Tim Larkin - American Self-Defense Expert on Surviving Life-or-Death Violence

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How to welcome to the Casey Adams Show. Today I'm joined by Tim Larkin, an American self defense trainer and the founder of Target Focus Training. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Tim.

Hey, thanks for having me, Casey.

Of course. So first off, thank you so much for coming out to the studio today. We're here at Blue Wire.

You know, being in Vegas native, I didn't even know this existed. This is amazing.

Of course. So I'm excited to dive into it. You know, I know our good friend Kamal put us in touch and yesterday and then now we're here doing the podcast. So I've been looking forward to it. Um, for people that may not know who you are and what target focused training is, I'd love to get a high level overview of what it is that you do.

Yeah, what, what I do for people is I help them put together a self protection strategy that minimizes the chance of violence ever coming into their life. That's the goal. Uh, the path they need to take is a little uncomfortable because if before I do that, I have to show them what happens if they ignore all the things that can keep them out of violence and meaning, you know, if you're facing imminent grievous bodily harm, bigger, faster, stronger person or persons are coming at you. We always assume that. We always seem they're bigger, faster and stronger. There's multiple opponents and they're carrying weapons. If you're in a situation like that, we have to show you the horrific things that you're going to have to do to another human to protect yourself. And what's interesting is once people learn that, then they'll make those behavioral changes. They'll actually do things. And from a business standpoint, it's great because, you know, I train mostly. I started out with military and law enforcement, but really the last 20 years, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurial groups. It's been really interesting to see the similarities of the thought process that works in life or death situation. Works really well. And you know what they've told me is it works really well in business to the same decision making capacities that you need. But yeah, that's basically what I do. I came originally from the naval special warfare community, the SEAL community. I got injured, blew my ears and in a diving accident and went into vertigo. And that was a true injury. That's the first time I really had a true injury to the human body where I lost control of myself. You know, I didn't have control over myself at that point. It was really debilitating. It ended, ended my career.

Wow. How deep were you?

We were only, we were, it's only first atmosphere, so it was only down about 20, 20ft. But I was congested that day. You know, I was young, I was arrogant. I didn't want to redo the dive later in the week because I was almost done with training. And so I decided I was going to, I went down, did the dive. There are, there are waves above the water, but there are ways underneath the water. And my, my, I, you know, it was swelling like my whole head was just hurting. I was just trying to get through this dive and a wave hit me. An underwater wave just hit just enough and that's what burst my eardrum and literally emptied out the semicircular canals and I went into vertigo. I had no idea which way was up. So for me, what ended my, my career as an operator, I stayed in the intelligence community was really the opening to what I do, I teach people now injury to the human body to be able to protect themselves. And it's a very deep, different subject obviously, and it's an uncomfortable subject for a lot of people, but it really is a life skill that I think everybody has to at least take a look at.

Yeah, absolutely. What, what was the motivation to go so deep into this level of training and teaching with people? You know, what was that moment for you where you're like, hey, obviously you want to learn this yourself, but when was that moment of like, you want to go teach this to people?

You know, it's, it's funny when I, we, we were, I was part of a group in the intelligence community. I was working for the head of the SEAL team, the, the Admiral. He had put together a program to relook at how we did hand to hand combat. I had no business being on that at that time. I had no Experience at all. They liked me. I had, I had a martial arts background from, you know, being a kid, and they invited me to do this. And what was interesting was I ended up through just a random chance meeting an instructor in San Diego where I was at base. And we're bringing in people from all over the world. This guy happened to be an instructor. He's a former Vietnam vet. And he was showing. He was showing self protection in a way that people. I'd never seen it before, very direct. It looked like real violence to me. Yeah, you know, what I had experienced as a kid, what I had seen. My uncles were very. Were very good fighters. And real violence versus, you know, combat sports is a very different thing. And what was interesting was I knew most people, that was the big fear. You know, some people do want to do combat sports and they want to become practitioners, they want to become competitors, and that's fantastic. But most people, they want to be able to protect themselves or keep themselves from having to live a life where they never need self defense. And to me, I found that to be a very fascinating subject. I was very comfortable with violence, and I'm very comfortable with those that are very good at violence, you know, getting good information out of them. But the challenge to me is to take same socialized people, give them some really difficult information that can save their life, but put it in a context that makes sense to them. And to me, that's something that, you know, I've been doing almost 30 years now, and I'm still. It's still something that I just love to do with. New group.

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to take a step back, you know, like, where were you born? Family, early childhood. And what led you down this path into getting into, you know, like special ops training, military, everything that happened there?

Yeah, it was Boston, Massachusetts is where my family's from. And. But, you know, my father was a officer in the Navy, so we moved every two to three years. So I lived all.

Yeah, you lived that lifestyle.

I lived that lifestyle. Very simple with it. And basically my dad was gone all the time. So our surrogate dads were the marines on base, whoever wasn't deployed, they were the guys that trained us, they were the guys that were coaches, they taught us how to box, they taught us how to wrestle, baseball, football. And so I was kind of. I had all these male role models in that arena, which I thought was normal until, you know, I started moving around the country and realized, oh, not all kids are raised on military bases. Yeah, you have these, you Know, crazy Marines, you know, helping you out. So it kind of inculcated that with me early on, and I was comfortable with it. You know, my generation, we were still allowed. We were allowed to. If you had an issue at school, men were allowed to have an outlet for violence, a safe outlet. And I think that's something that differentiates where we're at today. I think violence has been so stigmatized that the only people that have access to it are the predators. And so my goal is to sit there and show everybody, hey, listen, studying violence does not make you violent. It actually makes you. The crazy thing is, the more proficient you are in understanding the subject, the more peaceful your life is. And it's interesting because you understand. You understand how to deal with the subject. You've already thought about it, and therefore, you're going to enjoy your life until you have to. You know, it's kind of like the idea of learning how to swim. You know, you don't walk by a body of water after you learn how to swim and freak out, go off, I fall in. I'm going to go do the backstroke first. Or this. You know, hey, I know how to swim. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to live a fearful life. And so I encourage people because. Because I've had people that literally have had their lives turned upside down by violence. And so my goal is the opportunity to do a podcast like, this is great, because, you know, my clientele, unfortunately, my civilian clientele, 70% of them come to me after the fact, after there's been violence in their life. And so I'm hoping. Majority of people that listen right now are that 30% that's kind of proactive and they have a chance to maybe think about it before it happens.

Yeah, no, And I would say for myself, I definitely fall into that 30% where I. I can't say I've had a crazy amount of violence occur in my life, or I'm not even the most experienced. And if I was to ask you, and if someone was to one day walk into one of your training sessions, what can they expect? And, like, what are some of the foundational tactics that you teach or the situations that, you know, you try to predict people that if they were in these situations, this is what you should do.

The main thing I think that people really are lacking in is. Is an understanding of basic human nature. Understanding what motivates people to do certain things. The punching, the kicking, the striking is all very key. And that's easy to teach, actually. And. But the problem is when to do it. You know, when is it available? When, when is the right time. Understanding the difference between somebody who is just being socially annoying but not really threatening versus somebody who is, is printing and planning to do asocial violence against you, meaning really grievous bodily harm, and they're doing it, and knowing how to differentiate those two. And the training methodologies you use to help people with that. And it's fascinating because most of us are such social creatures and we enjoy interacting, that when I put people in an environment where all of a sudden communication isn't there anymore, it's very uncomfortable for people the most time. And predators know that and they know how to take advantage of that. So what's interesting is to give people skill sets that in a very short amount of time they can learn the skill sets of destruction, which are extremely easy combat sports, like, you know, the ufc, where it's the home of the UFC here in Vegas. I equate that to, if I'm in a seminar and I have like 60 people in my seminar and I brought in a, you know, an eight foot piece of granite, just beautiful Italian marble, the best chiseling sets, you know, world class artistic sets. And I told everybody, you guys aren't leaving until you replicate, you know, Michael's David, you know, on there. Well, they'd be there for thousands of years. They wouldn't come close, right? They couldn't do that. That's the equivocation of, of somebody who becomes one of the best in the combat sport arena. It takes a tremendous training. You truly are an artist. You truly are a wonderkind. And you're working within those parameters. Whereas that same group of 60 people, if I had that same thing of marble and I brought in a bunch of sledgehammers and I said, hey, listen, nobody gets lunch until this is a pile of rubble. They'd be able to figure it out really quick because the skill sets of destruction are very easy for us to understand. It's not pretty, but we can all get it done. And that's the cool part about it, is people think they have to be this high level practitioner in a combat sport to be able to protect themselves. And that's just not the case. And so, you know, I don't train people for competition on the duel. I train people to be able to take advantage of when a predator gives them an opportunity. And that. That's a very different skill set totally.

What would you say, like out of that 70% that you referenced of, you know, they've occurred some type of violence or interaction with a predator. What's like the most common thing that people come to you and say, hey, this happened to me. Is there a standard or is it really all across the board?

It's usually a manipulation, a social manipulation of, of the person itself. Meaning they're put in a position where their body oftentimes was telling them early on something was wrong. Meaning a lot of non verbal cues. You know, the idea, the typical thing they tell you, like the hair in the back of my neck stood up, I felt queasing, my stomach. That's your body screaming at you, saying, hey, there's something wrong. And unfortunately we've, especially in this age of technology, we've got to the point to where we really ignore a lot of our primal warning systems. And what happens is predators are very good at socially taking advantage of us. I mean, they'll play on our kindness, they'll play on our social awkwardness. They don't want to feel awkward. And people will tell me oftentimes, hey, I knew something was wrong here and I still did this. I kept going in. And then when it got to this point, it was too late, it had happened. And so what I do with people is I walk them back on all those, those scenarios, you know, because oftentimes people will tell me, well, I didn't have a choice. And then when you walk people back, you go, actually you did have a choice. You just didn't recognize you had a choice. And for me, you don't ever want to use violence if you can avoid it at all. And not because you can't do it, it's because you only want to use it when you truly are devoid of choice. Because living with the aftermath of having to use violence can be hard for a lot of people. And you know, I don't take it, I don't take it lightly. That's why it's so great to, you know, when you have people come to you and say, hey, you know what? Like second day of training, I had a guy come up to me, big like Texas rancher guy. You know, you tell he just, he was former A and M lineman and you tell he liked to fight. You know, he liked to go to honky tonks and fight. Came from a very wealthy Texas family. He stopped me the next day. He goes, I just want to thank you. And I said, what do you think? You know, it was just literally the first day of training. What do you mean? He goes, I called my wife this morning. He goes, after the first Day I realized how lucky I've been that, A, I didn't inadvertently kill somebody, you know, from getting willingly getting in these fights that I would get into that were totally avoidable. And he said, B, that I truly didn't run into a real predator that understood violence. He goes, I usually could have been killed, he said, because I'm not there. He goes, and I just told her, I go, that I'm not doing that anymore. So the behavioral change that he recognized is going to serve him the rest of his life. And that's just it. Oftentimes people just don't understand what to look for. They don't understand how predators operate. And we get so comfortable. Especially like I was talking to you about entrepreneurs earlier on with my entrepreneur crowd, oftentimes their type A personality, their drive, everything that works so well to get them where they're at within their social circles, within their business circles, oftentimes they'll go somewhere, maybe they'll go outside of the US they'll take that same attitude in a culture that just doesn't respond to that. And they don't. They'll inadvertently get themselves in trouble because they're coming, they're profiling as, as being very aggressive, borderline violent. And then you're going to get somebody who sees that and they're going to respond in kind and you're going to be confused and you're going to be threatened. So oftentimes it's just that education process with people saying, hey, understand what works in one arena can get you killed in another, you know, and, and you just have to be able to navigate that.

Yeah, I would love to dive into if you have any like, key stories personally that you've experienced where you've had to use some of these tactics and strategies and you know, to share like the different approaches and thought process you had to have in those critical decision making moments.

Yeah, well, I'll give one, I'll give, I'll give one that, that'll resonate with people. There's, there's two I normally tell one where I used violence and one where I didn't. But I'm gonna do the one where I didn't use violence. So I was picking my son up. He was, at the time he was 8 years old. I was picking him up in San Diego. I got him at his house. He lived outside of Del Mar. It was a very hilly area there. He's at. I go to turn down a road, nobody's on it. This guy comes flying down and he just flips me off, basically, you know, acts like I almost cut him off, which is crazy. So, sure enough, he's at the stoplight, I have to pull up. So I'm pulling up alongside, my son is sitting right, you know, the passenger side. He's giving me every expletive you can imagine. Just, just doing. And you can't see this, but I have some tattoos and you saw my tattoos. Look at you, your tattoo. You think you're so tough. He goes, I'll beat that. You know, he's telling all the, all the things he was going to do to me and I was just, hey, you know, hey, sir, you know, sorry about that. You know, I didn't mean to cut you off, you know, all this other stuff. And I was being very conciliatory, knowing full well he goes, you know that he's doing this in front of an eight year old kid. Yeah, my son, you know, I just didn't give him any bait. I knew he was looking for a reason. And so he takes off. And my son looks at me, goes, dad, why'd you do that? You could easily beaten him up, you know. Yeah. You know, yeah. So I walked my son through it. I said, you're right, I probably could physically. I go, it looked like I could take him. I said, but what do I know about him? He's. What do you mean? What if he had a gun? And he goes, yeah. He goes, oh, I didn't think about that. He goes, yeah. I go, I got you. I go, what about you? I said, you know, what if I was successful? What if I did? I pulled him out of the car, beat the crap out of him. I said, then I get arrested. I said, what are you gonna do? I said, you know, we're supposed to go meet my uncle, you know, your uncle, and have a great day. And, you know, how would that have ended up? And I said, and he wasn't really mad at me. He was mad at something else. He was just looking for a reason. And the funny part was my son had in his lap a magazine and he holds a magazine up. He goes, but you're this guy. And I was on the COVID of Black Belt magazine.

Yeah.

And so, so I was going, I dropped, I dropped him off and I put a. You know, I started my seminar and that was the story. I started with the seminar because it was, it was visceral for me. I mean, you have your son there seeing that every aspect of your ego is getting hit with it. But you know what? It wasn't the time I wasn't really being threatened either. The threshold wasn't there. And as hard as it was not to respond in kind, you know, it. I guess what I tell everybody is I try to live my life with the idea of the three day test. And the three day test is this. Whatever you're about to get upset about, whatever you think is so urgent that you respond, maybe you know, a road rage incident or something like that, three days from now, is it going to matter three days from now if you find yourself in a jail cell or you're six feet under, Are you going to tell yourself that you had no choice, that this was worth it? This was the only thing I could do?

Yeah.

And very few, few things meet that threshold. And to me, that's the key. If I can teach people how to do that ahead of time, to think about those things ahead of time, the behavioral changes that they make are huge. And those are the things that minimize the chance of violence coming in your life. It's when people slip and they make those mistakes and they say that offhand remark to the wrong person that they don't understand and they get this disproportionate response and then they realize the only thing that's going to work in this situation is the tool of violence. And guess what? I don't have anything. So, you know, I give people that. I give them, worst case scenario, what they need. I show them how to do it. I show them where in the human body we go after. And then we step back and okay, what are you doing in your life right now? What are you doing right now? That is the equivalent of sleeping with your head on a railroad track. And you know, the train didn't come last night, so you think everything's fine. My job is to make sure that you recognize your heads on that railroad track and to take it off. That way we don't have to worry about anything. So how many things in your life are you potentially setting yourself up for? The potentiality violence can enter it and how can we easily just change those?

Wow. First off, I love that story and I appreciate you for sharing that. When you say, like when you're heading railroad track, where do you. Where's the most common state where people are setting themselves up for failure? Potentially?

These, this is a, There's a. I opened up a Google talk, I did a talk at Google and there's a, a video clip that I have of a Seattle bus robbery.

Okay.

And it's one of those fascinating things. I'll make sure you get Access to it after. There's a guy.

This is your video.

No, this is a video. It's a crime video. This is a crime video. This guy is walking down a bus with a gun. He has. He has a. He has a Glock. He's putting in people's faces. He's taking their phones. Nobody's talking to anybody. Everybody's immersed in their phones and they're.

Not even seeing this.

No, they're literally immersed. They're sitting here just like that. I know. You know, like this. The guy comes to this one kid and the gun comes right here. And this kid's immersed. His ears and his eyes are on here, right? He looks up and he sees the barrel of the gun right here. He redirects the barrel. Good, good move. He redirects, gets up, takes the barrel gun. He has. He has his phone in his hand. And you're like, oh, good, he's going to use his phone. Okay, now listen, let me just make this clear. The gun was right here. He pushes the gun. He gets up. He has this hard. His hard phone in his hand that he could easily. The guy's face is right here. And what does he do with this?

Don't tell me he records.

No, no. He's literally putting it into his pocket.

He is.

He's got a long coat. Seattle. And he said, yeah, he does want to crack his screen, you know, and that's. But, but the, the.

Wow.

As much as we're laughing at that, it's something we automatically do every day. You know, we. These things have just possessed us that we give. We regularly give up our sensory systems all the time, male or female. This is the number one thing predators look for, is that you're immersed in these. Now, listen, these aren't. These aren't going away, but we just have to be aware of that, you know, especially in unfamiliar environments. But to watch a whole bus full of people not interacting while a guy's walking down, literally robbing people with a gun. I know. Telling you this, you know, this can't be real. When you see the video, it's just there. And that grabbed everybody at Google. Google right away, because that's really what's. What we're up against.

Wow. What's your thoughts on. Because I, when you said these, I thought you were going to refer to, like, social media initially of like, locations and posting and all that type of stuff. Do you, do you talk on that when you, when you talk to people? Because I know, like, for example, I have a lot of friends that you know, let's say they have big followings and there's been situations where they now post like days after they're at a location due to this incident of violence or people showing up. And do you talk about this or is this something that you think is very.

Oh, yeah. So social media is, Social media is a blessing and a curse. And unfortunately for predators, it's just a field day.

Yeah.

Because people are willingly giving up their locations. They're willingly talking about where they're going to be, what they're going to, you know, do. And, and that's smart. And I know a lot of influencers have been a lot smarter about how they're posting about that, but it's absolutely something to remember. And we don't, we don't always remember that we've turned on certain things. And, you know, I've had a couple people come into classes and they've told me that I've had some very, very well known people come in where they had crazy fans or they had somebody pierce their, what they thought was their security, you know, that they thought was well taken care of, and they realized, thank God it didn't happen. But I realized right then and there, had that person been armed, had that person really been trying to hurt me or attack me or my wife or, you know, my family? I don't have anything. I don't know what to do. And that's when they usually seek you out. And what's interesting about it is, you know, I don't train people to become super ninjas or anything like this. It's, it's the education that they get on the tool of violence and how it works is what causes them to rethink how they're living their lives and to do things like you're talking about, like, hey, okay, three days ago, Casey was here. But as far as social media knows, you're here today, you know, like, like type of thing. And that's smart. Little things like that are huge. They're just, they're easy to do. You know, I'm not one of these Luddites that thinks, oh, don't post on social media or don't do this. Listen, these, this is the world we live in now. And we're gonna, we're gonna go ahead and operate that, but we can operate a lot smarter with it.

Yeah. So, yeah, very cool. I, I'm a big story guy. And the story that you told before, do you have any, like, key stories that have fueled you and that have impacted you? Like you talk about the bus story, the one with your son. That to me, like, I learned so much through storytelling. And is there another story in your life that you'd want to share or someone that you've worked with that has impacted you in a very beneficial way?

Yeah, so there, there's a couple, but I'm trying to think the one will really resonate with people on this one. Okay, so you saw the, you saw the great story where I didn't use violence, right?

Okay, yeah, let's talk about the other one.

Let's talk, let's talk about 27 year old Tim. So, so I just come back from South America. I was working counter narcotics program down there as a special operation. That was the height of my arrogance, you know, But I'm really well trained, especially in what I'm doing now. But I was only in the military world during that time. So I'm in San Diego, I'm driving with my buddies, I got a jeep and we're like, it's midway in rose crowns in san Diego at 5pm which is just. Anybody that knows San Diego knows it's just wall to wall traffic. And so we're stuck in wall, wall traffic. We're just going and we're, we're talking about what we were doing down in South America and all this other stuff and we're just really enjoying being in San Diego. Well, I noticed this guy behind me, literally an inching traffic, thinks somehow I cut him off and got in front of him and he's, he's steaming. My buddy goes, look at this guy. So we see him and we just realized, oh, he's really mad. You know, steam's like coming out of his ears. So what do I do? Do what everybody normally would do. I egg him on. I look, I, I go eye to eye with him in the rear view mirror. I start to, I start to tell him, you know, like, you know, like laughing and blowing him kisses, which gets him more incensed. Don't think anything of it. So he starts working his way around. He gets in the other lane, gets up, gets in front of my car, and finally after about 10 minutes, gets in front of me, then all of a sudden hits his brakes and stops. And I'm like, great, tell my friends. Ah, yeah, he wants to fight. Okay. You know, he stops and gets out of the car. I get out of my car and I'm already ahead, I'm already ahead like towards his car. When I hear from the back, my friend yells, gun. Like, he screams a gun. And I'm like, Right then and there, Casey, I realized, you idiot, you now you have no protection, no cover. You're in the fatal funnel. Basically, this guy has an open. If he has, there's no place for me to dive. There's no place for me to get covered.

Wow.

What happens, though, is I look and it's not a gun. It's. It's a steering wheel lock that they used to have. They used to call it the. The club, you know, on there, you see, and they guys used to put it on their steering wheel so you wouldn't get your car stolen. So I look back at my friend, I say a couple of choice expletives to him because he really, you know, I thought it was a gun. Yeah, this was no problem for me. Guys like, you know, he's trying to come at me with a thing. I'm like, ah, it's great. So I charge him, and it's perfect. Like, he tries to swing at my head. I hit him right on the. On his radial nerve. I grabbed him arm, I go right for his neck. I slam him on the back of the car. I'm just about to hit him. And I'm so ready to hit this guy. I'm so, so jazzed because of what just happened, you know? And just as I'm about to hit him, I will. To this day, it's etched in my memory. This little girl, she had to be maybe four or five, looks up, she's pressed up again. She's crying, she's saying, please don't hit daddy.

Wow.

And right then, that was a. That. That was the last time. That was the last time I ever chose to respond with violence. Because, listen, from what I told you, I could have easily been killed had it been a gun. He would have shot me. I would have been lucky to survive that situation. Two, I had no idea he had a girl, a little girl in the car. The fact that anybody would do that, having a young child in the car and then three, I realized I should know better. You know? Now this is before I started really training, training people. I was really doing military and law enforcement. But it completely had me rethink, you know, how I look at the subject and what it's used for. I mean, if you use violence in an area where you didn't need to, you're gonna have to deal with the repercussions of that. You know, when you need the tool, it's absolutely essential. But it's something that you really have to understand. So I feel. It's like my passion When I tell the difference of those stories that you're sharing.

Both.

Yeah. Those sides of it. Because I'm not perfect, you know, and, and I understand the urges people have to do things, especially with young men. I, I get it at times and, and when we feel like, you know, there's an injustice or something. But I've seen too many people make too many mistakes using violence when they didn't need it. And so that's the other half of it. You know, I absolutely want to protect the people that need it when it's criminally being used against them. But I also want to make, explain to people, don't, don't be, don't be liberal with this. Be very conservative on how you use this tool because it's, you know, you have no idea when you cross the physical plane on somebody.

Yeah.

How they're going to respond to the trauma. You know, they might look perfectly healthy, but there might be a genetic, you know, situation in there, in their makeup that you don't know about that now you've caused an arrhythmia in a person and you've died. There are many cases that I've seen where two people get into a argument, one pushes the other one over and that guy hits his head on the ground and bleeds out and dies. And so now you've got one guy dead, you got the other guy facing manslaughter over something that if you had asked either of them would have been irrelevant to them. Whatever they were arguing over was absolutely not worth what they're both paying now.

Yeah.

And so to me, it's just the more you can share those types of stories with people, it really changes the way people think about the subject.

Absolutely. And again, thank you for sharing both sides of the coin there. A couple more questions before we wrap up here. Tim, do you have children?

Yes.

As a dad. Because I was curious, as a dad, how are you instilling these type of values into your children? Because I think it's not only a very important skill to grow up with, but I'm sure it's, you know, it gives them an advantage and the way they think about this, I think this is a very under teached subject. I didn't get any of this training growing up. So how are you treating, how are you talking to your kids? But then on a segment like what advice do you have for younger entrepreneurs or anyone who's getting into their adult career when it comes to a tactical side of taking some of these principles and applying them in their daily life yeah, for kids.

The one thing I really learned in everybody, I've trained the most adept people. The easiest people to physically train are those that are come from a gymnastics background or a dance background. So my kids do both. My kids do gymnastics and they do, they do dance. They've done it since they were 4 years old. I have 8 year old twin daughters and I have an 11 year old son right now. My eldest is, my oldest who I talked about earlier is 26 now. And so that gives them a really good grounding. And then I'll, I'll get all of them into Jiu Jitsu just because I want them to get used to being grabbed. And when I say Jiu Jitsu, it's fantastic. Jiu Jitsu is great. But the real reason I'm going is because the instructor, instructor is great with kids. And I would say if anybody's looking to get something with kids, make sure it's an instructor that really enjoys training children and can get them going and builds their confidence. That, that's key. What you do with kids, you don't scare them, you make it. What I want to do is I want to give them all the physical skill sets so that when they're old enough, like my, my oldest son really didn't get my training until he was about 17 and a half. I felt he was mature enough at that point to get it. My daughters will probably get it at 11 because unfortunately sexual assault on women is happening at ever younger ages. And I want them to start having that early on. Um, also, women don't have to, they don't navigate violence the way we navigate it. We, we, we as men, we communicate with violence sometimes, you know, like just, you know, locker room, pushing each other around. We have to navigate. Is this just kind of a social thing or is this real violence? Women, they only experience the real thing.

Yeah.

So they're not, they don't like to test things out. So mature, maturity wise, I can, I can teach women earlier. What's interesting about the life and death choices and the principles of violence. A lot of what works in life or death situations works even better when the stakes aren't as high. And the guys that really taught me that was when I was at the New York Mercantile Exchange. And these are all the heavy duty traders. And you know, these guys would come in after they hired me for a week and they come in after trading about 230. Half of them would be happy, half of them be pissed off. So it made for a really interesting dynamic. But what they really Liked was, you know, I talked about the idea that when it comes to violence and another human being, nothing happens until you cause an effect, you know, and meaning I have to get over there and cause an effect on you. If I want to be able to control your brain, take it out of the equation and go on, I can think about it all I want and I can say, well, if he does this, I do this. But until I actually make a decision and do something and I talked to the guys about the idea of, you know, what do you respond to in the day? Like, I know most entrepreneurs will sit there and say, okay, I've got these four things that I gotta get done before 12, okay, are you disciplined enough to not have the email, you know, you know, reminder that's coming up? Are you disciplined not to respond to the news, the latest social media post, you know, because every time you do that, you're out of cause state. Now you're in effect state, you know, you're reacting to something rather than being the cause. And so when these guys started applying that in their trading, they just did, they just did a hell of a lot better. And they also got out of bad situations much quicker. It was really interesting. I've had people in the business world for years tell me that their decision making qualities really improved when they understood that and the principles of being in cause state helped them with business negotiations. Helped them. I had one woman they were trying to, there's a hostile takeover company and she had to calm herself down and she started realizing that she was being too defensive in her thinking and she had to start being the cause. And so she, she came out, she's able to save her company and come around just using the principles that she learned in essentially a self defense course, you know.

Very cool. Well, first off, I just want to say thank you so much Tim for coming on the show today. Before we wrap up, where is the best place for entrepreneurs out there to learn more about your trainings, including myself? Because I think that again, this is something that I believe is so under taught and it makes me so happy to know that there's someone like yourself that's out there doing this at such a high level. Um, so where, where can entrepreneurs learn more about what you have to offer and overall follow you across all socials?

The, the best place, the best place probably is my YouTube channel, just Tim Larkin personal self protection there. I interview tons of subject matter experts on all of this and again I give all if you like some of the subjects that you and I covered I go in depth on a lot of that. It's just a great catch all place and from there you can find out everything else. For those that want. I, you know, my, my, my last book, When Violence is the Answer, is on Amazon and it covers all these subjects. The audiobook's really good on that. People tend to really like that. So either, either of those places, you know, would be the excellent place to go.

Very cool. Well, again, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And for everyone watching and everyone listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure you follow Tim, check out his books, follow him on social media. And of course, before we wrap up, thank you to Blue Wire Studios for having us today. We, we really appreciate it and I will talk to you guys soon.

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