Coming Soon

• Book: When Violence IS The Answer

Peter King: You're listening the PK Experience podcast. My name is Peter King, I'm the host of the show and today I sit down with self defense expert, Tim Larkin. Tim is the creator and owner of a program called TFT, which stands for Target Focus Training, which we describe a little bit further in this call but he's also the author of several self defense books, the latest of which is called When Violence is the Answer, and I realize that's a very controversial topic given today's social climate, but I actually think it's the perfect topic and the perfect message for those who do feel marginalized or victimized by potential aggression. Especially women who often think of violence and aggression in a very, very different way than men do.

Peter King: I've shared this on other podcast episodes, but I was at a conference one time when the speaker asked the men, "When did you feel threatened in your life? When have you felt that your life has been threatened? Have you ever felt that?" A good amount of men raised their hands and he said, "All right, well of the men in the room, how man of you felt this way in the last 90 days? In the last 30 days? In the last week?" By the time we got down to the last 30 days, the last week, hardly any guys were raising their hands. Conversely when he asked the women, "How many of you have felt that your life has been threatened?" 100% of the hands went up. "What about with the last five years?" 100% of the hands. "What about the last three years? Last one year? Last 90 days?" Still almost 100% of the hands were still up. "What about in the last 30 day?" I would say over 50% of the women's hands were still up. Women deal with a reality that men just don't and whether that's an actual reality or perceived reality is besides the point.

Peter King: If that is you, if you do feel that you are the potential victim of aggression or violence, or perhaps you already have been, this is the type of information that can literally make or break you in terms of life or death situations. Tim gives a few examples of his clients that have actually dealt with that, so it's really, really important information. I do want to make sure that there's the proper context for this. This is not about glorifying violence. This is about using violence as a last resort. When you are cornered, when somebody's attacking you and you feel that your life is potentially on the line to where you'd actually be justified in using a weapon if you had one. So, Tim teaches you how to use your body and defend yourself in a way that can be weaponized, so again, I do want to emphasize the caution in listening to this content and obviously applying it to proper context.

Peter King: Reiterate this at the end of the call. I don't think that this is good material for young men because young men often are still learning to adapt their aggression and their hormonal changes, unless they're very, very mature, unless they have proper supervision. So, Tim gets into that a little bit more in the call as well but with that, I'm gonna leave you with that. Hopefully we can have some level of maturity and presence of mind when you listen to this content. It's really, really good stuff. Tim is the man to talk to when it comes down to personal self defense. So with that, let's dive into the call. I would love to hear what you think by the way. Any feedback that you have, please let me know on the website PKExperience.com, but here we are with Tim Larkin.

Peter King: I'm very good, I'm here with Tim Larkin. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to share your wisdom today. I'm very, very excited to talk to you. So first and foremost, thanks for joining the call.

Tim Larkin: My pleasure.

Peter King: So for those who don't know who you are, let's give them a quick, brief background about who you are and what you do, and a little bit of your philosophy.

Tim Larkin: Yeah. Basically my story is, I was a SEAL candidate in 1987. I was a couple weeks away from training, from going to SEAL Team Four at the time, and I had one more dive. I had this BS dive we had to do, and I was congested. Didn't feel 100% that day, but I wanted to do the dive because I didn't want to have to make it up on the weekend. So, I forced myself to do it. We're tying haversacks of explosives underneath the water. Now at this point in my life, I had trained really since I was 13 years old to become a SEAL. I knew everything about it. My dad was in the NAVY, we lived literally across the street from a training command. I knew everything there was to know. I had been taking cold showers since I was 13. So bigger, faster, stronger. That was my whole world, was that, and that was it. I was arrogant about it and I was headed to be the number one guy in the class which was called the anchorman, and that allowed you to choose wherever you wanted to go.

Tim Larkin: That's where I was headed towards. It's funny because the last couple years, I haven't had this ability, but if anybody here's watching Narcos on Netflix, the reason I wanted to go to SEAL Team 4 was because they had all the narcotics work. They were doing Operation Snowcap and stuff like that. It was the place to be, so I was really full of it. So I just figured, "Hey, I'm just gonna crank for this dive. I don't need to be completely 100% healthy." Down there tying the explosives on, you got waves on top of water, waves below the water. A wave hits me right in the ear, blows my eardrum. Water goes shooting up into me, and my whole body betrays me. I have no idea which way is up. I go into vertigo and the reason I'm telling this story, is because it really is a crux of what the future brought for me as far as self protection and self defense.

Tim Larkin: I lived in a world of bigger, faster, stronger. I lived in a world of combat sports, martial arts, and also obviously going into SEAL Teams. You know, tough, tough, tough and all that stuff. It was the first time I had ever experienced a true injury, meaning I'd been cut, I'd been hit, bruised, cracked ribs, stuff like that but I could gut through all of that. This was something that my body, it didn't matter what I wanted to do, I had no control over it. It was true injury to the human body, and it shook my whole world. Not only did it immediately end my career before it even started as a SEAL Team member, but it also just showed me that relying on physical strength alone, you have to respect the fact that if you look at our bodies, we're all built the same. We have different sizes, but we still have all of these areas of the human body that are susceptible to injury. It was the nexus of it.

Tim Larkin: They kept me in the career. They kept me in the SEAL Teams. At the time I wasn't a SEAL, but they made me a Naval Special Warfare Intelligence Officer. I worked directly for the [inaudible 00:06:59] control of all the SEAL Teams. It was a super senior position. I had no business being there, but we were in expansion phase. They needed bodies, and I was broken because I couldn't dive, but they knew I knew the community so they kept me in. So, I got to work, when we were talking about the Narcos thing, I actually got to work on one of those projects from the intelligence side and Special Warfare. It was really, really interesting but the thing that's seminal to me was we, at that time, the wall was coming down. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Our whole mission in the military was changing from focusing on the Soviets to now.

Tim Larkin: We had guys, they actually predicted what's been going on. They predicted Bosnia, Herzegovina, they predicted what was going on in Africa with the Hutus and Tutsis. They understood that once the Soviets dissipated from there, that everybody's going to go back to tribalism, fighting, and they realized the way the US military, especially Special Operations, they really hadn't planned for a lot of door to door house kicking on the level that you see now. Now basic troops, marines, army are trained in stuff that really only Special Operations guys were trained in in the 80s. One of the things I looked at was hand to hand combat, and [inaudible 00:08:15]. I lived in a community with literally the legends of the SEAL Teams. The admiral brought in the best of the best to start revamping SEAL Teams because we also, in addition to everything changing, the military came together under the Special Operations Command. So, all of a sudden this command came together where we had to integrate all the other groups.

Tim Larkin: It was universal through there that everybody was looking at the idea of, oh, we've got to start putting hands on people again. Now, the conditions they were looking for, they brought me in. Here I am, this kid with no experience whatsoever, they liked me. They liked the work I did for intelligence and the work I put in, but no combat experience. I'd never been to a Team, never did anything. I mean, I felt if your listeners can understand, I felt going from the highest point that you could be as a kid, where you got to select the SEAL team that you wanted to get, that's how good you did training, to literally a pariah. It was a real hard thing for me, mentally, to overcome at that time because I felt a lot of guys who didn't deserve it, they just had better ears than me, were able to go on and train. So, what was interesting then is things worked out differently. That's the other things that a lot of listeners have to understand.

Tim Larkin: It's funny to look back that the best thing that ever could have happened to me was that injury, because it opened up the world that I never would have been exposed to. I mean, I get to work at the highest levels of all Special Operations Commands, and I got involved in things I had never did. One of the things I got involved in was they put [inaudible 00:09:50] together to start looking at hand to hand combat again. They liked me because I had a martial arts background. Being a Navy kid, I was always taking martial arts everywhere I went, and they liked me. I was kind of like a convenient meat puppet for these guys to knock around. Here I am, dealing with these guys who in Vietnam are just doing these amazing missions, and everything in between. All the black ops, and so I learned a tremendous amount from these guys but they started flying in martial artists and combat sport people from all over the world, and we trained with some amazing guys back then.

Tim Larkin: The thing we were looking for, we were looking for something that worked synergistically with weapons, and the equipment that we carried, and all of what an operator is dealing with. We put conditions in that the operator that we're talking about has been in country at least 60 days. Sleep patterns are taken off, your regular conditioning is all off, you're slightly dehydrated for sure, if not you've been mildly dehydrated, and so the only thing that you could really rely on is your body weight. We saw, like I said, these amazing athletes and these amazing martial artists but none of them could really integrate with weapons. So, I get a call in the middle of this.

Tim Larkin: We're probably about six months into looking at all these different martial arts and training, and it was amazing. It was awesome to train with these guys and to train with the SEALS that I got to train with, just to do all these various martial arts. We looked at everything, Filipino martial arts, we looked at the Korean martial arts. [inaudible 00:11:31] jiu-jitsu had just started coming around, so were kind of looking at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but didn't really take off. Wouldn't really take off for another couple years. It was great, but I get a call out of the blue one day from a buddy and my DEA. One of the things that was great about the command I was at, is I got to work with everybody. So, I had a buddy who was a DEA agent, and he was a really funny kid, and he calls me up. They thought it was ridiculous back then. It was hard for everybody to understand that now with the UFC and everything being so prevalent, you would think hand to hand combat would be a big thing, and it wasn't.

Tim Larkin: It was actually derided. It was looked at as if you had to get down to hand to hand combat, then you've made a horrible mistake, and that you screwed up. What we were able to do, is this guy calls me up and says, "Hey listen, you guys still doing that punchy kicky stuff?" I go, "Yeah." I called him a name and said, "Yeah, we are." He goes, "Well, listen." He goes, "We actually did some training with these guy out in the Pacific Beach." Now, you have to understand. We're flying people in from all over the world to train, and this guy is telling me I should check out a guy who's literally four blocks away from where my apartment is in San Diego. He goes, "Hey, trust me." He goes, "Just go check it out." So I walk by the little studio where this guy was. It was in a [inaudible 00:13:00] up one of the main streets in Pacific Beach, right next to really nasty pub and all this.

Tim Larkin: I looked in and it was a 900 square foot studio, torn up carpet, no pads or anything like that and there's nothing impressive about it. I was gonna dismiss it but then he had a tri fold taped up against his door and I happened to read the tri fold and it mentioned his combat service in Vietnam. He was in a division called the 173rd Charlie Company and the 173rd was left way out in the jungle for an extended period of time. These were the guys who were doing the tunnel rats and all that other stuff that you hear about Vietnam back then. This guy was part of that and so that's the only thing that got me to go back to one of his classes, which was the next day. So the next evening I go into an early evening class there. I walk in and all I can say is it looked like a slow motion prison riot. These guys were just sitting there. They were striking real parts of the human body. One kid I remember, he came in, he hit a [inaudible 00:14:10] the back of his neck.

Tim Larkin: Out of nowhere comes a rubber knife and he just starts using the knife. The kid's not reliant on the tool, he's literally systematically going through the human body. I looked at it and it just hearkened back to me that it looked like real violence. It looked like things I had seen out in the street. I wouldn't say I was necessarily a brawler, but I'd seen a lot coming up. My brother was a bouncer at one of the worst bars in San Diego. All my uncles in Hell's Angels. I'd seen real fights, knifings, I'd seen all that. This was the only training I ever saw that looked like a direct correlation and what I learned was, these guys were working on how to injure the human body. So, if I could tell everybody probably one of the biggest systemic changes you can start to make for your own self protection is if you just flip the switch.

Tim Larkin: Instead of looking at another human and noticing all the differences, which is something we all do, if we see a guy who's really big, intimidating looking, probably has tats, has that look, you start making all the assumptions. We notice, "Oh my gosh, this guy is so much bigger than me. This guy is this, this, and this." If you learn to switch it to, "Oh, he has a throat like me. There are his knees. Here's all the same vulnerabilities that no matter what the package looks like, all of these vulnerable areas exist." This is something that evolved over many years in my training. I trained in the military for a long time with this guy. I trained as a private contractor all through the 90s, and I started training corporate executives right before and then highly after 9/11. 9/11 changed everything to where I went not just military and law enforcement, but then I went first corporate executives that were internationally traveling places, a lot of oil companies, a lot of people that are putting pipelines in and things like that. People that were negotiating kidnappings and things like that.

Tim Larkin: We trained tons of those types, and then of course those people wanted their people, their loved ones trained, and that's how we made a switch to start training more civilians. What I learned was that if you can train somebody to understand how to use justified lethal force, and that's a very politically correct way of saying being able to break the human body until the person is no longer a threat, when justified, meaning the challenge is you can show a lot of really aggressive stuff, but if it's not backed up with a good decision making aspect, it's just a quick trip to prison for you. The challenge is is okay, how can I take this stuff that was really designed for the military, it's really only designed for imminent, grievous bodily harm. I tell people what I train is the equivalent of if you're facing this threat and you had a firearm available to you, you would feel justified emptying the firearm into the threat.

Tim Larkin: That's the same threshold that you would ever want to use violence on somebody else, and this all evolved from an accident that I had that I thought ended my life, to giving me a whole new way of looking at the idea of bigger, faster, stronger, and the fallacies of bigger, faster, and stronger. The fact that this is an individual self right. We all have the ability to protect ourselves. We don't all have the ability to compete in a combat sport, martial art, but we all can use violence to protect ourselves because it's a very different equation that you're training for.

Peter King: You said that so perfectly, and I want to just reiterate that because I think a lot of listeners feel outside their comfort zone when it comes to violence. Obviously, the title of your new book being When Violence is the Answer, actually this probably says it best. I was looking at some of the reviews of the book on Amazon, and this one reviewer started his five star review with saying, "I hate violence." He says, "I do not like violence, but when 9/11 happened I knew I did not want to be a passenger on one of the three planes that were flown into public buildings with great loss of life. I wanted to be one of the passengers on flight 93 who fought back. They lost their lives, but did not allow the airplane be used to massacre thousands more innocent lives." Then he goes on to say, "So, knowing that karate black belts are awesome fighters, thank you Chuck Norris, I started working on black belt. As it came up to my black belt exam, I still realized that I didn't have any idea how to take down a terrorist or a threat."

Peter King: I do want to just caveat that to say that people that were killed in those first two planes obviously didn't know they needed to fight back, but that to me is the threshold that you're talking about. This isn't the bar fight, or trying to puff your chest and take somebody out and use violence in that manner. It really is in a life threatening situation. I just wanted to reiterate that because I think some people do get lost the fact of glorifying violence or something like that, and that just isn't the case.

Tim Larkin: Yeah. Well, that's why I love the subject, because it's a huge challenge. I mean, I took a huge hit promotion wise using violence in my title. I mean I got kicked off of Google, Facebook. It just had become with the current election, the current administration that we have and the back and forth between both sides, there's an over reaction now on anything right now on social media. Literally, I got a letter back saying, "Well, this will just make somebody feel bad." An email I went to send out that said, "The victim turned attacker," was the title, it got shut down by the ISP, people that actually let you send the email out because, "Oh, no, no, no. You can't do anything like that, it looks like you're promoting violence." I understand there's a lot of people that are of the opinion that if you look at a subject or you study a subject, somehow you're gonna bring it upon you. There's that whole karmic thing that people talk about all the time.

Tim Larkin: I understand what they're saying by that but I then would ask them. I said, "Well, do you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen?" Because most houses in the United States, you have to, by code, have a fire extinguisher. He goes, "Oh yeah, I have it with me." "Do you know how to use it?" "Yeah, yeah, I know how to use it." I go, "Oh, okay. So you want fire to come into your life?" They go, "Well, no." I go, "Exactly." I said, "Now you have the peace of mind to know if a fire ever starts, you've already thought about it. You already understand what equipment you're gonna use and you know how to deal with it. Same thing." The biggest fear that any human has is to be dominated by one or more other humans to do things against their will, or to be physically assaulted, threatened their family or anything like this. It's a huge fear.

Tim Larkin: It's this 800 pound gorilla, bu we have been told by society that if we study the tool of violence, somehow it makes us violence or it makes us criminal. It kind of started in the late 50s, this thought process got really bad in the last 15 years to where you have situations now where it's never okay. They say it's never okay. People literally hesitate to take action to protect their own lives because they're worried about legal consequences, which quite frankly in the United States, you're pretty safe under the parameters of what we're talking about. Meaning, you're devoid of choice. Meaning, if you had the ability to run you would have run. If you had the ability to talk your way out of it, you would have done that. If you don't take action in facing grievous bodily harm, then you're almost participating in your own murder at that point because it's coming regardless of what you'd like to happen.

Tim Larkin: Training for that level. When I look at a client, my goal is they ask me, "Okay, what's the parameters to your training?" Here's the parameters of the training. What do we assume when I'm training a client? I assume that the threat they're gonna face is gonna number one, have multiple attackers. Those attackers are gonna be bigger, faster, and stronger, and those attackers are gonna carry weapons. That's your baseline because when you look at a combat sport or martial art, and people misunderstand this all the time, they think somehow by me pointing this out about combat sports and martial arts, I'm somehow denigrating combat sports or martial arts. Not at all. Combat sports and martial arts are amazing. The athletes are amazing. I live in Vegas. I go to the UFC all the time. I have a lot of friends that are in the UFC. I have friends that are in the UFC organization. There's no bigger combat sport fan than me, but what makes combat sports work? What makes a martial art or a combat sport competition work?

Tim Larkin: Well number one, you have to outlaw injury to the human body. The last time that I looked at the UFC, it had 31 rules. 27 of those rules outlaw direct injury to the human body and the reason being is it's the only way you can game-ify violence, because what you want when you put a contest together, is you want to pit skill against skill. That's why they have weight classes. That's why they have a defined area. That's why they agree upon the rules, and they then have somebody within the ring to enforce those rules. None of that's gonna be available to you out there, and it takes away a lot of the edge that a combat sport practitioner would have, because of course they're going against a threat that they know. They absolutely agree to what's going to be going on. They get prior training. Prior to that, they have time to train for that, prepare. They've got their teams. They get to eat what they want, they get to train the way they want, sleep the way they want. All those things are in there.

Peter King: They know when they're gonna fight.

Tim Larkin: Yeah, yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's amazing. I try to tell people, if anybody saw the UFC with Conor McGregor and the Kazakhstan fighter. I always screw his name up [crosstalk 00:24:41].

Peter King: Khabib?

Tim Larkin: Yeah, Khabib. Look at the two fighters, how amazing both of those guys were and he absolutely dominated Conor on that one. It went back and forth, but those are two top competitors. Watch the video again. When everybody pours into the ring, they're no more relevant than anybody else there. As a matter of fact, Conor got hit from behind. He was [crosstalk 00:25:08] in there. That's not denigrating [crosstalk 00:25:12] though that violence provides you opportunities, and I have many videos of professional fighters, well trained MMA people, in a real world environment with all the outliers, all the things we've been talking about. Multiple attackers, weapons, bigger, faster, stronger people coming in from all sides and what you end up seeing often times is you see people who are physically unimpressive able to take on a highly trained combat athlete who had stayed focused on the one threat in front of him, like he always trains, and he doesn't really understand situational awareness on that.

Tim Larkin: Now, it doesn't mean he's a bad person, but I also put it out to people this way. If I have a seminar, I'll have about 50-60 people in the seminar and I'll say, "Okay, if I brought in this amazing block of Italian marble, it's eight feet tall, and I told everybody and I brought out professional chiseling sets and [inaudible 00:26:15], everything that you needed to be a sculptor," and I told everybody, "nobody leaves for lunch today until you guys create Michelangelo's David for me perfectly." There'd be nobody that could probably even get even close to starting at that point. To find that person that could do that, you'd have to go to a huge group of the population. Either they have to be highly, highly skilled, have a great eye, have all the artistic abilities.

Tim Larkin: That I equate to a combat sport athlete. The people that we get to see that compete are at that level. They've gone through those thousands of people that train to get that elite status to where you see the best of the best. Very few are ever gonna reach that level, but if I came into that same group of 60 people, and I brought in a bunch of sledgehammers and I said, "Hey, nobody gets to have lunch today until this seven pound block of marble is a pile of rubble," believe me, they'd get the job done. Anybody could do it. As long as they can swing a hammer, they're gonna start reducing that to rubble. That's the skillset of destruction. It's accessible to everybody, it's not elegant, and it works amazingly well.

Peter King: Well, there's a baseline primal psychology of survival that comes out regardless whether you have any training or not. If somebody's trying to choke you, there's gonna be something in you. Your body is gonna eventually take over. Fight or flight is gonna kick in, but to apply the intentionality of what you teach gives somebody a literal fighting chance against a threat that potentially is much bigger, or stronger, or has a weapon or something like that.

Tim Larkin: Yeah, what people [inaudible 00:28:01] think about is when we train people for these events, if we put whoever threat, whatever threat you're thinking about, whatever individual you're thinking about, if we put the both of you in a ring and one guy is far more aggressive and far more willing to use violence or far more willing to train in that type of situation where everybody knows what's going on, we probably know how that would end up. There's a really good chance that you're gonna get taken out at that point. That's not what I train people before because when you look at the incidences and the people that have survived and have been able to fight back, what happens is the predator doesn't see them as a threat. Therefore, the predator will bring a body part, a vulnerable body part of theirs, into your range at that point. I just teach people how to exploit that because once you injure them in these areas, again, what happened to me when I was below the water, I couldn't get my body to do anything.

Tim Larkin: The only way I got up was I hit a tow rope of one of the IBSs above us, one of the inflatable boats that were above us, and I grabbed that and I pulled myself up. I thought I was pulling myself 45 degrees down towards the bottom. They said when my head hit, my head was flopping uncontrollably, bleeding out of my ear. They pulled me on, and that was the end of me as far as diving, but what I'm trying to tell you is that's what happens to injury of the human body. Watch, especially if people want to see the systemic change in injuring the human body, is watch sports injury. that's where we get a lot of good data. All the data that I use for injury to the human body comes from sports medicine [inaudible 00:29:42]. The reason we look at sports medicine is because it's humans colliding with humans, humans colliding with the planet.

Tim Larkin: What you'll see, and people say, "Yeah, but these are big, strong athletes." I go, "Exactly." So, here's somebody who's conditioned themselves at this amazing level, and you see them and all they care about, if it's a football player and he's carrying a running back, all he cares about is blasting through that line. He's completely focused on that. I just got a video of a kid from Dallas, from the Cowboys, and he's going through and he's barrelling through and gets his ankle broke. When you see the systemic change in his being, when you see the ankle break, all of a sudden the structure of his body doesn't work anymore. He goes down. He drops the ball. He's completely focused on one thing and one thing only. Even though his competitive streak is so strong, if he could have gutted his way out of it, he would have if anything, but he couldn't. His body betrayed his brain. The trauma was too great, and his body goes into an automatic reaction to deal with the trauma that is too much for the body. That's what we teach you to do.

Tim Larkin: When you do this to people, successfully injure them, they do all the work meaning they react to the strike. You just have to go to one vulnerable area, put everything you have into it, but then their body, say they weight 280 pounds, all of a sudden all 280 pounds is being mobilized to go away from that trauma and get it in there. So, you look superhuman when you injure people. I mean, a much smaller person. This was the other controversy that I have. I've done a lot of studying of the prison system and prison gangs, and especially how they use violence as currency to run their prisons. The way they look at it, they're very accomplished. I have seen footage of a 5'5", 5'6" Latino Sureno gang member jump up and take out a 6'6 Aryan brother. Just vicious the way it went down, but the full confidence.

Tim Larkin: When you see this guy jump up and going, he is fully focused on where he's going. He has got all maybe 160 pounds in motion up against a guy who had to weigh about 260, and not fat, just went right up, caught him unawares, and went right into him right away with an improvised shank and took him out, because he understood where on the human body to go. He didn't see bigger, faster, stronger. He saw opportunity, and was completely directing focus. Now, studying the prisons and studying prison gangs, people often say, "Oh, well you're promoting them, or you're glorifying them." No. There's good information. Probably the best information on how to use the tool of violence comes from the worst parts of society. Why? Because they have to survive that way.

Peter King: There's no rules.

Tim Larkin: There's no rules, and there's no authority. In the prisons you'd think, "Oh, you can go to prison police." No way, especially these big, federal pens that are run. I was just at Kern State, and I was going to a program there at Kern State. One of the super maxes. It's one of the birthplaces of the Mexican Mafia. It was amazing for these guys to show me just what they got in the last week. What kind of [inaudible 00:33:06] improvised weapons, and how they look at it, but these guys are very specific with violence. They look at the human anatomy in order to study human anatomy to know where to get the quickest results, because if they have to use violence, they can't fail. If the Aryan Brotherhood gets contracted to do, say, a murder for maybe a mafia group outside or something like that, their currency, their ability to run drugs and do all this stuff, is from the successful use of the tool of violence.

Tim Larkin: They had some situations where they attacked a guy, it was ineffective. This guy was able to survive the attack by the time the corrections officers got there, and they got him off into solitary and they'll never have another shot at this guy. So, after that, they got very strict about coming down and saying, "You will study anatomy. Here's what you're gonna look at. Killing is our cache, and you have to be really good at it." What we can learn from it? We can learn where you get the best results, just objectively. There's not questioning this. It's parts of the human body. When I can bring that, and then I can apply the filter that you and I just talked about, when would it ever be appropriate for us to do something like that? People will say and think, "Well, why would I ever have to take somebody's eye out? Why would I ever have to learn something like that? When would it be crazy?"

Tim Larkin: I'll give them this test. I said, "Well, you've just got to test the threshold," and the threshold I always tell people is, "Okay, so I was at the Wal-Mart, waiting patiently for this guy to pull out so I can get the parking space. This other guy zooms in, steals my parking space. I'm just enraged. I get out of the car, I run over to him. He gets out of his car and starts yelling to me. I knock him up against the car, grab the back of his head, and I gouged his eye out, your honor." Then I'll say, "Okay, you're at the mall. A guy comes by and he's talking to your wife, and he just tells her she was a fat cow. So, she knees him in the groin, throws him down on the ground and she gouges his eye out, your honor."

Tim Larkin: Then I say, "I was at my kid's school. The shooter came through when I was picking up the kids. He got his first magazine off. I saw him drop down to do a reload. I knew there was nothing we could do. I ran him down, knocked him to the ground, and I gouged his eye out." So all of a sudden people sit there and go, "Oh, okay. I get it." The first two were absolutely outrageous. You sit there and you go, "Way overreaction. Quick way to get yourself in legal trouble." The third one meets the threshold and all of a sudden it doesn't seem so crazy. All of a sudden with that particular description people are saying, "Oh, okay. Wait a minute. Exactly how do I do that? Where do I put my thumb? What do I do?" You have to make sure you explain this in the right things. I see people in my world, which drives me crazy. I hate it when people call it reality self defense because I don't think there's really anybody teaching reality in reality self defense.

Tim Larkin: I will see scenario after scenario. So here I am, sitting at the bar, and this guy comes up behind me. They're literally setting up scenarios that are gonna get you to prison, or get you in legal trouble. That's not the time. You have to really train clients to understand everything is avoidable and in that narrow window when you'd ever have to use the tool of violence. What's great about that is I can't tell you, Peter, how many behavioral changes have happened to people when they come through the training. I had a guy who was just a huge dude from Houston. Just a big, literally Texas rancher, royal family. A nice guy, meaning a very personable guy. He comes through the first day of training and the next morning he makes sure he's there as I'm coming in. He goes, "Hey, can I just tell you something?" "I mean, yeah." I didn't know what he was going to say to me. He goes, "I just want to let you know, I've got to thank you. I called my wife last night and I told her 'honey, you no longer have to worry about me.'"

Tim Larkin: Because he was a guy that he'd go out to honky tonks and stuff like that, and he wouldn't go looking for a fight, but at the slightest provocation he'd get into one right away. He said, "I realize I've been risking my life nonstop for the last 10 years willingly participating in things like that. I'm so damn lucky that I didn't run into somebody that actually knew how to use the tool of violence, and I'm so damn lucky that inadvertently I didn't injure somebody or kill them because of something stupid." What's interesting is, is when somebody's really well trained at that level of justified lethal force, with the conditions that we're talking about, your reaction to things that normally would cause you to maybe get angry or respond in kind, maybe up the ante a little bit on the antisocial aggression, people just start dismissing.

Tim Larkin: Some of the best responses I get from people is behavioral changes that they've done because they realize, "I don't even want to put myself in a position where this could be something," because what people don't understand is once you cross the physical plane on somebody, once you actually put your hands on somebody and do an injury, you have no control over what that outcome is gonna be. Meaning, I look at a guy who looks like Schwarzenegger in his prime. He's being a real jerk. I'm sitting there going, "Okay, well I can show all these different areas of the human body and go after [inaudible 00:39:05]. I just want to shut this guy up. What could I do? Oh I know. I'll strike him in the solar plexus." Anybody that's been hit in the middle of the torso, here in the solar plexus, little group of nerves that seizes up your lungs, makes it really hard for you to breathe. You're a kid, you got hit in the stomach or you fell as a little kid. I used to see little kids running around the yard, "I can't breathe, I can't breathe!"

Tim Larkin: You're thinking, "Exhale," but it's really hard to inhale. We've probably all experienced that. So, this guy think, "Hey, I'll just slam him in the solar plexus and that'll shut him up." So, he slams him in the solar plexus. Everybody at the bar is happy because the loudmouth just got shut up. This guy's looking like the hero and then he looks over at the guy, and all of a sudden the guy's turning purple and he's clutching his chest because what he didn't know is he has a genetically bad heart, and he's just caused an arrhythmia, and this guy's gonna die. So now, he's facing manslaughter at best in a situation like that. Over what? What I always try to tell people is, I say, "You have to start living your life through the three day filter, the three day test that I call it." That means if three days from now you find yourself sitting in a jail cell, awaiting the sentencing or awaiting your trial, or your family has put you six feet under and you're no longer with us, would you look at either one of those situations over the incident and tell yourself, "Yep, I was devoid of choice. I had to do what I had to do."

Tim Larkin: Very few incidents reach that threshold, and it's tough, but it's amazing when I see people when they really understood how to use the tool of violence. I think the thing that is so hard for people to understand is not that it's scary to learn it. I think they're scared that they're already pretty damn good at it. Once it's pointed out that we as humans, because we are the alpha predators, we are the number one, it's not because we're bigger, faster, and stronger. If we had to be bigger, faster, and stronger we wouldn't be here and I tell people all the time. I used to joke. I'd say, "Hey, who wants to jump in a cage with a 45 pound mountain lion that hasn't eaten in three days? Any volunteers?" Of course nobody wants to do it, and that's a much smaller animal. It's only 45 pounds, but an animal has reflexes and abilities that we just don't have. What makes us dangerous is we are built like predators, we have hands, we can create tools, we work in packs, and we're really very good at that. So, we overcome that.

Tim Larkin: The same way we should look at anything of dealing anybody, any sort of physical threat, we should train in the same way that we use any sort of a tool. A weapon, a club, or a knife. Basically, I'd like every body tool that you have to become a slow moving bullet through you to get to effect an injury in the area that you're going for. Whereas if a bullet ripped into that area, yeah, the trauma would be much higher, a much higher spike for the most part, but you can still get the same reaction that we're talking about. If I get hit in the solar plexus versus shot in the solar plexus, one's just gonna have a hell of a lot more trauma, but for me, it's the same reaction. The brain is out of the equation. I have the ability to put another injury on him and do that. What's cool is, it's not gender specific. The one thing that drives me crazy is women are treated almost like second class citizens a lot of times when you teach self protection or self defense.

Tim Larkin: "Oh honey, you can really handle this stuff so we're gonna teach you this, this, and this," which is crazy. Women have far more of a chance to experience real violence than men for the most part. Sexual assault at a ever higher level, and women are highly capable when they don't have to compete with bigger, faster, stronger. Women are very good at learning technique and getting right into it right away. So, we train women the exact same way we train men.

Peter King: I was gonna say your methodologies, and your philosophy, and ultimately the outcome is really put into context when you see a class full of 110 pound women learning this, especially those who have dealt with being violated or scary situations, got caught in a back alley, or walking out to a car and nobody else was around. All of a sudden there's a shadowy figure. When you put it into that context, for those that have an emotional, negative reaction to violence, think of that context. All of a sudden it shifts into a, "Oh no, we want violence. I want that." I have a 100 pound daughter. I want her to understand, and I've actually taught her some of the stuff that you taught me, for those specific situations, and you just don't know.

Peter King: That to me, honestly, I think that's part of your legacy. In fact in one of your other books, Survive the Unthinkable: A Total Guide to Women's Self Protection, is the precise answer for the Me Too movement, for this type of culture that we look at the president, we look at some of the aggressive language in the society, the tension in society. This is the right response in a mature fashion. There needs to be a certain level of maturity that's brought along with what you're saying, and I love that you spend so much time helping people put this in the proper context. That hey, if you use this in a wrong way, you might be sitting in jail for a long time. This is not puffing your chest stuff.

Tim Larkin: Oh yeah. I mean, people ask me, they'll say, "Hey, does this work in a bar fight?" I think, works great in a bar fight, works fantastic. I mean, injury to the human body works. There's no doubt about it. Use it when it's not warranted, you may get away with it. You may get lucky. One of the things that shocks a lot of people is I'll show two videos back to back. First video [inaudible 00:45:04] show this epic street fight. It's just epic. Two big guys in Russia just beating each other senseless. It goes on and on for about five minutes. One guy ends up on the ground. He's all bloody and everything, but he gets up and he [inaudible 00:45:20]. So, it was a big guy. People were like, "Oh my gosh." I show the second video. This comes from closed circuit TV at a bar. I think it was in Arkansas. Two guys talking, one guy trying to get in each others' face. All of a sudden, the other guy hits one guy. Boom, he hits the ground. That's it. Cracked his head on the concrete, he's bleeding out on one punch.

Tim Larkin: So I go, you're playing Russian roulette every time you cross the physical plane. If it doesn't warrant that type of result where a guy's bleeding out on the concrete, it probably was never worth doing at that point over that. Like I said, that changed the behavioral status. Then on the women's self protection, what's really strange with the Me Too movement, in some ways, is women are getting vilified when they say, "Hey, you should learn self protection." Nia Sanchez, who was a Miss America, I think, 2016, got hammered when she was being questioned during one part in the competition. She said, "Yeah, I'm a black belt in TaeKwonDo, and I really think it's important that women learn to defend themselves." The outrage on the other side was, "No. Women shouldn't learn to defend themselves. Men should not hurt women." I get it. In a perfect world, they're absolutely right.

Peter King: Yeah, I agree.

Tim Larkin: But I sit there and say, also, I should live in a world where I don't have to lock my house at night. That I don't have to lock my car up. That I don't have to live in a gated community, because we live in a gated community. Why would I need a gated community? We shouldn't have to. Nobody should come into our house or anything like that. What I try to tell people, and it's really hard especially right now because things are so highly charged on social media, ever since the election, in the last two years it's just been really vitriolic with everybody. What I try to tell people is you need to live in the world that we live in, and recognize the world for what it is rather than the world we want it to be. It doesn't mean we can't work to improve things. I'll have women tell me, "I should be able to run with my Powerbeats on at 10:30 at night and be unmolested." I go, "Absolutely you should but unfortunately, as the statistics show that you're profiling is a much more likely victim for something like that. You're just making it that much easier for the predators."

Tim Larkin: So, that's what people do. When people start weighing the consequences. The one thing in the training is you have to physically do this. We're mimicking injury. It's a cooperate effort, but you're learning injury to the human body. You're taking a hard part of you and you're putting it in a very vulnerable part of your partner, and you're learning how to do that. It's this cooperative effort because you can't go full speed in these areas. You're gonna break something on it irrespective, but what happens is people start to feel just a little bit of pressure in these areas, and they get it. That's what gives them confidence. Then you have people, like you said. The strangest thing about doing this in the last 30 years is the most unlikely candidates in my training have had to use this information.

Tim Larkin: I can't tell you how crazy that is. It's never anybody I anticipate, and that's why every class I tell everybody. I go, "I don't know who you are, but there's somebody in here, statistically, that's gonna have to use this information. Therefore, I need everybody completely focused on the subject this weekend." You know, joking around. We have a good time off mat, but when you're doing work, you're doing work. That's probably the biggest thing is just people understanding how to injure the human body. Unless you're a sociopath, unless there's something completely wrong with you, which you wouldn't seek out my training if you're a sociopath anyways. You'd just look at it and go, "Oh yeah, that works." The biggest thing that changes in people is once they understand how to actually do it and the fact that hey, you don't have to be superhuman to put injury on the human body, they usually do huge, as I told you before, behavioral changes.

Tim Larkin: They really take a hard look at their life and say, "Okay, what am I doing that's even bringing the chance that violence might enter my life? What can I do to minimize that?" That's the coolest thing. Unfortunately, especially in my early years of training, 70% of the people that would come to me, came to me after the fact. After violence had already entered their lives. If I can get to that other 30% that's either proactive or haven't really though about it, but they're hearing me speak. You know, maybe people in your audience. If I can reach somebody like that, if they just read the book, I've had so many people that have read the book that's literally changed the way they looked at things. I've got amazing feedback from people because yes, would I like everybody to train in the methodologies and the principles I train? Yes, but you can actually read the book and do a ton of mental changing. The way you deal with the subject. That alone would really help you navigate the world in a much more safe manner to minimize violence coming into your life.

Tim Larkin: Without even training, just understanding the concepts would help you.

Peter King: Absolutely. I had the pleasure of training with you for a little bit out in Maui a couple years ago. One of the biggest takeaways for me was as we were working through in our own minds, "What if there was a guy that's 240 pounds? How am I gonna take that on?" One of your trainers, Bruce, said to me, "It's not you against 220 pound or 240 pound guy. It's you against this eyeball," and he mimics holding an eyeball and puts it down on the table and is like, "Could you squash that eyeball?" I'm like, "Well, yeah I could do that." That psychological shift in me goes, "Oh, yeah." If you gouge somebody's eyes, it's a game changer because they're not thinking it's not brawn against brawn. It's just pure injury, and they have [inaudible 00:51:20]. So, it really opened my mind to the psychology behind what you're talking about, which really does change the nature of the whole thing and it made me understand, this is how you actually apply this.

Peter King: The other thing that I want to just say really quick for those that are listening, you mentioned it but I wanted to spell it out a little bit more. The program is called TFT - Target Focused Training, where you're literally zeroing in on ... why don't you describe it.

Tim Larkin: Yeah, we really like to say we like to teach you to train, put one square inch of you on a vulnerable square inch of them. That's really it. So there's approximately, this is gonna sound overwhelming to people but it really isn't that big of a deal, there's really over 130 areas in the human body that you could put trauma in to where you'll get a result that we're talking about. You're really talking about when you injure somebody, you want to either injure a sensory system of the human body, or you want to break the structure on the human body. Those are the two areas. What do I mean by that? We gave one example of, say, the solar plexus. We know if we strike the solar plexus, that the body seizes up and that's an internal sensory system. You're hitting the nervous system. The nervous system is seizing your lungs, and making it very difficult for you to breathe.

Tim Larkin: Whereas if you say, break an ankle, that's the structure of the ankle that's being broken. We talk about breaking, you have to be very careful of medical definitions. Medical definitions are far more liberal about injury than what we consider injury. When we're talking, we're talking about breaking the structure of the human body. So if your ankle, that would be ripping and tearing all the connective tissue holding the ankles together, the bones and the tib, and fib, and the foot and it literally just doesn't work. It just flops around to where they can't support weight. That's a broken ankle to us, whereas other times literally people that cracked one hairline bone on a foot or on the ankle bone, but they can still walk on it, that would also be designated as a broken ankle, but [crosstalk 00:53:20] we're very clear on how we define trauma to the human body.

Peter King: It's hard sometimes to even have this conversation, because as a former soccer player, I've rolled my ankles I don't know how many times and just even the thought of it, there's an emotional connection to it. I want to remind people that this is your world, and this is just data. It's just information, and one of the things that took me by surprise a little bit when I first started taking your training. We did a week long thing. That very first day you're talking about destruction of the human body, and cracking this, like you've just [inaudible 00:53:58]. This is your world, and this is normalized for you, and it literally took me probably a good three to four days. We were watching videos almost every single day to where by that fourth or fifth day, it started to normalize with myself and I was looking at it more analytically going, "Oh, yeah. This guy's coming in with a knife, but this guy knew how to hit him right in the solar plexus. Look at how it just crippled the threat," essentially.

Peter King: The flip side of that. You showed a video of a closed circuit camera in a Vegas casino, and a shooter came out, fired a couple of shots, everybody ducked. A hero comes out of nowhere. You're watching this and I see this guy, and he's coming from behind the shooter. The guy, he's a big guy and I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, this guy is a hero." He comes in, he doesn't know what you teach. He basically bear tackles the guy from behind, which is a natural instinct for a lot of people to do, and I'm thinking to myself, "Threat over." The perpetrator is able to somehow spin while he's falling and fires the shot off into this guy, kills him, and he's still free, and he still has a weapon. If this guy only knew how to strike him where you taught us to strike in the back lower rib area, threat over.

Peter King: It's such valuable information. It really truly is life and death. That's why I wanted to have you on the program.

Tim Larkin: Yeah, the skillset of the injury is super useful because that's just it. You think by grabbing somebody you're controlling them, and there's a default to do that. It's interesting, and this isn't to put down jiu-jitsu and stuff, but I was curious. It really took over in the military. A lot of guys started training jiu-jitsu. It's very rare. Usually what the reasoning for training jiu-jitsu with these guys, to give you an example, they'll say, "Okay, we were over in the sandbox and we came across these guys, and we had to put everybody in and take them in as prisoner. There was this one guy that was resisting, he was [inaudible 00:56:09] all over, and I weigh 200 pounds and I couldn't control the guy. I had two of my other SEAL buddies and we're trying to hold them down, and we can't hold them down, and then little chief so and so, who's an enlisted chief, their boss basically, he comes over and he spider monkeys up on the guy, chokes him out. Oh man it's amazing. We all have to learn jiu-jitsu."

Tim Larkin: Yeah, it's great for prisoner handling. It's great for stuff like that, and it can be very good on the street if you're only dealing with a single threat because I've had tons of times where guys are literally tied up, doing something, and they're completely under control and all of a sudden they're getting stabbed and they're getting kicked by other guys that are coming, that they didn't know existed. It can go horribly wrong for them, and that poor individual that you're talking about, and he was man, he barreled, he didn't even hesitate. [inaudible 00:57:04] shot multiple people at this point, and this guy just comes out of nowhere and just boom, barrels into him. What happened, what we understand, was when he went to tackle him, it didn't prevent this guy from being able to twist and move in, and this guy was so committed that he twisted and then he went up and shot him right up under the chin, killing the man when he came down.

Tim Larkin: It was really sad because if he had just put an injury on him, most likely that would not have been the scenario. He may have got off one more shot or something like that, but that individual that came from behind would not have been shot. That's why I put things out. You have to be very careful. I'm not criticizing the man. He was absolutely brave. It's just unfortunate. I have tons and tons of times where people take action but they just don't have good information. They're willing to do it, they're willing to put themselves, they're willing to completely sacrifice their safety to help others, and yet, if they just had this little bit of information of where to put that effort, they would have got a much better result.

Peter King: You mentioned before that you've taught classes before and you've had the most unlikeliest of people come back and say, "Hey, this happened to me." Can you give a couple of those examples of some of your clients?

Tim Larkin: Yeah. One of the ones that I talk about a lot is I had one female who came to us, and she had a therapy dog when she showed up. She had been assaulted before. She had been attacked, and the course itself was really difficult for her. You get brought back, especially when we brought out tools like knives and stuff like that. I was traumatic for her. She had to take many breaks during the course. Now, she had a concealed carry. Her husband had got her her concealed carry. She was functioning. It wasn't like she was so traumatized that she couldn't, but the training itself, sometimes it can bring it out with people that had violence before. So, literally in hearing this woman's story, she was one of those clients that I looked at and just said, "God, if anybody deserves a pass, it's this woman," so I hope this just becomes an interesting course for her the rest of her life, but she never used the information.

Tim Larkin: Well, I think I was about a year later, her husband calls up and tells us this incident, sends us the police report. She's at a Lowes, I think it was a Lowes or a Home Depot. She was getting stuff for her garden. She was getting some new flowers for her garden, and she had her therapy dog. Her therapy dog was a German Shepherd, but wasn't an attack dog, it was basically a therapy dog. She was loading it in the underground parking lot. She was loading it in by herself, she was there with her dog. As she puts her dog into his crate and locks the crate, she's about to grab the rest of the flowers when she hears from behind, "Do you need help?" She said every hair went up on her and her mind had quickly just started registering, and she said to herself, "It's happening again," and sure enough, the guy bear hugs her, brings her right up on the ground. She's able to have one arm free. She realizes immediately.

Tim Larkin: She said, "My first thought was I can't get to my gun, so it's not my first tool that's available to me," but she realized she could move. She said, "It was like you guys were in my ear." She used her elbow, she slammed it into the side of the neck. The side of the neck has two nerves, the phrenic nerve and the vagus nerve, and it also has an artery and a vein. So, you interrupt blood flow and nerve flow when you strike the side of the neck. You've seen it probably multiple times in mixed martial arts, and there's two reactions. If it's a vasovagal response, a nerve response, it basically puts a dimmer switch on the body. You'll see somebody just fade like this. Or, it would be a concussion that you hit. The vasovagal is you hit the side of the nerve. The nerve says, "Hey, we've got to reboot the body." You also interrupt blood flow because you send a bunch of blood up into the brain at that point, and then it dumps all the blood out of the body and that's when a person goes into dimmer switch.

Tim Larkin: Or, if there's enough force behind it and the brain slams into the skull, then you're gonna get yourself a concussion either way. She strikes the guy. The guy basically has a vasovagal and he's going back. She looks at his knee. First thing she realized, "Oh, I can ride his knee to the ground," and she stomps on his knee and she flamingos his knee at that point. He's on the ground. He had a gun that fell off to the side, but some other civilian came by and got it, and he's screaming on his leg. He starts screaming because he sees security coming. Starts screaming, "She attacked me, she attacked me!" Her thought process, she goes, "Well actually, he's not lying." It was interesting. When the cops got there, they were shocked that she didn't use her gun and she said, "Well." Now, there's a woman who's been assaulted before and she said, "I was able to see that he was no longer a threat, so I didn't have to do that."

Tim Larkin: That's what this type of training, the feedback loop of trauma and when you understand how to do it, you're not gonna violate your moral code intentionally, meaning had this guy hit his head or something and died or something, she still would have been far justified [inaudible 01:02:17]. They saw his van. He had the van going, it was this typical creeper van. It was going. It had all the secondary area supplies that he was just gonna take her, and throw her away. Somebody they had been looking for for about three years, and they got this guy. There's this woman who literally was freezing during training, but when it happened, she had clear, concise information, and she had a plan. She knew she could do something, and she did it.

Tim Larkin: It was great. I was really sad to hear it happened to her, but I was very happy that she was able to use it. She was so mad at herself because she thought, she goes, "Just because I have a dog," and she goes, "I thought I was save, and I had my gun. I knew there was nobody there, and I should have waited. I should have waited to have somebody walk me out or do something." Predators are always looking for the easy target, and if you just make sure you're not an easy target, that's more than half the battle.

Peter King: What type of objections do people have of this? So for example, right now I would imagine that some people are thinking, "Well I'm not strong enough to put enough of a force." I can hear my mom and my dad saying something, "Well, I can't do something like that. I'm just an old lady," but the amount of force that it takes if properly put is not more than ... I think there might a misnomer that you have to be in great physical shape or whatever, but just to continue to reiterate, this isn't that. If you just have the information, a smaller framed person can put just a little bit of force, behind your elbow, is enough force to put the dimmer switch on, like you said. What are some of the other objections that somebody might have, or some of the things that they may not realize. Putting you on the spot a little bit, but do you have any other-

Tim Larkin: No. Oftentimes what they do, they're always looking at things from a dual standpoint. One on one type of a situation. They're not really thinking about real violence. From a reaction standpoint I talk to people all the time, I go, "Hey, how many people have been walking along and then a bee or a fly hits you in the eye?" They're like, "Yeah." I go, "Yeah, you can just stand there like this, right? Stoic, no problem." They're like, "No, you do a dramatic oh my god, grabbing your eye, and go away." That's a little fly hitting you barely in the eye and that's how dramatic your reaction is for something like that. [crosstalk 01:04:40] Imagine whatever your mom's weight is, with all of your force going into the eye there or going into, say, the throat or something. You could lightly tap on the throat, people are coughing and sputtering. Anybody, if you're a normal adult that's within the ranges of 90 to infinity or whatever, you have the ability to injure the human body.

Tim Larkin: That's just it. We're not susceptible. None of us are immune to these areas, and that's a hard thing for people to understand, and I guess the thing that really sunk that in for me was years ago, when I was out doing prison systems, talking to my corrections officers, and they had done this really interesting little study. Somebody came in from one of the universities and showed these guys acts of violence, but also self defense videos. What was interesting was these guys never saw themselves on the losing side of violence when they would watch it. So what do I mean by that? Usually I do this thing, you may have seen, I may have done it for you guys, I do it a couple different ways but one of the ways I do it is I'll show one person choking another person and then I'll go to the crowd that I have there. I've done this on my TED Talk, and I go to the crowd. I said, "Okay, what would you do if you found yourself in this position?"

Tim Larkin: Everybody basically starts saying, "Okay, well, he's choking me so I think I could kick him in the groin, or I'm pretty sure I could hit the arms off and get him to stop choking me, or maybe I could punch him to the throat if I can get my arms long enough." They all look at it from that, and I'll say, "Hey, great, great, great." Then I'll tell everybody, "Would you like to see what I'd do?" They go, "Yeah." So, I would replace the guy that's choking the person. I'll continue to choke the person. I'll then three to four more injuries on them, taking them to nonfunctional. People look at me shocked and they go, "Well, no, no, no, no. You didn't say that. You said what would we do if we found ourselves in that position?" I said, "Yes, in that position. You chose to take the position of the victim because you could never see yourself ever being justified choking. What if the story you told yourself was 'I just finished the first threat. I turned around and I realized there was a second guy. The only thing I could think of was I just double choked him and that was my starting point.'"

Tim Larkin: The most powerful thing I could probably leave your listeners with is that. What I would challenge them to do is to do the uncomfortable act of watching acts of violence. If you see it on the media, the news, whatever, take the audio off of it. Look at the act itself and then just ask yourself, "When does it change in somebody's favor?" What I mean by that is whoever ends up being the winner in the exchange, ask yourself where the systemic change happened in the body. All the time it's an injury, and if somebody got an injury first and then they continued to put injury on the human body, and that's where the good information is for you. Meaning you're not condoning the criminal act you're seeing, if it's criminal. You're not saying it's okay. What you're trying to do is protect your brain on how you look at the tool of violence, and you only want to identify with the winning side of violence.

Tim Larkin: This goes into other visualizations. When they teach a golfer to visualize, one of the top golfers, a guy like Tiger Woods or anybody like that, if they're gonna imagine a certain hole, they're gonna imagine they're at the tee, tee to fairway, fairway to green, and a one to two put depending on what the scenario is, what [inaudible 01:08:24]. They're not gonna imagine tee to rough, rough to the beach, four strokes in the beach, and a three putter on that. You visualize what you want the outcome to be, and you need to start training your body to be understanding of where to look for the good information in violence, and what's useful to you, what works. What's interesting is these alpha predators they showed to you in prisons, they look at an act and they say, "Okay, yeah. That was okay, but I would have done this," meaning they'll look at it and they'll improve upon it. They never saw themselves fighting from the losing side and trying to reconstruct these from the victim's standpoint.

Tim Larkin: When you're looking at an act of violence, there's no good information from the victim's side, for us to protect our brains, and that is really a challenge for people but once they understand it and once they understand, "Hey, I'm not condoning this but I'm learning, I'm seeing what's useful to me here," that's when things really start to change for people.

Peter King: 100%, yeah, that psychological shift is massive. It was massive. I can't think of a better person to explain this, to put have put all this together, to put the heart that you put into this, train as an elite warrior, probably in the top fraction of a percent on the planet to be able to protect themselves and put injury on somebody else, completely taken all the way out. Exposed to your ultimate vulnerability and realizing and having that mental shift of, whoa, even at your level you can be completely exposed for physics, basically, taking over your body. So, can't think of a better person to teach this kind of stuff. You really do bring a lot of presence of mind, and thought, and care around this stuff for someone that really takes the chance to look at it. So, I appreciate that, and like I said this is information that I want to share with my daughter, my son ultimately, although I will say this.

Peter King: You mentioned something in the training that I went through about what's age appropriate for both men and women. Can you speak to that real quick for those that are there?

Tim Larkin: Yeah. The unfortunate thing when it comes to women is I usually train girls as young as 11. I trained my niece at 11. My daughters are five now, and they will definitely get it probably around nine, 10. The reason being is twofold. One, the sexual assault and physical assaults against women is just outrageous. It absolutely is, there's just a high likelihood of that. Secondarily, women tend to be far more mature about the subject matter, meaning they have no interest in trying it out because violence isn't something that they communicate with, for the most part. Whereas males, especially young males, a lot of the times we communicate with violence. We'll knock each other around, we'll do locker room type stuff, and so we have this confusion with violence. It's like okay, is this social violence? Is this hierarchical stuff, joking around violence, or is this the real thing? Oftentimes, young males can't distinguish, and they can do something.

Tim Larkin: I tell people all the time. I will train your son if he's under 18 but you have to tell me that he's emotionally mature enough to understand this, because you need to be prepared that if he uses this in an antisocial aggression way, in a locker room situation or something like that, he has a chance to do irreparable harm to the other kid. I made the decision, and a lot of my instructors did the same thing. I didn't want my son navigating his high school, my oldest son, my oldest son now is 23, and I didn't want him navigating high school with that information. That's crazy. If you really understand violence, it's just a decision to me. If you really understand boys as they're growing up and young men, you understand you want a maturity level when it comes to this type of stuff.

Tim Larkin: I'm definitely not anti martial arts. If you can get them into a great martial arts program, and it really comes up. People say, "Well, what martial art?" It's not so much the martial art, it's far more the instructor. If you have an instructor that understands how to train kids correctly, there's lots of benefits to it. Just don't think it's self defense. When my kids do jiu-jitsu, they're doing it because it's fantastic, it's great to learn, it is a good protection against schoolyard bullies and things of that nature. I have no illusions that it's gonna work against a predator, any of their training, and it's not the jiu-jitsu it's the age. People have to understand, especially if you have small kids, they've done numerous studies. You've probably seen one of the TV studies where they do where they teach kids self defense, stranger danger, all that other stuff, then they simulate something, say, in a park where a simulated predator comes up and says, "Hey, will you help me with my puppy? It's not feeling good. Can you help me take him to my car?" Or something and they throw the kid right in the car.

Tim Larkin: These kids that have just been trained are there. Why? The predator's mind is far more developed and far more psychologically devious than these kids can handle, and so it's our job as parents not to be helicopter parents, but to realize that we can't expect them to fight off, physically, a much stronger predator that's gonna be out there. It's our job. Now, what we can do with martial arts or combat sports, I've trained my kids in gymnastics first and foremost. The reason I started them in gymnastics is all these years of me training people, the people that get it the fastest are either former gymnasts or dancers. Their body movement is such that it's really good. My young son is doing fantastic in gymnastics right now. It'll set him up for anything that he wants to do in the future. Same thing with my daughter, so I would strongly advise everybody to have their kids train in gymnastics if it's available to them.

Tim Larkin: Martial arts can happen a little bit later. You can start them doing martial arts, say, around 10 or 11. You don't have to start them off super, super early, but you want them to be really comfortable with how their body moves. So, that would be a good way to approach it, but I can't reiterate enough that the training is more for their mental development, their physical development, their ability to work with teams, get motivated, achieve rank, do all the great things that martial arts and combat sports can do for kids, but I would caution parents. Don't think it's necessarily gonna be something that will ward off predators.

Peter King: Makes sense. The latest book, When Violence is the Answer by Tim Larkin. You've got a couple other books. I highly recommend checking out that TED Talk that you mentioned. Where else can somebody go to get more information about what you teach?

Tim Larkin: You know what we have going right now is a really great, great deal is I have a free master class that I put up. It's at SurviveViolence.com. If they go there, just give their email. It's totally free. It's a free video class and what I do is stuff just like we talked about. I really go in depth. I want people to really understand these concepts and ideas that we have, and that will prepare them. Then if they want to continue and train with us, fantastic, but at least it's an opportunity for me to introduce some of these subjects and see if this is something they were looking for.

Peter King: Well so, it's one thing to hear it in this conversation, it's another thing to see the videos and to see, "Oh, this is what you're talking about." The methodology that you guys go through as well, the very slow, deliberate, train the brain in a slow way to see things in that slow motion way, is I think also another level of training. Then obviously getting up and physically doing it. So Tim, thanks again very much for your time today. It's been awesome, and I highly recommend anyone who's listening to this, especially women and anybody else that might be put in that position of needing to defend themselves when violence is the only answer, highly recommend checking it out. So again, thank you Tim for your time today.

Tim Larkin: Great, thank you. Appreciate it.