INTRO TONY: Welcome entrepreneur movers and shakers. This is The Tony D'Urso Show and you are at the right place. I thank you for joining in with us. Now today we're going to talk about a sport, actually an art that on the surface, it can seem terrifying to some, but deep beneath it teaches us lessons that are powerful in our business world today. Now, guys, there's one word that changes everything in business, and it means the difference between success and failure. It really does. It's one word, and I'm going to challenge you to figure that out during this interview. We're going to go into the world of martial arts today. Now, most of you, like me, probably did it and tried it. We did some training, no matter how minor. We learned some self-defense techniques. I know from experience in studying with the likes of Grandmaster Billy Blanks of Tae Bo fame and eighth-degree Grandmaster John Gill, who, by the way, now has twenty-eight world titles. I learned that one key word, and I used that in my business and I'm still learning. Now, today's interview has nothing to do with violence or war. Let's see what you can learn. Today we're going to speak with Grandmaster Jeff Speakman, The Perfect Weapon. And while we're at it, this is all about helping you and your friends move on your journey to success. We want to help you get very successful, and we're going to help turn you into an elite entrepreneur. Get ready to meet Jeff. He trained with Ed Parker back in the day to become a tenth-degree Grandmaster in Kenpo Karate, and for a reference, at Ed Parker's International Karate Championships in Long Beach, that's where Bruce Lee performed some of his famous exhibitions and where he was introduced to the world. And some of Ed Parker's students were notables such as Elvis Presley, Chuck Norris. Now, Jeff is known the world over for his movie—it's one of the best martial arts movies out there—it's The Perfect Weapon from nineteen ninety-one, and he went on to make just under a dozen movies in his career. If I'm not mistaken, he teaches Kenpo 5.0 all over the world, and one of his centers is actually literally right down the street. There's a lot more to say. I could go on, but for me, that says it all. Let's get into it. Let's bring him on. Hi, Jeff. Welcome to The Tony D'Urso Show. JEFF: Hello, hello. Wonderful to be here, sir. Thank you so much for the invitation. TONY: Thank you. The honor again is mine. It's just such an honor. I'm going to just move on past that because I want to talk about so many things. I'm going to try my best to bring up what I think the audience would like and would like to know. And we want to learn about the using of martial arts, the training, and the discipline. We want to learn—well, can we use that? What can we use in building our reputation? What can we learn to work in our business? So let's start here. First of all, let's learn a little bit more about you and introduce you to some of the audience that may not know about you or Kenpo or anything. So Jeff, how did it all start for you?

INTERVIEW – PART 1 (BACKSTORY: MISSOURI & MEETING LOU ANGEL) JEFF: Well, it really was a year after I graduated high school, which was nineteen seventy-five in the Chicagoland area where I grew up in Chicago, like you. And I was a springboard diver in high school and a gymnast all my life, from the time I can remember—six years old, I was swimming and then diving. And then we went on and did quite well with that in high school. Then when I graduated, about a year after that, so it'd be nineteen seventy-six, I moved to Joplin, Missouri, where I attended Missouri Southern State, then College, now University, took six years to get a four-year degree because I paid for it myself. I had to keep taking time off to work, to make the money, to get back in there, to pay for the next semester. But I hustled through it as best I could, took my degree. And during that process in nineteen seventy-eight, I met a guy named Lou Angel who was teaching martial arts there. And in nineteen sixty-three, he actually got his third-degree black belt in Tokyo from the Grandmaster of that system whose name was Gogen Yamaguchi. And he was really the only, the second Caucasian to get a black belt directly from Yamaguchi back in those days. So how crazy, right? I moved from Chicago to this little town of Joplin, Missouri, and there I find this guy with this world-class reputation. What are the chances of that? Really crazy. So I took advantage of it because I was either going to go into some kind of dance or into martial arts, something movement-related, because that's all I've been doing all my life. I was hungry, looking for the next thing, and it just turned out that the guy I was roommates with for several years was a black belt with Lou Angel. And the thing that I found the most interesting about that was we were living together in a house in Joplin for about a year until I even knew that he knew martial arts. That's how much he kept it to himself. And I thought, "God that was really cool." You know, he didn't do it for the show. He did it for his personal development. And when it was indigenous to the conversation, he told me, but he wouldn't brag about it or bring it up unless it was in the conversation. So that level of humility, I really—it struck me. And so I asked him first. He actually began to teach me. And then in nineteen seventy-nine, I went to become a direct student of Lou Angel.

INTERVIEW – PART 2 (MEETING ED PARKER & MOVING TO LA) JEFF: So then after becoming a full Nidan, second-degree black belt, then I had graduated from college. And Mr. Angel said, "You know, if you want to make your martial arts your life, you should move to LA and study from Ed Parker because he's the best in the world." So I never knew much about Kenpo. Of course, I knew the name Ed Parker, and I knew the name Kenpo. But because it came from him, Lou Angel, in such a strong recommendation, and I didn't owe any money, I didn't have to get a job right away, I didn't have a family, I was completely alone. And so I went, "Okay, what the heck?" So I went ahead and moved to Los Angeles, sold my car to pay for the U-Haul, stayed with some friends when I got there, and I had a letter of introduction to Ed Parker from Lou Angel. So this is now the summer of eighty-three. I met Mr. Parker at his big tournament in Long Beach—the one you mentioned that Bruce Lee and Elvis Presley were at—and I met him there, bowed very deeply to show my respect. I handed him this letter, which he looked really strange at me at that point, you know, and opened the letter and went, "Oh my God, you're from my old friend Lou Angel." He hugged me. He said, "This is wonderful." Gave me his home phone number. He said, "Give me two weeks to get over this. Call me and we'll get you started in Kenpo." And that's exactly what happened. I became a student in the West LA School, and then in a couple of years after that, he asked me to no longer attend there, and come once a week with three other people to his house to learn from him personally. So now put that in perspective, right? A guy who went to Joplin, Missouri and went to college, and suddenly I'm in Los Angeles and asked by a guy like Ed Parker if I would like to become a personal student of his. And of course, the only two words that came out of my mouth were, "Yes, sir." And so I started then becoming a student of his, going to his home. INTERVIEW – PART 3 (THE MOVIE: THE PERFECT WEAPON) JEFF: Some people who were attending that karate school, their kid was there. They kept watching me teach, and one of them was a publicist in the movie business. And she kept coming up saying, "You know, you should take what you do and go study acting, because I've never seen anything like that." And I kept saying, "Ah, it's not my style." You know, I just—I never even went to a play in high school. I just had no aspirations whatsoever. But my undergraduate degree was in psychology, specifically in the behavioral sciences. So I thought, "Okay, you know, what a cool way to learn more about yourself and your behavior and how you fit in the whole picture." So she made arrangements for me to go visit a highly recommended acting school, which I did. Loved it. Studied there for five years, went on many auditions, got a little bit of work here and there. Never let anybody know I knew karate because I wanted to earn as an actor first and karate guy second. So that's when I met, ironically, at that workshop, one of the teachers was the guy that wrote Van Damme's second movie, Kickboxer, and I didn't know that. So we're just chatting one day and he told me that's what he did. And I went, "Oh my gosh, I do this thing called Kenpo." And we became friends. And he said, "Well, let me come down and watch this thing you call Kenpo. I've never seen it before." So he came to the West LA dojo, and after that he called the producer that he worked with with Van Damme, who had just finished his third Van Damme movie, so he's now off of Van Damme. He had a three-picture deal and he was looking for the next guy. So the guy that wrote Van Damme's second movie brought him to see me, and he kept calling him and saying, "You live in LA, you got to come see what this is." So he agreed, eventually came there one night after the school was closed, had some of my fellow black belts there. We put on a demonstration for him. We went at it really, really hard and it was dynamic and powerful and he loved it and immediately turned around and offered a four-picture deal to me, which of course I took. And then he went to Paramount with those four pictures and said, "Okay, I did this with Van Damme. I've got the next guy. It's this stuff called Kenpo. The only time you've seen it is when Bruce Lee did it, and this guy had Ed Parker, who was his teacher. He was in some of the movies in the past, and I've got the next guy." Well, they wanted to see. So now the president of Paramount, a couple of his guys and this producer. Now they come back to the West Los Angeles School at night to see another demo now for the president of Paramount. And that was it. When we were done with that, he said, "Okay, we want to take all four Speakman pictures from Mr. Diesel, Mark Diesel, the producer." And of course, he had not only had the right to do that, who wouldn't want him to do that? And so that's how I wound up at Paramount. And then we wrote the movie The Perfect Weapon for me. And so all those scenes in the karate school and talk about the tigers and the dragon and the history and all those are all my contributions. I didn't write them. Of course he wrote them, but those were my contributions to the story. And then, of course, Ed Parker and I were able to choreograph all of the fight scenes. And Mr. Parker was on the movie set with me every single day and night through the night, whenever we had fight scenes to film. So he was there to support me and help me and coach me. And as you can imagine, we became very, very close during that time. And ironically, he died shortly after we were done filming the movie, which was November of ninety. And then he died December fifteenth of ninety. And then the movie came out in March of ninety-one. He never saw the finished movie. He never saw the finished movie. But he did see the edited fight scenes, the preliminary, the first edit of the fight scenes in a little monitor in my trailer, which I shared with him. So it was our trailer. And the big fight scene of the movie, if you happen to remember the movie, there was one set piece fight scene that took place in this Taekwondo gym. Me against three other guys. Huge fight scene took us three twelve-hour days to shoot it, which is an enormous amount to do a fight scene with. And then so we were sitting next to each other on the couch in the trailer. And here's this little monitor and boom, they hit play for the first one. He is jumping up and down on the couch, clapping his hands, screaming, "That's it. That's it." And he's knocking me all over the place. I mean, he's out of control. You know, he was so happy. And many people who knew him a long, long time more than I said, "The only time they saw him happier in his whole life was during the birth of his children." Absolutely amazing. TONY: So that made the audience amazing.

SPONSOR BREAK – LINKEDIN ADS TONY: Just a quick note from my radio days, we're used to interrupting every ten minutes to do a station ID. It's not needed anymore, but I still like it. So for the audience, we're speaking with Grandmaster Jeff Speakman. We're talking about The Perfect Weapon. But I don't mean the movie. I don't mean the film. You're going to find out more what I mean. And you can find out more about Jeff and please do at JeffSpeakman.com—Speakman is S-P-E-A-K-M-A-N, JeffSpeakman.com. Please check it out. And yeah, there's a lot there. There's a lot there. And by the way, Jeff took the time out to do this interview just before what's officially called Jeff Speakman's World Martial Arts Event 2024 starts next week in Las Vegas. This event, guys, hosts the 5.0 Fighter World Cup Championships and Training Camp 2024. Now this interview is going to publish after that, you won't be able to catch it, but if you go to Europe, the European event starts November thirty in France. Maybe you can catch it there. Either way, you got to go check this out. Even if you just learn a little bit of the self-defense and some of the disciplines with it, it's very good. You can use that in any acts of life. The one thing that I got when I first, first, first started in martial arts many years back was confidence, but that's not the key word I want to talk to you about. But it gives you that confidence. Not that you're going to start a fight or do anything. But you don't feel worried about being in any situation. And I could tell stories. But this show is not about me. So we're going to go back to you, Jeff, and actually just one moment before we get into that, guys, here's a quick note about growing your business. It's something we all want to do. I was fortunate to be immersed in marketing during my corporate days, and I had my own company for some time. My show made number one on Chartable worldwide because of marketing, and it's a good show too. For you B2B marketers out there, you know how noisy the ad space can be. And if your message isn't targeted to the right audience, it just disappears into the noise. So with LinkedIn Ads, you can precisely reach the professionals who are more than likely to find your ad relevant, like I do. With LinkedIn's targeting capabilities, you can reach them by job title, industry, company, and more. This is so cool. You can stand out with LinkedIn Ads, and you can start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. Guys, LinkedIn Ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a very respectful environment. You'll have direct access to and build relationships with decision makers—a billion members, one hundred and eighty million senior-level executives, and ten million C-level executives. That's astounding. And you'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In technology, LinkedIn generated two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms. And you'll also work with a partner who respects the B2B world you operate in. And how about this—seventy-nine percent of B2B content marketers say that LinkedIn produces the best results for paid media. So just like I'm saying, this is something you should really check out and I really believe in. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a one hundred dollar credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/Tony to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com/Tony. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be. And just a quick thank you that I sincerely appreciate you listening to my weekly shows with today's lead entrepreneurs. The Tony D'Urso Show is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Would you please head on over to your favorite place and follow me there? I sincerely appreciate you. And now back to the chat with Jeff Speakman, The Perfect Weapon.

INTERVIEW – PART 4 (ED PARKER'S GENIUS & KENPO 5.0) TONY: And we can go anywhere in this interview. There's so much to learn about. I would love to know more about, please, some of your training with Ed Parker and Kenpo, how it's evolved to what it is today. Just take it. Maybe you could just take it away and just kind of let's roll with that. JEFF: Sure. Absolutely. I think the smart place to start is with a little bit of explanation of who Ed Parker was and most importantly, his contribution to the world of martial arts and obviously to the art of Kenpo. And this is really the most important part. I refer to Ed Parker as the Einstein of martial arts because he truly was a genius. And what I mean by that is if you have a whole bunch of really smart people looking at the same thing, and one person out of that group sees something different than everybody else, and then they go forward with that, and it turns out to be a revelation, that's what makes that person brilliant. They can see something that nobody else can see. And that's what he was. And what I mean by that related to martial arts is he was the first one and really the only one who took ancient Chinese fighting techniques and Americanized them. And what we mean by that is he took principles of physics, cause and effect relationships, geometric patterns, and made that system the system of the science of self-defense. So it's simply about the cause and effect relationships of Newtonian physics, how to move your body through time and space most dynamically, most powerfully and quickly to be able to create as much pain in your opponent in the shortest time possible. So instead of saying, "Master so-and-so taught me and I'm his son, and then he taught me and all that," which is great—this is not that. This is strictly a scientific application approach. And the essence of that is that it must evolve and change over time, so it never becomes irrelevant. I'd like to give you a quick Parker quote to make that point: "The ignorant refuse to study and the intelligent never stop. A real martial art isn't afraid of change. It makes it happen." So if you remember that Kenpo was always the art of perpetual change, it will never become obsolete. Now you enter Kenpo 5.0. So we got that name because we are the fifth evolution of the art of Kenpo. And what we did was we took Kenpo to the ground. In other words, there was no ground fighting in Kenpo. And if you want to make the bombastic claim that you're the street fighting self-defense martial art ever anywhere, you'd better know how to fight on the ground or you're going to get beat up really bad. Or you just need to shut up because fights almost always go to the ground. TONY: The one thing that we didn't do way back in the day, there was nothing on the ground. No, not for me. JEFF: So we took it upon ourselves to learn that whole world of grappling, ground fighting. And as it turns out, many of my students have been wrestlers and jiu-jitsu guys and compete in that. So we collectively got together and said, "Okay, let's use the formula that Ed Parker gave us—the science, the physics, the force, the acceleration, the impact value, the geometric patterns that he taught us in the stand-up art of Kenpo. Let's just employ them to what happens on the ground." So that means you have to go learn essential, basic practical jiu-jitsu to begin with. What's a guard? How do you pull somebody? How do you escape from a guard? What's a rear naked choke? Long list that we were woefully ignorant of. So we went about bringing that skill set into Kenpo. Then we temporized it. We made those scientific improvements to it so we can communicate better, understand the physics better. And then we went to the ground to employ the movements and the strikes and the thinking and the philosophy of Kenpo, not of MMA. TONY: So if I walked into your center and your ground fighting is definitely very different—can you, maybe not better, but just tell us more about what makes it so different from MMA? JEFF: Yes. And let me start by saying, to help us understand this, let's separate martial sport and martial art. So martial sport, which is what MMA is, is one person must fall from grace for another person to advance. Martial art is about where somebody would sacrifice themselves to help another person have a better life. So martial sport is about putting someone down. Martial arts is about lifting someone up. That's a very yin-yang description. And obviously there's a huge amount of overlap between the two. But the question I have for everyone listening is where do you come from? Do you mistakenly think MMA—which should be called MMF, Mixed Martial Fighting, because there's nothing artistic in what they do, nothing—how can I make the world a better place if my only goal is to beat somebody up and leave them in the dirt and I move on? If your goal, if you look at what the true essence of the martial arts is and has been, it really relies on "How can I help to make the world a better place before I die?" And if you dedicate yourself to that thinking, other options and opportunities come up. And let me start by saying, the sort of sarcastic but very, very accurate description is older Kenpo—version 4.0, 3.0, 2.0, wherever you want to come from—that was really about fighting the drunk in the bar. Kenpo 5.0 was about fighting the drunk MMA guy in the bar. So no rules. But how would you do your Kenpo against a well-trained MMA guy? Certainly not in the Octagon. Certainly not in the ring. Not under a sport umbrella. How would you do this in the street? Because if he takes you down, you don't know what you're doing. The fight's over. You're going to get annihilated no matter how good you are in your stand-up. He takes all of your striking away from you. And before you figure out what's going on, you're choked out. Your arm is broken, your ankles dislocated, or all of the above. You're completely at his mercy because you're ignorant of what they know. So we started by, "Okay, let's bring in what they know." Then, because they are a sport, there are rules, so they fight with rules. We're an art. There are no rules. So we learned what your rules were. We created techniques that violated your rules because that's the only place you're vulnerable. And then we built our entire system on how to violate the rules of MMA in the street against a well-trained MMA fighter. And that's why our ground game is different than what a jiu-jitsu or an MMA fighter would do on the ground. TONY: From my understanding, Kenpo 5.0 is Kenpo 4.0 with the ground game and ground fighting now added into it? JEFF: Yes, that's by and large completely correct. There is one slight difference, and that is we selected to reorganize all of our self-defense techniques. Instead of the way Mr. Parker had them, we created an idea called combat models. So techniques that were similar or that belonged with one another, like you do a technique for a left jab and then there's a right cross. Well, what happens if they get combined? That's called grafting. So we organized the entire system of one hundred and forty-five techniques so that all the techniques that belong together are put together. So you as the student, you get to experience, "Okay, here's the ideal technique. What's the most likely thing to go wrong? Here's the answer for that. What's the next and the next?" So you're learning a logical default sequence mechanism of problem-solution, problem-solution within the given flow of motion. So we try to take all the dependent variables on the ground, standing up—doesn't matter—and how can we organize this material best suited to be able to transfer information based on what is known of human learning, memory retention and recall? And once again, that's right up my alley of the behavioral sciences, which I studied. So I brought to bear my education and then started to experiment with the science of self-defense, which Ed Parker taught us all, and brought in this enormous mountain of information called grappling, and figure out how can we take these two worlds and blend them into one system based once again on logic and cause and effect and science. And Kenpo-wise, that's much bigger picture. So that Kenpo no longer will be held out from being a viable, serious street defense system, which we believe we have. We very strongly believe we have in the 5.0 system. TONY: I love it, I love it.

INTERVIEW – PART 5 (UNITY IN MARTIAL ARTS) TONY: Jeff, perhaps a little bit of a different angle on things. You mentioned to me once that there was more to go in martial arts, and I want to quote you, you said, "If we could just figure out how to work together," end quote. And I want to ask you, what did you mean by that? JEFF: There is, for anyone in the martial arts, they're going to be nodding their head right now when I say this. And for people outside, you'll be quite surprised. There is an unbelievable amount of discord, not only in martial arts—like how different is this martial art than that one? And who's better or worse? Blah blah blah. That's a given. But you would be shocked at how much discord there is within the system of Kenpo Karate. I can't believe it. It's so disappointing. Because we have this amazing art taught by this incredible guy named Ed Parker, with all of the science and intellectual side to it, as well as an enormously powerful physical side to it. And what a great balance. And yet, even though—another quote from Ed Parker is, "When I'm gone, I hope no one freezes my art." And then you turn to one hundred Ed Parker black belts and you turn to them and say, "How many of you have evolved the art since Ed Parker died?" Three, four hands go up instead of one hundred. And my hand is one of them. Of those people who changed the art at the behest of Ed Parker. How many have changed it to accommodate ground fighting? Well, we're the only ones. So although I applaud the other people for what they did and how they did it, we're the only ones who said, "Okay, hold a timeout. If I get caught—" I mean, I'll personalize it. I'll tell you truthfully, although I'm sixty-six now, I started when I was fifty-five in my first jiu-jitsu class. But the point is, if I'm in the bar and somebody recognizes me from my movie and he's drunk and he wants to break the arm of The Perfect Weapon, and he gets me down, it's done. There's no way I'm going to survive that. So that feeling of insecurity that you guys all know something I don't, and if I get caught in that mousetrap, I'm in big trouble. So instead of doing the ostrich response, we went forward and learned how to do that, asked people to come in to teach us. And we began working nineteen years ago on how to adapt Kenpo to the ground. And that's how and why we got to where we are. TONY: Absolutely amazing.

INTERVIEW – PART 6 (CHARACTER, RESPECT & MARTIAL ARTS VALUES) TONY: One of the things, and I wish I would have your website to pull up, but most of the people seeing this or hearing it—on your website, you talk about a certain sort of, not a format, but just decorum with the student. He's got to come with his clean uniform. It's got to be nicely ironed and can't look all tattered. He's got to have good grades. You demanded a certain level of character of that student, of respect. You know, you're not just—and we've heard these stories, some guy knows karate so he goes and stands out there and picks fights because he wants to hurt people. You didn't teach any of that, or at least the original basic Kenpo was all about being proper. You know, you didn't fight to hurt. It was more of a last-ditch effort in a way to take care of yourself from getting harmed. So has that all changed with Kenpo and Karate going through the world and different people learning different styles? Is that part of what you mean, how people have changed on that? JEFF: Yes. Clearly straight across the board. That's one hundred percent true. Now, let me begin by saying, to help us understand this, let's separate martial sport and martial art. So martial sport, which is what MMA is, is one person must fall from grace for another person to advance. Martial art is about where somebody would sacrifice themselves to help another person have a better life. So martial sport is about putting someone down. Martial arts is about lifting someone up. That's a very yin-yang description. And obviously there's a huge amount of overlap between the two. But the question I have for everyone listening is where do you come from? If you look at what the true essence of the martial arts is and has been, it really relies on "How can I help to make the world a better place before I die?" And if you dedicate yourself to that thinking, other options and opportunities come up. And if you take advantage of them, which we all have—I have franchise schools in twenty countries now because the energy that we have, that is the essence and the basis of the 5.0 system has drawn the same kind of energetic people in. And we have created literally this utopian society we live in, where it's all about the love and friendship that we have for one another. And the karate is a distant second, and we're pretty good at the karate thing we do, but it pales in comparison because suffering and tragedy will come in your life, and it comes to all of us. And if we can learn—this is what I meant earlier. If we can learn how to support one another and help one another through the tragedies of life, where we have your best interests at heart, then what—that's as human as you can possibly get. That's the best vibration of what it is to be human, to be involved in love and friendship, not in pain and hurt. And the trajectory to go through those things is through the intellect, not through the brutality. It's that you understand what critical thinking is, that you didn't go to school and drop out, you went to school and you finished, and you learned about debate and rational thinking versus dogmatic thinking. And how do they compete with one another? How are they the same? How are they different? How is our world, your world and mine right now changing at such an exponential rate? You can't even imagine what's going to be happening in the next five years, because every six months everything evolves to a different outlook on life. So how can we find a way that human kindness and intelligence will return to stoicism, if you will? If you're familiar with what that is. If you're not, here's the book to read. It's called Meditations by a guy named Marcus Aurelius. So far, the most important book I've ever read. Pick up that book and read it and you will start on your journey of understanding what stoicism is and its value. And it actually, for one hundred and forty, fifty, maybe sixty years, was the predominant thinking in Europe called the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. It ended pretty much around the time of the French Revolution. So to return to an intellectual, honest, open, caring-for-the-benefit-of-all-mankind kind of thinking worldwide. Let's not close off. Let's open up and let's try to heal the world. And it may be too late because of climate change, it may be, but what we have to do is get over ourselves and embrace the science and start creating solutions based on intelligence and reason, not based on dogma and superstition. TONY: That's very deep. That bears listening to again and really pondering about it. I thank you so much for sharing that.

INTERVIEW – PART 7 (WHY JEFF CONTINUES: UNREALIZED HUMAN POTENTIAL) TONY: And I want to frame this the right way. I want to know what keeps you going, Jeff. You're not sitting at the proverbial beach. You're not saying, "Hey, I'm a black belt. I can take care of myself and my family. I love what I'm doing and whatever I'm doing." You're not just enjoying your life. You put centers out there, dojos—I don't know if they're called dojos anymore. They were back in the day. JEFF: Yeah, they are. TONY: You train people, you see that they're doing it. You're doing everything you can. So the silliest question is why, Jeff? Why do you do that? JEFF: Here's the answer. And thank you for asking that particular question. It's vitally important. If I were to be so bold as to ask your permission that I could rephrase your question. If you were to ask me what do I believe in, which is the answer to your question—I believe in the heretofore unrealized human potential? That's what drives me forward. To see the potential of what we can be versus where we are actually drives me nuts, to be honest with you. So I have to find a way that I can maybe help to create a solution in that thought. How can I, with what I've achieved in my life so far and built this worldwide association of like-minded people, how can we now take that even bigger, even better, how can we help to heal our communities, reach out and understand how we're similar? We're all humans. We all came from the same place. Our chemical composition is consistent with the origins of the universe. We are one. If we could just stop for a second and think about how profound that is. All of the walls of illusion that have been set up to separate us by race, by color, by nationality, by religion, by politics. If you realize those are walls of illusion, they're not real. They're created by people who want to separate you so they can control you and get your money and your attention. And that's their power game. If we dissolve those walls of illusion, as we have done in this thing, we have this world I'm telling you about. The only thing I use to judge people is the content of their character. Not any of those. Not the color of their skin, what language they speak, their sexual preferences, what their religion is. Zero. It is the content of your character. And I observe that by seeing how you interact with the other people, your other fellow black belts. Do you care about them? Do you help them when they have a death in the family? Do you rush to their side? What can I do to help you? How can I help make your life better? Then we get together in Las Vegas, as you mentioned. We're about to in July. Every July. This is my twenty-ninth consecutive year of putting on this event. And by the way, it's open to all martial arts. You don't have to be just a Kenpo guy to enjoy it. And it has become the largest Kenpo organization in the world and the largest event and the largest black belt test. All those successes, what I'm suggesting to you, is those successes are based on the humanist drive that we have to seek out love and friendship, have that be the basis of why we come together, and then we work out hard. We train hard. We follow Ed Parker's art. We evolved it to include ground fighting, and we have found a way—think of that—in twenty countries, all those different languages. But yet we all love and respect one another. This has become this utopian society that I'm asking, I'm begging all of you to come and look at it. This is how we can live in the future. We have big, big problems to address. Climate change is probably number one and big things in technology and AI and medical and you name it. The rate of change is increasing exponentially as the hours go by. Never in human existence has there been a bigger sweeping, exponential rate of change. And if you don't get your head in that space that you're going to accept change, embrace change to create the future, it will create you. So you need to get out of your own way. Let go of your dogmatic thinking and the things that satisfied you ten years ago, two hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. That science is overcoming those. Don't shun science. Embrace it. Pick up a book, read it, and become part of the solution. TONY: That's very deep. Almost, not much you can say after something like that. It's very deep. Very profound, Jeff. Very sage. And while you were saying that I was thinking of when I grew up, you know, how people were treated. You treat people as people. They weren't a means to get something or take something. And it's just so different. And yeah, when you treat people as you would like to be treated yourself and you show that respect that we talked about, that I talked about, which is on your website, of how your dojo, how you treat other martial artists, how everyone respects each other. And I think how important that is. Whether you can fight or not isn't that important as it is how you treat others. You're dealing with a living, breathing human being just like you, who's got obstacles and challenges just like you. It's more fun to work together and be there for each other. I just love this.

INTERVIEW – PART 8 (CHUCK NORRIS & BEHAVIORAL MANAGEMENT) TONY: And I have a few more questions, but I'm going to take a commercial break in a different way. It's not a real commercial. I'm going to do a total segue because I wanted to make sure to ask you this question before we ran out of time. And it could be a simple no, it could be the rest of the show. But I was just curious, harking back, going back to your days with Ed Parker and some of the notables that were there at the time, I was just curious, did you ever train with or do you have any stories that maybe you'd like to share with Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris or even Elvis? I'm just curious. JEFF: Yes, both Bruce and Elvis were gone by the time I showed up on the scene. I do happen to know Chuck Norris, got to know him a little bit. He truly is a wonderful, wonderful person. And ironically, when I was doing the advertising for the movie The Perfect Weapon, you know, Paramount was then and probably still is the biggest production company in the world. So they have an enormous marketing arm. And you can imagine the biggest. And so they hired people to teach me how to speak in public and how to blah, blah, blah. And what was interesting to me, these people who were all about public speaking came in and kept using Chuck Norris as an example of the way I should be, because he was always such a nice person. He was always willing to sign another autograph, willing to stop and talk to somebody on the street. He's a real martial artist, goes to martial art events. He still puts on his annual event here in Las Vegas, as I do. So you do have role models, people out there who are real martial artists at the heart and the core of what they do, which I try to be. And that's the lifestyle I've chosen. Now I can, and since you do have a lot of relationships with your people that are on your podcast related to business, I would like to take a moment and say, what I've been able to do is I've learned a very, very practical application of the four basic ideas of behavioral management. Then I moved those into real life. And that is exactly the foundation of how I've built this huge organization around the world is by using these basic principles. Now I've turned that into a speaking model. So I'm now doing motivational speaking. I had my first experience with the Emerson Electric Company, and it was a wonderful experience. And I use the power of positive psychology, of how to build and live in a positive feedback loop environment, which in turn, if you apply those principles to a large or even medium-size business where you have an international business, where you have a lot of people, if you formulate your thinking with the understanding of the practical application of the behavioral sciences, it will give you another skill, another lens, if you will, to look at the world, to look at human behavior in it, and to look at "How can I get the kind of behavior out of these people that will benefit me or my company?" And that's exactly how I built this thing called the Kenpo 5.0 system. So that's really what I think is the value. When you respect other people and you ask their advice and you include them in on decision making, you do that with people in an industry that are working, that are building whatever widgets of some kind, but yet you make them feel a part of the process. If that becomes the reward, that in turn raises their behavior. They start thinking differently. They start creating solutions to problems before they happen. They're less likely to quit working for your corporation and go somewhere else because it's a positive feedback loop environment. And therefore the businesses save a lot of money because they don't have to continuously train new people coming in because they stay. And they stay because of the work environment. The culture of positivity that you create because you have a real-world, practical application of the basics of behavioral management. And that has been one hundred percent of my life. TONY: Absolutely amazing. I hope you keep on keeping on and that you do a lot of stage speaking. We need this in this world. It's, you know, maybe the old-timers or people from way back in the day kind of got a little bit, but we need to infuse because if you keep saying something, other people can listen and it can then like dominoes ripple through. But if we stop even saying any of that, it won't be able to grow, it won't be able to come back. We need to push, not necessarily push it out, but keep talking about it. Keep talking about it. Bringing back some morals, some understanding, some good character and respect. The key thing, the key thing that grows everything is respect. And that's what I've always learned in martial arts, which you don't know that that's what you learn when you first go into it, right? JEFF: Yeah, yeah, yeah. TONY: But if you look back on it, you go, "That's the one—that's the biggest takeaway I got from it." JEFF: Exactly. Yeah. And never underestimate the power of hate. Hate is used to manipulate and control people—lies, vitriol. Because it is effective. Yes, because fear is effective. Yes. But the real powerful statement about hate and how it's used to manipulate and control behavior is because it's the cheapest way to get large numbers of people to do what you want them to do. TONY: Wow. I've never heard it said that way. That is so true. It is true. JEFF: And we are right now because of social media and the hate and the vitriol of our political system—I was actually listening to political ads in the 2020, 2022 elections, one hundred percent of the thirty and sixty-second ads were all about why the other person is not good for the job, and I have no idea who you are, what your solutions are, or how you are better. All you're telling me is why that person is wrong. And because hate and its antecedents have, throughout history, been a very practical way to get people to conform, to do what you want them to do, which essentially is to give you money. This is the capitalist system run awry a little bit.

OUTRO TONY: Everyone, you know your job. You know the task to do. Yeah. We're speaking with Grandmaster Jeff Speakman talking about The Perfect Weapon, which again, I'll say goes beyond the movie, but the movie is one of the best iconic martial arts movies out there. That's my opinion, I think. I love it. And you can find out more about Jeff at JeffSpeakman.com. Jeff, there's so much to say. I'm going to listen to this again and again. So much advice, so much to unpack. I deeply, deeply respect you and appreciate you taking the time. You're putting on a world international event next week, and here you are taking the time to talk with us. I appreciate it so much. JEFF: My pleasure, sir. It's been a great honor to be with you, and I hope we can do it again. TONY: I appreciate that so much. And to our audience here, I just want to say that again, as I said just earlier, the biggest lesson I ever learned in martial arts and which I've used heavily in my business and podcasting is respect. If you take anything away, respect opens doors. Respect makes great friends, respect makes good business, guys. Respect keeps the customers coming back. There's so much to learn from that one word. So I ask you all focus on that. Let's learn from it. And here's a special thank you for those that listen to the very end. And would you do me a favor? Would you please share this with a few friends to help them too? All right, let's use this and let's help you move on your journey to success. Thanks. Remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds. And join me on the next episode of The Tony D'Urso Show.