use it as a vessel for growth, to use it to help them become more than they were before. It's not about fighting anymore. Unless you are in a violent profession or you're a violent man, you're not going to get involved in fights all the time. Anyway, self-defense is far from being one of the most important things that a martial art will give you. It's a great benefit and it certainly should be at the forefront of what you do. But it shouldn't be the only reason for doing what you do, because your chances of being in a fight are probably about 5%. The rest of the 95% of the time, you'd better be offering something with a little more substance to it. And that was one of the things with the Reality Check podcast that I do. That self-defense focused very much so because obviously, about real-life fights and footage of the same. And then self-defense and martial arts flavored, but that isn't the focus. That's the gateway. It's more than that. It's about being more than that and using the examples of what we see at the extremes of behavior to reflect on how we behave in day-to-day. And martial arts offers us that same chance.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

We're finally, I think, at a time where a growing number of, not the public, but a growing number of martial artists are acknowledging, you know what, there is overlap between traditional martial arts and self-defense, but they are not the same.

Jay Cooper: 

Correct.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You know, there's some Venn diagram intersection there. And when you acknowledge that, you get a lot of freedom to say, you know, what is my training? My training is not just about fighting. It can be about becoming a better person and the multitude of things that it gives us without having to compromise that or make excuses for it in the way that, you know, a lot of these folks out here, you know, martial arts is just self-defense is just fighting is just combatives. Okay. Sure.

Jay Cooper: 

I train for the streets, bro.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure. Well, then why are you a jerk? You know, if you've been training 30 years and you've been growing as a person, you must have been all horrible human being back then.

Jay Cooper: 

This is the improved version. Well, that's, isn't that funny though? Because the same people that are often saying it's like this discipline and respect and all that sort of thing. They're the same people that started because of fear. And they never left that fear behind. There's still that frightened child or that frightened youth that wanted to become bigger, and they want you to know how much bigger and stronger they are by telling you how much bigger and stronger they are and how they do it for real. Well, then you're not. If you have to tell me you're a badass, you're not a badass.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Right.

Jay Cooper: 

You know.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

As it was once explained to me, when stuff's going down, when you know, there's an altercation or a near altercation, the person who's sitting down, calm, collected, that's the one you need to worry about. It's not the one who's out in front bragging. It's not the one who wants you to know how tough they are or you know, the one that forces you to look at their belt and see how many stripes they have on it. Not to criticize people who have stripes, but there's a difference between quietly representing your skill via wearing a belt and, you know, wearing that belt to the grocery store.

Jay Cooper: 

Yes. Which, yeah, again, or having one that looks like it's a ladder, you know if you need 15 stripes. Okay. How about a thin one or a thick one, you know, just do that or, you know, it's, and again, the belt system used to mean something more than it does now as well. Or certainly was perceived as being a black belt used to be seen as a measure of fight ability.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I think it still is seen as that.

Jay Cooper: 

So it's seen as that tool to a point, but the stories we hear of black belts being beat up, and there are black belts, and there are black belts, there's that meme going around, because, you know, you can get a black belt in some dojos, schools, in about four years.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You can just go to the, go to Amazon and buy one.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah, exactly, they're about, you know, $15. The training that gets you the black belt, you see, I used to have this view that it's the training behind the black belt that makes the black belt. I shifted that over the years, and now I've got a much more you know, eh, approach to it, because all the black belt shows is technical proficiency within a given system. There's no, you know, you can be a black belt in Kudo. The Japanese archery system, and of course, they came from swimming anyway. The idea of the ranking system was originally a swimming thing that was then adopted.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I have not heard that before. Can you say more? Yeah, that's new to me.

Jay Cooper: 

Again, this is also one of the joys of martial arts. What you hear is as perceivable and things isn't always correct, but it was my understanding that originally when you looked at rankings within Japanese swimming, within schools, they had a rank system to designate your ability and your level and Kano thought that was great and kind of introduced that into the judo system, which was the start of the belts and the idea of the colored belts. So it's, all it shows is you've got proficiency in the UK, obviously where I'm from the accent, we had these swimming badges, the 10 meters, the 25 meters, the 50 meters, the 100 meters, and then you had your gold, you know, your bronze, silver, and your gold life saver awards and all that sort of thing. Swimming proficiency you can get the same thing in most like piano, you get proficiency certificates in piano, so everything has these little metrics along the way. It's a much more Western mindset. And the way we work things out here, and I use the words Western and Eastern for simplicity, not for any other reason. Because we want to see progress as we go along. We like those little achievements, those little ticks in the box to show we've made it. Whereas obviously when you look at the traditional basis of martial arts, the training was the reward. The fact you were there doing it, you didn't need to be told you were doing good, the fact you were there and still allowed to be there was your little tick in the box that you were doing well.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

The fact that you were still alive, you went home without a broken arm, etc.

Jay Cooper: 

Exactly, and the teacher called you absolutely useless, that was a compliment because at least you were paying attention to you. So then if you look at even the systems which are reportedly staying closer to the purity of grading, like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a big one. They're very big on saying, Matt, we don't have all these belts in ours. We got blue, purple, brown, and black, and that's it. Well, that's true. But you're putting stripes on, what's the difference? You know what I'm saying? So if you go, you know yellow, orange, green, blue, tends to be the standard progression within Japanese systems and many systems. So if you add two, three stripes, and then you can go for your blue, all you've done is just change the colors. You put a little stripe on a belt instead of a belt. So there's an argument that we don't have all these color belts. So yeah, you do, you just call them something else. You call it a stripe. You know, boxing's only got one belt, and that's gold. Anyway, but so for me, grades and things, they, a technical proficiency and it's, I've got a kid. I, we've got several children in one of the classes that we teach, we call it a little dragons program, which is definitely the younger end. And within that, we have five children on the spectrum. And they're never going to be able to fight. But it's their fight and their battle is working through their specific challenges that they have in life, and that's where they're victorizing. So the belt for them is irrelevant, but the training is good, but they like to get their little signature in the book at the end of the day. And when they get 10 signatures, they get a little colored star, and those stars, they, we really love getting those little stars. They don't mean anything other than you've been here for 10 times, there's your little star. And then when you get enough of those little stars, you've got your belt full and then you can get another row of stars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now in your martial sense, worthless.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure.

Jay Cooper: 

It's arguably a commercial endeavor. You know, you're getting a participation trophy, which is basically what it is.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yup.

Jay Cooper: 

The joy on these children's faces as they get these little stars on their belts. Because again, they're never probably gonna, one certainly is gonna have a hard time with many things in life. Very little communication level, very little engagement, but the other week he hugged me, which he's never done. Give me a hug.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It's a big deal. People may not realize that that can be a very, very big deal for someone on the team.

Jay Cooper: 

It's a huge deal. I mean, I started tearing up. So, you know, little, you know, inspection gave me a big hug. But, and it's, I've been with me like nine on a year. It took him a year to have that trust with me. Now he lets me hug him, pick him up, high-five him, all that sort of thing because he's shown me that trust. That, to me, was what the martial arts were about. But the development piece, he's never going to fight. He's never really going to be particularly skilled in the strictest sense of the word. But he's making himself better and he's helping him with everything else that he's doing. So the fighting is not important, the grades are not important. So if I give that kid a little star for turning up, and that helps him in a year, feel comfortable enough to hug, and now he's starting to talk and communicate, I don't see the harm. I really don't see the harm.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And I don't either, you know. I work with schools and non-martial arts schools on business and marketing things. At times and one of the things that I say is you want to incentivize the behavior. You want people to take you want these kids to show up because if they don't show up. You can't do anything for them. And if you look at the example of a kid who's nonverbal, they've got a difficult life ahead of them. So does everyone around them is going to be supporting them. So if you can give them a little bit more comfort in a difficult situation, a little bit more confidence in expressing themselves because they know that they struggle to express themselves. This is something a lot of people don't realize. They know they're not like everyone else and that causes a lot of frustration. So if you can give them some tools and some comfort, you've made not only their life better as they age but everyone's life around them. By giving them the consistency of a participation trophy, a star. But there's a lot of value there.

Jay Cooper: 

And then, once we've established that this is okay, and I don't think anybody would argue that that's not okay, what's the problem with then scaling that as we go through? As long as I'm not compromising on what I'm teaching, that's different. If I compromise what I teach, that's a different discussion. But if I'm giving them these little certificates, and a boy's colored belts, if I'm being a little more understanding, and if I'm allowing an adult to do this, because adults, we all have our own challenges and our own demons that we face. We all have our own confidence issues. So, why would I want to... Push them away. The people that need us the most are the ones that would be pushed away by doing it the way it used to be. That always seems slightly wrong to me. So I'd rather have, I'd rather be seen as being a little bit soft on them, but giving them something of value rather than having, you know, callous knuckles and, you know, crawling on broken glass every evening.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

People will come out and they'll say, you know, on this very subject, you know, we should be training the way we used to. Training has gotten soft. A black belt doesn't mean what it used to mean, et cetera. And I said, okay, you go run your school that way. You teach your students that way. The ones that want that will go there. That's awesome. But because we don't have this orchestrated standard of what martial arts is, which I've spoken at length about this. I'm incredibly thankful. We don't have some governing body saying, no, this is what this has to be. It creates the opportunity for a bunch of different people to train in a bunch of different ways. There's diversity in the market. And if you want to run a school, that's super hardcore and teaches only adults who want to get in a cage, you can do that. If you want to exclusively teach young children, and I know the schools that don't have adult programs, they just teach kids because that's what they want to do. Awesome. Do it. I support both.

Jay Cooper: 

The measure of validity is only if you can deliver on what you're promising. It's nothing to do with any perceived anything else. So if you say you're going to have a lot of fun and you have fun, you're valid. If you say you're going to be able to compete in sport and endeavors and get a trophy and you do, you're valid. If you say you're going to fight in the streets, it's a harder metric to prove, but as long as you've got that there, you're valid. So the validity comes from the claim and your ability to meet that claim, not from any other metric. And that's the only standard I ever apply to people. And people say, is this a good school or not? And I get asked that question quite a lot by people, people I know, or sometimes people on the internet just randomly send to me. And I will say, if that school delivers on what it says it does, that's a good school. If that's what you want, then you'll be all right at that school. If you want something else, that's probably not the school for you. Then that's it.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

How long have you been out of school?

Jay Cooper: 

The one we're currently at, we're approaching 10 years, now breaks in when I had a school. So I started off way, way, way back in the day. And I had a school when I probably shouldn't. I was a little young, probably, you know, my early twenties, but it was a thing. And that was of course the early UFC days as well. So those myself and, originally, I was the assistant instructor there because I've been training through various arts over the years. And I found this when I went to university, this was a club I started training at. And I took it over from the old instructor who, that was a story that's probably not worth getting too much into, but he wasn't necessarily the nicest person in the world. And I basically took the club from him. And there was a student there that trained with us. We ended up being and partners of cones of the dojo called Mel Lesley. He actually owns a martial arts MMA gym in Hull now called Flight Ministry. Well worth seeking out if you're in Hull in Yorkshire. Tell Mel that Jay says hi. But we had a group together and what the UFC had just come out. So there was a massive paradigm shifts in the martial arts at this time. And so we were importing these highly, highly authentic, and not the tall pirated copies of the UFC and the Gracie, the Gracie Jiu-jitsu, the base level instructional cause we're not BJJ at that point. And we started employing these instructionals and the way we would do it is we would go and we would knock lumps off each other and we would test the stuff by watching the videos and then go and beat each other up, seeing if it worked. Now, we had a little bit of a head start because at that time I was under Geoff Thompson and Peter Constantine of the British Combat Association, who to this day are still, luminaries within the field of self-defense. Peter certainly, Jeff has gone down a different route now. He's done a lot of personal development and things. But those guys certainly in my early years were massive, massive influences on me. And so we ran it as a self-defense focus club. And we did things called animal days, which were pro to MMA. And I actually fought on one of the early MMA-style circuits in England called Knockdown Sport Budo, which was run by a guy named Paul, Paul Lloyd Davis in Nottingham. And the first fight I won this story of that and the second fight I fought a certain Mr. Michael Bisping.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Kidding me.

Jay Cooper: 

Nope, I lost. But I do have the pleasure and the privilege of saying.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I'm sorry, I had assumed that, that you said you lost.

Jay Cooper: 

Oh yeah, I lost, but I did grab his testicles.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Okay. I was gonna steer you back to the story on the first one, but I think we've got to stay here for a minute. I'm guessing that's a statement very few people can make.

Jay Cooper: 

No, very, very few people in the world, and I'm sure Michael would agree of can state that they grabbed his testicles. It was, they hadn't set in the rules that you couldn't do it. So he got me in an inside arm bar and I just reached around and gave him a bit of a twist. The referee was slapping my hand like I was getting a dog to drop a cheese. I don't, bad dog, bad dog, let go, let go. So I let go of the nuts. And then the arm bar came on shortly after that. Yeah, that was it. So it wasn't a fast fight, but there's a punchline to it. When the UFC came to Calgary a few years later, many, many years later. I ended up going and getting floor side seats because a friend of mine got, was going with a doctor friend of his, and the doctor then got called up to actually be a fight doctor. So we had a ticket free and he said, if you're free tonight, do you fancy watching the MMA? I was like, Oh, sure. I have time for that. So I had floor seats. Terrible card, by the way, it was actually one of the worst cards I've ever seen, but it didn't cost me anything. So I can't complain too much.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

There you go.

Jay Cooper: 

But during the intermission, Michael Bisping was in the crowd and he was walking around doing the autographs and things. So, I went up to him and he was saying, Alright mate, how you doing? I said, Hi Michael, you alright? 34:25 Englishman, yeah. I said, Yeah, yeah. I said, Do you remember the old KSBO back in Nottingham back in the 90s? He goes, Oh God, yeah. He said I remember that. I said, do you remember like when that time you fought that guy and he grabbed your testicles and twisted him and he sort of looked up and he went, Bonjour, wasn't it like that? So like, Yeah, it was nice. It was a nice little throwback to things like that. So we got a photo of us laughing together.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I love it.

Jay Cooper: 

It was cool. I mean, again, you mentioned it now. He's like, well, I remember some guy grabbing the nuts, but I don't remember what the guy was. But yeah, that was me.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

That's something I loved about early MMA because the philosophy, everybody was coming in saying, I want to try, I want to test, I want to understand, I want to learn, you know, it was this very iterative martial arts process that I only find most of the time in amateur MMA now. I don't see it in the pro side.

Jay Cooper: 

No, you don't.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But I love going to amateur because they beat the snot out of each other and then they hug because they recognize I got better because you were willing to put your body on the line in the same way I was.

Jay Cooper: 

Absolutely, it were.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

And I think that's beautiful.

Jay Cooper: 

The funny thing is, so the first fight I had on the same tournament, I'll actually dash back to that. I was, I mean, I competed before in semi-contact, not to any level, but I competed in that and I've been doing martial arts for quite a while at this point. And I watched out onto the mat and I had a like, out-of-body experience. So, the guy said, you know, go. Now, bear in mind, this is full contact. It was like, basically, it was Kyokushin with grappling. So, you couldn't punch the head, but you could woof them in it so I'm stood there in my stance like this, and the guy is bouncing on his feet and he's thinking that I'm this super cool, you know, ice water in my veins ninja because I'm just stood here like this, and while he's bouncing around. And so I looked, gangster. But what actually happened is I've frozen. So I was going out there and I was like, what am I doing here? There's all these people. And I literally had an out-of-body experience. I just stood there. After about five or ten seconds, this guy clearly realized, okay, this guy isn't actually some badass killer. He looks like he's just his shit self. So, oh, pardon me if I'm not allowed to swear.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It's okay.

Jay Cooper: 

And he, and he literally went bang. And he hit me with a mighty getty, like, the hardest front kick right down the center. Sent me backwards about five foot. And it was like, Oh, yes, we're fighting. That's why I'm here. And I proceeded to beat the style of this guy, but it is amazing. And it was actually, I still reference it to this day not only within, when I teach competition but when I teach self-defense, because most of us, especially when it comes to fighting, we have frames of reference in life. And when you get hit with a frame of reference, you don't have your body scrambles. To try and come up with what it needs to do and try and come up with solutions on the fly, which is why a lot of people will actually sort of panic in self-defense situations because they don't have frames of reference for what's going on. And they're desperately trying to get to a familiar territory before they can do anything, which of course usually is too late. It's part and parcel of the adrenaline response. So you've got the fight and the flight, which is what everybody knows, and the freeze, which is what everybody forgets. The freeze of course comes back from primal responses when site predators were a big threat to us. So you hear a growl in the undergrowth, don't move. Because if I run, it'll trigger the prey response. It'll be after me. I ain't fighting it. So if I stay still for long enough, maybe it'll ignore me. And I'll, you know, come up with a different plan. And of course, we've moved on past site predators being that much of an issue for us in general day-to-day existence. I mean, there's not many Saber 2 Tigers here in Canada. We still keep those visceral responses in us. So we freeze while we're trying to come up with a response option. Of course, in today's modern environment, that's going to get your face punched in. But that was a textbook example of me going out there and all of a sudden having no frame of reference for what I was doing and my body froze. Cause it was waiting to see what would be the best option. I got smacked. Oh yeah. Yeah. They reminded me now if he'd have been a good kicker, and put a round kick to my head, I probably would have been snoozing. So my frame of reference would have been having a nice nap on the floor, but he chose a poor shot and he actually snapped me out of my temporary meditation.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Fortunately.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah. Actually, one of the interesting things, the amateur MMA circuit, I used to live in Champaign Urbana in Illinois, and I used to train under Jack McVicker while I was out there. If anybody doesn't know who Jack McVicker is, he's actually a good guy. Good player in the JKD world, which is what first got me to Jack. But when I got there, I found out that Jack's actually world-class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, he's multiple times Masters Champion as well. He's a black belt under Megaton Dias. He's a black belt under Royler Gracie. And he was a brown belt when I knew him. When I first met him, he was a brown belt back when being a blue belt was a big deal. And Jack was actually, he's referenced in Eddie Bravo's first book. Cause Eddie Bravo was twisting everybody at the tournament and he was cutting through everybody really easily. And then he faced Jack and Jack shut him down. So Jack actually beat him in that tournament cuz he saw what he was doing, just shut him down. So Jack's a top guy, top level player, but the guys was, that were training there, which actually included Ultimate Fighter, alumni, Kyle Watson, who's a good guy there. So, there was a place outside of where I lived, or where we lived in Illinois called Bloomington Normal, and they had a big bar there, and while I use the word bar charitably, it was a barn and "Lil' Evil" Jens Pulver, our chair in association to it, to use another old school name. And you'd go in there and it was basically like a frat boy bar. So you go in there and there was spit and sodas all over the floor, the bar down one end, and it was a huge ring in the middle, boxing ring and you'd go there and you'd sign up whether you wanted to do submission grappling, boxing or MMA. And so submission grappling was what it says on that's in. Boxing is being very generous. Tough man would probably be a far better way to describe that. And then the MMA was the MMA of course, cause this is in the proto stages. So you'd sign up and then you'd get, you'd say what your weight was. There weren't actually, they didn't actually weigh you. It was like, how much do you weigh? Yeah, I'm roughly this. Ah, fine. It's fine. And then you'd get your name called out and you'd go in the ring and everybody would be around there with the beers and they would have the fight and things. And I've told this story before. The guy from our team was called Tony and he was fighting a guy on the other team who had like, you know, blonde frosty tips and, you know, a bit of a rough ass. So the referee came over and said, okay, no biting, no gouging, no head-butts, no blah, blah, blah. Gave the rules and then he went over to the other side. So the fight starts, they tend to be feeling each other out. Tony ends up pulling guard on this guy and while Tony's working the guard and he's shifting left and right, the guy all of a sudden postures up and he drops the nut right down in the middle of Tony's face, just head-butts him clean out, busts him wide open. Of course, Tony goes like we all jump up. Because we're all going to go steaming at the ring now, because we jump up, all his guys jump up. So now we've got like a 20-20 standoff like the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story with a boxing ring in the middle. So of course the tables are going and the bottles are getting picked up. Now, I was on a break in America because my wife went back to university as a mature student and it was an exchange year. So I was a cop in England, but I was on a year break out there. So I was a youngish cop, you know, some mid to late twenties, whereas, with the, the unifies. So, when I'm the level-headed one in a group, there's issues. So, I'm like, I said, I got to the ref, and the referee said what the fuck is going on? And the referee said that's my fault. I didn't tell the guy that you couldn't head-butt. He said, I forgot to mention it when I was giving my instructions, I didn't say you can't head-butt. So, I made my guys back down, and I went towards their guys, and I picked, you know, what appeared to be the alpha there, and I said, look, I said, your guy wasn't told you can't head-butt, our guy was. So... We thought your guy cheated and that's, and so we ended up all kind of, everyone bought each other a beer and, you know, we weren't friends, but we kind of went our separate ways. But that was again, that adrenaline and that atmosphere from those proto-MMA days, it was a Brooke man. It was just, it was a fight for fight's sake. You know, there was no...

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You're smiling as you talk about this.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah, it was because it was an experience to go through. Now I'm smiling because I managed to walk away from the damn thing. But the raw, cause you were fighting because you wanted to test yourself. There was no money. There was no prize. There was no belt. There was no glory. There was no filming. There was no cameras. There was no magazine articles. There was no write-ups. It was just two guys knocking lumps off each other in a bar because they wanted to see if they could do it. And that was the early game. So even MMA now, MMA now, you can join an MMA gym. You can do daytime MMA fitness classes. You can, you know, so MMA has gone through that same genesis that martial arts did from back in the day. The training has changed now. And for the better, because CTE and all the stuff that goes along with that, you know, you don't. I've got head trauma and things going on but it's, there's a certain honesty to putting yourself in a position of incredible jeopardy and pressure to see if you can, if you can sink or swim in that situation. And that is what is missing from a lot of training these days, not hitting each other hard. Pressure doesn't mean you have to compete, but you have to have pressure in your training. If you train under pressure, you'll be able to perform under pressure. And if you don't. Then you won't be able to. You'll never rise to the occasion, you'll fall to the level of your train. Archilochus, 650 BC.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

How do you bring pressure in for your students?

Jay Cooper: 

Several ways. First and foremost, you've got to know what the technique is. It's pointless applying pressure when you've got nothing to actually respond back with. So if we take something very, very simple terms, we'll use a jab. So you teach them what a jab is, bang, bang, bang. Now you can do a jab. Now you know how to defend a jab. Okay. Catch, you know. We've back and catchers a million ways you can defend it, but we'll keep it simple. So I know how to do a jab. I know how to catch a jab. So the next one is I attack you, you attack me, I attack you. Cause then we've got three beats in that. We've got an attack, a defense, and an attack. And then I defend, attack, defend. Then we reverse the roles and we keep going that. Then we increase the speed and the pressure. Bam, bam, bam. And now I'm actually trying to jab you in the face. You're trying to jab me back. So we're going full power, full contact, but within a very limited frame. So if he gets too much, you can just step back because you know it's a jab coming. So you say you can safely test yourself in that situation. Then we go to one side, she's going to feed jabs, and you've got to defend. There's no comeback anymore, just feeding jabs. Then you can feed jabs and you can fire one back. And then before you know it, your jab's firing. Great. Now you can take that same process, and you can then apply maybe a slip to the jab instead of a catch, or an elbow destruction, or, you know parry hook, which or whatever it happens to be, you can then add another punch. You can add another punch. And so before you even get to sparring, sparring, you've got this whole process to go through. This can take a month. It can take two months. It can take six months. It can take a year to get comfortable within that, but that's fine. It's your journey. Not mine. I've had people come be able to do a decent jab catch exchange within two lessons. I've had others that need a couple of months. That's just because of their psychological makeup, but you apply pressure to the point where they're comfortable. And then you go a little bit past it and if they can thrive there, okay, next time you start there and you go a little bit further and you go up and so on and so on and so on. You build on it. If they can't cope, you dial it back. You dial it back. And there's no reason you can't have someone training at 10% pressure training with someone taking at 100% pressure. It's just the 100% has to give 10% to the 10% percenter and the 10% percenter gives 100% to the 100% percenter. That's, so you can have guys of completely different levels and experience and comfort zones just exchanging in that. That's how you get comfortable performing a technique under pressure. Then, of course, you add sparring and you can limit it. You can just punch, you can just kick, you can just grapple, you can just do whatever. Then you do all-out sparring. And then the thing that most schools, in fact, almost every school with a couple of exception misses is scenario training. Now, scenario training is specific to self-defense. If you're in a competitive school, you don't need to go past that. You're at the level where you're sparring regularly now, you're drilling regularly now, that's where you stay because that's what you do, that's your raison d'etre. If you're going into the self-defense realm, you then have to put role plays and scenario training in there. And within the scenario training, you've still got the same jeopardies of getting hit, punched, and kicked, but you don't know if you're going to get hit, punched, or kicked. You have to then gauge if it's necessary to engage in a fight, you have to explore alternative ways to get out of having a fight. There's sucker punches, there's ambushes, there's attacks from the rear, and it's a little harder to arrange because you need to have people able to fulfill roles. So your role here is a drug dealer, your role here is a mom with her kid, your role here is whatever, and they have to comfortably act within their role. And then so these scenarios play out about three minutes or so. And then you do a debrief, and you extrapolate what went on, and you play back the video of what went on, and what was your thought process, how were you doing this? Now, my friend in the UK, John Titchen, John Titchen Practical Karate and Dart, he runs things called Sim Days, where he specializes in this sort of thing. Myself, I started doing them, not because of my association with John, it's a happy coincidence that we do the same things. But because this is how we trained in the police academy. You do the techniques on the pads, then you try and arrest it, do the techniques on someone that's resisting you a little bit, and then you go into a setup. A setup scenario, okay, you're walking into the park and you got going up, there's a guy over there that's been seen with a knife on the bench, go and talk to him and action. And then you go in and you'd have to try and deal with the scenario as it unfolded. Sometimes they'd fight, sometimes they wouldn't. Now, what this teaches you is the thing that's missing. From self-defense training, which is context. So, when I started the Reality Check series of videos, that was what I wanted to try and give back. Context. Violence out of context is very simple. Someone's in front of you, punch them out. Someone's got this, hit them with a stick, stab them, shoot them, run over them with your car, you know, whatever it happens to be. But that's the how to do it, and the what to do. That's the single easiest piece in the iceberg. The when it's really difficult to get people to explain or to recognize even more than the when is the why.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Why.

Jay Cooper: 

And that's what gets people in so much trouble with the law. You can do exactly the right thing. But if you can't explain why you did it, you can still find yourself in massive amounts of jeopardy. In the Canadian legal system, there's something called the Feeney Warrant, which was basically entered into evidence of how police now have to get evidence to get a warrant to secure things, based on the back of the fact they completely arsed up their articulation of why they went into someone's premises to get evidence for a case. They were absolutely in place to do so. But they made such a cat shit job of explaining why the judge didn't buy it. So they then had to justify their extra grounds. And you find things like this throughout the world in case law and things where they've done a really bad job of explaining things or they've done a really bad job of justifying actions. And so to that extent, they make case law.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Sure.

Jay Cooper: 

So the why is the first thing people need to recognize because again, the what and the how absolutely easy, even the when to an extent, although there's nuances to that and levels to that. But it's the why because your why and my why are going to be very, very different based on our range of reference, based on our experience, and based on our own personal temperaments. Provided my justification for why I take a set, a set of actions is in place and I can articulate that on a base balance of subjective and objective with the balance tipping heavily towards the objective. Hopefully, then I'm good. If you'll forgive the diatribe and the monologue on this because I know this has been a long answer. When I was in the police once, I actually was a night duty detective in the UK. And there was a massive, massive pitch fight outside. And the police, the units were on their way to it. And so I said, I'm going down, I'll see if I can assist. So I'm playing close, so I go down. There's three guys running away, and the radio piece of my ear comes across, you've got three offenders running away. So I actually stood in the middle of the road, and I held my badge up and said, stop right there, stop right there, stop right there. And the guy in the middle sort of did the football shuffle and tried to run around and get past me. So I foot-swept him, and he went six feet through the air, landed on the floor, took a bit of gravel rash. I went up and grabbed him, got him up and put him against the wall, told his friends to back off. Because then the uniformed guys were coming up to me to be my backup. Turns out this guy was actually the victim. But based on what I had at the time, which was a radio in my head saying, three offenders go in your direction, he wouldn't stop when I identified myself, and I clearly did as such. And it's not like I jumped on him and, you know, gave him a good beating. It was like, he went to go past me, I just did a single sweep. So I did the wrong thing. I swept the feet out from under the victim and then grabbed him. However, I did it for the right reasons. So there was no culpability in terms of that end. So that's that old Access Reyes men's rea thing when it comes to legal proceedings. So the Access Reyes was there, the men's rea was not. I should probably qualify that. What not, that means Access Reyes is the physical act. Men's rea is the mental state. So if you engage in an act with the intention of doing that act, it tends to be the completeness of the offense. There are a few outliers and exceptions to that, where you can just have one and you're good to go. But that's what it boils down to. So that was an example of my why was right, even though it was actually wrong in terms of the situation. Which is, again, it's important that you know those articulation pieces, because on the surface, I took a victim out.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I'm sure he wasn't happy about that, but...

Jay Cooper: 

He was fine, actually.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Really?

Jay Cooper: 

He was like, my fault. My fault. He said you're right. I should have stopped. He said, but I wasn't, but he, again, that's not his fault because he absolutely should have stopped. But he saw me, but he was in such a hyper-adrenalized state of flight because he'd just been come from getting a hiding in the bar. He was in such a hyper-adrenalized state. Although he saw me, he couldn't bring his level down to process that his cognizance wasn't there. So he said, I should have stopped now in reflection, he's absolutely right. He should have done. So he did the wrong thing, but he did it for the right reasons because he was hyper-adrenalized and trying to get away from the fight. So again, it's literally the mirror of what I did, you know, I did the wrong thing for the right reasons. He did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

This seems like the next stage for martial arts training, right? This scenario stuff and we're starting to see more of it. But you know, we get all you have to do is look at the comments on nearly any martial arts-related content online and you see people who are being very reductionist, you know, they don't even worry about the when it's all you have to do is or just do this or I would just do this right and there's a natural instinct there we want things to be simple life is complicated and we want to be able to think that yes all I have to do is have the most mild competency in carrying a firearm, and I don't have to spend any time worrying about any of that and I'll be safe, right? And that's really what it comes down to for most people. They want to remain safe.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

But we see from, you know, that example, what if you were a little less disciplined in how you had addressed that? You did not know yet victim. Guy could have gotten really hurt. You could have done more of a number on him than

Jay Cooper: 

Oh yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

The people who were after him. But if he'd had a little bit more training, right, if the training was not simply physical, but worked with adrenaline as, you know, anybody who steps in to compete does. You know, you gave the example of you getting rocked in the face the first time and, oh, you snapped out of it. You probably didn't have to go through that again.

Jay Cooper: 

No.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You called it a reference. I know others who refer to it in other names. For me, it's just experience. I've experienced this. I know what this is like. It doesn't have the same impact because it's not novel for me.

Jay Cooper: 

You will always go, you will default to the thing you do the most of. Best example, and I've very rarely seen a better example of this, was Brock Lesnar against Alistair Overeem. When they had the fight, and you got Overeem, who's basically a huge strike on Lesnar, who's just absolutely a monster of a human being. Now, is he technically one of the most skilled fighters out there? No, he doesn't need to be. You can literally pull your arms off him, you know? And Overeem stagged him and got him good. Now, a lot of people said Lesnar can't take a punch, and it shows that he would. No, what happened is... and Overeem hits like a bus, so don't tell me that, oh, he can't take a punch. It's like, yeah, you'd be in a coma for weeks, mate, if he landed one of them on you. So let's not pretend Brock couldn't take a shot. Brock got hit, and he went back to colleague's college. What's the first thing you did? You went bang, you dropped a level and he put his arms out and he went to go and do his wrestling because he hit into his default setting and his default setting was wrestling. So it's like several levels, drop a level, and go for the single, you know? So he instantly went to wrestling mode, which of course is, it's not good when someone's feeding punches to your face. I've seen fighters, there was a guy in the UK called Pelle Reid who was a successful karate fighter, Lau Gar Kung Fu, he actually was, a kickboxer, and he made the switch to professional boxing and ultimately K1 in the end. When in one of his boxing matches he got tagged early and he actually swung the kick again, he hit him hard enough to reset but out came the leg. Pele's actually famous for knocking out one of the Klitschkos in early karate competitions as well. But again, he just, unfortunately, hit his factory default. What I teach my guys is, you'll be better at some things than others. And you'll get, you'll recognize that. Some good kickers, some good punchers, some good grapplers, some good weapons guys. Try and have... the ability in the ones that you're not so good at. Some you're good at, some you're okay at, some you're gonna be bloody awful at. Have enough experience in the bloody awful stuff that you can get back to what you're okay or good at. You don't have to be good at everything. I don't have to be the best grappler. I just have to stop you grappling me. I don't have to be the best boxer. I have to stop you boxing me and so on and so on and so on and so on. So provided, as you say, its experience, experience, and reference points are exactly the same. I have a reference point because I have the experience and I have the experience because I have a reference point. And that's why the training becomes so important. The pressure that you put on your training. So if you're training for self-defense, it's no different than if you're training for MMA. It's no different if you're training for kickboxing. You'll default to type. And if your default to type is keep punching until the referee pulls off, well, guess what? There's no referee. If you don't have the ability to de-escalate, if you don't have the ability to recognize that walking away from this is a good idea, if you don't fold that into your training, you're missing out. Because self-defense, honestly, is about 10% physical. The rest of the 9% of it, 90% is environmental awareness, situational awareness, being able to talk properly, carrying yourself, recognizing, when to walk away. recognize when to de-escalate or escalate, recognize you when to engage, recognize when to not engage. All these bits and pieces go into it. There's a science to it. I lecture on this. I teach on this, and this is actually, I've got a course it's gonna be coming out soon specific to address this. Because when you talk about martial arts, people always say like, martial arts is 90% mental. It's, everyone says it. It's like, you know, you get memes about it. It's like martial arts is all in the mind and the body. So this is true. How much training have you done for that 90% in the past month? It's that I'm willing to bet you've got a 90%, it's all 90%, but you're spending 90% your time on a 10% and 10% on a 90% if I'm being generous because most people don't touch it. You know, so to me, that's important. If you're going to talk about that mental thing, that self-defense thing, you have to put the reps in on that. How many reps have you ever put in on environmental awareness and situational coding?

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I'm probably an anomaly. I know where you're going quite a bit.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, because for you, but you recognize that that was something you need to do. Exactly. I was, I'm the same. My guys are the same. I actually have them do exercises on this on a weekly if not daily basis. And I'll set them homeworks. These are my distance learning guys that I do on my video training. I don't so much do this in class because they're not necessarily coming to me for that. But I will make them do their recollections. I'll make them dictate it, then wait 24 hours, then tell the same story, then compare the accounts, all the stuff like that. And this isn't new. It's not like I invented this. This is how we did it in the police. This is how you were taught to write reports. This is how you're taught to gather evidence. Cognitive interview modeling just expanded out for myself. And one of the inspirations was when you driving in the police advanced driving test. Certainly in the UK, you have to narrate your drive, what you're doing, what you're seeing, what actions you're taking, why you're taking them. Now, it's very hard to do, and what you actually start doing is recognizing what is and isn't important as you're narrating. You know, you're driving along, I've got a bit of a scratchy nose there, and I'm shifting my bum in the seat because my arse is going to sleep. You don't need to narrate that, but you do need to narrate mirror check, nothing in that mirror, coming up speed 45 kilometers an hour, and you go for this whole narration piece. Now you take that same idea, and you make that an internal monologue in your head whilst you're driving a car day-to-day. And you see lots and you don't get any many accidents because you're constantly aware of it. Then you take that same idea and you put it walking down the street, walking in a supermarket, and eventually you end up with an internal narrative that you don't turn off, you don't even know you're doing it, it's just kind of there in the background constantly. So you don't get in many situations because you see the things that are going to lead up to those situations. Outside of Captain Kirk beaming down in front of me and sticking a nut on. I am gonna be in a fight that I haven't seen, or at least had a chance to see, coming from the various warning signs. And that's that piece, and that's one of the heavy parts of that 90%. Your OODA loops, your color codes, and all the things that go along with that.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You mentioned you do some instruction, and this is probably a good time for us to put the websites and the social media and any of that stuff on the table so people can confine you and connect with you before we're going to start winding down in a minute.

Jay Cooper: 

So yeah, I mean, the easiest way to find me is on Facebook. I have a page on there called Aftermath: The Fight after The Fight. I do a weekly podcast called Reality Check. With the Budo brothers. And that's actually on their own Facebook page and they're on our YouTube channel, Reality Check with Jay Cooper. I'm on Instagram at HabitCount. And you can contact me at realitycheckbudo@gmail.com. That links to the Reality Check email account. And that tends to be the one I've started using for business and, and contact people in the martial arts. The distance training program I offer is called Habit University. And if there's any interest in that, then people can reach out to it that's five modules. And it runs over three years. We're actually entering into our third season now, our third year. But there's each year you don't need to have done the previous year to benefit from the next year. So I had people start at the beginning, then I had people start in season two and I've got some newer people starting in season three. It's not like you have to have done the first two. What it means, it's like when you watch a film or read a book, you'll get more the second and third time you read it or watch it and you'll see details you missed the first time. It's the central. And we've actually got, I've got my book coming out very, very soon which is called, originally it was going to be called, I've actually got the draft of it here.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yeah, that's it.

Jay Cooper: 

So this is the draft of the book. It was originally called The Mantle. We're actually going to call it Reality Check now. And, but what I've got in here is it's not like a self-defense man in the strictest sense of the word. There's a lot in here like you can see the little chapter on OODA looping. There's the original OODA loop cycle illustrations that is there. We've got Cooper's color code within it. It's about psychological training.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Oh, this looks great.

Jay Cooper: 

A little bit of physical technique in there as well. Timing slots from combat and things like that as well. Lineups and ethics, morals and legals and all the good stuff that goes into it. Because that's the other thing that I'm quite big into. I don't, there's no, as you said yourself earlier on quite correctly it's not... Hold on, it's not right and wrong. There's so many different values that we ascribe to things. So the legal, ethical, and moral standpoints. Legal being obviously the law and the overriding archon. Ethics being those standards within society that tend to be mutually agreed upon, although never formally codified. And then morals, which is your own intrinsic value sets. Now, when all three align, life is easy. When there's a misalignment between any one of those, you have a decision to make. COVID was a great illustration of this. Legally, the vaccine masks mandates, social distancing, et cetera, was put in there. Ethically, most people were happy to do that. Some weren't, so there was an ethical clash there. Morally, some people were willing to acquiesce to the requirements, some people were not. Now, again, I'm not judging right or wrong on what one of those you choose, but you're in a situation now where if your moral code doesn't align with the ethical or the legal values you have a choice to make. Are you willing to compromise on that? Or recognize that you're not going to act on this judgment simply because the rest of society and indeed the world doesn't allow you to do so. Or are you going to take a stand on that? Rosa Parks was a good example.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Yup.

Jay Cooper: 

You know, a Schindler's List is a good example. So it doesn't, just because you adhere to the moral code and you reject the ethics and legal things, doesn't make you wrong. You just gotta be, know where your line in the sand is. Same with moral and ethical. And sometimes Trump legal. We've had many, many fights for equal rights for women, equal rights for race relations, LGBTQ. Each thing becomes a moral and an ethical thing that eventually causes a change in the law. So it's not a one-way thing. War trumps all. No, it doesn't. Each one is a snapshot of time, of course. So understanding your personal matrixing way you fit in with that is an important part. Just learn how to throw jab, hook, or kick. That's what I try to explore in the book more because there are a million books out there selling that punch in the head. But there's not so many teaching you why you do that and when you do that, and that's what I wanted to get into in that book. So it's almost a personal journey within to yourself under the framework of a self-defense manual.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

I love it. We talk on the show all the time. Why is the most important question?

Jay Cooper: 

It absolutely is.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

It is the fundamental question. If your reason for training is not reflected in how you are training, how often you are training, whom you're training with, et cetera. Then, you know, you're missing out.

Jay Cooper: 

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

You know, if you're trying to go there, and you're driving that direction, yeah, you're moving more or less where you're trying to go. You're getting closer, but it would be more efficient if you lined up a little tighter. And it's a question that a lot of people don't ask.

Jay Cooper: 

It's a microcosm for life as well. My teacher, Shifu Singh, Shifu Harinder Singh, he actually, his big phrase it necessary to react? He's big on and this is something that I advocate as well. Reactions are okay, choices are better. So if I choose to do something, there's a much better chance of that being able to explain why, versus, you know, I just, oh, I just reacted. Well, reaction is exactly what you said. It's a reaction. There's a stimulus-response thing. That's a lot harder to articulate when we start to get to nuances. Whereas if I choose to do something, It can be just as fast as a reaction, but there's a whole thought process behind it, which if you understand yourself and where you're coming from, it's a lot easier to act quicker and then explain why you're acting in there. Because again, you've got the experience of reference points, call it what you will. And it's the principle I teach called End Game. Now, End Game is what do you want out of a given thing, whether that's your training, which you correctly alluded to, you want this from your training, so you put all your efforts towards that goal. If you're in a situation where you get pulled over by a police officer, whatever, a traffic infraction, your End Game should be not to get the ticket. If you're in a fight, your end game might be to put him through the floor, it might be I want to go home. The reason though in your end game is important is all the actions you take should reflect your stated goal. If you take an action which does not reflect your stated goal, it doesn't mean you're not going to get there, it means you're making that journey so much more difficult for yourself. You still might not be able to get it, that cop still might give you the ticket. Hi, officer. Yep. I'm actually very, very sorry. I didn't mean to be speaking like that. And this is why I fully understand that you know, the law is in place to keep me safe for a reason. You know, that's got a far better chance of getting you off that ticket than, I mean, you've got any real criminals to catch. Well, one of those responses has got a chance of, he might give you a break. He might not. One of them is you've just got a ticket. So again, it doesn't matter. If you like that cop, it doesn't matter if he's being officious, it doesn't matter what he does. You have the choice on your behaviors and your behaviors and your actions should be dictated towards what the result you want. Whether you get that result or not is largely relevant because it's the journey towards that result which is gonna make it possible or otherwise. Like the Vikings, they used to go into every battle thinking that the decision was already determined. Their job was just to give a good account of themselves. Same thing when you went through these sort of things.

Jeremy Lesniak: 

Wasn't that a great episode? You know, it's not too often we can talk about the, let's see, the anatomical elements of globally known fighters on this show. That was a first, I loved that story that just the stories overall Jay you're a great storyteller. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for telling such great stuff. And honestly, I think my favorite thing about this is that we got to talk about what I consider to be the overlap between MMA and traditional martial arts, right? It's that testing, that respect, that mutual benefit, that I think is often lost in these conversations. So, yeah. I had a great time audience. I hope you had a great time. I hope that you enjoyed Jay's stuff and you check out what he's got going on. I hope that you check out whistlekick.com and I hope that you consider two things. One supporting our Patreon, patreon.com/whistlekick. And then number two, we offer consulting services. If you have a martial arts school. And you've said, you know, I would like it to be something. We can help you with that. We have a tremendous track record and if you want to know what we stand for, we have more examples of what is important to us, what we stand for as an organization than anybody else. 834 episodes as of right now. Check out what we do. If you're interested, you can reach out, there's a form on the website, which will help. All you got to do is start the process. If you want to follow us on social media, we're @whistlekick. My email address, jeremy@whistlekick.com. Until next time, train hard, smile, have a great day.