Welcome to episode 2 and our very first guest–and it’s such a GOOD one!

We’re going to dive into the Mama Bear mentality with self-defense expert and ultimate Papa Bear, Tim Larkin. He is a best-selling author and founder of Target Focus Training,

In this episode, discover how women can unlock their innate protection skills, grasp the essence of true self-defense, and make life-saving choices with confidence. It offers transformative insights into self-protection that empowers everyone, especially mothers, to stand strong and prepared.

Key Points:

• Tim’s background and how he became a leading, trust defense expert
• The problem with traditional self-defense and what it lacks
• Understand the difference between antisocial and asocial violence
• “Your Brain over His Brawn”
• Making better decisions for personal safety
• Trusting your instincts over social pressures

Action Items + Next Steps:

As always, stay safe out there, Mama Bear!

Full Episode Transcript:

Emily Richett
00:01

You are listening to Mama Bear Survival, the show where we prepare to boldly face the world ahead. Thank you so much for being here. I’m Emily Raquette, and today we are going to dive into a really important topic when it comes to the Mama Bear mindset and protecting not only our families, but ourselves. Our guest today is Tim Larkin, and he is a leading expert in self-defense and protection. Tim has an incredible story. He teaches a method for protection that’s unlike anything else out there that I’ve ever read or discovered, and I’m going to let him explain it best. So let’s dive in. Tim, I’m just so excited to have you on the show. I grabbed your book, caught my eye, it’s called Survive the Unthinkable, A Total Guide to Women’s Self-Protection. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, and I started reading it. First of all, the Forward was by Tony Robbins, which I thought was awesome, and that he’s had all the women in his life be trained by you personally, I believe. And right from the get go, I realized, okay, this is different from everything I’ve ever learned about self-defense. And then I’m just so grateful that I discovered your book because so many women need this information. And if I’m able to share it with anyone who hasn’t already learned some of these skills, I, this can be life changing. It really can. So thanks for being here.

Tim Larkin
01:18

Oh, thanks a lot. I appreciate being, being able to get to audiences like yours. Like, you know, hopefully if, if you don’t know who I am, that’s a good thing. ’cause 70% of the people that come to me are people that have already had violence happen in their life. So it’s always great to get to people. I’m, I’m hoping the majority of your audience hasn’t experienced that. And it’s always great to get proactive about it so you don’t have to deal with it.

Emily Richett
01:40

Yeah. Well, tell us a bit about who you are and how did you come to be this self-defense guru that you are?

Tim Larkin
01:47

I’m a, I’m a I the, I’ll try to give you the Reader’s Digest on this. I, I grew up a Navy kid, so I traveled all over the country, originally born in Newport, Rhode Island area, and family’s from Massachusetts. Dad’s family is from Cape Cod. Mom’s family’s from Dad of Massachusetts. I grew up as a young kid. My grandfather was from South Boston originally. And, you know, basically he’s credited with making the family legit. My great-grandfather ran liquor with Joe Kennedy. So we, we kind of have that background, that outlaw background. I was brought up to learn how to take care of yourself. And so, you know, we went in my grandfather’s basement and he taught us how to box when we were very young kids. And I was exposed to violence early on. Not in a negative way, but in a proactive way. Meaning you have to learn, you know, the, the ethic was you have to learn to take care of yourself.

Tim Larkin
02:48

You have need to learn to protect yourself, protect your family, your sisters. Yeah. And that was something that just was kind of unique. It’s not something that we really look and teach young males much anymore, and we highly discourage it. So it was a unique time for me to grow up, went from town to town when my, when my dad’s deployments, and again, had to, you know, back then when, when you went around, new kids were pretty rough. And you had to, you know, be able to take care of yourself, but you also had to be able to learn how to observe the new dynamic and how you fit in. So there’s a lot of human nature training going on that I didn’t really realize as a young kid. It was just pure survival. And that’s kind of the approach I take with, with self-protection.

Tim Larkin
03:37

Now, I went on, became a, I went to USC as a Navy on a Navy scholarship, a u Broad Sea Scholarship. The reason I did that was because my last, my dad’s last deployment, we ended up in San Diego. We lived in Navy housing. The officer housing was in Coronado, California. And the back fence that we had backed up to the Silver Strand Highway right across the highway, literally, you know, less than 200 yards, was basically underwater demolition school, the SEAL training facility. Wow. And so, as a young teenager, I got exposed to the te the SEAL teams. And during the time when I grew up in late eighties, they weren’t as famous as they are now. It was kind of a unique thing, and that was it. That’s what I wanted to do. So I got in there were 2,500 applicants for two slots in the officer training to get into SEAL training.

Tim Larkin
04:32

It was very difficult to do that. I was able to get one of those two slots I went through. And because I had lived there, I knew everything about SEAL training. And the reason I’m telling everybody this is, is there, there’s a, there’s a message in this. I was bigger, faster, stronger. I had all the knowledge I already had planned my whole SEAL career. And sure enough, I get to training, we win hell week, we could win all the big events, you know? Yeah. Like I was number one guy in the swim, number one guy in what they call pool comp, where they try to, you know, just screw you up as far as being able to dive. All that stuff was easy. I had two weeks

Emily Richett
05:06

Was easy, easy. I read the books, books easy,

Tim Larkin
05:09

Easy only because if, if you’re exposed to it as a young man, and it, I really had an unfair advantage because I literally was watching classical

Emily Richett
05:17

Taking notes training.

Tim Larkin
05:18

Yeah, yeah. And, and the, and the seals, the, the seal instructors at the time were giving me all the information. Wow. And

Tim Larkin
05:25

So cool. Yeah. My brother and I were really annoying. We, we kept harassing them. And so they finally kind of made us like mascots and they’d have us sit up in the sand dunes and they’d tell us about the training. So I knew everything there was to know about it ahead of time. And I, you know, used that to my advantage. I was very arrogant about it. And, you know, I had already, I was gonna be the number one guy in the, on the class, it’s called the Anchorman. And I had already planned where I was gonna, I was going to then the best SEAL team to go to for action was Seal Team four back then. And I had my thing now, I was already gonna go to then Seal Team six after I planned, you know, I’m 20 something, you think you know everything.

Tim Larkin
06:03

Well, God has a different plan. Two weeks before I was to graduate, I had to do a dive. It was just a no big deal dive. It was there, but I was really congested. I had a lot eye congestion, sinus congestion. And I was so arrogant that I decided, you know, I’m gonna do the dive, even though I had the option to postpone it, and I would’ve had to do it on Saturday. Well, they started giving us weekends off and, you know, I’m a young guy and of course you don’t wanna do anything on the weekend. So I forced the dive and I ended up blowing my eardrum. And when I blew my eardrum, a a shaft of just really cold water, it felt like it went through the middle of my brain. And then warm fluid came out. And as soon as the warm fluid started coming out, I started losing all sensation underwater.

Tim Larkin
06:49

And I went into vertigo. And luckily I was able to get myself to the surface. And they said, when my head hit the surface, it was slapping uncontrollably. And they pulled me back up on the inflatable boat, the corpsman came in right away, looked at my ear, and I knew from his reaction, even though I was really out of it, I could tell from his reaction, I was done. I could tell that my ears were not gonna heal properly to be able to pressurize dive. Hmm. So what was interesting was it was a seminal train, a time in my life. And the reason being is because up until that point, I was always bigger, faster, stronger, any sort of an injury that I had, I was able to will my way through it. I was able to do it. This was the first time I had an injury in my body where I couldn’t use my personal willpower.

Tim Larkin
07:39

I couldn’t use any determination. I was completely just, just humbled by this, this injury of which I could not control. And what’s interesting is that what I thought was the end of my career at that time, and everything I had planned actually was a turning point in my life to where injury to the human body is really the, the touchstone of everything that I teach to people. And the reason we look at injury to human body is because as I told you earlier, at that point, I was bigger, faster, stronger. I was that guy, you know, and I was unstoppable. And yet I am as susceptible to injury to the human body as anybody else. And what we found out was that there were areas of the human body, approximately 70, and some of them have more than one. Meaning, you know, we have two ears and we have two clavicles, but we only count them once as, as a target the hazard.

Tim Larkin
08:38

So you have probably about 120 ears on the human body that when you put enough force into it, you can create those types of injuries. And the injuries that we’re talking about, the human body is an injury that no matter what you will, you, your brain doesn’t have control over the body. Your body actually carries the brain. There’s a, a reflex that happens called a spinal reflex reaction. And we’ve all experienced it. If you touch a hot surface or you step on a sharp object, you automatically come away. You can’t control that with your brain. You have to do it. The stimulus is so great in the trauma that it takes the brain outta the equation. And has you automatically pull your body away from the dangers is to protect itself. What’s interesting is when you’re reacting to those types of injuries, the brain is outta the equation.

Tim Larkin
09:26

So it’s a way to bypass bigger, faster, stronger on somebody. ’cause we’re all susceptible to this. So that became, I, I stayed in the community as an intelligence officer. I worked exclusively with them. It was a amazing career that I ended up having. One of the things that I got taken into, even though I was just this junior guy that had no business being there, they brought into the idea of looking at close combat and hand-to-hand combat. And so they had me redo that. They, they, they put a team together that was looking at all the different martial artists to say, Hey, we gotta, you know, the wall came down. The Soviets are no longer the big threat. We’re gonna have all these wars and we have to learn how to put hands on people again. So they started looking at hand-to-hand combat. And ended up just through Fortune a, a fortune into accident, I ended up finding the instructor who ended up being the guy that did the pilot program, me, who truly understood combat at that time, and, and understood how to put together things.

Tim Larkin
10:27

And it was a very, very roughly based on injury to the human body. Because again, that was the one thing that all humans are vulnerable to, regardless of physical strength and awareness. And you can’t protect these areas of the human body. So that’s where that started. But the more interesting problem for me was, I always thought I was gonna stay in the military and law enforcement world. And that’s what I wanted to do. I only wanted to work with operators. I only wanted to do, you know, the typical tough guy stuff. It wasn’t until I had been asked, I was doing some corporate training and I was asked to do this unique program in New York, and I had a bunch of international bankers that were traveling to very dangerous parts of the world. Kidnapping was absolutely a, a possibility. And even though they had their security teams, it was suggested that they take self-protection training.

Tim Larkin
11:17

And a lot of the security teams I had trained, and they suggested that I come out and do it. So on September 8th and ninth of 2001, I was in New York City. We were a block away from the Twin Towers. And I taught a group of financial professionals, a couple, probably half of them resided in the Twin Towers. That’s where their, their offices were. And on the eighth and the ninth, I went through all of this self-protection training. And at the very end, because I knew they traveled a lot, I showed them all the, the inconsistencies in the laws on what you can bring onto a a, a plane and what you can’t. And so I was showing things like box cutters and all of that, and I was saying all that. Well, I went home to Las Vegas on the 10th and then on the 11th, literally where I was training was absolutely destroyed in the Twin Towers.

Tim Larkin
12:14

After that, they all reached out. Luckily, everybody that was, that I trained was able to get out of the towers. Oh, thank God. Wow. So that was great. But it all had a seminal reaction on these guys. And they all said, you, you know, and then when we found out that box cutters were used and all that other stuff, they said the, the filming of that was supposed to be just internal for Goldman Sachs. And, and the group that, that had sponsored it, they came to me and they said, you gotta release this. You people have to know more about your approach. You know, it was a very seminal time and it changed. And all of a sudden I, I started getting offers to do all these speaking events to civilians basically, and to, you know, groups like young professional, young presidents organization and EO and, and groups like that. And then I started training more and more civilians and in particular started training a lot of wives and daughters of, say, CEOs and, and, and people. And what was interesting was training women.

Tim Larkin
13:15

I had trained women in the military and they’re highly capable. As a matter of fact, women, women tend to be much better at picking up the physical training than men because they don’t rely on muscle. They’re not used to being bigger, faster, and stronger. And so they realized that technique and how they use their body is gonna be very, very important. And so I was really pleasantly surprised when I started training women how quickly they got at how quickly they understood, you know, injury to human body. But even more quickly, how my goal is, the reason I talk about injury, and the reason I, I do all this, and yes, is if you come and train with me, the main focus will be the physical application. Meaning how to do the work and how to do things to the human body that are absolutely horrific but necessary if you need to save your life.

Tim Larkin
14:05

But what’s interesting is when you do that, when I, when when you focus on that, you come away from it saying, okay, thank you. I’m glad I got that knowledge. It’s really, it was, it was rough. But the, the flip side is this, now I have to ask myself the hard questions. What am I doing right now out of convenience or social awkwardness, fear of social awkwardness where I’m putting myself at risk for no good reason? And what I found is the greatest gift that I give any of my clients, male or female, but particularly the women, is they will come back to me after and they’ll say, Hey, Tim, I, the old me, I had this situation. The old me would’ve reacted this way. But after the training, I was able to get myself out of there. I didn’t respond. I realized I had choice and I chose safety and thank you because it could have gone horribly wrong had I gone the other way.

Tim Larkin
15:10

And that’s really what my goal is with civilian clients. It’s not to turn you into some sort of a, a, a, you know, a ninja fighting machine within two days at a seminar or something like that. It’s really like a CPR approach. It’s like a, it is like a self-defense CPR class. It gives you really good information for really extreme situations. But the big takeaway that people get is they start making better decisions so they can minimize the chance of violence ever coming in their life. Which I think is probably something that really most of us really want. Very few people want to train, you know, to the level that I train or any of my instructors and other people like that. And they look at like a UFC fighter or something, they think, oh, I can never do that. And I, I think what I help do is I hit help cut through all of that, especially for women to let them know you’re very capable of taking care of yourself. It’s just, you have to understand the right conditions.

Emily Richett
16:01

Yeah. You actually, there’s a, a part in your book I highlighted, and it’s in chapter four, the Will to Survive. And you do a bit of a recap here in the beginning, you say, as a woman, you have a fair chance of being attacked at some point in your life, you can hide from this fact or face it head on. If you decide to face it head on, the first thing to do is realize that most threats can be outright avoided by staying away and trusting your survival instincts. Yeah. So similar to what you just said, but then also realizing some people are in complete denial that they may ever really be in a situation where they need to protect themselves. Yeah.

Tim Larkin
16:41

Yeah. And that’s, that is, this business is tough because I’ve never been a chicken little, you know, I’ve never tried to use fear as a motivator. I don’t have to. People come to me, they experience violence, they understand the parameters. The fallacy is the reason, especially anybody that lives in the United States right now, even with everything that we’ve had go on last couple years, which has been unique as far as potential, you know, civil unrest, violence has been kind of a unique thing for the US that’s happened in the last couple years. But that said, even so, even so, we are a really very safe country, you know, in a lot of ways. And we know if you go to most cities, you know where to avoid, you know, the, the neighborhoods still, it’s still not, you know, like a lot of other countries where violence can happen anywhere.

Tim Larkin
17:36

So we have this illusion that it, it’s like this, but you have to ask yourself why is it, well, it is that way for the rest of the world, just because we are so good at doing violence. We have a very powerful military geographically, we are very well suited to, you know, for anybody that would try to come and invade our country or do anything, we are really well protected that way. I’m, I’m doing this at a global level because it permeates across our country. We think, well, we’ve never had to face this, this, or this. We look at something like Israel and, you know, Gaza, or we look at some of the other conflicts and we go, well, that could never happen to us. And so we have this illusion that, you know, we’re safe.

Tim Larkin
18:21

Everybody has the same response when violence happens to them, they will tell me the same things. I lived in the right neighborhood. I’ve never had any violence ever happen to me before. Never had to think about anything. My friends are all same, the same way. And then I get the but, and the but is when the unthinkable happens. You know, most people live a life prior to getting any knowledge, where I call it sleeping with your head on the railroad track and you feel great because, hey, nothing happened last night. Train didn’t come, train didn’t come. And then when violence happens, it’s that unthinkable. It’s the night the train came and you had your head on the railroad track. So my goal with clients is to point that out. Where do they have their heads on the railroad track and merely teach them to take it off?

Emily Richett
19:11

No, soft analogies with Tim, huh?

Tim Larkin
19:13

Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. Then if the train comes, you’re not there anymore. And yeah, it, it, it’s a fascinating subject to talk to people about, especially women. Women have this really unique thing. Like a lot of times when they talk about self-protection or self-defense, I, I, I had to try, I, I’d only been training prior to, to training civilian women. I’d only been training women that were either intelligence or military operators that were working in specialized units. And they of course were there, or, or specialized law enforcement units. Right. Very different. They’re used to that, you know, that world. And, and they see the potentiality for violence. What was really interesting, which will, will really resonate with this, well, the name of your podcast and everything is, yeah, when I would talk to women, I would say she’d, oh, I, I don’t know if I could ever do that to another human being when we’d show some of the things.

Tim Larkin
20:06

And I said, I understand that. But what was really interest interesting was, well, what if somebody was coming to attack your child? That same person that was very worried about herself, they say, well, I don’t know if I could do that to another human being. All of a sudden, just everything, just it, it was unthinkable for her to, to even have to deal with that. And she’d do anything to protect her kid. So my goal with women is, hey, you yourself need that same response for your own personal health and everything. You know, this idea is, you know, there, there’s no right for a predator to come into your life and undo everything, take you away from your children, your family, all the people that need and love you. And you are worth protecting. And, and having this knowledge does not make you violent. You know, having this knowledge is just, it’s one of those things that you hope you never need.

Tim Larkin
20:56

Oftentimes, I’m sure most of us, if you, if you’re in your kitchen, I’m sure most of us have a fire extinguisher somewhere because the code requires it by having a fire extinguisher, it doesn’t mean that we’re hoping to bring on fire. Right. It’s just that we’re provided, you know, we, we, we, now, we thought about it, we know how to use it. And if ever if, if ever needed, it’s there. And that’s the way I look at self-protection and self-defense. You know, it’s a skillset that we all need to learn the basics on and then just make better decisions.

Emily Richett
21:26

Yeah. Well I wrote that down. Self-protect versus self-defense. You really take an approach of, we’re not really waiting to defend ourselves necessarily, but we should be if we feel we’re in a threatening position to be proactive. Like you, you kind of have a counterintuitive approach to this. So what really makes it different? Like what are some tangible takeaways?

Tim Larkin
21:48

Yeah, I, I, I think the, the best thing is first of all, we have to understand there’s no such thing as, as learning self-defense. It’s a legal term. Self-defense is legal term. It’s a legal term for when somebody uses an act of violence. And then that act of violence is judged by the law. It’s never okay to do violence to another person. But what we’ll do is we’ll look at an act of violence as a, as a society. And we’ll say, okay, in this condition, in this case, this person was justified in using violence to protect themselves because of the predator that that was there. If that’s the case, it’ll be judge self-defense, and then that’ll be it. You won’t have to deal with anything if it’s a, if they look at that same act of violence, but they determine, you know, what wasn’t justified.

Tim Larkin
22:33

That’s a criminal use of violence. And you’re gonna now have to go through the legal process and deal with the, the ramifications of that. And so it’s a very interesting thing ’cause people say, well, I wanna learn self-defense. I don’t wanna learn violence, you know, know violence is for criminals and it’s no, everything we do is violence. You know, that’s the tool we use. The tool has been stigmatized so much that we as good people have literally given that tool over to the predators because we don’t think good people should learn how to use the tool of violence. And that’s probably been my, my biggest message that I’ve been trying to share for the last 30 years is that, no, that the tool of violence is available to everybody. How you use it will be determined whether it was a just or a criminal use.

Tim Larkin
23:19

And I’m not worried, in my world, I, I don’t ever worry about criminals coming to take information from me or learn information from me. They don’t need it. They already, they understand, they don’t understand it the way I put it out. They’re not as eloquent as we are and looking at the human body the way we do, but they truly understand how to use tool of violence. It’s good citizens that really need everything put in context for them to really let them know when would it ever, ever be appropriate where I would use this response. And that’s really, to me, I, I love that challenge is, is teaching that to people. And it, it’s really interesting. And also the other thing that’s really interesting is the way we teach, we teach very much natural human movement. And so the intimidating part for most people is not that they can’t do the information or they can’t do what we ask ’em to do and how to hu you know, injure a human body and do things. But what’s intimidating for them is they find out that they kind of already inherently know how to do this. It’s actually pretty easy. And they get uncomfortable realizing that, oh, I didn’t know. I already kind of know how to use the tool of violence. It’s just been pointed out to me. And, you know, it, that’s, that’s the interesting part. ’cause we don’t do anything that requires athleticism. You, you don’t, you don’t need extreme skill sets to be able to use violence effectively to save your life.

Tim Larkin
24:42

So, so that’s really something that, that most people, that, that’s probably the biggest change that I see in people is how they look at violence and how they understand when and where would ever be appropriate.

Emily Richett
24:54

There’s a part in the book you talk about, well ’cause I, I wrote down your brain and his brawn and comparing those two because you think you’re a woman up against it could be a big guy or or me against you, let’s say. And I’d think, ah, I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to protect myself in that scenario. But you use some really specific examples. And the one that I think is really relatable to us moms can understand is you talk about when one, your daughters was really young, she basically could brought you to your knees ’cause the way she, you know, flipped back her head. Babies do and got you. Like right in the nose or very specific point. And then when we think of it in terms like that, we’re like, you’re right. There are these automatic triggers that happen to us if we’re hit just right or just enough pressure that it can bring anyone even a big, a big strong man to his knees here. So you said your brain and his brawn. Can you tell me a little more about that?

Tim Larkin
25:48

Yeah, we’ve all experienced, you know, you know that, I mean, I think what it would take for a dad who gets hit in the nose to have a reaction where it’s so strong and overwhelming that the little 2-year-old that you’re handling, you literally let go of and hold your nose and go down ’cause it’s an automatic re response and you literally drop, thank God on a very soft carpet. But again, you know, the override that would have to be present for you to do something like that because the injury was enough trauma, meaning we can get hit in the nose lightly or, or you know, to, to several. And we, we go, okay, we still hold the child. This was just a unbelievably un unplanned, you know, full strike of this little child that, that did it. And just, you know, the hands just went and that was it.

Tim Larkin
26:39

What I try to tell people is, you know, they imagine they look at something like maybe some sort of a combat sport application where they see these two people just doing these amazing athletics and going at each other and they imagine violence to be that way. That’s not what you train for. What you train for is a predator makes a mistake. A predator brings something close, something vulnerable to them, very close to you because they don’t fear you and they don’t think you know how to do anything. And what I do is I give my my people, you know, the knowledge base to get that one, you know, to, to get that one strike that can change everything in their favor to where the person now is. That brain takes away their u their ability to use their brawn while they’re, while they’re reacting to the trauma.

Tim Larkin
27:21

And then you have other areas of the human body that you continue on until the person’s non-functional and, and you can take ’em out. And it’s just one of those things where women are highly capable. You know, the woman I talk about at the very beginning of the, of, of my book that I dedicated to Joey, she was a, she was a national, she was a ranger in the national forest. She’s an amazing woman, just incredibly athletic and a serial killer. Got ahold of her. And it’s a horrific story. She fought tenaciously, her cabin, they said her cabin just looked like it was hit by a hurricane. She had fought back so hard against the sky. And again, in the end, unfortunately he did end up killing her. But I mean, the tenacity that she fought back with was, was incredible. But when they looked at the results of where she put her efforts, it wasn’t in any part of the human body where you would get the type of response that we were talking about.

Tim Larkin
28:16

So it wasn’t that she didn’t have the tenacity, it wasn’t that she didn’t have the determination to live and that she gave it her all. She just didn’t have a little bit of knowledge that had she just moved things a couple of inches here or couple of inches there, she would’ve got a huge response that probably would’ve been capacitated her. And with the tenacity that she was attacking, she probably would, would’ve survived that situation. So again, that was my avatar from when I was putting this together. Here’s, here’s a woman that you know, has everything you know is is is great. She just needs that. A little bit of knowledge, you know, when this predator came into her life and not having that knowledge was the difference between living and and dying.

Emily Richett
28:56

Yeah. I know in your book it says there’s 1.9 million assaults that women face every year. And that number is probably higher. I, I would guess today I look at what we have going on at our border. I see the videos of the thousands of men coming over into our country and, and we have to look at what’s happening over in Europe and some other places where now violence in broad daylight on a playground toward children and mothers is becoming a more common site. And I think for a lot of us moms especially, we have this fear that’s rising, that our landscape is going to start changing. We’ve seen a lack of strong protective men. ’cause our culture doesn’t really celebrate that so much. And now we’re seeing more violent, unknown people entering our country. There’s that theorizing that maybe we do need to be more proactive, at least in our thinking and our mindset than being comfortable like we typically have been. So what’s your take on that? You see all this changing too. You also acknowledge that these are interesting times for the US over the last couple years.

Tim Larkin
30:08

Yeah, well I saw this happening in Europe. You know, I, I’ve been training over in Europe for years. Decades. And you saw an influx a couple of times in the last couple of decades in, in Europe. And what’s really interesting is it comes from these countries that, you know, and, and, and again, it it is, it, the vast majority of migrants are, and I’m not being politically correct, I’m just, I’m being, I’m honest it’s not, it doesn’t take a lot of people, but the criminal elements that come in come from a society that they can’t believe. I remember when they hit the UK the first time a knife crime went through the, through the roof. They looked around and basically said, okay, nobody uses knives. Nobody uses guns here because they tell you you can’t, yet they’re available. And they couldn’t believe it. And so they completely, you know, just started grabbing knives.

Tim Larkin
31:01

They didn’t care about the repercussions or anything, the things that, that our society, you know, kind of values where we all play by the rules. They just didn’t. And they realized they were wildly affected. A small group that’s willing to use that type of violence is, is there, you’re seeing it in, in the Nordic countries right now. The rapes have gone through the roof. It used to be with rape that 75% of rapes, the woman would have some sort of a relationship to the raper, you know, some sort of family friend, something like that. It completely flipped in the last decade to where now it’s the other way around. 75% are done by unfamiliar attackers because of the influx coming from countries that just have very different, they’re not, they’re not assimilating. We, we for some reason, don’t we, we, we, we had this response to them where we thought we had to honor the very lifestyles and, and thought processes that caused them to leave their countries.

Tim Larkin
32:07

And we had, we had to do this thing where we couldn’t, we couldn’t tell them that, hey, that’s not, you know, that’s not acceptable here. You know? Sure. And our, we, we would just, we, we did it for, for well-meaning absolutely ridiculous reasons. And we’re paying the price for that right now. Right now we’ve got a lot of militated military aged men from various countries, not Mexico and not the traditional migrants that are coming across the southern border who are coming across our southern border right now. And it’s, it’s, it’s a very unique situation and no, no real monitoring’s being done. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s concerning. But again, I don’t want to be a chicken little, but I do think that this year is gonna be an incredibly challenging year. You know, I, I think the potentiality for people to overreact and get triggered and get emotional is gonna cause some really poor decisions to be made with people.

Tim Larkin
33:01

And so it’s, my goal when I train everybody is to not, you know, my, my goal is I understand we wish the world was a certain way, but it’s my job to teach you to operate in the world that we have and the potentiality that we have. And that’s where understanding the tool of violence and understanding how to navigate it is so important in this day and age. Because so many people have allowed, especially with the social media, you know, all of that only continues to become popular. And the, the only engagement they get is if they pit people against each other. And we’ve done a really good job of that. I, I can’t think of a time in my lifetime where politics, you know, people’s political opinions became such a, you know, a, a touch point for everything, right? Like I, I grew up, I don’t even think I knew the politics of most people when I grew up ’cause it wasn’t that primary thing.

Tim Larkin
33:56

But now we’ve, we’ve really been able to divide ourselves. And of course this year is gonna be crazy. Yes. Yeah. With, with what we’ve got and potentially violent. Again, you know, there’s some unthinkable things. I mean, I remember in 2020 you had the mom, I believe it was in, I don’t know if it was Texas or Seattle, where she got stuck on the highway surrounded by a mob called 9 1 1 and was told nobody was coming. Mm. You know, and we’ve had situations like that. So understanding, you know, understanding how to navigate in a world like that, you know, is absolutely critical. And more critical is to understand the potentiality for situations like that and being able to navigate and avoid them, you know, is really key. Listen, I, if, if people come and train with me, they’re gonna learn how to do things to the human body that are really, you know, in all normal sequences, it would be just unthinkable to have to, to break the human body in, in order to protect yourself from a predator like this.

Tim Larkin
34:58

But what that does is it shows you truly what the worst case scenario could be in your life. And you end up making much better decisions in your day-to-day life. So that, that’s just one of the big things that I can’t emphasize enough because we get emotional, especially there’s something about getting behind a car wheel, you know, that people just, they get, they, they just completely change their personalities completely change. And I can’t tell you the number of people that come up to my training as a result of some sort of a road rage incident that went horribly wrong for them. Mm. They got away with it. They’re just one in the news. Yeah. They one in the news, they, i in, you get away with it. It’s, it’s, it’s that sleeping in your head with railroad track, you get away with it, you get away with it, you get, and then you do to that one person that just, now they’ve run you off the road and they’re physically coming towards your car. You know, I, I can’t tell you how many people have ended up in classes because of a scenario like that where they realized just by the grace of God that got out of it, but they had no skillset to deal with anything like that.

Emily Richett
35:53

Right. Well, there was just one in the news, a mom real, what a sad story. A mom, I guess, you know, flicked off a car and they drove up alongside and threw some shots in the window and it killed her child in the backseat. And that was, I just saw that one in the last week or two weeks on an, you know, Instagram. But don’t you think part of it too is we’ve created this social media culture where we’ve got these keyboard warriors that get so bold and brave that never before will we ever say the type of things that we say to one another that we will say on Instagram or on a post. And that we’re so quick to be able to judge and to argue and to be brave online. And that, I think some of that it must be trickling over into our culture, into especially people are out, they’re having a few drinks and words are said or exchanged, like things can escalate so much quicker because we’re living in kind of like a fake world on social media.

Emily Richett
36:48

You have some great tips about, for instance, with your car and parking like we do see, it’s, it was like taken right out of the news. I’m a former news reporter, so I always saw these like recycled old, old terrible news stories that would come up, like tips like park on the other side of the parking lot. So you get your steps in and you’ll be on your way to health. And you’re saying, Don, forget that. Don’t listen to that park close. Well, so Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire, I don’t know if you know who he is, he was on a podcast and they, it was a couple minutes long, there’s a clip where they said, you see me leave my, my cart, I don’t return it to the, the cart corral. What do you think of me? And of course he’s like, I’m judging you.

Emily Richett
37:24

I’m thinking all these terrible things. It was, it was kind of comedy, you know, for me as a mom, that’s one of the most vulnerable transitions is when I have like an infant, a toddler, I’m getting them strapped or riled from the car seat going into the store coming out. Now it’s all of a sudden it’s dark. I’ve got my groceries in the carts now I’ve gotta get them back in while my, you know, my, my back is out to the world as it’s dark and I’m trying to get them back into the car seats. I still gotta get the groceries into the back and then I look and the corral is like all the way down the, the lane or something. So that is such a vulnerable moment. So I made a simple comment and I just said, a free pass to moms with small children.

Emily Richett
38:01

Meaning not all the time, not don’t be a jerk and leave your cart all the time, but there have been plenty of times that I have suddenly felt unsafe by the time I have to go and unload my groceries, put my kids in the car, and then to leave them even for a moment, there are other cars nearby you people lurking, you name it, there’s plenty of reasons why you might wanna leave it. The hate, the, the name calling people called me lazy. I, I’m pathetic. I couldn’t believe it. And it was so good to see in your book that you reaffirm things like it’s safety first. You know, don’t listen to some of these, you know, warriors on the internet who might make you feel bad if, you know, if you need to leave your cart politely to the side. That’s what you do. We’re taking our information from the wrong places. We’re worried what people will think of us because we saw that post where everyone was bashing on the woman who said that it’s okay to leave your cart if you feel unsafe. It’s like we can’t let those things cloud our judgment when it comes to our survival.

Tim Larkin
38:59

Yeah. And, and you, you know, you were willing to risk criticism, you’re willing to risk social awkwardness. And that’s what I tell people all the time. I go, if that’s all you have to do, then you know, that’s great. So let’s put, let’s look at that situation. You decide, you know what, I don’t want people judging me. So I take, I’m gonna take the cart back. And that’s when it happens. That’s when the attack happens. You get attacked. They take, they take you in and everything. And I always just ask people about the three day rule, meaning three days from now, the action that you took, if you found yourself either six feet under or sitting in a jail cell, would you tell yourself that’s the only decision you could have made? That was it. And would you, would you live with that decision? And very few things meet the three day test.

Tim Larkin
39:53

When you, when you do to that point, you’re not even gonna remember the fact that you left your cart three days from now or that that guy gave you the dirty look for doing so when you drove off or any of that. And yet you’re there for your child, your family, and everything on that plate. And you have to have that, that idea. You look at somebody and they just, they just look off and you make a judgment call. You go, you know what, I’m not gonna go over there. I’m not gonna, you go in or your elevator door rope opens up, you don’t feel comfortable with the guy that you see in the elevator and you let it go. You know, these are the things that just that that willingness to feel a little awkward or to feel judgemental at that point or whatever social things that are going through your mind.

Tim Larkin
40:37

Don’t let it override the feeling that the non-verbal and women are really are in tune to their non-verbal cues. You know? So, you know, something is telling you something’s wrong. Let that be the priority and that’s the reason you make the decisions. And worst case scenario, okay, you know, you overreacted or it was something there, but you’re still alive, you know? Yeah. It’s, it’s one of those things that just, I, I think it’s crazy that people, that people don’t understand the potentiality for violence and just by taking little steps, leaving my cart and driving off with my child who is in the car seat, you know, that, that, that’s my priority. My priority is to go there, not to put the cart back in the carousel.

Emily Richett
41:21

Well, you have a whole section on trusting your gut. We, as the mama bears by nature is our biological instinct. It’s there by design, but I think it’s really been clouded over the last few years, especially as there is all this emphasis on being nice, being, you know, kind, being politically correct and acting a certain way that we don’t wanna be judged or seen as not those things by taking action. Like you said, when you start to learn about firearms, you’re learning a whole new level of situational awareness and preventing yourself from ever having to use your firearm because we know that that’s not going to end well. It’s either going to be a lethal decision or a very complicated legal one. It’s, it’s going to be very difficult. And it seems to me in reading about your training, that your training is almost similar in that way.

Emily Richett
42:12

You’re not training people how to sit around and play in the gray area and maybe do a little bit of pushback to be sure, well maybe now he’ll go away. You’re training people so that they’re making that decision. It’s go time. My life is in danger and I’m given this all I’ve got. So you really seem to prepare people for that time leading up to it to do all we can to avoid being in that moment where we have to make that go time decision because it’s, it’s not going to be a good outcome once we’ve, we’ve gotten to that point. Right?

Tim Larkin
42:47

Yeah. Well one of the statements that I’m known for that that’s kind of like almost a tagline for us is violence is rarely the answer. That’s the first part of the statement. It’s the second part of the statement. That’s the really interesting part, you know, but when it is, it’s the only answer. And that’s the uncomfortable part for people. And that’s what I specialize in. When is the, when would it ever be the correct time to use violence? And it’s a very rare occasion and it, it’s actually a very simple process. It really comes down to choice. If you have choice, it’s not the right time to use violence. You know, it’s, when you’re devoid of choice, it’s when you’re facing imminent, you know, grievous bodily harm. The only tool now you, you, whatever decisions you could have made prior to that point, those are no longer relevant.

Tim Larkin
43:34

You know, you, you, those opportunities, you already frittered those away. Now the only thing that’s gonna get you out of this is using the tool of violence. And so it’s a very clear choice on when to do it. And so I distinguish between antisocial, you know, antisocial aggression, which is what most of us respond to, you know, like the road rage and the guy that cuts you off and flip ’em off and it’s verbal and you know, threats of violence, but nobody actually really does it to, you know, asocial violence, which is really, it’s devoid of communication most of the time. It’s usually somebody who’s avoiding, you know, making any sort of eye contact with you. They’re coming in and they’re, you know, wholly set on using physical violence against you. And it’s a very different approach. And once you understand the differentiate differentiation between two, and we immerse you that in that during our trainings.

Tim Larkin
44:26

’cause that to me is the most important thing. When you understand how to understand a social, when all of a sudden communication, normal communication isn’t happening anymore and you feel really uncomfortable, that’s when you know, you know, it’s either the time to use violence or it’s a great time if you have an exit to take the exit during that time. And honing that in that is the one skill that people that I’ve trained over the last couple of decades, they’ve all said the same thing. They go, I recognized a social and I took action. Either I got out of there or I had to unfortunately use tool of violence, but there was no wiggle room there. They understood, you know, when to do it. And the other side of it is what I told you earlier where they come back to me and say, Hey, the old me would’ve used, would’ve participated in antisocial aggression and I didn’t, I did this instead and I got myself out of there.

Tim Larkin
45:16

And so it’s just, it’s, you end up, the more, the more you understand the tool of violence and are trained in the, the, the tool of violence, the more peaceful your life is. It’s, it’s such a counterintuitive thing. Yes. But the people that I know are the best at using the skill sets of violence are usually, and when I talk that, other than I’m taking out like the prison population and you know, your, your career criminals, but citizens and, you know, good people in our society that are very well trained and use of the tool of violence are usually the most peaceful, fun, hilarious people. I mean, some of my special operations buddies who are at literally the highest level, I would trust them to hang out with my kids during the day and just, they’re just great guys. Yeah. You know, and they know how to interact with little kids and they also know if it’s time to use it, they’re the first guys to go

Emily Richett
46:01

And Wow. Yeah.

Tim Larkin
46:02

It’s just a different skillset. I know very many women trained the exact same way.

Emily Richett
46:07

I think it makes a lot of sense. Like you said, it’s counterintuitive and people don’t look at it always in the right light. ’cause same thing with my book or podcast. People think, oh, preparedness. Like that’s all just fear based flip, flip that and think, well, if you’re prepared, if you’ve prepared yourself mentally, physically, you’re ready to face whatever comes your way, that’s when I can then be at ease and be calm and have that confidence that comes with it. Now if I’m not prepared, I feel like I’m not ready. If I found myself in a situation, I wouldn’t be prepared at all. Well then I’m always going to be on edge. I’m always going to be a little bit nervous. So I love what you’re doing. If people are listening right now, moms that they’ve heard this and they think, okay, I am realizing there’s a lot I don’t know and I need, i, I wanna learn. How can we learn more from you, Tim? Of course the book is a great place to start. And if you read the book, I think I was only a couple chapters in and I was like, how do I work with Tim? Like, I, like how do I go learn this stuff with Tim and I know you have a couple options for us.

Tim Larkin
47:06

Yeah. You know, the best way for people, if they like the, the subjects that you and I are talking about, I provide, I survive violence.com. I provide a, just a, a newsletter that basically has 11 modules in it right away. Free. There’s no, listen, I would love everybody to be a customer obviously or do that, but I really think it’s big. First I have to educate you, you know, is this the right approach for you? And if it is great, you know, we can talk about you getting a book or, or doing something. But if nothing else, these 11, 11 modules will really cause you to think and just also evaluate how you are living your life and can you make better decisions. So, you know, I believe in education first, so that would probably be the best place to do it. If you google my name, you’ll, you’ll get all of my other sites that you can get me at.

Tim Larkin
47:51

But really survive violence.com is something that you get an instant PDF you know, that’s it, it’s just nothing there. And we don’t, we don’t spam you with a lot of, you know, other sales offers or anything like that. So I I I try to go there first because this is a difficult subject. Listen, you know, violence is something that really, it’s the easiest thing to avoid. And so what I wanna do is I wanna make it palatable for people. I want them to understand that, hey, it’s okay to look at the subject. It does not make you violent, nor does it mean you have to use violence in any way, shape, or form. But to understand it, it takes away that 800 pound gorilla that’s always in the room because you’ve never looked at the tool of violence. And yet women, especially you guys are always, you’re always aware of the potentiality for violence whenever you got into any new situation. So why not take a little bit of time, educate yourself so you know what to respond to and what not to respond to.

Emily Richett
48:44

Yeah. Well you call yourself, you said, I’m like Gandhi with a nuclear weapon is one way you refer to yourself in that way, which I love that. What a just kind of a funny visual there, but also a very powerful one. Yeah,

Tim Larkin
48:59

Well the idea is, you know, I I, I actually using a variation that for a new book, but the idea is the tool of biopsy is really your own personal nuclear weapon. And so then who do you want in charge? You wanna basically make yourself a Gandhi or a Buddha where, and the reason I use that is just not from a religious term, but just that is avatar for a very ethical, peaceful approach to using this, this horrific weapon. But when it’s needed, it’s needed. And so that’s kind of what I try to do. I want you to live like that, that person, but I also want you to have that nuke, you know, because you know, God forbid if you need it, it’s the only thing that’s gonna work. And so learning to balance your life that way is, is really the, the key. And that’s what I try to do.

Emily Richett
49:44

We don’t want the, the jumpy, the jittery, the overly fearful person with that power. We want the calm minded, oh, look at that pup coming in. Alright, well I’ll let you get to it. Thank you for sharing so much of your time and your wisdom here with us today. I’m going to link to your site there where we can get on your email list, get those modules. And I know though if people are really ready to dive in, you have courses that will show them like where on the body those specific areas to attack and they could even come out. You, you have a whole facility in Vegas, right? Yes, we do.

Tim Larkin
50:14

Yeah, we do Vegas. And we’re gonna start offering, now that Covid finally has passed, we’re gonna, yeah, we’re gonna start doing our travel training again too, in other parts of the country and also overseas.

Emily Richett
50:23

Well, Tim, I end every show. I don’t know how much of a prepper you are, but I end every show with it’s go time. You’ve gotta get your bug out bag and you’re out of there. You’ve got all your essentials, your family, everything you need. What is one other thing you can’t live without?

Tim Larkin
50:37

It would probably be a my grandfather’s, my grandfather’s set of cuff links that he had just, he was, he was a seminal, you know, person in my life. He kind of what the subject we’re talking about, he was the first one to introduce it. He was such a, just such an amazing guy, meaning just well dressed, very cultured in there, but understood that hey, this is human nature and this is there. And so his, whenever I get to wear his cuff links, it always reminds me to be that person, you know, and, and, and to balance the two. So for me, that would probably be, from a personal thing, that would be something that I’d probably wanna bring with me.

Emily Richett
51:14

Wow, that’s really sweet. Thank you again, Tim, for, for sharing. And everyone go check out the show notes so you can connect with Tim and, and get his guide. Thank you. Thanks

Tim Larkin
51:23

Emily.

Emily Richett
51:24

Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard, will you do me a favor? Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And could you rate the show? You just click on those little dots in the corner to go to the main show page and then scroll down and fill in those stars. Last, don’t forget to take action. Remember, a self-reliant lifestyle is earned with little daily steps that add up to big action. Thank you for being here. Until next time, stay safe out there, mama Bear.

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