Download The Podcast MP3

She’d been assaulted twice before.

And it was about to happen again.

But this time she had the tools.

She was loading flowers into her car… when the hair on the back of her neck rose. A voice said, “Do you need help?” And then he grabbed her waist and picked her up off her feet.

In this situation, violence WAS the answer. “This is a key mindshift people need to take for their own self protection,” Tim Larkin said. Tim’s an American self-defense expert, the founder of Target Focus Training, and author of the “New York Times” bestselling book “Surviving The Unthinkable.”

Humans are vulnerable. Unless, we learn to defend ourselves…

“The side of the neck has two nerves, an artery and a vein. So you can interrupt blood flow. You can cause a vasovagal response where the person faints,” Tim said.

The woman threw her elbow into the man’s neck.

“And she essentially cause the vasovagal. Because the man dropped her. And he started to fold down.”.

She jumped on his knee and separated all his  cartilage. I tried not to imagine what that’d feel like. (I failed.)

But the man was no longer a threat.

I feel like I could be that woman. She wasn’t bigger than her attacked. She wasn’t faster.  Or stronger.  She used what Tim Larkin taught her. And it saved her life.  

“Violence is very transactional for criminals,” Tim said. “It’s their source of currency. And so they have to get it right. They can’t afford to have opinions, they have to get results. And so that type of thinking is actually extremely useful when you look at your own self protection. When they look at someone who’s bigger, faster and stronger they don’t see bigger, faster and stronger, they see he has a throat like me, he has knees like me and he has eyes like me.”

“How did you learn this?”

Tim went and talked to the heads of prison gangs, members of the mafia and drug lords running million dollar drug businesses from jail. He learned how they think.

I feel like we live in this society where there’s rules of etiquette, but there’s not really rules of etiquette when someone’s trying to kill you.

Crazy things happens everyday.

I want to learn how to be more aware of my surroundings.

And I want to do it by getting just 1% better a day. (By taking small steps each day…anything you do, to get better at protecting yourself.)

We’re all vulnerable to violence.

But we can be taught to overcome.

Links and Resources

Also Mentioned

Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:

Follow me on Social Media: