Reading Predators and Becoming an Impossible Target with Tim Larkin and Joe Polish

Somebody you'd all recognize, an entertainer of sorts. He had the most expensive house in Vegas. What I want is I want some of your Special Forces guys to come in. We're gonna do a whole scenario while my wife's asleep at night. I said, hey, that's great. I said, but maybe we could start somewhere else. And I held up this ticket that they give you at the gate when your car goes in. I said, 2 days ago, my wife was here dropping the kids off, and then afterwards she went and got her car washed. I said, most car washes are populated by who? Ex-felons. And what does this say? Not an alias. His name and the address and everything on it right there. Maybe we start there. It's not as hard as you think. You just have to be present enough and have enough things around you for a predator to look and say, just too much work.

How can you be a domino for someone else? The Joe Polish Show. Any problem in the world can be solved with the right genius network. Few speakers have sparked as much debate about personal safety as Tim Larkin. His training was famously banned in the United Kingdom. for being too direct about the realities of violence, a controversy that only reinforced his belief that society is often more comfortable believing myths about violence than preparing for it. Tim has never backed away from the conversation. Instead, he spent more than 3 decades challenging conventional wisdom and teaching what actually works when avoidance is no longer an option. As the founder of Target Focus Training and bestselling author of When Violence Is the Answer and Survive the Unthinkable, Tim has trained everyone from everyday citizens to military and law enforcement professionals. His message is simple, unforgettable, and backed by decades of real-world experience. Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it's the only answer. Please help me welcome my longtime friend, Tim Larkin.

What is up, brother?

Thank you. All right, so, um, boy, how do we start?

Well, let's Let me—

Go ahead.

All right, so Jason brought up something and he went over it really quick, and I don't know if you guys really caught it. Trump administration changes the name Department of Defense, Department of War. Why? Macho? Kind of tougher? Trump wants to be tougher? That's what all the assholes think. Why? Why do we change the Department of Defense? That's the real question. The real question is, why do we change it in 1947 to the Department of Defense? Well, I'm gonna go send people to defend you. We do defense. So what does that do? That opens up a whole bunch of places where we can put our soldiers where they don't belong. War is one thing. It's very simple. We break things and we kill people. And if you don't need that, then don't use us. We are not police. We are not social workers. We're not anything else. It's clear direction. Make sure, especially— my God, I cannot look at LinkedIn anymore. The language people use on their descriptions, the way— I don't even know what the fuck they do, you know? I mean, seriously, it's very straightforward. You have to have straightforward, clear communication. One of the best things they ever did was that whether you like Trump or not, that has nothing to do with it. Clear when it comes to violence also. Why do I use the term violence? I'm not saying fighting. Explicit, very student, different mindset. I can Fight with my boss, fight with my girlfriend, fight with my friend. But if I say violence, everybody knows what that means. You go right to it, but it's uncomfortable. And I learned this a long time ago. My grandfather was an Irish Boston— well, he made us legit. My great-grandfather ran liquor with Joe Kennedy and then bought a bunch of Pool halls in there. And then my grandfather took it up. And my grandfather took that knowledge. And one of the one things he always told me was he took my cousins and I, and we would go down to the basement. And he was living in Dedham, Massachusetts, in this base— in this one of these big houses. But the basement was where we did all the boxing. Taught all of us how to box. And he'd always say the same thing. And I didn't understand it at the time. But he would say to us, he goes, boys, When you're in the ring, this is what you do. And he would show us everything and he'd show the rules and he'd show all of that. But then he would say to us, he goes, he'd point to the window right at the basement out there. He goes, but if you go out there, he goes, you don't do this. And then he would show us things that were really effective. And what was that? It was injury to the human body. Because he understood that out there, he goes, I'm not protected by the rules. In order to have a sport with violence, you have to gamify it. And the way you gamify it is you take out direct injury to the human body. So the reason I set everything up like this is because I am not somebody that promotes violence. I don't glorify it. But it is the 800-pound gorilla that really lives in everybody's back of everybody's minds all the time. And very few people ever look at the subject until it's too late. This is not something you want to do on the job. You need to understand some of these parameters ahead of time. So when was the last time— okay, is there anybody in the last 5 days? Raise your hand that you had a situation where you felt the potentiality for violence. Raise your hand. Anybody else? Okay.

I've sought it, but I didn't— not physically.

No, I don't mean you using violence. I mean feeling that there was possibility, like you were uncomfortable with something.

Okay.

Your first jiu-jitsu lesson. There you go. Anybody else? Okay, so some of you aren't putting anything. How many people— how many women have been in an elevator lately and unfamiliar males have come into the elevator? Do anything go through your head during that time sometimes?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, really? Women pick up on it way quicker than guys. We're knuckleheads. We'll sit there, a guy will come in. Woman comes in right away and she knows, okay, is this guy safe? Do I need to get out? It goes through their head all the time. It runs in the background. It's this little thing that runs in the background all the time and the problem is most people have never thought, what would you do if something actually happened? They don't look at the subject because the subject's prepared. I mean, we look at the UFC. We look at everything else and we say, I can't do that. That's not me. That is something that requires athleticism, incredible dedication to sport, and there's only a very few that are going to make it to the level that you see when you look at the UFC or something like that. But the illusion is that that's the only way to do violence. They think that's what violence is. And yet you can see people, and it happens all the time. I've seen world-class— and I come from the combat sport world. I love these guys. But many times you've seen combat sport guys out in the real world getting killed by normal people, people that just wanted to do it, didn't hesitate, but they didn't play the game. They weren't trying to do it. They weren't using— they weren't doing it fair. Yeah. I answered a very uncomfortable question. Well, I answered where I thought it was the right answer, but somebody asked me, well, hey, how would you do if you went into the UFC? You know, how could, you know, if your system's so great, you know, how would you do it? How would you win? I said, oh yeah, I could probably create a situation where my fighter could beat anybody. Oh, well, what would you use? I said, well, I said, just before the guy goes in, the opponent to my guy goes in, he's going to get a text and he's going to open up the text and there's his dad duct taped in there, gun to the head. You're going to go down. You're going to make it look good. It'll be the second round. What do you think's gonna happen? Because he can't tell anybody he has. That is his father. That is there. But wait a minute. That that's not punching and kicking. That doesn't show anything. No, that's violence. You're willing to do what other people aren't willing to do. And the reason I say that you have to clarify all these things. And once you understand that there's no parameters in violence. When you see some of the things that have happened just in the last, you know, 5 years. COVID just— after COVID, everybody started calling me again. I mean, most of the people that know me were there, but after COVID, there were things I would say, I would prep people for, and they used to think, oh man, Tim, you're being a little extreme on these things. And then you see a woman in Texas on the freeway surrounded by a mob calling for 911, and she is told nobody's coming. That's in the United States. That's not in a third world country. That's not anywhere else. This happened across our country like that. There were cities where the mayor said, no, we're not, we're not handling any of this stuff. And this is not a political thing. This is just a reality. We saw it happen in our country and look how quickly we devolved into it and it became normal. to where we had to alter the way we do things. I have friends, uh, we're talking about Kamal.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, my, my friend Kamal Ravikant, I remember he had a place in Manhattan Beach, one of the nicest places around. They were— they had people that were blatantly going around knocking people to the ground, ripping off watches, whatever they had, and nobody was doing anything. And we all kind of glossed over it like, okay, okay, okay, we're back now, we're not doing that anymore. Well, It could go like that again. So, the reason you want to look at the subject is not because you want to become violent. It's not promoting violence. You need to understand the subject and when you understand the subject, you can make a life that really minimizes the chance of this ever coming to you and that's my goal whenever I teach anybody anything. But the reason I started out with the Department of War was because that's a really crucial— when Jason brought that up, there's a really crystal idea. Now, if we send the Department of War somewhere, oof, that's, you know, well, why are you sending the Department of War? You know, and that's the whole idea. The whole idea that we were being far too— presidents from '47 on were being far too liberal and being able to put our kids in harm's way for stupid objectives that That the military was never designed to do. We can't solve a lot of those problems. We can only— it's kind of like if you use us in a social type of a situation, it's the equivalent of taking a stick of dynamite to open up your car door. It'll work, but you probably won't like the result. You know? So, the reason I got so fascinated with this subject is because across the board, I saw people are really uncomfortable with direct information about violence. Yet when these people get this information, it has the exact opposite effect of what you would think it would be. You actually live a far more peaceful life because you understand what can and can't happen when it comes to the idea of violence. And that's where people just, you know, I think— By trying to be good people and avoid it. Like, I hear a lot of people say, oh, well, I don't want to study this because, you know, it's going to bring it into me. It's going to bring it in. And that's their excuse for not looking at it, which really says, I'm really kind of scared and I really don't want to do this. So, I'm going to come up with this karma thing. And so, I said to them, well, my answer to all that is that, hey, do you have a fire extinguisher at your house?

Oh, yeah.

You know how to use it? Yeah, yeah, I know how to use it. Oh, so you want a fire to come to your house? Well, no, I don't want that. So why do you know how to use that? Well, in case there's something there, I have a device that I now know how to operate, and therefore, what do I get to do? I get to relax because I know if there's a grease fire or anything like that, I can use the device that I have and I know how to do it. But until that happens, I don't have to be worrying about this. And that's why the subject's really interesting. And it's funny, we, up until probably my grandfather's generation, was probably the last generation that passed this on. This was something mostly for the males, young males, but it was a rite of passage. It was something you were expected to do. You weren't expected— our self-defense laws were not designed to require the police to come. Our self-defense laws were required that we took care of it. You know, we were able to defend ourselves in that and yet we got away from that. Most boys don't— really don't know how to fight. Now, there's been a great resurgence in the last couple of years with MMA and there is some really great stuff. Jiu-jitsu. All my kids do jiu-jitsu. I start that out, especially my girls. I have twin daughters that are 12 and the reason I got them in there is because I wanted them to get used to being grabbed. I didn't want them to freak out getting grabbed and it makes a big difference and so even you doing it now. So, you're getting choked out. It was your first jiu-jitsu class and stuff but you survived, right?

Yeah!

And you realize, okay, I'm not very good at this but I kind of see what I can do now and so you start to play with the problem and it's actually fun. I will say of all the martial arts right now, the jiu-jitsu culture is probably the best and why? There's a lot of camaraderie there, but I have some very good friends there. My buddy, I have a great interview with a top competitor. He's a very good friend of mine, Robert Drysdale, but he talks about when jiu-jitsu is appropriate and when it's not on there. And so the whole idea is you can train, but you still have to understand how predators think, and predators come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It's not just about physical. They can come after you. I mean, Joe was talking about the idea of you want to help people out and stuff, and yet we become marks. And that's true with me too, in my entrepreneur career. I've had that happen a couple of times. But when you get the mindset of you understand how these people operate and what they're capable of doing, the decision-making that you use in a life or death situation works even better in your day-to-day operations. If you do that. I've interviewed probably some of the top leaders of the prison gangs throughout the United States. Members of the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerrilla Family, the— I can't think of the other group that I had. Oh, the Serranos! These people are really interesting. It would be great if we thought they were stupid. You know, just a bunch of knuckle-draggers that come out. Probably some of the most sophisticated minds I've ever talked to. And they've all used that for criminal reasons because of their opportunities. If they were at the leadership level, if they applied it to the corporate world, they'd They'd be just terrors in what they do. Their vetting process—you want to talk about hiring people? See how they do it. And I don't mean—I mean—they vet people like no other. They know exactly how to do it. The interesting thing about most of these guys—I hear entrepreneurs all the time talk about well, I need this. You know, I need this device, or I got to use this program, or I have to be able to do this, or hey, I'm going to use what was it? Top level a while ago. Everybody—

Go high level?

Yeah, yeah, go high level, all that shit. I go, really? I got a guy that's locked up 23 out of 24 hours a day. He has no communication skill and yet he runs tens of thousands of gang members that literally distribute drugs throughout and he's running it, we're estimating about $1 to $2 billion a year from a prison cell. He's able to do it. How is he able to do it? Communication, structure, way they go. There's a whole code. In fact, the prison runs the outside. It's really interesting. What happens when they go outside? They start using drugs, alcohol, all of that, and they lose it. They're highly disciplined within prison.

Hmm.

So, I guess my message to everybody is Consider the fact that we live in a physical world still. It's really hard because we're going virtual on everything and there's some amazing things. The reason I love talking to entrepreneur groups and Joe's been kind enough to let me do it for quite some time is because we get so caught up in such a great world and all the opportunities and we're excited about, you know, things that are coming in that oftentimes we forget. And I think it's my job to remind everybody. We still live in a physical world. One of the biggest things that I worry about right now is the job disruption that's probably going to be coming up right now. And I really think it's being underplayed. And I just look at my business. I just did a promotion today. It cost me $1.50 in AI tokens to get it done. Total, the way we did it. Got my graphics done, my offer, everything sent out. Something that would've cost me probably, I think we estimated it would've cost me just last year, probably about 10, 15 grand just for the graphics that I needed and everything else. We were within 4 sales, we were cash flow positive.

Wow.

Right away. That's great for me. That really sucks for my graphic designers, all the other vendors I employed. I don't need them anymore. Okay? And that's going to be a problem. And nobody has that answer. I listen to the guys on Moonshot all the time, Peter and everybody, and they're great guys. They get really uncomfortable when you talk about this stuff because they know it's coming. So why do you need to think about this? Why are all these guys building Compounds. Why is steel all the way down in in Argentina? This is not by chance. This is they know they know something's coming. They know the disruption that's coming. Now I'm not I'm not overplaying it. I'm just saying there are going to be a lot of people that's going to be disrupted, and there's no new jobs to replace this because they keep saying well you know all these guys say oh it's just like the Industrial Revolution you know. No, it's not anything like the Industrial Revolution. We never had anything that replaced the human brain. And according to Elon, he thinks we're going to have something that's going to be, what, 1,000 times more powerful than a human brain coming very soon. You can't compete with that. I was talking to some of the guys earlier at lunch, and we were talking about military. I come originally from the special operations community, and our jobs are pretty much going to go away.

Yeah.

The physical training and all that, it's great. We'll still do it, but it doesn't— we can't compete against these robots. It's amazing what they can do.

Well, and isn't it like, I think he said by 2050, maybe it was even 10 years, 10 billion, the B, humanoid robots will be created.

Yeah, and even if he's off by 75%, That's still incredible. It's coming, you know, I see it in my world all the time and my world isn't just this. I do a lot of things. I also have a large— I have a weapons company and we also do a lot of tactical training and stuff like that and it's all changing right now. Things are rapidly, rapidly changing on things and we just need to be prepared for this and so the idea is there's a potentiality for civil disruption because nobody has an answer for the displacement that's coming right now. And the scary thing is they all thought it was going to be— remember a couple years ago everybody's saying, uh, you know, learn to code, learn to code. Well, guess who the first guys were that got wiped out and they're freaking out? These jobs are going to be wiped out are mid-level, mid-management, uh, jobs. Guys that are making a couple hundred thousand to say a half a million. Their jobs are going to be gone. They're going to be, you know, 40s, 50s, mortgage, kids, all of that. And nobody has that answer. We are just heading towards like Thelma and Louise. We're just heading towards the cliff and we're holding on and going, I think this will work out. I look at it and I just say, okay, how do, how do we look at this? And so my message is, you know, when I put this stuff out is not to turn people into, you know, warriors and this dystopian thing. But the idea is you need to understand How violence works, how people deploy it, and how to recognize some of the cues. The anti— there's things like the difference between antisocial aggression and asocial violence. Antisocial aggression is all the stuff that you can avoid. It's all the ego stuff. It's all the stuff that we think we have to respond to. You know, I cut me off. He's there, and you know you're gonna you're gonna do you're gonna get in somebody's face. No, that's not what we're talking about. Predators. It's the difference between when you see, say, like 2 silverback gorillas and they are— they're going to say who's going to lead the group on there. And they'll sit there and they'll bounce at each other. They'll go in. It'll go back and forth. A lot of drama, a lot of loudness, everything like that. But they're not hurting each other, meaning they're not trying to kill each other. It is a social display of who's going to be dominant. What a predator does is similar to when you watch, say, a lioness in tall grass getting down ready to go after a gazelle. Silent. You'll never see it coming. They're coming in and they're going to just attack like that, and they go directly for the kill right away. They'll go directly for areas of the, of the body of that animal to take it out like that. And that's what You know, I try to make sure people understand how quickly, you know, that can happen to us if we don't understand, you know, just the basics of human violence. When I study this stuff and when I talk about all these people and they do sound like a guy like Sammy Gravano, you know, horrible guy really when you think— I get along with him. I mean, it was a great— if you see the interview, I'm laughing a lot and everything, 'cause I get these guys. I understand where they come from. I'm not condoning what they did, but I am recognizing how he operates. But he was very interesting. Violence is used judiciously there. When they took over, when they killed Paul Castellano and took over, John Gotti took over, Sammy went out and killed as many of the bosses as he could. To get out, to get everything under control. Then once it was under control, that's when he knew, now I have to make these guys money. And he went out and he used his social skills. And they are really good at using social skills. The problem is we misunderstand what's going on. Our currency is we will make, you know, we will get a war chest together. We'll sell things. We have, you know, cash reserves. We have assets. We have all the, that's what we have. Everything they do is backed up by the currency of violence, credible threat of violence. And that's really what it is. And that's really how we all operate. The reason the US is able to do some of the things we're able to do, we can back it up with a credible threat to violence. What you want to do is you just want to be able to recognize when these things are happening and how these people operate and how they think and picking up on cues. The greatest, you know, the greatest feedback I ever get is from a civilian that I've trained. They've gone to maybe a 2-day course or something, and the principles and methods that they learn— it's not their physical abilities. I can't, you know, in 2 days, yes, I can show you all these things, but you know, you're gonna have to keep working on the physical. I really don't— that's not my goal. My goal is not to make you the My goal is to change your mindset because most people come in with this ridiculous idea of what violence is or, you know, how it— and these fantasies about how to deal with it. If I can get them to understand what it takes, if they have to use the tool of violence to protect themselves and how horrible it is and what you have to do to somebody to put down a true predator that you have to face, it's amazing the reverse engineering that happens.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, your brain says, I never want to go here. So, what am I doing right now that is opening myself up to these opportunities for somebody to use violence with me? And it's amazing how quickly people on their own change their ways that way and they'll make better decisions. The best feedback I ever get— I've got some great videos of guys that send it in to me all the time. And they say, hey, Tim, I got to thank you. He said, I had an incident that happened today. The old me would have gone right into this. I recognized what was happening, and I was able to pull myself out of it. So I never had to find out what it would be. I had one guy who's a very, just an amazing military operator, and he had something happen in Texas, and that was it. A guy started flipping him off, going in, getting real aggressive. And this guy is no He would not back down. And he said, I saw this and I thought, oh, I'm about ready to go. And then you came into my head. I told the story to people about a hockey coach, a girls' hockey coach in Milwaukee, that a guy was being obnoxious during COVID It was one of these things. He got kind of drunk and he was really, he was just being belligerent. He was being a really, by all accounts, just a real jerk.

Yeah.

And this coach was like letting it go, letting it go, letting it go and then the guy did one more thing and right before he got out and the coach just said something. They're outside. They both get into it. One guy pushes the other guy. This guy comes and pushes the coach. He stumbles back, goes right down the concrete stairs that were behind there, brains himself and he's dead. Now, nobody intended to do that. Okay. He had 3 daughters. The other knucklehead also was married in there. So 2 families lost their dads that day over something that was completely avoidable. That's what I always want to avoid for my clients. And I can't reach everybody, but when I do reach people, that's my goal. My goal is to make sure that you avoid the avoidable. Then, as that saying says, but when it is the answer, it's the only answer. That's that rare black swan incident where it's too late. You're already in it. You have you're devoid of choice. You have imminent violence coming on. If you do not respond with the tool of violence, you're basically participating in your own murder. And that's you know that situation. When I talk in these terms, it it makes people highly uncomfortable. And I do grab you on that, but the goal is not to scare you. It's not to make you freeze. It's to make you think. And it's amazing what comes out in people. They start replaying things going, oh, that's right. That could— you understand you have the skill sets to deal with this and really immunize yourself from ever getting involved in anything that's remotely avoidable. Now you're gonna have to keep your ego in check. There are gonna be times I've been called everything in the book. I've, you know, I've had everything questioned about me and I'm smiling all the time. Hey, I don't have to. I'll give you a perfect example. I picked my son up, my, my now he's 30, but I, when he was 8 years, 8, 9 years old, I picked him up, uh, in San Diego. He was living, uh, with his mom and I, I picked him up and I was, it was gonna be a great day. My, my, uh, Brother was working on— my brother sails America's Cup, and I was going to take him down to the, the bay. I was going to do a seminar. We were going to go out that night. I pull out from this— it was a hill coming down. I pull out the car, I come down, this guy comes flying down, almost hits me, and goes over and just flips me off, and the whole thing goes down. I'm just— I let it go. My son's sitting there next to me, that guy's crazy. So of course, you know, red light, And so I have to go, and I have to pull up. You know, I'm pulling up next to him, and I just got a tattoo over here. And I'm sitting there. I'm sitting there in the car, and this guy looks over, and he goes, "Oh, look at you, you tattooed." And I got an eight-year-old kid, you know, a nine-year-old kid in my car, and he sees it. He clearly sees the kid, and he's just having a bad day. You know, so he's giving it to me, giving it to me, giving it to me. And he goes, "That's what I thought. That's what I thought." He goes, you know, he calls me all sorts of names, and he drives off. My son's sitting there with a magazine. He's holding magazine. He goes, "Dad, why'd you let that happen? Dad, you could have got out there and you could have taken that guy out right away, Dad." You know, because he wants to. You know, he thinks it's a comic book. He wants to see Dad be the hero. And so I explained to him. I said. You know, buddy, I might be right. I go, but what if he had a gun? You know, or what if he got out and what if I was successful, but he hit his head? Now he's not functioning at that point. Now I'm getting arrested. Then what happens to you? I said, you know, the police are there. They're going to have to take you. They probably won't take you right back to mom's house. They'll probably take you to a place where mom's going to have to go pick you up. And I said, then who knows what's going to happen in my situation? And I go, why? Because he called me some names? I wasn't threatened. He wasn't physically threatening me. There was no way to do that. He goes, there's no way he could have done it. He goes, it was unpleasant, but I had you with me. And my son goes, but Dad, you're this guy. And he had my first black belt magazine. Head where I said— and black belt always made you do this stupid super aggressive thing and everything. You know, I knew it. I knew I had all these other pictures. I was trying to do it like an educational picture and everything. And they go, yeah, I just want to take one more shot. Can you just do this with a knife? And I sat there and I knew as soon as he took the picture, I go, shit, that's gonna be it, you know? And sure enough, it was. But, but that's it. So, so it's the idea of, you know, understanding When to do this. Now, I also want to tell everybody, I assume if you— whatever your excuses for not looking at the tool of violence, you know, meaning, hey, I'm older now, I got a bad knee, I've got this, I don't got that— hey, those are all legit reasons not to look. I get it because you don't think that gets you absolution. The problem is that makes you more— More Appealing to the predators. They'll track in on that. They don't— they're not looking for a fair fight. They're not looking for a challenge. They're looking for the easiest mark they can get.

Can I say something to that too? So let's talk about a woman going for a run or a walk wearing headphones.

So I had a woman, it wasn't Genius. No, it was somebody here. It was one of the groups. An ancillary, I forgot what the group was. She came up to me after a presentation. So this was, she had a house over at Biltmore area and she used to run the canals every day. And she would, she'd run with her things and it was remote where she was running. And there would be the occasional other runners and bike people on bikes. And she noticed there's a guy who came by a couple days in a row. Nothing creepy about him, nothing there, just kind of rode by, rode by. But 3 days in a row, she always ran at the same time, he was in there. And then the 4th day came, and the 4th day came, as he's coming by, he's riding by, he smiles at her, she smiles back at him, and then out of nowhere he comes up, he has a thing, it's like a spring, it's a cosh, and it's a spring weapon that has a large—

A spear?

Piece of metal at the end and he whacked down, he hit her. Luckily, it missed her head. It went down and hit her in the back and stuff like that. She had enough presence. She looked at the whole situation, she starts screaming, nobody's there. She throws herself into the canal that's down there and it's a— if you know that area, it's kind of a— if you do that as a predator, for him to go down there, it would really be inconvenient for him because anybody coming by, there's no way he can easily get out of there. It's the only thing she could think of and it absolutely worked. But he had been— they got him and he had a record and he had been stalking her for— he wanted to see, is she consistent in what she did every day? Did she have the earphones on? Yes, she did. All of that. And those are the things that I hear from people all the time. I should be able to do this. I should not have to worry about it. It's really, we should be focusing on the predator. He's the problem, not me.

Yeah.

I should be able to— And I agree, it would be great. That's the world we all want to live in. Unfortunately, I have to train you for the world we actually live in. You know, I shouldn't have to lock my doors at night, but I do. You know, just there's prevention things that you just have to do. If you're going to give up sensory systems of the human body, then, you know, people will exploit that. You know, a lot of women also, they'll do it like in an environment because they don't want to have unwanted male attention. So, they'll have headphones on or something and that's true, that works, that does give you an excuse but it also to the predator, he realizes you're never going to see him coming. You're not going to hear it and he will take advantage of it. So, the real threat you made yourself an easy mark for, the uncomfortable knucklehead who's trying the awkward, hey, how you doing? You know, all that. Okay. Maybe there's just a better way to navigate that without giving up. You know, sensory systems at that point and these are little things like that. Another thing you guys got to think about. I have a very— I can't— since we're filming this, I won't say the name but somebody you'd all recognize, an entertainer of sorts. He had the most expensive house in Vegas and my kids, my girls were friends with his daughter and We used, you know, they used to drop her off and my kids would play with them and everything. So, my wife at the time would drop them off and get in. You go through the whole— it's a triple-gated community, the whole deal. So, it's pretty productive. Well, he was worried because he traveled also a lot and he was worried about his wife and the young daughter. So, he had a safe. He had a safe room in there and the whole thing and his whole idea was— one of the things I thought was very funny.

What?

Was— and this is not a dumb guy, he's a very smart guy— he kept $10,000 cash in the safe room, just in one part of it there. And the idea was the guy comes in, he was just going to give the guy $10,000 cash, you know, slide it through, and he thought $10,000 would go away. He's in a $55 million house filled with everything. The guy, to get through and plan this whole thing for him to be able to do that, you know, he's not going to want 10 grand. You know, at that point. That's it. So, he had all these elaborate plans. He wanted me to take some of my training. He found out what I did, who I had and he said, hey, okay! What I want is I want some of your Special Forces guys to come in. We're gonna do a whole scenario, you know, while my wife's asleep at night one night. I want you guys to come in. We're gonna do this and the whole thing. I'm looking at him thinking, oh yeah, that's a great idea! And so, he's going— it was actually— he's pretty smart and some of the things he was saying Completely wrong way to do it, but you know I let him go, go, go. I said, "Hey, that's great." I said, "But maybe we could start somewhere else." And he goes, "Oh, well what?" And I held up this ticket, little ticket that they give you at the gate when your car goes in. I said, "Two days ago my wife was here dropping the kids off, and then afterwards she went and got her car washed." I said, "And I used her car today, and I found this." In the car. I said, most car washes are populated by who? Ex-felons. And what does this say? His name, not an alias, his name. And you'd know the name and the address and everything on it right there. Maybe we start there. Maybe we do. In fact, I couldn't believe— I had to go. This is one of the wealthiest communities in Vegas, and I had to go to the security Company, go, what the fuck are you guys doing? You're putting this out and they quickly changed it. I will give them that. He really didn't like that answer though. He really didn't. He really wanted to do the whole elaborate, you know, Special Forces thing. And I guess what I'm trying to say to you guys is it's not as hard as you think. There's just basic things. I don't— you don't need to be an expert in violence. You need to be able to do— you don't have to be great at weapons or any of the other things. You just have to be present enough And have enough things around you for a predator to look and say, too much work. Just too much work. Give you one more thing. One of the things I tell people all the time, one of the best things you can have for home protection is a dog. Now, not a Rottweiler, not a pit bull, not anything. The best thing is like a little Pomeranian that won't shut up. And Why do I say this? Okay, so I was training a dog and I had a great dog trainer. He's a great canine trainer that came in and he comes in one day and I could tell he was a little upset and he said, oh man! He goes, yeah! Because he worked with Metro and everything, the cops and he said, oh man! I just saw a horrible thing! And he goes, what was it? He goes, oh, this judge and I heard about it. This judge, he lived again in triple-gated community in Henderson.

Okay!

Very nice area. Home invasion. Came in, tied him and his wife up, beat him to within an inch of his life because he was under the impression that inside the safe that the guy had was a lot of gold and things, which was absolutely not true. There was nothing there. And it was really unfortunate. It was terrible. And the guy, I think the guy had, he retired from the bench and everything because he just never really recovered from that. And they were there.

Wow.

But that wasn't the thing to key on. What was really interesting was a week later, they found the group. It was a group, a gang of like 4 guys that did this. They found where they— their house. And what was really interesting was up on the wall was the map of that community. And there were big X's through lots of places. Common thing in every one of those houses was what? A Bible.

A dog.

A dog. Because you can't defeat— you can defeat a, um, you can defeat a system, a, a, uh, you know, electronic systems, and they don't care about any of that. But one thing that you just can't do is you can't shut up a dog, you know, especially in there. And that'll alert people, and it just makes it that much harder. So why even go there? I'm gonna find only the houses that don't have dogs. So that's what I'm trying to say. It's just little things. It's not You know, people immediately assume that I'm gonna get out here and okay, we're all gonna, you know, sit here. I'm gonna show you how to break everything on the body and so and I do do that. I'm really good at it. That's not my goal with you guys. My goal is to have you really protect yourselves and do that. And so all I'm asking you guys to do is to consider the idea that we're in some uncharted territory that's coming up here. I think a lot of people are gonna be displaced probably in the next couple of years and I think we're gonna see Something's happened because the numbers that are coming right now, as a matter of fact, it was Diamandis that said this and they only say it real quick and then they stop talking about it. But they said something about big layoffs that came off with like the guy that used to run Twitter. He left a bunch of people and they were trying to make excuses that all the layoffs have been because they overhired during COVID and all this other stuff. Kind of true. Well, the other guy said, yeah, but, you know, I've been talking to CEOs of these other companies and they're just tapering it. He goes, next year they're going to lay off another 28% and then they're going to do another, you know, so they're just going to take it over the next couple of years and they're going to try to space it out as much as they can because there's no choice for these guys. If you do not implement these new AI protocols, you're going to be way behind. You're not going to be able to compete with your competitors at this point. So it's this really damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Yeah.

So, my subject matter is worth looking at. Like, I don't— like, if you just read my book, and it's also audio, audiobook, if you just listen to it, the principles and methods that you would get out of there are highly useful. It's not about the physical portion of it. You know, whether you want to do that, it's a whole other thing. You know, if you want to come and do a seminar and stuff, yeah, it's great, and you can do all that. I would highly encourage somebody to do that if you've never done it before. What's really interesting is when we put this program together, the military had a couple of requirements. The military said, hey, we need to be able to— it needs to work with everybody. We need to be able to train all our guys and it has to work with whatever kit they have, you know, like all that stuff and the way I train people, that's what I assume. I assume you're going to be wearing certain, you know, like you'll be wearing business clothes or whatever you're— so you operate The way you train and I train people on all different surfaces and the other thing that's interesting is the biggest training methodologies, the best training methodologies for lethal application of violence is the act— the biggest things in the Spec Ops community. It's now— now they say it crawl, walk, run. In your training, meaning a vast majority of your time should be slow, accurate, correct training first. You train— well, I'll put it this way. Everybody thinks, okay, I got a spar. Well, you know, if I get in a fight, it happens really super fast and I got to do all this other stuff. So, you know, I got to learn how to go fast. Yeah! Yeah! I understand that. When you use this information, you're going to go as hard and as fast as you can. But if I got everybody up right now and I had a bunch of bags that were hanging around there and I said, okay, hey, go punch and kick that as hard and fast as you can, whatever your hard and fast is, that's it. But you can't— can you put it where it counts? Can you put it in the area of the human body where you're going to actually get a result? And most people don't do that. But what's really interesting is when you talk to top, top competitors, I have a little short out there that shows Conor McGregor, Boz Rudin and Mike Tyson, and they're talking about training methodologies that set them apart, and it was all slow, accurate training first. They front-loaded everything with select, just like firearms. You know, there's nothing more chaotic than a firearm. How many people have been trained in firearms? Okay, so you probably trained like me where you got the safety brief. They showed you how to use the gun and then they said, you know what? We're going to put some— we're going to put like some ammunition rounds in there, which are like paintball rounds, really Painful paintball rounds, just think of it that way. And then they took you out to the kill house, they opened up the door and they had the op team in there, 4 other guys in there, and they kicked you in and said, good luck! And everybody started shooting at you. How would you do? Yeah, it would suck, right? You'd learn nothing other than this sucks and I'm never going to do this again. Why do people sit there and what do they do first? Well, if you're with a really good instructor, he will, he will show you all the mechanics and then he will work on Dry firing to make sure first your trigger press is where it's at. When he's satisfied with that, he then may load one round in there, and then you shoot downrange and he'll see how you handle the recoil. Then he'll get that in there. Then once he has that done, he's going to say, okay, can you keep it in an acceptable group, a grouping, you're targeting? And if you can, great. If you can't, you're going to go even slower. Till you get that down. The last thing on any lethal application that you add is speed. Speed is a luxury. Okay? And you guys can relate to this in sport. How many guys golf in here? How many of you guys golf? So when your swing's off, when you sit there, you just swing harder, right?

No.

No, we all slow it down and we get everything in there and you get that slow, accurate, correct. Once you have slow, accurate, correct, you can do everything with that. So again, it's not what we've been told. We've been told that we have to be amazing athletes to be able to use the tool of violence. If that was the case, you should see some of these guys in prison. Talk about unimpressive physical people. Now, there are obviously the guys that you see on the prison shows. There are big dudes, but they're not necessarily— They're not the best fighters. You know, really physical specimens. They're just willing to do it and they know where to put the effort. Okay, they're not any smarter than any of us. They're just willing to do it and they know how to do it. And so what's been really interesting is just like anything else, once I front-load everything with slow, accurate, correct, then everything else becomes easy for people. You know, okay, now I know where to put my efforts and everything. And plus, once you know what happens to the human body, When you start shutting down things, you know you're breaking structure, you're breaking or you're you're you're disrupting a sensory system of the human body. Once that occurs, and you understand that, you go, "Oh, okay, I'm not going to waste my time with all this." You know, you know, non-specific trauma basically. And the easy way, I think I mentioned it earlier. If you know, if you look at the UFC rules. It gives you the code. It's just like when I learned improvised explosives. I went into a Walmart with one of the most famous guys in Spec Ops that teaches improvised explosives, and I was really uncomfortable when I came out of there because, man, you can walk into Walmart, you can grab this, you grab this, and basically it comes to don't mix this with that. Oh, I'll get that, and I'll get that, and I'll get that. And I walked out and I had improvised explosives, and I didn't break any laws. I could buy all that stuff, and we're able to do it. Same thing with what I'm talking about. Look at the UFC rules and just do the opposite on that because that gives you the Rosetta Stone because nobody can take human injury. Nobody can take injury to the human body and the great thing about these areas of the human body that are available to you is it works on everybody, meaning no matter how much I work out, no matter what I do, I can't make my throat any In harm's way. I can't, you know, my ankle and learning how to go after these areas is really a very specific skill set and I have had— I have had the most unlikely people end up using the information and saving themselves and the reason they save themselves— now, if I— if the person that they used it against, the predator they used it against and were successful with, if I took that predator and I took that person and I put them in a ring and I had a ref and the ref said, go, it would have gone horribly for that person. Absolutely horribly. But a predator will, because they don't fear you, they will bring you in because they're trying— they'll try the intimidation portion and they will bring it because they don't think you know anything and that's your one chance. And if you know how to exploit that injury to them, you then just— put systemic injury on the person and you save your own life. Will it— will you look good? No, you look like shit. You look ugly, but you're effective. That'll be the last thing. Peter Drucker had a great, uh, a great, um, um, maxim, and he talked about effectiveness. He defined effectiveness and efficiency, and He defines effectiveness as identifying the right things. Efficiency was doing the right things the right way. I can make somebody effective very quickly. Efficiency is a luxury, meaning you look good doing it. That's a coordination thing. I can work on all that. But the most important thing is you don't want to be—

Efficient.

Efficient and ineffective things. And unfortunately, a lot of the people that are doing this type of training— and again, I'm from the martial arts community, I love these guys— and they are saying, hey, this is something that you can use out in the street. No, it doesn't work out well at all. And a lot of the things that they do, like my discussion with Robert Drysdale, just amazing American jiu-jitsu competitor, just great guy, and he said, he goes, Help! He goes, if I'm really getting into this, I'd never go to the ground because he understands. You assume what? The assumption that I do when I train anybody is— these are the assumptions: multiple attackers. Those attackers are bigger, faster, and stronger, and they carry tools, weapons. Those are the baseline things that I always assume when I'm training somebody because that's the real world. And unfortunately, reality when it comes to violence, oftentimes it's Disappointing and inconvenient. You know, we don't like the reality of it and what we do, but you have to work within that. Now, the last thing I'll leave you with is this, because I know Joe needs to ask me questions for the next hour.

No, no, actually we're a little bit tight. I'm glad you answered all my questions without me having to say a damn thing.

But that's the reason I'm doing that is because You know, I know he just called me. He thought this would be great. And I just wanted to go ahead and share these things. And today, what I love about Genius Network is you can learn so much from other disciplines. And I've learned so many things that I'm gonna apply today to my world, believe it or not, that's there. I will leave you with this one last thing though that I think is really important. I told you that you can learn an awful lot from these predators, these alpha predators. Michael Thompson was one of the founding members of the Aryan Brotherhood. I interviewed him and he tells a story being in Folsom Prison. I believe it was in the late, early '80s. They had a huge— all of a sudden they were just— they found themselves just always either fighting the Mexicans or the blacks or— and the gangs were all fighting all of a sudden. They realized that it was disrupting everything. It was disrupting business. It was disrupting all this other stuff, but there was just all this fomenting of violence and they couldn't understand it. So one day they're out in the yard and they're having it and Michael's just, he's going through this guy. He's very good. And he's in it right away. He's taken out some guys and the guards are up there and he looks up and what does he see? He sees the guards exchanging money to each other. They had been betting on this. They had been fomenting this for their entertainment. And Michael sits there, and so he stops what he's doing. He gets in, and he has a huge booming voice. Ah! Boom! Gets in there. He gets the heads of the gang and goes, "Look at these motherfuckers." Boom! Done. They once they saw what was going on, they realized they're pitting us against each other for this. And look what it's done. It's disrupted because they make all their money, you know, making sure there's a flow of drugs and all of that. And they came in and the guards were ginning them up. So who are our prison guards? Yeah. What are they doing? How many of you guys, when I was a kid, did you ever care about politics? Did you ever care who your mom or dad voted for or who anybody else? Did you not talk to somebody Because they didn't have the right opinion. And he said, where do you think this all comes from? There. Listen, I've had friends from all over. I disagreed with them all the time on stuff, but we were still friends. They're not doing it. We are getting really dangerous with this because they want to keep you feeding. And the problem is the algorithm just changed. You know how you can go in here and you say, hey, this is my interests, show me all this stuff? That's gone. They go off of what you stop and scroll on. So if you scroll on something now, you're gonna get more and more and more and more of that. They're just going to keep feeding it to you because they need to have you on that. So just understand, just like those prison guards that were doing it, we're being manipulated and it is causing violence and it's causing irrational behavior. But if you're aware of it now, you can take action against it and realize—

Don't miss another episode of The Joe Polish Show. Subscribe today at thejopolishshow.com. If you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit thejoepolishshow.com/62. The Joe Polish Show, episode 62.