Speaker 1: Oh, beat force. If it doesn't work, you're just not
Speaker 1: using enough. You're listening to Software Gradio Special Operations, military
Speaker 1: news and straight talk with the guys and the community. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: welcome back to Software Radio in Studio. This morning, I
Speaker 1: have Tim Larkin. Tim is America's leading pro victim rights
Speaker 1: and personal safety advocate, no stranger to controversy. After being
Speaker 1: named the two thousand eleven Self Defense and Structure of
Speaker 1: the Year and simultaneously inducted into the Black Belt Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame, Tim ended the year by taking on the
Speaker 1: UK Home Secretary after getting banned from the UK for
Speaker 1: his stand on citizens rights to defend themselves from imminent violence,
Speaker 1: which was interesting. I was reading up on that, that
Speaker 1: whole thing, it was, it was crazy. Currently Tim was
Speaker 1: appealing the decision from the UK basically banned from entering
Speaker 1: the UK, which to me is is crazy, like they'll
Speaker 1: let people from Syria in the country with not Tim
Speaker 1: the American You do a lot of speaking engagements. You've
Speaker 1: got this amazing business which I'd love to get into
Speaker 1: in a bit. And then your latest book is When
Speaker 1: Violence Is the Answer, which is pretty badass title Learning
Speaker 1: how to do what it takes when your life is
Speaker 1: at stake, and in Tim and I share a mutual
Speaker 1: friend who has been on the show a few times.
Speaker 1: Come on Lacan who introduced us, So thanks for joining us. Hey,
Speaker 1: thanks for this morning. Man. I wish we could have
Speaker 1: got our our coffee talk recorded for the show prior,
Speaker 1: which I want to I definitely took a few more notes.
Speaker 1: But just I guess, why don't we start wars just give?
Speaker 1: I mean, you read the bio, but would love to
Speaker 1: hear kind of your origin story, kind of where you
Speaker 1: grew up and how you got into what you're doing
Speaker 1: now in including Yeah, I read an online your bio
Speaker 1: that you were an officer and a candidate and buds
Speaker 1: and had that Davy accident. So I'd love to kind
Speaker 1: of like cover all that and and up to now
Speaker 1: and what you're doing. I grew up in Navy bratt.
Speaker 1: You know, Dad was surface warfare officers, So you just
Speaker 1: you wrote ships. But I spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: for Genie Beach, spent a lot of times I Diego
Speaker 1: other places Dad looked. But when we moved to San Diego,
Speaker 1: I actually lived on Navy Housing Cornado, and right across
Speaker 1: the street was this crazy place, and we kind of
Speaker 1: my brother and I looked at it looked like a
Speaker 1: cool obstacle course we could play on, and so we
Speaker 1: figured we'd ride our bikes over there, and then one
Speaker 1: Sunday night, you know we're going to you know, my
Speaker 1: dad's already deployed. Literally, we've been there lesson two weeks.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, it's like World War three just
Speaker 1: went off. We were scared, we were frightened. We had
Speaker 1: no idea what was going on. My mom was scared
Speaker 1: to death. She was about to call and just as
Speaker 1: she's doing, next door, Sam Christensen came by Eric Christensen,
Speaker 1: who was killed in Red Wing. He lived right next
Speaker 1: door to me. Sam Christensen is a really good friend
Speaker 1: of my mom. She runs over to wine glasses and
Speaker 1: a bottle of wine. Carroll, Carroll, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: It's just the Seals. That was my introduction, you know.
Speaker 1: So I was fascinated after that, got to really know
Speaker 1: a lot of the guys as a young kid, I
Speaker 1: was like twelve years old, and they were awesome. They
Speaker 1: told me everything about training. I was sold. That was
Speaker 1: that was all I wanted to do. Been taking cold
Speaker 1: showers since twelve years old, get prepped. I knew everything.
Speaker 1: What was interesting was I went through. And the reason
Speaker 1: I tell people this story is because just you know,
Speaker 1: this is what is what happened to me. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a shark tank. If you go in there, if
Speaker 1: you show any sign of weakness or anything, you just
Speaker 1: get ostracized. Well, I was the opposite. I was the
Speaker 1: number one guy. I was weeks away from training from
Speaker 1: going I was going to go to Steal Team four,
Speaker 1: which back then was doing all kind of narcotics. I
Speaker 1: was full of myself. I was going for Anchorman. The
Speaker 1: whole deal. Got absolutely humbled a couple of weeks out,
Speaker 1: just on a normal dive, just just doing some explosives
Speaker 1: on a jap scully blew my ears. First time in
Speaker 1: my life that I had ever had a true injury
Speaker 1: to the human body. I'd been hurt, knocked down, cracked ribs,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. This absolutely went into vertigo under this
Speaker 1: were you guys doing the cent cole Many, No, this
Speaker 1: was out. This is just out at the dives off
Speaker 1: of the Bay Bayside. You know all big evolutions that
Speaker 1: already passed back then, San Clement, you was second phase,
Speaker 1: third phase, of was dive. So you go from being
Speaker 1: the number one guy in the class to like a pariah,
Speaker 1: you know, all of a sudden. Everybody was cool about it,
Speaker 1: but they just knew what was interesting was what I
Speaker 1: thought ended my career was the start, and that's where
Speaker 1: I learned injury to the human body and how that
Speaker 1: bypasses bigger, faster, stronger, And that's how I started down
Speaker 1: the road of looking at self protection a little bit
Speaker 1: differently from the violence standpoint of it. Stayed in. We
Speaker 1: did a pilot course. I was an intelligence officer. They
Speaker 1: sent me to Intel school a damn neck, came back
Speaker 1: work directly for Aspect War, come for Adam mallinoin at
Speaker 1: the very first place, and mean, we had like little
Speaker 1: trailers out there at the beginning. So it's interesting time
Speaker 1: because that's when everybody went purple and all of sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm this junior, junior guy in a very senior command
Speaker 1: and I had access to like incredible stuff that I
Speaker 1: had no business having access to. They kept me there
Speaker 1: because I was I understood the thing they knew. I
Speaker 1: had gone through training, I had a good rep. But
Speaker 1: they didn't have to give a healthy body that because
Speaker 1: we were trying to expand during that time, and so
Speaker 1: hearing I'm this intel guy and they're sending me around
Speaker 1: to work with everybody, and it was fascinating time. Made
Speaker 1: incredible contacts during that time. But one of the things
Speaker 1: we did was we relooked at hand to hand combat.
Speaker 1: The Berlin Wall came down and I had like some
Speaker 1: of the ledges of the Seal team on that on
Speaker 1: that staff, and they just started saying they actually predicted
Speaker 1: what's going on today, and they said, yeah, we gotta
Speaker 1: start changing the way we train. And one of the
Speaker 1: things they knew was we're gonna start putting hands on
Speaker 1: people again. That was the start, and that's where we
Speaker 1: started looking for, you know, a different way to look
Speaker 1: at hand hand combat, which then, you know, almost thirty
Speaker 1: years later now is morphed into what I do full time,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, my system, But it had its
Speaker 1: nexus beginning right there. I still remember, just back to
Speaker 1: the injury thing. I mean, I know how tough that is,
Speaker 1: because I I still remember a guy in our class,
Speaker 1: Elise like it's the good guy and after like made
Speaker 1: it through Hell week and he had a back problem
Speaker 1: the X ray. I mean, he's basically had a broken
Speaker 1: back act like finished Hell week with a broken back,
Speaker 1: but it ended it. It ended his time at buds Um.
Speaker 1: But that's just yeah, it's part of it. It's this luck,
Speaker 1: right you just kid, Yeah, I mean, listen, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to have the tenacity to get through. Think.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I always have felt good about
Speaker 1: is obviously I didn't quit, But you can't control what's
Speaker 1: gonna happen in your body. I saw really good guys
Speaker 1: get injured, you know, a rock portage, things like that,
Speaker 1: and that was it. You know, they just they couldn't
Speaker 1: they couldn't recover from that. It's interesting you learn a
Speaker 1: lot about yourself during that time. You learn you can
Speaker 1: do ten times more than you thought could. But you
Speaker 1: also realize that there's an element, like you said, there
Speaker 1: is an element of luck of getting through that training.
Speaker 1: Not to go completely off track, but the I feel like, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I got to Team three in ninety eight
Speaker 1: at the end of night, and I felt like the teams,
Speaker 1: even though they we weren't like Team three and four
Speaker 1: kind of the two operational teams, because the stuff was
Speaker 1: happening in the least stuff was happening in South America.
Speaker 1: Team four. And then we have these still have the
Speaker 1: old Vietnam guys. I think at at least three of
Speaker 1: them a Team three. This guy Womack, we called him
Speaker 1: his nickname is half half Assid McCarthy because he had
Speaker 1: a half his ass literally blown off of Vietnam. Like
Speaker 1: really good guys. But I feel like it's a shame
Speaker 1: that and and I won't go too deep on this,
Speaker 1: but and you know this from being an officer, there
Speaker 1: was no upwer mobility in the seal community pre nine eleven.
Speaker 1: Once you do up a tune commander spot, you're done operationally.
Speaker 1: And so a lot or most of the good officers
Speaker 1: would get out. They would go, Okay, I wanna go
Speaker 1: do something else, Um, go to business school. And and
Speaker 1: and the guys that kind of stayed when nine eleven happened,
Speaker 1: they got promoted up and and and a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't they don't want to talk about this, but really,
Speaker 1: we have this brain drain of officers pre nine eleven,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, massive upward mobility, and these
Speaker 1: guys get promoted up and and I just look at
Speaker 1: you know, when I got out in two thousands six,
Speaker 1: I started to see we had real problems in the community.
Speaker 1: Guys are getting over deployed because the system of promotion
Speaker 1: was encouraging guys to deploy, deploy, de ploy, deploy, which
Speaker 1: is not good for them psychology of it, and just
Speaker 1: not good for family life. But you're in with the
Speaker 1: boys and the pressure is like, Okay, well he's a
Speaker 1: good guy because I know he's been like deployed five times.
Speaker 1: And and I feel like the leadership of the Seal
Speaker 1: community has let the community down and we're at the
Speaker 1: place we are today where guys are murdering a fellow
Speaker 1: Green Beret in Africa. You've got this war crime stuff
Speaker 1: going on, and I'm almost like I'm not pointing the
Speaker 1: fingers at these guys that are that are involved. I'm like,
Speaker 1: why didn't we failed them as leaders? Like and then
Speaker 1: this I forget his name, that admiral came out was
Speaker 1: like I think we have a cult. We may have
Speaker 1: a cultural problem. I wanted to smack him in the
Speaker 1: face and go, dude, just go look at the headlines
Speaker 1: the past ten years, like this is a major problem.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's it's just sad to me because
Speaker 1: I felt like the Seal team that I belonged to
Speaker 1: and signed up for has changed dramatically. It's just like
Speaker 1: it's in big trouble, like culturally right now. Well, I
Speaker 1: got in before you, in that community before you. And
Speaker 1: what was interesting about the community I got into. They
Speaker 1: were the ext Vietnam guys that were in there, but
Speaker 1: they also were the guys that the the upside of
Speaker 1: the fact that you couldn't promote. You would have a
Speaker 1: lieutenant commander until a three star to go to hell
Speaker 1: if he thought it was and you know, they were
Speaker 1: really protecting their guys. What I noticed was when we
Speaker 1: did the expansion in the late eighties and we tried
Speaker 1: to get up to ten teams like like we just
Speaker 1: you know, what they didn't understand was there's a reason
Speaker 1: for the attrition rate. I'm a product of the attrition rate.
Speaker 1: The one thing I will say about that is I
Speaker 1: tried to gain the system. So when I got in,
Speaker 1: I'll give you a great example of good leadership. I
Speaker 1: got in to the admiral's command. They loved me. They
Speaker 1: were there. I and you know the guys you probably
Speaker 1: know some of the guys that that that were my
Speaker 1: boss is they really liked me, and so I applied
Speaker 1: for a freaking waiver for my ears. You know, it
Speaker 1: was that arrogant that I figured I could pull it,
Speaker 1: and I got it all way up. Even even Ray Smith,
Speaker 1: who became an admiral. Later he okay, he tells me,
Speaker 1: He goes, you know, I almost blew my ears right
Speaker 1: before that. Smith is a great guy. He was an
Speaker 1: advisor in my first company. He's a still he was.
Speaker 1: He helped me out so much so it got all
Speaker 1: the way up to Lamoine, the admiral, and Moyne sets
Speaker 1: me down and he says to me, goes, wow, he
Speaker 1: looked at all my recommendations and everything. He goes. He goes, normally,
Speaker 1: I just signed this, he goes, and I have no
Speaker 1: problem signing this. He goes, I just gotta ask you
Speaker 1: one question. And you know, anybody knew Adam Mooin and
Speaker 1: he had a stutter, but he was a very precise guy,
Speaker 1: and he was a very smart guy. The way the
Speaker 1: way he did things. He got criticism on some things,
Speaker 1: but he was a very sober guy. He saw where
Speaker 1: this kid go, you know what we were just talking
Speaker 1: about now, and he didn't want to go there. That's
Speaker 1: why he wanted to keep the seals a little bit separate.
Speaker 1: So he says to me, He goes, okay, you're you're
Speaker 1: a platoon commander. Now we're running a mission, and your
Speaker 1: ears so far been okay, and now you going your own.
Speaker 1: You're getting locked out of the sub. The mission starts
Speaker 1: and your ears go and you're done. And he goes,
Speaker 1: you probably have more than half the intel that the
Speaker 1: group needs and now you're out of it. Now you're
Speaker 1: second has to take over. He goes, if you're sitting
Speaker 1: in my seat right now, what would you tell you?
Speaker 1: And it was like the most it was the most
Speaker 1: brew And I said, and that just ended in my
Speaker 1: fantasy right there. I mean, what can you do ethically?
Speaker 1: I sat there and you're absolutely right, sir, he said.
Speaker 1: I will help you on anything you want to do.
Speaker 1: He goes, I think you're great. The problem was back
Speaker 1: then you can just transfer to the army. Uh. Now
Speaker 1: you can't. You can't. But that was the kind of
Speaker 1: guys I grew up with, and I absolutely agree with you.
Speaker 1: I think where it happened, though, I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's kind of before you got their teams. Where we
Speaker 1: really saw it was after Gulf War One, after Gulf
Speaker 1: War One, it got really bad to be in the military,
Speaker 1: you know, and everybody got out. Yea. That was definitely
Speaker 1: a contributing factor, I think because guys this ward doing
Speaker 1: they weren't operating. But yeah, I mean, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you just have that the environment, especially in the Clinton era,
Speaker 1: right I enlisted in the Clinton era, but I guess,
Speaker 1: you know. And then the reason I'm kind of I
Speaker 1: went there because I had dinner last night with two
Speaker 1: good friends of mine and we had a long talk
Speaker 1: about because they were asking me. These guys are like
Speaker 1: accomplished guys on One of my friend, Mike, has a
Speaker 1: food show on PBS for sixteen years, and he was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: what's going on with all the ship and the headlines
Speaker 1: and these war crimes? And so I just went I
Speaker 1: went deep with these guys. And I've always had a
Speaker 1: passion for aviation, and I got in with these group
Speaker 1: of fighter pilots who fly military aircraft. Twice a year.
Speaker 1: We have this fight club in San Diego and it's
Speaker 1: like full on, like very safe, but all top gun
Speaker 1: guys get I've flown with guys that have four hours
Speaker 1: flying the Space Shuttle. But I look at that the
Speaker 1: aviation community in the military is the leadership is so
Speaker 1: strong inside and outside of the military, and I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, what the seal community needs is stronger leadership
Speaker 1: and in a more robust like community outside on off
Speaker 1: active duty. Right when guys get out because they're lost.
Speaker 1: They go from this being the number one to kind
Speaker 1: of outside on their own. There's no real network. We
Speaker 1: used to have the reunion, but it's like the reunion
Speaker 1: is very toxic. You know, guys are shipped talking to
Speaker 1: each other pointing fingers um. You know, anyone writes a
Speaker 1: book is on a you know, on the ship list,
Speaker 1: and it just creates this like nasty environment outside of
Speaker 1: the active duty community where the brotherhood does exist, but
Speaker 1: when you're out it does not. And that that's why
Speaker 1: these guys are killing themselves and and and the fact
Speaker 1: that that the community is in a really bad spot,
Speaker 1: like we've let some things go on and look the
Speaker 1: other way, and and things have just kind of gotten
Speaker 1: out of control with with drugs all the ship you're
Speaker 1: seeing in the headlines now. I remember back in two thousand,
Speaker 1: I think I had this conversation the two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine one of my he's had just taken over as
Speaker 1: the CEO of one of the seal teams, because I
Speaker 1: will say what it was, but that conversation haunts me
Speaker 1: right now because he said. He goes, listen, he goes,
Speaker 1: we're going down a bad path, and I go, what
Speaker 1: do you mean. He goes, tell me you understand. He goes,
Speaker 1: my guys, he goes there deployed, deployed, deployed. And I said, so,
Speaker 1: we've talked about the obvious, the obviously, what that does
Speaker 1: to you mentally and everything. He looked at it from
Speaker 1: a professional development side. He goes, I can't get my
Speaker 1: senior enlisted into schools that they need to go to
Speaker 1: be better leaders. And I think we're seeing the effects
Speaker 1: of that because the op temple has been so crazy
Speaker 1: and you need a leadership to just be able to
Speaker 1: say no. And that that's kind of my point. They're
Speaker 1: just seeing that. The Admiral say, oh, he sends us
Speaker 1: all hands letter after this, this Platina gets sent home
Speaker 1: from I think the entire unit from Team seven gets
Speaker 1: sent home Like that's a big red flag. Man. And
Speaker 1: if you're saying I think we have a problem, you're
Speaker 1: part of the problem. In my opinion, and and that's
Speaker 1: where we just need to take a really hard look
Speaker 1: in the mirror. And I hope that the community does
Speaker 1: that as well as creates a better environment on the
Speaker 1: outside because back to my my kind of experience with
Speaker 1: this fighter pilot group, they have a strong community outside
Speaker 1: of when they leave active duty, and the corro camaraderie
Speaker 1: is still there, the friendship, the networking, the helping out.
Speaker 1: It's they're not like ship talking each other in the media,
Speaker 1: jabbing each other on social online, on social media. It's
Speaker 1: like a very different environment because they have really strong
Speaker 1: leadership and and a history dating back pre probably World
Speaker 1: War Two, of just really taking care of their guys.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that, you know, I can't speak
Speaker 1: for the broader Special Opps community, but the seal community
Speaker 1: for sure could use that. And the proof isn't the pudding.
Speaker 1: I mean, nobody wants to read those headlines, but if
Speaker 1: you just google some of that stuff, it's prolific, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of unreported stuff that's still out there.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's this idea, you know, I'm kind
Speaker 1: of getting back to the idea of dealing with violence
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, you know, I see. I have
Speaker 1: tons of friends from very native spec to obscutes and
Speaker 1: I got one buddy is he's in his mid fifties
Speaker 1: now and he just can't get off the train. He
Speaker 1: has to keep he's he's a contractor. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: he did years without the Australian sas did that, did
Speaker 1: that whole deal. That wasn't enough for him. He had
Speaker 1: to keep going back, had an amazing job in Australia,
Speaker 1: but he just missed the action. And I see it
Speaker 1: become an addictive quality and some guys and it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: It's really sad, you know that that that you get
Speaker 1: there because these guys have already done amazing service. It's
Speaker 1: not that they haven't performed, it's just I think people
Speaker 1: I don't think there's enough to educate people and reintegrate
Speaker 1: them back into society correctly. Yeah, no, it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a big, big problem right now as a whole.
Speaker 1: It's spent two hours talking about the v a UM,
Speaker 1: how how fun up the phase but it thanks for
Speaker 1: for kind of riffing with me on that one. But
Speaker 1: I do want to talk about your current business and
Speaker 1: we getting get into the book as well. But so
Speaker 1: you're based headquartered in Las Vegas, and you run training
Speaker 1: for for anybody can come kind of come to Vegas
Speaker 1: that's signed up for a course. We started. We started
Speaker 1: out military law enforcement. We do it all over they
Speaker 1: do it all over the world. You know, we offer
Speaker 1: based seminars for civilians. That really happened for nine eleven
Speaker 1: basically is doing contract work. Really up till nine eleven,
Speaker 1: we're doing kind of Blackwater type stuff down in Venezuela.
Speaker 1: Before Blackwater, that was really interesting and I always thought
Speaker 1: at that time, I thought the methods that we teach
Speaker 1: an injury to the human body, I always thought for
Speaker 1: the civilian population it would be tough for them to accept.
Speaker 1: And then nine eleven happens, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I got a bunch of corporate CEOs who travel they
Speaker 1: want training. You know, I did this. I did this
Speaker 1: seminal product on the eighth and ninth of September right
Speaker 1: by the World Trade Centers. You know, I fly home
Speaker 1: in the town that wake up in the eleventh that
Speaker 1: happened where I trained was destroyed. Three of my guys
Speaker 1: were in the building. They got out. They're all international,
Speaker 1: you know, finance guys that flew a lot the information
Speaker 1: that I gave out in that course that we filmed,
Speaker 1: and it was only supposed to be for them. You know.
Speaker 1: That's when we released that to the public, and we
Speaker 1: just got a really big response during that time. I
Speaker 1: think what's what's interesting is in this culture right now,
Speaker 1: we try to suppress anything that might make somebody feel bad.
Speaker 1: We don't want to deal with the fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: in the real world, we live in a physical world,
Speaker 1: and that one of those realities is there's a tool
Speaker 1: out there that should be available to everybody called violence.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately the tool is only available, really acceptably available
Speaker 1: right now to the predators. It hasn't been that way.
Speaker 1: Like my grandfather, you know, when he grew up, it
Speaker 1: was just a basic rite of passage that you learned
Speaker 1: how to protect yourself. You learn the rules. You know,
Speaker 1: you learned that you didn't start anything, but that if
Speaker 1: you needed violence, you know, you used it. Because there
Speaker 1: wasn't a first responder. It's gonna get there in time.
Speaker 1: It's funny because I I read the subway in New
Speaker 1: York and every time we get on the subway, it's
Speaker 1: just like being a warrior environment, right, Like I always
Speaker 1: check out the car. And you can see the kind
Speaker 1: of predators on the train because they they see you
Speaker 1: notice them, right, and you're like okay, like and it's
Speaker 1: just like this kind of unspoken rule, right because you
Speaker 1: just look at these guys and like, Okay, that guy's
Speaker 1: up to no good, Like that guy's trouble. But and
Speaker 1: he knows you now know, you know he's up. But
Speaker 1: most people just go about their day and don't even
Speaker 1: pay attention to that stuff. Show the video, Um, I
Speaker 1: need to talk at Google, And I said, okay, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna grab these guys out of the gate. And then
Speaker 1: I realized I had a really great clip. So there's
Speaker 1: a clip of a robbery that took on took case
Speaker 1: on a on a Seattle bus. The guy is literally
Speaker 1: walking down the bus. He's guy's gun and he's just
Speaker 1: going from person to person ripping them off. And nobody's
Speaker 1: talking to anybody. Everybody's immersing their phone. And what got
Speaker 1: them was the one guy that he's literally immersed in
Speaker 1: his phone, ears and eyes just gone. The gun comes in,
Speaker 1: he redirects the victory, steps up, redirects vector and goes
Speaker 1: in and you think, oh good, he understands and he
Speaker 1: has his phone in his hand and you think, great,
Speaker 1: he's going to use as a bludgeon. Now this is
Speaker 1: the guy had a gun in his face. No, what
Speaker 1: does he do with the phone? He's screen with his life.
Speaker 1: And I try to tell people, I go, you don't
Speaker 1: have no idea how much these things have taken over
Speaker 1: are It's not going to go away. We just need
Speaker 1: to be aware of it. And that got everybody's attention
Speaker 1: at that point because they saw themselves. They saw themselves
Speaker 1: when they were probably just immersed in a public area
Speaker 1: and unaware. That's that's probably the problem. The problem is
Speaker 1: exactly what you're saying. Predators take advantage of all of that.
Speaker 1: We just have to be aware of it. The problem
Speaker 1: is you're told that if you study the subject, that
Speaker 1: you're somehow you're advocating violence, or that you are advocating
Speaker 1: criminal activity, and it's just misunderstanding. What people don't understand.
Speaker 1: What people call self defense is really after the fact,
Speaker 1: what we do is we use violence, and then after
Speaker 1: the active violence has happened, it's going to be determined
Speaker 1: whether it was a justified use of the term. And
Speaker 1: if it's justified, they're gonna call it self defense and
Speaker 1: everything's away. If it's not, it's gonna be a criminal use,
Speaker 1: and now you're gonna get processed through the legal system.
Speaker 1: How to navigate those waters is really the reason I
Speaker 1: wrote the book, because that's where most people make mistake.
Speaker 1: They want to respond to things that are easily avoidable,
Speaker 1: and yet when they are devoid of choice and they're
Speaker 1: facing imminent grievous balbly harm, oftentimes they want to talk,
Speaker 1: you know. And and that's the one time, that's one
Speaker 1: of the rare times when you actually need to use
Speaker 1: a tool of violence. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we have.
Speaker 1: The saying you're probably well familiar with in the seal
Speaker 1: community is like violence of action, right. And I was
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan and after eleven most of the ops we
Speaker 1: went on, which I mean god, over a dozen no
Speaker 1: shots fired because we hit the target so asked and
Speaker 1: furious using this violence of action. By the time, these
Speaker 1: guys are like hoods on their head or there's zip tied.
Speaker 1: You know, it was like after that settled in, they
Speaker 1: got pisted, you know, you could see the rage, but
Speaker 1: we were so the violence of action just overwhelmed these
Speaker 1: guys and it just works, you know, especially I have
Speaker 1: a couple of buddies in New York. Jeff, my friend
Speaker 1: is a c amount of Vader media, and he's always
Speaker 1: he's a McDonald's all American basketball collegiate guy and he's
Speaker 1: an alpha dude. But he's always like fucking around with me.
Speaker 1: I'm like, Jeff, dude, I'm not gonna like play fight
Speaker 1: you you know what I mean. It's like it's because
Speaker 1: you just you don't know, like that your version of
Speaker 1: of like college you know, bar fights is like shoving
Speaker 1: back and forth and maybe one guy gets punched. I
Speaker 1: was like, you have no idea, like what what real?
Speaker 1: Like you know, combat fighting is like it's just like
Speaker 1: not going to go to completion, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like you're solving, You're solving for this equation and it's
Speaker 1: not there's no tapping out right. Well, it's funny. You're
Speaker 1: probably the same way. Like I love when people start
Speaker 1: screaming around with me because I know I have him.
Speaker 1: At that point they think, oh it terms it was
Speaker 1: this a nice guy and everything. No, I don't want
Speaker 1: anybody to know I know anything, because if I need it,
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a complete surprised I want that
Speaker 1: violence of action, and I wanted to be sudden. But
Speaker 1: I'm shocked. It's how how many guys who are alpha's,
Speaker 1: and I've I've trained a lot of them, especially here
Speaker 1: in New York when I come here that really misunderstand reality.
Speaker 1: Like I had a guy tell me he was from Goldman,
Speaker 1: just like mid two thousands. He told me about one
Speaker 1: of their traders. It wasn't a guy trained. This guy
Speaker 1: was truly like he was one of those world class traders,
Speaker 1: really full of himself. He was out one time and
Speaker 1: they're walking the streets, him and two other friends. These
Speaker 1: two guys approached them. He said, you know, I tried
Speaker 1: to rob them, and he goes, oh, you want to fight,
Speaker 1: And he literally goes, okay, we're gonna fight. He was
Speaker 1: to take off his jackie because you know, it's expensive jackets,
Speaker 1: so you think he's gonna As he's taking it down
Speaker 1: to here, the two guys look at each other, draw
Speaker 1: their knives and they stabbed in the death right in front.
Speaker 1: Because he was imagining what you're talking about, the male
Speaker 1: locker room, back and forth, the alphae state. These guys
Speaker 1: just do it. That's my exact point. I mean you
Speaker 1: just you made my exact point. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: I started carrying pepper spray in the city because I
Speaker 1: came out of a building in Soho, like Harry, this
Speaker 1: aerossoul and this crazy homeless guy like immediately ran up
Speaker 1: to me and grabbed me, and it clearly like schizophrenic.
Speaker 1: But I've never been like grabbed before, and I was like, man,
Speaker 1: what am I gonna do with this guy? And I
Speaker 1: end up getting him off me, but I was like
Speaker 1: it took like, you know, probably forty five seconds, but
Speaker 1: it was still like more than I wanted to kind
Speaker 1: of want to grapple with this this guy. But I
Speaker 1: was like, man, if I just had the if I
Speaker 1: had that pepper spray, I just blastom and walked away.
Speaker 1: He ended up this girl I was dating at the time.
Speaker 1: She tried to like get involved and I was just
Speaker 1: thinking myself, like what are you doing? And he'd started
Speaker 1: chasing her and I had to like go run that down.
Speaker 1: And you had another incident to here that I that
Speaker 1: I used talking about the early early two thousand's actress,
Speaker 1: her her boyfriend, and another couple. They're walking home. They
Speaker 1: decided to walk home from a club and lower his side,
Speaker 1: and back then it was a little more dicey to
Speaker 1: do that. So instead of grabbing a cab, they just
Speaker 1: they decided to walk home. About two to three at night,
Speaker 1: they get confronted. Guy pulls out a gun, the other
Speaker 1: guy knocks the knocks the girl down, pulls her purse.
Speaker 1: The actress, who also has a lot of brothers, feel
Speaker 1: she just decides to bone up on him and she
Speaker 1: just gets in there in the guy's face and the
Speaker 1: guy's got holding the gun, and I guess from all
Speaker 1: accounts he had a confused look on his face when
Speaker 1: when she was doing this, and she's like, you know,
Speaker 1: going off, trying to be in alpha, and she was,
Speaker 1: what are you gonna do? Shoot me? And he just
Speaker 1: goes yeah, bum bum and killed her right right then
Speaker 1: and there, you know, on it. And it's a completely
Speaker 1: misunderstanding of what true violence is and what a true
Speaker 1: threat is versus what a social confrontation is, you know.
Speaker 1: And what happens is a lot of people make the
Speaker 1: mistake they live in these worlds where they they operate
Speaker 1: in an inter office environment or whatever their social environment is,
Speaker 1: and you're able to get away with a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff because it's a shared community, and you know everybody
Speaker 1: as soon as you walk out that door, you have
Speaker 1: no idea what the background is. You don't know what
Speaker 1: you're dealing with. And that's where people make a hullable
Speaker 1: a lot of mistakes. Yeah, I know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: totally agree. It's it's it reminds me of Sear School.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ever went to Sear School.
Speaker 1: So it's like sometimes you just have to swallow your
Speaker 1: pride and wait for an opportunity. Right, you can't, you're disadvantaged. Um.
Speaker 1: I remember yesterday I'm in y p O and I
Speaker 1: was talking to this gal, Debra, who was an active
Speaker 1: shooting survivor. She been shot four times. She was driving
Speaker 1: in Santa Monica. It's like a lady like now it's
Speaker 1: like a venture capitalist and l a like very successful woman.
Speaker 1: She was driving through the Santa Monica neighborhood, rolled up
Speaker 1: and there was like a swat team and this guy
Speaker 1: on the lawn who actually just like shot two people.
Speaker 1: I think family members in the house came out and
Speaker 1: he was like drawing down with the rifle on this
Speaker 1: on this lady next door. She kind of like was
Speaker 1: confused and then put all together like drove in between
Speaker 1: this guy, the shooter and the lady and ended up
Speaker 1: getting shot. He shot the car like twenty times, shot
Speaker 1: her four times, but she survived. But then we I
Speaker 1: was telling her my experience. And this was the summer
Speaker 1: where they had the Paris attacks and a couple of
Speaker 1: attacks in Germany. I was coming back from Europe JFK
Speaker 1: and got off the plane at terminal I think it
Speaker 1: was terminal one. They held us at the gate and said, hey,
Speaker 1: there's a potential shooter in in terminal seven. And We're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is crazy. So we then they said okay, fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes later were all clear, get through possible control. I
Speaker 1: get through, and I'm waiting for my bag. Now they're
Speaker 1: like the whole places filled up like three or four
Speaker 1: inner people, and all of a sudden, I hear screaming
Speaker 1: and six armed officers run into the baggage area and
Speaker 1: starts yelling at us to run for our lives, that
Speaker 1: there's an active shooter. And it was complete like pandemonium,
Speaker 1: and I was like, shit, I gotta just like first,
Speaker 1: there was nothing. I felt really helpless because people were panicking, screaming,
Speaker 1: kids were being left behind, those like little barriers are
Speaker 1: being blown over. People ran outside on the tarmac, were
Speaker 1: like blew through the security doors and I was like
Speaker 1: ship man, like, what am I gonna do? I don't
Speaker 1: have anything. I'm gonna go take cover behind this concrete column.
Speaker 1: And I remember looking up at the officer that was
Speaker 1: there with me and she was like shaking with the
Speaker 1: gun and it was clear like, Okay, these guys have
Speaker 1: a they have a plan to deal with the threat
Speaker 1: that they don't know what to deal with the scared passengers,
Speaker 1: like all these panic people. There was no plan to
Speaker 1: deal with that, and we ran outside. I eventually made
Speaker 1: a decision, Okay, I'm that's a safe area, like there's
Speaker 1: a threat coming. And I get outside and I'm talking
Speaker 1: to one of the officers. I'm like, hey, what's going
Speaker 1: down and texting my friends and he was like, hey,
Speaker 1: we don't know. There's a shooter and there reported there's
Speaker 1: there might be a couple. He's like, can you help
Speaker 1: me get these people back inside. I'm like, dude, that's
Speaker 1: the worst thing we can do right now. It's like
Speaker 1: you have no idea? What Like yeah, totally. I was like,
Speaker 1: you're gonna put these people back inside? At least here
Speaker 1: they have options, they could run and get away these
Speaker 1: This little Jewish girl overheard me and she's like, I'm
Speaker 1: going with you. And so I end up taking six
Speaker 1: passengers underneath the airport at JFK, where they kind of
Speaker 1: load the bags on the cambtor belt up up into
Speaker 1: the airport underneath around the fence, and I remember seeing
Speaker 1: like all the taxis and ubers just kind of stopped,
Speaker 1: like looking like what the hell is going on? Because
Speaker 1: everybody knew something was up. And I'm like realized, I
Speaker 1: mean a black polo, black pants and I have my
Speaker 1: black back and I got these people and I'm like
Speaker 1: throwing my jacket over the barbed wires so they could
Speaker 1: they could climb, and the lady like she's like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you have to go first. And how so I go
Speaker 1: over and I see this fucking jersey guy running at me.
Speaker 1: I could just tell like this guy and he was
Speaker 1: like thinking, I'm like some terrorists. Yeah, He's like shoot,
Speaker 1: I got one, and I'm like no, no, no, like
Speaker 1: we're helping these people. And so he ended up helping us,
Speaker 1: and we gotten capped us and we need to get
Speaker 1: the hell out of here because they're gonna shut the
Speaker 1: roads down, They're gonna close this place down. It turned
Speaker 1: out somebody had phoned it in a hoax terminal one,
Speaker 1: in terminal seven, a combination between that it was one
Speaker 1: that Ude Hussein won that race. So you had people
Speaker 1: yelling and cheering, an officer a deed at an accidental discharge,
Speaker 1: and it kicked off complete panic. But I had never
Speaker 1: experienced anything like in my life. I was blown away.
Speaker 1: And I've been through multiple hooded box drills Dwayne Deeter's course,
Speaker 1: like and you know, I think it It was just
Speaker 1: like it was so out of my control. So I
Speaker 1: really try and avoid busy times on the subway because
Speaker 1: I don't ever want to get caught up and that
Speaker 1: mass crowd, like panicked crowd, because you can't do anything.
Speaker 1: You're just like you get trampled, like I saw kids
Speaker 1: getting trampled. So it was really terrifying. But I wrote
Speaker 1: an article about it because I said, look, there's there's
Speaker 1: things that you can do. For instance, looking at the
Speaker 1: Paris attack, right like some people just tipped the table over,
Speaker 1: close their eyes and we're just like praying for it
Speaker 1: to go away, and getting shot through these wooden tables
Speaker 1: because they don't understand the difference between cover and concealment.
Speaker 1: And the thing is you've got to get off the
Speaker 1: X right, like you have to get put distance between
Speaker 1: yourself and the threat. And it just looks if you
Speaker 1: live in a major metropolitan city anywhere in the world today,
Speaker 1: you're at risk, like we have this unfortunately, you know,
Speaker 1: terrorism is a real thing. So I'm glad guys like
Speaker 1: you were are putting out the training and this book
Speaker 1: like when violence is the answer because people need to
Speaker 1: be a little bit better prepared and it it save
Speaker 1: you know, in in Deborah's situation, she was bullied as
Speaker 1: a kid and was you know, took karate and self
Speaker 1: defense was just like the anti bully in her took over.
Speaker 1: She said, But we need more people like that in
Speaker 1: the world. And I'm shocked that this UK thing is
Speaker 1: just it's just silly to me that kidding banned from
Speaker 1: entering the UK. We're literally today we we actually sent
Speaker 1: it off. I've been invited by Parliament. I have a
Speaker 1: lot of Ministers of Parliament that actually we're very supportive
Speaker 1: and they've invited me to come speak to the House
Speaker 1: of Parliament. So we're putting this big push to bringing
Speaker 1: back because since just last year, I think there's forty
Speaker 1: one thousand knife attacks in UK, which was insane. I
Speaker 1: went to school that you I did University of London
Speaker 1: London School Economics for a year in the eighties. It
Speaker 1: was the safest place. And what was interesting was the
Speaker 1: difference back then was he had the same diversity that
Speaker 1: London has always had. But what was interesting was if
Speaker 1: you talk to Pakistani store owner back then, he was
Speaker 1: crowd to be part of the UK. He wanted to assimilate,
Speaker 1: He wanted his family to assimilate. I noticed when I
Speaker 1: kept going to London, you know, during those years in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands before I got banned, I just
Speaker 1: noticed this this polarization that we're seeing where people would
Speaker 1: literally section off you. Weren't you, didn't weren't me to
Speaker 1: feel welcome in certain parts of a town. It was bad.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize how bad it was getting. The problem
Speaker 1: is you've got people that don't understand violence, and they
Speaker 1: don't understand that, and you you have an influx of
Speaker 1: cultures that they literally looked around at the UK and
Speaker 1: they said, wait a minute, you guys don't use guns.
Speaker 1: And you don't use knives because they tell you you
Speaker 1: can't get they're readily available. We're gonna start using them.
Speaker 1: And it just shocked everybody and what really became a
Speaker 1: problem over there, And this is what I talked to.
Speaker 1: To the point is I made a comment after the
Speaker 1: riots in two thousand and twelve, two thousand eleven. It
Speaker 1: was the idea that I go, this is a great
Speaker 1: opportunity for the UK to look at their self defense
Speaker 1: laws and redefine them, because prior to ninety they had
Speaker 1: amazing self defense laws, fantastic ones. And the fifties there
Speaker 1: were some well meaning reasons why they changed the self
Speaker 1: defense law. They had some problems with gangs using excuses,
Speaker 1: and they came in with the kind of draconian self
Speaker 1: defense laws that basically said the only people that can
Speaker 1: take action are you trained officers. And then if you
Speaker 1: take action, even if it even something that's ridiculously justified,
Speaker 1: you're going to be culpable for that. So so people
Speaker 1: just hands off. It's backfired on them big time. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had that a little bit in America, right like,
Speaker 1: not necessarily in self defense, but even that that's why
Speaker 1: they passed that good Samaritan law. Right we were the
Speaker 1: US is so litigious, it's like a big whole another
Speaker 1: topic I could talk about. Just like you people slip,
Speaker 1: you know, by their own fault, or bump their head
Speaker 1: at a restaurant, and they're suing the owner righte and
Speaker 1: and it's like these people who are trying to give
Speaker 1: CPR and and family was suing them. Oh you killed
Speaker 1: my you know, my parents or whatever, so they passed.
Speaker 1: I get Samaritan law. But I feel like that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it should be something similar. Right well, I tell people
Speaker 1: the time ago. The reason that US is able to
Speaker 1: entertain a lot of the positions that we take, I'll
Speaker 1: just say it that way all over the place is
Speaker 1: because we are so good at violence, meaning we have
Speaker 1: a very powerful military, were we are in protected shores,
Speaker 1: and we have the luxury playing games that other countries don't.
Speaker 1: And I notice that, you know, That's why I highly
Speaker 1: encourage people to travel. My kids are going to travel,
Speaker 1: because when you get outside the US, it's interesting, like
Speaker 1: Western Europe and Western and the United States. When I
Speaker 1: give seminars, I spend a good portion of the time
Speaker 1: conditioning people and handling the legal questions. You know, they
Speaker 1: don't understand that when when I talk about something, I
Speaker 1: talk about a threat. You know, the conditions for our
Speaker 1: training or this. We assume multiple attackers. We assume they're
Speaker 1: all bigger, faster, and stronger, and we assume weapons. We
Speaker 1: also assume that the threat that we're talking about is
Speaker 1: your devoid of choice, meaning if you don't take action,
Speaker 1: you're facing grievous bodily harm. Had you an exit, if
Speaker 1: you could have talked your way out of it, you
Speaker 1: already would would have done that. So we're very clear
Speaker 1: on our parameters, to the point that if you have
Speaker 1: a firearm, you would feel justified emptying it into the threat.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a very high standard easy for people
Speaker 1: to understand. Even when you put that down, you'll still
Speaker 1: get some you know what about the reality of this
Speaker 1: that you go into other countries. I go to India,
Speaker 1: I go to South America, I go there are questions
Speaker 1: that we wait, where in the body do you want?
Speaker 1: They want? They have no problem, They understand when violence
Speaker 1: is appropriate, and they just want to make sure they
Speaker 1: have good information. It's interesting, I don't unintended consequences. So
Speaker 1: we stopped training our police officers to use the injury
Speaker 1: with batons. Now, my grandfather's, my my my great uncles
Speaker 1: were Boston cops and I remember sitting around them just
Speaker 1: telling stories and just laughing when a guy would pull
Speaker 1: a knife because they just pull out their stick. They
Speaker 1: go up, they break his wrist and they're they're very
Speaker 1: comfortable and very competent on that. And yes they broke
Speaker 1: the guy's wrist. He hadn't injury and had to be healed,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't shot. Today we default to lethal action.
Speaker 1: We shoot people things because we won't train people, because
Speaker 1: we don't want to deal. We don't have attorneys that
Speaker 1: the district attorneys that can properly explain the efficacy of injury.
Speaker 1: It is a lack of training. And even I'm shocked.
Speaker 1: In New York City at m IP, only supervisors can
Speaker 1: carry and carry non lethal. Yeah, they're like the last
Speaker 1: person that needs the non lethal Like you got to
Speaker 1: give these like the beat cops, the non lethal option
Speaker 1: because the only other option is to pull a gun.
Speaker 1: Like it's just crazy. Yeah, and it's it's funny. My
Speaker 1: wife is a captain with Las Vegas Metro. She just
Speaker 1: got back from Israel. She did attend a counter terrorism.
Speaker 1: They take her all throughout the country and she meets everybody.
Speaker 1: She came back, she has MATT, she goes. Their average
Speaker 1: response time for any instant, any terroristm is under two minutes.
Speaker 1: And there's a smaller country, and they've been they've dealing
Speaker 1: it for one times. And well, the reason the jihadis
Speaker 1: switched over to UH suicide bombing was because the citizen
Speaker 1: has got so good at swarming shooters. And I do
Speaker 1: I do an exercise in my training where I take
Speaker 1: everybody really calm, really calmly through a situation where they
Speaker 1: try to an active shooter comes in and we just
Speaker 1: go step by step by step and their job, their
Speaker 1: first job is just to try to get to the
Speaker 1: exit on the other side of the room. You know,
Speaker 1: as they're doing that, this this guy goes through and
Speaker 1: I do about twelve steps, he's able to get a
Speaker 1: shot off on each step. At least twelve people dropped.
Speaker 1: They may not be dead, but they're shot. We then
Speaker 1: reverse it and the only thing I have them do
Speaker 1: is instead of step away from the shooter towards an exit,
Speaker 1: I have them step towards the shooter. Within two steps,
Speaker 1: somebody has a hand on the shooter and it's just
Speaker 1: an education process because I think a lot of times
Speaker 1: when they do active shooters training, especially for civilians, they
Speaker 1: just scare the hell out of them. They don't really
Speaker 1: give them good information. And the one thing I learned,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if you had this experience when
Speaker 1: you went through training, the one thing that always stuck
Speaker 1: with me from BUDS was first phase, you just get psychotic,
Speaker 1: freaking instructors there. There's destroy you know, and you realize
Speaker 1: they were able to do that because you really can
Speaker 1: only hurt yourself during that time. You really can't. You
Speaker 1: can't hurt one of your other partners. But not as
Speaker 1: bad as soon as we went out. Second phase for
Speaker 1: me was weapons and explosives. We're out the island band,
Speaker 1: those same crazy instructors were like calm, you know, direct
Speaker 1: and want to make sure you got the information. What
Speaker 1: I learned was any time I learned anything lethal, it
Speaker 1: was always delivered in a calm, deliberate manner, and that's
Speaker 1: where I wanted to install it. And I think that's
Speaker 1: probably one of the biggest problems when we deal with
Speaker 1: training people to deal with violence. I think oftentimes we
Speaker 1: go for pressure testing way too early. You have to
Speaker 1: lay the foundation, you know, and and once you understand violence,
Speaker 1: it doesn't you don't have to become some super ninja
Speaker 1: or anything. But when you understand how violence works and
Speaker 1: how it operates, you can create a life that minimizes
Speaker 1: the chance of it ever end in your life. That's
Speaker 1: why it's worth studying the subject, you know, yeah, instead
Speaker 1: of ignoring it. So the last question I want to
Speaker 1: ask you was just can you share like a like
Speaker 1: a real world experience that that stands out in your
Speaker 1: mind where you've actually had to apply apply your training.
Speaker 1: Can you share that you have had to use it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably Venezuela. When I was working in Venezuela, it was
Speaker 1: the first time I really dealt in a world that
Speaker 1: was just just crazy. And this is pretty shaves. I mean,
Speaker 1: people think you know Venezuela then as one has had
Speaker 1: a problems for a long time. We went down there
Speaker 1: and back when we trained groups, we trained them to
Speaker 1: uh you know, they were they were trained as counter
Speaker 1: It was law Enford had everything had to be under
Speaker 1: law enforcement deal and you had to get approved by
Speaker 1: state department and so we did. We knew these guys
Speaker 1: we were training were not law enforcement when you knew
Speaker 1: they were out. They were just hunters and they were
Speaker 1: going out because they had a problem with a lot
Speaker 1: of narcos and stuff. So we trained guys. They were
Speaker 1: of the mind that they like to test things out
Speaker 1: and they'd like to see where you're at. And I
Speaker 1: remember sitting in a car one time and the guy
Speaker 1: just the gun was on me. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: this is one of the guys I'm training with, and
Speaker 1: he was there and it was loaded, the whole thing,
Speaker 1: and I just you know, where it was. It was
Speaker 1: easy for me to just redirect the doctor, turn right
Speaker 1: into him. I just jammed him in the throat. Then
Speaker 1: his senior, the senior guy, he just he had told
Speaker 1: the guy to do this because he just wanted to
Speaker 1: see what I could do, you know, And to me,
Speaker 1: it was it was just crazy. Then I find out
Speaker 1: everything we taught them on injury the human body. They
Speaker 1: kept coming back to us the next day and they go,
Speaker 1: that works really well, and I'm going, you know, and
Speaker 1: we didn't think too much. And finally I go, he
Speaker 1: said something about one of the strikes, and I said,
Speaker 1: what do you mean? It worked? Really? It was Oh,
Speaker 1: every night after we've done training with you. They go
Speaker 1: down to that famous prison, they pull out some guys
Speaker 1: that are on death row, and they just did it
Speaker 1: to him. They just wanted to make sure, they wanted
Speaker 1: to validate that the information we were giving them was
Speaker 1: actually true. And just working in that world. And when
Speaker 1: you when you work in that world and you operate
Speaker 1: in that world, you understand and that you have to
Speaker 1: be highly attuned to violence, into the potentiality for violence,
Speaker 1: and you have to deal with it in a calm way,
Speaker 1: you know, like I could care less that the guy
Speaker 1: was testing me. I didn't know he's testing me. I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, it's been as well. I thought it could
Speaker 1: be the Yeah, they're just sick of the gringo. They're
Speaker 1: gonna take them out. There have been other times I've
Speaker 1: had to use the information like a criminal criminal applications
Speaker 1: and stuff where it was if anything, it was disappointing
Speaker 1: because you never get to do you know, the highest
Speaker 1: level of your training. It's usually very basic strikes that
Speaker 1: get you out of it. But what's funny is the
Speaker 1: more you train. The one thing I will tell people,
Speaker 1: the more you train, the more you see profiles, the
Speaker 1: less it throws you off. If you know, if I
Speaker 1: see a knife, it's probably the ten thousand time I've
Speaker 1: seen a knife come at me or something which conditions
Speaker 1: you and trains you to where that's not a surprise anymore,
Speaker 1: and you deal with it. And what's funny is what
Speaker 1: you try to tell people is the most highly trained
Speaker 1: people that I know in lethal application, you know that
Speaker 1: are not criminals, are the calmest, great sense of the humor,
Speaker 1: love life. Most of them you would never know, you know,
Speaker 1: if you interact with them. And those are the guys
Speaker 1: always admired, And those are the guys I always wanted
Speaker 1: to be, like just this quiet confidence of they know, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm trained, I understand, but until something happens, I'm going
Speaker 1: to enjoy my life. I'm gonna have a great life.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and to me, that's the last thing I
Speaker 1: want to come off as to anybody is a badass,
Speaker 1: you know, because that puts you way behind the power curve. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean my own kids took jiu jitsu for you,
Speaker 1: you know, four years, but it was just uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I remember what it did for their self confidence. You know,
Speaker 1: they just carry themselves a little bit more confident and
Speaker 1: a lot of times, that's that's all you need. Like
Speaker 1: I remember my oldest son, Hunter was a freshman and
Speaker 1: he he was wearing one of my Seal shirts. I
Speaker 1: gave him like a Seal Team three shirt, and one
Speaker 1: of the seniors came up to him and gave him
Speaker 1: ship and he just looked at the guy with confidence
Speaker 1: like hey, that's that's looked him right in the eyes like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my dad. My dad was a Seal. And it
Speaker 1: was just like, you know how having a little bit
Speaker 1: of confidence just kind of diffuse the situation. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: a lot of times people, uh, they're gonna socially test you,
Speaker 1: but they don't understand what the repercussions of tuning that are.
Speaker 1: And that's what I'm saying when you do something wrong, person,
Speaker 1: Like I laugh all the time. You know, I still
Speaker 1: I'm you know, I'm in my early fifties, but I
Speaker 1: I still have a physical presence. I'm there. And people
Speaker 1: will say to me, well, yeah, you have this, you know,
Speaker 1: you have that look. You know, I have some tattoons
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. And I laughed again, and I
Speaker 1: laugh at people all the time. I go, I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: this works, this presence works. On everybody I don't care about.
Speaker 1: You know, if this is enough to intimidate, you're not
Speaker 1: my threat. You know, I know who I'm looking for,
Speaker 1: and the scariest guys I know they're probably anywhere from like,
Speaker 1: you know, five six to five nine hundred forty five
Speaker 1: to maybe a hundred seventy pounds into script. If I
Speaker 1: see those guys rolling in with their you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of Duffel bags, I'm out of there. I know,
Speaker 1: I know it's about to go down. You know, it's
Speaker 1: just very funny. Violence is a very different tool, and
Speaker 1: I didn't like. I went into the prison systems and
Speaker 1: I was able to talk to a lot of top corrections,
Speaker 1: guys that interviewed Arian Brotherhood, Black Grill of family in
Speaker 1: Mexican mafia, and you learned that these guys look at violence.
Speaker 1: Violence is currency for them. They look at it as
Speaker 1: a tool, and they're they're all results oriented. And I've
Speaker 1: been able to take that information and you sit there
Speaker 1: and go, yeah, it's coming from the worst part of society. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's where the best information comes. I just have
Speaker 1: to sanitize it for the general public. But I can
Speaker 1: put you on par with the worst of the predators
Speaker 1: on how they use the tool. And that's the goal,
Speaker 1: you know, Um, it should be available to everybody. What
Speaker 1: people don't understand it's how you use the information. Like
Speaker 1: this show Mine Hunters, right, it's a great, great show.
Speaker 1: But they said, look, we're we're so outdated in the
Speaker 1: way we're trying to solve these cases. We have to
Speaker 1: get into the mind of these serial killers to understand
Speaker 1: and develop, you know, actics to deal with this, better
Speaker 1: investigate these crimes and profile But yeah, I know it's great.
Speaker 1: I'd love to have you back on the show. I
Speaker 1: mean I could go another hour with you. But the
Speaker 1: book is when Violence is the Answer Learning how to
Speaker 1: do what it takes when your life is at stake
Speaker 1: by Tim Larkin. And where can people find you online?
Speaker 1: They can get me um probably probably if they go
Speaker 1: to Survive Violence dot com. I got a whole free program,
Speaker 1: thank you check out. It's really easy for them to
Speaker 1: remember that. Yeah, and then the Violence is the Answer
Speaker 1: to the book you can get on Amazon. I got
Speaker 1: audible at anything. And then you're on Instagram, I follow
Speaker 1: you this one. T F t uh Tim Larkin, Okay,
Speaker 1: t F t Tim Larkin or Tim markin t F T,
Speaker 1: so I just typed in Tim Larkin and found you'll
Speaker 1: find me all right. Then a couple of things before
Speaker 1: I check off again, I have to have you back
Speaker 1: on the show. I'd love to get more into kind
Speaker 1: of some practical tips for for the audience. Um, I
Speaker 1: just had a couple of things. We're doing a lifetime
Speaker 1: membership those of you that don't know, we relaunched softwrap
Speaker 1: dot com this week and basically created a centralized hub
Speaker 1: for all of our content under the soft rep domain name,
Speaker 1: and we're giving away a lifetime membership. Those that are
Speaker 1: interested in a lifetime membership, you can go to softwrep
Speaker 1: dot com forward slash lifetime. We're only given away a
Speaker 1: few hundred limited lifetime memberships for the listeners of the show.
Speaker 1: We're giving away a custom Shane Hyatt knife. Shane will
Speaker 1: make a custom knife just for you to enter. Just
Speaker 1: email us at radio at softwup dot com. It's radio
Speaker 1: at softwp dot com and just put knife in the
Speaker 1: subject line. And Shane is a good friend of mine.
Speaker 1: Him known for years. He was silting three golf platoon
Speaker 1: with me. Just really passionate about making knives. He doesn't
Speaker 1: make a lot of them. I tried, was telling him earlier,
Speaker 1: try to get him to make some custom knives for
Speaker 1: our premium Craig Club members. And he's like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to make that many knives. I want to travel.
Speaker 1: It's gonna it's gonna impede. I'm like, when you're trying
Speaker 1: to make a business out of this, He's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but not. I don't want to grow with that big
Speaker 1: it's just this funny color. It's gonna slow me down. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He's like, I don't want it to slow me down,
Speaker 1: which is funny. But anyway, Custom knife Machine, Hyatt. And
Speaker 1: that's it. It really enjoyed having you on the show, Tim,
Speaker 1: and thanks so much for having you. Appreciate him. We'll
Speaker 1: have you back back for sure. Guys out here, you've
Speaker 1: been listening to Self Rep Radio. New episodes up every
Speaker 1: Wednesday and Friday. Follow the show on Instagram and Twitter
Speaker 1: at self Rep Radio.