When Violence Is The Answer: What To Do When Your Life Is At Stake an Interview with Joe Polish and Tim Larkin - Genius Network Episode #83

Is violence ever the answer? In this interview with Tim Larkin, Joe Polish examines this question and more. Topics include saving your life when facing danger and how to know if you should engage or avoid a potentially violent situation. Tim Larkin is the leading pro victim rights and personal safety advocate and inductee into the Black Belt hall of Fame. If you would like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 83 that's geniusnetwork.com 83.

Hello, this is Joe Polish and I'm about to do an interview with a man that I've known for almost 20 years. Maybe more than 20 years, but he's brilliant. The topic is very important and let me just give you his brief bio. As America's leading pro victim rights and personal safety advocate, Tim Larkin is used to his fair share of controversy. After being named the 2001 Self Defense Instructor of the Year and simultaneously inducted into the Black Belt hall of fame, Mr. Larkin ended the year by taking on the UK Home Secretary and getting banned from the UK for his stand on citizens rights to defend themselves from imminent violence currency. Currently, Tim is appealing that decision from the UK government and his speaking engagements have never been more pointed and engaging as violent crime rises and economic weaknesses cause severe cutbacks in police forces in the western world. A former military intelligence officer, Larkin was part of the Beta group that redesigned how special operations personnel trained for close combat. He has a 25 year career where he has trained people in 52 countries in how to deal with imminent violence. Over 10,000 clients are trained in his target focused training. TFT from military special operation units, special law enforcement teams, celebrities and high profile business leaders on how to use physics and physiology to injure any human or humans trying to attack them. TFT is the original reality based fighting system. His numerous magazine covers and articles in the martial arts and self defense industry are as controversial as his pro victim advocate position on self protection. He is a highly sought after speaker.

As well as the media's go to.

Guy on self defense and victims rights. So with that being said, I want to introduce Mr. Tim Larkin.

Hey, good to see you Joe.

You too man. Well, we've known each other a long time.

Yeah, we've done several interviews, we've hung out quite a bit. We have lots of close friends, a lot of mutual friends. And you are a person that has.

A perspective that I don't know any.

Other person in the world that teaches what you do in the way that you do it has the philosophy behind it and is so articulate at explaining a subject that I really could not even begin to approach without someone like you helping to explain violence. And I remember from one of our interviews, I don't know how many years ago, this great line that you have where you say violence is never an option unless it's the only option. And have you changed your viewpoint on that at all since your latest book, When Violence is the Answer has come out?

Yeah, no, that's basically, that's the whole idea. The whole idea behind this is to tell people. Everybody likes to talk about when violence isn't the answer. And we all know that. And understandably so. The more interesting question, I think is when is violence the answer? Because it really is a. It's a survival skill. It's something, it's as basic as learning how to swim, you know, and we all should have an awareness of it. It's kind of like cpr. We all should have an awareness of how to use a tool of violence. And unfortunately, it's been stigmatized so much that the general public really has a poor understanding of it and has basically disarmed themselves for the unthinkable. Basically, we're talking about Black Swan event where they would have to, literally, they'd be devoid of choice and they would have to actually use physical violence to protect themselves. And very few of us understand how to do that. So the challenge with the book was just to kind of introduce the subject, let people know it's okay to look at the subject. Learning about the subject doesn't make you violent, you know, but it is a, you know, my argument is it's a very necessary life skill that most of us, for well meaning reasons, have never looked at. Right, right.

Well, you know, there's a lot of.

Questions I have for you.

I made a list of things, so I make sure I cover a lot of different topics here. Let's step back, though, to how you ended up getting into this. I mean, you have a very interesting background, you have a very interesting life. You have a super cool wife. Tony Robbins, as an example, is a huge fan of yours. I know you've worked with Tony and a lot of his students. I mean, you're the guy that high level CEOs and entrepreneurs and leaders go to for this sort of training. Men and women of all types, most of them, as you say, have unfortunately encountered violence, which gets them to seek you out, seek out your work. But for people watching this, I would love the outcome for them to, for one, understand who you are and, and how to take what it is that you know and understand how they could potentially save their life or the life of a loved one as a result of it. So this is not just an entertaining podcast or video topic on this subject. I would like people to be really impacted by it and I think it's important for them to kind of know what your motivation was for getting into this field in the first place.

Yeah, I was a Navy brat. You know, my dad was an officer in the Navy. We moved all around and when I was about 12 years old, we moved to Coronado, California and we were in Navy housing and the Navy housing literally was right across the street from the Naval Special Warfare base where the SEALs trained. It was, I could literally see the obstacle course from my house and I got introduced to back then and now of course everybody knows who the SEAL teams are. You know, back then in the early 80s, it really wasn't talked about. It was very, very under the radar. Even in the Navy, it wasn't really talked about. So my brother and I got introduced to this and we, we didn't know who these guys were, but we saw, wow, there's this cool job out there where you get paid to blow stuff up, you get to wear really cool shorts, go to the beach, learn how to swim, learn how to, you know, scuba dive, shoot automatic weapons. You know, as a 12 year old kid, that's just incredible, right? Especially if you're a Navy kid. Yeah. So we started hanging out over there. We would jump the fence and we were getting kicked off all the time. I learned all about the job, I was fascinated by it and I decided, well, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a seal. And my dad said, okay, but you have to go through college. You, you know, if you're gonna do it, do it as an officer. And I think he was hoping that I'd outgrow it, but I didn't. Went through just a fast forward through, actually got accepted. There was 2,500 guys that applied for two slots. I had two slots. The year I was there, I got one of the two slots. And the reason I'm saying all this is I'm building up towards this. I literally was so over prepared for the training because literally since 12 years old I had been interacting with the SEALs. And these guys became friends of mine and they told me all about training. So I knew all the secrets, I knew where to hide things. I knew the evolution of training, I knew how to prepare myself. I was really just, just so ready for for the training. I went through training, I flew through it. You know, I was the epitome of bigger, faster, stronger back then. You know, I was, you know, in my 20s. I was just unstoppable. And I threw through every part of SEAL training. It was, you know, all the big evolutions, hell week, and all those things that everybody talks about where they really beat you down, no problem. I was ready for that. I conditioned myself for all the cold water and things like that. I was doing an evolution a couple of weeks before the end of training. And at that point in training, I was the guy in the class that was getting singled out to be the anchorman. That's kind of the guy. That's the number one guy in the class. And I was arrogant. I was, you know, really full of myself. I knew exactly I was getting. We were selecting where we got to go. And because of my standard, my stance in the class, I was able to choose the place that I wanted to go. We're doing something that should have been no big deal dive. I was a little congested that day. You know, my ears were a little bit, you know, congested. But I didn't want to. If I skipped that dive, I would have had to have come back on a Saturday and done the dive. And I had a date on Saturday. So there's no way that was going to happen, right. So I forced myself to do this dive. You know, when I was underwater, I could feel the pressure was really bad in my ears at that point, but I pushed through. And we were, what we were doing, we were tying on explosives onto these obstacles. We were simulating an amphibious landing. You'd go in there, traditional SEAL UDT mission. Done it throughout training, numerous times. No issues this time. You know, like I said, I pushed it. There are waves on top of the water that you see, but also you have waves come, you know, underneath the water. So I'm underneath, tying on this stuff, and I feel a wave of water hit my ear. And when it hit my ear, it literally burst my eardrum. Burst my eardrum. Ice cold water from the Pacific went shooting up in the middle of my brain. Emptied out. As it was emptying out, I felt warm liquid leaving my. My, my brain. And as soon as it came out of my ear, all of a sudden I lost all sensation of balance. What had happened was it burst the eardrum, went into semicircular canal, which is kind of like our, our balance system, our gyro balance, and it emptied out everything. So I had no. I went into vertigo and had no sensation of balance. I lost total control of my body. Luckily there was the rope that was hanging down from the, from the IBS boat that was up ahead. I grabbed onto that, I could feel it. And I pulled myself up. But I thought I was pulling myself 45 degrees towards the bottom of the ocean. It was just incredible. They said when I got to the top my head was slapping against the water uncontrollably, blood coming out of my ears. They pulled me up and here I was this epitome of the ultimate trainee. At that point I had everything going for me. I saw the corpsman that was there. He quickly looked at my ears. He pulled out one of the little scopes that you could look in. I could tell by the look on his face it was bad. As soon as I got onto land, the docs looked at me and I could tell just by their response I was done. That was it. My ears were done. And so I went from top of the food chain to literally this pariah. Because in that it's a shark tank, you know, that you're, that you're in when, when you're competing in the, you know, in the SEAL or any special operations group. And injury is seen as a weakness. But that was somewhat change in me. This is the first time in my life I ever lost control of my body that I ever had something happen to me physiologically where I, it had nothing to do with my will, had nothing to do being tough, had nothing to do with anything. I had no ability to control myself and get myself out of it. It was the first time I had true injury to the human body. At that time it was devastating. But it was really the seminal change in my life. It was where I understood that hey, bigger, faster, stronger can easily be taken out if you understand injury to the human body. And that was really the path that kind of led me down the road. And it was one of those things, you know how you always, people always say be careful what you ask for. I had always been interested in hand to hand combat. I'd been interested in this kind of stuff. This was just the most. It was almost like the world, the universe is telling you, hey, we had a plan for you. You're going to do it this way, you're not going to do it the way you want to do it. So I went from being this 21 year old kid who thought he was going to be the ultimate Seal Team 6 guy to I had no idea what I was going to do. Now they liked me, they kept Me in the community. I became an officer and got introduced, went to a command I had no business being and stayed in special warfare in the SEAL teams, worked for the number one admiral of the SEAL teams who ran everything. They put me on the command, they kept me in the community, not as a seal, but as an intelligence officer. They trained me. And that's where on that command with all these senior guys, they started looking at the world differently and they started looking at the fact that the Berlin Wall had come down, we're not fighting the Russians anymore. Now we got this. They predicted what's going on today, they predicted the wars that we're having today. And they realized that they had to change tactics. And that's when they started looking at hand to hand combat. And that's how I kind of got into, you know, what I'm doing now. I had had a martial arts background growing up, you know, being a Navy kid, you always, every base you went to, the Marines or somebody was doing, you know, some form of martial arts, you know, and I saw, I had taekwondo, Tang Soo do, judo, American boxing, you know, western boxing, all of that background. And they liked me, the senior guys liked me. So here I was with the legends of the SEAL team, this, you know, young officer with no experience whatsoever. And they were dragging me around and letting me meet all these world class martial artists and everybody that they were looking at because they realized hand to hand combat, putting hands on people was going to happen with the combat troops. And that's how this whole thing started. I, because I had good relationships with, you know, as a young intelligence officer, it was my job to outreach to all the different communities. So I had to do dea, all the agencies, you know, I had to reach out to them and have interactions. One of the guys that I was pretty close with was a DEA agent and he knew we were doing this hand to hand combat search. We were kind of saying, hey, we need to upgrade our tactics. He called me up one day and he said, hey. He goes, you still doing that punchy, kicky stuff? He thought it was pretty funny because back then, you know, this is pre ufc, this is pre mma. So it's hard for us to remember what it was like, you know, really nobody was really training that much, you know, the way they do now. There's so many great options now. Back then it was really limited. And back then the idea was, well, if you're doing hand to hand combat, you failed in your mission anyways. You know, they didn't understand that the world was changing. So he says to me, still doing that punchy, kicky stuff? I said, yeah. He goes, hey, well, a couple of our guys went to this guy in Pacific Beach. Now, you gotta understand, we're bringing people in from all over the world. I'm in San Diego, I'm living in Pacific beach, which is a beach area of San Diego. And this guy's telling me, he goes, you should go check out this guy who literally was less than a mile away from my apartment. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. He goes, no, no. He goes, you'll like the guy. He goes. He goes. He's, you know, he basically. He said something. He goes, he's a, you know, a jerk, basically. And he goes, but you get along with people like that. And I knew what he went. What he meant was, I found the people that have the best information oftentimes are socially difficult to deal with. They have. They're impatient with a lot of people. They don't suffer fools. And if you handle that abrasive personality, you can get a lot of great information right from them. You just can't take it personally. And I was fine with that. And he nailed this guy. He was that. I went by the studio. It was closed when I first went there, but I recognized he had a little like tri folder that was taped up on the wall. It's just like a 900 square foot place. It was nothing impressive. And he told his background and he was a Vietnam vet. And the unit that he was from is what got me to go back to meet him. Because the unit he was in was a highly decorated combat unit that was left out in the jungle. It was an experimental unit they left out there a lot. And I knew they had seen a lot of combat. And I said, well, it'd be worth it for me to go back. Sure enough, I walk back and I'm just in my civilian clothes, you know, I look like just a typical kid, you know, you know, surfer kid. And I walk in and I walk in and these guys are wearing GI's. They're wearing like traditional GIs. But what's going on on the floor is nothing like I've ever seen. It looked like a prison riot. Guys were just hitting each other. All of a sudden a knife would come out of nowhere. They were doing what looked like which absolutely simulated real violence as I had seen it. You know, my background, my grandfather was a south from Boston. My uncles were tough guys. And I had seen real violence growing up as a kid. And this training was the only thing that actually looked like what I really saw on the streets. It wasn't me as a kid, it was my uncles. My uncles were very, very comfortable using violence against people if they needed to. And it fascinated me, the way this guy trained. It was completely different from anything I'd ever seen. The methodology and everything that was the nexus. And this guy focused. And the other thing I realized was this guy was focusing on injury to the human body. He was, he was the first guy that I ever met other than the predators that I would leave, I would meet later. You know, for this book I interviewed a lot of the predators from the, from the, you know, the penitentiaries. He was the first guy that stopped looking at the differences in a human being. Like, you and I would sit there, if we saw like a guy like, you know, Dwayne Johnson comes in here right now, right, we'd be, oh my God, look how much bigger he is, look how much stronger he is. You know, we were talking about Tony Robbins earlier, just what a physical being they are. And most people when see another human when it comes to physical, they notice the differences. Somebody that really understands the tool of violence looks at all humans from a perspective of the similarities. And that's the real difference. The real difference is we realize we all, it doesn't matter what the body type is, we all have similar weaknesses, similar areas. And that's really the crux of how it's really the Rosetta Stone. Injury to the human body really is the Rosetta stone to your own self protection. And the cool thing about it is we all are capable of doing it. But the difficulty is how can I take a same socialized individual and talk about the tool of violence in a way that they understand that it's a useful skill set and a life skill set and it doesn't make them a criminal. That's the challenge.

You know, here's the thing. So I've read and listened to your book. It's recorded in your voice if you want the audio version. And the book is When Violence is the Answer. Learning how to do what it takes when your life is at stake. And you've got some really important people giving endorsements for it. It's a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. I almost look at this book as life insurance. And there's so many thousands of people that go through the variety of martial arts training, self defense training, boxing, jiu jitsu, I mean, you name it. I mean, it's become a very big thing having their kids go to it with this whole Notion of protecting yourself in a situation. And I can't imagine how much better anyone going through any sort of training would be prepared mentally if they read your book first. Like every school that's out there, that is with the intention of helping people to not get killed in a situation would be well served to read this book, to recommend this book. And when I first started reading, I was like, because I've been through your training, it's phenomenal. I was like, how in the hell is he going to be able to describe things with words that would actually. And now I'm like, man, I want to go through your training again after having read the book because of the foundation. I mean, you do such a great job of mentally preparing someone as much as I think a person possibly could with words about how to think about violence. You know, the difference between social aggression and asocial behavior, which I want you to describe. But before I get ahead of myself, let me just, you know, kind of stick to. Because I've thought through the questions I wanted to ask you for the listeners, is why did you write the book? What was your motivation behind it other than, you know, yeah, it's important for your business and your, you know, this is what you do. But what was your goal with the book and what do you. Why did you want this out there? I mean, even talk about it, even for your children? But I mean, what was your reasoning for the book? Because it's a book that a lot of people that don't, you know, that judge a book by the COVID like, what the hell are you doing writing a book like this?

Yeah, oh, my publisher, you know, it was, it was a big battle. We were battling over using the word violence in the title. And I understood why. When you say something like fight, you know, you can fight with your friend, you can fight with your wife, you can fight with your boss. You know, fight is a very non specific term. You know, it's a comfortable term for people, but it's really imprecise. When you say violence, everybody understands. And that's really, that's what, that's what we are facing. You know, that's. That's the only time when it would ever be worthwhile for us to know how to protect ourselves is if we're really facing imminent bodily harm, imminent grievous bodily harm violence. And I want to be very specific with that. And it was funny. It wasn't until I was arguing with my publishers back and forth and it wasn't until the Pulse nightclub shooting happened and then we had multiple shootings after that when they got it and they, and then they became big proponents of the title after that. And they said, yeah, they said it's a very clear title and you're right, we should use that. The main impetus for me in writing the book is my client base is made up of 70%. 70% of the people that come to see me have had some interaction with violence. They've had either something happen to them personally in their life, they've already had violence come into their life. Only 30% of the people are proactive and come prior to anything ever happening in life. And my goal with this is to reach. If you don't know who I am, that's probably a good thing. Most people come to me after the fact and I can't undo that. I can't undo something that's already happened to you. And the goal in writing the book was to reach everybody. I can only, you know, I've trained lots and lots of people over the years, but it's just a drop in the bucket. I'm never going to be able to reach everybody. But the methods and the principles in the book, I can get out to a lot of people. And luckily with technology, doing interviews like this and getting out to large audiences, like your audience, I have a chance of reaching somebody who maybe has never even thought of the subject before. And I can put it in a way that is understandable to them and interesting to them and also take the irrational fear away from learning of the subject because we all think we're helpless. And what I've learned over the years is the most difficult things for people to wrap their heads around is that we as a species, you know, are pre wired to do violence. We're very good at it. That's why we're here. Not because we're not, you know, able to evolve above it. But if we had to be bigger, faster and stronger to be the number one species on earth, it wouldn't be us. You know, I mean, I joke with people all the time. I'll say to classes, I'll have a seminar and I'll say, hey, how many people here want to jump in a 10 by 10 cage with a 65 pound mountain lion that hasn't eaten for two days? And nobody, you got some really big dudes in there. Nobody wants to take that challenge. Because we recognize animals are much more physically adept than we are. What makes us dangerous is our brains and our ability to work together and create tools and do things. And our greatest source of Protection is correctly training our brain on how to use this information. And that's the goal of the book. And it's also to open the subject, to take the stigma away from it. Meaning that we've stigmatized the study of violence so much that the only people that have it available to them readily are the predators. Right. And it's really an inherent right that we all have, and we all should have an understanding of how to use the tool. Just like most parents want their kids to. When they train their kids to get swimming lessons, it's not to become Michael Phelps. They don't want their kids to drown. You know, and it's a very different approach than, say, combat sports or martial arts. You know, when we're talking about violence or self protection, it's very different. Combat sports and martial arts, for the most part, have a very different goal. Some people think it's, you know, a path to self protection. And it can be, you know, there are some effective things, but usually it's based in some sort of a competition. So it's a very indirect path to violence. And to be able to have a competition with violence, you have to take out injury to the human body. It's the only way it can happen. So the rules that you have, like in the ufc, like, I think the last time I looked, it was there's 31 rules, 27 of them were outlawing injury to the human body because there's no place in athletic competition to deliberately maim, cripple, or truly injure somebody. That's not the goal. Downside of that is when your life is on the line and you have somebody who is bigger, faster and stronger coming at you, you absolutely want to be able to use injury to the human body. And if you have this indirect path that combat sports or martial arts has, you probably aren't going to get the results that you want.

Let me ask you a question about that, too. So is there disadvantages to spending a lot of time training for competitive, say, martial arts? Because you're doing it for exercise, you're doing it for competition, but you're not doing it to actually, as you describe injury and stopping and hurting, maiming, killing someone if need be. Is the brain getting programmed to end those most violent situations? Meaning, I guess, another way of asking to the same question, would you rather have someone that's never gotten any training at all for this sort of thing, or someone who, I mean, what are the pros and cons?

Yeah, it's always great when I have a blank slate. If I Have a blank slate and somebody who has intent, they want to protect themselves. They're easy to train that way. That said, some of my best, you know, I'm out of Vegas, and so I have a lot of UFC competitors that are friends of mine, really good dudes. I have tons of people in competitive martial arts and sports. I have tremendous respect for it. That's where I originally come from. So it's not that one is better than the other. It's the right tool for the right application. I can take a really well trained MMA guy and in very short order introduce him to injury to the human body, which he has a basic understanding of for the most part, but he doesn't directly train it all the time. As soon as you show him, you know, how to apply that, they're phenomenal athletes. They're great guys, and they pick it up very quickly. They're the first ones to come to me and say, hey, Tim, I feel really comfortable in the ring doing this, this, and this, but if the knife comes out or this, you know, I'm not really sure what to do. They're extremely honest with themselves on that.

Are you the best in the world at this particular category? How would you describe that?

I think I provide people with the most direct path. I think that's one thing that I do. I see a lot of competitors that are out there and some great guys, and I'm friends with a lot of them. But I have to say, the methods and principles that I. That I put out, I feel are the most direct path to a human being facing grievous bodily harm. I think the way that I communicate it and the way I can train somebody will get them the most direct result that they're looking for. But I'm a very small. That's my. That's my one area. It's a very narrow window that I'm good at.

Right, right. And when I say that, I don't mean, like, look, there's. There's a lot of amazing people that are friends of yours, and you reference them and you credit them and all. I mean, you're very good about, you know, directing people who are amazing. It's just for someone who's out there actually teaching people that they can go to.

To learn it.

I mean, you and I probably didn't even set up as much of a credibility that you actually have in this area. I mean, how long you been doing this now?

Yeah, almost. I'm coming closer than I want to for 30 years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is it funny?

It's crazy.

I just turned 50 years old.

It's crazy to think how long we've known each other because I remember yesterday, but. Yeah. And I think the way to say it, and I appreciate you saying that I do believe and just from the great people that have given me. I mean, a guy like Gavin de Becker, who's world class and then I also have, you know. Well, Steve Pressfield knows every warrior there is. He was great. But you know, guys like that that I really respect have said things. You know, Dave Grossman, who wrote On Killing and stuff and he's very, very well known law enforcement and also, you know, commentator on violence. Just loved the directness of the book. I've had people who really like it. Very few people have looked at this subject this way and.

Yeah, I've never read a book quite like this. It's fascinating.

Yeah, it's the book I've always wanted to write and I have to give it to Little Brown, my publisher. They had the guts to put it out there and they really didn't censor me too much. There were some things I had to change, but it didn't take away from the essence of the book. I think it said it everything. The first international rights that I sold was Israel was the first and Russia was the second.

Wow.

They were the first two that grabbed the international rights and that said everything to me was as soon as they got was there. Because they're very. They're two cultures that are very, very well versed in violence and not in. I want people to understand this isn't advocating violence. This is really putting it in a. You know, my goal with having this conversation is I don't want to turn people into super ninjas or anything. What I want them to do is I want them to avoid the avoidable. I want them to be able to have a great life. I want them to minimize the chance of violence ever coming into your life. A buddy of mine in the industry, Tony Blauer, you know, I take from him all the time. He's a really good thinker on this. And Tony and I, we go back and forth all the time. And he's a very funny guy. One night in, you know, one. One flight and I get it. I've traveled all over the world just like he has. You get, you know how it is. You travel all the time. You know how sometimes somebody just wants to have a conversation with you on a flight and you just, you just want to sleep or you just want to relax. Some woman engaged Tony, and she Said to him, she says, oh, I've always wanted to learn self defense. And Tony is just ornery and he's just, you know, low energy. And he just looked at her, he goes, now you do. You don't want to learn because if you did, you'd be like me. You'd be training all the time. It would be something that you want to do. He said, what you probably want is you probably want to learn to live a life where you minimize the chance of ever needing self defense. Now, I can help you with that. And I thought that was one of the best ways I've ever heard it put. Because that's exactly what I do. I want people to come to me. Not, you know, it's rare to do what I do. It's rare to take it and still be passionate after 30 years of doing it. I mean, my favorite people to train are brand new people, you know, and I've taken it far beyond what you need for your basic self protection. Most people, what I want them to do is I just don't want them to. They make such avoidable mistakes. They. They make us something. In this world of technology that we have, which is so amazing, we're living in the most amazing time, I feel it's my job to remind people every so often, hey, you still live in a physical world, and the threat of a bigger, faster, stronger individual forcing their will on you is probably still the base fear that we all have. And never in the history of, you know, at least in the United States, have we been more unprepared for that eventuality. If something happens, if the Black Swan event comes, most, you know, and I'll. I can speak worldwide, but I'll just keep it to America. Right now, most Americans really have a response for this. You know, they don't know how to deal with it.

No, not at all. And if you don't know how to deal with it and you actually talk about, you know, a woman in the book that came near event, after Bonnie, I think was her name, you know, experiencing, you know, a violent situation and then having it happen again, but just where she was because she showed up the first one with, you know, PTSD and just really shaken up. But after going through your training and then and being in a situation where someone tried to attack her again, she actually knew how to handle it and it didn't psychologically damage her. And with what you're saying that we're still living in a physical world, we are so secluded from this, from the standpoint of how to Deal with it. Although it's all over movies, it's all over entertainment, it's all over video games, it's all over the news. I mean, we see it all the time, but to actually experience it are completely different things. Hopefully no one ever has to. But the reality is, you may. And I remember early on, I won't say his last name, but our friend Brian, I remember talking to him about coming to one of your events because he had been in a situation with his wife. And I can't even remember the exact details of it, but a person in a car literally just went off on them, got out of a car, and.

He was in a.

And he's a strong guy, lifts weights, big guy. And he just didn't know what to do. And at that moment, he's like, damn. I mean, I could have really gotten killed or hurt or my family. And just what it did psychologically, I mean, when someone. That's the thing that people don't really see from movies. Like, if someone's put into a situation, what it does to them mentally could literally damage them for years. I mean, the trauma. And so I think what you are providing is. It's not something that you're. I mean, people totally misinterpret what you're about. I mean, you are a guy that will de. Escalate and avoid any sort of confrontation or violence, put your ego to the side no matter what, unless you're in a situation where your life is at risk or, you know, and then what the hell do you do? And most people watching this or listening to this would have no clue. And that's why I want to do the interview with you, so we can say, okay, so, you know, here's a reality of life here. I mean, hell, I don't want to. I don't want to go and get in fights. I don't want to be in any sort of situation. But what I do want to be is mentally and physically prepared, you know, as possible, if that ever happens. And I want that for my, you know, for my listeners.

Yeah. And that. So when you look at something like, that's great, we can use Brian's situation. Brian is super successful business guy. We both. We both know. Yeah. Aggressive negotiator. Yeah. All those skill sets that. That really helped him achieve the success that he had. He took those outside of the business world and he applied them in the general world. And when he did that, he got this disproportionate response. He was under the impression when the guy had cut him off. And he was under the impression that they had this social contract where this was a verbal altercation. This guy went immediately to physical. And Brian was shocked because the guy could easily see that Helene, his wife, was pregnant. You know, she's very pregnant at that point. And Brian was just shocked. What really hit him was he realized at that one time, he goes, I got nothing in the toolbox for this.

Yeah.

And what's great is the skill sets that you receive through this. The reason I'm very specific about people understanding what it takes to survive something like that is that you then back up. Because everybody that has had to use the information that I know or has had something happen to them will always tell me about that one, one point where they knew it was going wrong, where they knew it was going on. But because either they were socially, it would have been socially awkward for them to disengage or they felt that, well, I can't, my ego can't let me get out of this at this point. You know, even though the body is non verbally screaming at them that something's wrong, they then end up in the situation. My goal is to educate people to the idea that, you know, the only time violence would ever be something that I would respond, you know, I would respond with violence is it would have to pass what I always call my three day test. Three day test is if I go ahead and escalate this and take this to the next level and actually physically protect myself or go after this person, am I okay three days from now if I'm sitting in a jail cell or if I'm six feet under debt, would I say that I was devoid of choice? There was nothing else I could have done. You know, there's no way I could have gotten myself out of this situation. And very few things pass that test, you know, and it's really something that you have to think about ahead of time. That's why it's so important that people understand the subject and they really understand what do you have to respond to and what do you not have to respond to? And Brian willingly got him into an altercation, willingly got into an altercation that he could have, he could have got himself out of it any time at that point. He could have disengaged, he could have just let the guy have his day. We don't know who the other person is we're dealing with. I used to tell people, I used to do a thing where putting a knife to somebody's neck and we talked about how you negotiate and what you do. And I'd say, great. You think that would work great. When was the last time you put somebody's. A knife to somebody's neck and ask them for their wallet and their watch and they're. I've never done that. Exactly. So you have no idea what's going on outside that person's head. You don't know what you're dealing with, this disproportional response. We have to understand that, you know, you want to go through life with the idea that it's going to sound extreme, but I literally go through life with people I haven't met before. I treat everybody outside of my circles, my social circles, as somebody who potentially is six seconds away from a shooting spree. And I don't want to be the person to set them off. So how would you interact with somebody like that? Well, you'd be overly polite, you'd be conciliatory. You'd be. In that you wouldn't do anything to aggravate the person unnecessarily. There's just no reason to do that. And by taking the extreme example like that, you avoid so much potentiality to ever get yourself in a situation like this.

Let me ask you to define. Because you've talked about it, but you refer to violence as a tool.

Yes.

And so what's your definition of violence? And any myths that exist that people believe are true, but you just know they're not.

So when I say violence as a tool, that's to help people out. Because the stigmatization of the word violence is. There's no good information there. There's nothing. I don't want to learn anything about violence, because violence, they equate with crim. And so a story to help that is if you imagine, say, a young mom who is cleaning up. She's put her baby to bed upstairs. Her husband's on a business trip. And as she's cleaning up in the office, in the kitchen, guy bursts through the back door and attacks her when he comes in. Obviously he's been staking out the place and stalker and he's gonna try to assault her. Gets her up against the sink, he's attacking her. She realizes this guy's bigger, faster and stronger. She doesn't have the power to overwhelm him, but she knows she has to do something. She's thinking about her young child upstairs. So she tries to defend herself. She flails at him, she scratches deeply into his face, which absolutely enrages this guy. He gets even more violent at that Point. He looks over, he sees the butcher's block that has the chef's knife. He grabs the chef's knife, he plunges it inside of her neck. Her eyes roll up. It's over in seconds. She's dead. We as society would agree, that's a horrific act. There's no way that this guy should ever see the light of day. If there's a death penalty in that municipality, he probably deserves it. But in bare minimum, he should never be out of prison for such a heinous act. So let's rewind that same thing. She's cleaning up, everything's there. He bursts through the door again, attacks her. He's bigger, he's faster, stronger. She's realizing he's choking the life out of her at this point. He's trying to reach down and undo the drawstring to her sweats. And she looks back, she sees that same butcher's block, grabs the chef's knife. She takes the chef's knife, she plunges it in the side of his neck. His eyes roll up, it's over in seconds. He's dead. This time, as it's a horrible act. But we as society look at that and we say, well, she should be protected to the full extent of the law. She did everything to protect herself and her young child. This guy was going to assault her and God knows what he would have done. But she should be held up as kind of a beacon of somebody who is trying to protect herself and prevent a horrible act of violence happening. What we need to understand is we need to understand that the knife to the side of the neck worked each time. It didn't matter whether it was the good guy or the bad guy. It was merely a tool. Violence is merely a tool. How you use the tool will be determined whether or not it was a justified use of the tool, which will be ruled as self defense or a legal use of the tool, which will be the judge's murder, and you'll be dealt with accordingly. But the tool itself is really inert and it's available to everybody. And that's kind of the way I try to get people to look at the subject. Learning it doesn't make you a bad person learning how to use a tool because you're not, you know, it's how you would use the tool. But the problem is we have basically, we basically as a society, decided to disarm ourselves and solely turn this over to the predator class. And so that our effective use to protect ourselves has gone really out the door because we don't know how to access the tool of violence. So that's one of my main motivations, is to try to change the methodology. The way we think about the actual subject matter, as disconcerting as it is, it's the same reason that we don't, you know, we learn to swim because we don't want to drown. Nobody wants to think about drowning, so we learn to swim. Same thing with violence. You know, we don't want it just to be used unilaterally on us. We should be able to use the same skill sets to protect ourselves.

Yeah. And that is so not how most people think about this subject. So how does someone ultimately prevent. Prepare for, you know, survival in a life or death, you know, violent situation?

We have to get out of the idea that, you know, we. We've been told basically by media and. And now with the proliferation of, like, the UFC and everything, you see these amazing physical athletes, or we see prison dramas or whatever, and you see these, you know, incredibly violent criminals. And we think that learning to protect yourself is really only for the physically elite. So we tell ourselves, well, I will. You know, you look at a UFC event and you go, wow, I could never do that. Therefore, I can't, you know, I can't protect myself. But what I try to tell people is most of what they're watching is they're watching competition. And competition is a very different skill set than destruction. And the way I like to explain it for people is if we came in here and we had a beautiful block of Italian marble, and I had a random group of people in here, and I said, hey, here's Michelangelo's David. Here's the empty block. I need you to carve. Michelangelo's David. Probably nobody in the room even has skill sets to approach even approximation of what, you know, Michelangelo's David could do. They couldn't. They could chip away all they wanted, but they don't have the artistic skills to do that. That's essentially what competitive, you know, combat sports are. It is something that is tightly controlled. It requires extreme athleticism, training. There's very rigid rules that are applied to it. You have weight classes, you have all these things, and really very few people are going to raise to the ranks to where they could ever compete in that world. But if I stayed that same group and we looked at that marble and I gave everybody sledgehammers, and I said, okay, nobody gets lunch until this thing's a pile of rubble, we'd all quickly be able to figure out how to throw the sledgehammer and reduce that to a pile of rubble. And that's really what destruction is. And when you're looking at protecting yourself, it's the skill sets of destruction. And we're all capable of doing that. We're all already hardwired to do that. But what we have to do is we have to learn where on the human body to put our efforts. And like you were talking about, you know, Bonnie earlier, you know, here's this completely unlikely woman who once she had the skill set, she had the Rosetta stone to look at, to say, oh, okay, I need to look at all these similar areas on all humans that nobody can take trauma. And if I know how to do this, then I can get a result, regardless of whether or not this guy's bigger, faster, and stronger than me. What I try to do with people is it's not a competition situation. It's where a predator gives them an opportunity because they don't think you have any skills. They don't think you're able to hurt them, and they will put a vulnerable part of them near you. And now you have the skill sets to know how to exploit that. And that's really what it's all about. And that's really how people have been able to survive. Some of the most unlikely people that I've ever trained. Yeah.

What are a couple stories that stand.

Out, A couple that I use in the book? You know, one is I had a girl that I did a YPO cruise. So Young Presidents organization rented a whole cruise ship, and it was a family cruise, and they had asked me to do a special training. I was already doing regular trainings on it, but that's me do a special training because a lot of young girls were on there that were getting ready to go to college, and a lot of the dads were worried. So I did a father daughter program where I had a bunch of dads and their daughters attend training. And, you know, I did it prior to them going off to college. And. And very few of the girls really wanted to do the training because, of course, they're on this amazing cruise ship, and there's all these other things they could be doing, but they came in for a couple hours and they did it. One in particular is one girl. I knew her dad, you know, through ypo, and I never met her before, but I met her, and she literally was the epitome of Reese Witherspoon's character in Legally Blonde. She was that girl very smart, but very, very la, you know, and she did not want to be there. But to her credit, got through the whole thing, and I didn't think anything of it. You know, the cruise went on, everything. Everybody did great. I'm in New York about two, three years after she comes traipsing in with her three sisters, her three younger sisters. In my training, I had no idea she was coming in. She goes, I don't know if you remember me. I said, yeah, hey, how's your dad doing? She goes, oh, great. She goes, you didn't hear what happened? I go, no, I haven't talked to your dad since the cruise. And. And she said, oh. So then she tells me she went freshman year to college, was with her roommate. She had one of those beds. They each had those beds that a lot of college kids have that have the desk underneath and the bed, like a loft bed, you know, had hardwood floors at their dorm. She wakes up in the middle of the night to this guy on top of her, okay? And he's pulling down the covers and he's holding. And her first thought, she told me, she goes. The first thing she goes, is like, you were in my ear. She said, I knew he wasn't close enough. You know, I knew. I only. She goes, I knew I only had one move. I only had one opportunity to change things in my favor by getting an injury in this guy. And this was something that had been well over, like, I think probably a year and a half since she'd had the training. She'd never trained since. But because she had the principles and she understood, she immediately realized, because your brain. And when something like this happens, and this is why it's so important for people to have some form of training. And I equate it to the idea of, you know, people think, like, becoming a doctor versus learning cpr. Well, self protection is cpr. Everybody can learn it. And that's basically what this course was that she went through. And she realized the guy wasn't close enough, and she had to wait. Now, imagine that you're being pinned down instead of freaking out like most people do, and rightfully so. This girl just got calm and realized, okay, he's too far away for me to do something. He had to adjust because, you know, we had done the scenario of, you know, specifically, I will with women. I will do rape profiles with that. And she understood. He's going to have to adjust, and he's going to have to bring himself closer if he wants to try to assault me. And sure enough, he tried to pull the covers down as he got there. He brought his head closer to her. And that's when she acted. She said, the only thing I saw was his eye. And I knew I could get that. She wrapped her head. She wrapped her arm around the back of his head, and she went right in. She gouged his eye. Well, the guy was, you know, she's probably about 110 pounds soaking wet. This guy is about 230, 235. When she affected the injury, he violently pulled back. Not violently, like, hit her or anything, but violently pulled back from the trauma of his eye being attacked. Pulled her literally off, off the bed. So she goes off the bed. She hits the floor. She hits the floor. Her forearm goes right across his throat. At that point, all her weight, her 110 pounds, lands on top of him. And she said, I could feel the cartilage crunch and crush. And I felt him kind of exhale and release. You know, there's just there. And then she got up, ran right out and was screaming, you know, down the hall. By the time they cut back, the guy had asphyxiated and died. Security checked it out. Serial rapist. They'd been looking for this guy for a while. It was on a college campus. He specifically would target women. And he found out that he had been watching her for weeks. And she got into her patterns and everything. He realized how they always. She's on a ground floor dorm room, leaves the window unlocked all the time. He knew the whole pattern on this, and, you know, she was able to do it. But the interesting part for me was every one of my clients, when they come back, they have a similar story where they saw one part of the human body that they knew they could get to, that they got from the training, and that was their sole focus. And what people don't understand is I'm a. You know, if you look at me, I'm about 235, and I fit that same profile that her attacker fit. When she attacked the eye, it wasn't her using her physical force to move him away. It was him, all of his muscles, throwing his body away. We do all the work when we get injured, you know, and we've all experienced this. If you touch that hot surface on a stove, it's your hand that comes pulling off. It's not the stove making you do that. If you've ever had, like, a fly hit you in the eye. And it's funny when people. When they have those people, because they dramatically go back and pull the right. The fly didn't do that. Your musculature and Your reaction to the trauma did that. You know, the minor trauma that you got there. Well, it's the same thing with this. You know, the. The person being injured does all the work, and what you're doing is you are taking away their bigger, faster, stronger status because their body is betraying the brain, is basically betraying the body, the body's betraying the brain. He. They no longer have control over their body because they're solely focused on the injury, which was what happened to me when my ears got burst. For the first time in my life, I had no control over my body. It didn't matter what my will was or anything else. I was responding to trauma to the human body, and that's what happened with her attacker. But if you had asked me at the time when we did that class, who's the one kid that you hope has a pass? I would have picked her, just like I would have picked Bonnie, who you're talking about, who got attacked at the Home Depot. On it. These are two people. The one thing I tell a class is, you know, usually I got anywhere from 40 to 60 people in a typical seminar. And I always tell people somebody here is going to have to use the information. Statistically, I can't predict who it is. And every time I try to predict it, I'm always wrong who it is. But that's why I make sure that when they go through the training that they're very deliberate. They understand the difference between, you know, sole social and asocial, and that we keep in a very asocial environment, meaning no communication. There's no. Like, if you go to a. Like, I have a great MMA gym right by me. My buddy owns it, and all the top competitors, when they come to town, they all train there. They play the best music. It is so awesome to see these competitors who are out there just, you know, working on all their moves, whether it be jiu jitsu or punching, striking. We tie whatever they're doing. And there's such camaraderie. These guys, you know, they'll. They'll really go at each other, but afterwards, they're helping each other up. They're doing everything. If you then went across the street to my place, you'd see people training. They're breaking things. They're simulating breaking things. On the human body, it's completely silent. There's no music. There's nothing other than the bodies hitting the mats that you'll see that there's no laughing, there's no social interaction. Because when you face the type of violence that we're talking about. That's exactly what it is. It's devoid of communication. There is no communication when somebody is attacking you. Therefore, what you're talking about, I need to install that in the right place. And that's where combat sports sometimes can be. You're not necessarily installing things for the asocial event, you're installing them for the competitive event.

Describe social aggression and asocial. I love the way that you describe it in the book because that just even that understanding, it kind of reminds me of this. I don't. I think it was Gary Halbert that said, you know, the reason you can't negotiate with a terrorist is they got nothing to lose.

Right.

You know, and so the way that you describe it is how I respond or how someone watching this or listening to this will respond to the world. You take a person who just wants to kill you, hurt you, get whatever, what. You're the obstacle and it doesn't matter. There's no compassion involved. That's understanding that this exists. And if you ever confront it or be confronted by it, if you choose to respond to the person and try to negotiate the way that you would, you're dead. Or you could be. So if you could define that.

Yeah. Antisocial aggression is what most of us think we need to respond to with violence. It's really funny. Like, people want to respond, you know, if somebody. When I hear people say things like, oh, this guy, you know, you know, knocked into me and didn't apologize and so I got in his face and back and forth. That's antisocial aggression. Eminently avoidable. Meaning you can de. Escalate. You have to choose to respond to it. You have choice. And if you choose to respond to antisocial aggression, sure. Could it lead to asocial violence? Yes, it could. It could lead to that. But there's still communication going on at that point. It's unpleasant communication, but it's communication. Asocial is devoid of communication. It's a difference. If you ever watch like natural Geographic or any of those things where you see like. Like the two lions or the two males in any pride of lions or something trying to, you know, there's a lot of displays, you know, trying to take over the pride and stuff like that. What's really interesting is, you know, they. They're roaring each other, they're bowing up, they're knocking each other. They're not really trying to hurt each other. They're not deliberately trying to injure each other. And it's A very huge physical display, you know, basically trying to run one off the territory. That's a lot of what goes on in antisocial aggression, especially when you tip the typical thing that you see at a club or, say, a bar where there's too much alcoh involved and just a lot of bluster that's going on. It can lead to violence, but, you know, that's not necessarily why it's happening. You take that same lion, and then you watch it actually hunt. When it's actually going after prey, it's completely silent. It stays, you know, hidden, basically. And when it launches, it just, you know, huge. Just. There's no communication. There's no warning whatsoever. It's just pure aggression and pure violence when it comes down, you know, because in the killing mode at that point, and that's the difference. Same thing with human predators. When you see human predators, you know, I'm never worried about the big tattooed guy who's, you know, the loudmouth, yelling at people, trying to, you know, run people off the territory or. Or be obnoxious. That's not the guy I'm worried about. I'm worried about the little guy in the corner who's just sipping his beer, quietly pulling his knife out, who is just gonna spring into action with no warning whatsoever. He's gonna go right to kill. He's gonna go right into, you know, stabbing somebody right away. That's the individual that I train us to worry about, is that type of an individual. And in understanding that, that asocial is there's. You're devoid of choice, meaning there's no communication. I can't communicate with somebody. You know, the story I tell that is kind of the classic is the story of the. Well, there's a couple of good stories. The one story that probably will put in perspective is I had a buddy of mine in the 80s that was a big bouncer at a biker bar, one in San Diego. And he was closing up one night. And, you know, he's used to dealing with the Mongols. He was used to dealing with the Hell's Angels. He was, you know, really, you know, aggressive dudes. And there were some really bad incidents that happened there. But he made a decision one night that he was closing up. It was after a rough weekend. It was like a holiday weekend, and he just wanted to get out of there. And he was telling everybody his last call. Little guy in the corner just sipping his beer, not really making much of an issue. But he wasn't to Mike's satisfaction. Drinking his beer fast Enough to get out of there. And he told the guy two times. The third time, Mike physically put his hands on him and he didn't mean to knock the guy over, but he kind of cuffed him and the guy went over on his chair and hit the ground. Beer goes out, Mike just stands over him. Mike, 6, 8, probably £300, solid. Just a solid dude and very aggressive bouncer. Good guy though, for the most part. I mean, this is an unusual night for Mike. You know, he let his guard down on this. He stands over the guy, he's like, I told you all we saw. Because I was sitting over in the corner, all I saw was the guy get up. I saw him get up and walk right out the door. And I saw Mike drop to the ground. As he got up, he got up, he had a knife, he had cut his Achilles tendon and then came right up in the inside of his leg and sliced his femoral artery. And Mike was lying on the ground bleeding out, and he just calmly walked out the door. Mike had made it this. He, he had picked somebody who didn't play the game. There was no social interaction at that point. On another night, he never would have done that. But that was a completely asocial act that happened. Now, luckily we're able to get him hospital staunch the bleeding. Mike survived, but he was never the same with his Achilles. And again, completely avoidable. Mike didn't have to do that. And I'm not saying the guy's response, but what he, this guy was, this guy was fresh out of prison. He came from a culture that what Mike did.

So they caught the guy.

Oh, yeah, they caught. But I think it was like two years later they got the guy.

Wow.

But he was, he was out of prison. And in prison, what Mike did was basically say, hey, this is it, I'm coming after you. And. And he responded in kind. He just said, well, six, eight, huge, strong guy. Yeah, I'm not going to deal with that. I'm just going to cut your Achilles and come right into this and I'll just walk right out. And that was his response. And you know, my whole thing on that is that whole situation was avoidable. And what I try to tell people all the time is there are so many people right now that are doing things out of convenience, arrogance, and just almost a sense of the world should be this way, that they're essentially sleeping with their heads on the railroad track. And because last night the train didn't come, they think it's okay to keep their heads on the Railroad track. And my goal is, you know, look at the subject matter, hear what happened to these other people. Learn to avoid the avoidable. Take your head off the railroad track, then you don't have to worry about a train ever coming. It's just so easy to live your life that way. If you understand the difference between antisocial aggression and asocial violence, the difference between something where you still have choice and you can easily disengage versus the more important, the one violence is, the answer is when you don't have choice. And that's the asocial. And that's the one, the only thing that's going to work if you get yourself in an asocial situation. You need to understand how to use a tool of violence.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. So you, you say, and I love the way you describe it in the book, is your brain is your deadliest weapon. So you talked about that early, go into that.

Yeah. What makes, what makes us dangerous? You know, the human brain is responsible for, you know, creating things like the space shuttle and you know, these amazing, you know, technical tools that we have and also the nuclear weapons, you know, we are, that we're capable of doing that. We've had all these shootings happen lately. We've had all these acts of violence that have really rocked the world lately. And I understand the question. Everybody wants to get inside the criminal's head and they want to try to learn something because we want to tell ourselves this is never going to happen again. If we just understand where this guy came from, we're going to be able to prevent all these other things. We don't understand that the one thing we'll never be able to control is the intent to do harm. In that that is the ultimate concealed carry that everybody has. I tell people all the time, you know, you're driving down a road and you know, we're both driving on a, on a one way road and we're driving by all these cars and then one guy decides just to come over into my lane and hit me head on. He makes that choice and I'm shocked by it and I'm there. And then I realize if you really pull yourself back, oh my gosh. I have been relying on a social contract. I've been relying basically on a painted line for my protection. And I figured he's going to agree, just like I agree that we're going to continue to do this. Well, what happens when people use these acts of violence? It's those people that just Decide to stop playing by the rules and exploit those rules against us. And we have to understand, you know, that the brain is our greatest weapon. Meaning, you know, as I said before, it's not about being bigger, faster, and stronger. It's understanding how to use our brain as our protection. So this is your weapon, your first line of tools available to use your human body. And then anything like a firearm or a club or anything like those are all ancillary things. But you first have to have your brain engaged correctly before you can do it. And that's what we try to do. I try to lay out in the book is how to correctly think about this and how to look at it and how to prepare your brain. And the idea behind it is, once you've done this, it's kind of like having that fire extinguisher in the kitchen. You know, that most of us, by code, have to have a fire extinguisher in our kitchen. Now, does that mean because we have the fire extinguisher, we're going to be more likely to bring fire into our life? No. We've thought about the situation. We know how to operate the fire extinguisher, and we're okay until there's a time where I absolutely have to use, use it. I don't need to think about it anymore. It's the same thing with violence. By understanding how the tool works, by understanding when the appropriate time versus inappropriate time would be to use those things and to really understand how it works, we then can go back to our great lives and understand that, you know, we can have this great life, but we recognize if any of these cues hit us, we know, oh, okay, I have to be aware of this, either to get myself out of there right away, which is the preferable thing, or if I've ignored the warning sign and I'm facing imminent grievous bodily harm, now I have to sit there and look at the human structure and know where to go and where to put my efforts to save myself. Yeah, well.

And so basically by reading this, I realized this. How many people, for lack of a better comparison, are just sitting ducks because they have no even sense of what to even do in situations that you describe? And you actually do a very effective job of giving people confidence and especially going through the training to do that. So when and in what situations would violence not be an answer? I mean, other than most of them?

Yeah, that's really anything where, if you have to ask yourself, should I use violence? Should I use. If you're telling if there's any hesitation, not the time.

Right.

You won't have to ask yourself the question. So, you know, people get into legalities of things. The situations that we're talking about will really take care of you because you're devoid of choice in the situations that I'm talking about, meaning violence is imminent. If you don't take action, you're basically participating in your own murder at that point. And you're never going to have to ask yourself is this the time to use violence? Meaning it's going to happen at that point. Where people get into trouble is when it's an ego thing. It's like, you know, you look at the Brian situation, not to beat up on Brian, but he's a great example of that where he, he brought that upon himself because he, he chose to take the bait. He chose to get involved in an antisocial situation that he easily could have ignored. You know, I talk about the situation in my book where, you know, a guy thought I had cut him off. I'm with my son in my car. My son was about, I think about 8 years old at the time. That's right after I had my first cover on Black Belt magazine. He's literally holding the magazine in his hand and this guy starts berating me, you know, berating me, knowing first of all he's berating me. And the first kid he sees in the passenger side is my kid. So this is a guy that's willing to berate somebody who has a little kid in the car, right? And he's going, and he was baiting me in every way, shape or form. And as a dad and as a guy, and I'm going to train one of my seminars, I'm going to drop my son off to hang out with my brother for the day while I go train the seminar, you know, and here I am, you know, the self defense instructor of the year. My son's literally holding the magazine, the.

COVID of Black Belt magazine.

So all those things are there. And of course my ego was. Yeah, the first thing that jumped up was my ego, hey, I can get out and I can take care of this guy right now. You know, that's what you first want to say, hey, you know, show my son, you know, all this, all these ridiculous thoughts go through your head because your, you're incensed by what this guy's saying, right? And then everything kicked in for me and I realized, hey, you know, I'm gonna let this guy do it. I didn't. I let it escalate as, hey, Sorry you feel that way. He kept. He kept at it and just, you know, ended up driving off because he wasn't getting any feedback from me. I wasn't feeding it at that point. You know, if I had no choice, if the guy got out and I had to do something, sure, I would have taken action at that point, but I knew it wasn't going that way. It would only go that way if I fed the fire. Right. And I decided not to. And it was hard for my son. I had explained to my son, because my dad's like, you know, he's holding dad. This is you. You know, he's holding the thing. And I said, yeah. And I said, what happened? Okay, let's take it out. There I go and do this. And I probably could. I probably had a really good chance of taking this guy out, and it would have felt really good. What if I injured him? What if I really severely injured him at that point? What if I get out of the car and I don't realize he has a gun and he shoots me or say I'm successful and then I get arrested at that point. What happens to my son during that day? You know, all these things that you just don't think about. When I had the choice not to do it. Yeah. And that's really what it is when you have the choice, you know, you never want to flip the coin because I have no idea. Once you cross the physical plane, we have no idea where it's going to end up. You know, things that are relatively safe, quote, unquote, say, striking somebody to the solar plexus. We will all probably experienced getting hit in the stomach where you can't breathe, or, you know, we've had a kickball hit us, or if you got hit in the back and, you know, you can breathe out, but you can't breathe in. Basically, that's your solar plexus. And it's a relatively safe strike, all things considered. But what if you strike a guy in the solar plexus and all of a sudden he grabs his chest and you didn't realize even though he looks like Schwarzenegger in his prime, he has a genetically bad, horrible heart. And now you've triggered an arrhythmia, and now he's on the floor having a heart attack, ends up dead. Over what? Yeah, you know, over what. And now you're facing manslaughter charges at best. Yeah.

I mean, you even described the thing, the Little League.

Oh, yeah, the hockey, dad.

The hockey.

Yeah.

Not Little League. Yeah. The coaches, they get in a fight and someone ends up dying.

Yeah. And two families lost their dads that day. You know, one dad's incarcerated for the rest of his life, the other dad is. Is dead.

Yeah.

Over. Over a disagreement on how the kids should be trained in hockey.

Right.

That was it. You know, if you were able to pull those guys back and say, hey, guys, this is how it's going to end up. Do you still want to go there? Neither of them would have ever wanted to go there, you know, but you don't have that choice unless you educate yourself from the beginning and really think about these subjects.

Yeah. So here, let me ask you a couple more questions.

So.

What are some perhaps ugly truths about the world we live in that everyone should be aware of, but most people are not?

So we're hearing. There's a couple of big proponents out there that are telling us that the world is way less violent than it used to be. They're, well meaning, they're data skewed. You know, unfortunately, the natural state of humankind throughout life has basically been successfully using violence to, you know, dominate others. You know, we live in a very unique society, but we live in this society. If you live in the United States, you live in a society that's so good, has been so good at using the tool of violence that we can have this. This relatively peaceful life in the US for the most part. You can pretty much go to any city and say, okay, this is where you go and this is where you don't go. Other parts of the world are not like that. I've traveled to those parts of the world. Here we are. But the problem is there's data manipulation. So they're saying, well, the murder rate's lower than it's ever been. Is that because we're less violent? Or is it because medical technology has advanced so much that something that would have killed you little five years ago, they now can save you? You know, does that mean the act is any less violent than it used to be? So there's all these ways of looking at things that people just don't take into consideration on that. I don't think you have to be paranoid. I certainly don't want people to be paranoid about violence. But, you know, I think we have to understand that things are. You saw after the financial collapse in 2008, we saw home invasions rising. We saw all this crazy stuff. You have to understand that people are. We are days away from. If there's any interruption in the logistics of delivery of food, water, anything like that, if it's water. We're three days away from being at each other's throats at that point. It's just the reality of that. When you look at any of the societies that have collapsed, like if you look at Bosnia, Herzevina, how quickly that went from a situation where Muslims and Christians were fine with each other, literally they were interacting with each other all the time, to within days one group is throwing the other off of bridges. At that point, it's just, it's in there. It can turn just that quickly. If we understand that about human beings and the potentiality for violence, you know, in worst case scenarios, we're not surprised by it. I don't want anybody who reads the book to go away with some paranoid prepper type of a view of the world or a dystopian point of view. But I also think we have an unrealistically rosy picture. You know, if you live here in the United States and you think, well, you know, violence really doesn't affect us, you know, we're so evolved that we don't do this. Yeah, we're evolved. We're evolved to the fact that we had three war fronts in the last 10 years going simultaneously at the same time. And it didn't affect our society because we're that good at it. I mean, what other country could have three war fronts going on where there's no rationing, there's no mobilization of the country, less than 3% of the population was affected by it. In the military, we just have to understand that there's this potentiality for it and that protecting yourself and understanding how the tool works makes you a much more peaceful person. Actually, the people I know that are the most highly capable in using lethal force tend to be the calmest individuals that I know and live lives that are really just great lives for the most part. They understand, they understand. You know, if things go bad, this is what I have to do. But until that time, I'm going to really enjoy my life and there's not this unnecessary fear. The greatest thing I get from my clients after they go through training or they read some of the materials that I put about is the mindset change. They said, you know, I never thought about that this way. And I've stopped doing X. I used to do X because it was convenient or. And I didn't realize I was taking an unnecessary risk. And they're just making little changes in their lives that really minimize the chance of violence ever entering their life. And that's my main hope for people reading This, I mean, I'd love to, I'd love everybody to train with me. It would be great. It's just not realistic. But you can change the way you operate your life to make sure that you minimize the chance of this stuff ever, ever affecting you.

Well, and I think that too. I mean, it's not just a book on like awareness and how to. Although you actually do describe what to do. And I love the way you address, you know, everyone wants to know the three points of the body that you hit. And it's like, that's not how it works. And you do a great job of explaining leverage and explaining injury and explaining how even if you're not physically strong, how you have the power and the capability if you understand how to, how to create injury. The thing that I really like about it though is that, I mean, my sense of having read the book twice, once through reading it and once through audio, is that I have so much more awareness of just stupid shit that I didn't even think about that you could just do to put yourself in bad situations just by not even being aware that it could happen. And one of the biggest things is a gal that I am dating, we were driving, listening to it on a two hour road trip. And when I first put it on, she's like, well, you know, I mean, she got kind of scared, like, oh, I don't want to hear about this. And I'm like, just listen to it. And by the time she listened to about three hours of the book with me, and this is literally just a couple days ago, by the time that we had gotten that far in, I mean, she's like, I want to read the rest of this book. And became genuinely interested and went from a. I saw her going from a, like, I don't want to know about it because it scares me to. Oh, shit. I mean, I really should know about this. This is really important and I want to actually learn this because I didn't even think about this until, you know, you are describing it. Which made me realize, yeah, that's why I wanted to do this interview with you because I don't think anyone hearing this will really kind of grasp the importance of it without going through the book. And what's interesting is you talk about how you train people is you train people slowly. And that awareness really made me think about mastery, not just of this subject matter, but of anything in general. When you just sit. I mean, we're sitting here in my conference room at my office that has 2,200 books in here. And I've read over a thousand of the books that are in this room. And you pointed up deep work by my buddy Cal Newport, who I've done an interview with. And you've read the book and your whole subject here is like deep work put into this area about saving people's lives. And I mean, you are very responsible for many people probably not getting killed and for people being put in rape, violent assault, situations that actually knew how to handle it. And you're doing a great service. I mean, no matter what anyone thinks, I mean, I know you. You're like one of the most peaceful people I know that really can damage people if you're ever put in that situation. And you don't use this knowledge for anything other than wanting to be helpful. Just the whole. Just reading this and the way you describe the subject of violence, the way you describe it, I believe has helped me think about. And it's. I mean, I just read the book recently, so. So I think it's going to help me with all areas of subjects in my life just because the way that I just start deeply thinking about the application of it and why it's so important and that's why I want people to read that book. And this is not a book that you're just going to. It's kind of like an experiential thing. I think you will have a total paradigm shift on how you view the world and how you view violence and how you view your own safety and how you look at courage and how you look at confidence as a result of the way you describe it. And then if someone wants to go deeper with it and do the training, that's what I want you to talk about. I want. So let me just make sure there's. First off, is there anything that I didn't ask you or that we didn't talk about that's important for you to share?

No. You know, you're doing a great job and I just want people to understand that. Yeah, there is actual. As you touched, I actually do talk about the physical training. I'll talk about it. I'll talk about how it is, but I'll talk the difference of something being principle based knowledge, which is what you were talking about, versus technique knowledge. We want to.

Yeah. Techniques could get you killed. Principles could save your life.

Save your life. And we've heard that in a lot of other applications in business. That's why I love, you know, like my time in Genius Network and all the great people you've introduced me to. What's great is a lot of the work in the book goes beyond that, you know, and I've learned a hell of a lot from a lot of the entrepreneurs that I've got to interact with and the way they think and what they've been able to do, take that information and how they apply to other aspects of their life. You know, which is really interesting because, you know, if it works in a life or death situation, it'll probably work in something that's a lot less, you know, severe than that. Right. Which is, which is kind of nice. The methodologies and a lot of people pointed those things out to me. But when I look at something like Cal Newport's book or anything like that, I want everybody to understand the physical training aspect, which is what there's a lot of fear based about that. People really get scared about that. They, people don't give themselves permission to do things poorly anymore. They don't. They lose that learning. They learn, they lose that thing. Especially when we get to adults, we. You don't. You know, I have little kids right now. I've got four year old twin daughters and I've got a seven year old. And I'll tell you the one thing about having little kids really teaches you again is that they don't self criticize, they don't, they get up, they walk, they do something poorly, they fall over, they laugh, they continue and then there's continual improvement. I saw my son starting out in gymnastics and he was horrible at the beginning. Now the kid is amazing, but he never knew he was horrible. He never told him. He just said, oh, okay, I'll just keep doing that. It's the same thing. When we learn the physical training, we're all capable of protecting ourselves. We just have to give ourselves the permission to do it poorly at first. And that doesn't mean poorly like ineffectively. It's just you gotta stop judging yourself. And the cool thing about doing the slow methodology training at first is that everybody, it's achievable for everybody to do that. But it's also the most highly effective way to learn anything. Anytime I learned anything that had lethality to it. Shooting explosives, I was taught in the McCombest manner. Say like, you know, when I, when I was going through my, my training, you know, before I blew my ears in the SEAL teams when they were teaching us weapons, these guys went from psychotic instructors when they were doing the physical portion of the very first six weeks of training, they just beat the heck out of you and they yell at you Scream at you. Everything's done really fast. They just try to stress you out. When I switched over to weapons, you know how to do it slow, methodical. Everything was just perfect. Highly achievable for everybody to do that. And that's what I want to get across to everybody. I don't care what your physical liability. You know, people will have excuses. They'll say, I got a bad knee. I'm out of shape. I'm. You know, I can't do X, Y, or Z. That doesn't make you any. That doesn't give you a pass from any predator. That's just it. If you have physical disabilities, it's even more important that you look at something like this and that you minimize the chance of this stuff ever coming into your life. And I've had people with all sorts of physical disabilities and challenges come train with us, and we always find a way for them to be able to use themselves. As long as you can think and move, we can help you with that. And so. So this is eminently achievable for any human being that can, you know, that has basic movement of their human body. And so it's something that is worth looking at. And I think that's the biggest misconception, is that you have to be some sort of a physical phenom to do this type of training. I understand when people look at me, because, yeah, I still keep in shape, but I'm in my 50s now. I'm not. I'm not what I was in my 20s. I mean, our competition days are way over, But I get it. They look at me and they go, oh, you're. You know, you're. You're one of those bigger, faster, stronger guys. And so they make an assumption. And then I start showing them other people that I've trained and people that they come in. It's just all walks of life. I mean, I literally might. If you looked at the people that become instructors, they are literally a cross section of all races, all genders, all, you know, orientations, all political. Thing that's the cool thing about violence, is people that I've trained, I've had pleasure training all over the world. I've pulled people together that never would have met each other. And the thing was the potential for violence. I think the most extreme example I can give is one of my seminars. I had a transgender client working out with Christian Mission. It was wild. They bonded. They bonded over the fact that this guy was going to go back to a country in Africa where Christianity was absolutely outlawed. And risky. And for him to go in there preaching, he was going to face, you know, hatred. The transgender was going to go back to a community where he faces hate. Hatred. She faced hatred. You know, the whole time. Two people like that, you know, bonding over something like that. And that's what's cool. I mean, the one thing people have to understand is violence cuts across all demographics, all political persuasions, everything. Nobody gets passed. And it's the one thing that makes us, you know, can in some strange way, actually make us all recognize we're all humans. You know, it's kind of. It's unique.

Well, okay, so where can people go to get a copy of your book? Other than the obvious places like Amazon.

Or bookstores and all, that's great. What I've done for everybody is if you go to whenviolence is the answer dot com. Okay, and yeah, you'll buy it through Amazon. But the reason I want people to do that is I had literally 2,500 pages of information. I had to cut down to a couple hundred pages of a book. So what I did was. And it's a thank you because. And I gotta thank you for doing this. You know, you're taking the risk. This is a risky subject for people to talk about. It's definitely not the norm. So if people buy the book, what I did was I did 10 video modules for each chapter, one for each chapter, absolutely free. It's my thank you to everybody for doing the book. People love the video modules. So I go in depth in each chapter there, and that's there. But you can really. Amazon won't let me do it. They won't let me put it up there. So the only way you can get it is if you go to one. Violence. And again, you know, in the publishing community, the reason I went with a publisher was because I wanted to get the broadest audience. So it's definitely. Not everybody laughs as an author. It's not a moneymaker. But, you know, my thank you to people that actually support this because they've. They've literally kept me off the list of, you know, New York Times. I've outsold probably four or five of the people in the top 10. And they won't put me on the list because violence is in the title. You know, it's just. It's very political that way. So it really helps. It really helps with people do this. Amazon's been good. They put me on lists and stuff. But, yeah, it would be really helpful. So to get the most, you know, bang for Your buck, you know, go, go to one Violence One Violence is the answer.

And so what about your training? So you have target focused training. Tft.

Yeah, they go to tft. Then our next trainings we have coming up. We usually hit a lot of the big cities. The one thing that I've done is hanging out with Tony Robbins. I was able to understand how to do trade shows and so I was able to put a trade show type of gig together where now I can hit major hotels and I can train a lot more people. Because the biggest challenge for me was finding training facilities throughout the US and abroad. And so now what I've done is I go into big ballrooms. We mat out the whole place with these amazing mats and we can service a lot more people. So just look for us, we'll be in most major cities.

Where do they find, how do they find local targetfocused training.com targetfocustraining.com so Tim, to the listeners, seriously read the book. If you prefer listening to it, you can also get it on audio. When Violence is the answer. Learning how to do what it takes. Because if you're ever in that situation where your life is at stake, believe me, this book probably would be one of the most important things you could ever have. I wish I would have had a book like this 30 years ago.

What's crazy about it is the one thing I've learned all these years is literally your life can be turned upside down in seconds when it comes to violence. I mean it can alter your life more severely than just about anything else that's out there. I've seen amazing people unfortunately have their lives turned upside down in seconds because they didn't have anything they didn't understand how to deal with with a potential situation. And so hopefully this will go a long way for anybody to minimize that ever happening.

Yeah. And so another thing I want to mention is so you're here at my office because for the next two days we're going to be in Genius X, which is my 100k group. And Dan Sullivan of course is in the group along with we got 25 of some of the top entrepreneurs in the world that are in the group. And so we're having a meeting for the next student and you're going to speak to them and you're going to share with them important stuff. And Dan Sullivan found this book to be so important that he bought a copy for every one of his 10x groups. So Dan is a huge endorser of your work and it's important, because if you're an entrepreneur, if you're anyone, it doesn't matter. This is a really important thing, especially if you have children. You know, they can read. Have them read a copy of this book. Get a copy.

Yeah. I can't thank Dan enough. I mean, he's been such a great supporter over the years, and he's been very helpful. He understands the challenges that I have, and he's been. I can't think of somebody who is to have in your corner.

Yeah, he's awesome.

He's awesome.

Cool, brother. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Joe.

Yeah.

Appreciate it. Good luck, everyone.

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