You can’t be brave if you’re not afraid. In this episode of Acta Non Verba, I continue my conversation with Tony Blauer and how fear impacts your daily life. During our conversation Tony and I also discuss how to make courage a daily practice, using Adversity to build strength, and what Tony learned from Brandon Lee and Sugar Ray Leonard.
Coach Tony Blauer is a personal defense and fear management expert. He is one of the only combative experts who has successfully affected training across all combat-related communities, from self-defense and combat sports to the military and law enforcement sectors. His research on psychology and mindset as it relates to confrontation management has influenced over four decades of reality-based martial arts.
You can connect with Tony via his website: https://blauerspear.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
In this episode of Acta Non Verba, we hear part two of my interview with martial artist, personal defense and fear management expert, Tony Blauer. In part one, Tony talked about how fear plays an integral part in most of our actions and reactions every day.
00:59
You can find part one of my interview in episode 13 of Acta Non Verba. In part two, we will continue the discussion of the effects of fear. We also talk about overcoming adversity and how to practice being more courageous in all areas of life. Tony also opens up candidly about his friendship with Bruce Lee, some Brandon Lee, and his interaction with one of the greatest boxers of all time, Sugar Ray Leonard. You can find out more about Tony Blauer and his training at blow now.
01:28
Here’s part two of my interview with Tony Blauer. Please enjoy. Wanted to share this about adversity. And I love this with your program, your people is to let people know and remind them. In the same way I can say when someone goes, well, yeah, I want to be able to be courageous. Or how many of you practice courage every day? And it’s not like jump off a building, do something that scares you. We’ve all seen those means. It’s not, here’s the neat thing. It’s just so subtle, but so heavy. I’m gonna go skydiving in freight of heights. You’re gonna be.
01:57
Emotionally and psychologically high for several days. I skydived, I’m afraid, Alex. You’re like buzzing for a week. But it doesn’t mean if one of your big issues in life is public speaking or saying I love you or saying I’m sorry to a spouse, working on relationships, skydiving is not going to fucking help. So these big metaphors like, and I’m not mocking Anthony Robbins stuff, like a fire walk, like skydiving, like swimming with sharks, they don’t.
02:23
transfer the experience to everyday programmed habits that are the result of decades of your personal evolution, your DNA evolution and your personal evolution. And so why I wanted to interrupt again, because I want your listeners, hopefully everyone listening to this is already part of your audience, in the same way you can practice courage. And the only way you practice courage, this is the true way, is when a stimulus…
02:53
truly appears in your life and you get a fear spike and you have a moment of going, I’m going to pretend that this stimulus doesn’t exist. Now I’m shirking my responsibility to evolve, to self-actualize. I get a fear spike. Oh my God, what is this? You know, it might be an issue with your mother or father. They call you and now suddenly you’re seven years old again. That’s a moment of valuable introspection. And then going
03:22
What do I need to do to feel different? What do I need to do to learn here? That’s the practice in courage. And it’s not a light switch. It’s not like, oh, I’ve overcome my relationship with my stepfather or, you know, how many people are afraid to quit their job that they hate to become entrepreneurs? Well, guess what? Every fucking one of you was, you were afraid before you embarked on doing this. Everyone who worked for somebody else. And then the hardest thing I ever did was closing my martial arts school.
03:52
It was all I ever wanted to do. Took me probably 18 months. I’ve been teaching since 1977. I closed it in 1993 to pursue teaching seminars around the world. It was the hardest thing I ever did. It was the best thing I ever did. But I wasn’t like, I’m afraid to close my school. It was like, what if this doesn’t work out? What if this is the wrong move? What if people don’t really care? What if I’m marginally successful? I mean, I better make this much money
04:22
overhead to if I couldn’t. All of those are fear-based thoughts. They’re all me visualizing the future. Now, what’s this got to do with adversity? My interruption. Everyone listening who follows Marcus’s message and everything, you don’t practice adversity by waiting for some stimulus that puts you in an adverse position and then go, I’m going to embrace it. Fuck it. That’s a choiceless choice, right? If you don’t run away from it.
04:51
but you can practice adversity because adversity and fear are fucking dance partners. Absolutely. You know, and so you get a fear spike. Like if you don’t, like I said earlier, remember the joke I made is I don’t want to learn how to skydive from somebody who has a death wish and is a adrenaline junkie or just an adrenaline junkie. They may be really good, but I want to learn to skydive from a 55 year old jump master, not a 24 year old red bull, you know, uh, uh,
05:20
sponsored freak, a unicorn. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go everybody, come on. No, no, no, no, no, let’s slow down, man. Why is that old guy still alive here? Oh, he’s been teaching skydiving for, right? So again, I’m amplifying things, but anyone who listens to your message, because I think some people think, and it’s the same way I teach the no fear and the practice courage.
05:46
and the self defense, it’s got to be proactive. You don’t want to go, oh good, I act a shooter event. Now I can find out if that thing I invested in works. No, the foundation of everything we do is based on the mantra choose safety. What is the safest thing you could do today? And sometimes the safest thing you could do is choosing adversity. Sometimes the safest thing you could do to become the best version of yourself is to go into that fear, not because you’re going up.
06:15
I saw a meme that says do something that scares you every day. I don’t subscribe to that. I think it’s okay. But at the end of the day, this is so deep and heavy. Unconsciously, if I say to you, Marcus, I need you to get into 10 more street fights before you can get to the next level in my system. And you went, I really want to get to the next level. But we’ll guess what, everyone listen to this carefully. If I told you to truly understand peer management and self-defense, you have to have at least 10 real street fights. Go out to a shitty part of town and get into a street light.
06:45
guess what your unconscious brain is going to do in its selection process. Just like any predator, you’re going to select prey. You’re going to select somebody you think you can beat. You’re Maslow’s heart needs to hear one survival will never, you know, the duck is never going to go, I’m fucking hungry. Oh, is that a fucking lion over there? I’m going to go fucking start a fight with that fucking coyote.
07:14
So I tell people like, you know, I’ve had people go, hey, have you heard about this guy? He says, his black girl dad says he’s had 600 street fights. I go, dude, that’s like taking driving lessons from a driving instructor who says, I’ve been in 600 car accidents. What the fuck has a street fight got to do with self-defense? One is avoiding violence. One is a street fight. It’s violence. And so.
07:40
It’s an interesting thing. If I said you go get 10 fights, you would pick 10 people that you could beat, even if that was at a non conscious selection level. Yep, subconsciously. And so if you have a program that says, hey, adversity is a gift, man, if you want to develop the resilience, you need to seek adversity. And you don’t do that by selecting the adversity you want. You do that by going, oh, fuck, I don’t want to do this and then going
08:10
Is this really something I don’t have to do? Or is this something that if I do this, it’s going to create a level of resiliency. That means my ability to manage fear, my ability to have courage on demand has been compounded by compound interest. I’m now better at this. So that you think about, let’s say we’re firefighters and you’ve been on the job for 10 years and it’s my first day and the alarm goes, I’m like doing this. And you’re like,
08:40
Hey kid, conserve your energy. We’re gonna get to the fire at the same time. I don’t want you out of breath when we get there. What starts to happen is the stimulus is the same. Our physiological adaptation is different. And as we get more reps in it. So when you practice going, accepting adversity, accepting fear and making those next smart choices, it’s your first fight versus your 10th fight, your 10th fight versus your 20th fight. Your body gets acclimated and.
09:07
The big reframe here is it doesn’t change the danger. You’re still in a fight. But now you have much more greater potential to find that Travolio flow state because you’re just accepting what’s happening and now you’re going, okay, let’s go. That’s it. There’s no judgment, there’s no emotion attached to it. We just go with it. And early we were talking before we hit record, you were friends with a martial arts legend. Well, you are friends with many martial arts legends.
09:37
but the one I’m talking about specifically is one that you met in California and he’s no longer with us. Can you talk a little bit about how you met Brandon Lee? Sure. Obviously he had a lot of respect for you clearly. And can you kind of offer us an insight into the way that he looked at some of these things, whether it be fear or legacy or any of those kinds of things? Yeah, so I met him, crazy story. I, in the 80s, was doing stunt work in Montreal. Montreal’s kind of like mini New York for film.
10:06
I was doing stunt work, actually got to meet Pat Johnson. He was a stunt coordinator on a movie, funny, funny story in that work. The actor was so horrible. It was a lower budget TV movie and he had to sucker punch me at one point and he was horrible. So the director came in, that doesn’t look real stuff. So I said, hey, give me 15 minutes. And I took him off site and I showed him how to punch and sell the punch. And then we finally come back ready, rolling. And he’s so nervous, the actor.
10:34
He miscues and fucking hits me right in the face. But, you know, it was like 1986, 87. I’ve been fighting, I’ve been doing martial arts in 1973. I’ve been teaching since 77. It was an actor who just went around and punched me in the face barefoot. Wasn’t a big deal. They didn’t fucking hurt at all. It was a shitty punch, but it was a real punch. And the angle was right, you know, hook punch. And my back was, sorry, I was opening the door, click, and I got hit. And it was like literally, you know,
11:04
Perfect. And the director goes, cut, that didn’t look real. You tricked me completely. No, actually he punched me in the face that time, dude. Anyways, so nothing to do with Brandon, just reminded me of Bill. Why I met Brandon is because I started doing stunt work, had some lines here and there. And I was like, wow, I wonder if I could go into movies. But I didn’t know anything about acting.
11:34
So I was in a bookstore in Montreal and I found this book called A Reverent Acting, yellow cover by this guy named Eric Morris. Then he had a studio out in LA. I’m reading the book. I love the name, A Reverent. I love the word A Reverent. So, you know, there’s all these books on an actor, the actor studio, be an actor, act now, and then this book called A Reverent Actor. So I grabbed it and I was going to LA.
12:02
a month later for an interview with Black Belt magazine or something. So I’m going to take an acting class, see what it’s like. So I call up the guy. This is 1985. And I call up, I go, hey, my name is Tony Blower. I got your book of Reverend acting. He goes, how did you get it? I go, I bought it at a bookstore. He says, well, it’s not out yet. I go, what do you mean it’s not out yet? I’m holding it. He says, well, it’s not supposed to be out. That’s weird. I go, well, there’s a copy in Canada and I’m looking at it.
12:33
He goes, that’s so bizarre because it was not supposed to shift yet. And I was there a couple of changes who wanted to make it in whatever, but okay. You got it. He goes like, what’s up? I go on martial artists. I do some work and you know, sometimes they want me to speak parts. I don’t know what I’m doing and I hate not knowing I’m doing. So I’d like to take a lesson. He says, he says, that’s an E. He says, you know, it’s so funny. He says, I’m working with Chuck Norris right now. And remember Jim Cata, the movie with, um, I forgot the guy who won the gold in gymnastics.
13:02
He says, I’m his coach. And he says, what’s with all you martial arts guys calling me? Because I’ve got Brandon Lee in my class. Wow. And I freaked. Like I didn’t say anything on the phone. I was like, but I was like, because you know, you thought you were Bruce Lee’s biggest fan and I was, right? So I hate to break it. Everyone thinks they’re Bruce Lee’s biggest fan, right? Because he’s, if he touched you, it was like that spiritual guy. So I said, you like,
13:31
Let’s Brandon does private work with you. He’s in the group last goes, no, he does the group glass. And I’m like, oh, we fuck. My heart starts pounding and my God, like, why could just meet brand? So I booked the private lesson. I get in there. He actually doesn’t want, he says, you want, he says, don’t do the private company, the group last year in town for a week, come to the group. I see the group last. It’s like 50 bucks instead of 250 bucks, whatever it was. He says, do that. I think you’ve got a lot of value out of that. And then if you want, so he’s really cool. So I’m there. I get there.
14:01
And of course I’m breaking out thinking, I’m going to maybe meet Brandon, right? And what am I going to say? This is Bruce Lee’s son. Holy shit. So I get there and it’s a small, small like theater space, classic way of the movie is like some shit hole, you know, with some old theater seats and all the seats are taken. And, uh, there’s a couple of you sitting on the wall, classes packed. So I sit down on the wall against the wall and people are doing monologues. They started doing monologues. Brandon’s still not there.
14:30
Okay, whatever. I came here for a purpose. I was calling the guy, anyhow, I didn’t know. Just pretend you didn’t know. So I get back into this, I’m watching this, and all of a sudden a curve in my eye says he brand moves. Says hi to a couple of people, he’s quiet because there’s a monologue going on. And sure enough, there’s a fucking space beside me. He comes down, he sits beside me. And I’m like, fuck, no way. Okay, thank you, you’re the worst thing. And this guy is on stage, and he starts doing this heavy monologue, and it’s a very violent, aggressive one.
14:58
And all of a sudden, like he’s moving around and bends over and he starts, he’s yelling about fucking killing somebody and this and that. And all of a sudden he has a knife in his hand, which nobody noticed he had had a folder in his hand and it was supposed to be a prop, but he was like really into this scene. But all of a sudden it’d be like, if I’m here like this and I go, I don’t matter. And I’m like, and I like, and I like, and I like, I call it’s in this night is out like this. Well, if this wasn’t on zoom,
15:26
You might’ve gone, well, where did that come from? And leaned away from it, right? Of course. And I’m sitting on the floor and he stands up and he’s pacing with this knife and I’m scanning the room. Immediately I went knife and everyone’s like leaning in going, oh, this is a good monologue. And I sit there like this and I immediately kind of shifted my stance a little bit and I brought my hands into this position here. And as I did that,
15:54
I noticed Brandon doing the exact same thing. And then Brandon noticed that I was already in position. And we kind of like looked at each other and then looked back and then they dissipated and everything. And we didn’t say anything about it because there are a few more monologues. And then afterwards this old studio was, I don’t know if you’ve ever been, there’s an old famous deli in West Hollywood called Cantors. All the actors used to go there, very famous. And so we leave the class and Brandon says to me,
16:21
Hey, we’re all going a bunch of us are going to Cantor’s. You want to join us? I was like, sure. And we’re walking. Not a lot of people know this story, man. I don’t know that I’ve ever talked about this on a podcast. We’re walking side by side. And I’m thinking, okay, how do you break the ice? How do you start a conversation? And I’m sort of beside him. We’re walking and I go, you know, I gotta say, huge, huge fan of your dad’s. And he looks at me, but he looks at me like, what did you say? You know, it’s kind of like that.
16:51
You know, like, what’s that smell? And this is just coming out of my mouth. Like, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m like nervous. A shit. I got a big fan of your dance. I mean, he, a lot of who I am and what I do now was inspired by it. And I just, I wanted you to know that. And he’s, we’re walking like this towards the place and we’re walking and he just fucking stops like this. Like people are still walking and I stopped as he stops and he goes,
17:21
Are you a big fan of my dad’s? Yeah. You know, everyone’s a big fan of my dad’s. Everyone said, no one wants to ever meet me because I’m Brandon. They wanna meet me because I’m Bruce Lee’s son. And he tears into me. And I’m like looking at him going, fuck, could I have picked, like if someone said, what is the worst thing you could say to Brandon Lee right now? This would have been it at that time in his life. Yeah, there’s a, yeah. Right? He was trying to make it in movies. He was trying to.
17:50
but all the doors were opening because he was Bruce Lee’s son, not because he was Brandon Lee. Right. You described him as a martial arts legend. Is he? I don’t want to get hit by any lightning and I don’t want to have like people coming after me kill me. Bruce Lee was a martial art legend. Was Brandon? Brandon was a really good martial artist. He was a fighter, but if he wasn’t Bruce Lee’s son, would people go? And I say this without too respect to what he became a good friend. This is the way our minds work. I looked at him,
18:20
So he finished talking, I didn’t interrupt. He said, I’m sick and tired of people opening doors for me or giving me opportunities, not because I have any talent or anything to add, because of my last name. And he’s just glaring at me. And I went, I was standing, we’re standing on the sidewalk, and I was standing on one of the, like right on the crack of the sidewalk. And I said, hey, would you help me out? And he goes, help you out of what? I said, I…
18:46
feel so small right now, I’m stuck inside this crack on the sidewalk.” And he laughed. And I said, man, I fucking, that had never even occurred to me. I fucking apologize. And he’s kind of like, hit me in the shoulder. He said, let’s go get something to eat. And we went and we didn’t talk at all. And then after he invited me at an apartment up off of Melrose, we went there. We got drunk. We played ping pong.
19:15
He had a ping pong daily, he was fucking amazing, ping pong. And it just like that moment passed and then it became, we just connected. We talked quite a bit. He had, what movie did he do before Legacy of Rage? Was I forget the order, I remember him calling me up asking me, he was training with a martial art, I’m not gonna mention his name in case people hear this. People will be really angry that I said, Brandon wasn’t a martial art legend. Brandon was really good, but anybody who’s…
19:44
pushing the martial art legend is forgetting this story because they don’t know the story, right? If you were Bruce Lee’s son, you’d be a martial art legend but nobody knows of you because you’re martial art prowess. Okay, vicariously, yeah. You know, my son, interestingly enough, I never even realized this, but the first day he, I got a picture of Brandon holding Nicky, the first day Nick stood was in Brandon’s apartment in Echo Lake. Oh my God. Yeah.
20:13
This is a picture online of Nick who’s like 14 months old or whatever standing in Brandon’s apartment. You know, Brandon taught me how to use chopsticks properly. I was on the set of The Crow three weeks before the accident. He invited me out to work on Legacy of Rage, some fun stories there. But we became friends. He came to visit me. We were close enough that he flew to Montreal to hang out with me when I lived in Montreal. We went out. I never, ever, ever, ever exploited.
20:42
or mentioned my relationship with him ever. In fact, there was a sushi restaurant called Sushi on San Juan. But I was friends with the owner. I used to eat there, like, I had a school right near there. I’d eat there two, three times a week. So you know this, but Brandon had Bruce’s genetics. There’s a lot of what he would talk, the way he’d make his fist, the way he would, and he would pick, like, and we were in there one night consuming far too much Saki.
21:11
and having custom made, we closed the place. And at one point, the owner, who’s making the sushi for us, says, like I didn’t like leak to the press, hey, Bruce Lee’s son will be at my gym on, oh, how did the paparazzi get here, right? Because that one story, that one event in 1985 on the sidewalk was enough to like, fuck, wow. And I respected him so much for that. So we’re sitting there.
21:41
And the owner looks, he goes, Hey, anyone ever tell you look like Bruce Lee, literally word for word. And Brandon looks at him and then he looks at me and I go, look at me. He looks at me, he goes, and I go, maybe a little bit in the eyes, dude. I go, but this guy’s oriental too. I go, but you know, they all look the same to me. Like they’re all laughing. And because I was friends with that guy, after Brandon left, the next time I was in, I told him, I said, wow.
22:08
I said, I didn’t want any because I didn’t want pictures, take people taking pictures, stuff like that. He’s like, holy shit. He freaked out, of course, you know, of course, but it was fun. I remember Brandon, someone broke into his apartment when he was in, he talked about the sword, but he called me right after the fight and he was talking about spear, startle, flinch, thinking about fucking flinch, move. But he was also really trying to be a great ambassador for G. Condeau and his dad’s legacy. He loved JKD and he loved Thai.
22:37
and he loved grappling and he was a really good athlete, but he was more of a fighter than an athlete. Brandon was more dangerous if you got him in a street fight than if you sparred with him. Wow. Like many people, if they can flip that switch. And one of the guys he was training with, I remember him. So I got, when Brandon realized he could trust me, then I began, when I felt, working on some things that, and I’ve never talked about this to anybody,
23:07
At one point we were doing things, working out and we’d get together. It was like Kato Greenhorn. We’d do ping pong and then, you know, he throw a sidekick at me. I fucking, we were doing shit. And that was like fucking surreal. I was like, Hey, Bruce Lee’s son is your Kato like at the Green Hornet. I’m Clusso. I’m not the Green Hornet. We’re fucking around, right? At one point he says, you know, my dad’s sidekick wasn’t done properly. Oh, and excuse me. He goes, yeah. And he mentions his instructor’s name.
23:37
The guy I’m training with now, this is before he went back to Inosato Academy and stuff. He goes, the guy I’m training with now, he said that the way my dad locked his sidekick, he could have generated more power and all that. I go, so first of all, as a guy who studies kinetic chain and intuitively the way I link my body and moves, we do in my garage gym that I teach now. And what’s amazing is, you know, I told you earlier that I stopped teaching in 1993.
24:07
group classes. And so as much as I love traveling the world for like fucking 27 years, I didn’t realize until I started a group class again in March through zoom, how much a part of my soul that was that I’m now I’ve got 43 years of knowledge and skills at creating drills and presenting material. But all I ever wanted to be was a self defense instructor when I discovered what I did.
24:36
me and for me. And so when I taught, when I was teaching from 1977 to 1993, when I closed that, that took a part of my soul. Of course. And I rediscovered it again recently. Like I look forward most to in 30 minutes, I’m going to say goodbye because I’m going to start warming up my class at four. And because that is the most important part of my day is connecting with people online, even though it’s through zoom, but it’s like I’m in front of a group class now trying to inspire people.
25:06
to become safer, more situationally aware, more effective at being able to protect themselves with their families and stuff. It’s that group dynamic, that live dynamic. Anyway, off on a mini tangent there. So I’ve been studying, what is the, I showed Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980, a different way to throw a jab. He had his entourage around me. We were playing 21 in a private basketball game in Montreal when he was fighting Duran. And all boxers when they’re moving, I don’t know if you can see my feet here.
25:36
I know I’m really far away, but boxers, when they jab or step forward with that lead foot hit and then come in, sorry, no, that’s the way I do it. They’ll step off the rear foot, like so they’ll go to close at this point, hitting this ball. They’re hitting like this, they’re stepping in. And the rear heel raises. Well for street defense, I developed a protocol of jabbing off the lead foot and rotating the same side in. And Leonard’s shadow boxing.
26:04
while we’re playing 21, he’s fighting Duran in two weeks. And he’d be stopping and shadow boxing and moving. And I’m so used to coaching and teaching and everything. And he does his job this way. And I said, hey, do you wanna see a different way to jab? And I just say it like, like a throw in him. And he’s like, yeah, sure. And so I’m off on the side. And it’s like a surreal moment where I’m, he’s 24, I’m 20. We’re just two guys talking about movement. But I see three of his bodyguards and somebody entourage.
26:32
going, who the fuck is this guy showing the Olympic champion who’s got to beat Benitez and Leonard’s there playing with this stuff. And it wasn’t me like showing him how to jab. I was explaining to him that when you jab off of your lead foot, your recovery time changes on and again, I don’t know if it’s too far for you to see. But if you watch my lead foot, if I jab like this and you slip it.
27:02
I need now need to effectively control this distance too. So I throw that jab at you in a counter and you have to slip and come across with it with the right. I got all this, but this heel is up. It changes my immediate mobility. You’re familiar with the term, no reaction. Absolutely. So for a screen, and this is years ago, like now, the jab industry, but I would teach people jab like this, where you plant this.
27:30
rotate this side of your body. So you unload, you unload torque here. Now, if you go fuck, I missed the guy and he’s coming back. I’ve got the ability to move my feet because that lead heel is planted. So the lead foot is planted. So I’m showing him this and he thanks me and everything to go back in the disguise of like sneering like that. Like almost like it was like, like that was dumb or should I ever say. I checked this out and if I ever bump into Sugar Reagan, I will have this conversation with him.
28:01
But he went and he lost a 15-mile fight to Duran in Montreal. Classic battle. And then six months later, he took the famous No-Mos fight in New Orleans. And if you watch that fight, you’ll see Sugar Ray Leonard jabbing with his lead heel up, which he didn’t do in the first game. And I… People are going, what an asshole Blower is. He’s saying, I didn’t do anything except suggest…
28:26
that your ability to move away from somebody is enhanced if your heel is raised. Sugar Ray Leonard is an athletic genius, right? He did stuff in the ring that Bruce Lee only wrote about. And that’s another story. I mean, I hung out with Leonard when he came back. I went down to Chinatown. I came back after getting back. I helped build the original World of Bruce Lee Museum in 1980. And when Leonard came back for a tax meeting from the first bike, it was only six months after the fight in New Orleans, he came back into town. I…
28:56
sent a message to his lawyer saying, hey, you know, any chance he wants to get together? And I’m like thinking, what are the odds, you know? Because I’d met him like six months earlier, I helped out, found him a location to train privately. And I got a message back, you know, Ray says, come over to the hotel and tell me the secret location to go there. And I brought my world of Bruce Lee, my pictures from California. And I don’t know if they said it was a real game of death, Sue, but who knows if it was. One night, I keys their place, I’m building it, I put on Bruce Lee’s tracksuit.
29:25
and fucking worked out in it. Wow. Don’t tell anyone that. No. It’s like we’re just on a live podcast, but at Brandon’s apartment, Brandon had a lot of his dad’s books and he had all these books, man. All his notes in there. And you know, Bruce Lee had very specific handwriting. You’ve got Dow Jigar Doe, right? And I’m like, Brandon’s got all these cool books there and I love reading. So I’m there, Nick’s playing on the floor, you know, these 18 months, Brandon’s making some food.
29:55
I pull out a book and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, I’m going fucking close the book. I’m like, holy shit, these are Bruce Lee’s books with his actual writing. Wow. I actually said to Brian, I said, Hey, can I borrow a couple of these books? Listen, you guys, you guys. No, I don’t think so. We’re sure I’ll bring it back to you. You can’t borrow those books. Don’t you know? But, uh, I got so many random stories, man.
30:22
But I started telling him, I started telling him this, one of his instructors saying is that, then he comes right in and he says, my dad’s sidekick wasn’t that good. This is good, but it wasn’t. I go, I go, time him. I go, listen, I don’t care who you’re training with. Like there’s a way that the body extends. There’s a way there’s a kinetic chain. Where your dad linked up his shoulder, hip and ankle, that sidekick angle, which I studied intently, your dad’s sidekick was amazing. Could he have…
30:52
created a more powerful angle. If you watch some of the video that emerged of Bruce Lee, like trying to crush a heavy bag, you see his hands and body are way opposition. I go, don’t confuse his movie kick with how he would try to put you through a wall, you know? So Brandon, a lot of people try to influence Brandon thinking, whether this was conscious or unconscious, and trying to find the picture of the angle of the kick. Because there were things I aspired to do.
31:22
I don’t know if it’s filming. So there it is. Like that’s me. There it is. So what’s interesting about that is my whole body, I don’t know if you remember the post, my whole body went into fucking spasm after that because I had hiked six hours. I was dehydrated, the sun setting. And I don’t know if you can see in the picture there, my hair is blowing way back. This is above the tree line. The wind is howling. I’m wearing hiking boots and I locked that kick out there and Dan, one of my students, takes the picture.
31:49
snaps a box, it’s 35 millimeter film. So you can’t look at it. There’s no, it’s, this is back in the eighties. He takes a bunch of pictures and also like, I’m on the ground going like my Latin and my hamstring, my quad, everything just spasms him from the hike. But when I blast a sidekick and I’m trying to crush somebody, so you can see like in this one where I’m drilling a bag here, it’s not nearly of course, I’m wearing jeans in that, but it doesn’t have the same forms. I explained to Brandon, don’t.
32:19
And years later, years, years later, we’re in Hong Kong. And I told him, I say, listen, man, you gotta work your craft. You wanna be a great actor. You wanna be a great martial arts, you wanna do that stuff. And I said to him, use your name. I said, your father. I said, if somebody said, who’s the most famous man in the world? You can only pick three. Most of the world would pick Jesus, Ali, and Bruce Lee. That’s what I told Ren.
32:50
Your dad is one of the three most Iker. Why wouldn’t you use that? You either have talent or you don’t. I think you do. You got drive, you got killer instinct, you got a fucking look, right? Use that, man. Don’t, I have goosebumps now remembering that story, but I’m like sitting in Hong Kong telling him, I said, if Bruce Lee was my father, I’d open every fucking door. Because the only way you’re gonna get good at being an actor is by acting.
33:20
fucking get the reps in that reps get the rep and if you hadn’t given him that talking to maybe the crow never would have happened and that’s why he loved the crow so much because it was such a departure from everything else. Who knows I’m not going to imply you know I might have been one of 10 people saying at him at all times right I had a long distance relationship with him I was just interviewed for a documentary they’re doing on him and hopefully gets one he gets released. Oh wow. It was crazy how many years ago it was 1986.
33:49
That was when I was in Hong Kong doing Legacy of Rage with him. But the reason I say when was that, you know, that was like over 30 years ago, is this documentary was being done at Eric Morris’s new studio. He’s still alive. He’s old, old actor. He’s got a bunch of books, but they use his studio. So it was like this reunion. I went back. Wow. To where he was, he was Brandon’s coach, acting coach, you know? And so we’re like, holy shit.
34:18
dude, what are you still doing in these producers and photos that had never been released about Brandon that I took on the set of the crow? I’d never necessarily, you know, again, it’s not pat on the back. I took pictures of Brandon in makeup in the cemetery that three weeks later when the accident happened, you know, I didn’t for the longest time develop them. And then when I developed them, I had pictures of him full makeup, going over scenes, he’s in makeup. And I had my 35 and then shooting pictures and doing some stuff like that.
34:49
never released them. It was crazy. Crazy. Tony, I want to be respectful of your time. Like I said, I could talk to you forever. Thank you for opening up about not only about your journey and the philosophy behind Spear, the philosophy behind knowing for your K&OW, but talking about Brandon, talking about your journey with Brandon and how you learn so much from each other in the process of going through that and how your legacy is.
35:17
continuing to influence the rest of the world by helping them influence others, understanding fear, and knowing what’s going on. Where can we find out more about what you’re doing? Where can we learn about your online training? You have a lot of things that are going on right now. Yeah. So we just launched a new website called Blower. My last name B L A E we are training systems.com. So we’ve got one more website called Blower tactical, but like, if you’re looking for more mindset shit, like Blower tactical might be the tactical, you know,
35:47
We used to have like a picture of me breaking someone’s ankle in front of a Hummer with a machine gun, like one of the pictures, because most of my work is with, you know, squad teams and military and stuff like that. And I’d have, as the company grew, you know, I’d have like business friends going, are you sure you want people looking at that? I’m like, I have a cool picture. So we have lower training systems and then, you know, that takes you everywhere. But we’ve got stuff for no fear. We got stuff for our garage gym, the garage gym thing. I’m just having so much fun. We’ve got pilots, doctors.
36:16
martial artists, military, federal agents, moms, like I don’t know any, because the magic of Zoom, like I said, like it looks like I’m doing a private W and we’re not doing things like, and I made it very clear. There’s no, there’s three pieces of equipment. You need a resistance band, a light resistance band, a PVC pipe and a medicine ball, something everyone can get. And I can teach you how to protect yourself with that. It might seem ridiculous, but I tell people, look, if you can…
36:43
take a first aid medical course in four or six hours and develop life-saving skills, like taking a four, five, six hour course with a firefighter or a paramedic or EMS, and they could teach you life-saving skills. That is the mindset that I bring to these courses, is what can I teach you that will buy you time in a confrontation so that you can escape danger? And so for people who want more, they wanna become trainers or whatever, we’ve got a much more robust course.
37:11
To get certified in my system, you’ve got to do a minimum of three months of my garage gym in the elite program. So that’s like doing, you know, that’s doing four live classes with me a week. They don’t have to be live. You can look at them and watch them after you’re done. Because we’ve got people all over the world, different time zones. But it’s not like this weekend seminar. It’s like you’re doing like three months of training minimum, plus online digital, plus written stuff. And then our online courses, how do you teach this stuff?
37:41
That’s what the online course is. How do you teach it? Come back to 1980, being asked what I want to do. I want to make people safer. I want to make good people safer. Well, I can’t do that myself. So I’m looking for, you know, good Samaritans and conscientious professionals who want to learn from the source and share this. And we’ve literally had, like we’ve had school teachers who know the school system isn’t going to provide them with anything more than an app.
38:10
run, hide, fight, you know, in an app. We have had school teachers going like, if something happens, I’ve got to be able to do something. And I’m like, good for you. They want to have that skill. And that’s kind of like a philosophical impetus under our Be Your Own Bodyguard program. At the end of the day, even if you have a bodyguard, if I take out your bodyguard, what are you doing? Who the fuck’s your bodyguard? Be your own bodyguard. Do you know how to think about
38:40
defusing the escalate confrontations. If Bush came to shove, do you really know how to protect yourself? And it’s not what most people think. It’s not a technical thing. It’s a blend of primal gross motor movement and indignation. That indignation is a magical force. Let me leave you with that. Indignation is a type of anger. Indignation is the anger of how dare you. A different anger than fuck I’m pissed. How dare you is a superpower.
39:10
Tony Blower, thank you for changing the world. Thank you for scaling courage. Thank you for teaching everyone. I look forward to talking to you soon again, my friend. Thank you, buddy, anytime. I always love you, brother. Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
