A Guide to Violence and Self-Defense.

hi everyone nice to see you again it's Michael schrimmer it's time for another episode of the Michael Schumer show brought to you by wondrium this is the teaching company's new name for its streaming service that you can listen to all their great content engaging educational short form videos long-form courses tutorials how-to lessons travelogues documentaries and more streamed right into your phone like here's one uh that just I was just scrolling through the app and there's every time I go there there's a new course it's not a shade it's like every day this one's called a new history of the American South I know a lot about history of the American South I've took courses on that before but as new as you know the Confederate flag still waves in some places taken down in other places very controversial what in the world does that stand for why were all those statues from the Civil War still there in the night 20th century what so let's look at this uh this is 12 30 minute lectures the geography of the American South very different from the geography of the American North also populated by different people from Europe in terms not not the Native Americans that's a whole nother course the world of slavery slavery became how slavery becomes American the southern colonies take root the southern states and the new nation War Uprising and Southern solidarity the birth of the cotton South Evangelical faith in the South arguments forward against slavery and so on the life in the slave South 24 lectures the end of the war and slavery reconstruction and all that uh in the late 19th century now we're into the 20th segregation lynching and disenfranchisement and on and on it's a dark history that we should all learn um not the 1619 project not the 1776 project just you know it's okay to have complexities in history and that's one of the things I enjoy about one dream is they give these uh professionally produced courses taught by the world's leading experts in the field that give you all the Nuance it's never simple black and white anyway check it out one dream if you do it through the show uh onedream.com Sherman you get two years for the price of one really I'll just pause there just hit pause boom go over to well you have to listen to this onedream.com and then subscribe two years for the price one come back and then hit play to listen to the next episode of the show thanks for supporting the show thank you to one dream for the support of the show much appreciated here's our next episode I'm your host Michael Shermer the publisher of skeptic magazine get your latest issue on economic matters at your local Barnes Noble or independent bookstore or any of the chains that carry it or go to skeptic.com magazine and you can order it there either the print edition we're still in print in fact we're Four Color throughout how cool is that look Easter Island oh meteor impacts okay uh and or digital of course you can read the magazine on your um on your phone on your iPad or whatever you prefer and if you care to support the podcast you can do so through the skeptic society which is a 501c3 not profit so your donations are tax deductible go to skeptic.com donate and that's what sponsors the show primarily okay my guest today is Matt Thornton who's been teaching functional martial arts for more than 30 years he holds a fifth degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is organization straight Blast Gym has more than 70 locations worldwide and has produced Champion MMA fighters as well as world-class self-defense and law enforcement instructors he lives with his wife salomi and their five children in Portland Oregon his new book here it is the gift of violence practical knowledge for surviving and thriving in a dangerous World nice to see you Matt it's been a while since it's been a while thanks for having me on here it's it's good to see you too yeah I like wising congratulations on the book I really loved the book course I blurbed it so I guess I must have read it long ago when it was in manuscript form it was good to revisit it and so let's do this let's talk theoretical about um violence and the evolution of violence and why it's there and so on and look at some of the different theoretical issues about how to make a decline even further and then the Practical ones what can listeners take away from your training um to protect themselves and their families how's that sound that sounds good yeah before we do that though you start the first chapter with some autobiographical material which I I found quite interesting so give us a little bit of background how did you get into this where'd you grow up and were your parents and so forth yeah I grew up in a little town called Hollister California which most people don't know about I think it's probably most famous because the Hell's Angels took it over uh of a long time ago they made a movie about it with Marlon Brando uh but I grew up there my dad was police officer and he was Lieutenant of the police department there and my mom was a very dedicated job's Witness so from a very early age I was going to the Kingdom Hall and the Jehovah's Witness meetings and everything four times a week and they are fall for all intents and purposes pacifists so you couldn't be a police officer or join the military or do anything that involved carrying a weapon if you're a Jehovah's Witness on the flip side and I think you know I'm grateful for this that my father wasn't a witness because on the flip side I had my dad very practical man um I would say agnostic maybe atheist not very religious at all didn't really want to contradict my mom but tried to instill his values for me as well and so growing up and talking to the two of them about violence and watching what my father had to go through and hearing what my mother would say there was definitely a some internal conflict about what's right and wrong and eventually when I got into junior high school and I hit that really awkward age and we moved to a larger town I ran into some bullying which happens so many people I think so many people that get into martial arts get in for that reason initially and um my reaction to it was overboard I just went the what I felt inside never changed but I went from feeling fear to just sheer aggression and um it kept me from getting beat up again but it wasn't the long-term solution for violence and that I think maybe was one of the reasons why I was so fascinated with martial arts ever since I saw him I knew they were there I was fascinated and the only other thing I'll say which is kind of fueled my research and my career over the last 30 years is what I was primarily interested in as it relates to martial arts and this is where the skepticism definitely comes in because I was interested in what works in a fight and what doesn't work in a fight I wasn't interested in any of the cultural affectations or the mythology or I wanted to know what works and what doesn't work I wanted to figure that out and that's what started me on my journey and eventually led me to found SBG and and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and all the things that we teach today your uh parental upbringing in half of a Jehovah Witness that's pretty unusual I think Jehovah Witnesses are not supposed to marry somebody outside of the faith or if they do that makes it a little difficult it's discouraged um I don't think you get this Fellowship for it so she wasn't kicked out of the church for it and her whole family were dedicated Jehovah's Witnesses she had three older brothers um and two of them were missionaries so they had both married and gone to live in Hong Kong and South America and places like that so that side of the family was completely embedded in in the church but um yeah you know I never the way it works is if you get baptized as a Jehovah's Witness which you're supposed to do as a young teen so you dedicate yourself uh to their belief system after that if you do something that they consider inappropriate then they can disfellowship you I stopped going when I was about 12. um never set foot in a place like that again and from 13 on and I never got baptized they would ask me but I just didn't feel right doing it and so I'm kind of Untouchable in a sense I'm not actually Jehovah's Witness I'm not a member of their Church there is no disfellowship or anything they can they can really do so they just tend to ignore you how can you stop going doubts um anger doubts watching the people's behavior as compared to what they were talking about doing and preaching preaching and doing and there was a I think it helped in in many ways inform how I how I think and my love for the scientific method and for epistemology and for all things that are practical because I got to see the opposite their version of learning was you'd go in it as you know it's multiple days a week so there's a Tuesday night bible study a Thursday two hour a congregation where you get together and then Saturday you go door to door and then Sunday you have the big services and then also probably go door to door so that's what the typical family is doing and when you go and sit in the church their method of learning is basically you would read a paragraph of the propaganda whatever their interpretation of a particular scripture was and then within that paragraph at the bottom there'd be a question and within that paragraph Was the answer and you were just meant to highlight the answer and then go back and read it back to them and that was what they considered thinking and learning and after a while I started to realize that really doesn't have anything to do with thinking and learning I'm just memorizing and the logic for for the things they're saying just didn't hold up you mentioned you were angry what were you angry about you know running into bullying I think when I was a kid Notting not knowing how to handle it um foreign I talk about this a little bit in the book but if you're younger and you get picked on one of the reasons why I always tell parents and kids at my gym and other places like if they get if they get picked on in school and it and they need to fight back you want the you want them to fight back in every single case you want them to I don't care if they have a uh policy where the kid gets suspended for a week then gets suspended for a week I don't care what the teacher or the vice principal says you make sure that that kid fights back because if they don't fight back and just wind up taking a beating then it's psychologically damaging uh for young boys and it happens all the time and so I was kind of on that Spectrum where I was just taking beatings until eventually I just realized you know I just flip and and started administering them but um all that I think was going on around the same time 11 12 13 and that's when I started to pull away from the church and uh discovered girls and other things like that that'll do it no yeah bullying is pretty common I was bullied I mean pretty much everybody at some point but bigly boys gets bullied but I guess with the Mean Girls Girls do it in their own way that's yeah just as destructive um what do you recommend to parents who say reading your book or or coming to you and saying my kids being bullied what what do I tell them to do I mean short of you know just punch the guy in the face that's hard to do yeah yeah the first thing is to teach the child to be assertive well you begin with by talking about boundaries what's an appropriate boundary what's not an appropriate boundary what people are allowed to do and what people are not allowed to do adults and kids one thing people are not allowed to do is put their hands on you if you don't want them to have their hands on you and they need to be raised with that value I tell a story in the book about my daughter is actually giving a talk at a skeptic's meeting one time a few years ago and uh my daughter was she was about eight or nine at the time and she was sitting in the audience with my wife and there was a guy next to her grown man who kind of put his hand on her shoulder and then she kind of shrugged it off and got a little upset and you know the guy kind of looked at her and I saw the whole thing from where I was because I was on the stage and I viewed it harmless I don't think he was a predator but what made me happy was the way she reacted and the immediate reaction by my wife which was to put her arm around her and completely support her in that and what she was doing and I think she could have learned a terrible lesson had she been told not to do that or that she shouldn't do that so once they have their boundaries in place and they understand those boundaries are important and they have that sense of right and wrong of what other people are allowed to do then it's important to be assertive and assertiveness comes more naturally for some people and not so naturally to others but like anything else in this world it can be trained so you teach the kid to say what they feel out loud and to verbalize that so if a child is running into bullying the first thing they need to do is stand their ground and verbalize and say hey that's not okay hey no you can't do that you talk and it begins with talking and talking in an assertive comp where there's you know eye contact shoulders back and again all these things can be trained and if that's not working then you tell you tell a teacher you tell appropriate administrator and if you've talked to them and told them to stop and you tell an administrator and it continues then you take them down you know you tackle them or you punch them and you put the the beautiful thing about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is the kids that train with me can take a bigger stronger kid put them on the ground control them without hurting them they don't have to just keep punching them in the face and tell that kid to knock it off or they're never going to let them go and it's only going to take one of those incidents and then everybody else in the school is going to leave you alone so um there's there's steps along the way so you're not just starting with punching them in the face but it all begins with those boundaries and learning how to be assertive in a healthy way yeah I remember when my little guy he's seven now he was maybe three or four I think four at the playground and he's he's just a sweet uh sweetest guy and he wants to play with everybody he's very generous so some kid comes over and just takes his toy as he was a car or something and just walks away and and my little guy comes over to me like can you help me here so I said no I just said no just go over there and say that's mine don't ever do that again he said oh okay I mean he didn't know what to say and so I just made that up and he walked over and said exactly that kid gave him back the toy and that was the end of that wow that really works yeah absolutely absolutely so in that sense then violence is a form of deterrence let me get the quote here from your mission of your straight Blast Gym to make good people more dangerous to bad people absolutely you know at the end of the day the world is not gonna uh well let me take a step back big long-term trends of course you've written about this Stephen pinker's written about this are good and that every generation seems to there's there's exceptions and spikes and things like that but every generation seems to be a little less violent than the one that came before and I know that the life I live with my wife and my kids is totally different from the level of violence that my many of my ancestors had to to deal with but having said that it's never gonna I don't think it's ever going to completely go away and we're not going to wake up tomorrow and all of a sudden America or any other part of this world has all become magically safer and there have always been bad people walking Among Us people that if they see someone uh vulnerable and open and somebody that they can hurt they will do it if there's no consequences or anybody else around and so the only way and the best way to stay safe in those situations is to be dangerous and if you're dangerous then they're likely to leave you alone and and long-term consequences of training in a combat sport so it's not a martial arts book in the sense that there's no pictures and I'm not I'm not talking about that that would be a different book but I do talk about what works and what doesn't work in a fight and how to find a place and how to train in a way that is going to work practically for people so people decide to take up training the recommendations of how to do that are in the book but what I I'm always advocating for Combat Sports the martial arts that work the things that work against a resisting opponent are sports they're Judo they're boxing their Brazilian Jiu Jitsu their Muay Thai and the thing all those Sports have in common is an opponent process uh and a liveness and that is the the martial arts epistemological version of the scientific process and if you remove that it won't work but because Sports care about the results because people want to win they maintain that kind of form of meritocracy and because of that they're all they're all valuable if somebody just fell in love with Judo or somebody fell in love with boxing by all means just go train that particular combat sport one of the long-term consequences of training for a few years is you also start to carry yourself naturally in a way that's just going to be more assertive and and more aware of your environment and look like uh less of a Target and predators all predators School shooters no matter what everybody looks for the weakest right they're lazy and they're going to go to the most vulnerable place um before they attack and so if you look like you're not even capable of necessarily beating them but look like somebody who will put up a fight look like somebody who's not going to be easy it's going to make noise it's going to make it hard they're going to move on to someone else and as we talk about in the book and Studies have shown they're really good they being predators are really good at at thin slicing and at making really quick judgments within a fraction of a second as to who they think is going to be a good prey and who's not and a lot of that is um subconscious a lot of that goes back to our you know our evolutionary evolved traits but those though that ability that assertiveness that kind of radiate like I'm not going to be an easy target this happens kind of naturally from training in a combat sport you don't have to fake it you don't have to walk around you're just like if you just spent three hours in a boxing gym or you last weekend you were in a judo tournament throwing people around this is the way you walk down the street is going to be a little bit different from somebody who hasn't done anything physical since they were in you know maybe High School how much of what you're doing is also teaching discipline like any sports or athletic activities competition would do I've never done any of the stuff you do but you know I'm really into sports I played baseball and played tennis and bicycle cycling yeah and so on and it's like it really taught me to be strong disciplined um organized and and just just physically stronger I don't know fitter whatever just absolutely it fuels my mind better if I don't work out yeah I think it's clearly in the rest of the day yeah yeah so you know what the one of our priorities and we talk about in the book which was a statement I got from Paul sharp who's another one of our instructors but it's so good you know what we're here to do is make good people more dangerous to bad people but what I've discovered after doing this for 30 years is making good people more dangerous to bad people can also make better people so just the process of all the things you have to go through if we talk about an art like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or any combat sport but I'll talk about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in particular and people who aren't familiar with that that would be the ground fighting portion of what they would see for example in the UFC and it is impossible literally impossible to get decent at that art let alone good unless you have tapped out like Ben's had been submitted having submitted to your opponent hundreds and even thousands of times and sometimes you're going to win and sometimes you're going to lose but the losing isn't just okay the losing is is always trying to remind my students it's an essential part of that process and it's a pure meritocratic system nobody cares if you're a construction worker or you're a surgeon or how much money you make when you step on the mat whether you can do what you're capable doing and not capable of doing will be immediately apparent and you won't be able to fake it any more than somebody can fake speaking French or playing a guitar like it sounds good until someone who actually speaks French comes in the room or somebody hands you a guitar and Combat Sports are just like that and so everything that you get every every piece of skill that you get from the sport you have earned and you've gone through trials you've learned how to become uh more comfortable and very uncomfortable situations and absolutely those lessons carry over where don't they carry over I mean they become part of who you are and they affect your relationships with other people and everything in a positive way yeah all right so let's talk about the evolution of violence why do we have violence wired into our nature what was its purpose in the first place yeah I start with that in chapter one and and I think it's important to remind people that you know we're animals and just like every other animal violence it can be an Adaptive trait and our ancestors um weren't just okay at avoiding violence many of them were actually good at administering violence as well you know all of our ancestors I'm sure if we went through our that unbroken chain of success that each of us has and we forget how amazing that is because the others have all died off but all of us have had ancestors who've had to murder and fight and go to war and do things like that as part of who we are and I don't see that changing so violence is as intrinsic to our nature as animals as reproduction or Sexes and just like we see when we talk about sexuality or reproduction sometimes people take extreme views on it that are not so helpful so they'll demonize and repress it on one end like the pacifists I talk about in the book and on the other end you'll have people who will turn it into a fetish and romanticize it and use what I call voice speak which is a lot of kind of male bravado or round violence which you might see in a Hollywood action movie that type of view of violence neither of those I think are healthy and so since this is part of who we are and this is part of what we have inside I think logically most of us should seek to have a healthy relationship with the topic and a healthy relationship is not going to fetish fetishize a romanticized violence and it's not going to demonize or repress violence I think we have to look at violence for what it is see it for exactly how it is and then get back in touch with that part of ourselves that our ancestors have okay so here's how I think about it this is what I wrote in um uh the moral Arc about the evolution of of violence I start with Richard Dawkins selfish Gene in which he talks about how a cell or body or an organism a survival machine is the Gene's way of surviving perpetuating itself genes that code for proteins that build survival machines that live long enough for them to reproduce will win out over genes that do not genes that code for proteins and enzymes that protected survival machine from assaults such as disease help not just the organism to survive but the genes as well survival reproduction flourishing this is what survival machines do by their very nature it's in our Essence to strive to survive the problem is that survival machines scurrying around in say a liquid environment like an ocean or Pond will bump into other survival machines all of whom are competing for the same limited resources quoting Richard to a survival machine another survival machine which is not its own child or another close relative is part of its environment like a rock or a river or a lump of food but there's a difference between a survival machine and a rock a survival machine is inclined to hit back if exploited and then Richard continues this is because it too is a machine that holds its Immortal genes and Trust for the future and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them so in a way violence then just begins at that most basic level that absolutely that somebody else will try to exploit you not because they're evil or they hate you just that's what they're programmed to do that's exactly it I couldn't couldn't possibly say it better than that it reminds me as well when I begin the process to write this book I sent a questionnaire I had about 100 questions and I sent them to maybe 100 and some odd people who all had extensive experience with violence and I would ask different questions in there but I was curious what they thought about what what still bothered them what questions they had about the topic and one of the best answers I got back which lends itself to the title of the book The Gift of violence which is a bit provocative and people of course ask why it's a gift came from uh former Navy SEAL friend of mine who said very simply what greater gift can you give someone in Freedom from exploitation by physical means and that's exactly right and so the work you know power real power in our world has always belonged to people who can threaten security or take security and that's where it all begins we have to have a base there that we can keep ourselves in the ones we love safe yeah I also wrote about um Christopher baume's research on hunter-gatherer groups that use uh deterrence and first they start with gossip and then deterrence and various means all the way up to Capital Punishment to deal with bullies and Free Riders yeah so one question is how come natural selection didn't select out all the Free Riders bullies Psychopaths and and just nasty people that don't like to play by the rules is we don't have that we still have that like maybe one to three percent psychop Psychopaths people are just naturally violent um and and why isn't it zero yeah that's a great question and I'm not sure I know the answer to that but um what I would say is there are times when it is of an effective strategy there's no there's no way you can get around that there are times when it's definitely an Adaptive strategy when homicide will will work for example to solve particular problems and in today's evolved Society where we have um our our culture and we've seeded that to law enforcement and we have police and we have all those things it's not a good strategy for Success you know crime doesn't really pay and and anybody who's extremely violent is probably going to have a miserable life eventually and they wind up in prison for the rest of their life especially now in 2023 but short term for people who are just thinking very very short term and one of the things with that prefrontal cortex and people that tend to be extremely violent especially if they're reactive aggressive people is a lack of impulse control so they're not thinking about their lack of self-awareness a lack of impulse control a lack of empathy in a sense that they don't care or try and put themselves in the shoes of their victim and when you put all that together they're not going to be thinking about what's going to work in the long run they're just going to go for what they can get how you can get something immediately now and so I think as long as there's people out there who have that wiring where they just have to have what they have to have in that moment then we're going to have violence we're going to have people using that strategy even over long term it may not work and the other thing I would say to that too and I talk about this a little bit in the book but violence is also a way that men wind up having sex you know and if if you if a culture values being aggressive and frightening off any other predators of prey around are being skilled in violence or at least appearing to be skilled in violence and that is rewarded with more opportunities to procreate than what do we think is going to happen in two or three generations and so and that gets you know I say violence is intrinsic to our nature and deep down it's both for men and women and there's a long history of women who would choose violent scary Predators as mates for all the reasons that our ancestors could have that would have been a great strategy you know at various times through our Evolution and I think that's still part of it too I think there's a level of sexual selection that goes on especially with the younger kids who are just entering into maturity and they're 12 or 13 and they can't think of anything else and then they get rewarded with more attention from women and from girls for those violent actions they're going to commit those violent actions but here you probably mean women selecting for dangerous men men that can control their violence they don't want them to be violent but they don't want to be violated by other men and a dangerous man who loves them and protects them then will stand up to the dangerous men danger to the women yeah I think that's absolutely the healthy version of it but just like anything else I think that there's a shadow side to it too where you know there is a small selection of women who I think actually would choose somebody who's a violent person and maybe not even understand or that about themselves but um I don't think overall I think you're absolutely correct but I think sometimes those things get just as animals those things get wired the wrong way and they wind up those impulses wind up coming out in a way that's not going to be healthy or productive Oh you mean so like rape most men are not rapists no but but it's not zero right and so the the bum's answer to the question I asked you uh it gets to another passage you had in the book voting I think it was Jerry Coyne not survival of the fittest it's the Rival of the fitter yeah evolution is not natural selection is not designed is to be perfect just good enough to survive and get our genes into the Next Generation so bum's answer is you can have a relatively stable Society that's successful with the one to three percent psychopath bullies Free Riders and so on if it was 25 or 50 it would fall apart and you'd have to do something but we can all kind of grind along with a handful of these people over here that's what we have police for or you know dangerous people to handle that but it's never going to be zero right and so knowing that kind of allows us to say oh all right yeah okay so this is why it's happening there's kind of an underlying logic to violence mostly it works well but you can't it's not going to be perfect right it's not not it we're not striving for Utopia because that's not possible yeah and bob hair when he was been writing about Psychopaths and sociopaths and things like that as well even though that percentage exists the vast majority of that percentage is not violent either and they I think they've done studies where you know some of them can become very successful stock Brokers or certainly my guess would be politicians things so that you know why did why is that one percent exist I think that one percent exists under because under the right circumstances the traits of being a sociopath can probably you know benefit the organism in some cases you know uh Kevin dutton's book uh I forget the titles they put positive psychopathy something like that uh he's a psychologist so he studied psychopathy uh he agrees with what you just said basically most of them are they're in competitive jobs where you want somebody who is fearless uh doesn't care what other people think you know the CEO of the Fortune 500 company whose job it is is just to make as much money for his shareholders and uh and so on and uh and Kevin also worked with the special forces in the UK he has this great story of of uh you know like the final screenings that they've already screened out you know 99 of the people can't do this job uh and but but in the final test they they got this guy in there he's blindfolded he's face down on the ground and they fire up this big truck engine next to him and then they take a tire that they've rolled over here and they roll it right up to his face and like right up on his head to see if he flinches right and the guy that doesn't Flinch is like that's the badass we want he passes right that's who you want when you're going to send somebody special forces into some foreign country that's dangerous yeah you know not somebody who's empathetic and sympathetic and and kind and soft and so so there's a useful uh role for these kinds of people and most of the time there is I'll tell you a funny story about that too it actually kind of made me feel better after I heard this but um I was talking to some of the guys who were in The Seals and they were the trainers and they're looking for you know that level of resilience and toughness and all that as you go through training but they also have an eye out for someone that might just be a true sociopath or true psychopath because it's not in anybody's interest to teach them those skill sets and um it's kind of an unspoken thing they have uh between them but when the instructors would find somebody that they thought was that was a true psychopath they were usually great so they were doing super well and all the tasks they were performing at the top of the class but the instructors are looking at each other and like do we really want to train this person I don't think this is somebody we want to train so they have one little portion of the test that's off camera where they can choose to fail someone if they decide to as it relates to a drowning incident and when that person got to that point that person would always fail out and it's not written and it's you know there's you're not going to find any regulation somewhere but it's kind of an Unwritten code that they had it actually after he told me that story and I started to think about it I was actually quite grateful that The Men Who do that job have that aspect you know thinking that long term and uh it's also going to bring up David buss's research on uh what was his book the murderer next door yeah the murderer yeah here it is um where so he starts off by asking have you ever thought about killing someone and it turns out almost everybody has what was it 80 percent of men and 84 percent 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women reported having had at least one Vivid homicidal fantasy in their life I mean this was astonishing yeah uh and so he he provides some of these uh where for example one man who acted on these fantasies from a group of Michigan murderers who bust studied said he killed his girlfriend because I was deeply in love with her and she knew that it infuriated me for her to be with another guy jealousy is a common motive as evidenced by another case in which a man flew into a jealous rage during sex with his wife according to him she asked him how does it feel to [ __ ] me right after someone else has he strangled her to death in bed the impetus behind jealousy is not hate bus says but love and attachment is in this police confession by a 31 year old man after stabbing his 20 year old wife to death when she confessed to having sex with another man during a six-month separation I told her how can you talk about love and marriage and you've been [ __ ] this other man I was really mad I went to the kitchen got the knife I went back to her room and asked were you serious when you told me that she said yes we fought in the bed I was stabbing her her grandfather came up and tried to take the knife out of my hand I told him to go and call the cops for me I don't really know why I killed the woman I loved her foreign so jealousy is a is a huge trick it would definitely be one of those motives yeah for sure but why would that be so bus argues it's uh mate guarding right if you get cuckold if you're a guy and your job is to get your genes in the Next Generation and you get cuckold and you end up raising somebody else's child that's counterproductive for natural selection right it's all you know the The evolutionary psychology view on all of this and especially violence has always made a great deal of sense to me I you know that's not what the book's about I talk a very little bit about it to try and get to the core of it and then talk about Solutions but David buss's work and the rest of it I mean but also that's why I you know I have to be careful because something can make a lot of sense and then wind up not actually being um the actual driver but I think in this case it is and I think it's pretty obvious you know women need mates that are going to protect them and protect their offspring and protect them from predators and other people and men need to be able to fight off mate poachers and protect their offspring and protect their women and make sure that the other people aren't coming in and stealing their resources by having children with the women that are under their care and um you know it there is a there is a logic to violence most the time there's there's always those horrible circumstances where none of us can wrap our minds around why something happened and that does occur but very often you know it is a logical chain of events that lead up to that violent attack or assault so your book is titled the gift of violence I take it as a play a bit on Gavin uh to Becker's book The Gift of fear and here you know talking about women they you know they are pretty finely tuned to non-verbal language of men around them because they have to be they're just by definition not as strong and big and so forth so they have to women have to be more risk averse than men do yeah one of the things I talk about in the book one of the points behind the book which goes back to Gavin to backer's work and I read when I decided I was going to write a book on this topic I read a great deal for a couple years I read most the material that was on the on the market to make sure that nobody else had written what I was going to say or done it better and by far the best book that I read was the gift of fear and his follow-up book protecting uh protecting the gift about children is also fantastic I think every parent should read that book but his thesis is very simple and that's you know because we're of all primates we have within us these uh I call them Primal instincts um that will let you know when there's a predator or somebody around and in every almost every case you know people the victim of a particular assault or attack will say that at the beginning that they felt it all of a sudden happen and they were shocked and that they were there they were but through asking the right questions you can find out that there's a chain of events that preceded that and the other person the victim themselves often had all kinds of internal signs and signals that they were rationalizing away because they don't want it to be true they're denial they don't want to be think bad of people they don't want to be racist there's a million different reasons but they have this uh internal dialogue trying to rational way rationalize away their instincts and that is extraordinarily dangerous and so one of the things I want people to do is get in touch with those instincts and to listen to those instincts and those instincts like you just said are going to be different in some ways with women for all the reasons that you mention and so one of the things I talk about in the book is if you have a female friend or a wife or a daughter or somebody like that and she tells you that this guy is giving off you know bad signals that she doesn't appreciate you may not notice anything at all I may not see anything at all but anytime a woman says something like that to me I take it very seriously and I and I cast a different you know more careful and pay more attention to that whoever that particular person is because they will definitely notice things that we don't and vice versa so I think it's really important for us to listen to other people when they start talking about that what's the ratio of men to women that come to your gym for training and and what is their motive yeah um I'm proud to say that right now I would say probably between 30 and 40 percent of my gym is female and I have 750 so members in my Portland location it wasn't always like this so you know we've evolved to that point when I when I for most of the first 10 or 15 years I taught I had less than 100 people they were all in their early 20s to early 30s uh all fighting and if you were to walk in you'd see like 20 guys with their shirts off and rash guards and rolling around on the ground punching each other and grappling and it would be terrifying for the average person to walk to the gym you know I have a I have a window in my office where I can see it's one-way window and I can see people walking up to my door here at the gym and for years I would sit here in the daytime doing my work and I would watch people with their training bag in hand um walk through the front door of the gym go right about to open up the door and then they would turn around and walk away and I realized that people are plagued with so much anxiety sometimes people just have terrible social anxiety but also fear about that and so one of the things we really tried to do is create a system where a culture where people will always feel welcome they'll feel comfortable they're not going to be scared to try it because I really do think it's good for everybody and and it works uh and it turns out women love Jiu Jitsu just as much as men one of my coaches here is in his mid 70s and I've got a very successful MMA fight team here as well and everything in between and my wife and my daughter's train and we have kids training and um and as far as how well they do I actually my experience over the decades has been women learn Brazilian Jiu Jitsu actually quite a bit quicker than men the technical aspect of it they're easier to coach women at female athletes in general tend to be easier to coach the male athletes because there's not as much uh ego applied to winning and losing that you have to get past and it can just be more practical you explain something and why something would work and they're like okay and then they do then they do it they don't make that mistake again whereas a male athlete if he thinks he can get away with it against a particular opponent even if it's long term it's going to be a mistake for them will often continue doing it as far as why same same reasons almost everybody that signs up at the gym because we interview everybody and it's not just that my gym but all our gyms around the world we interview everybody when they come in and most people vast majority of people come in because they want to learn self-defense and they want to get in shape but they want to do they're scared and they want to be able to defend themselves and uh if the need arises and that's only that motive is only increased um based on what's happened here over the last three years especially here in Portland where you know our shootings and our homicides have tripled and um the homelessness and violent assaults and attacks in the city all the time that weren't there prior to 2019 and so I even more so but they come in and they they become interested in self-defense they want to try it we have a way of building them up so we're building up weak people rather than weeding them out it's really easy to make strong people stronger the real artists to make weak people stronger and so we work with them we build them up get to a certain point and then what happens most often after six months or a year or year and a half they've fall in love with the sport itself they just fall in love with Jiu Jitsu it becomes cathartic and you know they get stressed if they don't get a role in that week and it also becomes a part of their social culture their friends everything else and then once that happens then they're hooked for life oh I totally understand that if I don't get a ride in I'm just anxious the whole day absolutely and it's made worse by Strava because I can see what everybody else that I follow is is doing that day it's like damn I got to get out there so yeah you know having that social aspect okay but but listening to that inner voice that that kind of instinctive there's something odd about this guy how do you train how do you fine-tune that through training I mean you don't want your your your women uh clients to be Mason every other guy that walks by but on the other hand you don't want them to get sucker punched or whatever but how do you know when you're being paranoid versus you're being accurate yeah I think our instincts are far more um evolved and and much better than most people realize and they're quite accurate um and very sophisticated and that's the what I call Primal instincts the unconscious ones not the not the conscious situational awareness of knowing what to look for now not look for but just that own internal voice and people will begin getting the fight-or-flight response long before they make contact with a particular Predator out in the street and learning to know what that is and to feel it and to listen to it is really all you need to do and so what you have to worry about there is a signal to noise ratio and if you're paranoid and you've got too many thoughts going around in your head rather than being present in the moment of what's going on you're less likely to pay attention to those instincts than if you're not while at the same time if you're walking around with rose-colored glasses on and anytime those instincts come up you want to repress them or you want to ignore them then you will also be in trouble so learning what they are learning what they feel like and just listening to them is really all people have to do in the beginning and by getting educated when we talk about the conscious awareness of what's going on around you things to look for and not look for like what um Gavin Becker calls pre-incident indicators those are fairly easy to teach to people they're pretty common sense is one of my police officer friends that's a coach here at the gym says jdlr just doesn't look right you look at a situation and you're not exactly sure why yet but something just doesn't look right so then you look a little more and you say oh here's somebody why is he wearing a jacket it's 110 degrees outside or why are those two guys in the car parked across from the convenience store even though all the spots in the community things like that and the more people those things are pretty easy to learn and I talk about a lot of them in the book I think I give people all the main ones that they need and once they learn that that will also help because it helps reduce that signal to noise ratio they'll know what what's not paranoia and the things that people you really need to do pay attention to yeah you have a list here in your chapter on the importance of noticing uh to look at the face hands waistline and then back to the face and then the environment yeah that's just the general scanning technique so if I'm looking at someone in the street you know what am I looking for for example someone's walking towards me and the first thing I always I don't want to stare at people but you also don't want to not look at them at all and be afraid to make let them see that you see them sometimes just a predator just knowing that you've clocked them is enough where they're going to pick somebody else so you look at somebody's facial expression and we get so much information from that even just a brief second because we're so good most of us at being able to read all kinds of emotions and intent behind people's expression so you look just for a second then of course I'm just looking are they wearing anything on that person of what's in their hands primates are going to hurt you with their hands and their teeth what are they carrying are they hiding their hands or their hands in their pocket that kind of thing um and then just briefly back up at the face and the reason why I look one more time back there is just to see if they noticed I noticed them and if that made a change in their demeanor and then go about my day and from that point forward you know you can kind of if you're if it just doesn't look right you can kind of keep an eye on them in your peripheral vision and if necessary make space because at the end of the day the physical solution to all violence no matter what kind out of macro level and a micro self-defense level is managing and controlling distance and if you can manage a control distance you can manage to control the conflict and in order to do that you of course have to be aware of what you're supposed to stay distant from making that eye contact without steering is a signal to them I see you I see you I see you just real quick it's not in a way you know it's not in a way that's meant to be provocative or intimidate it's different from if I was looking at somebody and I wasn't you know trying to intimidate them this is a quick look up and down and then that's it you know it takes a fraction of a second yeah yeah my little guy and I were walking uh just through a little Mall here across the street from the office and that's a there's a big five and a CVS there's a lot of people around but there's some woman sitting on the bench she had her cell phone uh but then I couldn't tell if she was talking to the phone or just talking to this guy and she seemed a little out of it and then as Vincent and I walked by she's like says something like you know idiots like staring at us and then so we just get I just ignored her we continued and then my little guy goes why did she say that she sounded so mean and then I thought yeah that's right I want yeah his instincts I think were like there's something wrong with it then when we came back he was really watching her so I put him on my right side myself between him and her and then I kind of eyeballed her and then we just walked straight past her and she was still mumbling you know I couldn't tell what if she's mentally ill you know what's the difference between somebody who's kind of nasty or whatever could be dangerous probably not but mentally ill unpredictable yeah that's the problem when you're dealing with mental illness and you know the reality is just the the and anybody people that don't believe me you know go on a ride along with your local police officers in your department or whatever you're going to see that there's a sizable percentage of the homeless population that is dealing with um severe drug use and or mental illness and I don't know what the long-term social Solutions are to that I do think we need to be we need to be when we see people are going to be a danger to themselves and other people I think we need to get better at being able to put them in places like hospitals where they can be looked after but just the the truth is I can walk out the street here in Portland and walk down a block and there'll be two or three homeless people I know who they are everybody else in the neighborhood knows who they are and they've already assaulted a dozen people we've got a guy here in the neighborhood in my gym that everybody knows and he's attacked like eight people big dude homeless guy sometimes he seems to be okay and he's maybe he's on his medicine sometimes he's not so the big problem with those situations and why they scare people is you can't read them the same way and I think that's what happened in potentially in the Neely situation as well as tragic as that was if you're dealing with a you know a violent criminal actor who's after your wallet or something like that there is a logic to it that you can you can kind of know where that Line's going to be and where it's not going to be whereas somebody is suffering from mental illness they're they're seeing and hearing something completely different from the scene that you're actually in and they might all of the sudden lash out at you and so it can be very scary for people you're talking about the New York Subway Case yeah yeah that's what it sounded like to me is I didn't I don't know and I don't think we have enough information yet I don't have enough information yet to feel comfortable talking too much about it but what from what I've seen it sounds like he got on there he was acting very erratically he was acting in a threatening manner enough so that I think at least half a dozen people wound up calling 9-1-1 and in these three people decided to intervene and it's a tough call because what do you do do you wait until the person actually lashes out there's all kinds of footage we can see out there in the news of you know people in the street just literally just walking by an elderly person or something like that and pushing them in front of a bus or stabbing them cutting them or hitting them with a stick just random violent attacks that are happening to people and how do you know when somebody's going to do that it's very difficult to tell if if they're suffering from mental illness so um that makes everything more complicated the answers are still the same the answers are to be aware of it and to make distance and to keep distance and maintain it but um knowing where to draw that line when it comes to actual physical force can definitely be tougher well because of the outcome his death you know the Marine is now controversial had the had the neatly not died then it would have been oh he's a hero to stop the violence but everything's okay but it's not because he's dead so now what well we don't know and I guess there's more footage still we haven't seen yet that might help but how hard is it to take somebody down put him in a Chokehold and not kill them yeah I get asked I I get asked this quite a bit and I've been asked to be a I've actually been asked to be an expert witness on a number of cases when it comes to things like this and I've always avoided it and one of the reasons why I've avoided it is you know it's very easy for me to say having done Jujitsu for 30 years yes take that person I can hold them down forever there's nothing they're going to really do about it and if I want to put on a choke I can put on a choke and gently put them to sleep and a joke is this is one of the sad things about this too because it's it is of all the ways you can end a conflict if you're dealing with somebody who's who you truly have to put away or they're going to keep hurting you the most Humane thing you can possibly do and the thing that's the most reliable is apply a bloodship you don't have to bash them in the head until they go unconscious you don't have to break their arms you apply blood choke and one one thousand two one thousand before I said three one thousand you mean the carotid arteries here yeah very there's various kinds but a choke where you're cutting off the arteries before I get to three they'll be unconscious one one thousand two one thousand and then they're unconscious and if you let it go they'll wake up which happens all the time around the world and you know grappling academies where we try not to put people to sleep but sometimes people don't tap in time and and uh and they wake up I've never seen it not happen if you hold it indefinitely you can definitely kill them so tactically and technically is there a way that can be done yes here's why I avoid and why I've never wanted to be a witness in those cases the flip side of that is there is no safe way to have a physical conflict with someone and try and subdue someone or deal with them in a fight there's no Safe Way Every Day people die all around the world from getting punched once there's a website one punch knockout I think I can't remember what it was but they track it and often it's because people fall and hit their head but not always and you could hit some I could pick I could take someone down and they could die I could be holding them and they could have state of excited delirium and die and the other people around might think I was the one that did it or that you know the the way I was holding them was responsible so I I really loathe to um second guess people like the marine and the other two men who from all for all intents and purposes it seems to me they were Good Samaritans and what although it was a tragic situation the flip side of that is how many times have we seen people assaulted women raped things like that going on in trains and people just stand around or film it seen that happen over and over again and so encouraging other citizens to stand up for each other that's to me that's not being a vigilante that that's being a a good a good citizen it's what it seems like they did um did he die from the choke I don't know did that did the Marine hold the choke I mean some people have said five minutes I don't know I'd have to see the video on that I don't think I've never seen I believe they let him go when they got to the next stop and I don't think there's a stop in New York that's five minutes away from the other one so there's all kinds of questions I don't know the answer to and I'd want to see the video yeah but you could do everything right and still wind up accidentally killing somebody you know but back to your comment about practicing every day and you've you've done this a thousand times you've Tapped Out you've tapped people that you know thousands of times you're just used to it so the fact that he's an ex-marine well maybe he hasn't grappled with anybody in five years and all of a sudden you're on the ground and you know we you and I can talk about it read about in the newspaper well why didn't he do this well yeah you know you're not in that situation with just massive adrenaline and just forward panic and massive adrenaline Panic everything if you are trained and yeah there's nothing there's no people I think sometimes people have a misconception I didn't serve in the military that there's some extensive hand-to-hand training that you get when you're in a Marines or there's not I mean they have gotten better and there's been uh there's been some people who've really done a great job of bringing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and functional martial arts especially to our special operations soldiers so they get um a healthy dose of Jiu Jitsu but not not what even what to buy the first belt you get in Jiu Jitsu is called a blue belt usually takes about two or three years they don't have anything near that level of training unless they pursue it on their own same thing with police officers they'll get a couple hours literally a couple hours total of how to deal with someone in a hand-to-hand situation and that is it and if they're lucky they'll get a couple hours of training a year and unless they seek it out and I think the smart officers and I can't imagine doing that job and not doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu on a regular basis I can't wrap my mind around that but the vast majority of police officers the vast majority of soldiers the vast majority of Special Operations operators have very very limited amounts of actual hand-to-hand combat and and like I said it's very you know people die in physical confrontation all the time so it's just very hard to say yeah right exactly and also these a lot of the times these cops are just sitting in the car doing nothing so they go from low heart rate resting and then within 30 seconds they're at the you know all-time eye of adrenaline stress and and there can't be much reason and rationality there it's like those descriptions of of a mass public shooting or shootout between the police and a perpetrator with a gun and you read about it and it goes on for pages and Pages it takes like 15 minutes to read the whole account of it then you see how long it lasted you know like six and a half seconds yeah and and and and when it's deconstructed in the courtroom it's like well how come you didn't go left here and then shoot him in the leg instead of what you did it's like what you you can't even ask the question why I mean it's like I wasn't thinking at all that particular comment about shoot him in the leg is yeah that was one of the most egregious things I've seen anybody especially at the level of responsibility that President Biden has say about violence is just such a stupid comment and to be in public service for so many decades and to be making policy on how police officers what they can and can't do and to think that shooting someone in the leg is a viable strategy is deeply disturbing to me so I hope that immediately some AIDS got around him and tried to but I've seen him say it a couple other times since then so it's I'm at a loss on that one yeah and so you know I always wonder why do the police have to respond when the suspect runs you know is it like well if we if we let them go I mean usually often they know where he lives you know they can just go pick him up later like the case of uh I forget the guy's name that was asleep in the Wendy's line a drive-through line in Atlanta I think it was and you got all the video uh the body camera and this goes off for like 45 minutes they're talking to the guy they know who he is and or he lives and then they say well okay we're gonna have to you know cuff you here and then he takes off and then they run him down and ends up shoot you know he's dead well why didn't they just let him go just pick him up tomorrow or something I don't know what the police policy is on these things I don't know different departments have different policies on that and they've they've gone both those things have been tried in different places Chicago under Lori Lightfoot uh put in a policy where they're not engaged in those kind of chases there's a there's a cost either way so I yes you could go pick them up yes you probably know where he lives the the cost that's going to occur to society is if that becomes standard operating procedure for the police is it just going to encourage more violence more Mayhem and then when uh when they get when there's a cop around they're just gonna run they're just gonna take off because they know that they can't be chased and you're going to see what we've seen now this is one of the one of the problems with the shooting him in the leg and these kind of policies that are made about Public Safety where they put feeling good above being right you actually end up doing more harm than good and we've seen that with the BLM movement and what's happened in post-george Floyd what's happened to law enforcement and violence is many cases is triple there's been a doubling of homicides in the black community places like Chicago and Baltimore and St Louis are basically War zones and so there is a price to be paid as well for telling police officers to not be proactive not having officers on the street pulling cards over taking guns out of cars pulling over gang members actually operating as members of the community within that community and instead pulling back has a huge cost to it that's going to be paid in Blood by fellow citizens so um it can be it can be tough to make those kind of decisions at the end of the day in my personal opinion I think the more proactive the police are the safer everybody is but uh and I think that's been proven true and we saw that happen in New York when they cleaned up that City and and and I think that we know what to do we're just at a place right now culturally where um those answers aren't those Solutions aren't politically correct at the moment you have an opinion on the George Floyd um move that the cop made Chauvin put his knee on the back of the neck and is that a legitimate way to restrain somebody should he have done something different can be um I think the main thing in that particular situation so years ago a lot of the Departments made it illegal to hog type people so hog tying is when you have somebody's hands behind their back and their ankles then you connect them so they're belly down and what had happened is people had died so they're laying on their belly and just from laying on their belly especially with stress and all the adrenaline you talked about and then let alone whatever controlled substances are flowing through the bloodstream or fentanyl or who knows what methamphetamine and then they wind up unable to breathe and expand their rib cage and they would die and there's been several uh situations where people have been hogtied and thrown in the back of cars belly down and they died and so the procedure then came became turn them on their side and so what I found unusual about the George Floyd situation is they had him belly down of course there was three officers involved you only really get to see showman from the angle that most people see with the camera but um why they didn't stop and put them on his side sooner I don't know but the again the flip side of that is what was his actual training and from my understanding in that department um what he did and having them Billy down in that particular position was something that he'd been trained to do so that's another question to ask if that's what we're telling the officers to do um we we need to take a hard look at that as well maybe it's not practical to train hundreds of thousands of police or however many there are in the country through your program but that seems like what they need to do the problem is if you don't keep up with it constantly like going to the shooting range with your gun then it's probably not going to be practical a very tiny amount of solid Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training let's say um two hours a month okay 30 minutes a week or an hour or hour a week at most will make a massive difference in how officers handle those situations and it'll be much safer for the officer and much safer for the people being arrested and one of the sad things about what's happened recently is one of the first things to get cut when the budgets of these departments are cut or where they're understaffed because everybody's retiring and no one wants to be an officer anymore whatever the situation is which is happening in LA and Portland and Seattle and San Francisco is the first thing that gets cut is training that's the first thing that gets cut from the budget and even if they do have training in the budget they don't have the officers to be able to rotate out to go and train so I know the officers here in Portland really want to train but they're so understaffed that to pull one or two out during the day or the evening to come in and do some training is taking them directly off the street and directly away from going from 9-1-1 call to 9-1-1 call which is all we have the staff for right now there's no patrolling there's no proactive policing there's none of that we don't even have a traffic division they just restarted it they're the highest level of traffic fatalities ever in Portland last year because they removed the traffic division so everything that has happened has been backwards and made things worse and the easiest simplest cheapest intervention it would have been is to get those Officers Training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu around the country and where that's happened one of our coaches from SBG trains the Pasadena Police Department and and you can look at the data from Pasadena and you see the use of force incidents just drop way down officers being injured drops way down um yeah cases of people resisting arrest drops away all of it everything becomes better and safer even for the attorneys at the city it's less liability so you have to kind of try and get the message out to them that it's a win-win for everybody to have these guys training and do you have an opinion on the use of guns for self-defense a lot of your people come to you for yourself defense do they also have guns what do you recommend about that yeah I'm uh I'm definitely an advocate of the Second Amendment I'm definitely an advocate of people's right to defend themselves um I'm not an extremist on it but I do think it's important and when we live in a country that has more handguns than people I don't think that's going to change tomorrow I think you could Outlaw all guns tomorrow um and then the only people that won't be caring will be the good people which is not going to be good for anybody um so I do think that they can be good uh I carry sometimes my wife carries or you know a lot of my students and other instructors will carry on a regular basis and like anything else you have to be if you're going to carry a tool which is all a gun is whether it's a knife or a gun or anything else you have to really put the training time in with it and you have to be you know very responsible about how you handle situations very responsible about what you allow yourself to get pulled into and not pulled into because now you have a weapon on your person just like with a police officer will say unarmed but there's always a gun involved in an altercation between a police officer and somebody else because it's his own and like happened in the uh in Ferguson if the person reaches for it that becomes a life life or death encounter that battle over that weapon so you need to be able to hold on to that weapon you need to be able to know when to draw and how you need training so as long as somebody's responsible law-abiding citizen and they want to put the time in training I'm all for it I don't think it's uh uh a catch-all solution to self-defense or violence for a lot of different reasons and one of them is a story I tell in the book it's a very sad story but a woman that came to me for training who was in a wheelchair she had very limited movement and she'd been assaulted and groped and pushed over like half a dozen times here in Portland and at first when she told me that I was kind of shocked especially at the time because just statistically it it didn't make any sense but then I realized immediately she's a magnet for for that kind of trash they see her somewhere where there's no wit there's a certain type of human when they see her and there's no witnesses around is immediately going to go over and try and assault her because she looks like she's an easy victim and we talked about her having a gun but the problem was her ability to hold it and even her confidence level it she felt like she would be compromised and with something like pepper spray also not necessarily a bad idea but she's in a wheelchair and how fast can she get around so in her particular situation my advice for her and what I felt the best option was was a dog to get a big dog and have that dog go with her everywhere she goes I hope she did because that would be Kryptonite for that kind of for those kind of predators but so in the right circumstances with the right training and a lot of responsibility I think um handguns can definitely be or firearms in general can definitely be part of the solution yeah I've written a fair amount about this and have largely given up on reducing the gun violence by very much because there's just so many guns yeah a lot of large numbers even if it's just you know point zero zero one percent of people that are whack jobs that's enough you know for every day to be some crazy shooting and you know we're not going to take the guns away and if if if the second amendment was somehow canceled which is never going to happen and they tried to collect the guns you'd have Waco every weekend because people are not going to do that that's another one of those cases that uh I I couldn't figure out why the uh the government responded the way it did you know David used to go he used to go into town yeah fairly regularly to get a haircut go shopping with her why did they just pick him up there why the they knew they were stockpiling weapons you know why would you risk that yeah that was a mess and there was no reason for that to go down the way it did and I think we can all look at that in hindsight and see it I think the sheriff just said he could have just waited till until he came into town and just arrested him there problem solved they had kids inside that compound so yeah when you talk about things like school shootings because I get I'll get asked about that a lot as well you're not going to be able to take guns off the street to prevent school shootings in America you could pass all the legislation tomorrow you want to um if we want to protect schools then we have to handle it the way the same way we handle everything we truly want to protect when we when we truly want to protect something our Courthouse or anything else we control entry and you control entries and exits and that's one of the most important things you can do and it doesn't mean you have to turn a school into a prison but it does mean there has you know I should not be able to go downtown Portland walk in through a side door of a school without any teachers or any other administrators stopping me and asking me for ID and walk down the hallway that shouldn't happen and by controlling access and the entry points I think you can solve the problem a lot look what we did after 9 11. I mean people were talking about arming pilots and putting officers on every flight a lot of Impractical Solutions what did they do they hardened the cockpit doors that was the first thing they did they made it and then they changed the habit of the Pilots so that you know they weren't coming out and going to the bathroom or having flight attendants going to give them coffee you know they put the thing up and then line and then they have a protocol they're coming in and out so that once that door is locked unless they use that protocol for those for the first to go to the bathroom it is locked and you're not going to kick it down when you're flying and we haven't had an attack like that since that was the smartest most practical thing to do yeah people respond to the craziest ways there was also a surge in sales of parachutes that Executives and high-rises could have so they could jump out if their building gets hit by a plane I was just insane all right so you have some other things you could do to re uh to respond things to look for signs of potential attack one they're closing in on you two coordinating their movement with one or multiple other people I guess that you mean that are closing in on you hiding their hands looking out for potential Witnesses self-grooming or weight shifting all right so explain those yeah the the way these guys operate in almost every circumstances very similar so there they pick out a victim they find the victim they either going to attack immediately or they're going to go through some kind of interview process so maybe attend to distract you or whoever they've targeted and when they come over they're going to be fidgeting they're going to be looking around for Witnesses looking around who's watching is there anybody watching right now is there a police officer right there and so there's just kind of like this nervous demeanor and looking around and then grooming is any kind of physical motion you make an attempt to look natural that's not natural so stepping back putting things to do with their hands hands up here so all of that usually proceeds punching the other person in the face or tackling them so they don't just walk up put their hands up and punch but they're they're nervous they're looking and then you see some sort of grooming behavior and very often they'll blade themselves they'll put their strong side back because they're going to hit with that punch and that is the sign where it's time to get physical whether that means getting away or getting close or biting or whatever whatever the circumstance calls for but you're very late in the process with that Predator at that point they're on you and then you will have gone from doubt and worry into true fear which true fear is Gavin to Becker rightly says is a biological feeling you get in the face of an actual threat it's not an imagined threat it's There's an actual threat here in front of you and that that's the point where I think that true fear is going to start to kick in and it should because those are all the things you need you know to be aware of this person has bad intentions and usually they're there to just steal your wallet or or is it just they just want to be violent for violent's sake it depends you know one of the things I I talk about quite a bit in the book is I think anybody who's looked at the data so the first thing I did when I when I went to write this book besides read a lot of the other stuff on the market was look at just the raw data at the Bureau of Justice statistics the FBI the CDC on homicides there's a lot of it available Washington Post database on shootings but I think anybody that just looks at the data just take 30 minutes and go and look at the data over however long a period because it's pretty consistent the last three years to the last 30 years if you look at it and you think about it I think you will draw the conclusion that at the heart of most problematic violence most being the largest category of plurality are issues of immaturity and these are issues of a lack of impulse control self-awareness and empathy the the the most likely time to be attacked in the most likely age for your attacker will be between the ages of 17 and 22. and then there's a massive drop-off as it starts to come to 23 and 24 and it goes down here and about half of what we see especially when we see shootings um fully 50 percent are fatherless young men murdering other fatherless young men over issues of status it's not about a lot of money it's not about not even necessarily about the drug trade it's status you disrespected me you looked at me the wrong way something like that and the solution to that disrespect that's culturally appropriate is violence and then that's what it turns to and that's almost half if you took all the shootings out in a year that are of that category you would immediately cut about half of them off yes there's jealous husbands and yes there's armed robberies that go wrong and there's there's banks that get robbed and people and shootouts and there's drug deals that go that go bad but those are all the little categories of what's left and the the biggest thing and the biggest issue I think we're going to have to deal with as a society and understand is we're going to have to come up with some solutions for that group of young men otherwise we're all going to be in trouble you're the only the only short-term solution to that problem is more police and locking up the repeat offenders because it's a small percentage that population that continually repeats the same crimes but long term and I don't and that's not my book's not a public policy book but long term I think we need to have a conversation about why that's happening and we have to be able to acknowledge that that's happening and um and see if we can come up with some solutions for it because it's not happening now it seems unfortunately I hate to be pessimistic but at least in the short term I think everything is looking not good not good for my city and not good for what I see around the country yeah Portland I used to love going to Portland do book signings at Pals that never going there again now I guess well so the question is well one thing I think I do hope optimistically this is just a little blip in the radar you know the BLM movement and then covid and you know the Ferguson effect and you know this kind of pulling back defund the police hopefully you know within a decade we'll be back to where we were say in 2015 or so before it all turned South but the um yes I was going to say the um what was I going to say I forgot oh I was going to uh give another conversation in your book you provide that I think is really useful uh because with homelessness increasing we all encounter Beggars right so here's the conversation that you should have so when you are approached by somebody they go hey man you got a dollar your response should just be no or you could just ignore them I guess uh and and then then maybe they say come on man I just saw you leave the store you got to have change he has now failed to respond to the word no that's the beginning of a problem no would you leave me alone please so you've asked them a question and then he said no come on man just a dollar no back off that's step two you've now issued a command and then the third one if they still pursue back the [ __ ] off now and that usually doesn't I've only had to do that once here in Santa Barbara we do have some homeless not too bad here uh but when you know one guy just kept pushing and pushing and and I was with my wife and son I just put myself between him and I just got right up in his face and then he left yeah but yeah so that's a bit of an escalation game on their part I guess to see how far they can get that's actually that particular exercise that I wrote down exactly like we do there is something that we physically act out when I do self-defense workshops for people so I'll go places and you know there's not there's not a lot I can teach someone realistically in a day or two days so I'm not pretending somebody's going to be able to walk out of there and be able to fight but what I can do is give people a lot of the information in the book things to look for and not look for um and then act out some of these scenarios and help teach people how to be assertive and a lot of people have trouble doing what you just did saying that out loud you know especially women a lot of women have been raised in a way where they're told to be polite and they they haven't had the kind of experience doing that so physically both men and women but but physically acting that out and and practicing that and that goes back to what I was talking about with the kids it's no different from what we do with the kids with the kids it's talk talk tell tackle and here where your your ask tell make you're going to ask them with politeness decease whatever they're doing and then you're going to tell them that they need to stop that and if you've gotten to that point of telling it continues that is a signal that this is a predator because anybody when you say no to anybody and they don't accept that no that's a problem you're now you have a problem and so you're going to need to you know make space or stand your ground and let this individual know that you're not going to be a victim and I can't tell exactly what the right answer between those two always will be for everybody's circumstances will dictate that tactics will change upon contact but um the general formula is the same and also just learning how to talk to people in the street one of the things I talk about in the book as well is you know the old really bad advice people would give kids of not talking to strangers which doesn't make any sense or work because kids have to talk to strangers all the time what you want to do is teach your kids how to talk to strangers and people who have a hard time being assertive even as adults one of the things I tell them to do is practice having conversations with random people you meet in the street you're a person who gives you the coffee your Uber driver whoever it is so you just become more comfortable with that verbally engaging with other people in a manner that's polite but assertive and and radiates a certain confidence and it's a skill set it's a skill set you can practice just like you can practice Jiu Jitsu and then if you get in a situation like you were in where somebody's pushing their boundaries you're going to be more apt to pull that off when you tell them to back the [ __ ] off now they're probably gonna back the [ __ ] off as they will so the impulse you're trying to override there is our tendency to want to be nice yeah and we know there's homeless people you don't want to you you want to do something to help I like your little line but just save the five bucks and give it to a charity yeah but you know it's hard when the guy's there with his hand out we have a McDonald's right next door and you know when I first moved into the office here the guy was asking me you know we got you know a dollar or two or you know I I gave him one of my two Sausage Egg McMuffins and then of course that only reinforced the point to you know the next day hey how about a Happy Meal there you go I'm just like all right so how about just know or now I just kind of keep my head down and just walk past whoever happens to be there sometimes they have a sign uh you know please help or whatever you know and it's just it's hard at the end of the off freeway off-ramp there they are you kind of hope that the light doesn't turn red when you're when you're the first car there next to the guy you know because I guess you know we have a nature that we we want to be nice and helpful but don't want to be exploited yeah I was I've definitely been a sucker for that as well in my life and then I've had what changed my opinion on that is having multiple Comfort conversations with police officer friends of mine who would be they would see me engage in those kind of situations in various places and then explain to me why long term that's a bad strategy and what we're actually doing is we're making it easier for them to be in a position where they're more likely to be hurt you know anything that we do to try and make it more comfortable for them to sleep on the sidewalk is the wrong answer because sleeping on the sidewalk is not good for people the level of violence that they're going to be exposed to and everything else you need to have the resources and we spend so much money on those resources I I don't even remember what they were spending per year in San Francisco per homeless person but there is a enormous amount of money that we are pouring into the system whether it's effective or not effective uh what I will say is there are programs there so here in Portland anybody that wants to get off the street can get off the street if they're hungry there's places they can go to eat if they need someone somewhere to sleep because it's cold there are places they can go to sleep there are places they can go to get counseling there are places they can go to get job their resources are there so anything we do to make it easier for them not to take advantage of those resources and just sit on the corner taking Fentanyl isn't long-term a compassionate solution so I think sometimes people just have to wrap their mind around that and you're not doing that many favors either why are so many of them not taking advantage of those Social Services is it mental illness or it's a rational choice and it's cheaper and more efficient to to beg yeah yeah it's both I mean everybody wants to assume the best of people and when we think homelessness we always think of a family or somebody that lost their job and they had a terrible bout of luck and now they're on the street and they need help and all of us want to help somebody like that right we all want to do that but um the reality is when you drive around Portland or if you do ride-alongs with the police officers and you meet them a vast majority are hardcore drug addicts and a certain percentage as well are severely mentally ill and the ones who are very mentally ill oftentimes they won't cooperate with the halfway houses or they'll they'll leave and the drug addicts don't want to go to the shelters or go do any of that because they have to get clean you can't take fentanyl if you're in the homeless shelter and the truth is they want to sleep on the on the sidewalk and take fentanyl that's what they want to do and so for some of them it's actually a conscious Choice it's a life decision and I'm sure they've suffered immensely to get a point where they've made that decision but either way they're not looking to get off the street they're looking to stay on the street and do drugs and so we're going to have to confront that eventually as a society and to do that we have to look at it and see it for what it is like there's a lot like a lot of the homeless encampments here in Portland are basically just drug camps there are five or six people they get together put a tent around and they're buying selling and using drugs all day long and then the petty crime that is involved with all that to be able to afford to to buy the drugs that's a huge percentage of what we have going on though it's not just people who are down on their luck those are the minority they're the minority of that group the people who truly don't want to be homeless and are temporarily homeless they're the minority of the group that we see every day on the street yeah I was wondering because we have that down in La too I used to ride along the uh bike paths along the rivers like Santa Ana River Trail San Gabriel River Trail and so on now there's homeless encampments along the way and do they because it's better better weather here you always I always wonder did they talk amongst themselves you know like hey it's it's much better in La let's all go up there and and furthermore they have handouts or whatever we can get showers or bathrooms and something like that oh they definitely do and you know I've talked to a lot of the homeless people around I've had conversations with them I both with police officers and just on my own and they'll tell you if you go up there a lot of them are very honest and they'll just tell you yeah I'm here to do the drugs and important is a great place to get drugs and if I need this I can go here and they know all where all the resources are and and the resources are in many ways what draws them here was funny because we had a solution a proposed solution which thankfully was uh didn't get a vote uh but they wanted to give a thousand dollars a month additional to people who were sleeping on the street in Portland and I was just thinking to myself you have no idea what's going to happen a month or a week after you pass up where everybody this is San Francisco and Seattle is going to migrate to Portland because it's a thousand more dollars worth of Fentanyl and it's just these um well-intentioned but not well thought out policies that tend to make the problem worse because people I don't think think of everything that's going to go along with that yeah I remember what I was going to say when you're talking about um uh the the motivation for evil and violence Roy baumeister's book evil where he interviewed a lot of those um guys on death row and for murder and rape and so on and it was like to a man and they're all men uh they all felt like the the victim deserved to die and they all had their perfectly rational reasons she cheated on me or he cheated on me in cards or he took my parking spot or he dissed me or insulted me in front of my girlfriend so they all had reasons and it wasn't due to lack of self-esteem which was you know popular in the 90s and just the opposite they were very high in self-esteem they felt quite high and you know then I was also reading Donald Black's paper on self-help Justice what do you call violence is self-help Justice something like that again most of these young men are dispersing what they consider to be a form of Justice yeah you know the the police department's not gonna take care of me or it's a it's an illegal drug trade so you can't sue the guy for standing on your street corner right so you got to go there middle of the night and and and get your Justice and a lot of it's that way so I'm wondering what you think about what let's go to a root cause why are these young men doing this you mentioned fatherlessness do we have theories and research that shows there is a correlation between fatherlessness and teenage young 20s violence yes there's a massive amount of body of literature that shows that um and I've I've took a deep dive into that literature and I read about it quite a bit in the book but to be honest with you I lean towards that conclusion before I ever read the literature because you can control him for it and you can see the difference so when you look at the crime rates there's no way getting around how different groups have massively different rates of crime and so you can control for poverty you can control for unemployment you can control for age control for all these different factors and you'll still see this large gap difference the moment you start to control for out of wedlock birth rates it starts to match up and it matches up almost perfectly and I know that doesn't mean that it's the reason but it definitely points to that reason and I think there's been lots of studies since then that that have proven that that's the reason um and I think I think boys young men learn how to behave properly how to treat women how to interact with other men how to defend their boundaries and properly and improperly from their fathers and if you remove fathers from the home and you have no positive male role models around them they gather together in groups and then they go out and cause Mayhem I told a story in the book when I was in South Africa many years ago I was at P Landsberg National Park and they had had a rash of rhinos being mutilated and killed and at first they couldn't quite figure out what it was that of course the first thought is poachers but they weren't taking the horns and there's not many things that can kill a rhino and what they discovered is that a young male elephants had gathered together basically in gangs and were chasing these rhinos torturing them and uh killing them and what had happened was they had taken a a group of rhinos from Kruger National Park and they'd put them into P Landsberg but the straps on the helicopters weren't heavy enough to carry the male Bulls so they had brought the women and they had brought a lot of young men in smaller smaller male elephants but none of the bulls and no matter what they did they just had this problem of rampaging young elephants and so then eventually they fixed the straps bring the bull elephants in drop them down in there and the problem solves itself within a couple months and obviously humans aren't elephants but I I do think that uh that basic principle carries over and it yeah the the literature well yeah and I I agree with that that what's the causal mechanism behind that okay let's think about this Adrian rain you talk about him in your book I I read his anatomy of violence book uh he's the guy that did the brain scans on these serial killers and so on basically they just had they're all just uh libido and ID and there's no break the prefrontal cortex is largely we essent right um and so something like having a structured home environment not just a father but a you know a good marriage and you know a solid consistent family with a nice neighborhood without gangs and sports to release a lot of that male energy and so on um is a way of dampening those libidinal impulses that bubble up and it's not that you and I have these impulses to kill and rape and murder and torture people uh but uh because but but those got kind of beaten out of us not beaten out of us you know normed out of us much earlier you know so there has to be something along those lines um difficult that when young men are at that dangerous age when they start to hit puberty and like when I became violent you know 12 to 13 that's when a lot of it starts we're in a search for identity we're trying to find out what it means to be who we are and what it means to be a man and what men do and what men don't do and respect as a as a male and um in a complete absent of mature male role models then we gather together and nothing good nothing good comes from that unfortunately um yeah I just had Heather McDonald on the podcast her book racing Merit yeah and she is written books on Cops Warren cops and so on okay she's conservative but she makes some good uh arguments I say that because I'm not conservative but she does follow the data and uh you know so she points out that in 1963 I think it was when Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his study of the 23 25 rate of fatherless homes and the African-American Community across the United States and and he was sounding the alarm and she says that the rate is now like three times that was close to 75 percent now and so she thinks that's one of the deeper root causes of black on black crime which is not politically correct it's taboo to talk about that now but it's real and if black lives matter you have to address that problem yeah it's it's real and it's about half of all our violence in this country about 50 percent uh I think she's right on that I actually quote that uh moynitt from the Moynihan report in the book and you know that's a whole another big topic that would require a whole book that to write about but anybody that goes back and looks at the data you will see it looks fairly stable and then you hit the very early 60s in 1963 and something happens now what happens in 1963 I don't know there can be a lot of conversations about what happened there the birth control and there's all kinds of other things that could go on but I also think that was the beginning of the welfare state and there have been some economic incentives that help destroy the nuclear family in two parent homes and I think that has devastating effects on uh on violence and You can predict how much violence you're going to have within a given Community if you know the out of wedlock birth rates and how many kids between the a certain age males without fathers in that in their home live in that particular area you can predict it fairly accurately and there's not many arguments against it um the main one that I would run into and I read a lot I've heard which is a very popular one with people more of the left is to come back and reference Scandinavia I said well what about Sweden um swedes don't get married they don't get married the same way but and I talk about this in the book as well but that's just a basic misunderstanding about Scandinavian culture my wife's Icelandic but if we talk about Sweden and just in particular it's really only about three percent of households with young children where both the biological father and biological mother aren't living together with that child in a certain age so swedes are actually fairly conservative people and once they have kids they tend to live together and raise the child together and the father is present in the child's life they don't get legally married in the sense that we do here but they don't need to get legally married in the sense that we do here because the way their laws work and they cohabitate with each other they wind up getting all the you know the same kind of things we would get in America for marriage so it's just a basic misunderstanding of Scandinavian culture and then if you go and you control for that and you look for where's the violence in Sweden where is the violence in these communities it's with that three percent it's when that small population and this holds true around the world this is one of those policy issues that's difficult to know what to do because the government can't force people to get married no right but you can give tax breaks for marriage and tax breaks for having children and you get to like I get to deduct the mortgage interest on my loan and so on that's the government saying we like that you're married having kids and owning a home you know uh but you can't force people to do it right so it has to come from the bottom up through Norm changes I I agree 100 through culture agriculture we have to value mothers and value fathers and and and value taking care of your kids and raising your kids and put that up where it belongs as far as the one of our primary duties as human beings and give that the honor and respect it deserves and and just be really careful about not accidentally creating economic incentives which may take away uh some of those fathers from being in the homes with the mom another thing I want to ask you about some of these police videos like the Rodney King beating I heard I read a sociologist describing this as a forward panic almost as if um like like a like a Shark Feeding Frenzy or the Wolves going after the prey and they just kind of lose all frontal cortex control and it's just you just get out of control it looks like that in the Rodney King beating some of these other more recent police videos it looks like that just something snaps because of the Panic or the adrenaline or I don't know what but I haven't read much about that I don't really know if there's anything neurophysiological to that well we had a recent case I can't remember um what the name of it but within the last year where we had a bunch of police officers everybody involved pretty much was black but you had a group of black police officers pulled over a black suspect and then beat the Daylights out of them and it was caught on video and people were filming it from across the street and they're literally holding them up and punching him and that was one of those egregious cases of of police violence where these guys definitely need to go to jail and there's a couple things from that one was they had just gone on a long Chase with this guy which is usually what that's what happened with the Rodney King situation Rodney King's slightly different but there's a much longer video that the vast majority of Americans never got to see they just saw that one particular yeah I saw that and what preceded that video was him driving like a maniac through residential section and getting these guys chasing him and what happens when you chase other people as your adrenaline starts to go up you know and all of a sudden you get out of the car and you're adrenaline's surging and this guy gets out of the car and then they start fighting with you and then yeah Instinct takes over and pack mentalities can set in and even educated people and police officers can't get caught up in that kind of mob uh it's one of the reasons why mobs are so dangerous you get caught up in that kind of action and engage in behavior that you otherwise might never engage in if you were alone or just with a couple other people that's clearly what I think happened in the case the officers pulled that guy over but when I first saw it the first thing it looked to me was looked like it was a gang beating and and I went back and I looked at the backgrounds of some of those officers most of those officers have been hired within the last year or two years and some of the standards because some of the Departments are having a hard time getting good officers to apply I mean no nobody in their right mind would want to come be a police officer in Portland where the citizens are going to be throwing condoms filled with feces at you and screaming at you and if you go out and make an arrest even if it's a righteous arrest likely just to call you a you know a pig and a racist like who wants to work in that community so it becomes hard to then get good candidates and so what do they do they lower the standards and so you have guys now that are getting hired in some of these departments who are convicted felons and who have gang membership and and this is what this goes back to Rampart as well if we go back to Los Angeles but the gangs are great actually at getting their own people into the department if you lower the standards enough they will sneak people in there who have gang affiliation which is what happened what part of yeah part of what happened in the rampart Scandal and I think it's my speculation on the case and I haven't read much about it since but I think that that particular incident with those officers is probably something like that but big picture yeah you get involved in a Chase and your adrenaline's going and you've been chasing Somebody by the car and driving around 10 minutes and all of a sudden you both jump out like everybody's adrenaline is surging and um and this is this is when you know more apt to for somebody to get hurt yeah okay last question on this uh General topic sexual violence and rape why do men do this what are the different theories about it yeah um there are lots of different theories about rape um and I'm not exactly sure to be honest with you what the actual reasons are uh I mean obviously from an evolutionary standpoint if we if we go down to the selfish Gene model I think that would probably be the the most basic um element of it but what I try and focus on in the book is is the self-defense aspect of it so what do women need to be aware of what do women need to look for and men but primarily women and um and how to handle themselves in those particular situations but again give us a couple of pointers there for our listeners well the big thing I think to keep in mind and this goes for all violence but it's particularly true of rape is that uh the vast majority of violence is committed by people that we know this is true of homicides this is true of assaults it's true of everything so a lot of the self-defense literature of the books and the videos you'd see online about self-defense put a heavy emphasis on the stranger the guy in the ski mask in the in the parking garage who's coming to get you and I get that and that exists and we want to have we want to be able to defend ourselves from that but the reality is most of the time it's going to be somebody you know and this is particularly true of rape it's going to be a date it's going to be a boyfriend and when you see half the women who are murdered in this country are killed by a husband or former lover and in almost every one of those cases there was a long series of stalking that preceded it where this guy was stalking them and they oftentimes have made multiple police reports about it and sometimes they've even gotten a restraining order but there's a progression that these guys make and so the sooner you can see this see this Predator recognize the predator in sheep's clothing then the better you are to make distance and avoid the whole situation to begin with I mean if it turns physical if somebody's trying to hold a woman down a raper there is no art on planet Earth that's going to help her defend herself in that situation better than Brazilian Jiu Jitsu because by definition she's going to be on the ground and from a grappling perspective she'll probably be on the ground in a position that for us is not that bad and you have somebody between your legs when you're on your back you can choke them and break their arm and do different things to them if they're skilled so it's the perfect art for somebody being pinned down somebody being held which goes back to if you're not being pinned down and you're not being held why are you fighting right if I can get away and I'm not a police if you're not a police officer and you're not protecting yourself or someone else in most situations if you can make space and get away you would want to but if you are being held down and if you can't get away it's because someone's grabbed you and they're holding you in place and that's where grappling comes in so the physical solution is that physical is submission grappling but the the big solution long term is to patrol your relationships and I talk a lot about what I call character disordered people in the book because these people who you know who wind up eventually being becoming violent criminal actors and becoming the attackers they don't start out as violent criminal actors they start out as character disordered individuals who also give off certain traits that you'll be able to recognize continually push boundaries continually refuse to take no for an answer and then push and push and push until they feel like they've got you just at the right spot to where and they have the opportunity and then it becomes an attack and recognizing the people like that that are in your life and calling them from your relationships is the single best thing it's like just pick one thing somebody can do a woman and anyone can do to be safe it's like not having those kind of men in your in your bubble is super important and so that just goes back to being able to recognize them and listening not rationalizing away those thoughts about what's happening in the moment trying to apply good intentions all the time to someone who may very well have bad intentions is it your sense that those signs are probably there early enough to do something about it get this guy out of your life before it gets to a situation where he could commit violence 100 but that most women just ignore it because they want to be nice or friendly or whatever yeah want to be nice don't want to think of think that about them there's lots of different reasons um hoping it stops hoping they go away hoping if they comply a little bit they'll just cease the Litany of different things that could go on in someone's head that prevents them from just making positively asserting their boundaries and then defending it but at the end of the day that's what's going on and you know I'm not saying it never occurs that all of a sudden a guy will come out and grab a woman in a parking lot throw in a car and try and rape her that can happen too it happens sometimes that's not the majority of cases vast majority of cases like I say it's people that you know people that you interact with people that will talk to you people you're going to have a conversation with people that you're engaging socially with um and and that is a good thing in a way because that's what gives us a chance to realize who these people are yeah good thing that those kind of predators that just all of a sudden strike from the Shadows that you never see are the vast minor the small minority I think it's probably good advice not to follow Hollywood movies of how to fight I was just watching uh uh Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where the uh uh the the Manson character um Tex Watson comes at uh Brad Pitt with a knife a big old huge knife and pit you know blocks it and then Knocks The Knife into the guy's leg and it's just like how hard is that gotta be to do it's a great movie totally yeah violence is very rarely done well in movies one of the MythBusters episodes was Could you actually shoot a gun out of somebody's hand and they just kind of wave it off like that right no yeah no that's definitely true it's crazy all right Matt the gift of violence practical knowledge for surviving and thriving in a dangerous world everybody should read this book I mean it's really important you know we don't like to think that that's the world we live in but it is even if it was a near perfect world it's never going to be zero so thank you for your work and what you're doing and where can people find you online in your gym thank you Michael it's been an honor to be here um straightblastgym.com is the website for our organization you can find our locations around the world my website mattthorton.org just my name.org and then they can purchase the book on whoever books are sold Amazon Barnes and Noble yeah yeah nice so um and just just as a when you join what happens and you go to the gym once a week or once a day or are you I'm in you're we're going to interview you we're going to find out what you're really interested in and what you know why you're really training and what you want to get out of training and then we're going to have you train a couple days a week we keep it to two days a week because people sometimes tend to to do too much in the beginning and burn themselves out or get sore and in a way that they're not used to so we kind of moderate what you're allowed to do for the first six to eight weeks and then after about three months we try and work you back into the gym as a whole at which point you'll create your own schedule and train however you want and hopefully at that point you'll wind up loving it but I think the big thing for people to know is it's for everybody I've got students in their 70s I've got kids that are four and five males females it's safe you're not going to get hurt if you go to a good school and you're going to make great friends because you'll have you all of a sudden exposed to another social group of people who aren't creeps I want to do this in Santa Barbara I wonder if there's a place here that does something like that there's a bunch of them in your area you want to do some good places to train just let me know I'll send you okay all right yes well let's do that

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 6,360

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, bullying, deterrence, George Floyd, gun violence, justice, mass shootings, morality, police brutality, psychopathy, race, racism, revenge, Science Salon, sociopathy, The Michael Shermer Show, violence, Matt Thornton

Id: r3QdqPB5aDg

Length: 108min 51sec (6531 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023