The School of Greatness - 94 Self Defense Strategies – Survive The Most Critical Moments of Your Life with Tim Larkin

Episode Date: September 24, 2014

"Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is the answer, it's the only answer." - Tim Larkin For show notes and to learn more about Tim Larkin we welcome you to LewisHowes.com/94

This is episode number 94 with self-protection specialist Tim Larkin. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, everyone?

Thanks so much for joining me today on the School of Greatness podcast. My name is Lewis Howes, and a quick fact today is that I am a passionate salsa dancer. That's right. I love to salsa dance. And I used to live above a jazz club in Columbus, Ohio, where each week they would have a salsa band come and play. They'd put down a dance floor and all the salseros from Columbus in the area would come out and dance. And I was terrified to dance. I was like, man, I'm just a tall white boy who doesn't speak Spanish and has no rhythm. And I was terrified to practice and to learn. All these girls would ask me to come out and dance with them.

And I would always say, no, I don't want to make you look bad, right? So after about three months of this happening, I'd go down. I was just obsessed with the music and the culture and the people and the passion that I really wanted to learn, but I was scared. And after about three months, a couple of girls that I would see out dancing constantly would always try to get me to come and dance. And I never did. One time, they finally got me to go out in the dance floor. I was terrified. I finally did it and was hooked. I was like, man, I got to learn this. And I got to become the best white salsa dancer that I can be. If that's even possible, right? So I went out constantly for months and months.

Every night of the week that I could, I went out salsa dancing. I took private lessons. I took group lessons. I was listening to salsa music constantly throughout the day. I was watching. This is really how I learned, though. I watched about two or three hours of YouTube videos every single night and was practicing by myself in front of a mirror acting like I was spinning a girl around. That's really where I learned it was

by myself every night practicing and watching videos and then mimicking some great people that I saw on YouTube and practicing myself. And that's my fact for the day. And a cool thing that happened, I was just recently salsa dancing the other week, and a couple of ladies were so nice. They came up to me and said, I would love to dance with you, but I also love your show, The School of Greatness. And thank you so much for what you're up to. And they shared with me their story. And I just thought that was an amazing experience. So if you ever see me out salsa dancing or anywhere in the world, for that matter, please feel free to come up and say, hi, I want to hear about what you're up to, what your, what your dreams are, what you're creating in your life. And I appreciate everyone

who does listen to the show and says, hi. So, and let's go ahead and talk about our guest for today. His name is Mr. Tim Larkin. He's a New York Time bestselling author of the book called Survive the Unthinkable. He is a self-protection specialist. Tony Robbins wrote the foreword to his book, and he shares some incredible stories and some credible strategies for how to protect yourself in any situation. strategies for how to protect yourself in any situation. So if you don't have a weapon and someone has a weapon, he teaches us how to protect ourselves in that situation. Or if it's just someone bigger than you or a couple people or you just feel like you're uncomfortable in certain situations and you'd like to have some skills as to if a worst case scenario happens, you know what

you need to do in that situation. He talks about some of those strategies in this episode and he teaches this all over the world. He's an incredible guy, some great stories. And the facts are that approximately 1.9 million women are physically assaulted annually in the United States. So there's lots of men that are assaulted as well, right? But 1.9 million women are assaulted in the United States every year. Wouldn't it be powerful to have some strategies, some defense mechanisms that could support you in getting out of a situation that normally you'd be terrified on how to get out of? Some of his strategies are very different than what you may think you should be doing.

Make sure to pay attention to this episode. And I'm very excited to dive into this with the one and only Tim Larkin. Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Super pumped for this one. It's with Tim Larkin. What's up, Tim? How you doing, Luke? Doing well. And we just got connected recently through our mutual friend, Ryan Holiday, who's obviously been on the show and a good friend of both of ours. So I'm glad we got connected

through there. And he said, you know, he emailed me and then he texted me. He goes, you got to check out what Tim is doing. He's doing some really interesting stuff in the self-defense space. And you've got to check out what Tim is doing. He's doing some really interesting stuff in the self-defense space. And you've got a book out that is called Survive the Unthinkable, A Total Guide to Women's Self-Protection with a forward by Tony Robbins, which is pretty cool.

I'm a big fan of Tony. And I thought it would be cool to talk about, kind of just go off right off the bat with the situation with Ray Rice. And I want to go back into your backstory here in a minute, but I want to get right into it and talk about what is up with the situation with Ray Rice that happened recently. I guess it was about six months ago now, maybe. But what actually happened and if that's a situation that ever happens for a man or woman where you're stuck in an elevator and someone is attacking you, what's something you can do? There's no space. There's no way you can run.

There's nowhere to hide. So what happens in a situation like that when you can't really defend yourself, I guess? Yeah, there's a couple different things to consider when you look at a situation like that. One, of course, is the story. Everybody wants to know the story. And the story is only useful before the act of violence and after the act of violence. What you're asking is what happens at the point of violence? What can I possibly do?

Yes, Yes. You know, and quite honestly, in, in, you know, other than competition, other than, you know, uh, uh, martial arts or combat sport competition, you have to assume that the threat that you're going to be facing on the street or, you know, in the real world is obviously going to be bigger, faster, and stronger. Um, we always assume, you know, when I'm training somebody that the threat's also going to be carrying weapons and that there's going to be more than one. when I'm training somebody that the threat's also going to be carrying weapons and that there's going to be more than one. That's just a baseline parameter. So, I mean, when you look at it from that perspective, you have to say, okay, given those things, I'm not going to be bigger, faster, and stronger than the person. They may be carrying weapons or maybe more than one.

What is the universality in humans that we can look to that doesn't require me to be bigger, faster, and stronger? And really what it boils down to is injury to the human body. And the body itself is loaded with areas that if you put enough force into those areas, you can get a huge result regardless of the person's size, speed, or strength. You know, my whole career in the special operations community was destroyed because of an injury, um, had nothing to do with my tenacity, had nothing to do with me being bigger, faster, and stronger. I was, I was the leader in my class.

I was the golden boy. And, um, it was my ears for me. I burst my eardrums and that was it, man. I had no ability to resist, no ability to fight back, overcome it. And when you are, your life is on the line, those are the types of injuries that you want to put on somebody. You want to be able to put injuries on them that regardless of their will, regardless of their ability to handle pain, that a structure or sensory system on the human body is destroyed so that they're busy dealing

with that particular injury rather than trying to put injury into you. And it happens all the time. I mean, you know, like, like you'd say, you know, a smaller, weaker woman, you know, if you're around little children, you know, I have twin girls that are one years old right now and I have a little three-year-old boy and, you know, they'll poke you in the eye, throw their head back by accident. They're much smaller, much weaker than us. And you can't do anything about it. You're like in pain. Exactly. Well, I had a friend, I had a very good friend that got uh you know slapped in the groin um you know by his daughter he's 270 pounds the guy's former uh you know former lineman for uh oklahoma university he was on the ground sucking his own you know and that's a little girl who

didn't mean to hurt him obviously so that's why you know we have to's a little girl who didn't mean to hurt him, obviously. So that's why, you know, we have to get over that illusion that because somebody is physically stronger than us, that we're completely weak because, you know, that's the beauty of the human race is the fact that, you know, if we had to be bigger, faster and stronger as a species, we wouldn't be alive. So it's our ability to use our brain first and foremost that allows us to overcome some of these obvious weaknesses that we have in our bodies and use our knowledge to be able to protect ourselves. It sounds like the classic story of David and Goliath where he just found a weak spot. spot. And it's really about finding the weak spots is what I'm hearing you say in the human body that we can't really defend or we can't recover quickly to when we hit those weak spots. Now, a lot of people do these self-defense or maybe they're like doing mixed martial arts or different styles of mixed martial arts that are supposed to be

supporting their defense and setting them up to win in self-defense techniques or in situations, I should say. But it seems like a lot of these, and I don't know the names of all of them, so I'm not going to try to butcher them and act like I know which one does and what they don't do. But it seems like a lot of them try to work with moving with the body and having them go around you as opposed to blocking it but using their momentum in defending yourself. But really, that doesn't seem like very practical to me because, again, if someone's bigger than you or stronger than you, they just grab you. It seems like it's going to be hard to get out of that. strong and they just grab you, it seems like it's going to be hard to get out of that. Yeah. Well, what you have to do is you've got to pull back. I tell people all the time, the worst way to ever evaluate whether a system is going to be useful to you is to view training

videos of the system because it's always going to look good on those parameters because they're going to make things look good. They're going to make the scenarios favorable the person not to do is just tasteful as it is and you gave the great example at the beginning of the podcast you know the ray rice issue that's real violence and so you watch if you you know if you look at acts of real violence and fortunately or unfortunately um with the internet and closed circuit tv as prevalent as it is, there's just unbelievable amounts of it available to you of objective acts of violence, you know, and this is what I use in my training when I show people because they need to see most people don't understand how violence

really works. They have this idea of the heroic battle, the back and forth. And when they quickly see what real violence looks like, it's completely counter to probably anything that they looked at. Yeah, this isn't the UFC. There's no referees. This is real life, and someone just comes up to you when you're not expecting it and attacks you. Yeah, and here's a challenge in my industry. My industry is a very balkanized industry. It's basically my way or the highway type ideas. And there's a lot know it's it's a very balkanized industry people you know it's

basically my way or the highway type ideas and there's a lot of fantasy in it too um you know you'll have people say on one end and on the reality self-defense side that oh mma is terrible and you know won't help you and and then of course the mma guys their big counter is we'll come in the ring and uh you know see how good your stuff is. Both, both sides are wrong. Both sides don't get the idea. I mean, my, some of my best students are former athletes and former, um, you know, MMA fighters in particular. Um, because those guys, I already know they have tenacity. They have everything. I just need to show them to take what they used to use to submit somebody and then show them out on the street how to create an injury, you know, where they do that.

You know, how do you apply, you know, information on the streets where you're not competing? You have to learn the tools of destruction on the street. And so I don't look at one as being better than the other. It's just the right tool for the right job. If I'm going into a competition arena those competition rules are fantastic but if i'm out on the street you just need to consider this the ufc has 31 rules last time i looked 27 of those rules involved you know prohibitions against injury to the human uh to to uh the body you know the human body there's 27 of them that involve weak areas of the human body that you're the body you know the human body there's 27 of them that involve weak

areas of the human body that you're not allowed to strike you're not allowed to go after you're not allowed to attack and that's because it would end competition immediately wow interesting yeah and so and so you you understand i live in vegas literally my training center is across the street across the way just you walk right out the door over to Jason's place. He's got every UFC fighter there is. Dana White's kids work out there. I love MMA. I love the competition.

I love the nobility of it. But what you have to understand is what makes that so great often can be a huge detriment to you when you're facing real violence. Yeah. And it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is when understanding your principles, which I want to get into here in a second, when understanding your principles, you could be an average woman who doesn't work out that could take on an MMA fighter from the UFC in the real world. And if you hit them in the right place, you could injure them so that they couldn't attack you anymore. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah. And the premise is not, you know, you have to understand that we're not talking about, um, a known competition, meaning if that woman was

facing a highly skilled MMA fighter, um, you know, we had a situation out here, there was an MMA fighter out here who just, just, you know, another, another domestic violence, just beat his girlfriend, you know, terribly out here, a guy another domestic violence, just beat his girlfriend terribly out here, a guy named, well, he goes under the name war machine and there's a manhunt for him. But it's the same thing. If you have the knowledge of how to protect yourself, you don't go out to use it in any fair manner. Meaning a predator is going to approach you, bigger, faster, stronger predator is going to approach you. A bigger, faster, stronger predator is going to approach you. Obviously, they don't fear you.

They think they can dominate you. They feel very comfortable. They give you an opportunity that you can exploit if you have the right knowledge. So it's not a question. I don't want to give any impression that in a complete situation where all things are equal and people are in a ring and everybody knows what's about to go on, where all things are equal and people are in a ring and everybody knows what's about to go on, the practitioner who's really put the time in in that type of arena is going to be far better qualified to deal with that than just somebody off the street. But when you add injury into the mix, everything becomes 50-50, meaning whoever gets the first injury is, when you look at these acts of

violence, real acts of violence, it's the person that gets the first injury that ends up usually walking away. And you just have to make sure you have a correct definition of injury. Yeah. And it sounds like, you know, correct me if I'm wrong or, you know, just verify this for me, that when it's a man attacking a woman, I would assume that a man would probably want to grab the woman first or, or, or hit or strike them somewhere first, but it might start with grabbing and maybe I'm wrong. So just stop me if I am. And in that case, if someone starts to grab you and shake you, and then it starts to go into some other place, what's something that someone could do right away if they realize this could get out of hand, but they haven't the man hasn't injured the woman yet but maybe she's like he could so let me do something now before it happens yeah the one thing that we we tell all our female clients right out of the bat is once a guy has put his hands on you you have to understand that the physical plane has been crossed and the fact that he's bigger, and stronger means you're facing grievous bodily injury. And, you know, the laws back that up.

Okay. And we're talking about a serious, serious, you know, assault here. I'll give you an example. Like I had a girl come to one of my classes a couple years ago in New York. Or I'm sorry, I was on a cruise actually with a corporate group, and they had a father-daughter situation. Most of the girls were getting ready to go to college. So the dads kind of brought them to the self-defense presentation I was doing on the ship,

and a lot of them came kind of under protest because they wanted to go do something else, like sun or something. But this one girl in particular, she was like a carbon copy of Reese Witherspoon and legally blonde. I mean, she talked like that. She was just that girl, you know, and, um, went through the training, you know, that we did. Didn't think much of it from my perspective. Two years later, she traipsed into one of my seminars in New York with three of her sisters in tow. And she says, Hey, I don't know if you remember me. And I knew her dad fairly well. And I said, yeah, of course I do.

And she said, yeah, I don't know. Did dad call you and tell you what happened? And I said, no. And so she'd gone off to college. She had a first floor dorm room and was living with a roommate and woke up one morning, the roommate was sleeping over at her boyfriend's place and she woke up with a guy on top of her in bed and um she had one of those those kids those college uh bed uh beds that is much higher it's higher up and underneath is a desk so i just want

you to imagine that this guy on top of her hardwood floor, he, um, he had her kind of pinned and he was, you know, getting to the point to where he was starting to take down the, um, uh, you know, the, the sheets and her first thought, her first thought was he's not close enough. She recognized now she hadn't had any training since mine, but she recognized that in order to get an injury she had to make sure the guy was close enough so she could be sure because the only thing she could see from that perspective that was of use to her was the eye um you know it's just one of the areas that we had trained so she waited she realized as we told her he

initially grabbed her and then he has to adjust if he wanted to try to get to the next step to affect a rape, he has to kind of adjust. And when he was adjusting to pull down, he leaned closer to her with his eyes. And that's when she went into action. And she went in, wrapped her one arm right around the back of his neck and just attacked the eye. The guy was so strong. He was two, you know, she was about probably 105 pounds. He was easily 235. She pulls him off the top of the bed. You know, he pulls her off with his reaction because that's the other thing we told, you know, if you go after somebody's eye, they're going to violently try to react away from it. She held on, she latched on and she just focused on that as he took her off the bed, you know, and she's holding onto him, you know, she kind of

lost grip of the eye and her forearm. She, this was not a conscious effort, but her forearm went across his throat and as they hit the ground, all of her 105 pounds ended up, you know, striking him in the throat with that forearm. She got up, she could, she felt, she felt the injury happen when she hit. And she knew the guy was hurt because the body kind of went a little bit weak. And she was able to get up right away and went running down, you know, and, you know, screaming down the hall and, you know, got help right away. By the time security got there, the guy had already asphyxiated and died. Turned out he was a serial rapist that had been going in that campus and a couple others

for about six years. He had watched her for three weeks and realized that the roommate every other night is usually at the boyfriend's place also tested realized they always leave their window unlocked on the first floor this guy just had a whole you know they found all the notes and everything oh my gosh um but what it comes back to the reason i'm telling this lewis is because she had she had one training session with us that specifically showed her injury to the human body and you know what I try to tell people is is when something happens to you your mind is going to search for the most of fit you're going to you're going to

you're going to only be able to do what you've ever trained and you're only going to be able to do what your knowledge base was she knew how to affect an injury to the eye she realized she couldn't compete with the size and she realized that once she affected the injury, she had to stay on it. I'm telling you, this was literally a girl that did not want to even go to the class. And her younger sisters were in there. And I've got a good relationship with all of them since. Unfortunately, nothing else has happened to any other member of the family. But she would have been the last person i ever would have picked but she absolutely retained what was there

because of the way it was shown you know the way the information shown and that's probably the other next step is most most ways people learn how to protect themselves when it comes to call it handy hand combat call it combat sports call it you know whatever reality self-defense the methodologies that most people put out there are really really just not useful to people from a learning sense wow that's a powerful story and uh i'm i can't believe the guy died right then that's yeah that's crazy i mean now man that's such a great story i'm just like blown away by the imagery that i just saw that in my head um now it sounds like like you just mentioned there in these other you know mma sports there's a lot of like blocking and defense but it sounds like what she did she didn't have to block anything or like guard herself all she did was

attack right at the eyes and use a technique that I'm assuming you taught through target-focused training. But she went after him. She didn't try to block him or necessarily kick him off. She just went after it. Now, how does someone – I don't think that anyone can actually do that naturally because i think the natural um instinct is probably to block i'm assuming if something comes after you so yeah yeah yeah you know you're absolutely right listen and what we do is you know we show um you know a lot of the best information when it comes to self-protection comes from the worst parts of society. And one of the most enlightening things that I've been doing these last couple of years

is really going into corrections and getting to know and interview a lot of the top predators. Most of them are parts of either Latino or white or black gangs. So you actually go to the prisons and interview them. Yeah. Well, I have a lot of friends in the corrections community. They, they, they hooked me up and I'm, I'm, uh, I'm doing this. I, the current book that I'm working on is looking at different ways society looks at violence. And when you look to the people who use violence as a currency and in the prison systems, violence is power and violence is absolutely necessary it's a necessary tool as as you know if we're looking at from an entrepreneurial standpoint

it's as necessary to us as our marketing efforts are you know um we don't we don't get you know uh they don't necessarily get money um status recognition but they get powers get that and they run you know they absolutely run it through run, you know, they absolutely run it through fear and, you know, they need to understand how to use a tool of violence. And from them, you learn a lot of different things. Um, one of the things that you learn is if I showed them an act of violence, if I showed them something you and I, because we're same socialized human beings, would try to look at the act of violence and we would immediately see from the victim's perspective how we may have

blocked or protected ourselves or could have countered that act of violence. It's a very natural thing for people to do. What's really interesting is when you show these predators, the alpha predators, these killers, and they look at an act of violence, they look at it from the successful use of the tool. So they look at it from the person who is successful using violence and their comment is, yeah, that's good.

That's how I do it. Or you know what? You could have done it better. Here's what I would have done. They're, they're thinking, no, it sounds when I tell you that it sounds like, oh, my God, these guys are sick.

But let's review something. How you use the tool will be determined whether or not it was good or bad. But violence works regardless of whether you're a good guy or a bad guy. That's that's that's kind of key, you know. And when this is an incredibly powerful way to inoculize yourself from a victim mentality. So when you view an act of violence, if you can train yourself to do this, as controversial as this sounds,

you're not condoning the act, don't get me wrong, but what you're training your brain to do is never to associate with the losing side of violence. And how can you learn from the winning side of violence? What do you mean by that? Never associate with the losing side of violence? Well, the losing side of violence is trying to block your way out. And try to look at it from a victim and try to rework the victim's outcome.

There's nothing to learn from a victim's perspective. Interesting. That's useful. So you almost have to look from a victim's perspective. Interesting. That's useful. So you almost have to look at yourself as the predator. No, just look at yourself. You see, we have to,

we have to rethink how we look at violence. Right, right, right, right. I'll give you a quick example. Um, a guy kicks the door open and a woman's down in the kitchen,

washing some dishes, you know, getting ready to close up the night. Her infant sons, um, up upstairs to sleep. Uh uh she's alone in the house guy kicks her door open and she all of a sudden finds herself in the struggle fight for her life she starts resisting because of course you know she's got a baby upstairs and she's extremely scared for her own life baby's life she's fighting heroically um and this guy didn't expect such a resistance.

And so he gets to the point to where he gets really frustrated because she's just trying to fight him off. He sees a butcher's block. He sees the knife. He pulls the kitchen chef's knife out. He stabs her in the side of the neck, killing her, murdering her. Now, we would agree as society that this guy needs to be prosecuted full extent of the law. If there's a death penalty, he probably deserves it. At a minimum, he should never be allowed to walk the streets again. Let's look at the second scenario. Same thing happens. This guy kicks the door open. Epic struggle. The woman's fighting back, fighting back. She realizes this guy's way too big, way too strong. She's not able to hold her own. But then she looks back.

She sees that butcher's block. She sees that knife, pulls the knife out, stabs him to the side of the neck, killing him, protecting herself. We as society would look at that and we would agree, hey, she needs to be protected to the full extent of the law. She needs to be lauded for her actions to protect her and her infant son. And at a minimum, you know, we should take huge measures to protect people like this as a society. What I'm asking people to do is completely different. I want you to understand that whether it was the good guy or the bad guy, the knife to

the side of the neck worked each time. Violence is merely a tool. How it's used is whether it's good or bad. The problem is we have stigmatized the study of violence to the point to where the only people that have access to it are the worst parts of society. And that was not the case 50 years ago. Crazy.

So how many people should be, should we all be learning how to be violent in our, you know, should we all be learning how to be violent in a sense so that if it ever comes up, we, we understand it and we're not just defending ourselves, but we're actually applying violence towards someone else. We should learn how to use the tool of violence. We should be very familiar with the tool of violence, not be violent. The issue is this, a lot of information is shown. And, you know, when you're looking at self-defense, you're looking at a lot of some of the reality self-defense and the way they show it, they show it in scenarios that are completely inappropriate. They'll show bar fights, how to get out of a bar fight, how to do this,

how to do that. And as a sane, socialized individual, you look at that and you go, my God, if I actually did that to somebody, I would go to jail, you know? So therefore I don't want to learn that because it was shown in the wrong context. So I tell people all the time, let's take the, since I use the idea of, of, of, you know, going after somebody's eye and digging an eye out, you know, as repulsive as that is. Let's just look at context on that. Okay, so you're sitting at a bar and somebody comes up and they tell you that's their seat and that's your drink. And, you know, they, you know, they want you to move. They're being super aggressive on you.

So you slam them into the solar plexus. You grab them by the back of the head and you dig their eye out. Okay. Everybody sits and says, geez, you know, you're pulling into a parking space at Whole Foods. And you know what? You've been waiting. The Prius pulls out and then some little guy in a Mercedes runs in, steals your parking space. You get out of your car, you run over there, you slam up against the car and you dig his eye out. Yeah, exactly. It's crazy.

So now you're at Sandy Hook. You're an administrator there. Three kids have already been shot and the shooter drops down to do a reload. And you realize it's your opportunity, and you get there, you throw yourself at him, you slam him in the side of the neck, you get down, you dig that eye out, and you stop him from shooting anybody else. That's what I try to get across to my clients.

There is that unthinkable time. There is that black swan event where this information is absolutely critical that you know. And the interesting part about this, Lewis, is the more familiar you are with this material, the much more peaceful life you live. You don't have this irrational fear of violence that a lot of us have, even if it's subconscious. You know, when you really look at the subject matter and we deal with it up front, this was something that every successful person, you know, really throughout society up until recently, where we've kind of outsourced responsibility for protecting ourselves

to other agencies. We, especially the more successful you were, the more you had to really be able to physically protect yourself. And it was expected of you to learn that because it was, you know, it was a self-reliance issue. And now it's to the point to where you look at it and you're basically a thug if you look at this material or you're, you know, you like violence or you're just a bad person. And that's the big fraud that's out there. You know, this is a tool that is available to everybody and is part of being human and it's to make damn sure that we don't get taken advantage of it is our nuclear weapon it is our last resort but it is also something that is absolutely

critical if somebody is going to try to physically dominate you and ruin your life in seconds you you need to understand how this tool works. Yeah, I think it's definitely important to know worst case scenarios in life for everything and be aware and be ready in case it ever happens so that you feel comfortable and confident enough to know that if it ever did happen, you would have some sense of training, basic training on what to do. And I'd rather have, you know, spend a half a day or a full day learning some training on what I hope never will ever happen than never take that training and then it happening and it being the end of my life or the end of my girlfriend's life or whatever it may be because

we weren't prepared or at least we weren't, didn't have a basic principles and understanding with just a few techniques or strategies and tools on what to do in a certain situation so i definitely agree with that now can you tell me you created target focus training correct yes can you tell me what that is and and what the program is designed for specifically then i'm assuming talking just about what i just said but yeah yeah the um the really really target focus training has a twofold purpose you know if you wanted to you know our my um my phrase that i'm i'm really known for is violence is rarely the answer but when it is the answer it's the only answer and people love the first

part of that and the first part of that you And the first part of that, you know, that violence is rarely the answer. That's really where I spend a good amount of time with my clients to make sure that you avoid the avoidable. You know, because there's a lot of antisocial aggression that's out there that we feel we have to participate in that could lead to a social violence. could lead to asocial violence. But what we quickly learn is that when you live a life where you avoid the avoidable, and we point out that, hey, you don't have to respond to verbal threats. You don't have to respond to a lot of the things that you feel you have to participate.

If you ever choose to use violence as an answer, that is the wrong time to use violence and what's very funny is people always want to use violence the wrong time you know they're the first ones to want to you know just defend their bar stool they're the first ones that if their wife you know gets you know grabbed or or a slight comment's been made they want to go after you know that they want to react to right the wrong yet yeah those same people if all of a sudden they're asleep and their door gets kicked open and there's three guys there uh all with armed with shotguns all with ski masks and the fourth guy has duct tape guess what most people are going to want to do they're going to want to talk hey who are you why are you here you know and it's a complete

disconnect you know when when things are used and that's that's really what i try to point out to people so you know we really uh it's twofold i want to make sure that you totally understand how to avoid the avoidable how to avoid anti and not participate in anti-social aggression but then you know, more importantly, there are other people that try to do that, but what we don't show is the other end because the other end, to me, is the one where there's just no real good instruction, and that is you're facing grievous bodily harm.

There is no exit. If you don't do something to protect yourself, you're essentially about to participate in your own murder because this person is coming to do violence regardless. And that involves no communication. There's no communication in asocial violence. And training people in the right environment and introducing them and showing them, you know, that and inoculating them from unnecessary fears. It's just it's just been my lifelong passion to me it's it's i just think the the information is so misunderstood it's so demonized

so you know stigmatized that you know it's my goal to bring this information back to the people that truly need it you know and the people that truly need it are the people that are living these great lives and they're they're helping people out and do so many things. And then some predator comes in, some just, you know, one percenter who just wants to destroy that, who doesn't care. And oftentimes there were either actions taken that they could have avoided that scenario altogether, or if they actually got into the physical act, had they had some of this information,

they had a very good chance of being able to protect themselves. Right, right. Now, this stuff is fascinating to me the more I'm listening to you. And I'm sure you've got workshops that are around the country, or is it just in Vegas that you do, or you do private stuff? I've been doing this for 25 years. I uh 50 instructors we travel literally around the world doing uh doing seminars okay cool yeah and i'll link up your site target focus training.com on the the show notes afterwards and i see there's uh there's trainings here you can check out all this stuff

um and i definitely recommend going and doing this. But for those that are listening that maybe haven't had a chance to go yet or they're going to go in the future, what are like two or three places in the body that, you know, we've heard about the eyes so far, you know, aggressively going after the eyes. And I'm sure there's a technique or something that they can do, but what are a couple of places in the body besides the eyes, or you can use the eyes as an example that we should be focusing on when needing to attack someone back and, um, you know, maybe give an example or two of what someone can do. Yeah, there's, there's, uh, there's a couple, I'm just going to put a caveat in, in, in what we're about to say. The industry will tell you

the big three targets are eyes, throat, and groin. I had a client recently, well, recently meaning the last three years, that as he was putting groceries into his Lexus, he just wasn't paying attention. He felt all of a sudden a. uh caliber you know gun put up against his temple and when he was able to look through his peripheral vision guess which three targets weren't available to him you know the eyes the throat and the groin right our door was in the in the way right three so there's a there's a danger in in giving just you know quick answers the best target is the one you can get. The way he survived that was he saw the top of the foot. The top of this guy's foot was literally underneath, you know, his car door. He dropped, he dropped down, he dropped down and dropped a knee

on top of that. The angle was such that when he dropped down, obviously the gun couldn't follow him around. He knew that from just the way we trained. He broke the guy's foot, grabbed the back of the heel, pulled the guy's leg under the car door, lifted up, snapped the guy's knee. And the guy passed out from that. And as when the police came, now we're talking about 155 pound doctor that had, that had never had violence before, but he understood, you know, the situation, you know, from this, it's an awareness. So what I would suggest people do is you learn, you know, various areas of the human body that, you know, the weak areas of the human body, how we've come at all of this is from studying sports injury. So all the data that you get from

sports injury, and the reason you want to use sports injury data is because the forces used to create a sports injury is a human colliding with a human or the human colliding with the planet. And those are forces that you and I can replicate. And so when you see what, you know, when you see two fully committed athletes, say going after a ball or in a combat sport or something, going after something, and then something goes wrong, meaning somebody misses and hits a part of the human body that just gets wrecked. And you see these two highly trained athletes go from, you know, completely active to one guy is fully immersed in his injury. He's done. The crowd knows as soon as they see the, you know, in soccer, the ankle getting snapped, knee injury in football. In MMA, you see guys getting hit to

the liver and they just, they get dropped. Or you see him getting hit to the side of the neck and it's either a fainting effect or a complete knockout at the beginning. It's because these are vulnerable areas of the human body that can't take force it has nothing to do with how strong the guy is his will or any of those things an injury is some structure or sensory system of the human body being wrecked to the point to where it's regardless of whether the person feels pain or not that structure that sensory system is no longer working for that person. And that is what happens because as soon as you affect an injury on somebody to that level,

that's when their brain is taken out of the equation. And the brain is the most, you know, dangerous thing in a human. An active brain is really what you're fighting against. So, you know, you can look at their areas. There's ankles. There's knees. those involve joint breaks, you know, and you have to understand with joints, it's best to have a prior injury in somebody, meaning a lot of times people show things where you just grab a wrist and you try to turn it. That's, that's a recipe for disaster. You know, people aren't going to be able to do that in real life. Yeah. You can slip out of that easily.

People aren't going to be able to do that in real life. Yeah, you can slip out of that easily. You could say, punch into the solar plexus first, then grab the wrist and affect a wrist break at that point. The arm is very loose because it's dealing with the strike to the solar plexus. So it's just this premise, this understanding that I take an area of the human body. I show it to you. I show you what the effects are when you show it to you, I show it, you know, I show you what the effects are when you strike it. I also, you know, it's twofold, you know, Lewis, you're looking at things from a perspective, oftentimes, especially in military

and law enforcement clients, they don't realize sometimes that there's some extremely vulnerable areas of the human body that when they're affecting an arrest or taking somebody prisoner, that, you know, if they place their body weight on this area, it's a physiology for excessive injury that they just don't want to be able to do. So it's a twofold education that you give people. But basically I would identify, you know, say the eye and I would have you look at the eye from a variety of different sight pictures, the person lying on the ground, the person on all fours, the person standing up from behind because i have no idea how violence is going to affect you i don't know you know any of these i just know that it's random and so it's

my job to give you as many different profiles uh available to you so that no regardless the situation you find yourself in the angle you find yourself in you can find a vulnerable area of the human body and throw your body weight through it. Wow. I like that. So you're putting the victim, let's say, in all these different positions and then having them go through exercises on how to defend and attack back. Yeah. Well, the main focus is just like in the industry, it's very funny.

People are very much into pressure testing people before they have any skill sets so you know i i put it to the idea of if you're going out to learn firearms training every time i was taught anything that had real lethal application firearms and explosives the instruction that i got was calm direct clear and they made sure that I could statically do everything before I ever attempted anything dynamically. So there's always a crawl, walk, run approach to everything. So what I try to tell people is the first thing I'm going to do with you is I'm going to show you where on the human body you get the best results.

you is I'm going to show you where on the human body you get the best results. And then I'm going to show you how to take, you know, the tools of your body and use them to, you know, strike and get your targeting down first, you know, zone it in just like you get on the range. You'd learn after you get your safety brief on how to use the weapon. You know, you sit there and you squeeze off around with the instructor and you see where it goes and you get feedback and you know, you sit there and you squeeze off around with the instructor and you see where it goes and you get feedback and you go, hey, is my targeting on first? And until you're shooting those small enough groups, the instructor would never then either have the target start to move or have you start to move and shoot. That's the next stage, you know, is you slowly start to either go after a moving target or

you slowly start to move yourself and shoot. And you don't move on until, again, your groups are nice and tight. Then you can start doing some of the dynamic pressure testing and maybe even force on force. The way most people learn combat sports or martial arts or self-defense is akin to me taking you to my range, giving you the gun and go, OK, you know, go hit the target. And just about as you're, you're going to hit the target. I got three guys shooting at you right away. And everybody's like, yeah, pressure test, pressure test. It's like, no idiot. This is stupid training. It's, it's, we, we, it's the only thing that we approach is like this when

it comes to, um, you know know hand-to-hand combat or any of these other things it's where we throw out all of the other proven skill sets on how to learn correctly and get and lock in correct material um because we have this this fascination with you know just basically static striking and and stressing each other out and you know not learning anything interesting now tim what made you so passionate about all this in the first place um my whole life was you know i was on i was on track to be i you know i my grandfather um when i was very young was a an avid boxer he was out of boston and and uh you know i was introduced to that very early and i was always interested in combat sports throughout got multiple black belts before i went into the navy i got accepted as an officer to go through seal training and i flew through it i was just there

i grew up i was a navy brat grew up literally in coronado across the street from the seal command learned everything from 13 on on how to prepare for training. So it was my... So before class, you were like already an all-star. Oh, I had everything down. The guys showed me where to hide food. I knew I was taking cold showers from the time I was 13 on. I was inoculous.

I knew how to be cold, wet, and sandy. I knew how to do all the obstacles. I had all of that stuff down. So you couldn't be bigger, faster and stronger than me. I had it all down. Two weeks before training, I did what was supposed to be a very routine dive. And I a pressure wave came through from an explosion that went way, way, way. It was I don't want to make it sound like it was some huge explosion next to me. It was just a kind of a pressure wave bubble that came through, and it was a rough day anyways. And I was underneath doing breath hold diving at the time with our rigs and blew my ears. And I went into vertigo at that point. My eardrum ruptured. It felt like seawater literally went into the middle of my brain. And all of a sudden, I lost all sensation of balance. The only thing that saved my life was

the, uh, toe line, the anchor line of the IBS inflatable boat that was there was I grabbed onto it. And as I was pulling myself up, I was pulling myself up, but my sensation was that I was going down to the left 45 degrees. I felt I was going down. They said when my head hit the water that my head was slapping uncontrollably and I had no control over my balance at that point. And that ended my career before it even started. I was going, I was the number one guy and I was going to that time the hottest SEAL team. I had everything pre-planned, I was on my way. At that time it was called SEAL Team Six.

That was my big goal to get there. I was already, it was already in my head that I was there. Cause I was doing everything. And this injury turned my life upside down. They kept me in the community, but I couldn't be a SEAL. So they had me be a special operations intelligence officer. I went to the head SEAL command work for the admiral at the time, who was Admiral LeMoyne, who was redoing the setup of the SEAL commands at that point. I got to work with all these legends of the SEAL team.

The only reason I was there was because they knew they liked me. They knew I was a hard worker and they could give me the slot because there are so few SEALs. They could give me a slot that an active duty SEAL would have had to take and it would have taken an active operator out of the field, which they couldn't afford at that time. So I got to go work at a command I had no business being at and I had a job that I had no business having. It was a very senior job from my very low ensign JG rank at the time. Got around all these SEALs and basically they were looking at redoing hand-to-hand combat. They had me come in because I was young, I was fit. I was basically a good meat puppet for them to knock around and ended up

finding an old Vietnam vet. I actually ended up finding this guy by a DEA friend of mine. And I brought him into the training and he ended up having the beginnings of what became target focused training, this focus on injury to the human body, looking at violence, making sure everything synergistically works with weapons. You know, if you have a knife, if you have a firearm with you, you can synergistically use the same, the same way you train your mind and your body for targeting works even better when you have tools. And so everything just worked together and the arcs and angles on how to go after somebody was just really fascinating from special operations candidate. I became an instructor through this guy. He and I hit it off.

through this guy, he and I hit it off. And then when I left the Navy, we ended up kind of doing the early version of like a Blackwater. We were doing private military contracting through state department in a very different way. We're doing a lot of Fortune 500 companies. We're doing a lot of international corporations, training their security teams for like oil companies

and natural resource companies you know where they'd go into these dangerous areas so it was really fascinating back then and then right after I for a friend I used to get a lot of Wall Street guys calling me and I got a call to do a course September, what was it? Seventh and eighth, seventh, I'm sorry, no, eight and ninth of 2001. And I was in New York. I was, you know, blocks away from the Trade Center and finished the course on a Sunday, finished the course on a Sunday, flew home Monday, woke up Tuesday, and where I had been training was destroyed. And that's when the focus changed from me doing special groups, military, law

enforcement, and groups like that to basically reaching out to civilians. That's when a lot of people, everything changed right after that those guys that attended that class were blown away because on you know that we taped it for them and on there i'm just showing them all the different things you can bring on a plan and go look what you can bring on a plane you bring on box cutters you can bring this you can bring that and they were just blown away and they all encouraged me at that point they said you know you got to stop just doing it for groups like us. You really need to do more general public information. And really, that's kind of where I changed course. And I started focusing. I still do a lot of military law enforcement, but my biggest passion is to bring

this to people that probably would never even look at this subject because the way it's normally presented is so foreign to them. It's such a way that, you know, it's almost like a criminal element presentation. And so they therefore don't want to be a criminal and they don't want to even look at this information. So to me, the challenge and the passion is let me show you something that works in the most extreme circumstances and has been combat tested, proven. Let me show you how this actually, you know, the worst parts of society basically use these same principles to protect themselves and how they use this information against you and how easy it is for you to inoculate yourself against this by just having this information. It does not make you one of them. It does not make you a bad person.

It just gives you information. It's absolutely vital, you know, should the unthinkable come your way. I love this. And this is a fascinating story about how you got into it. So I appreciate you sharing that. I want everyone to make sure to go check out the book, Survive the Unthinkable. It's a total guide to women's self-protection. And of course, men can get it as well.

And I'm sure there's information in there for them being attacked. But you can go to the, uh, the workshops. If you check out timlarkin.com or if you go to targetfocustraining.com, I'll have it all linked up in the show notes at the end. Uh, Tim, I want to ask you two final questions and, uh, and then we'll wrap it up. The first one is what are you most grateful for recently? You know, I, it's, it's really funny. I'm really grateful, uh, for, for having my kids right now. And that sounds like a, you know, kind of like you're, you're typical. Yeah, of course you are, but having younger kids at this, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, middle-aged now. And so I am able to look at how they learn. And it's so great. The one thing I keep telling my clients all the time is as we get older, we forget to give ourselves permission to do things poorly as we learn.

And these kids just, you know, I see them, you know, they get up, they never get, you know, they stand up, they wobble for a little bit, they fall over, but they don't get discouraged. They don't self-criticize. You they're not they don't have that capacity yet and they just joyfully kind of learn and i try to put that you know when my clients come to train with me they get so caught up on how they look or how they think they're performing and they just go internal and i just get them results focused and realize that, hey, I'm going to make you effective first. Efficiency comes later. If you want to be efficient, that's OK. We can work on that. But I can make you effective right now without you being necessarily efficient and give yourself this permission. And it just reinforces it me for every day when I when I see it. You know, one of my girls makes a new discovery on how to, you know, stand up or use a toy or do something. It's something that I think, I won't say I lost it, but it was dormant

in me until, you know, the last couple of years of having these little guys around me. Awesome. I appreciate that. Thanks for sharing. And the final question, which is what I ask all my guests is what is your definition of greatness? is what is your definition of greatness? Definition of greatness is probably the people that I associate with the word greatness are people that have followed a passion where they absolutely, it just oozes out of them. They just, they want to share the information, whatever excites them they just they want to share the information whatever excites them is what they want to share and it's such a rare quality and i think so few people have the the ability to really go after what they want and share that and i think you know i think greatness

is squelched by very pedestrian needs i think a lot of times greatness is squelched because we think we have to follow the career path that's going to give us the most money or the most prestige, or we don't want to offend our family, friends. We don't want to be called, you know, crazy or anything. And those people that just buck that, it's just amazing to see just the levels they rise to and how they're just fearless in what they share. And to me, that's what I associate when I think of the word greatness. I appreciate that. Thanks, Tim. And thank you so much for all that you're up to in the world for

creating information and education and training for those that aren't looking to get attacked and for giving them a place and the right tools to defend themselves if it ever happens. So I appreciate you for creating that information for people and for all the success stories you've had from women and men who've dealt with an attack that they weren't expecting, who were able to get away from it.

It's because of you for creating that training for them. So thank you for all that you're up to. And thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to share this with your clients. It's great. thanks so much guys for sticking around and diving into this episode with tim had a great time and learned some amazing things about what he's up to and how to defend yourself in any situation so make sure to check out his his website we've got it all linked back on our show notes over at lewishouse.com slash 94 you can check out all notes over at lewishouse.com slash 94. You can

check out all the links there, lewishouse.com slash 94. Thanks again, guys, so much for being a part of this podcast. If you haven't yet subscribed, make sure to subscribe over on iTunes, leave us a review. And I appreciate you guys. I'm super pumped for what's to come and all the great guests I have coming up soon. So thank you again. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.