Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 4 - Tony Blauer

Episode Date: July 3, 2017

Tony Blauer has been a student of violence for 40 years. He is the CEO and founder of Blauer Tactical Systems, an organization that works with Military, Police, First Responders, and civilians. The SPEAR system is based on survival reflex, instinctual movement, and human physiology. His mission is simple - Make the world safer. Whether you accept violence or abhor it, it is part of the world we live in. Preparation, understanding (of yourself), and situational awareness will help you navigate any environment.

Let's start this week off with a question. Before I ask that question, I need to lay out a story for you. So this story is about you, and it depends a little bit on your personal situation, meaning if you're single, that I'm just talking about you. If you're married, then I'm talking about you and your spouse. If you're married with kids, I'm talking about the whole family unit. This story can take place wherever you would want it to throughout your normal day. So pick any day of your life and imagine living it. But at the most inopportune moment for you and the most opportune moment for somebody else, it's interrupted by violence. That could be you and your family sitting at dinner and an armed robber comes into the restaurant. That could be you coming up to an ATM trying to withdraw money and you turn around

and there are maybe single or multiple armed or disarmed assailants who want to take your money from you. This could be you as a housewife who answers the door. On the other side of that door is evil. Hellbent on ending your life and raping and killing you. The most important part about this story that I want you to remember is that when that encounter begins, it's not controlled by you. You do not get to pick the time. So now that you understand the story, I can get to the question. and the question is simple to ask and complicated to answer.

And it's this. What would you do? How prepared are you to answer the call in that moment? You are presented with a situation that is outside of your control. And whether or not you want to be in that situation, you are. You're in it. There's two ways out of it. One is as a victim, the other is as a victor.

Now, depending on your background, the answer to that question can come very quickly. If you've never taken the time to think about that question or what you would do in that situation, you might actually have more questions than answers, which in my opinion is a dangerous position to be in. Today I got to sit down with Tony Blower, the CEO and founder of Blower Tactical Systems and the Spear System. Tony is an absolute wealth of knowledge. He is interested in self-defense and helping people realize and understand that you come into this world with the bare bones essentials and reflexes necessary to defend yourself. He's a man who has been trying to help others answer the questions that I have posed to you for the last 40 years. And that's a long time to spend in the

violence pool. He considers himself to be a polarizing figure inside of the martial arts community, which, in my opinion, is surprising. Having said that, I am not a martial artist, and I don't have any loyalty or allegiance to one particular craft or art form over the other. I look at this as additional information that could enhance any other martial arts skill that you may have. regardless of your thoughts, Tony is an absolute substance matter expert. And that term will make a little bit more sense as we get into the podcast. The things that he says and the life that he has lived over the last 40 years teaching people these things is very rich in content. I've been having these conversations with Tony for years and I still ask him questions all the time for clarification. And I don't think this podcast is going to be any different for a lot of people. There is very, very, very, rich content and go back and listen to it a few times if you need to because I think the information that he is talking about is very important and it truly could make the difference in your life between being a victim or being a victor and at the end of the day I don't know if there's much

more than that. Rewind it if he says something that doesn't make sense. Rewind it if he says something that piques your interest. Reach out to him if you have questions. I have no doubt that he'll get back to you. He's passionate about this subject. It's, you know, this is the life that he lives. And it was great to sit down in a controlled environment to be able to pick his brain for an hour and a half. Hope you guys enjoy it. I want to start with the video you posted and then sent to me,

it wasn't four or five days ago, with the woman at the range, the man behind her with the loaded firearm. And if you've ever been in a violent confrontation in your life, you can look at that video and realize that there are some things that are intuitively and inherently wrong with it. And if you've never, well, first off, let's be honest, the scenario that was being portrayed is highly abstract and unlikely for most people.

But if you'd never been in a violent confrontation or had something like that happen, you might actually think that what was being portrayed in that video could have some application. And so you sent it to me, and I think your words were thoughts with a question mark, and I just wrote, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Because I don't know overtext how to articulate it,

better. It was good. It was good. But I find all the time, or what I have found in my life, is that people confuse performance for practical. And I struggle, I was thinking on the way up here driving, you know, I was getting ready to talk to you and it's like, I don't know how to how to describe what it is that you do.

But that video, I think, is a perfect opening because you posted it on your social platforms and you kind of dissected the difference between contrived and real life. Right. And I'm going to let you go ahead and describe that video because I think it's a perfect opening for kind of who you are. And then we can talk about your background and build forward from there. Cool. Nice way to ambush me right off the top. Usually when people have me on a show, they'll send me questions.

And I always tell them, I don't want to know your questions. I just surprised me like in a real confrontation. And I'll convert the flinch and get tactical. Well, I don't want to have an interview with you. I want to have a conversation with you. Right. And so you did it, and now I'm flinching. It's an interesting thing because when you read the comments,

you can see that juxtaposition you're talking about of people who've never been in a violent situation, who confuse facts and fantasy, who confuse technical for tactical. And something that I've told people for many, many years, is that your greatest hindrance for your spontaneity in a real violent confrontation will be your fixation on being technical.

The bad guy in a gunfight isn't thinking about his feet or his front sight or his grip. He's just shooting, and the weapon is truly an extension of his violent mind. I don't think bad guys, even in the U.S., but especially overseas, They're not, I don't think they've ever thought about their footwork. Right.

They've never been taught about grip or anchoring the weapon or front side focus or controlling your breathing. And even, and I basis only, I've never been in a confrontation that involves weapons in the U.S., but I've seen plenty of it on the news. None of them are doing anything that you're ever taught in any type of tactical school that you go to shooting-wise. Here's an interesting thing when I'm working with firearms instructors in our courses is, to get in their head that bad guys are more accurate in gunfights than good guys who train. Statistically, if you look at like the average, you know, hit ratio of a police officer who's qualified to trade, it's super low, where, you know, like five cops will shoot a bad guy

29 times and he lives. And, you know, a bad guy will shoot a cop and, you know, it'll hit the side of his panel and ricochet up and kill him through his armpit. And it's, it's, you know, It comes back to this. It's a really fascinating discussion in our trainer development where we talk about. Let's just spend some time here talking about technical versus tactical. And the way your brain is wired, when we fix it and when we spend so much time for position, position, position, and where should this go? We are micromanaging movement. And, you know, in Olympic lifting, that's important.

So, you know, you don't talk with, like, you know, fitness metaphor. I go, like a thruster is like a street fight. And a clinging jerk is an Olympic lifting movement. And they share certain kinetic chains and range of motion. But the violence of one and the sacrifice you'll make in form for speed and intensity, that's the scenario. The scenario is speed and intensity. Yeah.

So, but coming back to that video, I mean, it's that, which, by the way, is not a unique video by any stretch. A cursory search of the internet will net you scenario videos like that, left, right and center. So I started last year in all my Facebook lives and interviews like this. I'll talk about, I had to create categories so that we could try to debate intelligently because, I mean, the internet is still, you know, like, I already. that the ability to protect yourself or a family or a loved one or to be a courageous bystander is in arguably the single most important skill you could possess. And people go, well, I disagree with that.

I go, well, like, you're just disagreeing because you want to hear yourself talk. If whatever success you have in your life, if right now I said, hey, you know, you're at this, this, you know, station in life and everything's good, but guess what? This is happening tomorrow to you and your family. Or that horrific, you know, heinous, violent encounter is not going to happen because, you know, you've got situational awareness. You've prepared. You're committed to safety. But you've got to give up all your material possessions. So the choice is I keep my watch in my car and my house and my guitar collection and my stamp

collection and my gun collection. But the most important person is taken away from me. And I could have stopped that through some training and some awareness. and stuff like that. Or I give up, and I tell people, like, if you think about that for a, for a nanomomomomoment, if you're a sentient, normal person, you're like, like everything that I built, I built, nobody gave me this stuff. And I would, I'd give it up in a second to make sure that my family was safe.

Yeah, I'd have to agree. If I, and again, from my own experience, I find there's a disconnect because almost everybody you encounter will never have to make a decision like that in their life. So it's hard for them to wrap their head around the change in mentality once you realize it's possible. I agree with that. And I think, so, you know, I've been teaching real world self-defense for coming up on 40 years. 40 years, just one singular focus. You know, I wasn't a ninja for three years and I wasn't, you know, into judo and then jiu-jitsu and then taekwondo. And these are all the categories that I talk about. From 1977 to now, my singular focus has been self-defense and the study of that.

And that has evolved and taken me down many paths. The biggest one and most important one is understanding self-coaching, how we talk to ourselves, understanding the difference between the biology of fear and the psychology of fear, and recognizing how nobody talks about that stuff, you know. And that when I interviewed victims and victors of violence, I was intuitively, I didn't know it at the time, but over years and years of doing it, there was this thread that we would call flow or mindset or whatever the cool shit. And it was interesting. I saw this TED talk from 20-something years ago. And I don't know if the TED talk was, it was this brain researcher. and I don't know, the TED Talk might not have been 20 years ago,

I don't know how long that's been around, but his research on this concept of how the brain works is 20-something years old, which was around when I started developing, really refining my approach to scenario training, which was completely different than, you know, the big military, the big law enforcement, where I said, hey, we need to do these micro-fights where you can incrementally make adjustments

that impact your reticular cortex, your body's awareness system, and you're conditioning the stamina, endurance, and the propioception of combat. And so I would say, like, okay, if the fight's going to happen as you come through the door, as you open your car, there's no reason to do like a 10-minute scenario before that and lead up to the ambush. Let's just work on the ambush. And that spawned the whole, the whole spear system of understanding startle, flinch, convert, and how to do that? do we take potential energy and when it starts to get converted by the sudden violent aggression and becomes kinetic energy, how do we use physiology and physics to convert that? And so, you know,

split the, you know, split jerk is the most powerful explosive lift and Olympic lifting, right? So I'm no expert, but I'll go with you on that way for sure. I mean, you see people, that's, that's the big, so regardless of somebody's size, you know, you see these like 135, pound, you know, athletes lifting, you know, 400 pounds and doing crazy. It's mind-boggling. Right. That movement, that kinetic chain of cord to extremity there is what, to me, what the spear system is, like that explosive movement.

And so it was in doing all these scenarios that I discovered that. It was like this serendipitous discovery. And, you know, I'm off on one of my rare tangents, but I'm so passionate about you're a human weapon system. How do I get into everybody's head? When I was 20, I'm 57 now. When I was 20, I got asked, what do I want to do by a venture capitalist? And I had no idea what a venture capitalist was in 1980.

And I was training this guy in Montreal, a very successful real estate guy. And he said, hey, you've got the X factor. I'm going to introduce you to a friend. I'm like, what's the X factor? And he smiles. And I go meet this guy. And he says, yeah, Rick Scott says you got the X factor. what do you want to do? And I said, I want to make the world safer. And he sits back in his recliner,

and he's like, you want to make the world safer? And how are you going to do that? And I said, we as a community teach self-defense wrong. We teach self-defense as a complex motor skill. We teach self-defense as a martial art. And this circles back to the video that you talked about. Yeah. We say, hey, if he's got a gun, you're going to parry here because that'll set up this overhook and into this strike. And then you can do. these four these a b c connect the dot chains of movement and and we we create drills to support what we're practicing and i've always said guess who controls the fight the bad guy you need to figure out how to win the fight by reading the body language of his movement yeah your background

to me is fascinating i mean so i'm listening to you talk about 40 years and the overarching topic that i wanted to talk to you about i mean in a single word is violence. Mm-hmm. Because you've, I mean, you've been a student of it for, like you said, for 40 years. So, I mean, I guess the only way to start is to go back. And I mean, I'm assuming you started in martial arts of some kind. I mean, where did the journey actually begin?

So like, give me not the 90 minute version of 40 years. Wow. Don't Tony me, okay. Give me a little bit of, but it would like walk me from, because I would have to assume it started in a martial arts of some kind and then maybe a realization that the martial art was more of a performance art as opposed to a I don't want to say

a combat art or something that has more practical application in the street perhaps and then how you got to the station that you're at in life right now sure the so first off

like if you know why you're doing something you'll derive great value from it and so I tell people martial arts because it always like a lot of people go people love me or hate me and most of people that that hate me have never met or trained with me or somebody that I actually you know so they they look at what you're saying right yeah yeah and and so they they go well like they when I posted that video I said like if you Google the definition for self-defense you will get

almost universally something to the effect of the physical act of protecting yourself for your property sounds reasonable except that's our co-relevant that's Muriam Webster and Google and Wiki and all this. The problem with that is there's no D1 or D2, detect and avoid, defuse and deescalate. There's no moral, ethical, or legal explanation or suggestion in that. It presupposes that you're already in the headlock.

It presupposes that the gun is already out in your face because it says the physical act of, meaning shit already happened, happen and actions faster than reaction and how are you supposed to, you know, fight with physics and math. And so I looked at that in about a year and a half ago, I said, you know, we got to change the world's definition for self-defense. So we came up with the decision to choose safety when danger is imminent. The decision to choose safety when danger is imminent. I like it.

It's so 360-degree, man, because I could say to you, is the safest thing to do right now to play dead? And we can reverse engineer scenario and you go, yeah, this would be where I would actually put a full of body on top of me and not let the bad guys know that I'm not dead, right? And that freaks people out, especially warriors, you know, someone like you going in my head, I'm sitting here, I'm trying to think about, okay, what would that sit? But, you know, we could go down the rabbit hole far enough that at some point I'd be like, sure. Okay.

you know, active shooter, 20 people come in, the club in Paris, Orlando, and the guy's shooting, you're nowhere near him, you don't have a weapon, you don't have access to a weapon, you've been hit, you're down, and he's dead checking people. Are you going to sit up and go, I'm alive? Or are you going to go, okay, I need him to think I'm dead,

and if he comes near me, I'm going to fucking kill him, I'm going to jump him, but I'm not going to run across the floor from 20 feet limping. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. you know why I like your definition is because it starts with a choice. It forces people to think morally, ethically, and legally.

I always tell people, hey, listen, don't let ego or pride dictate your next strategy. And so if I have a definition, so we're, you know, the first audio tape that I produced in 1988 was called cerebral self-defense, the mental edge. Because nobody was talking about self-awareness.

Andy, when I see guys talk about situational awareness on TV, I pull my hair out. Oh, I do too. That's why I ask you that question on Facebook live, because I see you doing those videos and I have to mess with you. So I ask you rhetorical questions that you and I both know the answer to. And the big thing about this is that if you don't have refined and continually refined self-awareness, your situational awareness is always biased or clouded. If you're not aware of your prejudice or you're arrogant or your fixation, on Jiu-Jitsu is the answer. Taekwondo's the answer. And this is what I started to talk about earlier is like the categories where category I talk about is in four categories. Category one is all martial arts. You just put it in a box every martial art and they're all great as martial arts if you know what you're doing

if you're a stamp collector you could have the world's first stamp, right? The Smithsonian's trying to buy it from you and they want they've offered you 50 grand and If you take the, and I'm making up numbers, I know nothing about stamps. And if you take the world's most valuable stamp and you lick it and put it on an envelope and send it to your grandmother, the post office will return it to you with an insufficient postage stamp on top of it, ruining it. Yeah. Right? Because in contemporary world, that has no value in our scenario now. And that's why I tell everybody, everything we do is what's the scenario.

So what is, when I say choose safety, if danger is imminent, is the safest thing to do to run, to barricade, to charge the threat. Now what it's forcing is this analytical process. And what I've learned is this is one of the ways that I've helped professional warriors, first responders, athletes manage fear, is to focus on the skills and strategy because that dilutes and dissipates some of the emotional connection, because it's the that fixation we have a definition and of course you talk about the psychology of intimidation is when you're visualizing what your opponent is going to do to you instead of what you must do to your opponent yeah you're giving them the control and the power yeah and this story goes on it's an unsolicited story in your mind and that's where you break that fear cycle and when we teach

people we have this map called cycle behavior and it's like the neural circuitry of fear and you look at it almost like it's almost like three-dimensional where you visualize oh shit i'm in the fear loop here this is my belief system it's erroneous it's doing that and what you're It's projecting images in your head. And, you know, we ask people, and it says, it's actually much more profound on a whiteboard, but I'll try to pull it off here, is I'll write on a whiteboard in big letters, courage.

And I'll ask the group, don't overthink this, but what's the opposite of courage? And one or two or three people will always call out cowardice. And I go, you know, when you think of somebody who's not courageous, they think, shit, I was a coward there, I was afraid. And it's connected to the whole fear, but the most extreme description of somebody who didn't do something because of fear is you're a fucking coward. And I look at the group and I turn around, so I'm blocking the word courage, and I write the letters D, I S, hyphen.

And I go, the opposite of courage is when you discourage yourself, that if you really understand the neural circuitry of fear and you understand what we visualize and why when some, people visualize failure instead of success. So you can be mountain biking looking at the openings or you can look at the obstacles. And I guarantee that if you look at the rocks and the trees and the bumps, that you have a greater chance of falling than if you're looking at what's the path. So just not even to interrupt it. Like in skydiving, when people are coming in all the time they hit things on landing, you ask them what they were looking at. And they're like, well, I was trying to avoid that tree, but I was staring at it. It's the same thing as driving. It don't look at what you want to avoid look at where you want to go. Right. Exactly. And and that simple expression is, is the

navigation of self-defense of, of, uh, situational awareness. And it comes back to if I say choose safety is where you want to go. Yeah. So is safety, I got to, I got to go through this person's body. Is that the safest direction? Um, and the scenario, you know, we tell people, the scenario dictates everything. And it was a scenario that changed me. from being a hardcore martial artist to a guy obsessed with cracking the code and hacking self-defense. And I was teaching a, you asked me how this all started, I realized after that I was born and grew with this element of fear that I didn't know, you know, where it, where it originated. I would be seven years old and if I was walking out my door, I'd go, what if it was a bad guy?

side of the door. I was always like imagining the stuff. Did you have a experience that stuck with you when you were super young that scared the crap out of you? You think that comes from or you just naturally? I think being born. Yeah. Yeah. Back when I was born. Okay. So just it was kind of just inherently who you were as a person growing up. It was weird. I was obsessed with any fighting on TV growing up in the 60s. I was transfixed by the TV. But I was always and you didn't and you still don't to this degree. Here we are in 2017. People still don't talk about. their fears, right? If you look at why relationships fall apart, if you look at why maybe missions fall apart, I've done stuff where, you know, I'm working with a SWAT team and I go, hey, would you want

your point guy to tell you about his personal problems before a mission? And they're like, fuck, no. I go, well, what if he hasn't been sleeping for two days and found out his, you know, his wife wants to leave him, his daughter's on drugs, and he's just not clear. I mean, and in the type A macho community like they're not comfortable talking like hey let's let's hold hands and sing kumbaya um it wasn't about that it was like hey if i can look at you and it's the same thing it's the same thing with this with with with with the shit going on with with my face and and anyone noticing my speech is a little slurred my left side my face is paralyzed um and i'm very self-conscious about it and but what i did is i forced myself to tell you about it so that you could mock me and taunt me and but i wouldn't do

that to your face. I would do that over the phone. Yeah. And over to my face, was that a pun? That was very good. I wouldn't do that to half your face. Um, um, um, but no, I agree with what you're saying. It's, uh, it's, it's the guys should be worried about the secondary and tertiary side effects of the personal life or the person that you're working with. But yes, it's tough in a type personality, especially, you know, like the seal teams, man, if you had a drop of blood in the water, I mean, we were going to consume you like great white sharks. Right. But because we loved you.

You know what I mean? We were doing it out of a sense of endearment. We were, you know, we were beating you because we loved you and we were going after that. But yeah, at the end of the day, you just want guys to,

they want them to be able to perform. Listen, and this is my whole point is I knew that by bringing up what, you know, what I'm dealing with this neurological, this nerve rehab. and you can't grow nerves very fast, you know. A millimeter a day.

Yeah. And I'm pushing it, man. And it's exhausting for me. But I knew that you would either say, okay, let's not do it, or you'd say, don't be a pussy. And you said, don't be a pussy. You said, like, talk about it, do it. Yeah.

Address it head on. But that's the example of self-awareness and your self-awareness, and my intuition said I could trust you. And what I needed, so what you did is you actually encouraged me because I was discouraging myself, right? I'm a professional speaker and have been for decades. Yeah. Ooh, yeah. Right?

Challenging. And so for me to go, holy shit, you know, I can't, I'm after 30 minutes in a conversation, I'm exhausted. And I'm using that real life world, hopefully to inspire some people listening to this just to deal with their shit head on. but also to recognize that I could have pretend I have like, oh, I got a toothache, I, you know, let's do this in two weeks or, and I'm saying that in the example of the type A's of the SWAT of the military, that it's, we don't want people to whine and complain, but I tell people, and anybody who works for my company, I go, the most important thing to me is clear community. communication on time, real-time communication.

And because I can't help you if you're hiding something and then it gets worse. And I want to know why you didn't tell me on Monday and Wednesday we've got a way big way bigger problem. And it's the same understanding that clarity and we were talking about situational awareness. There is no situational awareness if you don't have self-awareness. Yeah. And so the biggest thing is self-awareness when you realize you're not prepared or you realize, you're standing on the axe, you will get a fear spike. And if nobody's ever talked to you about the difference between the biology of fear and the psychology of fear, then that can create

emotional inertia right there. And now you're, you're, you know, that's a hesitation. And you know how dangerous and deadly hesitation can be in a real confrontation. I do, and I'm sure we'll get into that. But I also think that maybe a lot of people who will listen to this won't have a clear understanding of the difference between the biology and the psychology. So if you want, I mean, break it down a little bit. Yeah. So, so, so, so I do things is, is really interesting just, just to, what I do is I try not to get pedantic and create an obsequious relationship. That was a joke, right? Because most people, I don't understand most of those words, but yeah, I'm assuming it's hilarious. And that was it and that it was hilarious. It was hilarious. And I said that on purpose because

that's what people do is they use big words and they try to. make and so what I do is I go listen I'm going to teach you about like gun disarms this is the little hole don't be in front of the hole start the drill and that's literally yeah and you should see like people who know all the Jackie Chan type gun disarms and all that and when I put them in a grappling against a weapon situation I go look this is the hole don't be in front of the hole this is like right straight out of Sesame Street don't be in front of that little hole and it changes their performance instantaneously don't be in front of the hole and And so when people ask me, hey, what do you mean by the difference between the biology

and the psychology fear? The biology fear is what happens to you starting from a physiological level. It's an 80,000-year-old start-flinch reflex. It's kept us alive. You know, the cross-exensor reflex does, da-da-da-da-da-da. You're talking about like an increase in heart, right, though? Like all of that stuff. And I, and I, and, you know, that got really big in the first responder community.

And I go, listen, give me a real layperson example. An old friend of mine was a Thai boxing world champion Thai boxer. He won the UFC, Maurice Smith. I don't know if you know Maurice. No, almost nothing about Thai boxing. Big, big, heavyweight. And he won a UFC, heavyweight UFC badass dude. He would listen to like headsets like we're wearing to like rhythm and blues before a fight.

Now I've been in, you know, the changing room before a boxing match, a kickboxing match, a UFC match. And everyone has a pre-fight ritual. There's some guys listening to death metal. There's guys punching themselves in the face, smacking their heads, right? You've seen it all, like in the... We had our, I mean, most guys have their pre-operational as well, whether it's, and a lot of it has to do with music,

and a lot of it, too, is systematic laying out and putting on your gear. You're packing your mind for the evolution that's getting ready to occur. Right. And so, you know, the fighter has much less gear, right? Practically nude. He's got gloves and wraps and maybe a pair shorts.

So you would see their pre-fight ritual was more manifested in body language. The guy sitting there with the, you know, the leg going, da-da-da-da-da-da. You know, another guy pacing the room. One guy, you know, hitting his hand, smack in his face. And then there's Mori Smith lying on a massage table listening to the rhythm blues. See, that's the guy I'd be more concerned with. But get this, and you're going to love this story. So I interview anybody.

I mean, I've talked to pro fighters, great victims, attempted murder victims, and I'm trying to get in their head, because I know at the end of the day, that there are more people who defend themselves through sheer will and indignation than there ever will be people who, you know, technically pulled off this arm bar or the spinning hook kick. In fact, there's no evidence of that being used in real violent encounters.

And that's the thing that drives people crazy. I go, listen, it's not what we believe, it's what we see. And CCTV, body cam, helmet cam, smartphone, of all the violence you see in the world, when did you ever go, holy shit, look at that. Oh, hey, that was a pretty good leg sweep there. Like, you don't see, you don't see that. And so I go, if we just looked at what was going on,

we could reverse engineer a self-defense system based on how people attack good Samaritans. And that's what I've done. You asked me, you know, how do you explain what I've done? And it's so aloof because we've been through osmosis, we watch a John Wick movie and a Bruce Lee movie and we watch cartoons and Superman comics and we've got this mental blueprint

of what the hero is going to do and the evidence of that just doesn't support the fantasy. It doesn't support. I mean, so from the world that I came from with firearms, right? And you watch the reaction and I have to address movies all the time. It's what the biggest driver of misconception especially when people in the military, they have questions about the military, and they're like, oh, is it like this movie? That's probably the first question I get 90% of the time. So I'm always

talking about movies. And it's, I actually, I was watching an interview with a police officer. I forget where it was, but he was shot. And he was shot by a pistol round. And he just sat down and called for help. And it was like, I think it was a lower leg, probably to the, I think it was either to the quad or to the cap. But he wasn't incapacitated, and he was asked why he sat down. And he said that that's what happened in movies. And, you know, because they're used to seeing in a movie a pistol round is fired, and a guy goes flying backwards, you know, does three back flips.

Right. And he's dead on the side of the road. And a rifle round, I mean, they just, you know, people drop dead. And in my experience with firearms, that is exactly the opposite of what happens. I mean, I've seen people stitched up with lead driving, forward to the point where you're like, you know, I mean, you don't know what's going to stop the guy. It's the misconceptions that people have between reality and what's unfortunately, constantly bombarded, they're bombarded with and that becomes their reality. Right. I mean,

like I said again, so I see it in the gun world. I can only imagine in the fight world, like you probably are laughing your ass off or shaking your head when you're watching stuff like John Wick. It's, you know, and it's funny because I'm, I'm, a huge fan of any type of mastery. Yeah. So, you know, if you play, like, someone asked me what type of music I listen to and I said, good.

Like, like, if a song is good, I don't care if it's rap or classical, I'll go, I like this song, it's good. And you'd appreciate it for the mastery. And so I enjoy the John Wick movies. I enjoy that violence. I enjoy the choreography. I go, I enjoy going, like I enjoyed when Bruce Willis in, um, was it last Boy Scout,

where, where he goes, uh, he asked the guy for a cigarette and the guy punches him. And he says, if you hit me again, I'm going to kill you, you know? And you remember, you remember that scene? You ever see that? I'm struggling to remember that movie. I may not have actually watched it. Okay. But I mean, it's like total, he's the bad guy.

You hate him. He's the, he's that villain. And, and Willis is like, you know, captured and tortured and says, hey man, could have a cigarette? And the guy goes, yeah. He puts a cigarette in his mouth. He goes, got a light. And as he goes to light, and whack, hits him with a left hook.

And he, Willis says, you do that again, I'll kill you. The guy's like, looks around. I'm like, really? Aren't you the captive? And so he goes to punch him again, and Bruce, you know, kills him. And you're in the audience going, yeah. You know, and so there's just a part of us that just fantasizes of, you just want to be that guy or see that guy.

Agreed. I think the danger is confusing what you're seeing for reality, though. Yeah, and that's what, and so what I've done is I kind of reverse engineered, I really believe it's not formal science, but a scientific approach. And that was how I designed the high gear suit. I said, listen, you know, violence doesn't care what style you practice. Let's do a scenario, put on some gear, and do those moves. And if you can't do them in a situation where there was consent, preparedness and awareness, then I'm going to suggest that maybe you can't do them when there is no consent preparedness or awareness. That it would be even harder. I don't know, maybe I'm an idiot.

But the, you know, it's so funny because when we watch videos, and I've had guys that I've trained that would make me tap 37 times, you know, grappling with them, that if I boxed with this guy, my face would look like a hamburger patty, that in their own skill set, in their own category one, two, or three, and I never went through the categories, but I will, they're that good. But category four is the violent encounter, and the violent encounter is started by the bad guy. And when the bad guy starts, you asked me to define the biology fear, so I'm wrapping around to that. I answer all questions. Yeah, I know. I'm not going to let you escape, but in the back of my mind, I know we're going to get there.

So the biology of fear is your nervous system's response to what's happening. And you can stress inoculate to it based on your training or your life's experience. But the psychology of fear is what you're thinking about what's going on right now and how you're relating to it. So you know guys that jump out of airplanes to stay qualified but hate jumping out of airplanes, right? Actually, the vast majority of military jumpers fall in. to that category. There's no passion. It's purely for paperwork. Right. Now you, on the other hand, have a passion. Correct. And so look at the difference here. The protocol, the SOP for safety, for preparation for, you know, drop zone and all that stuff is somewhat standardized. It gets crazy,

obviously, with some of the stuff that you do, because the windows and margins for error are much smaller just jumping out of an airplane. But everything, the whole ritual is the same in terms of, you know, check, check this box, check this box, check this box. And so what changes on game day is always mindset, which is my fascination with helping people understand that whether you're in business and a relationship or, you know, like I say that the ability to protect yourself or loved one is in arguably the single most important skill, I would say that if you could look in a mirror and go, I will be a courageous bystander or I will protect myself from my family, that if you understand how to manage that fear in that moment, then you can apply that strategy to

any other stressor in your life. And so I was down doing some training of Bragg many years ago, and I got in early, and one of the guys asked me if I wanted to go jumping. And I said, like, up and down, he goes, no, no, like out of an airplane. And I said, no, I'm good, thanks. And he went, ha-ha, you know, Mr. Fear Management expert, are you afraid? Well, maybe one I've never been taught, so it would be a terrible idea to actually go do that. Right. You know, and so I looked at him and I said, you know, actually I am afraid. And so I'm managing my fear by not going.

And he laughed. And I said, actually, I've done it twice. I did a static line jump and I did tandem jump. And I did it as a fear management exercise to talk about fear because I'd read a book of some Navy study on the effects of fear and they use skydiving and blood testing and urine and all this stuff. And I actually jumped out of the airplane as a psychological test because I'm not comfortable with heights. And I said, well, if I can do this and I'm applying my system, I can talk about it without just being a guy who's lecturing. And I said, so I've done it. I know I can jump out of an airplane

if I have to. If I tell myself, you're jumping in an airplane, I'm going to go. But I've done it a couple times. And while it, I will say this, that Tandon Jump was one of the most exhilarating things and I was high for months. I mean, just, it was just an insane experience. And

it was actually watching the original point break where I said if... Fly like an eagle, Johnny. Yeah. And I said, I said, to my buddy, I said, if that's what that looks like, we got to go. And here's an interesting thing is I, it was Saturday night

and we saw the movie. I said, let's go jump tomorrow while we want to. He said, okay, and he bailed in the morning. I called him at six in the morning to go, and he said, I can't do it. I said, come on. Well, he says, I can't do it. And, you know, I went and I did it. And then I went and did that. And so jump ahead to this Fort Bragg story. The guy says to me, ha, you're afraid, like teasing kibbutz. And I said, yeah, I am managing my fear by not going. And I said, let's talk about fear, because that's what I do. I like to find a way to sneak in and see what people say. And I said, you don't have fear about this. He says, nope, man, I love this.

I jump every time I can. I said, so no fear. He goes, no. I said, so let me pack your chute for you. And he goes, fuck you. I said, fear. You know, and we laughed. And what it was is as you get stress inoculated to something, the word fear, as the

layperson understands, it becomes caution or respect or ritual, you know. And that's one of the big things that I do. You know, when we're trying to get in people's heads to talk about the biology fear versus psychology fear, it's to look at fear as an acronym and to deconstruct it. The acronym, the two that we use are false evidence appearing real and false expectations appearing real. The false evidence might be, I look at you and you've got, you know, I could see the scar tissue from street fights you've been in battles you've been and I see the collie I don't get in street fights Tony I walk away I know and I'm I'm trying to make this

dramatic for the audience who can't see perfect creating a visual picture for people who are listening you're you actually are beautiful but but imagine looking at somebody and you see okay that guy's had his nose broken a couple of times you can see the scar tissue under his eyes you can see cauliflower ear and when you see that that evidence triggers a visual to support the story how he got that. And so you can either look at the guy and go, okay, MMA street fighter. If we fight, this is the psychology of intimidation. I'm visualizing what he's doing to me.

When I see the story, okay, he double legs ground and pounds me. He's going to beat the shit of me. You can tell he's been in hundreds of fights. And I mean, I'm not an expert, but I can already tell you if somebody's thinking like that, nothing good is about to happen. Right. But that's how, that's the difference between the vision. victim and the victor mindset.

Because another person looks at that same guy and goes, if this guy had any defense, his face wouldn't look like that. If we have to fight, I'm going to put another mark on his face. Yeah. And you need to find in the scenario evidence for a successful strategy. How are we going to get out of here? And that comes back to choose safety. Is the safest thing for me to do here to diffuse and back off and feign fear and be

submissive or is it to, you know, anticipatory self-defense, which is fancy for sucker punch the guy, right? Like, what do it? But you can't, I say this generic or generalizing, you can't think, you can't intuit your way to this solution if you don't have a cerebral system that says, look, this is the neural circuit of fear. And the psychology of fear is how you think about fear, whereas the biology of fear are the physiological changes. So if you get an adrenaline dump, so you've been in situations where I guarantee if there was a heart rate monitor on you,

it would be like 186. For sure. No, I can think of very specific situations and not only the adrenaline spike, but the dump afterwards where you get, you know, you feel drained. Sure, but the more important observation here is this. If you were in a gunfight,

if you're fast roping, if you were low crawling somewhere and shots were going over your head and there was a moment where you went, oh, fuck, is this where I die? And then you went, shut up, fucker, keep moving, right? That was you changing from fixating on the biology of fear to the psychology of fear. And those moments happen for sure. Of course. You're, you know, talking about fear. I've been around, I was super fortunate to be around some very brave and courageous people. Like, I've seen some things that I'll remember till the day that I die, but I've never met somebody who doesn't have to deal with fear. Again, people look at these misconceptions of the military,

or especially the community that I came from, and they think it's a community of people who are just fearless, and it's absolutely not that. It's a matter of, you know, since you've been talking, you talked about like a lot of stuff, and, you know, I think back about the way that we used to train in the military, very systematic. So you had a system that if you got stuck worrying about the biology or the psychology or anywhere in there, you knew the next step that you needed to do.

So you wouldn't get muddled down and stuck in place in that moment. Because, I mean, I could give you story after story of time that I'm scared out of my mind in a combat situation. Or I could give you story after story of when I'm jumping. I mean, I do love jumping, but I do have, especially when I base jump, I'm dealing with fear and a, very real capacity in a very real moment with your toes on the edge, get ready to jump off. And the moment that I don't feel that or I don't have the respect for it, I'm going to back away from that activity. I actually think it's essential to not only have it present, but to be self-aware of it and to be

able to, I don't know why people don't want to talk about it. I mean, I can talk all day long about things that scare the crap out of me. I don't know why people, there's like there's some stigma about talking to things that scare them. I really think, and it's interesting because you made me think of something. that I force people to talk about when we're trying to, again, what we're trying to create is, you know, you know, the acronym SME. Yeah, subject matter expert. Well, you know, a subject matter expert is somebody who's memorized someone else's material. It's really not that impressive.

Right. So everyone can be an SME. That's something for sure. Yeah, go through a course and get a certificate. You're an SME. So we have in our trainer course one of the slides says SME. And we, you know, we've got all these type A's and they're like, yeah, SME, subject matter expert. And next slide says substance matters expert. You need to know why. Why are you doing this? Why it works?

My favorite question. And so, so, you know, before the whole what's your why came about, I mean, this is like 20 years old in our in our PowerPoints back in the day. It's what's the difference between a subject matter expert and a substance matters expert. And you got to know the why. And so coming back to fear is when we're kind of like mentoring a coach in our system, we're not saying, hey, memorize this shit and then regurgitate like I do. I go, like the exercises are profound because you're giving somebody concepts and principles that they might need to use in the most harrowing moment in their life.

And that could be for, it could be a home invasion. It could be a date rape. It could be, you know, at a time of someone's got your neck or your groin or they're on top of you. It doesn't matter if you're in uniform or if you're, you know, a 17-year-old at a party that some guy's trying to rape. At that moment, you're not your uniform. You're not your status. You're not your gender.

You're just a good person going, what the fuck? And what's stopping people from making decisions is fear, right? It's that simple. And the evidence of that is so profound because over the years of talking to people, we've got a video that we show in our Be Your Own Bodyguard course, where I set it up and I go, I'm going to show you a video of this very famous street fighter from Massachusetts and home invasion, I gouge,

like actually throws the attacker out since he came to the wrong fucking house and watch this interview and I play it, and it's a 185 pound female who starts talking. And I stop it like one second in and everyone's like, you, people listening to show can't see my body language,

but they're like, oh, that must have been the wrong tape. Looking left or right, assuming you're made a mistake on the content. And I asked them, I go, how many people are going, yeah, that he obviously put in the wrong video. And then I let it play. And it's this 185-pound non-martial artist woman who opens the door, gets smashed in the head with the guy who's got like a, you know, a blunt trauma, smacks her in the head with some wooden object, knocks her down. She's got a wheelchair-bound son who's not home at the time. she's on the ground he's on top of her strangling her she in you know her cloudy vision sees the picture of her son

and says to herself oh my god if he was home this guy would kill him and she goes mother bear and you know in her hands picture you know her hands are overhead you have the center of herself you know covered up and you know if somebody's choking you're hitting you know their eyes and throat or open usually and she just She happened to be, and this was her martial art, she was a massage therapist. She grabbed this fucker's head and she says to the camera, I jam my thumb in his eye. And she goes, and she looks and she paused. She goes, I mean like right inside his head. And he started howling and bleeding and, you know, flinched off me.

And she said, I picked him up and I threw him out of the fucking house. And I said to him, you came to the wrong fucking house. And we use this at the end of our course because, because, Because we tell you, like, look at the will and indignation. What was from martial art? There was no martial art. It was sheer will and indignation and the desire to not die right there or to protect her kid. And so when I look and I study real violence, what I see is a fascinating lack of technique.

And what I see are total tactics. And people confuse that. I've heard many people say, you know, especially I think you usually based around like UFC commentary like everybody has a game plan until you get punched in the face one time and then your game plans out the window I mean I for one I avoid street fights at all costs I mean I avoid violence in general at all costs but every violent encounter that I've been in it's kind of like you say it doesn't it doesn't really matter what what I think is about to happen you got to read the terrain and

just react to it right and I'd say you know I mean I think there's one thing that I would add you know you're saying that fear is holding people back, I also believe that people are being conditioned to abhor violence and they're being pushed away from the concept that, you know, it's just like, you know, nope, don't be violent. That's an offense. You know what I mean? Like there's all these different terms around violence, whereas if I look at my own life, and I'm going to probably have to describe violence a little bit better, but I look at violence as a virtue. And I don't necessarily, and I'm sure when I say that people think of two people duking it out in the street, and that's the exact opposite of what I'm actually talking about.

I think more it's a commitment to doing whatever it is that you have to do. You know, in a gunfight, you know, if you're on the receiving end of an ambush, your only chance of survival is violence of action to overwhelm because you got ambush, not because of how tough you think you are, but because of, of an enemy who saw you and they saw an advantage that they had. They observed you and how you were and they thought that they could manipulate that or take advantage of that. And your only opportunity to defend yourself is to be commit yourself to whatever action is

necessary until sometimes break through their lines. Like your proximity to the ambush is going to determine your level of response. But the key is from day one, we teach people violence of action. Right. And to me, it's that accepting the commitment. That's what I think of violence. I mean, like, if passivism, be a violent pacifist, be so committed to who you are and what you want to be that you're, you're violently promoting a pacifist life or love, right? Love violently, like just drive headlong into being in love.

And if it comes to having to protect yourself, like for me, there's two rules. And I give these rules to my kids when it comes to street fights. I'm like, one, just walk away. Avoid it. And two, if you have to fight, win. Those are the only two rules. Right. You know, but it's that, like, violence is everywhere.

It's just accepting that violence and being able to do whatever you have to do and being committed to being able to drive for that I think separates the victor from the victim. And so what do you think would stop? If we were cavemen and we were being attacked, by giant wolves and three of us run and one of us is cowering. What is stopping that one person from running or fighting? And so I'm going to suggest that it's fear, emotional inertia. So you know what inertia is.

Right? I would agree with you. I think it would be fear as well. And so this is why someone says, hey, I want to spend an hour with you. So I, you know, and it's fascinating because, you know, what's evolved over 40 years is now, literally being able to Skype call with somebody on the other side of the world and just talk about fear to them. Because people say, you know, like,

they want to know the secret move. Well, show me a move. And I go, you know, and I remember getting asked years ago how important speed is. And I said, speed is everything. And they were like, I go, but you think I'm talking about fast twitch muscle fiber, non-teleographic motion.

I'm talking about speed of recognizing you're in danger. Yeah. Speed of now managing your. fear, speed of choosing the optimum strategy, because neuromuscular communication doesn't start until acceptance and go, that three to one. And so if you'll understand that all hesitation is rooted in our inability to manage fear. So fear is either throttles everything we do, who you talk to, therefore who you marry, how much money you make, where you live, how much weight you lift and whether or not you defend yourself, all throttled by fear or fear is looked at as a fuel

and it can supercharge. But that comes back to this differentiating between biology and psychology. And I often share this story and indulge me. I grew up on skis. I grew up in Canada. You're either skater or skier. And I grew up on skis. And I was considered by the time I was like 13 on top skiers in Canada. People were talking about me representing Canada, the Olympics. And, oh yeah, you know, you're super talented and then, nah, nah, nah. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anytime somebody talked about it, even now just talk about that, now my heart started a race.

I mean, that's, that's the PTSD of that event, right? Yeah. And so I'm like, they would tell me that, but I didn't know who they were talking about. I didn't recognize that athlete that they saw. And I remember a big race. I was probably, I don't know, 14 or 15. We're above the tree line.

Wind is howling. My coach, you know, is rubbing my knees to keep me warm. I've pissed five times. I want to projectile vomit. I'm so nervous. He says to me, how do you feel, kid? And I looked at him and I went, great, coach, right? And, you know, and he says to me, yeah, I remember, you know, midpoint here, the gate there.

There's a lot of ice building up. So take that wide. And, you know, and this is like you going, hey, how did you hit that tree? You go, I was trying to avoid the tree. So you never motivate somebody through a negative You don't tell somebody Whatever you do, don't fill in the blank Yeah, you know, you're golfing

Don't hit in the water, don't strike out Don't let this guy hit you at his left You know, you're like, now you've just created Whatever that black box is, that's where part of our attention goes And but here's the thing Is somebody can say that to you But if you understand what I'm trying to put out That you could say to me

you know, don't think about the pink elephant in the room. See how I made you? And everyone goes, ha, ha, ha. I go, that's okay. But now that I know that I'm thinking of it, I know the neural circuitry of that, I can actually look at the pink elephant and also punch you in the face. Because I can now split it. I'm aware of what my brain is doing.

I'm aware of where my attention needs to be. And so that is like when you said, hey, there were incidents scenarios where your heart was, and you're going, oh, fuck. But you were still, you're, you're, fine and complex motor skills are totally working. That contradicts survival learning research where they say, hey, as your heart rate increases,

your complex motor skills decrease, I always hated that. And when that came out in the 90s, I said, that's bullshit. If you want your conflicts motor skills to be dialed in at an elevated heart rate, then train them with your heart rate elevated. So we would do things.

I had one guy's training for a MMA fight where I had them on a train. at 180 beats a minute, jumping off doing complex motor skills. We actually turn that into a video called combat calisthenics where I would do this, where we'd be sprinting with holsters and guns and mags on and on random commands while we're sprinting, have to draw, and obviously not accurate. You're inside while you're on the treadmill, so you're almost like a tank and a turret. Yeah.

Training your body to do this coordination exercise while you're on a sprint. But the difference between that person, who trains to that level. And since, you know, to use a police officers, which I wasn't a police officer, so I'm making a generalization, but the difference between the officer who trains to that standard

and the officer who has never encountered that until he's in it for the first time in his life, the performance, you know, there'll be the bell curve. And one guy's going to be on the peak of it, and the other one is going to be in the valley. 100%. Yeah.

I agree. And that, you know, we need to. And here's the thing is, like, I really believe after 40 years that I've hacked in a positive way the code on self-defense by telling people,

hey, you are a human weapon system. And you brought up something now like why people have, you know, abhor violence. Well, it's not only that they have poor violence. Everywhere that I look, it's, I see people trying to put themselves into a bubble and act like the world

is created by object that have round edges. And they don't. If you put yourself into a bubble, when you leave that environment, this contrived environment of control that you're trying to exert on everything. You're going to realize that the world is as creative sharp objects and your bubble's going to pop

and you're not going to be prepared for it. Right. Well, one of the things, I forget, did I write a blog about this? I don't remember, but I've talked about this domestication that we've been domesticated. You know, it's a difference between the wild dog that you go pet and it bites you and, you know, the domesticated dog.

And humans have been domesticated. Not that long ago, everybody, if we go back a few hundred years, Everybody knew it to hunt and kill and skin an animal or whatever. They were dead. Right. And so violence, the behavior of violence was integrated in your survival practices. And I think on my website somewhere I talk about, hey, when walls went up and you got to move behind the walls and stand in line for food and someone said, pay your taxes here, that's when it started getting weaned out of you.

And the visual when I talk about this is I want people. to understand that, you know, if you and I went to, you know, went into town to sell our pelts because we went hunting and we left the wife and kids and some, you know, bandits came up on the property and she was out on the deck with a black powder rifle going, Andy and Tony are going to be backs. Why is your wife sound like that, man? I don't know. I'm still stuck that you and are off going to the market to sell our pelts, but I'm with you. Right. Right. Yeah. You know, and so you see this in like in some Western and you go, oh, this is badass. She's either going to get raped and murdered or killed these guys.

But it's early in the movie, so she's getting raped and murdered. And so we start to, you know, try to guess this whole thing. But what I want to tell people is, like, those scenarios were real for some people. And whatever the outcome, everyone was scared, except for the true sociopath. And so the asocial motherfucker who is just a complete sociopath. Chemically or physically just wired differently, for sure. But people mean to understand that bad guys flinch and good guys flinch. Bad guys have fear and good guys have fear.

And a lot of it is like, so immediate action when you were ambush and charged a threat, what made the sniper less accurate was the audacity of your violence and action. The individual coming towards. Right. Yeah. And so what it comes back to the word that begins with the letter F, his fear, his inability to manage his fear. Because as you got closer, the target got vigor, but why was he flinching? Why was he jerking the trigger?

What happened to all of his technical skills? Yeah. And so everything, you know, and I've had a lot of intellectual conversations about this. Yeah, but this, but this was, and it always comes back to it. And I go, it's like peeling the onion. I go, yeah, but why wouldn't they do that? Well, because, you know, their reticular cortex wasn't activated. Okay, but why wasn't that?

Well, and it all comes down to amygdala, limbic system, reactive brain. At the end of it, when we go down to the core, it was fear. And so the single most important skill, I believe, all that we would change the world. Andy, if through this podcast feel went, I need to understand fear because fear will either throttle me on my next date, my next job pitch, my next jump, my next lift. I ask, you know, all the fitness buffs that I work with, I go, do you know before a lift that you're going to miss it? And most of the time they do.

Don't you grab the weight and go, this feels kind of heavy. I should have warmed up more. That's your intuition, your instinct saying back away, lower the weight, lower the weight, a lot more. Did you know this? Every victim of violence. Every. That's 100%. Every victim of violence that I've either studied through reading or talk to live. Every single one of them said I had a bad feeling before the attack. I can't believe that, actually. Because I've experienced a little bit in my own life for ways that I have no vocabulary to articulate, just the spiety senses or whatever you want to call it. Your radar is up, but something just feels off.

Here is the big thing. So, so, you know, we talk about choose safety. So I make the joke, hashtag choose safety, because everything's gotta be a fucking hashtag. Well, it won't trend unless it has a hashtag from my very limited understanding. Even on a podcast, you have to say, because it's auditory, audio is, you know,

it's hashtag choose safety. So if I said to you, just remember this, here's three rules for your listeners and for you. You don't need this because you do it intuitively, but these are the rules, pass it on to your kids. Number one, we have a GPS, a survival GPS. The GPS says, I don't feel good. This tastes bad. You ever heard someone who tastes something and go, this is bad and then they want you to taste it to confirm it? Yeah. And you're like, no, I don't, your face told me

everything. It's fine. The milk is bad. I get it. Right. I think the fish doesn't taste weird. Well, stop eating it. Choose safety. Food poisoning, right? There's no downside to choosing safety. So the rules are, number one, trust your GPS. Your GPS is, hey, you're going the wrong way, right? And so if you get a bad feeling about a business deal, about a person, about a survival situation, listen to it. You just stop. And I go, if you choose safety, then you will change your route.

And if you can circle around and do a little bit in research, take a little bit look. And if you find out that some false evidence triggered some. paranoia and everything is cool, guess what? You're still safe. But if you ignore the instinct and the intuition, because you don't have self-awareness, then you walk right into the ambush, whatever the ambush is. Bad business deal, bad relationship, or in the worst-case scenario. An actual ambush. A violent. Yeah. An actual ambush of the violence. So we tell people, you know, number one, trust your GPS. number two

manage your fear at that moment right manage that fear and then number three just choose safety and you know you come back to what you said is like the you know the world right now is so domesticated and so conditioned to like you know

I was on an interview with oh my god his name just my oh god I can hate I'll come back to that but the the guy after listening to me said you're telling people to stop outsourcing

Jack Donovan he said you're telling people to stop outsourcing their safety and I'm like I love that term don't you can't outsource safety think about this every it's a great description isn't that cool yeah so listen to this and let me tie this to this if your situation awareness is compromised

can you convert the flinch and take tactical action I would say it's greatly reduced because you don't actually know what's going on right it's super late. That's the only way. So if you have no awareness of an attack, you're going to get hit in as far as an algorithm might go, right? You need to have situation awareness. So if you're on your phone, because everyone's on their phone, and you're texting, and you look up and you

realize, oh shit, I'm being triangulated by three bad guys. I know this is happening now. That in that moment, you don't, even if with your phone in your hand, you don't have time to dial 911. You don't even tie in to dial. 911. That's how fast this shit's happening. And so what I want people to think about in terms of outsourcing safety and living in the bubble and no, you know, violence is horrible. And Jack Donovan wrote a really provocative article called Violence is Golden. I don't know if you ever read that, but you read it. No, I will for sure. Violence Golden. Loved it. Very polarizing. I loved it. every problem in your life can be assisted by or solved by a subject matter expert except for one.

You have a toothache? Well, you can do the work yourself or you can go to a dentist. Your stomachache, you can do the work yourself. You can go to the dentist. A doctor. Your roof leaking. Call the roof guy. Car is broken down. Yeah, there's a specialist for every ailment. And even though there are seals, special operations, guys who would love to be there, cops, who would love to be there, you're always reactive

because the violence, the actual initial violence is always dictated and controlled by the bad guy. One of the questions we asked you like, who controls the fight? And the people who look at that original video that you referenced when we started, where it's like,

okay, here's a guy standing with a gun, okay, I'm going to sweep inside, I'm going to cinch the arm or some crazy stuff. I'm overhook the arm and do a, you know, jump into a guard, pull the person down and put a guillotine on. And the girl doing it, she was skilled. I mean, she was fast. She was hard.

She had amazing socks on. And she moved well. And people look at that and they go, wow, I've got to practice that. And I'm going, no. First of all, well, I'm not going to dissect it right now. People can go online and look at that. But no, that's technical. That's not tactical.

and it doesn't even take into account the scenario where assume a round is going to go off. Where's that round going? Or assume that that person would never get that close to you where you would be able to close a distance like that? I mean, a smart person with a weapon is still not going to close to a distance where you can get your hands on them.

Well, everything's a scenario, and if we have time, I'll tell you a story that actually happened in Coronado with a gun disarm training. I thought you were going to tell me on Orange Avenue. That would have been a better story. Sorry. Sorry. So I forget where I was going with this before. What was I talking about? Oh, my God.

You're talking about the lady in the socks. Yeah, no, just before that. Violence is golden. Yeah. So the, I think I was trying to tie this into how people are so domesticated that they don't, they don't look at it and they realize that in your fight, your point, right? And so you can't be rear security in your fight. You can't be on the command post. You're right there. It's you got to be. And so, you know, and it's interesting because I've done this with like completely untrained people.

I'll say how many of you could defend yourself right now? And they're like, well, that's why we came to your self-defense course, Mr. Blower. I said, okay, just checking. This is a true story. This is 1988 the first time I did this. I said, I'm just checking because some of you might be coming. for refresh her. I just want to see if anyone any background. Anyone have any martial background? 20 ladies in the class. I said no. I said, okay, so none of you can fight. No.

So what about Albert de Salvo? How many of you could take him in a fight? So they look at me like I'm fucking crazy. I go Albert de Salvo, anyone know who that is? They're like, no. Oh, Boston Strangler. Come on, guys. Oh, you know, I could see the heads going up and down. You knew the name Boston Strangler. You didn't know his real name. You knew his stage name. Right? Yeah. And his performance name, if you will. I said, did you know that he raped 2,000 women that got bored of that and then murdered 12 women raped them after they were dead. Are you serious?

Yeah. Holy cow. Yeah. So they had the same reaction as you. Now they're like scared. I go, how many do you could take this guy? He's a professional rapist. He's actually a professional serial killer rapist.

The FBI's most dangerous predator. Now they're looking at me. This is the first five minutes of a course. What do you think their confidence is in me at this point? Right? They're like going, who the fuck is this guy? Eroding, I would say. Right.

Right. And so, so I say anybody, anybody here would be willing to fight Albert Salvo? And you could see them like the girls that came with a girlfriend are looking at each other like, how do we get our money back and get out of here? This one woman at the back, Francine, puts her hand up halfway. And she says, true story, she says, is he going to rape me or kill me? At which point I realized that she's a super odd question. But it's not odd if you've been raped before.

Okay, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. Right, right, okay. All female class. So I said to her I said, Fransine, that's a super odd question I said to her Let's assume it's the end of his career So he's going to kill you and then rape you

I mean how graphic is this You can see these 19 other women are looking at like this Yeah, jaws are probably hitting the floor And she says I don't want to die So I would have to fight right And I said you're asking me a question I'm not there I'm asking you a question Are you going to fight

And she goes well I don't want to die so I'd have to try something. I go, you'd have to try something. What are the words that are inoperative there? Say it. She goes, I would try something. Will you fight? She says, yeah. I go, you will fight? I go, yeah, I go, ladies. Francine lived, the rest of you, dead and raped. You know why? Because Albert DeSalvo, when he was caught, said, I only raped and murdered people who cooperated with me. Anybody who resisted, I ran away. I didn't want to get caught. Bad guys don't want to get caught. They don't to get hurt. They don't want for things to take too long. And so get this. I don't understand. So when you tell me the store, man, it grates against everything I am as a human being because it's like,

like to me, fighting is like, yeah, get, but get this, get this. So the class is, the 19 women are furious with me because in that moment where everyone, your ego wants to be right, it's like, well, you tricked us, right? You could have said, you could have told us that first. If you told us that Albert DeSalvo didn't want to get caught and didn't want to get hurt and that if I struggled, he'd run. Wouldn't have had the impact. It wouldn't have the impact. So I look at them and I say, I'm sorry, I'm new at this.

How much confidence do they have in me now? Right. So this story takes 10 minutes to tell, but it was actually like two minutes live. Quick exchange, yeah. Right? So they're like, and I calm everyone down. I go, okay, okay, okay, let's just start over. I'm new at this.

And they're like, holy shit. I thought this guy knew what he's doing. I look at the group. I go, how many of you have kids? They all had kids. I said, how many of you have babysitters? They all had babysitters. I said, okay, you went out to run some errands.

You come home, the front door is slightly ajar. You come in. Just flighty sense is a little bit tweaked. You see the babysitter is duct taped on the floor. And she's gesturing with her eyes and her face that there's somebody in the house. But you fucking know that already from the duct tape. Right?

Yeah. You put down their bags and you move in and you hear noise in the kitchen. And you hear loud music. And you see there's a guy, his back is to you. He's got headphones on. He's listening to loud fucking music. And he's slowly unbuckling his pants. And you notice behind him is your kid who's been tied to the kitchen table already stripped nude.

At that moment, Andy, the room fucking erupts. All these women start. screaming at me. One of them says, I will rip his fucking heart out. Nobody touches my family. Another woman is screaming at me. Her veins in her neck. How dare you? How dare you put that image in my head? I quiet everybody. I go, ma'am, what did you say? She's hyperventilating. She's like, what the fuck kind of class is this? I go, what did you just say? She goes, what? I said, what did you say you would do? She said, I'll rip his fucking hard out. And I looked at her and I said, that's medically impossible, but I like where you're thinking.

And the class stopped and they realized what had just happened. I said to them 60 seconds ago, I asked you if you would fight a fucking coward, 145-pound rapist killer who was afraid to get caught. And you all said, no, I wouldn't fight him. And now you see yourself killing somebody who's trying to harm your kid. What is it you saw yourself doing to protect your kid that you don't see yourself doing? to protect yourself because listen carefully, they're the fucking same thing. Self-defense becomes about procrastination and understanding the scenario.

It's not about technique and belt. And that's the message with the human weapons system. That's the, when I say to you, you've been domesticated. You know how to fight. The core of the whole sphere system is understanding startle, flinch, convert. How did cavemen fight? I got asked that years ago, hey, what's the best art for the street? And I said, art is for a museum.

And people hate me for saying that. And I go, don't hate me. Hate the bad guy. I'm just trying to make you safe. It's not a great phrasing of a question. You're looking for a, you're looking for a simple solution to a geometry problem that's inside of a dryer on high. Right.

You know, it's like you can't play chess. Right. When the board is spinning and the pieces are flying off. There is no. The Hoffmiker's gambit doesn't always work. Right. Yeah. And so, and I remember, I remember saying to this guy said, what's the best art for the street?

And it's that typical, you know, I don't really know much about this. So I'll just ask the generic, what does everyone want to know? Like, should I be studying jiu-jitsu or tie boxing? And everything has value. But if you're not teaching people how to think, how to choose safety, how to detect a fused offend, to understand the moral and ethical and legal implications, ramifications of the decision to, you know, to act or not act. I think those, you know, the moral, ethical and legal, I think those are almost never considered.

by your average person. They're not taught. So how can they be considered? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. You know, again, I come from a different background where, I mean, I was responsible for every action that I took to the point of taking photographs, looking at videos, writing down statements. Where did that bullet go?

Every action that I took. And there's aspects of moral and ethical. And there's, you know, we get briefed on the ROE's every deployment. Like, you are responsible. I mean, I look at, and again, why I choose to walk up. away from violence, you know, one, street fights, they're not, they're not pretty, you know, morally again, I'm going to, I don't care, you could say something mean to me. Can I inject a thought for your listeners? I want them to understand that it's taken me months and I still slip on this.

I don't use the word street fight anymore. Street fight now is two douchebags and a bunch of iPhones. I couldn't agree with that more. And so I want to reframe that. A street fight is, a fight you can avoid. An ambush, like a fight. So what I did is, let's just, I'll throw out real quick, these four categories. Category one is all martial arts. Anything technical, technical, traditional, classical. So every martial, you can think, goes in category one.

Category two are all combat sports, boxing, MMA, you know, any type wrestling, anything where, structured competition, you know, you're like skin is hitting when people are, or there's contact being made. And then category three are the new phase and fat of RBSD reality-based self-defense systems. Gotcha. I think the name reality-based self-defense systems is silly. What other type of self-defense is there besides reality-based? Contrived?

Right? And so, but anytime somebody says, look at this scenario, look at this gun disarms, I sweep here, I fly here, I do that. What it does is, I mean, it's just putting out the wrong information, which is making people less safe. And so then there's category four, which are violent encounters. And why I created this is just trying to create a platform where people could discuss with greater clarity and intellectual capacity. I go, listen, if you ask somebody in category one what they would do in a home invasion, what they would do at an ATM, what would they do at a carjacking. The Taekwondo guy is default going to think about kicking him.

That's what he does. What you practice is what you'll do. It doesn't work if you're in a car. Right. Or you could be outside the car. I mean, again, like, yeah, I mean, all that stuff is we practice in a 40 by 40 mat room. And then, but the attacks happen in these extreme confined spaces. I remember way before 9-11 doing some work with the air marshals.

and their training area for their empty hand stuff was a mat room. Their shooting practice was done in a scaled mock-up airplane. And I said to them, why are you doing your empty-hand stuff in a mat room instead of in the airplane? And it was like, well, you know, nobody knew, right? It was just part of that generationally passed on. We grapple here. We strike here. It could be because 9-11 hadn't happened.

Right. The scenario hadn't presented itself. But it's still the same way. them, I said, what is the distance between two seats on the average airplane? They said, 23 inches. I said, then put duct tape down in rows of 23 inches and make sure all of your movement happens in that. If you're worried about, you know, screwing up a knee or, you know, falling and you're practicing stuff, but at least be aware that these are the limitations, you know, a cop does a vehicle stop with somebody and his arena is maybe eight or 10 or 12 inches between the drive.

driver's door, if he made the mistake of a driver's door approach, and a highway. You can't dance around. And so people are practicing in these like 60 by 60 mat rooms at training centers and they don't understand confined spaces and linear movement. And all that practice from my own personal experience falls apart when you're presented with that confined space and all these things that you are, you have conditioned yourself to do. Oh yeah. You do like unless you practice them by reverse engineering and just you're presented. just saying, and so the categories, coming back to the category, and said, hey, the violent encounter is controlled by the bad guy. Bad guy controls the level of violence, the location,

and the duration of the fight. You need to figure out to solve that problem. So if you ask anybody in category one, what would you do here? They're going to, they're going to select, in the same way. Now, think about this. Let's change this and let's pretend the categories are foods. So we say the umbrella is food. Category one is oriental. Category two is Italian, you get the point. And now category four is, you know, customer hungry. And he goes to category one, hey, I'm starving. The guy's going to give him Korean barbecue because he's the Taekwondo guy. Right. So everybody, and this is the unconscious bias that I talk about. It's not a good or bad thing unless what you were practicing became a problem for you in the fight,

because you were thinking technically instead of tactically. Like you said, if all I've done is Taekwondo and somebody jumps in my car at gunpoint and says drive and and they're not concealing their identity and they're moving me to a secondary crime scene and all I can think about is like you know side kick to the head or back fist I got a problem yeah and so what I've confused is my categories training for the ability that it will transfer logically to a category for solution and just the evidence isn't there I don't know if that sounds if that no makes sense to me it does I mean I never studied martial arts uh at all but to me I see value there because of the one thing that should overlay from category one to category four is the acceptance of violence and being comfortable with emotionally engaging in that.

Sadly, it doesn't. Really? Yeah, because some places don't do any contact and things are so cooperative. So if everybody spard, well, here's the thing. You said earlier, it was a religious thing. You said deadly pacifist. You should be a violent pass. And so this is a true story back in the late 80s, early 90s.

I had this guy sign up and he signed it for three months. His name was Al. Signed it for three months. And he's training like six days a week every open class. He's a university student and he worked at this restaurant that I frequented and we started talking about what I did. And he came in. He was like a prodigy man.

he learned so fast that I said, this kid keeps going, man. And he's going to work for me. Holy shit. He picked up everything. And so his three months ends. And he stops coming in. And as I see him, I go to the restaurant, I go, dude, what happened?

He says, yeah, your membership's up. But I figured, like, you trained every single class you could. And we're good at it. And got really good at it, really fast. And he said, yeah, you know, I always had this thing. Could I fight if I had to? and I prove that to myself. I said, so he said,

so I'm good, I'm done. And I said, what? I said, no, no, no, no, you can't stop. I said, if it's financial, man, we'll figure out some barter, you'll help out. But I see, like, I see big things for you. He goes, no, no, no, no. Like, I just wanted to know if somebody ever put their hands on me,

could I throw a punch? Could I take them down? Could I ground fight? Could I, you know, my name of my place was the eclectic martial arts center. We did everything, knife, gun, stick, everything. You know? And I'm like, no, you can't. can't stop after three months.

And he looks at me and we're in the restaurant and he leans forward and lowers his voice. He goes, look, man, we don't know each other very well, but I'm a pacifist. True story. I mean, when you said that, I couldn't believe it. I wanted to tell you the story. I go, like, what do you mean you're a pacifist? Dude, like you were beating the shit out of people for three months. I mean, he sparred every class.

He goes, I go, what do you mean you're a pacifist? He goes, I'm a pacifist. I mean, like a stand in the rain with a sign pacifist? He goes, yeah. And I look at him. Never heard that exact description. And I go, Al, there's nothing wrong with being a deadly pacifist, you know. And it was funny.

Why not be, right? Why not be? That's, yeah. So what was interesting is, you know, he had a metric in his mind. Could I get here? Could I manage my fear? Could I step in the octagon? Not the octagon.

Yeah, the ring. Could I, could I spar? Could I? And he just wanted to know, you know, and he wanted to learn a little bit of stuff. And that was his measurement. Checking the box, done, moved on. It was kind of crazy. But it was when you said that, it triggered that memory.

Yeah, I triggered you. You triggered me. Hashtag. So I got one for you. And then I won't take up too much more of your time. And this is just based off of kind of just what I see around me. You know, I, situational awareness. it was hammered into me from like a very early age.

And like there's some things about me as a human being that are just changed now. Like my default is I look at people's hands. You know, every, it's just, that's just the way that I identified friend or foe for a long period of time. And I, you know,

like I pay attention to layouts and stuff like that. And I would say that I am prepared. Like when I look at it, it's just me being prepared for whatever may happen in life. Like violence, Violence doesn't surprise me, and really in any shape or form. But I also have an advantage because, again, I came from a community where it was taught and it was structured, and a lot of people don't have that background of structure and understanding.

So instead of being prepared, what I see a lot of people falling into is a trap of paranoia. and I think it's you have to balance you have to balance the two out and I mean I guess my only advice for people is to stop listening to what everybody else constantly tells you especially on whatever media source it may be because I mean if you look at the statistics we're not living in a more dangerous time right now but we're just living in a time where we have access to information you know instantaneously so we're hearing about stuff and it makes it seem like every corner you come around there's going to be an IED or an armed intruder or an armed threat and I think that I think it's pushing people into a position where they're incredibly paranoid. How do you, how do you, or how would you recommend people not get to that point where they're always on edge, you know, in air quotes, and just kind of in a mindset that they're prepared to deal with what statistically is very unlikely to happen to them in their life, but should they encounter it, they have the tools necessary? It's a great question.

I would respectfully argue that we are in a more dangerous time because of political correctness, because of how brazen shit is that. So I would agree with that. I meant literally like your statistical odds of encountering and violent situation. Right. I agree with you on the political correctness side. Like, you know, something's happening and like nine people will film it and nobody will help. Like that makes things more dangerous now, right?

So I had that happen to me not more than a month ago. Oh, right. Yes. You alluded to that in one of our... Yes, it was a guillotine choke's work. That's all I'll say. Right, right, right. But the whole time I'm looking around looking at able-bodied males who are doing nothing to help an officer

and just standing there with their phones filming. It's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah. So specifically, you know, we have something called the Golden Rules. of violence. And so not to be confused with violence is golden by Jack Donovan. And so the number one rule is acceptance.

You can't do shit if you don't accept what's happening. So if you don't have self-awareness, then you can't look at what's going on and go, what would I do if I was driving down the street and the highway got flocked by a bunch of freaks and now I've got a zombie attack? If the first time you're thinking about that is when it's happening, then maybe your prior training,

because you're a solutions driven person, gets you out of it, right? Like I have no doubt that one day you'll call me and go, hey, like what you did to help the officer. Yeah. Right? But not everyone has the luxury of being trained like you were and get that experience. And you alluded to that earlier. Here's the thing As I tell people, listen,

you know, I remember somebody asking me what I do And I didn't want to talk I was on a flight And it was a red eye And she was really chatty And I wanted to go to sleep And she says, so, you know, she was a flight attendant Not working the flight

And, you know, she's all wired She goes, oh my God Yeah, she thought I was going to I thought I was going to miss this flight And this is in my hub And I'm like, no, right? And she goes so obviously Obviously, I'm a flight attendant.

You can see. I'm in uniform. What do you do? And I'm like, we're taxing down the runway. So I go, okay, I don't want to talk to her. What should I say? I do that will just kill this conversation. I go, I'm an insurance salesman.

I was going to go to Bible salesman. Right. So I'm thinking, so I say insurance salesman. She looks me up and down. She goes, no, you're not. I can tell. And so I looked at. So I look at her.

I go, okay, I'm a life extension insurance salesman. She goes, life extension insurance, what is I go, I teach self-defense. She goes, oh my God, I always wanted to learn how to defend myself. I go, no, you didn't. And I'm trying to put her off. So she goes, what a dick. And turns away and just right.

She goes, I was going to learn to defend myself. I go, no, you didn't. She goes, I beg your pardon. I go, people who always wanted to do something, do it. I think what you meant to say is you always wanted to know how to never be near a situation where you might have to defend yourself. And she goes, oh my God, yes. Next thing I know I'm like doing a three hour free seminar, you know, on the flight home with her.

You writing stuff on napkins. Right. But here's the thing is people don't really understand what they want. If you think that street fight would be a re-name. Right, the right, rename. That violent encounter is getting out of a headlock or not being choked or arm-barring somebody. If your fixation is on a move and you're not part of the Marshall community, that will scare you. talk about. I remember David Wallach,

old, I don't know if you know, strength coach. I don't know, former CrossFit Rubicon. He had it on one of his t-shirts that said embrace violence. And it would offend people. And I would go, no, you need to embrace it in the same way. Like, like, well, because people read that and they think embrace two idiots standing in the street, slugging it out. Right. Whereas when I read that, I say embrace the fact that violent and accept the fact that violence exists and don't be surprised by it. So when bad shit happens,

I can't watch it right away. People don't realize this, that 57 years old, been studying it for 40 years, when something awful happens in the news, I won't watch film right away. I am so, I am so abhorred by it.

I get, I still, like, even now thinking about stuff, I get an adrenaline dump, my heart starts to pound, and people think I'm like, like that violence monger like oh and i'm like i abhor it which is why i created the system i created and the most important stuff that we do is getting people to accept the shit and it's to me and i mentioned earlier that i feel like after all these years i've hacked it i can look at somebody in the eye and i go if you spend a day with with me or my team you will understand everything

you need to protect yourself or your family and in the generic sense. You're like, you're not like, you know, like high-level shit. If someone's got a hit on you or if that's another problem, or if you're like special operations or first responder, we're not talking. But I tell you the 3D's detect a fuse defend that understanding your startle flinch is like an organic airbag

that deploys in an accident. The accident is an ambush. Describe the startle flinch just quickly. Because I realize you've used the term a couple of times and a lot of people may not understand intuitively what it is. So if a stimulus gets introduced too quickly, particularly one that is scary or violent, it could be a snake, it could be a loud noise,

your body recoils from the danger, your hands at violent speed, bypassing cognition will come up to protect your head, and then if there's time and space, we'll extend, the extensor chain will push away, push out towards where you perceive the danger. Okay. And so we figured out a way to take the physiology of that

and to reverse engineer and understand, extensor versus flexor, some kinetic chain stuff, and some simple, simple exercises we call fingers flayed outside 90, and how to combine the physics and the physiology to create the strongest biomechanic frame, hence we call it the split jerk of cell defense. And you understand that from any lifting. Like, hey, if you're using your body intelligently, ergonomically pound for pound, this is the strongest position you can be in. And that's what we just want. So this is a building on something like, go scare your kids, or your, or your, or your love. one and watch what naturally happens.

The thing I love the most about it is, I mean, you see it all the time. Just go to YouTube and watch videos where people get scared and watch the reactions that they have. You're building on the reaction that they have. We are weaponizing the flinch. We're teaching people that if a guy goes boo and your hands come up,

he has locked and loaded your finger jab, your palm, strike, your forearm, your elbow, your ability to grab and grapple to, you know, and just to get back in the fight. And so because that all happens, at a subconscious level because your reptilian brain activates it. What we've actually done is the drills that we've created

are teaching your cognitive brain to embrace and respect what your reptilian brain is going to do when you disrespect it. It's going to happen anyhow, right? Yep. And so it's just a faster way. So I tell people, and it's crazy. Category one, two, three people hate my guts when I say, I can teach you how to defend yourself in a day.

And they all go, this bullshit, this is a scam. And I go, you're confusing learning a martial art in a day. for learning self-defense in a day. I never said that. I can teach you how to use a shotgun and how to protect your door in minutes. Yep. But it doesn't make you a SWAT operator

or a special operations warrior, right? I can teach you how to use a fire extinguisher in five minutes. Doesn't make you a firefighter. You're not a firefighter. And so I can teach you about situational awareness and self-awareness, fear spike, fear management, detect and avoid,

how to diffuse and de-escalate, some strategies for that, and then how to use your body the natural toolbox you have. You've got a hidden arsenal on you that is particularly explosive when you can convert the potential energy that becomes kinetic energy during the flinch, or even if you're in what we call a non-violent posture, de-escalation posture, where your hands are up, your fingers are sprayed,

you're outside, dine, you go, hey, man, I'm in trouble. Like, that is a Trojan horse for a palm strike. your weapon system's already in place. But it isn't if you've never thought about it. Yeah. And so very, very quickly, and we've had, listen, I've only been teaching this for four decades. I know it works, right?

And so you ask me, what do you tell people? I go, listen, you have life insurance. Most organized adults have life insurance. But in the same way, if you think about it, it, it took particularly men longer to do the life insurance because we had to come to grips with the idea that, oh, maybe something could happen to me. Am I right? Am I right? It's like, yeah, I would agree with that statement for sure. So think about it, but it's the same thing with self-defense. It's like life insurance is only valuable to somebody else because you've got to

die for them to collect it. The self-defense, if you fail to survive the fight, there was no value. You know, we talk about the economics of violence is no matter how much material wealth you have, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you can't afford to be attacked. It will impact you emotionally. It'll affect your family. It'll affect what you do. And so we just tell people, hey, it's just one of the things you do. Like, for example, do you have a lock on your door?

Do you have a smoke detector in your house? Do you have a first aid kit? If, you know, self-defense can and should be taught, like a paramedic or a firefighter. to teach a CPR, and that's what my company does. Of course, we do longer courses, specialty courses. But our biggest thing, and my biggest push is coming back now, almost, you know, 37 years later, how do I make the world safer? It's getting this message out there that you're a human weapon system,

but you can't access this hardwired survival reflex if you deny its existence and you put blinders on to what's going on in the world or that risk. And so you- And I would add to that. Yes. And constantly listen to what other people are telling you you should do or what is acceptable. You know, like if you boundary yourself by what other people want you to believe, all of those things add together, you're totally screwed.

Even though you are a weapon system. Right. Totally agree with you. Right. And so the big thing here, it's like we had a guy who saved a man's life in a restaurant using the R3D, detect, diffuse defend, who. he was a paramedic. He's at dinner with his family.

And he sees another table having dinner, about six people. And he just looks at, again, situational awareness, what's wrong with this picture? He looks at a guy who kind of like sat up straight and kind of staring deer in the headlights and everyone's chatting and talking. And he went, that's, there's something wrong there. And he looked at it. And then he started to get a fierce spike. And because we live in a world where like, hey, don't bother people. Don't intrude.

Oh, yeah. No, they're in their bubble. You have to stay in your bubble. You know, like, again, politically correct culture. And he goes detect and avoid. In this case, it was, I think that guy's having a stroke. Yeah, he's going to say it sounds like a stroke. Right.

And he gets up and moves towards the table and says, excuse me, are you okay? And everyone at the table is like, who the hell is this guy? We're looking at this guy. And then they realize something's wrong. And the guy, like, looks up. And then he went D2, diffuse, call 9. 911 right away and he starts to you know do it you know who's got an aspirin he's like like

and ends up saving the guy but he calls me like a goosebumps now thinking about because he calls me up he goes i used the the the system the fighting system that you've taught and i applied it to my understanding of first aid in cpr and and that's where i first started thinking about it that self-defense can and should be taught like cpr that it's like a six-hour course and you have the ability at the end of a CPR first aid kit to save somebody else's life but not yours and i come back to in arguably the single most important skill isn't your ability to save my life but your ability to save your life right yeah um and uh it's it's a fascinating thing but what we've got to overcome is this this and you alluded to it earlier the stigma of no it takes six years to get a black belt or you got to do

this you got to do that and we're not teaching people martial arts we're not teaching people m m.m. We're teaching people about improvised weapons. We're teaching people about natural tools. We're teaching people that if you can put your seatbelt on in your car and reach across your shoulder, that that's the same range of motion of an elbow across somebody's face or eyes or ears or temple. And that you've done more reps of that elbow motion

than most martial arts have ever done of an elbow. In all your years of driving, you just never realized, oh shit, I've got this hidden arsenal inside of me. But what will stop you if somebody's choking you, right? And they're choking you and you're up, your backs against the wall, Andy, and they're choking you. And also, and I scream at you, Andy, put on your fucking seed belt. Right? And I trigger that visual.

What would stop you from ripping an elbow across this fucker's face? Nothing. Not you. Yeah. What would stop? Begins the letter F. Fear. Yeah.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to, I'm afraid to get sued. I'm afraid it wouldn't work. I'm afraid he was going to beat my ass. Mind you, you're being choked by the person. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Right. your house with a weapon and says if you cooperate with me, I won't hurt you and you listen to him because this guy who broken to your house with a weapon is a upstanding citizen. Yeah. Who's negotiating with you, right? Yeah, man. You know, when you're talking about the detective, I've been just kind of rolling back through my through my personal memories of the variety of violent encounters I've had in my own life.

And other than, obviously, being ambushed from a distance, you know, ballistically, I can't think of an encounter that I've been involved in that actually surprised me that I didn't at least have some type of warning that I could see maybe in hindsight like I, you know, earlier on maybe I missed it, but even like with the, like I said about a month ago with the officer at the restaurant, like the writing was purely on the wall.

I knew that it was escalating and it wasn't, it didn't surprise me at all. So when it escalated to violence, it's like, okay, then violence is the course of action that we're going to take. But it's that skill, and I think you mentioned this earlier, the one, the being able to detect it, and then, two, managing your fear, that overlays into everything, like you're saying, to relationships, into business, to violent encounters. Like, it's, there's a lot of meat on that bone.

Oh, my God, it's literally, and I've had really deep long talks about that, where, and we actually started doing a seminar, and we should actually do something together on this, because I think you dig it. But the seminar is called No Fear. And it's not a self-defense seminar. There's no physical stuff. It's all lecture and conversation. But it's called no fear, but we spell fear K-N-R-W.

K-N-R-W. K-N-O-W. K-N-O-W. K-N-O-W, no fear. Yep. And it's really about understanding fear. If I, you know, think about this. Remember the ski story?

I started, you know, I started to say, well. You were a Canadian and Olympic skier, yes. Yeah. And so the biggest issue there was I was afraid to tell my coach that I was afraid. And my coach didn't understand how to draw out of me a conversation about that. And people still, to this day, 2017, don't. It's like that big thing, especially type A, especially guys. But everybody in a relationship, you know, I have a fight that goes for three days with Jess.

And then at the end of it, you know, crying and making up. And she was afraid to say this. and I was afraid to say this, and you just wasted three days of your life. Because at the end of the day, you could say, well, I was angry because, but it was fear of being vulnerable or telling the truth or whatever. And I really believe we would change the world if people understood fear, that it's not no fear, that the idea of the old no fear slogan, that the idea that there is a state of no fear perpetuates more fear,

because if you falsely believe, oh, when I'm really good, I'll have no fear, and then you get a tinge of fear, you go, shit, something's wrong, It rocks your ecosystem. Right. But if you say, fear is my friend, fear is supposed to be here, it's like you said, the day that I stand on the edge of a cliff and I don't respect the danger and the fear, I'm going to back off that you're using it as a fuel to supercharge your life and your experience where most people use it in a way that allows them to be crippled by it. It's throttling their potential.

And so here I am as this teenage skier. and the message that I'm trying to share here is had my coach come up to me that day 15 minutes earlier and said how do you feel kid and I went great coach and he put his arm around my shoulder before I was in my skis bindings on getting ready put my arm around my shoulder and said hey you know you're really good athlete have you noticed though you kill it and practice what you wipe out in every race right have you noticed that you notice that you notice that You sabotage your, like I never finished a race. I would, and I was always the fastest.

Oh man, too bad you got a tip. Too bad you hit that ice. You're always the fastest till turn three and then you went down. I was, I was so aggressive. But it's almost like Jose Aldo charging Connor McGregor in that fight where that blind aggression to get it done makes you emotionally vulnerable. It actually inhibits your performance. Yeah, yeah.

there's got to be a balance between like, you know, it's you guys in shooting, you know, like, you know, smooth as fast. You've got to control the mechanics and the scenario and you've got to figure it out a way. It's like people, you know, I get people go, why would you want to flinch in a fight? I go, you don't. But if you do and you've never thought about it, your recovery from it is longer. And in an ambush, there will always be a flinch. That's physiology. You can't not flinch.

So, you know, the ski message is, I think, kind of deep. and maybe might touch some of your listeners, is I had sabotaged my success as a skier because I was afraid that I was as good as everyone told me I was because I didn't feel that good. I was like, if I was so good, why am I so scared? That was the actual question I would say to myself. If I'm so good, why do I have butterflies? Why are my hands sweaty? Why can't I breathe right here?

Nobody shared tacky-sike-siki auditory exclusion. and nobody was talking about like, oh, these are the physiological changes when your body's preparing for danger. Right? And, you know, and it's funny. And it's, it's a huge part of what we teach. But nobody gets there.

You know, you asked the big question, you know, was what do we tell people? Where do they go? You know, you won't get life insurance or take a CPR course or get, you know, insurance for your house or buy a dog or tell someone you love them or do this for your kids or your business.

if you're scared. You've got to accept that these are the strategies and these are the risks and you're going to threat to discriminate and then you're going to choose the optimum strategy and there's going to be a lot of shit outside your comfort zone that's going to scare you. And then what you do is you talk to somebody like you or me

or some other SME who hopefully isn't just a subject matter expert but actually has substance to it. They've done their research. You know, like I love people, you know, they'll probably, of course, the internet is wonderful, a while a blast of comments, but people who go, you're full of shit

flower, and I look at the person's profile, and I'm like, dude, I've been teaching longer than you've been alive on the planet. You know, like, please, give me a break. At least do some research on who I work with and what I do before you say I can't teach somebody in a day.

Check yourself and make sure you're not projecting your limitations on me, because I can fucking do it. I tell you what, I couldn't say any better than that, so let's ended there for session one. I have a feeling we'll be back for many rounds. There you go. Finished another one.

Episode four is in the books. Same thing as every other podcast, guys. If you like the podcast, do me a favor. Tell somebody about it. Write a review. Help me spread the word. I appreciate all the feedback you guys have been giving me on social media through email. Any way that you can reach out, it's definitely appreciated.

And I'll do everything I can to keep making it better. Until next time, later.