 All right, 21 convention 2014 in Tampa. And today we have somebody who is a pretty amazing guy. I know him personally. He's going to talk to you about self-defense. He's going to talk to you about mindset and the killer instinct. He gave a speech in 2012 in Austin, Texas on the killer instinct and tapping into your masculine power when it comes to violence, intense situations, and even transitioning into business and being the better expression of yourself. His first degree, black belt under William Vandery. He also has trained with Paul Vunak, certified JKD instructor. The list goes on and on. Mr. Ed Akin. What's up, man? All right. Thank you. All right, all right. So this is my second time at the 21 convention. So if you're wondering why there's 22 speakers, it's probably my fault. I think I had a strong arm, Anthony, into making me talk today. So anyway, I hope you guys' trip was good as mine. You guys got felt up at the airport like we did. But I always opt out. You guys should opt out. I know some guys are from another country. Where are all the guys from? I know someone's from Moscow, Australia. How's the TSA there? Good? They're just fine. Well, I bring it up for a reason. We're going to talk today a little bit about extreme violence and not that the TSA is doing a great job or anything like that. But I represent the TSA and I bring them up because if you think about why they were created in the first place, right? They're created as a system to keep us safe from terrorism. So part of that system is they create some rules and some things of prohibited items that we could no longer take on the airplane, right? And so the idea being that we can't use those items as weapons. And so I kind of did an experiment this time. And I didn't bring it down, but I didn't want to show it on camera either. But I went through the security TSA and they allowed me to go on, went through all my stuff and they let me go on with at least six weapons, right? All of which in my opinion are more deadly than box cutters. And these aren't overt weapons. They're everyday items, they're perfectly legal. But I bring it up because, hey, we're going to be talking about systems today. And systems in and of themselves, whereas a system of government, of religion, of martial arts, systems are limited, right? And if we think of the truth, no matter what context that is when it comes to violence or terrorism or the truth of life, it's limitless. And so we can never really, we can have systems that help lead us to the truth, but when they represent the truth in and of themselves or claim to, we find out that that's false. But more importantly, there's also another element in this and we're going to go back to it, but the creative motivated individual is always going to find a way to utilize systems to his or her advantage, right? To always flip the system or to even circumvent the system. And so we're going to use that because what I'm going to be talking about today or the title of my speech are the three reasons why I believe every man needs to train for extreme violence. The three reasons why you sitting out there need to train for extreme violence. And I don't want this to kind of be like, hey, here's the three reasons why you need to eat more leafy greens or here's the three reasons why you need to drink more water or do Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What I want to do is give you concepts and I'm really big on universal concepts and kind of looking at the bigger thing. I think everything obviously is related, but if we can step back enough and be abstract enough, then we can take the concepts, even if they're presented to you in a way of dealing with extreme violence because I believe that's very important, but it's the concepts that you'd be able to plug into other areas of your life. And if you guys can get that, then I'll have done my job, right? Because not everybody's going to go and get ready for the zombie apocalypse after this. Some of you guys might, but hopefully you'll be able to take some of those key things with us. So with that being said, we have to, what would the first reason be? And we have to identify this because the second reasons, two and three, these are really steps and they're byproducts of answering the first question because my idea is that once we set up, once we would honestly answer why you as a man need to train for extreme violence, then we have to prepare for it, right? Well, how do you go about doing that? And I'm going to lay out some principles. So even if you don't train in martial arts or you train in different martial arts, you can apply these principles. And so in order to realistically answer that question, well, why should you? It's a pretty basic reason. The first reason is pretty, it's a no-brainer, right? And the first reason is this, it's survival, right? The idea is if you as a man are going to be in extreme violent situation, right? Pretty simple. You want to be able to go home at night and take your body with you, right? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, what's the first level is like physiological. So I think taking your body home with you is pretty physiological. So that's pretty basic, right? That's a no-brainer. It's like, hey, if you walk out of here today and somebody sticks a gun in your face or somebody attacks you, you want to be able to go home at night. And so this gets to our first concept in order to really say, okay, well, how? How do we need to prepare for that, right? We have to do the first thing. And this is a great, great thing that most people don't do. They think they do it, but they don't. And we have to analyze reality, right? We got to look at what's really happens. How does shit go down in the street? How does, you know, somebody breaks in your house. How is that scenario likely to unfold, right? And what types of scenarios do you as a man walking around in the world do you have a chance of getting into, getting involved with? Even if you're trying to avoid it, sometimes bad things happen, right? And so we have to analyze reality. We don't want to guess or pontificate as to what we think is gonna happen or what somebody told us is going to happen. We have to investigate reality. And what we find is that when bad things occur, when extreme violence occurs, it can happen in any number of ways. It's, you know, so we kind of are at a quandary. We're kind of at a roadblock because how do you prepare for the unexpected, right? How do you prepare for something that can unfold in an infinite number of ways, right? So we're gonna get there and I'm gonna give you a set of principles. We're not gonna get a system, but we're gonna give you a set of principles and concepts of how to break that down and how to look at things differently. And this concept right here can easily transfer over into other areas, right? How many of the best marketers do, what do they do? They analyze markets. They see what the market wants, but how many companies create products or somebody has a great idea for a product, they create the product, they put a bunch of time and effort in marketing into it, they release it and nobody buys it because they didn't analyze reality. So even though it's a pretty simple concept, how many people actually follow it? And if we're talking about the seriousness of surviving something really bad happening, then we've gotta start with analyzing reality. So how do we do that? Well, when it comes to violence, we live in the information age, so we have hundreds of thousands of hours of actual fights that we can go watch, right? We now have video of cage matches where we actually get to see what techniques work and what don't in a pressure situation. We get actual violent crimes, we can see mass attacks, the knockout game, we can see flashmiles, we can see rioting, not that you wanna look at all that stuff, but you wanna be prepared to see how different elements and things come together when it comes to violence, because that's the first thing, is we analyze reality, but we don't wanna stop there. We have to use reality as our feedback, right? And that's the second concept, really. We're still on the first reason, but we're gonna, and I'm gonna spend more time on this survival setup because what I'm doing is giving you a framework of training, and it's through the training that's actually gonna change you physiologically, right? It's not gonna be buff or all this stuff. You will if you do certain strength training. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about your filters and the way you walk through the world and you carry yourself, right? It will change you, but we need to use reality as your feedback mechanism, right? Extremely important, especially when we're dealing with violence because people get caught in their paradigms and people get caught in systems and their stylized way of being, right? This is a lot of the concepts I'm giving you come directly from Bruce Lee. He was a pioneer and a master and a philosopher, but using reality as a feedback, a lot of people will get caught in their paradigms because they'd also need to have a proper outlook and a proper approach to deal with their context and our context is extreme violence. So what do I mean by that? Okay, well, we haven't a good idea of how violence can unfold and it can unfold in any number of ways, right? So now we can say, okay, well let's look at reality and let's look at some solutions. So some of the solutions are, well, let's look at cage fighters. Those guys are pretty tough, right? So we look at MMA and there was a fight in Vegas not that long ago, like just this last month and a fighter after his fight went out to the bars in Vegas and he ended up getting an altercation. Now he was a smaller guy, I think he fights at 155, but he ended up getting in a fight with this big dude and just as he was telling the guy who was saying, Google me, bitch, I'm a fighter, the guy clocked him, right? And hit him hard. Now to his, you know, he's a trained fighter, he's a really tough guy. So he took the punch, right? And what did he do? Well, he did a pretty smart thing as he went for a double leg because if you know anything about Jiu-Jitsu or if he has superior grappling, you get the guy in the ground, you can beat a bigger opponent. Not that you can't beat them standing. But what happened was he was in a bar and there were multiple people there and so when he went for his takedown, somebody else jumped in and grabbed him and pulled him off and then a bunch of people got into the fray, right? Luckily it got broken up but he's even more lucky that the guy's friends didn't have a gun, a knife hit him in the head with a chair. So this is where we can run in and we go, okay, let's look at this. And there's really two camps when it comes to violence. There's the guys really doing it in the proven combat martial arts and then there's self defense and traditional martial artists, right? And so the traditional martial artists are the self defense expert who deals with weapons, who deals with multiple opponents who can do 50,000 neck breaking moves. We'll look at that fight and go, yeah, see MMA is bullshit. It's a controlled environment, right? Yeah, those guys are tough but they're on a soft surface, they're not on concrete, they're not striking vital organs and vital going to the eyes, they can't hit the groin and do all the stuff that we can do. So they'll just scout MMA and they'll go, okay, it's bullshit. Meanwhile, the MMA guy is over here and he's listening to this dude and he's like, all right dude, let's go prove it, right? Let's go fight right now and if they end up fighting, provided there's no weapons, the MMA guy is gonna dust him with a basic jab cross hook and leg kick most of the time. But remember, there's no superior styles or martial arts. There are superior training methods and superior individuals, right? So there may be an individual over here who can take them out but what we need to do if we were to answer this question and we were to survive, we have to get the best of both worlds. We have to look at this and go, no, it's not that MMA has a superior training method when it comes to certain things, when it comes to one-on-one fighting, right? They're pressure testing, they're in the cage, they're getting punched, they're seeing what works, they're learning what works and what doesn't. They're getting taken down. This guy is doing more training and he's covering more areas but his training method is lacking because he's not sparring, right? Sparring is when you get to really find out if your stuff is worth it, right? If you don't, but that's the framework. If we can have a good framework of good functional training methods, then we can add the other stuff on top of it. See what I'm saying? So what this does is now we get into, we gotta have a concept of how to approach systems, right? And I'm gonna get back to this because this is really important. Remember, these are universal concepts I'm giving you. This doesn't just have to apply with violence and I really want you guys to think about systems because we wanna have an approach and before we can have an approach we need to have an approach of how to break down violence, right? Because we have this thing that's basically and this is a way to look at anything that seems really complex but we have this thing that can happen in any number of ways, right? And so we need a way to look at that and to break it down into different parts, moving parts, albeit, but we have to have a way to understand it so we can structure our training and utilize the right systems and right parts of the systems that we need. And so the first thing we could do and this firstly was master at martial arts. He was master at looking at breaking down different martial arts and in a time when people were stuck in styles and systems he was looking at the fight as this all-encompassing thing where anything can happen and what he said was, well, a fight can happen in any number of ranges. So he began to break fighting down into kicking range which is your longest range because your legs longer than your arms, boxing range, trapping range which is in close and then grappling range which is like combination of throws, clinching and groundwork. And so we can start breaking things down, breaking violence down into different ranges, right? Because we don't wanna just stop with the empty hands fight, we wanna get to the extreme violent outcome, right? We wanna prepare for that. So if we look at violence, how can things happen in the street? What's the longest range? When it comes to violence, intense situations and even transitioning into business and being the better expression of yourself. His first degree, black belt under William Vandery, he also has trained with Paul Vunak, certified JKD instructor. The list goes on and on. Mr. Ed Akin. What's up, man? All right, thank you. All right, all right. So this is my second time at the 21 convention. Where is my system? Where is my, what I'm relying on, where is it limited? And you start filling in the holes with those things, those other systems that work, right? But we need a philosophy. And this is where, this is really important. What the correlations is, then you, by changing one area of your life, you change the others, right? And what we find is that we find ourselves in the zone more often. You're in the present moment. You're responding like an echo.