The Business of Live Events & Tony Blauer's Self-Defense Philosophy 💰 EP112

26:53The market changes, you're managing fear really quickly. You're, you're, you're being followed. You know, you're managing fear. You're late for a flight. You're managing fear. Uh, it's, it's, uh, it's a wild thing. And the better we manage fear, the better we manage time. So time is the only resource we can't get back when we're in a fear loop we're catastrophizing what's going to happen what next oh shit i'm going to lose this i'm going to screw this i'm going to you know like when when when covid hit was wild because all of my contracts most of my contracts are law enforcement military well guess who stopped doing any training at that time so we went and so like 35 contracts got frozen and i'm like a small boutique business you know i've got uh 20 trainers around the world but it's just me my wife and a couple people inside sales the whole thing stopped so two weeks became two months and i'm going i'm going i'm going to lose everything and now it was fear management and it was like like how am i gonna so here i am a fear management expert i felt like somebody shoved a vacuum on my ass and was sucking out my insides right i was just like like like terrified um and that's why i i i tell people i make this joke if i wanted to learn how to skydive and I'm afraid of heights.

28:10I told you I'm afraid of everything. So number one fear in the world is public speaking, but like you see me talking in front of a group, when I'm in my zone doing my stuff, I got no fear because you know your material and you know how to manage the fear. But if I make the joke, if I'm going to learn how to skydive, I don't want to learn from a Red Bull, 22-year-old Red Bull athlete with a death wish. I want to learn from a 55 - or 60-year-old jump master who fought in three wars survived and has done a thousand jumps and he loves it so much that when he retired he said i want to teach people to do this right so if i want to learn investing and you see this you know now you like there's uh i make fun of this all the time like if i see one more longevity influencer online who has gorgeous genetics they're 24 years old right like hey talk to me about longevity when you're 100 and you look like that not when you're 24 so if i to learn and i want to learn investing from someone like you i want to learn if i want to learn fear like i'm like like i said i've been afraid of everything am i going to be a good dad oh my god should i open my school should not open my school all my life throughout my career 60 deck as you know six decades 60 decades that'd be pretty old six decades um and i tell people i go I'm going to tell you and hopefully it'll work for you what I did to manage fear with all these stages you know and there are some people that are you know people who are just not afraid of anything and they're like I call them the unicorn and if you meet a unicorn while you can be inspired by them there's nothing to learn so if you and I go how did Mozart write that when he was seven if we don't understand that we're not unicorns right so we can be inspired by greatness but we can't really emulate what that person sees.

30:01You see things differently, like math-wise. I've seen you talking and you do like a computation and all of a sudden you see that like you're a rain man. And if I go, I want to be able to do what Dan does. When I look at that, I go, I don't understand what he's doing. How did he do that? So it's a zone of genius. You can be inspired, but I'm off on a crazy tangent. But it's important what we do when we make those decisions to improve ourselves, there's going to be when you move outside your comfort zone, you get a fear spike. And if you don't know how to manage that fear spike, you step backwards and you stay small.

30:37So I think that's where I was going. So typically we talk about investing into businesses, talk about charity, things like that. I want to talk about investing to yourself. Why is it important for people to invest into learning self-defense, whether it's martial arts, gun training, or a combination of all of the above? What can people be doing? Why should they be doing it for themselves and for their households? Well, I think at the end of the day, whatever your political angles are, whatever your diet nutrition angles are, we are survival organisms. If I knock you out, your body, independent of your ego, your attitude, your beliefs, tries to re-regulate your nervous system and awaken.

31:20If I cut you, you don't have to go say, hey, white blight cells, do your thing. shit tries to heal itself if i if i said what do you say and jumped across your body without you thinking would go whoa whoa take it easy you would hit a what we call a non-violent posture and try and naturally diffuse so we understand uh intrinsically there's a survival response we have in it i really believe um because for centuries we've outsourced our safety like there's like like a hundred years ago you knew which mushrooms killed you and which ones got you high you know a hundred years ago you might be you know i go into town to sell some pelts and some you know bandits come onto the ranch and our wife was up there with a black rifle powder right you know rifle going i will shoot you but she was shaking she was managing her fear to protect her kids and protect her property so um we've outsourced our safety and i think when you realize that you are the provider the protector that that classic language when you know you look in the in the in the mirror and you go i can protect myself i will defend myself and the world's gone a little crazy in the last five years if i need to be a courageous bystander and like the the i've been saying this for about 20 years the ability to protect yourself or a loved one is an arguably the single most important skill you could possess and i've had a lot of people try to argue with me and i go okay let's see you have a car collection i go keep your car collection but i'm killing your family you go okay no yeah take the cars oh you have a stamp collection like because people try to like you know you the the the the the irrational mind tries to argue and that you know be the contrarian and I'm like so to I always like giving the substance before I get to a direct answer is why should you learn uh how to improve your situational awareness manage fear be able to handle a sudden close quarter a violent encounter uh find out that you just got uh you know you're in a car accident you're you're getting robbed and you got in a fight and you got cut or duty to care I'm gonna put a tourniquet on somebody else or holy shit I did get cut I stopped the guy how do i put a tourniquet on me the like the ability to save your life for someone else is like what is more empower more empowering than that here's the transcendent part of that is and it's a great thing there's a guy that i trained he was a marine and he came to train with me a couple times hand to hand he retired and he got hired by a dod software company department defense guys and he was responsible for 12 people and in their sales team and multi-millions of like like sales commission now he's on and they figured his background and who he knew and all of this how he that right you're like you're buying the rolodex right and and the credibility like he was there he calls me because he knows we do all the the mindset fear management stuff and he literally says that i can't mention his name but but his quote is his i would rather be in a gunfight than be in this board meeting that i go to and talk about my quota he had no like so here's a guy like if i said to you dan uh board meeting negotiating or uh surrounded by bad guys with guns shooting at you you go board meeting right so uh i i really think if you think about this outsource safety concept because what do you do something's happening you're like 9-1-1 the what's the response time now on shit yeah like minutes we had a home invasion in 2009 cops were there in three minutes three that's outrageous that was 2009 um i might have come home to a completely different scenario with no family but like now like you can empty like a magazine on somebody like 9 12 14 in four or five seconds like you're you're not even finished dialing 9-1-1 and you're dead or bleeding so it's for for many people out there they they live in a bubble uh oh you're gonna love this this story i think it'll really resonate with where you're going so i was really good friends with bruce lee's son brandon and i was on the set of the crow with him three weeks before before he was shit you never knew this is wild i'm on the set of the crow they're doing some some stunt work uh and i'm like going like like this is a dangerous set like this these guys something's off here and there was one part where they were going to throw an actor into some boxes and I see nails coming out of the boxes and I'm like I like I go over to the I go to stunt coordinator I go dude like there's two nails out of this like right here you're going to throw somebody in so when I heard what happened I was like there was there was a moment where I felt like if I was there I'm the type of guy that that if there's a gun on the table I'm going to check is it loaded is it this is it so I don't know if you know the whole story of how he died um you know uh there was the the uh dummy round blue when the primer blew no one cleaned the gun so there was the the uh the tip of the bullet was in the barrel when they put the squibs in to fire the close up on the gun so you get the flash it blew the uh the lead out like so slow that it just did so much damage when it hit brandon in the stomach but i got this call like Brandon's dead and I'm like holy shit um and um so I went out to the funeral and I'm on a red eye back and it was back in the day Walkman you know so I had a Walkman I I love to read I had three books it's a red eye back I was living in Canada at the time and uh I put my books down here I'm in business class I got a seat beside me I'm like oh good quiet I'm doing this and before they closed the the the door a flight attendant not working the flight runs on so she's got her name she's got whatever delta or american whatever it was she gets in and i'm wearing like i got like this t-shirt jeans and uh she says oh that's my seat i moved my shit and i'm thinking you know and then she's like fired up it's midnight you know she goes oh my god hi my name's uh you know suzy i'm a flight attendant uh i thought i was gonna miss the flight this isn't my hub and I'm going, oh my gosh, she's going to talk all night.

37:45I want to sleep. And I'm like, I'm not in a good mood. A good friend of mine just died. I'm coming for a funeral. I'm trying to make this dramatic. And she goes, she goes, so what do you do? And we're starting to taxi. And I look at her and I go, I'm a life insurance salesman thinking who wants to talk about life insurance just as you're taking off. Right. And she looks at me up and down. She goes, you're not a life insurance salesman. I'm a good reader character person. And I said, okay, you got me i'm lying i'm a life extension insurance salesman and she goes life extension insurance what's that i go i teach self-defense and she says oh my god i always wanted to learn how to defend myself and i interrupt her and i go no you didn't because people who always wanted to do something do it i said i think what you meant to say is you always wanted to be you always want you want to know how to never be near a situation where you might have to defend yourself and she goes oh my god yeah we i ended up doing a five-hour seminar for the whole flight home but it was this idea that if when you say to people come to blackside and train with us they go this looks cool but then they sit there they don't realize the noxious effect of fear like why would you invest in and practice something you never want to have happen you've got to be another level in your thinking where you go the worst day of my life would be i had a chance to influence the outcome, but I didn't know what the hell to do.

39:10And that's what we're giving people here is options. We're options facilitators. Every one of us is a human weapon. We, we, we all know how to fight. We don't know how to fight. We don't know. We know how to fight and it's overcoming that fear first. And it's the type of thing where you can come and do the training and go, okay, now I know, and maybe I'll do one or two more gun classes, or I got to practice once a month with the tourniquet, or I am going to learn jujitsu or whatever. You fall in love with something. But the ability to know that you can protect yourself and not be manipulated, that's huge.

39:43But the transcendent value is that changes your emotional psychological posture at your next meeting. Right? Yeah. So it's super interconnected. You know the expression, the pen's mightier than the sword? so i took some poetic liberty and i added a sentence to it the pen is mightier than the sword when you know how to use a sword for sure right so you're there you're going in the back of your mind like you're such a strong negotiator because you know you don't need the deal if you don't like the person or you don't like the whatever you're gone that's the katana i'll cut this in a second where i'll let you remember iggy pop this is one of my favorite quotes is he said imagine if desperation were attractive so a lot of people come in there they need the deal so bad or they need and and so they come at you negotiating with fear as opposed to with fierce like in you know it's uh it's that mindset switch and you can get closer to that when you do this training because you discover that you are vulnerable and then you you build to strengthen that and you just you become a better version of yourself immediately even after two days so you guys can see what we've been talking about operation black site you can go to instagram it's at operation black site on instagram and social media and then also operationblacksite.com you can see full details okay the spear system you've been teaching the spear system for many many years all over the planet what is the spear system explain break it down and where can someone go find or research or hire you or book you or come to get training etc yeah thanks um so the i i grew up doing wrestling taekwondo boxing got into some confrontations where nothing worked they were so close they were so fast one was a road rage one was multiple salience one was in actually in a boxing ring um and and i had this wicked tunnel vision and i was a bruce lee junkie like all of us right i think you were the world's biggest bruce lee fan but I was like everyone every Bruce Lee fan thinks they were the biggest Bruce Lee I loved them I remember when I was 15 my mom said are you gonna go into the family business you're gonna be a lawyer doctor cop you know it's the 70s so there were only three jobs and I and I I said mom I'm gonna be a famous martial artist like Bruce Lee I'm gonna develop my own system and she pats on the floor looking at Bruce Lee magazine doing the splits she patted me on the head and said okay sweetheart we'll talk about this when you're older like I just knew I wanted I abhor violence and I'm so afraid of it that I just think about it all the time I study.

42:18I'm obsessed, not passionate, obsessed. And so I started teaching in 1977. My first paying official student in 1980, this kid, Mitch, gets dropped with a left hook, Dan. And I'm teaching him at the time what we all think of when we think about fighting. We think John Wick. We think Jackie Chan. We think Bruce Lee. Doing moves, doing moves. So I'm teaching him the moves and how to think and do this stuff. and I go and just visualize this. I come back to his private lesson. I've been training him for three months. He was having a bully situation at school. His dad was a friend of my family. I'd known them for decades, literally since I was born and I'm 20 at the time.

42:59And he says, and his dad, Joey says, Mitch is having a bully situation at school. I need you to teach him some stuff because you're still doing your martial tricks, right called the martial tricks i said yeah it's 1980 i'm making four dollars and fifty cents an hour for my father sweeping in his in our we had a ladies import export clothing business so i'm in the back sweeping and i would punch boxes every day we get a shipment in like rocky this is like before 1976 when rocky you know came out or no 1980 it was four years after so i'm inspired by the rocky scenes and i'm beating the out of the boxes doing stuff joey says i'll pay you this is really how I started my business he goes um how much you charge me uh for Mitchell I go I'm not going to charge you a friend of the family he says no no no no no I want you to do this like for real and be and be serious about this and uh I go um okay I don't know I can't charge you he says how's 20 so I'm thinking five classes because I'm making five bucks an hour I said whatever that's fine he says so I'll pay you 20 bucks a class and I'm like holy shit and I'm going I'm rich like i'm like i can retire i haven't even had one class so i start teaching mitch suddenly mitch's brother steve goes how come mitch gets private lessons now i got that i'm in there in a wealthy area and then one day we're training outside and derek across the street says what are you guys doing next day i got 30 30 30 like in a week i'm at 20 at 20 bucks an hour oh my god and i'm 20 it's 1980 and and i'm still working 40 50 hours a week yeah i'm doing so what so i'm doing this and I'm working 9 to 5 for my father, sometimes Saturday and then every single night for 6 years I'm teaching privately but Mitch's bully situation that kicked this all off I come back for a private lesson and he's sitting there like this in his room and I went what happened he jumps up here, can I swear on the show?

45:01not the F word and he's going and I'm going calm down man what what's going on and he goes you know the bully and they it had been a verbal abuse and up until now no physical and um he said uh man the guy today he put his hands on me and i told him you look like the school wasn't doing anything so i was just teaching him in case it got physical he was running late for class and the bully trips him and everyone starts laughing and um mitch gets up and he and he's like what are you bothering me for and i'm paraphrasing it for for editing purposes you know what are you bothering me for i don't even know you've been bugging me since school started and the guy walks up and he goes and he shoves him he goes what are you gonna do about it to you no to to my student mitchell right so he's like and mitch is 15 years old and he shoves mitch and mitch goes back and he just goes red like someone puts your hand on you and you just lose it and he grabbed the guy and slammed him against a locker bank and said leave me alone man i don't even know who you are you've just been bugging me and then he looks at me, and Mitch looks at me and says, then he dropped me with a left hook.

46:03I said, Mitch, I don't understand. What do you mean? Like, why didn't you parry, block, slip? And he goes, well, I was holding him with my left hand and then he goes, I had my school books that I picked up in my right hand. So can you imagine if you and I had to box, Dan, and I had to hold your shirt and hold books, how easy it would be to hit me in the face, right? and so but is and and i and i swear this happened i said i described it as it was like the god of self-defense i was 20 1980 i went oh my god we teach self-defense wrong and what i meant by is we don't talk about the emotional psychological we don't have a pre-fight ritual um it just like real violence is just sudden it happens and action's faster than reaction what happens when our situational awareness is compromised i'm gonna get a little nerdy here for a second our executive function is hijacked our cognitive brain is bypassed and our limbic system is called an amygdala hijack goes do shit like and we you know so we know mike tarzan been on your show many times he loves snakes you most guests here if you slipped a snake in here during the interview they'd be like what the they would do so their primitive self their primal self would react to that until you stress inoculate so i started that day in 1980 i said everything we do has to make sense in the real world and we started reverse engineering everything we would look at any real incident and go what impact does it have on our body and our mind because i don't i'm not going to stand there and and if i always tell people now if you look at cctv and video evidence you don't see it you've never seen a john wick fight in the real world it doesn't exist there's no evidence of it you would think if all of the and i've been a martial artist for 50 plus years so people think i'm hating on martial arts i'm just trying to make us safer going look this is cool i've got a gun collection i got spears i got knives but if somebody broke into my house i'm grabbing my glock and a tomahawk like here we go i'm not going to grab my spear or a black powder a rifle where i go miss and go oh like shit right let me let me reload um so we just got to look at real violence so how did spear happen is while i was only i was doing fight club before fight club was a movie we were like getting once a month together we'd get the shit you get to get together and beat the crap out of each other but it wasn't just let's fight like in fight club i'd say um literally i go dan what's your biggest fear in a confrontation and you'd say i don't know two guys with a knife and then we would do psychology we do drilling and then we'd put our makeshift gear on i lived in montreal at the time didn't have my equipment company so it was like a hockey helmet gauntlets taekwondo chess guard baseball shin guards we were like frankenstein right we'd put everything on and then i'd say uh next up uh dan fleischman and you'd put your gear on and i go dan your scenario is this and two guys with a knife would approach and you'd be like oh man man, this is when he interviewed me.

49:11And I would give you that fear. And you'd see people like viscerally go. And because if I say let's spar, you go, hold on a second. You warm up and you get ready and you stretch and you shadow box. You don't just start. So these things were like fight club with a scenario. And in it, I noticed we'd have, we had a reputation, we do these once a month, that some bad asses from all over Montreal would come in. And a lot of them would like turn and frigging shrimp and go fetal and tap. And I go, man, like I thought this guy, you know, you judge a book by cover. But what I realized is nobody understood two things here, how to manage their fear in the scenario.

49:54But the other thing I noticed is that when people were surprised, they all flinched. And it was like, so I started experimenting with this and I developed a drill called the sucker punch drill, which would be, I'd have a mouth guard on, you'd have gloves on and we'd just be talking. and I'd say, Dan, whenever you want in the conversation, punch me as fast as you can, right? Remember the Ali video that I showed? We show a clip of that or a picture of that on here where there's a picture of Ali, like the greatest, the Freddie Star. Have you seen this video yet? I don't think so. I'll send it to you.

50:25Freddie Star's leaning over talking to Ali in the interview in the UK and Ali's like listening and drawn in and then Star goes and whap and he throws a jab and I got a picture of Ali going total fetal but here's a guy that's fought fraser norton you know like the foreman and here's like like this little comedian who surprised him and made him flinch so we show that video because a lot of people especially male egos go i'm not gonna flinch this is bullshit and i go like your flinching is your friend when your situational awareness is compromised you want something to go whoa i didn't see that so spear is an acronym for spontaneous protection our startle response accelerator response spontaneous protection enabling accelerated response i figured out almost like classical conditioning a series of drills where we uh trick the body synthetically into micro flinches and then attach a cognitive correction so we're converting the flinch so So instead of us going like most victims of stabbing who don't survive a stabbing, they'll get slashed in the arm.

51:34And then there's always a trail down their back. So if you started hitting me, I flinch, non-conscious movement, but then I want to get away. I go like this and I turn and the person's still coming at you. So there's a forensic line all the time. So what we do is we teach people the flinch is going to happen whether you like it or not. But then how do you convert it? So how do you attach the amygdala hijack with the limbic system with this cognitive, like an athlete, what should I do here? So it's a micro flinch. And then there's a sequence of drills we do, we call fingers played outside 90, where you drive in and you recruit this cordu extremity explosive movement, almost like a biological airbag.

52:19And we've been teaching it. So I discovered this like an archaeologist in 1986, 87. and I've been refining it like to today. When COVID started, I saved my company by teaching online. We've done almost 800 classes since, 800 two-hour classes online all over the place, man. So I just say that because I'm still, I'm so obsessed with it. We're still coming up with wild stuff. So basically I recognize we're all human weapons. We all have fear. how do we use fear as fuel how do we use our natural inclination to whatever we're going to do and weaponize fear and weaponize our startle response and get back in the fight so where can people find you on social media where can they find your website how can they get a hold of you um so best thing is is so i've got two main websites blauer training systems my last name b-l-a-u-e-r training systems i've been around long enough that if you just google tony blauer you'll find my my the lovers and the haters like any of all of us have uh then there's blower spear um of course you can find me through black site i've been i think every single event since since we started um and and uh you know i love it thank god i i live close to here you know so it's just easy for me to shoot in and do it but um there's there's something so special if you're sitting on the fans should i do this should i do this like being able to understand your vulnerability and how to turn like like the primary ingredient of courage is fear and to experience that and then to go oh my god i know how to put on tourniquet i know how to shoot a gun and you're not going to master stuff like the and you got world-class instructors here but you're going to know what you don't know and fear of the known is a lot more manageable than fear of the unknown absolutely all right guys it's really important to have these discussions with your friends family and followers about learning self-defense so if you can go to martial arts training if you can go to gun training if you can go to a gun range learning something at least having some basis obviously we'd love to have you here at operation black site but in your own hometown wherever you are in the world there is people that can teach you martial arts shooting self-defense etc so at least you have some type of a basis because what you don't want to do is the famous quote from mike tyson everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face so going through experience going through the the back and forth learning from people that actually know what they're doing can literally change your life and hopefully save your life if you know god willing it never happens but if it does you want to be at least somewhat prepared for those moments so you know what to do in those situations all right guys this is a very different episode where we talk more about investing to yourself and to your mind and into protecting your household.

55:13And oftentimes we overlook it until after the fact, after you get into a carjacking, after you get robbed in Los Angeles, after you get into a random stabbing in London or New York where it's happening now, like you do it after the fact, it's mathematically unlikely that you're going to be the one that gets robbed again or get stabbed again. You know, it already happened to you, like, unfortunately. and so it's not that often you hear someone get like carjacked twice right there are definitely women that have been raped multiple times because that's a much more intense thing and it's more more focus happens there but the actual like robbery shootings and things that we see oftentimes happen during tourism or in certain cities certain territories and so getting the training beforehand rather than after the fact is very critical similar to trying to be healthier before you go to the hospital right rather than fixing after the fact so the more things you can do to be preventative to learn is critical have this discussion with your friends family followers maybe take all your staff your co-workers together go out there and do some martial arts training or a day at the range just getting comfortable with it and then if you can actually spend time or you like it then obviously be great if you can get into more intense training because this is a lifelong mission you don't just learn once on a one day thing or a two-hour thing here and there this is part of your your daily life because at any moment your whole life can change appreciate you guys listening check us out at themoneymondays.com you've been helping us you know stay in the top 10 for over 110 weeks in a row so if you can comment like subscribe share check out tony blauer across social media and we will see you guys next monday