The Art of Manliness - #428： The Life of a Dragon

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00:01:26.300 I'm Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. And if

00:01:40.900 you're like most boys, you probably went through a karate phase as a kid. When I went through my

00:01:44.380 phase as a five and six year old, I demanded that my family call me Daniel-san because Karate Kid is

00:01:49.100 my favorite movie. I was also going through a Top Gun, Goonies, and Ghostbusters phase at the same

00:01:54.380 time. So the full name was Daniel-san, Mikey, Maverick, Peter Vickman. My family did not

00:01:59.580 comply with that demand. Anyways, if you went through a karate phase, you got one man to thank

00:02:03.500 for that. It's Bruce Lee. My guest will show us today Bruce Lee nearly single-handedly popularized

00:02:07.580 martial arts in America thanks to his breakout Hong Kong Kung Fu movies of the early 1970s.

00:02:12.180 My guest's name is Matthew Pauley and he's the author of a new definitive biography of Bruce Lee

00:02:15.900 called Bruce Lee a Life. Today on the show, Matthew and I explore the creation of the legend that is

00:02:19.820 Bruce Lee starting with his unique family history that had him straddling Eastern and Western

00:02:23.500 cultures his entire life. Matthew then gives us vignettes into Lee's early life that shows his

00:02:27.300 fire, scrappiness, and love of martial arts, including his rise as a child star in Hong Kong

00:02:31.320 and his love of street brawling. We then discuss how Lee started formal training in Kung Fu as a

00:02:35.500 teenager and how his ambition caused him to bump heads with his teachers. Matthew then shares how

00:02:39.220 coming to America helped Lee refine and reinvent his martial arts practice, how Lee got his big break

00:02:43.960 in Hollywood, and how he ended up teaching Kung Fu to movie stars like Steve McQueen and James Coburn.

00:02:48.800 Along the way, Matthew shares Lee's relentless fitness routine, talks about Lee's personal library of over

00:02:53.480 2,500 books that included a lot of philosophy and psychology. We entered a conversation discussing

00:02:57.980 Lee's legacy and how he changed not only cinema, but our idea of manhood in America. After the show's

00:03:02.420 over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash Bruce Lee.

00:03:16.040 Matthew Pauley, welcome to the show.

00:03:18.740 Thanks so much for having me on, Brett.

00:03:19.820 So you got a new biography out about a man who I would say had just a huge impact on not only

00:03:28.680 American cinema, but also Asian cinema. And because of the Art of Manliness podcast, I would

00:03:34.440 say he had a huge influence on American masculinity as well as Chinese masculinity. And I'm talking,

00:03:41.760 of course, about Bruce Lee. Like every other red-blooded American boy, I went through a karate

00:03:47.480 phase when I was in elementary school, watched the Kung Fu movies Bruce Lee did during the 60s

00:03:54.120 and 70s. So he's always been a big part of my idea of what it means to be a man, right? The guy who's

00:04:01.880 just can kick butt no matter whatever situation he finds himself in. And so about a year ago, I was

00:04:07.640 like, okay, I want to do a podcast about Bruce Lee. Let's go look for some Bruce Lee biographies.

00:04:11.960 There's got to be a ton out there because this guy, of course, you know, he changed cinema as we

00:04:15.260 know it. But I was surprised by the dearth of biographies about Bruce Lee. What do you think is

00:04:22.400 going on there? Why hasn't there been that much written about his life and his career?

00:04:26.980 I was shocked as well because Bruce Lee was one of my childhood heroes. And I'd read all the martial

00:04:33.660 arts magazines, but I hadn't really looked at the biographies. And when I researched it, there was only

00:04:39.220 one still in print. It was written 25 years ago and it was pretty poorly researched. And that's one

00:04:46.220 of the reasons I felt compelled to write the book. I think the reasons are twofold. One, I think it

00:04:52.880 matters that he's Asian American. We know pretty much any white guy does anything gets at least half

00:04:58.400 a dozen biographies. You know, Steve McQueen has six. James Dean has nearly a dozen. Also that Bruce

00:05:05.620 was into Kung Fu, which I think is sort of looked down as lowbrow. If he had been a painter, I think

00:05:11.400 he would have gotten at least a couple of good ones. And so I think those two factors meant that Bruce

00:05:16.140 in a weird way got overlooked. So everyone knows who he is, but no one thought he was a serious enough

00:05:22.200 figure to be treated with the kind of respect you need to have for someone to write a five or 600 page

00:05:28.900 biography. All right. So you felt, you saw there was a need and you were like, I'm the guy,

00:05:32.800 I'm the guy to fill this need. And I'm glad you did because the biography is fantastic. I couldn't

00:05:37.460 put it down. Let's talk about Lee because as you said, he's Asian American. A lot of people think he's,

00:05:43.100 you know, just Asian. He's just from, from Hong Kong, but he's got an interesting background. One of the

00:05:49.380 things he struggled with, you say struggle throughout his entire life is he straddled two worlds.

00:05:55.360 He straddled East and he straddled the West and that straddling, like it started even before Bruce

00:06:02.780 Lee was born. Tell us about his family history and how it shaped or may have contributed to how

00:06:08.740 he perceived the world and how he experienced the world. Yeah. So one of the revelations that I

00:06:13.500 came up with while in my research was that his background was far more diverse than we had

00:06:19.180 previously known. Everyone who was into Bruce Lee knew he was part Eurasian, that he had a European

00:06:25.140 ancestry, but they thought his grandfather was German Catholic. And what I discovered was actually

00:06:32.640 his great grandfather was Dutch Jewish, a man named Moses Hertog Bozeman, who in the 1850s traveled to

00:06:40.240 Hong Kong, bought a Chinese concubine and had six kids. And those kids became the richest men in Hong

00:06:47.180 Kong. And Bruce Lee's grandfather, whose name was Hong Kong was so wealthy, he had 13 concubines,

00:06:55.680 and then had an affair with a British woman. And that was Bruce Lee's grandmother. And so Bruce Lee

00:07:02.740 was part Han Chinese, part Dutch Jewish and part English. And so growing up, well, first he was born in

00:07:10.700 America, which a lot of people don't know. His father was an actor who was on tour. He returned to Hong Kong when

00:07:16.380 he was about five months old. And in Hong Kong, he faced discrimination because he wasn't pure

00:07:23.100 Chinese. And then when he returned to America, when he was 18, he faced discrimination because he was

00:07:29.620 Asian, not white. And so his whole life was spent sort of being proud of who he was in context in which

00:07:37.540 he was discriminated against. And I think that's part of the reason he was so interested and so successful

00:07:43.360 at bridging the divide between the East and West.

00:07:46.540 So a lot of people don't know about this about Bruce Lee is that his acting career began way before

00:07:53.580 he did any of his Kung Fu movies. He was actually a child star in Hong Kong when I think when he was

00:08:00.280 like four or five or six, right?

00:08:02.640 Yeah. So his father was an actor. So he came from an entertainment family. The first film he showed up

00:08:09.800 then, he was two months old. It was filmed in San Francisco where he was born. And he just appeared

00:08:15.880 on screen. Actually, it was a cross-dressing performance. He played a little girl. But, excuse me,

00:08:22.460 his acting career began in earnest when he was six years old. And he appeared in nearly 20 films as a

00:08:29.520 child actor up until he was 18. And what's interesting is none of those were Kung Fu movies.

00:08:34.240 Right. Yeah. He was known as, he was known as the little dragon.

00:08:38.200 That's right. That was his stage name. Lee Xiaolong is how they pronounce it in Mandarin.

00:08:43.780 And so it's an appropriate one because of course, Bruce was a fire element. He had a short temper.

00:08:50.560 He was very fiery. He was hyperactive. But yes, he was called the little dragon. And that became sort of

00:08:56.700 his symbol and why later he wanted to name his movies Enter the Dragon because that's who he was.

00:09:03.420 That's who he was. Well, yeah, you mentioned he's fiery because I thought that was another

00:09:07.020 interesting aspect of Bruce Lee because this is a guy, Hong Kong, you know, not technically

00:09:12.340 part of China. It was still part of, under British rule. But, you know, Chinese, where the culture is

00:09:18.520 typically conformist, the emphasis on community. But you have Bruce Lee here who was very individualistic,

00:09:26.120 more than his siblings, more than his dad. Where did he get that sense of individualism despite

00:09:32.400 growing up in a culture that kind of shunned it?

00:09:36.060 Well, some aspects of his personality, I think, are just a mystery. Each child gets born with their

00:09:41.920 own soul. And I think Bruce from the very start was highly individualistic. But there are certain

00:09:47.580 things that influenced him when he was young. One thing I thought was fascinating is that he nearly

00:09:53.100 died during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II. There was a cholera epidemic.

00:09:59.540 And he had to fight from the very earliest years of his life just to live. And then that kind of

00:10:06.700 fighter spirit, I think, infused him for the rest of his life. Another factor I think was crucial

00:10:12.440 and was underplayed in most Bruce Lee biographies because the family is embarrassed about it. But his

00:10:18.480 father became an opium addict. It was very common for Chinese opera stars, which his father was,

00:10:25.940 to smoke opium. But in Bruce's teenage years, the addiction sort of got its claws into his father.

00:10:33.000 And I think that affected Bruce greatly and caused him to distrust authority on a certain level because

00:10:38.880 he didn't trust his father or he had complicated feelings towards his father. And so, Bruce, from a

00:10:45.360 very early age, refused to accept anyone imposing authority on him. There's one of the stories,

00:10:52.780 the revelations in the book, is that he was kicked out of this prestigious parochial school he went to

00:10:58.920 called LaSalle. And for years, no one would admit what really happened. But I ended up talking to some

00:11:04.240 of his classmates in Hong Kong. And what turned out that happened was, first, he pulled a knife on his

00:11:09.660 PE teacher who had struck him. And then later, he did a prank on one of his classmates that upset

00:11:17.500 everyone. And he got kicked out of school. And so, he really was a kind of hyperactive,

00:11:22.280 troublemaking kid in the back of a class who couldn't sit still and never did his studies,

00:11:27.100 was considered a terrible student. And his true love was street fighting. And so,

00:11:31.860 from a very early age, he was a pugnacious, rebellious kid.

00:11:35.840 Yeah. The street fighting thing was interesting because Bruce Lee's dad was an actor. He grew up

00:11:41.000 in a relatively affluent, he had an affluent life growing up. Family had servants. He was able to

00:11:46.820 go to these prestigious parochial schools. But the guy loved to fight. And I mean, somehow,

00:11:53.560 he always ended up the leader of these gangs. And which is interesting, because you typically think,

00:11:58.180 okay, if you're poor and you come from a rough neighborhood, okay, you end up in a gang because it's

00:12:02.660 supplying you some sort of sense of security that you're not getting at home.

00:12:06.460 That makes sense to us. But it's like, why would this upper middle class kid

00:12:10.540 start street gang so he could just beat the crap out of people?

00:12:15.380 Yes. That was fascinating about him. One, that he came from an affluent background. That's sort of

00:12:21.540 downplayed. His story, they like to do a kind of rags to riches. And that's true when he got to

00:12:26.680 America because his parents cut him off. So, in America, he started at the very bottom. But in Hong Kong,

00:12:32.640 he was at the top. His mother's family was one of the richest in Hong Kong. His father did very well

00:12:38.960 in real estate and was also a famous actor. And so, he had a very affluent upbringing.

00:12:44.800 I think one of the things I had to get my head around is when we think of Hong Kong, we think of

00:12:50.980 modern Hong Kong, which is basically this high-end shopping mall. But when Bruce was growing up in

00:12:56.020 the 1950s, it was basically a refugee camp run by British businessmen. And there were millions and

00:13:03.300 millions of Chinese refugees fleeing the war, the revolution in China. And so, the streets were an

00:13:09.080 actually dangerous place to be. There were triads. There were gangs. The police were extremely corrupt.

00:13:15.080 And so, there was a lot of sort of gang activity. And I think Bruce, in his middle-class way,

00:13:21.140 was imitating what was going on around him.

00:13:23.800 Yeah. The thing that I got a chuckle out of, talking about some of these gangs made up of

00:13:28.620 10-year-olds. And they had knuckle dusters and switchblade knives and chains. And I'm like,

00:13:35.000 geez, Louise. I mean, my son is seven. I couldn't imagine him

00:13:39.240 keeping a pair of brass knuckles in his pocket, just in case he gets in a fight at school.

00:13:46.120 Exactly. My son's three. And the idea that he has a razor blade stuck in his shoe to use in a fight.

00:13:52.240 Right.

00:13:52.680 It's a completely different era. And I often thought of sort of West Side Story. The jets and the sharks,

00:14:00.320 they would go meet. And Bruce would go fight with the British kids across town because there was this

00:14:06.220 Chinese-British rivalry in the colony.

00:14:08.680 Yeah. There was a lot of that going on. So, let's talk about his fighting during his street gang years.

00:14:14.840 At this point, he wasn't really doing kung fu or any type of martial art. He was just

00:14:18.640 punching and kicking and doing whatever. There was no method, right?

00:14:22.560 Yeah. So, Bruce Lee just was a tough kid. And one of the other things it's hard, it was hard to get my

00:14:30.660 head around is you think of Hong Kong and you just think, you know, kung fu everywhere. But at the time,

00:14:35.840 kung fu was sort of a low, not very respected thing. And so, it wasn't until he met a classmate or a

00:14:45.900 friend of his named William Chung, who was much better as a fighter than Bruce. And this drove Bruce

00:14:52.100 crazy because he was a perfectionist and he always wanted to be the best and he wanted to be a leader.

00:14:58.160 And so, this idea that there was this older, bigger kid who was better than him kind of drove him

00:15:03.180 crazy. And he wanted to figure out how to be better than William Chung. And it turned out William Chung

00:15:08.340 studied Wing Chung Kung Fu under the tutelage of the master Ip Man, who's now famous for all of these

00:15:15.960 movies from Hong Kong. And so, Bruce only took up Wing Chung to be a better street fighter and to be

00:15:22.780 better than this kid, William Chung, who it drove him crazy, was a better fighter than him.

00:15:28.820 So, this was about when he was 15 years old, right?

00:15:31.660 Yeah, 15, 16. Yeah.

00:15:33.260 So, I mean, let's talk about kung fu because it's sort of, I think it's become a catch-all phrase.

00:15:39.700 I mean, at the time, it seemed like it was used as a catch-all phrase for pretty much any martial art.

00:15:43.460 And you see this when Bruce Lee comes to America and he's teaching people, like, people used karate

00:15:49.940 interchangeably with kung fu. But there is a difference. Like, what exactly, what is kung fu?

00:15:56.640 What separates it from, say, taekwondo or karate? And then after that, specifically, what was

00:16:02.240 Wing Chung in it? How is it different from other types of kung fu?

00:16:06.420 Right. So, the way I would think about it is the martial arts describes all sort of fighting styles.

00:16:13.460 That have a formalized structure where they teach you certain ways to punch or to kick or to throw or to grapple.

00:16:21.440 So, boxing can be a form of martial arts.

00:16:24.440 And then each nation had its own particular type.

00:16:28.440 So, taekwondo is a Korean art form.

00:16:31.160 Karate is a Japanese art form.

00:16:33.100 And kung fu was the term the Chinese use for all their different types of martial arts.

00:16:39.060 And then within kung fu, then there's the specific styles.

00:16:44.820 And so, China has hundreds.

00:16:46.800 You could go on for an entire podcast discussing them.

00:16:50.240 Wing Chung was one style of southern kung fu.

00:16:54.360 And it was actually kind of small and obscure.

00:16:57.040 There were only a couple masters in Hong Kong.

00:16:59.220 There were styles like Hung Gar, who had a far bigger following.

00:17:02.420 But Wing Chung became popular in Hong Kong because its students were particularly good at challenge fights.

00:17:10.640 And they would go out and challenge stylists from other kung fu styles.

00:17:15.520 And they would win a lot of these fights.

00:17:18.060 And so, if you were a brash street fighter like Bruce Lee and you wanted to be better at it,

00:17:23.200 Wing Chung was the style that you would study.

00:17:25.960 Right. And Wing Chung was supposedly, according to legend, started by a female monk, right?

00:17:33.320 That's right.

00:17:34.200 So, every Chinese kung fu style has a legendary story of where its origins came from that is almost always highly fictionalized.

00:17:44.260 But it tells you a little bit about what they think the style is about.

00:17:48.000 And so, Wing Chung is unique because its founder was supposedly Shaolin Nunn, who had developed the style by making it better for women in the sense of close in contact, low kicks, and focusing on if you were someone who was smaller than your opponent.

00:18:09.080 And since Bruce Lee actually grew up smaller and frailer than his siblings and his classmates, because he nearly died in that cholera epidemic, it was sort of the perfect style for him.

00:18:20.200 So, I imagine, you know, because kung fu was looked down upon, he had to keep this as a secret, didn't tell his parents he was taking kung fu lessons.

00:18:27.720 That's right.

00:18:28.340 His parents, throughout his life, were trying to figure out ways to get him on the straight and narrow.

00:18:34.340 It was one of those situations I think is familiar to a lot of families.

00:18:37.220 His older brother, Peter, was the studious A student who his father favored.

00:18:44.280 And Bruce was the young, rebellious troublemaker.

00:18:48.100 So, Peter was the one they were saving tuition money for, and Bruce was the one they were saving bail money for.

00:18:54.060 And I thought it was kind of fascinating that Bruce, even though he was rebellious, there was a certain base level of respect he had for his parents.

00:19:03.520 He would hide things from him that he knew would get him in trouble.

00:19:09.820 And so, he never told them that he was studying Wing Chun until they finally found out, and then they blew up, and there was a huge argument about it.

00:19:16.920 And Bruce said to his father, it kind of hurt.

00:19:19.580 Like, I'm not a good student, but I'm good at fighting, and I'm going to use fighting to make a name for himself.

00:19:24.520 Of course, at 16, he couldn't realize that he would eventually become the most famous unarmed martial artist to ever live.

00:19:32.880 But even from an early age, he had this sort of idea that this is the one thing I'm good at.

00:19:38.200 And he spent the rest of his life figuring out a way to fit that into society.

00:19:42.720 Well, you know, we've talked about Bruce had a natural disposition to being individualistic.

00:19:49.160 Kung Fu and Chinese martial arts, big on tradition, big on structure, big on rigidity.

00:19:55.860 Because, you know, he's sort of derived out of Confucianism, where there's ritual, and you do things a certain way, because that's just the way you do them.

00:20:02.520 Did Bruce Lee bristle at his Kung Fu instruction?

00:20:06.820 Like, were there already, like, things like he would just pop off to his instructor?

00:20:09.980 Did he kind of respect the process?

00:20:12.140 Well, he wasn't respectful in this sense.

00:20:15.000 One of the first questions he asked his teacher, Ip Man was his master, and Wang Xunlong was the guy who taught the daily sort of beginner's class that Bruce was in.

00:20:24.980 The first thing he asked him was, how long will it be until I'm better than you?

00:20:29.480 So, and his instructor, in recalling this, has this great phrase he said, he asked too much.

00:20:37.460 And you can just imagine, you know, you're teaching this punk sort of teenage kid martial arts, and he doesn't know anything.

00:20:44.220 And the first thing he wants to know is, how long before I can kick your butt?

00:20:47.660 And so, Bruce was pugnacious from a very early age.

00:20:50.900 But I think at the beginning stages, he knew so little that he was willing to kind of learn the pattern.

00:20:58.620 He was willing to learn what they taught him.

00:21:00.860 But very quickly, within a few years, he started to branch out and bring other elements into Kung Fu besides just Wing Chun.

00:21:08.420 And did it make him a better fighter, like a better street fighter?

00:21:11.720 Like, he started winning more of these duels?

00:21:13.480 Like, I thought that was interesting.

00:21:14.280 I didn't know that that went on in Hong Kong, where people would just be like, I challenge you to a fight.

00:21:18.400 And it's like, you'd have to do it.

00:21:20.620 Did that help him at all?

00:21:22.360 Yeah, that's a fascinating aspect of Hong Kong culture at that time.

00:21:25.680 It doesn't go on anymore.

00:21:27.120 But they would go on to the rooftops because there's so little space.

00:21:30.840 That was the only place they could get privacy.

00:21:33.060 It did make him a better fighter.

00:21:34.680 And it didn't calm him down at first.

00:21:37.740 I mean, what he would do is go into the streets and go sort of – one of his stunts was he would wear really traditional clothing in westernized Hong Kong.

00:21:48.840 And if someone looked at him funny or said something about the clothing he was wearing, he would start a fight with them.

00:21:55.940 And that's what eventually got him kicked out of Hong Kong, is he started so many street fights with sort of random strangers

00:22:01.700 that the police came around to his mother and said, if you don't calm him down, we're going to throw him in jail.

00:22:07.980 All right.

00:22:08.160 So this is a man, a young guy who had a chip on his shoulder, a man to be reckoned with.

00:22:12.480 So, yeah, he finally gets kicked out of Hong Kong.

00:22:14.600 His parents were fed up with him.

00:22:16.000 He got kicked out of school doing kung fu.

00:22:18.560 And they finally decided, you're out.

00:22:21.980 You're going back to America.

00:22:23.540 You're going to Washington.

00:22:25.520 So why Washington?

00:22:28.140 Why did he end up there?

00:22:29.720 And what happened to Lee?

00:22:31.240 Did that have an effect on him?

00:22:33.160 Did it turn him around at all?

00:22:34.700 Yeah, it had a profound effect.

00:22:36.160 The reason he went to Washington was because his father had a friend who owned a restaurant in Seattle.

00:22:42.260 And so the Chinese community, it's always a friend of a friend because they're living in America where they're being discriminated against.

00:22:51.200 So like all immigrant communities, they band together for mutual support.

00:22:55.540 So Bruce was sent to Ruby Chow's restaurant in Seattle, and he was expecting to be treated like an honored guest.

00:23:04.520 But his father was so angry and felt he'd been spoiled growing up because his father grew up very poor, and he felt like he had this kind of, you know, rich son who didn't respect anything.

00:23:16.540 So he told Ruby Chow's to treat him like, you know, a wash boy, a bus boy.

00:23:22.860 And so Bruce got stuck in a closet, essentially a converted closet under the staircase, and was forced to do the most menial tasks.

00:23:31.280 And as we mentioned earlier, he was a childhood actor.

00:23:34.000 He never held a real job.

00:23:35.600 He went to nice schools.

00:23:36.880 He had an affluent background.

00:23:38.580 He had servants in the household.

00:23:40.240 He never had to wash a dish in his life.

00:23:42.700 So he's 18.

00:23:43.900 He's all alone.

00:23:45.000 He's in America, and he's washing dishes, and he's thinking, this could be my future.

00:23:51.240 Like, I may never get out of this restaurant.

00:23:54.200 And so that experience worked.

00:23:56.860 He literally was scared straight, and it focused his ambition and competitiveness to dream of what he could do to make it in America.

00:24:07.200 And in many ways, Bruce's story is the classic immigrant success story of a young boy who had a troubled past who comes to America and finds his way here.

00:24:17.640 So, yeah, that moment he decides he's going to become a doctor or a farmer, which is, you know, he didn't do well in school.

00:24:25.040 And he's like writing.

00:24:25.640 I think he wrote his brother or a friend back home in Hong Kong.

00:24:28.500 He's like, here's my plan.

00:24:29.600 What I need to do to exactly what I need to do to become a doctor in five years.

00:24:34.280 I mean, it was really funny.

00:24:37.140 But so he goes back to school.

00:24:39.420 He gets pretty studious.

00:24:41.140 He buckles down.

00:24:42.440 Does he continue to practice kung fu or do any street fighting, or did he leave that behind him for a bit?

00:24:49.880 Well, one of the things we hadn't talked about is that he was also a dancer, and he was the cha-cha champion of Hong Kong.

00:24:57.040 So the first thing he did in America was he taught dance to other overseas Chinese.

00:25:01.340 And so that was his first real job, other than washing dishes in the restaurant for his room and board.

00:25:07.680 But at every dance performance, he would sort of, in the middle of it, show off some of his kung fu.

00:25:14.000 And some of the Chinese community, the students who were learning dance from him were amazed by his incredible Wing Chun talent.

00:25:21.340 They hadn't seen anything like that before.

00:25:23.500 And so he quickly realized that he could make at least a part-time job out of teaching kung fu.

00:25:29.840 And he quickly gathered a group of sort of street toughs from the school he was at at Edison Technical High School in Seattle.

00:25:40.440 And his first student was Jesse Glover, an African-American.

00:25:44.200 And so Bruce Lee was the first person to ever have the first kung fu instructor to ever teach a black student,

00:25:50.680 which was a real racial breakthrough because at the time the Chinese community and the black community were at odds.

00:25:57.480 And he slowly expanded from Jesse to the point where he had maybe a dozen young students learning Wing Chun kung fu from him.

00:26:07.580 And once he got to college, his dream was to become the Ray Kroc of kung fu.

00:26:14.440 That is the guy who founded McDonald's.

00:26:16.700 He was going to franchise kung fu schools across the country.

00:26:20.940 So he had this very entrepreneurial spirit from a very early age.

00:26:24.840 Yeah, that bit about him being the cha-cha king was interesting because the people that he danced with would say that Bruce could just look at one move and immediately put it into action,

00:26:37.040 which goes to show the guy probably had an innate talent for body awareness, space awareness.

00:26:44.040 He had that talent.

00:26:45.060 He knew how to move his body.

00:26:46.520 Unlike me, I'm very clunky and I would step on people's toes if they were to teach me a cha-cha move.

00:26:51.320 That's right.

00:26:52.620 You know, Bruce Lee's image is someone who became this incredible martial artist through sheer force of will.

00:26:59.520 And that's partly true.

00:27:00.760 He trained tremendously.

00:27:02.720 He was absolutely obsessed about the martial arts.

00:27:05.060 But he also had a certain sort of genius.

00:27:09.200 And that was what I think his girlfriend in college, Amy Sambo, said that he was a kinetic genius.

00:27:15.080 He could look at a move and just figure out how to do it immediately.

00:27:17.860 He could do, you know, she was a ballet dancer and he could do a pirouette within a couple tries.

00:27:24.900 And so that was Bruce's great gift is that anything physical he was able to do quite quickly.

00:27:30.500 And that gave him this tremendous advantage in the martial arts, particularly learning new martial arts.

00:27:36.200 I'm sure we'll get to, but one of the things that Bruce is known for is incorporating a lot of different styles into one.

00:27:42.640 And only someone who's really gifted at learning other styles quickly could have done that.

00:27:48.340 Yeah, I thought that was an interesting point you talk about when he starts teaching Kung Fu to some of his fellow students at the technical high school.

00:27:57.520 It wasn't really like it was very informal.

00:27:59.920 Like they'd meet in a parking lot or in a park somewhere.

00:28:03.440 And it wasn't really, the way you described it, it wasn't really Bruce teaching them, like as, you know, at the front, like I'm the teacher, bow to me, respect me.

00:28:11.100 It was more like Bruce was actually, he was the one, he was using them to refine his martial art.

00:28:18.760 And these guys that were along, you know, that were there, like they learned some things along the way.

00:28:23.160 But really, Bruce was using his, this sort of, you know, very informal Kung Fu school that he had as an incubator for himself to refine and sort of start melding different types of martial arts.

00:28:34.320 Because, you know, Jesse Glover, I think he had a boxing background, correct?

00:28:38.200 That's right.

00:28:39.020 Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead, talk about that.

00:28:41.220 So, yeah, Jesse was boxing in judo.

00:28:44.640 And a lot of these guys were street toughs.

00:28:47.460 And so there were a number of amateur boxers.

00:28:50.060 They did judo.

00:28:50.920 And what's interesting about Bruce is he adapted to the environments that he was in.

00:28:56.640 And so I joke that if he had gone to Russia, he would have been the best at Russian martial arts.

00:29:01.560 But he went to America where boxing and wrestling were the two main forms of kind of sports combat.

00:29:08.560 And so he quickly started to pick up things that his students knew.

00:29:14.060 And that's one of his great gifts is he didn't come and just say, I have the perfect system.

00:29:20.300 Let me just give it to you.

00:29:22.040 He would look at what they did and go, oh, that's nice.

00:29:26.520 I like that.

00:29:27.500 Why don't I figure out a way to work that in?

00:29:29.940 And so one of the complaints of his students were, is he teaching us or is he actually just using us to make himself better?

00:29:35.880 And he was in part doing both.

00:29:38.640 And one of the things I always try to remember when I was writing about Bruce is at this point in time, he's 19 years old.

00:29:43.900 And when I was 19, I was pretty self-centered and only interested in my own development.

00:29:49.820 And I think Bruce was like that in his early years.

00:29:53.220 So he was more like the gang leader.

00:29:55.360 And he had this kind of gang of Kung Fu students slash followers.

00:29:58.780 And they would meet together and he would show them some moves, but then get them to spar together so he could make himself better.

00:30:05.980 And in those early years, his primary goal was he wanted to be the best martial artist in the world.

00:30:13.520 And they were there to help him as opposed to the other way around.

00:30:16.580 That was another common theme throughout Bruce Lee's life, like these big ambitious goals he set for himself.

00:30:22.820 It's like, I'm going to be the best in the entire world.

00:30:25.500 And later on, we get to this too.

00:30:26.680 He's like, he set a goal.

00:30:27.880 I'm going to be bigger than Steve McQueen.

00:30:29.680 I mean, the guy just had ambition.

00:30:34.680 Yeah, I think that's one of the things I sort of admire most about Bruce is that, you know, most people get to America from another country and they're just thinking, how can I survive?

00:30:46.000 You know, there's all these stories of people who were doctors in Iran and they're driving a cab.

00:30:50.640 And then their dream is that their children will do better.

00:30:53.640 Bruce didn't want to wait around.

00:30:55.960 He wasn't going to wait for the next generation to make it in America.

00:30:59.980 As soon as he landed, he was like, I'm going to be the biggest Kung Fu instructor in America.

00:31:05.380 I'm out of schools all over the country.

00:31:07.180 And I'm going to be the best martial artist the world's ever seen.

00:31:10.600 And then, as you mentioned, when he got a break in Hollywood, he didn't just think, I'd like to be a working actor who gets parts here and there.

00:31:17.940 He was like, I want to be the biggest movie star in the entire world.

00:31:21.260 As an Asian guy in 1960s Hollywood, which was completely impossible because Asians barely could get any parts on TV, let alone a starring role in a movie.

00:31:31.920 So, Bruce had an innate sort of self-confidence that's, in a way, staggering when you look back at it.

00:31:38.300 Right.

00:31:39.000 So, in these Kung Fu schools, he had one going on.

00:31:42.320 That's where he met his wife, Linda, correct?

00:31:45.820 That's right.

00:31:46.420 So, he had given a lecture at the high school where Linda attended.

00:31:50.640 And she had noticed him because he's a handsome guy.

00:31:54.140 He was a flashy dresser.

00:31:56.520 And she thought he was kind of big city.

00:31:58.720 He reminded her of the star of West Side Story.

00:32:03.720 And so, because she immediately had a crush on him, she went and found the Kung Fu school where he was teaching at the time and became one of his students.

00:32:12.460 And so, she was really sort of a disciple of Bruce's before they started dating.

00:32:16.720 Well, yeah, there's another aspect.

00:32:17.980 And we'll get into this, too.

00:32:18.940 Like, Bruce, he was a ladies' man.

00:32:20.720 Like, he was – and what was surprising at the time, you know, during the 50s and 60s, this is a time when there was, you know, interracial dating or relationships were looked down upon.

00:32:31.620 Like, it didn't matter.

00:32:32.720 Like, all women, when either they were from Hong Kong or from Washington, like, there was something about him that was attractive.

00:32:40.220 That's right.

00:32:40.580 Bruce had game.

00:32:41.800 You know, he was –

00:32:42.900 He did.

00:32:43.160 He was a child actor.

00:32:45.420 He had a tremendous amount of charisma.

00:32:47.160 And so, while his brother was the introverted, studious one, Bruce was the life of the party.

00:32:53.400 He was the extroverted troublemaker.

00:32:56.180 And I think that a lot of charisma is a sense of danger.

00:33:00.400 And he carried that with him.

00:33:02.540 And that kind of frision excited, you know, the co-eds around.

00:33:07.360 And so, he never had a problem getting a date.

00:33:09.380 He always dated beautiful sort of flashy girls until he met Linda, who – she was much more serious and thoughtful than the typical girls that he dated.

00:33:19.180 But, yeah, he had a – he was a ladies' man.

00:33:21.640 He really was.

00:33:22.320 So, he starts these kung fu schools.

00:33:25.260 He – in the process, too, he also marries Linda because she gets pregnant.

00:33:29.240 And that was a big ordeal because her family was dead set against her being married to an Asian-American.

00:33:37.120 But, you know, Linda says, no, I love him.

00:33:39.560 We're going to do this.

00:33:40.660 And that's the other thing.

00:33:42.100 Like, Linda really seemed to believe – you know, as you said, she was a disciple before she was Bruce's wife.

00:33:48.960 Like, she really believed in what Bruce was doing.

00:33:52.140 I think that's the most crucial thing to their relationship is – and what allowed Bruce to have the confidence to succeed during periods when everyone else was telling him it wasn't going to work was that Linda was his rock and she believed in him in this almost religious way.

00:34:10.320 I mean, she just worshipped him.

00:34:12.080 And she thought she was lucky to get him.

00:34:15.380 And that's fascinating because, as you mentioned, her parents were dead set against it.

00:34:19.580 People forget, but interracial marriage was sort of the gay marriage of that period.

00:34:24.880 It was illegal in 17 states in America for members of two different races to marry.

00:34:30.840 And it wasn't until 1967 that the Supreme Court outlawed what they called anti-miscegenation laws.

00:34:38.760 And so her family – Linda knew her mother wouldn't approve, and she kept Bruce Lee a secret for nearly a year.

00:34:45.480 And it wasn't until she got pregnant, they tried to elope and then got caught.

00:34:52.080 And then there was this big family powwow where they tried to convince her not to marry this Chinese guy.

00:34:58.920 And so – but she was very adamant, and she loved him absolutely.

00:35:02.940 And I think that was the key to his success later in life is that he had this sort of rock of support and admiration and belief.

00:35:11.060 We're going to take a quick break for you.

00:35:12.040 Word of more sponsors.

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00:37:11.960 And now back to the show.

00:37:13.080 And not only was he a Chinese guy, he was a Chinese guy trying to be a Kung Fu teacher.

00:37:19.220 And they're like, what is Kung Fu?

00:37:21.420 And who would want, you know, it's like, you know, I'm going to be an Instagram influencer.

00:37:28.200 Like, what in the world?

00:37:29.640 How are you going to support my daughter being an Instagram influencer?

00:37:33.500 That's right.

00:37:34.720 I mean, we forget about it, but no one in America outside of Chinatowns knew the word Kung Fu.

00:37:40.140 The Chinese community was very small and very isolated, and they didn't interact that much with the white community.

00:37:47.100 And so almost nothing was known about Chinese culture in America in the 1960s.

00:37:52.280 And so when they asked him, you know, one of Linda's uncles asked him, what are you going to do to support my niece?

00:38:00.300 And he said, I teach Kung Fu.

00:38:01.920 And the guy goes, what?

00:38:04.220 You know, same thing.

00:38:06.440 Instagram, at least people knew.

00:38:07.800 It was like, you know, I'm going to teach her blah, blah, blah.

00:38:09.920 You know, he just like made up a word.

00:38:12.640 So they thought not only had she gotten pregnant by a non-white guy, but she was going to marry somebody who was going to be destitute his whole life.

00:38:22.020 All right.

00:38:22.200 So he tries to do this Kung Fu thing.

00:38:24.980 He starts opening up different schools.

00:38:27.200 And it didn't really pan out because he spread himself too thin.

00:38:29.720 He couldn't have paid the rent.

00:38:31.060 How did he get back into the acting game in America?

00:38:36.480 Because as you said at the time, during this time, there weren't a lot of parts for Asians.

00:38:41.400 If Hollywood was going to cast, they needed an Asian.

00:38:44.200 They typically take a white person and paint their skin and make their eyes look, you know, do makeup so they look Chinese.

00:38:50.340 They wouldn't actually hire an Asian.

00:38:51.520 And so how did Bruce, how did Bruce get back into it?

00:38:54.880 And how did he think like, yeah, this is going to be the thing.

00:38:57.520 I'm going to drop teaching Kung Fu and I'm going to become a Kung Fu star.

00:39:01.360 So it's an amazing story.

00:39:03.140 Like one of the things I think to understand Bruce is to understand that he was an actor first and foremost.

00:39:09.720 And so even when he was teaching Kung Fu, his favorite thing to do was to go around giving Kung Fu demonstrations.

00:39:16.680 And he gave them all up and down the West Coast.

00:39:20.260 And he was, that was his great skill is to get on stage, do Kung Fu.

00:39:25.540 And I felt it was a, like a standup comic sort of working his routine and creating a persona.

00:39:31.560 And so during these years, when he was teaching Kung Fu, he was also really creating this persona of Bruce Lee, the Kung Fu master.

00:39:40.580 And, and inevitably someone noticed.

00:39:43.660 And when he was in Long Beach in 1964 at a karate tournament, he was noticed by someone who recommended him to a TV producer by the name of William Dozier.

00:39:54.560 And William Dozier wanted to do a Charlie Chan TV series.

00:40:00.340 And actually the radical idea he had was to actually cast an Asian for an Asian part instead of doing the yellow face of casting a white actor and putting him in makeup.

00:40:12.360 And so he offered Bruce Lee the lead role in an American TV show, which would have been unheard of.

00:40:19.900 It would have been a complete and total breakthrough.

00:40:22.180 And so Bruce was immediately on board with his, you know, tremendous self-confidence.

00:40:26.320 He believed that, you know, right out of the gate, he was going to be a TV star.

00:40:30.240 And I think it's an interesting point to make.

00:40:31.740 He was an actor first, but again, like he, I think some people dismiss Bruce Lee as a martial artist thinking, well, he was just an actor.

00:40:39.020 But like the guy was actually, he had, he had chops.

00:40:41.320 Like he, he, he was impressive.

00:40:43.180 He, he was doing the one inch punch that he's made famous for where he just, you know, put his fist an inch away from someone's chest and then just knock him over a chair.

00:40:51.880 He could do the fingertip pushup, like the one finger pushup.

00:40:55.100 Like he was, he was an actual, like he could fight.

00:40:57.600 And that was another big takeaway I got from this.

00:41:00.180 Like he wasn't just all, it wasn't just an act.

00:41:02.440 Like he was the real deal.

00:41:04.020 That's right.

00:41:04.600 And that's important to state, which is when I make the argument, he was an actor first, I'm speaking kind of chronologically and psychologically, but he, he was the real deal.

00:41:15.180 He was a genius.

00:41:16.800 And that's why I think he's irreplaceable because you have martial artists, great martial artists who try to be actors, movie stars, but they're not very good actors.

00:41:27.260 And you have actors who try to be sort of action stars, but they're not very good martial artists.

00:41:32.860 And Bruce Lee is one of the few people to be a genius at both.

00:41:36.480 He was a very good actor and he was an unbelievable martial artist.

00:41:40.420 And those two abilities that he merged are why we still remember him.

00:41:45.280 So as you said, he got on the radar in Hollywood and that didn't work out, but he did get up.

00:41:50.180 He landed a part with a TV show, the green Hornet, where he played Cato.

00:41:54.780 So how did that role change the trajectory of his career in Hollywood?

00:42:01.120 So Dozier tried to get Charlie Chan's number one son off the ground with Bruce Lee as a star, but it was immediately rejected by TV executives because no one in 1966 thought the American public would accept a Chinese hero on TV.

00:42:14.580 And so Dozier pitched him his second show, which was the Green Hornet.

00:42:20.080 So Bruce got knocked down from being the star of the show to being the sidekick playing Cato to the Green Hornet played by Van Williams.

00:42:28.720 And at first, Bruce was quite upset that he had been demoted.

00:42:31.960 But Dozier convinced him that this was a real opportunity to show the American public real Asian martial arts, which they'd never seen before.

00:42:41.660 That's another thing that's hard to remember.

00:42:43.580 There had never been a TV show with a character who was doing actual Asian martial arts on it.

00:42:49.660 It was all the kind of John Wayne punch thing that you saw on TV.

00:42:53.180 And so Bruce had this chance to show off what he could do, and he quickly became more popular than the main character.

00:43:02.460 He got more fan letters, and he was really embraced by the very small martial arts community of the time because one of their own had finally gotten on TV to show off their stuff.

00:43:12.700 And so this set Bruce on the path of becoming a martial arts star by getting this first role of playing Cato, who was the karate master for the Green Hornet.

00:43:25.360 Right. The Green Hornet ended, didn't do too well.

00:43:28.700 It had that really bad crossover with Batman and Robin, which did.

00:43:34.080 When you were describing, I started laughing because I was like, that sounds like just a terrible combination there.

00:43:39.520 But anyways, I mean, so yeah, as we were talking about, so he starts, acting's on the radar again.

00:43:44.040 As you're saying, he's the real deal.

00:43:45.500 Bruce had this innate talent for physicality, but he amplified it or magnified it by training all the time.

00:43:53.820 And this was another sort of innovation Bruce Lee made was he was big on personal fitness, physical fitness.

00:44:00.700 And at the time, in the 60s, you know, lifting weights, taking supplements like that's it's today.

00:44:07.620 It's very natural. Of course, everyone, it's very mainstream.

00:44:09.940 But at the time, like only weirdos did that sort of stuff.

00:44:12.820 But Bruce, very early on, embraced physical training.

00:44:16.600 Tell us about his his his physical training and his physical fitness routines.

00:44:20.660 Yeah. So that's an important point, which is even the NFL didn't allow its players to lift weights in the 1960s because they believed it was damaging to an athlete.

00:44:30.700 That's how sort of different the attitudes were at that period.

00:44:33.180 And martial artists never did anything except do their martial arts.

00:44:36.940 And he was the first person to realize that to be the best martial artist possible, you also had to be strong and fast and in shape.

00:44:44.160 And the best way to do that was to specialize your training for that.

00:44:47.780 And so he he looked at it and he looked around at what was available.

00:44:52.700 And so from boxing, he picked up road work.

00:44:55.740 So in the mornings, he would go out for like three or four mile runs and he also jumped rope.

00:45:01.440 But then he also was, as you said, early into the weightlifting craze.

00:45:06.740 So he had all the muscle and fitness magazines of that period.

00:45:10.980 And he would buy the supplements that they were selling for his diet.

00:45:14.820 And he also had he had friends give him sort of weight lifting equipment.

00:45:21.160 So every couple of days he would go through a weightlifting routine and jog and run.

00:45:26.620 And so he trained like a modern athlete long before modern athletes were training like that.

00:45:31.620 And he was there in that area.

00:45:33.740 He was extremely innovative.

00:45:35.260 Yeah. And he got shredded.

00:45:36.300 I mean, that that's how he had that.

00:45:37.620 You know, when he he fought with his shirt off in the movies and he's just he looks jacked and shredded.

00:45:41.740 That's right. He I think he recognized two things.

00:45:45.920 One, what was interesting about Bruce is he realized very quickly that for the martial arts, you don't want to be too bulky.

00:45:52.220 So all of those weightlifting magazines at the time were about size.

00:45:57.280 You wanted to have the huge puffy muscles.

00:45:59.660 And he realized that those slow you down.

00:46:02.680 And speed is what kills when you're fighting.

00:46:04.800 But a quick punch is much more important than a heavy arm throwing it.

00:46:08.760 And so Bruce wanted to be sleek and slim and shredded and ripped.

00:46:14.680 And then, of course, he was also acting at the time.

00:46:17.300 And I think he recognized that for years, for decades, centuries even, Chinese males were portrayed as kind of weaklings.

00:46:26.180 And that if he wanted to create this image of a masculine, superpowered, superheroic Chinese male character on screen, changing his musculature would be one way to do that in such a visual medium.

00:46:41.200 And so being completely ripped and shredded would convey this power on screen.

00:46:46.700 And so he had two goals.

00:46:48.600 And I think during this period, you can see him pursuing both goals at the same time.

00:46:53.720 He still wants to be the greatest martial artist on earth.

00:46:56.440 And he also wants to be the biggest star on earth.

00:46:59.240 And whenever he could find a way to do both at the same time, he was happy.

00:47:03.060 Right.

00:47:03.320 And another component to his self-improvement during this time, not only was he training hard and exercising, he also, a lot of people don't know this about Bruce Lee, he was a voracious reader.

00:47:14.260 Like, he was actually, and he didn't just read, like, dumb books.

00:47:17.880 Like, he was reading St. Augustine.

00:47:19.480 He was reading Plato.

00:47:20.640 He was reading pretty heavy philosophical works.

00:47:24.260 What was going on there with Bruce's reading?

00:47:27.640 Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why he's endured is because he wasn't just a meathead.

00:47:32.520 He just wasn't, like, some boxer guy who can pound people.

00:47:36.780 He studied philosophy at the University of Washington.

00:47:39.680 He was a college student.

00:47:40.800 And he fell in love with philosophy and psychology and also some of the self-help books of that era.

00:47:46.760 And his library, he had over 2,500 books, which we know he read very intensely because he has margin notes everywhere.

00:47:54.560 And he would write down quotes that he liked from the various authors.

00:47:58.120 And he read voraciously a lot about martial arts, but also Descartes, Hume, Aquinas on the Western side.

00:48:06.640 And then he would read Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Confucius, Mencius, and the various Chinese scholars and philosophers.

00:48:13.720 And so he was thinking about everything he was doing physically.

00:48:19.600 And he was an amazing way able to kind of combine the two that most people don't.

00:48:25.220 You either have the eggheads or the meatheads.

00:48:27.580 And Bruce was both.

00:48:28.780 So what I thought was interesting, too, is that his reading influenced his martial arts.

00:48:35.820 And it allowed him to start creating what became known as Jeet Kwon Do, which was Lee's version.

00:48:43.240 And he incorporated a lot of what he read to develop.

00:48:46.660 So, like, how would you describe Jeet Kwon Do?

00:48:49.760 So it seems like it's more of a philosophy towards martial arts and not necessarily a system of movements.

00:48:57.720 Would that be right?

00:48:58.820 I think that's what he came to.

00:49:01.580 Initially, he was trying to find a better version than what he felt he had from Wing Chun.

00:49:08.040 And that was from he had a famous fight with Wong Jack Man that he won, but it didn't go very well.

00:49:13.680 And he was frustrated.

00:49:15.100 He thought he should have won it very quickly.

00:49:16.880 It took a long time and was sloppy.

00:49:18.600 And so he'd been, for years, working out with these American students who were good at other types of combat sports, as we said, like boxing and judo.

00:49:28.540 And Bruce started to think about ways to create what he considered would be the ultimate martial arts style.

00:49:34.900 And the three things he combined were the kicking from kung fu and the footwork and punching from boxing.

00:49:42.520 But then he added a unique element that no one's ever done before.

00:49:46.400 He added Western fencing.

00:49:50.420 And his brother was a fencer and had showed him fencing.

00:49:53.760 But Bruce, then this gets back to his studies, loved reading fencing books because they were highly technical and they were all about these various sort of specific techniques.

00:50:03.360 And so Jeet Kune Do was really sort of unarmed fencing.

00:50:08.340 That's the way he thought about it at the time.

00:50:11.160 But then after a while, he philosophically began to believe that no style should be formalized.

00:50:18.580 And so what he began to preach was that Jeet Kune Do is just a phrase.

00:50:23.740 And what it means is to essentially find your own best style and that you shouldn't be attached to any one system because then you become mechanized and like a robot.

00:50:34.620 And fighting is a fluid thing.

00:50:36.340 You're always in this moment where you're going back and forth.

00:50:40.000 And if you're attached to a specific set of movements, you can be easily defeated.

00:50:44.980 And so that was Bruce's ultimate message.

00:50:46.920 Right.

00:50:47.080 So he was the ultimate.

00:50:47.960 He was like the grandfather of mixed martial arts.

00:50:51.140 Take whatever you can and make it work for the situation.

00:50:54.680 That's right.

00:50:55.100 And that's where you see his American-ness.

00:50:59.880 As you said earlier, it's sort of Chinese culture was very much attached to tradition.

00:51:05.360 And so when you listen to a kind of traditional martial artist and you ask him what you study, he'll tell you who his master was, who his master's master was, and the whole lineage.

00:51:16.920 And what's important is that you kept the tradition pure.

00:51:20.500 Bruce's approach was totally pragmatic.

00:51:22.920 It was like, if that works, it's great.

00:51:25.780 It doesn't matter if it's Korean or it's Japanese or we got it from Brazil.

00:51:29.720 We don't care where it came from.

00:51:31.460 All we care is that it works in a fight.

00:51:33.940 And that's very much what's become the spirit of MMA, which mixed martial arts.

00:51:39.520 It doesn't matter who taught you that punch or where it came from.

00:51:43.320 Did it work in the fight?

00:51:44.400 Did you win or did you lose?

00:51:45.700 That's all we care about.

00:51:47.300 So during this time, he was developing his new type of martial art.

00:51:51.440 I mean, it's a style without a style, I think is how he described it, or a system without a system.

00:51:55.740 He was working with some big karate guys here in America like Chuck Norris.

00:52:00.800 But then he got hooked up becoming a karate or a kung fu teacher to some big stars like Steve McQueen, we mentioned.

00:52:08.640 Was it James Coburn was the other one?

00:52:10.720 Yeah, it was the other big one, big disciple.

00:52:12.440 Well, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a student of his.

00:52:17.920 How did that change Bruce's career?

00:52:21.820 Because I imagine being with these guys gave him more of an itch, more of a desire to become a big movie star.

00:52:27.920 Yeah, so when the Green Hornet got canceled after one season, he was in L.A. with a wife and a young son, and he couldn't pay the rent.

00:52:37.600 And he needed to figure a way to do that.

00:52:40.120 And what he had learned early on from his experiments with becoming a kung fu instructor is that teaching kung fu is a hard business.

00:52:48.020 Because most of the students don't have that much money.

00:52:50.520 There weren't that many people who were interested in Asian martial arts at the time, so you couldn't get a lot of students.

00:52:55.240 And so, he realized the way he could do this and survive was to teach private lessons to celebrities for an extraordinary amount of money.

00:53:07.000 So, he had these celebrity students paying him the equivalent of about $800 an hour for private kung fu, or at that time, Jeet Kune Do lessons with Bruce Lee.

00:53:19.440 And he had two goals in doing it.

00:53:21.420 One was just purely monetary.

00:53:23.080 These lessons allowed him to support his family.

00:53:27.480 But the second goal was to learn from them how they had become a star, and also to use those relationships to advance his own acting career.

00:53:36.300 And I think it's crucial to understanding Bruce's success later, to know that he was essentially a disciple of Steve McQueen and James Coburn.

00:53:45.820 At the same time, he was also their teacher.

00:53:47.800 Like, he was learning from them as much as they were learning from him.

00:53:52.940 And he was learning, how do you make it in Hollywood?

00:53:56.040 How do you be a star?

00:53:57.460 How do you conduct yourself?

00:53:59.160 How do you dress?

00:54:00.320 What kind of car do you drive?

00:54:02.300 How do you interact with the directors?

00:54:04.520 And so, in many ways, he went to sort of film school through these private lessons.

00:54:10.320 Yeah, the lesson was, from Steve McQueen, just be cool.

00:54:13.800 Gotta be cool, man.

00:54:14.480 That's right.

00:54:15.680 That's right.

00:54:16.420 And he learned how to be cool from Steve McQueen.

00:54:18.920 Like, how to dress, how to conduct himself, how to interact with women.

00:54:22.240 And when he got back to Hong Kong, the people were like, we've never seen anything like this.

00:54:27.060 And that's because he had spent several years at Steve McQueen's feet going like, how does this guy do this?

00:54:33.160 Man, I want to be cool like Steve McQueen.

00:54:34.860 Everyone wants to be cool like Steve McQueen.

00:54:36.160 All right, so that's interesting.

00:54:37.180 So, he's in America, but his career, like, he didn't become a star in America.

00:54:43.220 He had to go back to Hong Kong.

00:54:45.620 Like, how did that happen?

00:54:47.100 I mean, you think he came to America, he'd be done with Hong Kong, but why did he end up in Hong Kong?

00:54:52.160 And why was that the thing that made him catapult him to worldwide fame?

00:54:56.660 So, after the Green Hornet, in which he played Cato, was canceled, he was extremely frustrated.

00:55:03.560 Because for the next four years, all he could get was, like, one bit part every eight months on some terrible TV show.

00:55:11.100 So, he played, like, the karate instructor on some terrible sitcom, or he had a bit part in a crappy western.

00:55:19.360 And those, A, weren't paying the bills, but B, weren't advancing his career.

00:55:23.320 He was actually, he had moved backwards.

00:55:24.900 And so, what little fame he had gained playing Cato was quickly dissipating to the point where no one knew who he was outside the industry.

00:55:33.400 And he was extraordinarily frustrated.

00:55:36.000 And he was given an opportunity to go back to Hong Kong and make a movie.

00:55:41.300 And the reason why that happened was the American Studios released the Green Hornet in Hong Kong.

00:55:46.260 And they renamed it The Cato Show.

00:55:50.300 And so, Bruce was the star of the show in Hong Kong because he was a hometown boy who had gone off to the Hollywood, which was, like, the magical kingdom, and succeeded, as far as they could tell.

00:56:03.680 They had no idea that he couldn't pay his mortgage and he was struggling.

00:56:06.820 All they saw was, my God, one of us had actually gotten on an American TV show, which in the 1960s never happened.

00:56:13.980 You know, it was like if you were from Botswana and you were the one kid who succeeded everyone in Botswana would be like, my God, we made it.

00:56:21.560 We're in Hollywood.

00:56:22.880 And so, Bruce was that guy.

00:56:24.400 So, they offered him a chance to be in a really low-budget kung fu movie.

00:56:30.880 And Bruce wasn't certain he should do this because he thought the movie probably would be terrible.

00:56:35.660 No one would see it.

00:56:37.580 And it wouldn't advance his career at all.

00:56:40.100 But he needed the money.

00:56:42.340 He had bought a fancy house in Bel Air, and he couldn't afford the mortgage.

00:56:47.220 And so, he went to Hong Kong purely for the cash.

00:56:50.800 And then, remarkably, the movie he made called The Big Boss became the biggest box office sensation in Southeast Asian history.

00:56:59.280 And Bruce immediately overnight became bigger than The Beatles, the biggest star anyone had ever seen.

00:57:05.660 And that completely transformed his career trajectory.

00:57:09.540 When did those films start crossing over to America?

00:57:12.780 So, those films weren't released to America until almost right like a few months before he died in 1973.

00:57:20.400 So, what's interesting about Bruce is his fame outside of Southeast Asia, where he was huge, was entirely posthumous because outside of Southeast Asia, no one really knew who he was.

00:57:33.640 And so, The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, the three Hong Kong movies he made, and then Enter the Dragon, which was his Hong Kong Hollywood co-production, were all released in 1973.

00:57:46.080 And, I mean, how did these films change cinema?

00:57:51.940 Not only in Hong Kong and America, I mean, what was different about these movies that made them so huge?

00:57:56.400 Well, one factor, obviously, is that it had Bruce Lee.

00:58:00.440 Right.

00:58:00.660 And Bruce Lee, you know, when you watch his earlier performances, you can see the talent, but he's not quite a star yet.

00:58:07.420 And it's that undefinable thing, but by the time he's in The Big Boss, you just can't take your eyes off of him.

00:58:14.940 He's absolutely magnetic.

00:58:16.920 And so, these were the first movies in which you saw a genius at work.

00:58:21.680 The second factor was nobody in the West had ever watched a Hong Kong movie outside of Chinatown.

00:58:28.100 So, there were like three white guys who would go to Chinatown and watch it, and then the Chinese community would watch them, but no one else did.

00:58:35.460 And I compare the Hong Kong film industry in the early 1970s to the Nigerian one today, which was very popular within that geographic area amongst that community, but no exposure outside of it.

00:58:51.620 And so, his movies transformed the world because they introduced the Western culture to what was going on in Chinese cinema.

00:58:59.880 And as you said, these movies didn't become really popular until after he died, but they had a lasting impact on American cinema because a martial arts movie became a thing, and a lot of the stuntmen that worked with Bruce Lee went on to make a lot of popular crossover.

00:59:17.040 You know, they started, they were filmed in Hong Kong, but they aired in America.

00:59:20.680 I mean, Jackie Chan is a great example of that.

00:59:23.320 Chuck Norris trained with Bruce Lee, you know, the guy was Walker, Texas Ranger.

00:59:29.040 And, but the best Chuck Norris movie was Sidekicks, though, I gotta say.

00:59:33.940 You like Sidekicks?

00:59:34.780 I like Sidekicks.

00:59:35.460 I'm a lone wolf McQuaid guy, but I'll give you Sidekicks.

00:59:38.980 Right.

00:59:40.080 But, so, like, it changed American cinema.

00:59:42.220 Like, that became a genre in America after Bruce Lee.

00:59:44.280 It changed American cinema, I think, in several fundamental ways.

00:59:48.140 One, it brought all this Asian talent over.

00:59:51.420 And so, you mentioned Jackie Chan.

00:59:53.020 Jackie Chan was a stunt boy on two of Bruce's films.

00:59:56.940 You can see him for, like, a fraction of a second in Enter the Dragon when Bruce snaps his neck.

01:00:01.700 And so, Jackie learned at Bruce's feet.

01:00:04.540 And after Bruce died, they tried to make Jackie the next Bruce Lee.

01:00:08.240 And then he realized it would work better if he played a kind of comedic clown role.

01:00:12.940 Chuck Norris, as well.

01:00:14.960 So, all of this talent that came after Bruce introduced to the world through his movies, it introduced an entirely new genre to the West.

01:00:23.920 You know, karate, kung fu movies were big in China, but no one had seen them in the West.

01:00:29.220 And so, suddenly we had this genre that you later see with The Matrix or Kill Bill or John Wick is a great example of a kind of modern kung fu classic.

01:00:39.360 And the third way, I think, is crucial is it totally changed fight choreography.

01:00:46.880 So, if you go back and you watch sort of 1960s Star Trek, you can see Captain Kirk throwing this bolo haymaker John Wayne punch out of right field, missing the guy by three feet, and the guy collapses.

01:01:00.560 And that was considered acceptable fight choreography.

01:01:03.200 You know, you can't watch a show today where it's an action hero.

01:01:07.820 He's not a martial arts master.

01:01:09.920 You know, Tom Cruise is kicking and punching and doing jujitsu moves.

01:01:13.900 Batman, Christopher Nolan's Batman is like, you know, this kung fu master.

01:01:19.000 Sherlock Holmes, that recent movie, the guy with this.

01:01:22.100 Sherlock Holmes is a kung fu master.

01:01:23.480 So, it completely changed action cinema in the West.

01:01:27.460 And that was, I think, probably the deepest impact Hong Kong films and Bruce Lee had.

01:01:32.380 And besides impacting America's cinema, Bruce Lee, through his movies, impacted American culture.

01:01:39.080 You know, as you said, in the 60s, no one knew hardly anything about Asian martial arts.

01:01:44.320 You know, if you said kung fu, they're like, kung what?

01:01:46.080 What is that?

01:01:47.160 But because of Bruce Lee, like, now there's, you know, dojos in pretty much every single town in America.

01:01:52.960 That's right.

01:01:53.940 And that's why I was shocked that there wasn't a good biography about Bruce Lee.

01:01:59.020 And I think that's because his image is just this kung fu movie guy who made a couple low-budget films.

01:02:06.240 But if you think about it, he completely transformed American culture.

01:02:11.060 All these parents in the suburbs whose six-year-old sons are learning Taekwondo are only doing that because of Bruce Lee.

01:02:18.940 No one was doing that back in 1961.

01:02:21.440 The kung fu craze is totally a result of the popularity of Bruce Lee and his films.

01:02:29.140 And afterwards, millions and millions of young Westerners, like myself, took up the martial arts.

01:02:35.920 And so, it spread all these dojos in every small town.

01:02:39.840 There's this quote in the book from Fred Weintraub, who produced Enter the Dragon.

01:02:44.620 And he said, you know, before Bruce Lee, every small town had a barbershop and a beauty parlor.

01:02:51.520 And after Bruce Lee, it also had a karate studio with a poster of Bruce Lee on the wall.

01:02:56.940 And so, all of these kind of strip mall dojos that you see today are part of Bruce Lee's contribution to the world.

01:03:04.420 And what's interesting about him personally is that was his goal.

01:03:08.920 It wasn't an accident.

01:03:10.400 He set out like a missionary to use the medium of film in order to spread Asian culture to the West.

01:03:18.740 And so, he really, his impact was self-conscious and incredible.

01:03:23.840 And that's why I think he's an important cultural figure and not just a celebrity.

01:03:27.560 So, there's a lot more we could dig into.

01:03:30.060 We talked about his family life, which was complex.

01:03:33.300 Yes.

01:03:34.680 There's also his death.

01:03:36.060 You know, like, you know, Bruce Lee, he died a young man.

01:03:38.300 He was only 32.

01:03:39.460 And because he died young, like a lot of people who die young, there's a lot of legends around his death.

01:03:44.780 Like, you know, basically kind of like Tupac or Elvis.

01:03:47.400 You know, some people think that he's still alive.

01:03:49.060 But you, it looks like you've uncovered how Bruce Lee really died.

01:03:54.520 So, we'll let people buy the book to find that out.

01:03:56.520 But before we end, I'm curious.

01:03:58.280 After writing, I mean, this is a big tome of a book.

01:04:00.700 Like, were there any life lessons you took away after researching and writing about Bruce Lee?

01:04:06.940 You know, it's interesting because Bruce Lee influenced my early life.

01:04:10.940 It got me into martial arts.

01:04:12.400 I wanted to be like Bruce Lee physically.

01:04:14.900 But as I was working on the book, he influenced me on a kind of emotional level, I would say.

01:04:22.240 And very specifically, this book took seven years to write.

01:04:25.840 It was incredibly hard to do.

01:04:27.920 It was only supposed to take 18 months or two years.

01:04:30.880 And so, the advance money ran out.

01:04:33.060 I was like living on, you know, paycheck to paycheck, just trying to survive.

01:04:37.940 You're like Bruce Lee.

01:04:39.440 Exactly.

01:04:40.260 I was, and so I'm writing about Bruce Lee starving in Hollywood.

01:04:44.400 And I'm starving here trying to write the book about Bruce Lee starving in Hollywood.

01:04:47.700 And the way it inspired me was that you should never give up.

01:04:52.700 If you've got a dream and a thing that you really love, and this is cliched, but Bruce Lee proves that the impossible is possible if you're willing to pay the ultimate price.

01:05:03.840 Because he did something by becoming the first Chinese American male actor to ever star in a Hollywood movie that no one had ever done before.

01:05:11.680 And no one at the time, even his closest friends, thought he could do.

01:05:15.360 And the only reason he achieved that is because he would not quit.

01:05:18.620 And when they told him no, he just got angrier and kept at it.

01:05:23.160 And for me, that was the lesson I held on to, which was when I thought I couldn't finish this and it wasn't going to work, I just kept at it.

01:05:31.280 Because I was like, if Bruce Lee can become the first star, I can finish this biography.

01:05:36.980 And I think that's a lesson we can all hold to our hearts when times are tough.

01:05:41.080 Did you write an affirmation like Bruce Lee did?

01:05:43.300 We didn't talk about that.

01:05:44.240 I thought that was interesting too.

01:05:45.240 No, we didn't.

01:05:45.960 Yeah.

01:05:46.120 Yes, his affirmation, he did a lot of self-help stuff from Napoleon Hill and his affirmation was, you know, I'm going to be the biggest, he used the term, oriental superstar that the world has ever seen and make $10 million and just over the top sort of affirmation.

01:06:02.880 So, no, I didn't do that affirmation, but I kept it in my heart that I wasn't going to quit on Bruce Lee because he wouldn't have given up.

01:06:10.760 That's right.

01:06:11.360 Well, Matthew, this has been a great conversation.

01:06:13.320 Thank you so much for your time.

01:06:14.040 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:06:15.240 Thank you, Brett.

01:06:15.940 This was a lot of fun.

01:06:17.140 My guest here is Matthew Pauly.

01:06:18.240 He's the author of the book, Bruce Lee, A Life.

01:06:20.200 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

01:06:22.380 Check out his website, mattpauly.com for more information about his work.

01:06:25.260 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash bruce lee, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

01:06:42.400 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

01:06:45.420 Guys, for more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

01:06:49.300 And if you enjoy the show, you've got something out of it.

01:06:50.980 I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

01:06:53.680 Helps out a lot.

01:06:54.420 As always, thank you for your continued support.

01:06:56.220 Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

01:06:58.960 Thank you.

01:06:59.560 Thank you.

01:07:00.080 Thank you.

01:07:12.180 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#428： The Life of a Dragon — The Untold Story of Bruce Lee

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