MICHAEL JACO, originator of the first ever Hand to Hand/ Combat Fighting course for the Navy SEAL teams, holds 3 Navy Commendation Medals, 6 Good Conduct awards, and too many other ribbons, medals and awards to name from his 24-year military career

MARC MACYOUNG, publisher of ten books on surviving high-risk situations grew up on the blood-splattered streets of Los Angeles and has worked as a bodyguard, bouncer, security guard and director of a correctional institute.

DIRT TIME managed to catch these two warriors on July 7, 2005, for a fascinating telephone conversation on ego, fear and combat. What follows is a transcript of the call, which began with introductions…

JACO: Okay. I basically, I spent 24 years in the SEAL teams, started my own business, Tactical Awareness, basically what it is, is it teaches people tactical skills. Right now what I’m doing is I’m working with Nemesis Global, a company that I’m helping to start up where we’re doing training for military and law enforcement, and also our long-term goal is to provide aid to African countries in the form of security.

MACYOUNG: I used to be part of the reason why the streets of Los Angeles were so dangerous, and then I changed sides. I teach police, law enforcement and various agencies from around the world, I also teach military around the world, hand to hand stuff, defensive tactics, but where I’m going now is more towards de-escalation and situational awareness and how to recognize approaching danger instead of having to kill someone, to get out of there before it gets that bad.

JACO: Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve tried to do over the years as well, I started a hand to hand program over the SEAL teams, and pretty much what we were trying to accomplish was go from everything from tearing someone apart if you needed to in a combat situation to controlling people (in the situation) so de-escalazation is definitely a term that we like to use, you just can’t always go in and shoot everyone, that used to be the way that we trained in the old days but now the world is a different place, you can’t go into a lot of these countries and just do that, but we like to sneak a peak and go around and do our thing and just get out of there and not even touch anybody but that doesn’t always happen, just like in Afghanistan just recently…

DIRT TIME: All right, so I’m going to ask you to talk about your opinion of fear.

JACO: Basically I think that fear is something that most people have, most people have fear in their lives, what I’ve found through a lot of my training, through a lot of introspection, and a lot of the things that I’ve gotten into, fear is something to be, not to overcome, but basically what you’re doing is you’re going beyond fear, you’re rising above fear, it doesn’t actually come into your life at all. When you feel the fear come in basically what you do is you transcend to a different level. I will look at fear, I will look right at it, I will recognize it for what it is, and I will go either the other way, or I will transcend it or move it out of my way.

MACYOUNG: Okay, so in other words, your idea is fear is something that needs to be overcome.

JACO: Right it’s not something you want to embrace or bring into your life. Fear, I feel that it’s extremely negative, everything that fear represents is a negative in your life, and a negative to the world, basically, so fear is basically on an ego level. It’s a very base emotion, kind of like your ego. I think the ego and fear are one, and to transcend that, to go to a higher level, as in a spiritual level, you transcend that and go to a different level.
I think a lot of people think that fear and ego are good because they represent a push, to push you in a different direction, and I don’t see it that way, I see it as basically when those come into your life, it’s not a positive thing, it’s a negative thing, and when you try to represent a negative as a positive, that doesn’t work.

MACYOUNG: I make a very big distinction between fear and panic. Fear I maintain is good, panic is bad, and basically the functional difference, is that when you panic you don’t know what to do. So with fear I have an emotion, but I also have a response. My challenge is, can I do this response in time? Panic is, I’m just running blind. Say we’re out in the savanna of Africa and all of a sudden a leopard shows up and says, “Suppertime!” The use of fear is you’re up the tree, immediately. If we didn’t have fear, we’d say, “Oh, I see, look there’s a charging leper, let’s say we totter over to this tree and discuss whether or not we should climb it.” Fear gives you the motivation, gives you the push to achieve an end faster. Now panic is, that you don’t have an option or an answer that you trust, or you have internal issues that are interfering with achieving an end. So from that standpoint, panic and obsessing on the fear is very negative, but usually I’ve found that if you look at fear as an ally, because it’s telling you an important message, like, “this has to be DONE” and the question is, can you achieve it in time?

JACO: Yeah, I can see definitely at a certain level you can use fear as an analogy for a motivator, but…

MACYOUNG: Oh yeah! Have you ever noticed when the farting bumblebees are passing by, a.k.a. bullets, right, how quick you can do things?

JACO: Oh, absolutely. I don’t think that’s out of fear, that’s out of knowing that if I get in the way of those things they will, like,, tear me apart. So when I look at something I don’t even recognize fear at all because fear will basically pull me in a direction that will start that process that you talked about, going deeper into that panic state. So when I think of something that’s dangerous, that most people would think would be fearful, that is something that I don’t even recognize, I don’t even look at that, I don’t think, that thought doesn’t even come to my mind, that that’s fear, so I need to respond to that.

DIRT TIME: Mike, if you could just elaborate a little bit more, what do you think about fear as a motivating factor, like in the leopard in Africa situation.

JACO: Well, basically you’re not focused on fear, you’re focused on getting out of there. Fear is not motivating you. You don’t want to die.

MACYOUNG: Isn’t that fear?

JACO: It’s not a motivation, the fear doesn’t motivate you not to die, you just want to take care of yourself. I’ve been in those situations many times, and people have shot at me. You hear the bullets and rounds moving and seeing people dying, it doesn’t give me fear, I don’t even go there, I feel like I’ve gone to a different level….

MACYOUNG: I think you have but I think what you’re dealing with here though is that you also have a firing solution, you have an answer. Many years ago I was talking to a professional stunt car driver, and he and I were comparing stories about what we did, and this guy looked at me and he said, “You do what?” and I looked at him and I said, “You do what?” And his response was, well, I know what’s going to happen is that if I crash I car, I know that I’m going to go from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30, and if I’m alive at 30, the odds are I’m gonna be alive at 10. And he looked at me and I said, “Yeah but there’s only certain ways that people move, and here are the common patterns.” What it turned out is that each of us thought the other was nuts for what we did, but at the same time we also knew in our own field what the danger was and what we could do to counter it. And what we didn’t know was what was the answer in the other’s field.

DIRT TIME: So if I’m walking down the street to get home, and I live in a bad neighborhood, just because I know what I would do in a given in a scenario, doesn’t mean that I don’t have a choice. I could either walk home being afraid, or I could just walk home being aware.

MACYOUNG: But again you’re talking about a viable solution. If you’re walking home being aware, the odds are you have a viable solution.

DIRT TIME: But you can be afraid even if you have a viable solution.

MACYOUNG: Here’s where we come to another point which is a term I call faith. We go into situations knowing that something can go wrong, and that’s where I think that fear is a very good motivator because it helps us achieve our ends faster.

JACO: Right, it sounds like what you’re saying is, if you have training, like you talked about your friend who has the training in his field, and you have training in your field, then you know how to deal with fear. So what happens when something happens to you that you’ve never been trained in, that’s completely out of your range of knowledge?

MACYOUNG: Panic.

JACO: Well, that’s gonna happen quite a lot, because there’s always gonna be something that happens in your life, and it always does, that’s outside of your range of knowledge.

MACYOUNG: Life is just too big for everything that ever comes at us for us to be prepared to handle, but if we have faith in our abilities, we can a lot of times deal with situations that come up. I through a lot of life fire experience, and a lot of training, have faith if I follow my training, there’s an 80% chance that I’ll survive. So when I engage in that behavior, I know that I’m shooting the gap. But knowing that there’s still that 20% chance, that’s where fear is my friend, fear is gonna help me make sure that the 20% doesn’t pop up. You have a response that you know is most likely to work, and you engage in that. And when you talk about your transcending of that, you know, courage is not a lack of fear…it’s that something’s more important.

JACO: Well, what I’m talking about as far as transcending (fear) is you’re not even actually going to the fear state whatsoever, because there’s always going to be times that you don’t have the training or the resources available for that training that’s gonna take you to the level that you need to get out of that situation, so if you don’t go to that state at all, when you open yourself to creative input, that’s where the faith that you’re talking about comes in. I’ve been in so many situations where, like I’m extremely well trained to dive, and I can give you situation after situation where things are way outside of my training, because I was able to relax through it… I mean, parachutes not coming out, but because I was able to relax and basically not focus on my fear, and transcend that fear I open myself up to creative input to get out of that situation.

MACYOUNG: You have faith in something, “I know I can figure this out.” I can go to that state where I can get creative. You knew that state and you had faith in it. So the thing that a lot of people don’t have is an understanding of a) that state and b) that they can come up with that answer. So their fear becomes panic and they never get to that state.

DIRT TIME: So how would fear help, whether someone has training or not, how would tapping into a fear response, not a panic response, but a fear response, help them?

MACYOUNG: If your child is hurt, what do you do? Throw the kid in the car and get to the hospital. Now driving is an incredibly complex series of actions and processing and yet, under pressure, people can perform it. They can achieve that goal and in doing so they’re terrified, but their goal is get the kid to the hospital. Now do you want to take an extra 30 miles to go sightseeing when this is happening, no, the fear is gonna make you drive like a maniac. Now in comparison, there are people whose first reaction is to stand there and panic, and that’s bad, that’s their inability to overcome the problem or to come up with a solution that they will allow them to act.

JACO: Marc, I think we agree on a couple things, and one of them is that panic is not good. I think we agree that basically we need to go to a different level, you don’t need to go to that level at all. But I think where we differ is, you’re still in that fear. I mean, I just heard you say that while they’re fearful, they’re driving to the hospital. I don’t think they’re in that state, I think that I don’t even know if they even go there at all, there might be a momentary fear thought and then it hit them, boom, “I’ve got to DO this,” and it was gone, there was never any fear after that point, that’s my feeling.

MACYOUNG: Having taken kids to the emergency room, no fear was pretty much with me all the way. The reason I was breaking the speed limits of light was I knew I had to get the kids to the hospital. Fear when it is channeled becomes an almost Zen state, and I think that is what you’re talking about. Because there’s been other situations where I’ve gone in and the other person wants to end my existence, and the fear may have been in the moment, and then it does go into that state that you’re talking about, and I understand that, and I agree with that, but I’m curious as to how many people can achieve that.

JACO: I think that everyone has that within them.

MACYOUNG: Well, I know that they have that within them, the question is, does the structure of their ego prevent them from getting there?

JACO: Very good. That is a problem. Basically the way society and the church and everything about us, our schooling, everything, teaches us that you need to have fear in you, and I think that’s wrong, I think that we need to transcend it, to actually be taught how to transcend that fear, not to have that fear in our lives. I mean, fear is a negativity any way you look at it. I think that’s what you’re talking about as far as you’re driving with, or are with fear, I don’t think you have fear anymore, I think you have a goal, you’re moving towards it. You have stress in your life, that’s not fear.

MACYOUNG: You’re right, it does transcend, and I’m agreeing with you on that statement, but let’s say that fear is the thing that starts it rolling.

DIRT TIME: So I want to make a segue into something else I want to talk about, and that’s the whole mindset, because I feel, like I took a lot of self-defense classes when I was younger, it was like, totally based on fear, I was like, “Oh my god, this might happen,” so I took all these self-defense classes that were totally based on fear, and in one of I remember watching the video of our last fight, and we’re all totally freaking out during our attack, but we’re still fighting… But I feel like the mindset that I got from the class was like, I’m walking down the street hanging onto my weapons or my pepper spray or whatever I have on me, and I’m just like paying attention to everything around me, and I feel that it was fear based in that I’m totally moving inwards…

MACYOUNG: Okay, it’s Gavin De Becker’s “let’s peddle fear.” A lot of times our egos are the source of our fear, they’re irrational, they create a fixation on something, whether or not that is an actual situation or a real situation… When you have something that you know works, when you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is the best answer, the most feasible answer, you will act with total commitment to achieving that. If you don’t have that faith you’re gonna waffle. I could teach you all sorts of combat moves but as long as your ego is telling you FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR, you’re going to fixate on that and not look out of that self reinforcing cycle to see that hey, the actual level of threat I’m facing here really isn’t that much…and unfortunately a lot of the things that are out there are not fixing the source of the problem, the fact that you’re ego’s fixating on this and why is it fixating on this, and if it’s fixating, do you think that you want to fix it? You know, like, change the fixation in yourself?”

JACO: Your ego wants to control things…

DIRT TIME: I was wondering if you could talk about this in terms of in what mindset because most of the martial arts training out there is very defensive, “if this person does this, then I’m gonna do this.”

JACO: I think that basically we’re coming to words again. Defensive I think is also a negative connotation so people think that you can defend yourself, but if I’m attacking you, you could only defend yourself so long before I will get through, so you can defend yourself only so long. So when I attack, I attack back, or I leave. If you go into the point where you’re focused on your fears, it’s only going to create a spiraling negative effect. You have a negative training, you’re trying to defend yourself—you don’t want to defend yourself, you want to go to a higher level, a higher state.

MACYOUNG: You need to achieve a goal. My goal is to end it. Now whether I run fiercely or I pick the guy up and pile drive his head into the concrete, it’s over. So the external goal of “end it now” gives you a wider variety of options. My problem with a lot of training that is currently out there is that I feel that it reinforces the fear. A lot of people are fear addicts, they’re fear alcoholics, and a lot of these instructors out there are the evil bartender selling another drink.

DIRT TIME: This is so funny because this is exactly what I went through for years, I was like, what if this happens? I need to take another class! And the whole time, because of my mindset, because of my fear I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.

JACO: You’re going to find something that continually feeds that ego-based fear, as you find one thing that doesn’t work, your ego is gonna say to you, if you’re listening to your ego, to go find another fear-based training. And it’s like, I’m not going anywhere, it’s crazy, so you have to learn to transcend your ego.

MACYOUNG: My problem with a lot of training is, if you take a victim and you empower them, what you get is an abuser, ‘cause you have not taken away the ego pattern that these people have, so what they’ve done is change sides. So what I really have a problem with when I go to these women self-defense courses and they’re talking about empowerment…oh great, you’re gonna take your dysfunctional pattern and give it steroids.

JACO: That’s true. Unfortunately what happens in a lot of those cases is that women go to the extreme, they hate men, they want to bash men, and that’s part of the healing process. I think if you look in nature you see if they slash down a forest or there’s been a burning, something like that, you’ll see poison oak or poison ivy will flourish in that area until the other plants come back and drown out the poison ivy but that negative process has to come. So I think a lot of that negativity is where it comes from
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MACYOUNG: Winston Churchill said, “When you find yourself going through hell, KEEP GOING.” Don’t set up a permanent address! A whole lot of it what I’ve seen people do is that they move their zip code. “I come from a dysfunctional family so I’m gonna stay there and revel with it,” no you need to keep on going. You need to keep on growing, evolving and get beyond that, and unfortunately I think a lot of the training out there really reinforces this fear base instead of saying you need to overcome this, you need to move beyond this, they’ll say you’re right, and this is the way you can make sure that it works. So I have a dysfunctional system that’s not working, but guess what, I’m gonna teach you how to win using your dysfunctional system.

DIRT TIME: You know, it’s funny to hear you say that, Marc, because that sounds so similar to what Mike says about fear.

MACYOUNG: And a lot of the tricks that people use to fool themselves are actually reinforcing their ego, basically what they’re doing is they’re trying to solve a problem using their solution but the only thing they don’t realize is that their solution is reinforcing their ego, reinforcing the problem.

Thanks to Marc MacYoung and Michael Jaco for taking the time out to participate in this discussion. For more information on Marc MacYoung’s No Nonsense Self-Defense, go to www.nononsenseselfdefense.com For more information on Michael Jaco’s Tactical Awareness training, go to www.tacticalawareness.com. Please send suggestions for future debates (and debaters) to yael@dirttime.org.