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

"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 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 94 with self-protection specialist, Tim Larkin.

• 0:07Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 0:33Lewis Howes?

  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 salsa from Columbus and 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?

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  So after about three months of this happening, where 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 I was, you know, 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 gotta learn this and I gotta become the best white salsa dancer that I can be, if that's even possible, right? So I, 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.

• 2:01Lewis Howes?

  I was watching you. 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 it 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.

• 2:31Lewis Howes?

  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 outside 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 Times bestselling author of the book called Survive the Unthinkable. He is a self-protection specialist. Tony Robbins wrote the foreword to his book.

• 3:15Lewis Howes?

  And he shares some incredible stories and some incredible. Strategies for how to protect yourself in any situation. So if you are, you know, 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 of 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.

• 3:59Lewis Howes?

  So there's, there's lots of men that are assaulted as well, right? But 1.9 million women are assaulted in the United States every year. So wouldn't it be powerful to have some, 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. And some of his strategies are very different than what you may think you should be doing. So make sure to pay attention to this episode and I'm very excited to dive into this with the one and only Tim Larkin.

• 4:39Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. Super pumped for this one. It's with Tim Larkin. What's up, Tim?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  How you doing, Luke?

• 4:47Lewis Howes?

  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 gotta 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 foreword by Tony Robbins, which is pretty cool. I'm a big fan of Tony. And I thought it'd be cool to talk about, kind of just go off right off the bat with the situation with Ray Rice.

• 5:27Lewis Howes?

  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 where, and if that's a situation that you ever happens for a man or woman, where you're stuck in an elevator and someone is attacking you, what's, 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?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's a couple of 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 we're talking, what you're asking is what happens at the point of violence? What can I possibly do?

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  You know, and quite honestly, in, in, you know, other than competition, other than, you know, 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. 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. That's just a, you know, 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 a universality in humans that we can look to?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Um, 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. Um, that if you put enough force into those areas, you can get a huge result regardless of the person's size, speed or strength. Um, you know, my, my whole, 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.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  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. Um, rather than trying to put injury into you. And, and it happens all the time. I mean, you know, like, like you'd say, you know, smaller, weaker woman, you know, if you're around little children, you know, I have twin girls that are, uh, 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, hurt you. They're much smaller, much weaker than us.

• 8:22Lewis Howes?

  And you can't do anything about it. You're like in pain.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, I had a friend, I had a very good friend that got, uh, you know, slapped in the groin. Um, it, 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 cock. You know, and that's a little girl who didn't mean to hurt him, obviously. So that, 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. Um, that, that allows us to, uh, overcome some of these.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Um, these, these obvious weaknesses that we have in our bodies and, and use, you know, our, our knowledge to be able to protect ourselves.

• 9:15Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. It, you know, it sounds like the classic story of David and Goliath where he just found a weak 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, uh, recover quickly to when we hit those weak spots. Now, a lot of people do these, you know, self-defense or maybe they're like doing mixed martial arts or different styles of mixed martial arts that are supposed to be supporting, uh, their defense and, and, and setting them up to win in self-defense, uh, techniques or in situations, I should say. But it seems like a lot of these, and I, I don't know the names of all of them. So I'm not going to try to

• 9:58Lewis Howes?

  butcher them and, and act like I know what, which one does and which one, what, what they don't do. But it seems like a lot of them try to work with moving with the body and like having the person, you know, having, having them go around you as opposed to blocking it, but using their momentum, uh, in defending yourself. But really, uh, that doesn't seem like a very practical to me because again, if someone's bigger than you or stronger than they just grab you, uh, it seems like it's going to be hard to get out of that.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the, the, what you have to do is, um, you, you, you've got to pull back. I tell people all the time, the worst way to ever evaluate whether a, 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.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Parameters, you know, because they're going to make things look good. They're going to make the scenarios favorable.

• 10:46Lewis Howes?

  The person.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Have to do is just tasteful as it is. And you gave the great example, the beginning of the, 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. We, um,

• 11:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, this isn't the UFC. This is not, you know, there's no referees. This is real life and someone just comes up to you when you're not expecting it and attacks you.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and here's a challenge in my industry. My industry is a, you know, 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. 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, it won't help you. And then, of course, the MMA guys, their big counter is, we'll come in the ring and, you know, see how good your stuff is. Both sides are wrong. Both sides don't get the idea. I mean, some of my best students are former athletes and former, you know, MMA fighters in particular. Because those guys, I already know they have tenacity, they have everything. I just need

• 12:20Speaker 01

  to show them to take what they used to use to submit somebody and then show them out in 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, to the body, you know, the human

• 13:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:14Lewis Howes?

  Wow, interesting.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and so 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.

• 13:43Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the premise is not, you know, you have to understand that we're not talking about a known competition, meaning if that woman was facing a highly skilled MMA fighter, you know, we had a situation out here, there was an MMA fighter out here who just, just, you know, in other domestic violence, just beat his girlfriend, you know, 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, it's the same thing. If, if you have the knowledge of how to protect yourself, you know, 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, they're, obviously, they don't fear you, they think they can dominate you, they feel

• 14:50Speaker 01

  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, in a complete situation where all things are equal and people are in a ring and everybody knows what's about to go on, the, you know, 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, you know, 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, and you just have to make sure you have a correct definition of injury.

• 15:30Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. 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,

• 15:42Lewis Howes?

  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. Um, 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 injured the man hasn't injured the woman yet, but maybe she's like, he could. So let me do something now before it happens.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the one thing that we, we, we tell all of our female clients about all the bad 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, faster 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. Um, I'll give you an example of like, uh, I had a girl come to one of my classes, uh, a couple of years ago in New York and, uh, or I'm sorry, I was on a cruise actually with a, with a corporate group and they had a father, daughter situation. Most of the girls are getting ready to go to college.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  So the dads kind of brought them to the self-defense presentation I was doing on the ship and a lot of them came, you know, kind of under protest because they wanted to go do something else like son or something. But, you know, this one girl in particular was, was, I, 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 traipses 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, Oh, 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, uh, floor dorm

• 17:36Speaker 01

  room, um, and was living with a roommate and, uh, 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 it's higher up and underneath is a desk. Mm hmm. So I just want you to imagine that. A loft. 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.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  She recognized, now she hadn't had any training since then, 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 a hundred and five pounds. He was easily two thirty five.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  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. Right. 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 on to him, you know, she kind of lost grip of the eye and her forearm. She did, this was not a a conscious effort, but her forearm went across his throat. And as they hit the ground, all of her hundred and five pounds ended up, you know, striking him uh in the throat with that forearm. She got up, she could, she she felt, she felt the injury happen when she hit. And she knew the guy was hurt because the body kinda went a little bit weak and she was able to get up right away and went running down, you know, and, and, you know, screaming down the hall

• 19:51Speaker 01

  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, on the floor. This guy just had a whole, you know, they, they found all the notes and everything.

• 20:16Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Um, but what, what it comes back to, the reason I'm, I'm telling you this, Louis, 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 gonna search for the most, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna only be able to do what you've ever trained and you're only gonna 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. Now, I'm telling you, this was literally a girl that did not want to even go to the class. And, and, you know, her younger, her younger sisters were in there and, you know, and I've got a good relationship with, with all of them since. Unfortunately, nothing else

• 21:01Speaker 01

  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, and the way the information's 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 hand-to-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.

• 21:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's a powerful story. And, uh, I'm, I can't believe the guy died right then. That's, that's crazy. I mean, now.

• 21:45Lewis Howes?

  Man, that's such a great story. I'm just like blown away by the imagery that I just saw of that in my head. 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 like try to like block him or necessarily kick him off. She just went after it. Now, how does someone, you know, I don't think that anyone could do, can like actually be, do that naturally? Because I think the natural instinct is probably to block, I'm assuming, if something comes after you.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, you're absolutely right, Lewis. And what we do is, you know, we show, um,

• 22:37Speaker 01

  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, 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. Um, most of them are, are parts of either Latino or, um, you know, white or black gangs.

• 23:03Lewis Howes?

  So you actually go to the prisons and, and interview them?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I have a lot of friends in the corrections community. They, they hook me up and I'm, I'm, I'm doing this. The current book that I'm working on is looking at, 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 it from an entrepreneurial standpoint, it's as necessary to us as our marketing efforts are, you know? We don't, we don't get, you know, uh, they, they don't necessarily get money.

• 23:41Lewis Howes?

  It's status, recognition.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  But they get power, get that and they 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. 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 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,

• 24:24Speaker 01

  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'd do it. Or, you know what, you could have done it better. Here's what I would have done. Their thing, 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 kind of the key, you know? And when, this is an incredibly powerful way to inoculate yourself from a victim mentality.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  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? With the losing side of violence is trying to block your way out. It tried 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.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Interesting. That's useful. You almost have to look at yourself as the predator. No, just look at yourself, you see, we have to rethink how we look at violence. Right, right, right, right. I'll give you a quick example. A guy kicks a door open and a woman's down in the kitchen washing some dishes, you know, getting ready to close up the night, her infant son's upstairs asleep.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  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 where he gets really frustrated because she's just trying to fight him off. He sees, he sees a butcher's block, he sees the knife, he pulls the kitchen chef's night out, knife out. He stabs her in the, 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.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 27:29Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  As 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 stigma, 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, you know, 50 years ago.

• 28:03Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  We should learn how to use the tool of violence.

• 28:22Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  We should be very familiar with the tool of violence, not be violent.

• 28:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  The, the issue, the issue is this, a lot of information is shown and you know, when you, when you're looking at self-defense, you're looking at a lot of, uh, 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, as repulsive as that is, let's just look at context on that. Okay. So you're sitting at a, you're sitting

• 29:12Speaker 01

  at a bar and somebody comes up and they tell you that's their seat and that's your drink and, and you know, they, you know, they want you to move. They're being super aggressive on you. So you slam them in the, in, 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 going, 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 him up against the car and you dig his eye out. Yeah. Exactly.

• 29:51Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  That's what I try to get across to my clients. There is that unthinkable time, there is that block 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 upfront, 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.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  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, 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 is 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 within seconds, you, you need to understand how this tool works.

• 31:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I think it's definitely important to, 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 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.

• 32:29Lewis Howes?

  Now, can you tell me, you created target focused training, correct?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:33Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, the really, really target focused training has a twofold purpose. You know, if you wanted to, you know, our, my,

• 32:52Speaker 01

  my phrase that I'm really known for is violence is rarely the answer.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  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 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 asocial violence. But what we, what we quickly learn is that, you know, when you live a life where you avoid the avoidable. And, you know, we point out that, hey, you don't have to respond to verbal threats. You don't have to respond to

• 33:38Speaker 01

  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 wanna, you know, just defend their bar stool. They're the first ones that if their wife, you know, gets, you know, grabbed or a slight comment's been made. They wanna go after, you know, that They wanna react. To right the wrong. Yet, you know, those same people, if all of a sudden they're asleep and their door gets kicked open and there's three guys there, all armed with shotguns, all with ski masks, and the fourth guy has duct tape.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Guess what most people are gonna wanna do? They're gonna wanna talk. Hey, who are you? Why are you here? You know? And it's a complete disconnect. That's funny. 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, it's twofold. I wanna make sure that you totally understand how to avoid the avoidable, how to avoid anti and not participate in antisocial aggression. But then, you know, more importantly, a lot, 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.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  If you don't do something, you're, you know, 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 that them from unnecessary fears. Um, it's just, it's just been my lifelong passion. To me, it's, it's, I just think 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.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  And they're, they're helping people out and doing 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 got, 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.

• 36:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Now, this stuff is fascinating to me, the more I'm listening to you. And I'm, I'm sure you've got workshops, uh, and a lot that are around the country, or is it just in Vegas that you do, or you do private stuff?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  We have, I have fifty, I've been doing this for twenty-five years, I have fifty instructors. We travel literally around the world doing, uh, doing seminars.

• 36:32Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, and I'll, and I'll link up your site, targetfocustraining.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, and doing this. But for those that are listening, uh, that maybe haven't had a chance to go yet, or they're gonna 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.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, there, there's, there's, uh, there, there's a couple. I, I'm just gonna put a caveat in, in, in what we're about to say that, you know, um...

• 37:26Speaker 01

  The industry will tell you the big three targets are eyes, throat, and groin. Um, I had a client recently, you know, 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 forty-five 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?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  You know, the eyes, the throat, and the groin.

• 37:56Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Our door was in the, in the way.

• 37:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:04Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  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, 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 a hundred and fifty-five pound doctor.

• 38:39Lewis Howes?

  Huh.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  That had, that had never had violence before, but he understood, you know, the situation, you know, from, from this. It's, 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,

• 39:19Speaker 01

  say going after a ball or any 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, a 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

• 40:02Speaker 01

  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 or that sensory system is no longer working for that person. And, and that is what, 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, most, you know, dangerous thing in a human, an active brain is, is really what you're fighting against. So, you know, you can look at their areas, there's ankles, there's knees, those involve

• 40:47Speaker 01

  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 slip out of that easily. You could, you know, you could say, you know, 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, the strike to the solar plexus. So it's just this premise, this understanding that, you know, I take an area of the human body, I 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

• 41:30Speaker 01

  at things from a perspective, oftentimes especially with 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. Could injure them. Strategy for, for excessive injury that they just don't want to be able to do. So it's a two-fold 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 very, 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.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Uh, available to you so that regardless of 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.

• 42:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow, I like that to putting your, put it so you're putting your, the victim, let's say, in all these different positions and then having them go through, uh, exercise on how to defend and attack back.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the main focus is just like, um, you know, in the industry, uh, 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.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  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 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, and zone it in just like you'd 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 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.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  You know, is you, 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, okay. 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.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  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, you know, hand, 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. Because we have this, this fascination with, you know, just basically static striking and stressing each other out and, you know, not learning anything.

• 45:05Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Interesting. Now, Tim, what made you so passionate about all this in the first place?

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Um, my whole life was, you know, I was on, I was on track to be, you know, I, my grandfather, 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. That all 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.

• 45:46Lewis Howes?

  So before class, you were like already an all-star?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I had everything down. The guys showed me where to hide, hide food. I knew, I knew, I was, you know, I was taking cold showers from the time I was 13 on. So I was, you know, I was. An inoculated. I knew how to be cold, wet and sandy. I knew how to do all the, all the, uh, 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, um, 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, uh, next to me. It was just a kind of a pressure wave bubble that came through and it was a rough day anyways. Um, and I was underneath doing breath hold diving.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  At the time with our rigs and blew my ears. And what 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, I lost all sensation of balance. The only thing that saved my life was the 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 forty-five degrees. I felt I was going, you know, down. They said when my head hit the water, that my, my head was slapping uncontrollably.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  And, and I had no control over my balance at that point. And that ended my career. It before it even started. I was going, I was, I was the number one guy and I was going to the, the, at 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, you know, because I was, I was, you know, 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, worked for the admiral at the time, who was Admiral Lemoine, who was redoing the, the setup of the SEAL commands at that point. I got to work with all these legends of the SEAL team.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  The only reason I was there was because they knew, they liked me, they knew I was, you know, 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 for my very, you know, low ensign JG rank at the time. Got around all these, uh, 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.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  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. Where it was just really fascinating from special operations. Candidate, I became an instructor through this guy, he and I hit it off.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And then when I left the Navy. We ended up kind of doing the early version of like a Blackwater. We were doing, 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, I used to get a lot of Wall Street guys calling me and.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I got a call to do a course September. What was it? Seventh and eighth, seventh, I'm sorry, no, seven, eighth 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, 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.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Those guys that attended that class were blown away because on, you know, we taped it for them. And on there, I'm just showing them all the different things you can bring on a plane and go, look what you can bring on a plane. You can 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 gotta 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

• 51:29Speaker 01

  to even look at this information. So to me, the challenge and the passion is, let me show you something that works in the, in the most extreme circumstances and, 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.

• 52:05Lewis Howes?

  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, the workshops, 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. Tim, I want to ask you two final questions and, and then we'll wrap it up. The first one is, what are you most grateful for recently?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  You know, I, it's, it's really funny. I'm really grateful for, for having my kids right now. And that sounds like a, you know, kind of like your 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, and these kids just, you know, I, I see them, you know, they get up, they never get discerned. You know, they stand up, they wobble for a little bit, they fall over, but they don't get discouraged.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  They don't, they don't self criticize, you know, they're not, they don't have that capacity yet. And they just joyfully kind of learn. And I, 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, 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 okay. 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.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  It, it, 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.

• 54:14Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. 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?

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Definition of greatness is probably the people that I associate with the word greatness are people that have followed a, a passion where they absolutely, it, it just oozes out of 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

• 55:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:30Lewis Howes?

  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, you know, get attacked, and for giving them a place and the right tools to defend themselves by, if it ever happens. So I appreciate you for creating that information for people and for all the stories, 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.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to share this with your clients. It's great.

• 56:26Lewis Howes?

  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 website. We've got it all linked back on our show notes over at lewishouse.com/94. You can check out all the links there, lewishouse.com/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.