Avoid These Self-Defense Myths: Expert Exposes All I Tim Larkin DSH #467

Basically, you fought everywhere you went when your new school came up.

Now, it's really discouraged, but back then it was kind of a rite of passage.

So for me, fighting was normal.

Not in a brutal way, but just in a, okay, you know, this is what I have to do to let everybody know that you can't pick on it.

Obviously, I've interviewed a ton of people from prison gangs.

Nothing is extreme as what they live every day.

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all right guys self-defense expert tim larkin in the building your hands are registered weapons all right oh yes yeah that's uh that's what the wizard of oz told me and from there i was like yeah he's coming on the podcast but the worst is when you're in this business and people try to describe you they always will say something like oh he can kill you with his pinky you can do you know which immediately sets people off yeah you know and then they don't want to listen to you

What got you on this journey of self-defense?

Was it a moment in your life where you were like, wow, I need to be able to defend myself?

You know, I think it was, I was a Navy brat.

My dad was a naval officer, and we moved from city to city.

Originally born in Boston.

My grandfather was a huge influence.

He's a huge, he was from originally South Boston.

His grandfather ran, if you watched anything like

Boardwalk Empire, he ran liquor with the Kennedys.

Oh, yeah.

My great-great-grandfather.

And so my grandfather was there.

They owned pool halls.

And then my grandfather grandfather kind of went legit, and he did real estate and insurance, but he still had those roots.

And so he thought it was really important that boys knew how to fight.

Taught me at a very young age how to box.

But he said a really interesting thing to me.

So I remember, I was probably six years old.

I'm down in his basement.

That's where my cousins and I would always go and fight.

And I don't think our moms knew what the hell was going on.

Bike club down there.

Yeah, basically, it's a little bike club.

But my grandfather said he stopped us at one point, and he loved boxing.

and he'd always say, boys, such a great rule.

And this is, you know, here are the rules and this is what you do.

But then he'd stop and he looked at us and he points to the window and so we're in a basement.

So he pointed up to the window and he goes, but out there,

he said, if anybody tries to hurt you,

he started showing us different things.

It had nothing to do with boxing.

It had to do with truly hurting people, injuring them,

specific areas of the human body.

because he said out there, there are no rules and you have it.

And as young kids, we didn't really know kind of what he's talking about, but that was his experience.

His experience was he dealt with criminals and he dealt with people that truly just wanted to

hurt you

beyond repair.

And so that was his approach.

So that, as a young kid, that got me thinking about that.

I've always found the extreme end of self-protection the most interesting part.

I mean, the situation where your life is on the line.

Combat sports is fantastic, and I love combat sports.

I'm a huge fan.

I have a lot of friends there in the the UFC.

The trainings are fantastic.

But for me, the interest was always the criminal aspect of things.

And, you know, what do you do when somebody truly just wants to kill you?

And, you know, so that was a journey that, you know, as I went from city to city as a young kid,

back then,

basically you fought everywhere you went when new school came up.

Now, it's really discouraged.

But back then, it was kind of a rite of passage.

Wow.

So for me, fighting was normal coming up, not in a a brutal way, but just in a okay, you know, this is what I have to do to let everybody know that you can't pick on it.

It's like jail almost.

It was a version of it, and it's so funny because since then, obviously, I've interviewed a ton of people from prison gangs.

Yeah, and it's interesting kind of the similarities of what I was brought up.

Nothing is extreme, it's what they live every day.

But yeah, pretty much.

My relationship to violence was very different.

But it was never from a process of thinking violence was

good or bad.

It was just, it was the subjective tool that you can use.

And I noticed the people that knew how to use it and were not criminals lived a much more peaceful life and they were not harassed.

My mentors, the people that I always admired, were these guys who always could take care of themselves, but there was just something about them that most of the time another predator would just leave them alone.

Wow.

And I always wanted to be that guy.

And so that kind of got me as a young man on my journey.

And then the last place that my father was stationed was San Diego, California.

And we had Navy housing in Coronado, California.

And my backyard literally backed up.

I had a chain link fence.

There was a little highway called the Silver Strand Highway.

On the other end was basic underwater demolition school, the Seal Teams.

And so at 12 years old, I didn't even know these guys existed.

You know, now everybody knows about the teams, but back then nobody knew about them.

And I couldn't believe there's this job that you got paid to jump out of airplanes, blow things up.

And so as soon as I found that out, that was what I wanted to do in life.

And my parents were not happy.

You know, they wanted me to be a traditional naval officer.

And back then, it wasn't very,

it was discouraged to go into the SEAL teams back then because there really wasn't a career path for it.

But I was fascinated by the job and I just decided that's what I wanted to do.

And so I got a scholarship, went to college and went into naval special warfare and did very well in my training.

I was two weeks away from graduating and I had an accident underwater where I blew my ears really badly to the point to where I couldn't pressurize dive.

Today they could heal me, but back then they didn't have the technology.

That's my seminal point.

For me, it was twofold.

One, it ended the career that I thought I was going to have and switched me into another career, still in special warfare, but I was an intelligence officer, and I worked with everybody after that.

I was a very junior guy in a very senior command, and I got to work at levels that nobody in

my

rank ever should have done.

Like you were the youngest by far?

Yeah, by far.

And we had modified grooming standards sometimes, so meaning I could look like a civilian.

And we traveled places.

And yeah, I was probably my position that I had because we had just created, in the military, we had just created the

Naval Special Warfare Command, part of US SOCOM.

Didn't exist before, but 87 existed.

We had trailers, you know, while they're building everything, and we were undermanned.

And so they pulled me in and gave me this position I had no business having because they didn't want to take a guy who was fully functional and could die.

We were so shorthanded.

So it was a huge opportunity.

And

as I said, I thought, oh, my life's over.

You know, I don't, everything I want to do, I can't do.

All my friends are going on and doing these amazing careers.

Well, that command changed everything.

Number one, what I want to tell everybody is when I blew my ears underwater,

I had been leading everything in the class.

I was going to be the anchor man.

My team won hell week.

We did all the things that are physically challenging.

What

was amazing was this was the first time in my life I had been hurt.

I had been, you know, been cut before and everything.

But this was the first time that I couldn't just will my way through something.

This was a true injury to the human body where I lost control of my body.

I went into vertigo underneath there, meaning where you lose all your sense of balance.

Wow.

I was very lucky that I didn't drown and that I was able to get up.

They said when I hit surface, I'd pulled myself up by the anchor line.

My head was slapping against the water, bleeding.

And when they pulled me out, I had no

understanding of where I was.

Wow.

So that was true injury to the human body.

And what's interesting is

that

turn in my life is really what I teach people.

I teach people how to exploit injury to the human body to save their own lives.

And you find out really quickly there are areas of the human body that if you put enough trauma into them and you put enough force into them, the response of the human body is to protect itself and it bypasses the brain.

And so that's where it all started.

And the nice thing about injuries of those type and you've experienced it if you put your hand on a stove your hand automatically comes off.

You don't burn yourself, oh I better move it.

It happens.

The afford and effort nervous system of your body has you pull it away and then you realize oh I burnt my finger and that's to protect your limbs.

But in that time where you burn yourself and pull back your brain is not involved in that process.

It's you responding to the injury.

If you step on a sharp object, your foot automatically comes up.

Those are

reflexes that come up.

And that's what we noticed back then was if we taught a system that exploited these protective measures of the human body, you had a really good chance of bypassing bigger, faster, and stronger.

And because everybody responds to trauma that way.

But it's not, we don't teach things like

when you teach for your own self-protection, you're not teaching to compete with somebody.

You know, you're teaching to, you want to put an injury on them as quickly as possible so you you don't get to find out how good they are at whatever they do.

Right.

And so that's kind of how I got to where I was.

And we did this originally in, I was at Special Warfare Command with the teams, and they were looking at redoing hand-to-hand combat.

And that's how I originally got into it.

And then was it outdated at the time?

Yeah, very much.

We hadn't looked at it.

You got to remember

back then,

when I was at this command, the Berlin Wall came down.

And so up until then, we were working the Soviet problem.

And so that, the mentality of it was if you're looking at hand-to-hand combat, you've screwed up.

You know, we're talking about the Russian wave coming and all this other stuff.

And we really hadn't looked at it since Vietnam.

And so what happened was the wall comes down.

Soviets, we realized, are going to go away as they are.

Russia will still be around, but the Soviet Union itself is not there.

And we're going to go back.

These guys, these Legends of the SEAL teams that I was assigned with, and I had no business being there,

they immediately recognized what was going on.

Most of them were Vietnam vets, high combat guys.

The Admiral, I will say at the time, grabbed his best people.

And they realized, hey, we got to re-look at hand-to-hand combat.

We're going to start putting hands on people again.

They predicted all the warfare that we now see, like in Afghanistan and everything.

First, we all knew the Balkans were going to go off, and that's where Bosnia-Herzegovina-Herzegovina went off.

And they knew that we had to change our tactics.

And one of the things they wanted to look at was hand-to-hand combat.

I just happened to be in it.

They liked me.

I had a martial arts background growing up.

Obviously, I told you

my fighting background.

I had no experience as far as warfare or anything, but they liked me.

And so they included me in this pilot program where they were looking for something.

And we came across a guy who

was from the Vietnam era.

He was an Army guy, which is really funny that the SEALs looked at an Army guy.

And he did the tunnels.

He was a tunnel rat.

And so he understood intimately hand-to-hand combat.

And

they met, we did a pilot program, and that ended up being the beginning of what now of what I teach, which is target-focused training.

Nice.

And speaking of target focus, so let's talk about some parts of the body.

So like I play a lot of basketball, right?

Right.

Sometimes things get heated.

One time this kid squared up with me.

and I had to make a decision whether to fight him or not.

You know what I mean?

Right.

So in that situation, what parts of the body should I have targeted?

That's

a different way of looking at it because

it's going to be whatever is available to you.

To answer your question right away, the best target is one that you can get to.

And there are a variety.

There's about 120 areas on the human body that get a response like we're talking about.

Meaning if you put trauma into that area and the trauma is high enough, you will get an automic response.

Wow, 120.

Yeah.

Yeah, approximately there.

No, we're talking everything from a high of, you know, say taking somebody's eye and blinding them to hitting them in the solar plexus where they're going to recover from that, or,

you know, nerve strikes that you're going to do that, you know, will deaden an area.

But all things being equal, they'll come back.

So

the trauma will vary, but the response will always be the same, meaning it'll give you time.

And that's really what we want out of an injury to somebody: I want time to be able to stack injuries on somebody until they're non-functional.

But for basketball, I've got a lot of great ones where

when I say great, it means it's great information.

I remember there's one where LeBron's going up, and I forgot the other player, but he came up and he threw his elbow up.

Traymon Green, bro.

Yeah.

He got him right in the throat.

And, you know, most of the time you think, oh, Levon's faking it.

No, he wasn't.

LeBron was not faking it this time.

He went down.

You saw what the response was to the throat.

And he was very lucky that he was able to recover from that.

Other time, there's a New Zealand basketball player that was there, and a guy went to grab the ball and ended up taking his eye out on that.

Yeah, basketball has some really, basketball provides a lot of information on broken joints as well.

Guys going up to recover and they come down their ankle incorrectly.

So you see how the body responds to trauma.

You know, there's two ways, there's two forces that we're interested in for a human.

We're interesting in injuries.

When you look at injuries, we look at sports injury.

And the reason we look at sports injury is because those are injuries that happened with humans colliding with humans or humans colliding with the ground.

And those are the forces that you and I can replicate.

And so sports injury data is like your Rosetta Stone to the human body because the same areas of the human body keep showing up all the time.

And so that's what you focus on.

Yeah.

When it comes to fighting someone with a weapon, is that something you teach or is it mainly just hand-to-hand?

Yeah, the assumption just the assumption with what we teach is your opponent, you know, you're going to be first facing multiple attackers.

We all assume it's going to be multiple attackers.

We assume they're going to be bigger, faster, and stronger, and we assume they're going to be armed.

Got it.

With some way, because that's really your baseline for once we step outside here.

In a controlled environment like a competition, all that's taken out, you know, taken out.

I have to be very clear.

When I talk about competition

sports, combat sports, and violence, it's a very different thing.

One is not better than the other.

In fact, some of my best...

student clients over the years have been guys from the MMA world and they're great.

I couldn't do what they do, especially, you know, I'm well past my competitive years.

But they come to me because they say, hey, Tim, I'm not really sure when a knife comes out.

My brother was robbed the other day and I didn't have any good information to give him.

And that's where I can help out with people.

But the main idea is really, it comes back to the same thing, putting an injury on somebody and taking the brain out of the equation because The brain is what allows you to operate everything.

It operates your body weapons and it operates that tool.

So if you can get somebody in a reactive state through an injury, you really don't have to worry about what they have on them.

And there's tons of video data on all of that, you know, that you'll see where all of a sudden an armed guy gets injured and all of a sudden that tool that he has, be it a firearm, club, or a knife, is useless to him during that injury time.

And people that really understand that.

The alpha predators truly understand that.

They're very good at that.

And that's why I spent a lot of time interviewing and then going to the federal prisons and talking to people that operate in that

petri dish of asocial violence.

I don't glorify those people, but there's a lot of great information that you can learn.

And one of the great information is a lot of these prisoners have great situational awareness, which is something you teach.

So what are some signs to look for if you feel like you might be potentially in danger?

Well, you hit it with the situational awareness, but

most people think it means an attitude and or a look or like you know trying to look intimidating and that's that's not it at all.

It's really just a presence of knowing you know you know your surroundings, you know what's going on right now.

Like for me, and we're in the studio right now.

If I'm curious about what's going on behind me, all I got to do is look in the reflection here.

But I don't have to disengage from you.

I can just know, okay, there's, I can see what's going on there.

It's just a basic understanding of your surroundings, you know, where things are going on and just watching people.

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um

probably the best thing that everybody here can do i'm going to give give your folks some great information that all you have to do is read or listen

and that would be the number one tool that I think everybody needs for real self-protection, you know, of yourself and your family is understanding human nature.

And studying books like Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power or I think even better is his Laws of Human Nature.

The reason those two things, and they're very easy to get, there's many other ones, but those are easily accessible and very well done.

If you understand human nature and you understand how predators operate, you can spot things well before it gets to the point to to where there's violence.

My goal with any client is I will give them all the information about bigger, faster, stronger.

I will show them how to injure the human body.

We'll do all that.

But that's only if everything else fails.

If you have to use the physical part of my information, that means you've had a traumatic failure in your situational awareness and your understanding of human nature.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And so that's probably the greatest thing because the easiest thing for me to teach people is, you know, punch here, kick here, stomp here, grapple here, do that.

All of those things are fun and they're interesting, but really what gets people in trouble is not recognizing the danger prior.

Usually when I talk to people that unfortunately have had to use the information that we've provided, they will tell me I knew something was wrong here,

but because I didn't want to feel, I felt awkward saying something or I felt like I would be judging somebody, I got to hear and then it was too late.

And so my goal with people is, listen, listen to your intuition, understand your situation.

If you're getting those

uncomfortable signals early on, you have to really learn to trust those.

Yeah, trust your gut.

Yeah.

And I mean, people they sounds

it sounds kind of like, oh, yeah, everybody knows that.

That's why I show the violence first.

Because I show people that

I go, this is what it's going to take if you ignore all of this.

And there's many examples of people doing...

clearly avoidable situations that then get themselves in and the only tool that works at that point is the tool of violence, and you have to understand how to use it.

When it comes to de-escalation techniques, I know it's probably case by case, but is there anything in general you use?

Yeah,

most of the, like I said, the alpha predators that I know is,

there's one guy I interviewed, Michael Thompson, and he was one of the founding members of the Aryan Brotherhood.

Wow.

And Michael just recently got out.

23,

he says he didn't do all of them 23 murders in there uh just just a formidable even in his 70s is a formidable human being um wealth of knowledge and he always talks about the idea of he said we have a thing of uh warm smile cold heart

and what he means is your outward appearance you don't want to let anybody feel like you are a threat in any way shape or form You don't want to feel like you're a pushover.

But to me, with my presence, you have to say, what is your body type?

how do you present to the world?

Well, to me, especially at this age, I present as kind of an old meathead, you know, a gym guy and stuff, and just kind of nice.

And people always say, Oh my god, you're so nice, you're this, you're that.

It's exactly what I want people to think.

I don't want them to feel threatened, I don't want them to feel like I'm aggressive in any way, shape, or form.

Because if I need my information, I want it to be a complete surprise

in that situation.

And you conduct yourselves that way.

One of the early lessons I got in that was from a SEAL team friend of mine, And he was on the unit that used to be called SEAL Team 6.

And back then, everybody else in that unit would dresses like a biker.

You know, they all had long hair.

They drove Harleys.

They did the whole thing.

And they were.

They're an intimidating bunch of guys.

But you pretty much knew if you were in the Virginia Beach area, you pretty much could pick out who these guys were.

This guy, he drove a Volvo.

He had round glasses.

He wore three-piece suits.

And

he would carry a briefcase, but he would also carry a uh

um a uh valise for for like suits and in that was a sniper rifle wow and he was probably one of the best snipers at the time that the steel teams could produce but what was more valuable about this guy is he could blend in anywhere and you would never know

and most of the people that I found that are truly dangerous and truly capable could come in here right now and you wouldn't you know visually you wouldn't be triggered by any of them you wouldn't be worried about oh is this guy that I mean I come in sometimes, and just my physical presence, even at my age right now,

I still have a presence where people, oh god, you look like a big guy and stuff.

And I laugh because

the people I know that are truly dangerous, you will never know until you know it's too late.

Yeah, because you see documentaries of those CEO killers, like Ted Bundy, they look like normal people.

Flattened effect, yeah.

You're not there.

And

they understand human nature also.

They want you to feel very comfortable.

Most of the times, true predators are truly engaging.

You know, they will make you feel great because they'll get right in, but they have no problem

jamming a knife into you.

They look at it the same way you and I would look at

going and ordering a drink at the bar or something.

To them, it's just no problem.

It's a means to an end, and they know how to deceive you to get that.

Exactly.

And one of the guys you interviewed was Sammy the Bull, right?

Oh, yeah.

Sammy is great.

Sammy was great in the fact that

he truly understands human nature.

And when they took over originally, he and John Gotti took over, Sammy was really the person that set everything up.

And he talks about, yeah,

out of the gate, we had to be incredibly violent.

As soon as they killed the boss, you know, they got Paul Castellano, they killed a lot of people.

They took over, boom.

But Sammy then understood, he goes, hey, we cannot rule by violence only.

We have to understand, we have to make sure that these guys make money.

So he went out of his way to build a network of guys that they were rewarded for making money.

They had very strict standards at that point and everything.

But it was a really interesting use of violence.

And if you look at violence, the use of violence in history, the Mongols did this, everybody else.

After the violence is really where you have to have control.

And that's, again, understanding human nature is critical.

Sammy really understands human nature.

Now, granted, I'm not condoning anything that he did.

Yeah.

But he truly understood how people operate.

He talks about a situation where money was lost in an investment.

And the other guy said to him, and it was a civilian that he was investing with, meaning not a guy that's in the mob.

Oh, interesting.

And the other guys, when they found out that they lost money on that and that they actually owed this guy money,

They go, Sam, what do you do?

Screw him.

He doesn't need any cash.

And Sammy knew right away.

He goes, nope.

He goes, I'm going to pay him in full.

It wasn't his fault.

He goes, I need to be able to do business with him forever.

And so, again,

we make these assumptions that predators are knuckle draggers and they're stupid.

And what you find out is the people that are at the highest level of, and that can use true violence are usually wildly intelligent and very judicious in how they use it.

Yeah, to be able to make it in that life, because most of those mob guys end up dead or in prison for life.

And he was able to make it out.

Yeah, he was.

And he went through, you know, he's mentally tough.

And it sounds like I'm glorifying him.

I mean you know It's just what I what I try to do when I look at individuals like this I say Where's the good information for us for for law-abiding normal people these guys survive in this world and we are not gonna operate in a criminal environment But what can we take from that environment where if you make a mistake there you die, you know or it's it's critically bad you know information

Those skill sets given to a normal a normal person are wildly valuable when you need them and you know I've been doing this almost 30 years now and I would say the biggest return I get from people is when they call me up and they say hey Tim

prior to taking your training reading your book whatever the old me would have done this in this situation but because I understood your information I did X and I didn't have to deal with it at all I got myself out of there you know it's always great when I hear people like when I train my military guys and my law enforcement people

and they tell me about yeah we successfully use this in our mission and blah blah blah that's great feedback I expect them to do well they signed up for it you know it's when you can help somebody who never should have to experience violence navigate those waters and successfully not have to use violence and still you know be intact and everything's great that to me is way more rewarding than hearing from you know one of my you know commando teams or yeah or one of my operators.

Absolutely.

Being able to help people like literally save their lives just feel incredible, honestly.

Yeah.

And that's

the young me when I got in, I only wanted to treat all the, train all the hardcores.

And that's all I did.

All the hardcore units, NATO, I did everybody all around the world.

And that was fun and it was great.

But it was the one that got me was I trained a doctor.

He was a brain surgeon, believe it or not, a true brain surgeon.

And I got a letter.

Now, this is backing to tell how old I am.

I said I've been doing it for 30 years.

This is actually a handwritten letter that I received.

He had gone in, he'd been called in late.

He was, I think, believe it was Cincinnati.

Into

a young eight-year-old kid, had, I believe, a tumor or some sort of a hematoma that had to be operated on immediately.

The kid was going to die.

Doctor driving in in the middle of the night, it's probably, I think it was early morning hours that he came in, parks in it's an inner city, uh, Cincinnati

hotel or hospital.

Yeah, drives in,

and as soon as he parks his car in the parking lot,

he gets attacked.

Two guys come out of nowhere from him.

The first guy had a knife and he comes up.

The doctor, he saw right then, he goes, Tim, it was just like you said.

He goes, I saw, he saw the radial nerve in the guy's arm.

He struck it with his ulna bone as hard as he could.

He kicked the other guy into the groin.

He dropped.

The guy that he knocked the knife out ran off.

The guy on the ground tried to do something else.

He then kicked him, knocked him out.

Now, this is a man who is probably about 155 pounds, very you know not not a built doctor but he understood the situation

he goes in performs a surgery successfully comes out cleans up and the first thing he did was he sat down wrote that letter wow he said i just want you to know he goes you saved two lives you saved mine and you send the kid that i saved and that changed my whole perspective on everything and i said you know this guy never this guy here here he is going in to save a young kid's life yeah and and he experiences violence and because he got some good training and he understood what was going on thankfully, you know, he was able to get himself out of it.

That's incredible, man.

Yeah.

Eight-year-old kid.

Yeah.

And those are the kind of things.

I mean, you know, my customers that have clients from over the years, a lot of them share stories.

There's horrific things of violence that happened to them that they come to me after the fact.

Now, I can't undo what's already been done.

That's why I love doing podcasts like this and getting out to people.

I'm hoping, you know, normally, if you don't know my name, that's a good thing.

Normally 70% of my clients come to me after the fact.

Something's already happened, as far as my civilian clients come to me after the fact, only 30% are proactive and get some information or training prior to an event happening in their life.

So by doing things like this, I'm hoping I'm reaching a lot of the audience that hasn't had anything happen.

Yeah, it's better to be preventative.

Yeah.

And especially, you know, we got a crazy year coming up now.

Election year, yeah, there's going to be.

Yeah,

why we're in the state we're in right now, you know, we can all talk about that, but it's crazy.

And people are really triggered and overreacting.

And violence is a lot more common.

It seems like it, yeah.

Seems like it's making a comeback.

So, understanding it is a really great time to understand it, you know.

And if you understand the tool, and again, I don't want everybody to just like a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll look at like a UFC event, or they'll see on social media, they'll see all the combat sport athletes doing these amazing things, and they're going, Oh my god, I don't have the time, nor do I have the skill set.

So, therefore, self-defense or self-protection is not an option to me, right?

And that's not it at all.

That when you see those competitors, they're amazing at what they do.

But I try to compare it to

CPR.

A doctor

is not going to look at somebody that takes CPR and laugh at CPR.

It's for a very specific thing.

Now, you're not going to be a doctor.

Most people, if they put a little bit of time into good self-protection information, they can avoid 99% of the potentiality for violence coming in their lives.

Wow.

Now, they're not going to be a world-class competitor in combat sports.

It's a completely different skill set.

The way to look at that is if

I had a class of like 40 people right now and we brought in a beautiful big slab of Italian marble and I brought in the best sculpturing tools that there are for each person.

And I said, listen, nobody leaves today until you recreate Michelangelo's David.

Well, those folks could be there a thousand years and they'll probably never be able to do that.

Okay, that is becoming a high-level combat athlete.

But if that same crowd looked at that thing of marble and I brought in 40 sledgehammers and I said, nobody gets to eat lunch today until this is a pile of rubble.

It would suck.

They wouldn't like it, but they'd all grab a sledgehammer and they'd be able to reduce that into

a pile of rubble.

That's what learning the tool of violence is.

It's available to everybody.

If it wasn't, you wouldn't have a lot of these criminals who are so good at it.

Because they don't do it.

They're not good at it because they train

religiously.

It's because they understand and they have no compunction about grabbing a hammer and hitting somebody in the back of the head.

And

once you understand why that works,

you would never use it for the criminal application of use of violence.

You would sit there and understand it.

But if you needed it to protect yourself, now you have really great information.

Absolutely.

So the way I try to tell people is there is no such thing as self-defense.

Self-defense is a term.

It's all violence.

How you use the tool determines whether or not it was judicious.

If it was judicious, the courts will rule, hey, this is self-defense, and you'll be fine.

If you criminally use violence, well, then you're going to be in this system and you're going to have to deal with that.

But it's all the same.

There's just violence.

You know,

people get caught up.

I want to learn self-defense.

It's like, no, you don't want to learn self-defense.

You want to learn how to use the tool of violence.

You want to know when it would ever be applicable.

That's the big challenge is what is a threshold to where this would ever be allowed and then what works in that situation so you have to make sure that you have both of those covered when you're training you know good people i love it tim it's been so valuable man where can people find out more about you and your trainings um yeah you can get me i'm on all the social on the socials probably uh best place to start is surviviolence.com um i give out free information out of that of course ig just tim larkin you'll find me on any of the plots perfect we'll link it below thanks for coming on man you got it brother thanks for watching as always always, guys, and I'll see you next time.