West Point, 2014: What a Martial Arts Mastermind Went to a Military Academy to Learn
In November 2014 a group of martial arts school owners met at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The full two-day audio record survives.
In November 2014, a group of martial arts, BJJ and MMA school owners convened at the United States Military Academy at West Point for a two-day mastermind meeting. The event was run for members of the coaching programme now known as Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, and at the time carried the programme’s earlier name.
The choice of venue was the point. By 2014 the professional martial arts school had spent two decades borrowing its business vocabulary from retail and franchising — traffic, conversion, lifetime value. West Point offered a different lending library: an institution whose entire output is leadership under pressure, developed on a curriculum, measured, and repeated across generations of cadets. School owners who spend their working lives teaching discipline to children went to look at how a professional institution teaches it to adults.
What follows is the complete session audio from both days, recorded live. It is published here as an industry-history record — the working conversation of the profession at a particular moment, not a promotional recap.
The complete session audio
A video record of the meeting also exists but the recordings are held privately and are not published here.
Published by Martial Arts Professional as part of the industry-history record. This was a member event of the coaching programme now known as Martial Arts Wealth Mastery.
Full transcript
Transcript generated from the original recording and lightly edited for readability; minor errors may remain.
The transcript covers all seven session recordings from both days of the November 2014 West Point meeting, about 170,000 words.
- Download the full transcript (PDF, 817 KB, 300 pages)
- Download the full transcript (plain text, 877 KB)
Day 1, Session 1 (opening)
Okay, so, everybody got the schedule, right? We were unusually organized this time for this. What we are going to have is my good friend Bernie Kerik is going to be here all day tomorrow. So he’s going to come over for the tour with his 11-year-old daughter, actually. He lives about an hour from here. And they’re going to stay all afternoon and then… through the evening he’s going to stay over on Saturday night. And did everybody read that bio?
Oh my gosh. A little bit of… Colorful guy. Yeah, yeah, very colorful. He was a high school principal carried around a baseball bat, was turning around in the high school. Remember that movie?
That movie was Bernie Kerik’s High School. So he grew up in Patterson, New Jersey, which… The way I drove, I drove by Patterson where he grew up and drove by Franklin Lakes where he lives now. But he grew up in Patterson, New Jersey and was a… Mother was a prostitute who got murdered by the time he was nine. Never had a relationship with his father. Grew up in Patterson, New Jersey before they turned it around. By his own account, pretty much everybody that he knew in high school either ended up… in prison or, you know, or dead really by the time they were in their 20s. And that movie was set in Patterson High School and his high school but was set past when Bernie had gone through there. So he ended up training in martial arts as a high school student and ended up as a student of Peter Urban.
In New York. And if I remember the story correctly, I think it was Peter Urban who told him, look, you know, you’re either going to go down the wrong path or you’re going to get your life turned around and suggest he joined the military, which he did.
[The transcript continues in the PDF and text files above.]
