Live Ready: How to Think Like a Protector and Stay Safe in an Uncertain World with Sam Rosenberg

What if you could spot danger before it happens and react with total confidence? In this must-hear episode, I sit down with Sam Rosenberg—former Marine, personal security expert, and the man who’s protected some of the biggest names in the world, including Tom Cruise, Warren Buffett, and Benjamin Netanyahu. But here’s the thing—he believes you should be your own best protector.

We dive into the biggest security mistakes people make, why most self-defense training is missing the mark, and how to develop the mindset of a pro when it comes to personal safety. Sam debunks the myths that keep people stuck in fear, reveals the real secret to situational awareness (hint: it’s not just “paying attention”), and explains why confidence—not size, strength, or even weapons—is your best defense.

Whether you’re a preparedness enthusiast or just someone who wants to walk through life with more awareness and control, this episode is packed with practical strategies you can start using today. So, are you ready to Live Ready? Tune in now and take your personal security to the next level!

Join us at Preparedness Pro in our Facebook Group or on our blog where you'll find peaceful, practical preparedness advice every day of the week!

Transcript

Live Ready: How to Protect Yourself Like the Pros with Sam Rosenberg
Kellene: [00:00:00] Welcome to Preparedness Pro, where being prepared isn't about fear, it's about freedom. I'm your host, Kellene, and every episode we explore the peaceful principles of preparedness and self reliance. No gloom, no doom, just practical solutions for everyday living that help you become more independent and prepared for whatever life brings your way.
From kitchen skills to financial wisdom, emergency planning to sustainable living. We're building a community of capable, confident people who understand that preparedness isn't about preparing for the worst. It's about being free to live your best life regardless of what comes your way. So whether you're starting your preparedness journey or you're a seasoned pro, you're in the right place.
Welcome.
Hey everyone, it's Kellene. We are going to have a fun show for you today. We're going to get down and dirty with Sam Rosenberg , and really understanding situational awareness, self defense. He's the author of a great book [00:01:00] called Live Ready. , I mean, doesn't that apply to all of us, right? But he's the author, speaker, and internationally recognized expert on personal security.
And he knows of which he speaks. He used to be, personal, security for tom Cruise, Benjamin Netanyahu, and even Warren Buffett. , but he had a little bit of a philosophical shift, so, , he's here today to share his philosophical shift.
He's the author of Live Ready, A Guide to Protecting Yourself in an Uncertain World, The Traveler's Guide to Personal Security, and The Path of the Victor. And he's the inventor of the response pen. We're gonna talk about that today, too. His perspectives on preventing and responding to violence is routinely sought by a lot of folks, news media, podcasts, influencers, nationally, and even internationally.
So Sam, thank you so much for being on the show today. 
I appreciate it. My pleasure, Kellene. Thanks for having me. 
Well, we're going to get into some questions because have I got some [00:02:00] questions for you? You've had this. Fascinating career trajectory. I mean, from a Marine Corps officer to protecting some of the highest profile figures in the world.
Warren Buffett, Tom Cruise. Okay. Yeah. Netanyahu too. Okay. But what was the biggest lesson you learned in the close protection world that the average person can apply to their own safety? 
Sam: I think that's a great question. And, I'd like to just preface that by saying that, when you mentioned this philosophical shift that I had, to me, the idea here is it's good to have a lifeguard, but you should ultimately know how to swim.
And, I had this little shift in thought process back in 2003 after working close protection for about seven years. Almost exclusively, really protecting people and organizations. And to me, I think it's critical that people understand in many ways, the same skill sets and tools and mindset that we use to protect public figures so that you can protect yourself, your family, your organization, [00:03:00] whatever it is.
And to answer your question, what is the most important lesson learned? I think that really, when most people think about self defense or personal security, we have a tendency to almost exclusively focus on the physical elements physical elements of preparedness. Can you handle yourself if you're attacked?
How do you use weapons or weapons appropriate for you? All of those kinds of physical dimensions. And in my teachings, when I talk to women very often there's this ever present concern and it's not just women, but a lot of people in general. But, most of the time it's, It's coming by that way.
Of this mentality where they look at me as a relatively big guy and they say, well, how am I supposed to protect myself against someone your size when I'm 130 or whatever it is? The reality though, is in the biggest lesson is that really it's not about being a commando, what it really is, is about being able to think and make good decisions under pressure and your ability to do that is a function.
[00:04:00] First and foremost of preparedness. In the close protection world. We try never to go through a door that we already don't know what's on the other side. We talk about doing advanced work and one of the key differences between good close protection and in many ways what people's perception of bodyguarding is, is that with celebrity bodyguards very often it's sort of like the big guy that walks around with a celebrity and if something bad happens, if something kicks off, they're supposed to be there to, to respond.
But the reality is that that is very reactive. And in the close protection world, everything is proactive. We want to get ahead of the curve at all times. And advanced work is a big factor of that. So planning, thinking ahead of things, where are you going to go? How are you going to get there? What does it look like once you're there?
If you have to escape or if there's an emergency response. And, this is a chess match. And I think that the most important thing is to understand that the basis of [00:05:00] personal protection really begins with our mind and our ability to think and make decisions. The critical thing though, is that what are the factors?
that really limit our ability to think well under pressure. And how do we systematically condition ourselves to being able to overcome, for example, paralysis or the natural panic reactions that occur in a critical situation. And that once again comes back to the basis of your entire show, which is preparedness.
So while I talk about the mindset, And the soft skills, if you will, being more important in many ways than the physical skills, the gateway to developing those physical or those mental skills is many ways the physical training and actually doing, work ahead of time, preparedness, training, thinking through things and getting ahead of those curves.
Does that make sense? 
Kellene: Absolutely. Absolutely. Preparedness, mental preparedness is the second principle of preparedness is what I teach. And the [00:06:00] third is physical preparedness. That muscle memory is invaluable in a crisis. 
Sam: Yes. Yeah. You have to have it, one of the most. Basic concepts in any responding to any disaster, any crisis, any emergency is that the time to prepare for those emergencies is not when you're faced with the crisis, the time to figure it out and to prepare for it is ahead of time.
It's now it's today while we're talking. The key is get ahead of the curve, do your diligence, think through when we're talking about our families, think through emergency planning. You know, we have to look at the, the terrible fires that just occurred out in California or the disasters that occurred in North Carolina.
How do we get ahead of those curves and make sure that, you have proper emergency planning in advance for your families and that involves communications bug out. What do you do if you have to get out of dodge? Where are you going to go? How are you going to go there? Are your is your stuff packed?
Do you have go kits? All of those kinds of things are absolutely critical. But, and for the [00:07:00] listeners of your podcast, I'm sure everybody gets it. That's why we're here talking today, is that we all understand this, but advanced work and prior planning and doing the chess, playing the chess match ahead of time is really the key.
Kellene: So you mentioned the philosophical shift. I mentioned it as well that led you to teaching rather than just protecting. Share with us what triggered that shift and how did it change your approach to security? 
Sam: You know, I have always been very interested in the training aspects myself and, I'm a lifelong martial artist and I, lifelong shooter and, I've always had a passion for preparedness.
It's just part of my wiring. And I think a lot of people who get into my line of work. And a lot of folks that are to use my good friend, Dave Grossman's, concept that are more sheep dogs, as opposed to sheep, we think in this way already. So it was a natural fit for me in many ways to go from the Marines into the close protection world, but it was a lucky stroke.
But shifting [00:08:00] gears was really a function of a series of experiences. One of the experiences that I had was. No matter who I was protecting, no matter what the executive protection job was, whether it was someone who was more of a public figure or just, a CEO of a company or some bad situation happening within a workplace that we were there providing protection for.
There was a desire for training and there was a desire for people to be able to take personal responsibility for their security and there was a reality as well that no matter how good I did my job and no matter how well we protected people, we couldn't be there all the time. And in many cases, these jobs.
We're temporary in nature. We were going to protect people for a period of time, get them through whatever difficulties they were dealing with, and then they were going to be on their own. I had this, this real understanding that personal security is ultimately an individual responsibility.
And [00:09:00] it was my desire as someone who's always enjoyed teaching to be able to really teach these skillsets. I also saw a distinct lack of. Good information out there. Now this is going back to 2003. back then, the UFC came out in the early nineties and there was this kind of movement towards jujitsu and movement towards, ultimate fighting and mixed martial arts.
And that was great. We saw sort of a re evolution of martial arts, but in many ways there was very, very few practical approaches to how to deal with real personal security. Nobody was talking about critical incident response, such as active shooter response. At that time, nobody knew, What do I do really?
If I come face to face with a gun? Very few people were addressing things like, what if the guy's got a knife? What if there's more than one bad guy? How do I integrate across all of these domains and disciplines? It was just an extreme rarity. [00:10:00] And what I saw was an opportunity, if you will, to pull together a lot of information that was just seemingly inaccessible or only available.
The way I had to learn it in little fragments and bits and pieces from multiple different sources, trying to coalesce it into a cohesive and practical approach. And I felt like I had a practical approach to teach. And when I started to teach my clients and when I started to teach their families, and then when I started to teach executives at workplaces and things like that, I found them that they were very, very hungry for this information.
Children hungry for this information. And on top of that, I noticed something very interesting. And what it was was some of the people that I was working with were ostensibly what I would using the Abraham Maslow term, we're really self actualized people in every domain of their worlds, objectively, they had conquered the business world.
They had financial, [00:11:00] extreme financial wealth very often. They lived in good neighborhoods. They were very well protected in general. They had safety and security, but they were coming to me and they stuck with training very often for a long period of time because I realized it was fulfilling a need that they had that was not really being fulfilled any other way.
And what that is, is as a little philosopher myself and a student of philosophy is I look at Abraham Maslow's pyramid, his hierarchy of human needs. And most people know about this from school, from the old idea of, food, clothing, and shelter being our subsistence needs that we must have before we can achieve anything else.
And Maslow postulated that once we had our subsistence needs met, we could move up this ladder of higher needs being met. Security and safety was the next need that would be met. After that was things like belonging and then esteem. And then eventually this state that he called self actualization, which I like to think of as basically [00:12:00] living life on your own terms.
And what I found was a lot of these people were living their life on their own terms, but the reality is that they did not believe that they were really secure. And the reason why they didn't feel that was because they kind of knew that despite all the protections and the sort of bubble wrap around them, a bad guy could take it all away from them.
Instantly. And what they wanted was to fill that void. They wanted to know they could protect themselves and they could protect what matters most to them, like their family on a more primal level. And it wasn't dependent. It didn't want it to be dependent on tools or technology or others. They wanted that human factor.
, and this really anchored with me that to me, Again, it's good to have these lifeguards, all of these things that we have around us that protect us or have tools and technology that can support us. But when it really comes down to it, what is the absolute basis of everything [00:13:00] is our ability to think and make decisions and physically take action ourselves, no matter where you are, what you're doing, how you're doing it, who you're with.
You need to have the skill sets to be able to, to protect yourself. And that's, that was really the impetus to move and shift gears. Now, the funny thing is Kellene, I, I wanted to get into teaching almost exclusively and, kind of came full circle. A few years later, I realized there really is.
Still a need and demand a lot from a lot of my corporate clients that we still need security consults. We still need threat assessment. We still need vulnerability assessments on our physical sites. And we do all of that. And we still need close protection. Sometimes sometimes you just need lifeguards to help you out.
So I set up another company and we all operate under the live ready umbrella. But the basic concept is right now. We do kind of all three of those domains, preparedness, we do intelligence work, but we also do close protection. But my main focus is [00:14:00] still as an educator, because at the end of the day, it's a personal responsibility.
And I want to enable people, empower people to have that, that ability themselves. 
Kellene: Well, When we first started, I did some name dropping, of course, I'm sure it's kind of fun for you to do sometimes, you know, Tom Cruise and Netanyahu and Warren Buffett, these are three very different high profile individuals.
What surprised you most about working in that world? 
Sam: There, there are three people that. I can talk about, there's a lot of others that I don't and, really, I rarely ever talk aside from, yes, I named drop from the standpoint that it, it's important for people to understand that there's some credibility to what I'm talking about, that I've been there, done that.
You know, but the idea here is I don't share a lot of stories. What I can tell you is this, everyone I've worked with was an unbelievable gentleman. Tom Cruise was incredible to work with. We worked with him while he was on a movie production for about, I don't know, eight or nine months. [00:15:00] We You know, have worked with Warren Buffett, , on a lot of different ways over many years from the standpoint of some of the work that he does and, Netanyahu was a much shorter term gig when he was on a speaking tour kind of in between prime ministerships and, and I can tell you is I've got some remarkable stories about all of them.
I learned a lot from all of them and from those jobs. But what I can tell you is interesting as a a takeaway from that, one of the critical things was back when I was working with some of the Israeli dignitaries. And this is a time before all of that was really kind of taken over by the state department after nine 11.
But the idea here is that functionally speaking, it was an opportunity to work at a level. And in many cases, some of the others were in the same field, but in working at a level where Your clients are being targeted actively. And when you're working with very high profile people, sometimes you're doing security and it's just kind [00:16:00] of security in the most general sense.
You're protecting them from the everyday concerns. But when your client is actively being targeted, it elevates the level of chess to an exceptionally high degree. And there's no room for error either way. But the concept is now you really, the stakes are such that you have to understand how to do this work.
And a lot of it comes down to being able to read people in situations. And of course, never create those opportunities. What one of the most Hallmark ideas that I teach for. My clients is at all times work to deny opportunity, and to get ahead of the curve and make sure that there is no opportunity to victimize or to, to really, to do injury or damage, damagement to you or your organization, whatever.
And that is a very specific kind of mindset and skillset. 
Kellene: So I guess that's what, what surprised you in working in that world is how often you had to educate them on that. 
Sam: In terms of what [00:17:00] surprised me was, well, it wasn't so much me educating, clients that they were in danger, but more so I would say what was interesting and intriguing was how often the clients wanted to learn how to protect themselves.
Kellene: Ah, yeah. Now your book Live Ready focuses on protecting yourself in a very uncertain world. What would you say is the most common mistake people make when it comes to personal security? 
Sam: I think there's, it's, there's two interrelated mistakes and I'll share it, I'll share it in a broader perspective.
The book itself, I talk about two interrelated themes that I've come across throughout my career. One is what I call the myth of helplessness. The myth of helplessness is this notion that we are effectively helpless in the face of certain kinds of danger that we must leave that to the professionals.
To me it's a conditioning and it's somewhat like. The old story about how they would train a circus elephant. If you remember the old story, it's not a happy story. I'll warn everyone. [00:18:00] The way they used to train circus elephants was they would tie them to a stake in the ground when they were babies.
And this little baby elephant would pull and pull on this chain until eventually it just gives up. And what this means is when it's fully grown and it is the largest, most powerful land mammal on the planet, a human handler can lead it around on the end of a rope. And in the mind of the elephant, it's helpless to resist.
This idea is like the very definition of what we would call in the psychological world, learned helplessness. And I think of it as the myth of helplessness because the elephant is not born that way. It is systematically conditioned. And I think that we have all been systematically conditioned as well.
With very few exceptions, having trained kids to soccer moms, to executives, to Navy SEALs, there is some dimension of this myth of helplessness and most people's psychological matrix. And the first thing we have to do is under is really overcome that, this is [00:19:00] not a mistake that people make.
It's a function of conditioning that has been sort of foisted upon us. And it starts early in school. You know, you're not allowed to fight back against the bully. You're not allowed to stand up for yourself. The idea here is that we condition people that they must seek help from an authority figure or from someone else.
And if they can't receive that help, What do they do next? They have to become a victim and they can't do anything until they're victimized. The thing is that overcoming this myth of helplessness and making sure people understand that you can in fact control most situations if you just know how to think and make good decisions and you don't have to be, a big strong physical commando to do so is critical.
The second interrelated myth is what I call the myth of randomness. And this is equally pervasive. It's, it's the thought process that violence is random. And we hear this all the time. We hear it in the news media calling violence random. We hear people using terms and colloquialisms [00:20:00] like, no one saw it coming or the guy just snapped.
The reality is that violence is never random. It is a process, and it's a process as observable and predictable as boiling water, if you know what to look for. So the key here is to understand that overcoming these two mythologies, first and foremost, sets you in a different playing field. Now, When people have in fact accepted this and they say, Hey, I want to live more ready.
I want to live more prepared. And I'm going to do what I can. One of the mistakes I see people making very often is in the realm of situational awareness. As we talk about. The root of self defense, the root of personal security and the ability to observe people in circumstances that I mentioned earlier in the close protection world, ultimately it comes down to this idea of situational awareness and but most people I talk to say things like Sam, , I pay attention to my environment.
I'm always aware paying [00:21:00] attention is just the prerequisite. You actually have to know more. You got to know what to look for specifically and when to look. So you're not burning yourself out all the time and you got to know how to look and beyond that, what you really have to understand is, a basic strategy of when you're switched on and when you're looking for danger, you got to know specifically when, in fact, am I BB, am I am maybe being targeted and then how do I manage that?
It's this sort of pre violence stage. Okay. That I think is the missing link, and it's the soft skills that is the missing link that most people don't know. I can teach people how to protect themselves physically, fairly efficiently, I would say extremely efficiently and fairly easily. And I can teach people how to disarm firearms and deal with knife defense and deal with physical assaults relatively easily and relatively efficiently in terms of [00:22:00] time.
And get them where they need to go in short order. The critical thing though, is the real skillset is being able to recognize the danger early, know specifically when you are being targeted and know how to disrupt that pattern in its tracks before it actually becomes a physical. Issue and a lot of the situational awareness to be very specific with my concern over this is that people who say I'm just paying attention what they're really looking for like the bad guy jumping out of the bushes with a ski mask.
But most people are more vulnerable or more likely to be targeted by someone who uses charm and persuasion than someone who uses brute force. Being able to recognize persuasion oriented predators who would use social skills to be able to manipulate conditions that could then create the opportunity for victimization is an extraordinarily rare and powerful skill to have.
And I spent a lot of time teaching, for example, [00:23:00] young kids, teenage girls, Going to college. It's an absolutely vital skill. Once I've taught this to business executives, they look at things very differently and they see people, they see potential employees, business negotiations very, very differently.
The idea here is that these skill sets of understanding real situational awareness, how to read people, read circumstances and do it accurately and objectively and see what's really there. And to understand that intentionality of it, that changes the game for people on so many levels. It's not just a physical self defense skillset.
It's a life skillset. And that's part of what I talk about in live ready. 
Kellene: Wow. That's interesting. You're, you're definitely selling books here because there's so many things that you're talking about that I'm like, Oh, I hope he covers that in his book. Oh, 
Sam: definitely in depth. Yeah. 
Kellene: Wonderful. You've, you've trained everyone from families to Navy SEALs, as you referenced earlier.
What's the one [00:24:00] skill or mindset shift that has the biggest impact on someone's ability to stay safe? 
Sam: I genuinely think what it is, is confidence and, confidence is. It's an interesting subject, right? How do you build confidence? It's a question. 
Kellene: It's not only protection, but it's sexy too. I just want to add that in there.
Confidence is sexy. 
Sam: Absolutely. It's, it's magnetic, isn't it? And, the idea here is that how do you build confidence? I've started to write a series of blog posts on this because it's just something that I've been thinking about and something I've dealt with for many, many years, for decades now.
And it's not so much the absence of fear or being able to manage fear. That's a different aspect of this. But I think the mindset shift of confidence is one that Allows you to have a sense that you can control yourself and your [00:25:00] responses to anything that comes at you. If we go back to sort of a foundational principle of life that it's not what happens to us, it's about, how we handle it, right?
It's about how we choose to respond. And when we think about the things that we can control in our lives, we can't control what other people think and do, we can influence it. We can't always control whether or not we're going to be targeted. We can influence it. We can't control necessarily whether we're going to be physically capable of defending ourselves.
I mean, we can influence that to a degree by preparedness and the right tools and skills and stuff, things like that. But what it really is, the game changer is the sort of intangible that comes from. Getting into those domains by preparing yourself ahead of time, whether it's for a natural disaster, whether it's for another kind of emergency, whether it's for a self defense situation, [00:26:00] the act of preparation builds confidence, just like if you prepare for a test or if you prepare for a public speaking engagement.
You have greater confidence going in because you have rehearsed, you've practiced, and having real skill sets is a game changer because when you really know what to do, you don't have to fake it. One of the misconceptions that I think people have in terms of just the world of personal security is this stuff that they talk about.
If you just walk with confidence and look like, where you're going and walk with purpose, take big strides and all this kind of stuff that bad guys will leave you alone. I actually believe that in many ways, bad guys are exceptionally good at reading people and they make just as we have to become good at reading potential danger, we have to also recognize that there are bad guys who make their living literally.
By reading people and being able to assess who is going to make a good soft target. [00:27:00] So how do you avoid looking like a soft target or in fact being a soft target? Well, the only real way to do it is to actually be a hard target. When you're actually a hard target, you give off those vibes. And it's unconscious and it's energetic and, people simply don't see you as an easy target, right?
Anymore. And it's not something that has to be faked. It's not something that has to be, achieved through, bluster, right? So the confidence that comes from training and the confidence that, is achieved is the game changer. And that's why I always encourage people and I do this very loud and very often in my book.
Train, do the preparedness, do your work ahead of time, make it a part of your life and you don't have to become a commando or a ninja. The key is that you have to train though you have to know what to do and how to do it ahead of time. And when you do, it gives you that sense of confidence that I know I can respond.
One of the big challenges that [00:28:00] most people have, I think in general, dealing with conflict is that they're reacting. They're not actually responding and there's a big difference in those two words. When I react to something, it's impulsive. And when I'm responding, it's more thoughtful.
There's an old saying that, it's a military maxim. Everybody's heard it for the most part, but it actually goes back 2, 500 years to a guy, a Greek warrior poet named Archilochus. And it says, we don't rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training. And I think that this is an absolute truth.
You know, , we rarely, rarely rise to the occasion when it's a high stress situation. What we do is we drop, we fall to the level of our training and preparedness. And if we have that preparedness already in place and we have that level of confidence, we can adapt. We can make decisions. You know, the other military maxim that's very true is that no plan survives contact.
You know? So the idea here is that you go into battle and [00:29:00] you realize, Oh, you know, we plan this, but the bad guys over here, things are different than we anticipated. Your ability to adapt to rapidly changing situations is a function of that planning and preparedness in advance, which kind of comes back to the very first thing we talked about is my biggest takeaway from close protection is.
Advance work, right? Do your homework in advance. Do your preparation, you know, listening to podcasts like this, immersing yourself in it. You don't have to become an expert the way you are. I am that people need to take responsibility for this. And by doing that, the benefits are greater confidence. And as a result, greater adaptability in the moment.
Kellene: Yeah, that adaptability. I think that that's probably the hardest thing to teach. Wouldn't you say? 
Sam: Yeah. I mean, , I almost would say you can't really, I don't think you can really teach adaptability. I think adaptability is a [00:30:00] byproduct of confidence and having experience and skill sets. , there's only two ways to get experience, right?
You can get it the hard way, you know, you survive something and then you have this very powerful learning if you survive. Or, yeah. , you do, you, you base your knowledge off of lots of other people who have already been there and done that and can educate you as to what the appropriate responses should be, , that that's the easy way.
And that's the way human beings like to take in information. We love to learn from others. What's the best path, so I don't have to continually reinvent the wheel. Yeah. , but the, that's what I really think is the basis of it is when you have that preparation and , it bleeds over into the sense that I've been here before and I've done it, I've experienced this, that's what he sort of the byproduct of that evolves into the adaptability of, I can do many things here.
I know how to respond as opposed to just react. 
Kellene: You know, a lot of people assume that dangerous [00:31:00] situations happen to other people. How do you get someone to snap out of that complacency and take personal safety seriously without making them paranoid? 
Sam: Good question. So you know, , I think that, , in the goal of training in the goal of a podcast like this, the goal of a book like live ready.
You know, the goal is not to make people paranoid. The goal is to build confidence in, in oneself and one's abilities. It's the opposite of being paranoid. Now, how do we get over denial, right? Or this, this natural mechanism that people don't want to perceive bad things happening. And I can tell you, I've had some really interesting moments throughout my career that have stood out to me.
And some of them are like people saying to me, I just practice thinking good thoughts and nothing bad will ever happen to me. As if the law of attraction, is if all I ever do is put out positive vibes, only positive stuff's going to come to me. But , [00:32:00] I'm not pessimistic about that.
What I am, I understand, recognize, but what I, what I am is a little more realist in that you got to understand at the same time, you're trying to project that energy out there. There are bad guys who are looking for people exactly like you. All right. And they're trying to attract exactly you into their world.
Someone who is unprepared, incapable, never thought it's going to happen, can't possibly defend themselves, soft target. So the idea here is, from a standpoint of, , overcoming that mindset, that denial, I do it myself and in my book, I do it. Somewhat analytically and one of the things I explain is that we have a number of things that I call the veils of denial that interfere with our natural ability to sense danger and to respond appropriately.
, in no particular order, , the veils are, they're not complicated, but they're interrelated. , one of them is what I call the veil of [00:33:00] normalcy. Let me frame it like this. Okay. So imagine you take your average, , person's walking down the street. She sees someone approaching her and she gets this moment of nonverbal interaction instantly has a bad feeling, right?
So she has this intuitive vibe. Something's not right. And, maybe her body starts to react a little bit. There's a moment of fear or chill runs up her spine. She gets the hair on the back of her neck standing up, whatever it is. Okay. What do we do? What most people do is they immediately look for hard evidence.
They snap from the intuitive side into the cognitive side of their brain and they start trying to analyze the situation and they look for evidence and they go, well, he's not doing anything wrong. He's not dressed inappropriately. He's not looking at me funny. There's nobody else around that's, , sending off any warning signs, whatever it is.
There's no hard evidence that they can sort of articulate and go, aha, here is what has caused this, [00:34:00] this danger sense. Well, What we do is we have a tendency to dismiss that intuition and our early warning sign, what I call our radar. You know, we dismiss that radar. And one of the most profound reasons why we do this is because of this idea of called normalcy bias.
See normalcy bias is our, all of us have it. It's our brain's natural desire for things to be normal. Right. When things get too far out of whack and too far out of normal, such as the idea that someone might try to victimize you, what people have a tendency to do is , it's very destructive to our thought process.
It makes us extremely uncomfortable, makes us, feel fear. And what our brain has a tendency to do is to look for all of the evidence that things are probably just normal. Everything's actually normal, even when there's lots of evidence to the direct contrary. So we play a mental game with ourselves where we [00:35:00] actually start looking for the evidence of normalcy as opposed to the evidence really of what caused this.
Okay. And very often, as I mentioned before, people don't know what to look for. So they don't know how to recognize the early warning indicators. Cognitively that someone may be targeting them and since they don't know what to look for, they don't. It skims past their cognitive faculties. So my first thing is as a mistake that people make that you can overcome or you know that people can sort of try to rewire is being aware of normalcy bias.
Anytime your brain says it's probably nothing. Be careful. Right. Be careful. The reason why we all have that as a hardwired faculty is not just from the natural standpoint of we don't want things to be abnormal for our psychology. We've all experienced this moment, right? We've all been here. We've experienced , the creepy guy and it turned out to be nothing.
So we've almost been cognitively [00:36:00] reinforced that it probably is nothing. So we rolled the dice in that way. The other factors that get in the way are things like. The social veil, right? I don't want to treat anybody in rudely. I don't want to judge a book by its cover, right? Or we see someone and we go, but I don't want to profile people.
So we actually put a socially conditioned veil in front of us that inhibits seeing what's actually there. , we also get into more, Sort of subtle dynamics that what I call the veil of reciprocity veil of reciprocity is where this mistaken belief that if I am just polite or kind to someone that they will reciprocate, that does not mean that you shouldn't be kind or shouldn't be polite.
What it means is you cannot assume that it's going to be reciprocal. There's plenty of people out there who look at kindness as weakness. And that's exactly what they're looking for. You know, there's a lot of these different dynamics that come into play. These are just a few of them of [00:37:00] mental hangups that we have through social conditioning, through the myth of helplessness and the myth of randomness that had been embedded into us and or a psychology in such a way that when we see things, we're not typically seeing them for what they are.
We're seeing them the way we want them to be. Okay. And that gets us into trouble. So, , when I'm talking about the situational awareness going beyond just paying attention, yes, you've got to get out of your phone. You can't be down here texting, , in unaware, you have to actually allow your senses to do their job.
But when you're seeing things, being able to condition your mind to be able to see what's really there is important because we don't see with our eyes, you know, we see with our mind and we have to recognize how to train our mind to see what's actually there. And again, that's just a summary. I mean, we go deep into this and one of the chapters and live ready, uh, being able to see what's really there and articulated accurately.[00:38:00] 
Kellene: Well, that's great. We, we've had quite the master class, , in the psyche of preparedness. If listeners could take just one action after hearing this interview to be safer and more prepared, what would you hope it would be? 
Sam: Read my book. 
Kellene: I 
Sam: mean, I think 
Kellene: that goes without saying because there's so much that you brought up.
Sam: Yeah, I, I think, to answer that question, I think the most important thing I want people to take away is I want you to understand that really you have the capacity to protect yourself, , everyone does, and it's not really about being bigger, stronger, faster, having the bigger gun, having a tool to rely on what it really comes down to is your ability to think and make decisions and.
, the key takeaway here is think through things in [00:39:00] advance. , simple thing as an example, just to start people on this path. I would imagine I'm just going to make an assumption that people will listen to preparedness pro podcast, right? They are going to look at a restaurant differently than most people.
They're going to put their backs, you know, make sure their back's not to the door, all that kind of good stuff. So they have the observation, train your kids. Right. When you go into a restaurant, when you go into a, , a movie theater, whatever it is, ask them, where's the emergency exit? , where's the kitchen in the restaurant?
Because there's always an emergency exit out the kitchen and get them conditioned to know that when you walk into a space, scan the space and if nothing else, if nothing else, look for your secondary exits. Is a really, really valuable skill set to sort of Inculcate into our habituated way of thinking.
, if nothing else, that is a really good skill set to have and something to [00:40:00] teach your kids because they will take that idea and they will run with that everywhere they go, , whether they're in school or playground or whatever, they will get in the habit of looking around and saying, if I can't get back out the way I came in, where am I going to go?
And just having a secondary exit. As one skill set, , we'll reduce the likelihood of them freezing in a bad situation because now they have options. Make sense. 
Kellene: Yeah, having options. That's wonderful. , that's what training happens. That's, , what training gives us is having options. Confidence gives us through that training having options.
Yeah, that's great. Okay. So , I've got two minutes left. , give us a one minute, , blurb on your response pen. 
Sam: Oh, , response pen, one minute blurb. . Believe it or not. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it is true. 2003 when I invented this guy, this is an older model.
Nowadays they have, they're a little , less tactical looking. I, I was teaching improvised [00:41:00] weapon tactics as one of my first classes. And, , I had a need for being able to teach people how to carry an item they could carry anywhere in the world, pens, whatever it is. A lot of people were doing flashlights.
That's great. , but I invented this tool, , got two patents on it and it was the first tactical pen on the market. And, obviously we both know probably that over the last 20, 25 years, you know, , There's a million tactical pens on the market. , one of the key differences is that most of them are designed like an ice pick that are designed to stab.
 And the problem I have with that is it's only one level of force and it's not really the right tool for that level of force of that deadly force. You know, this tool here is designed as a hitter. It has a glass break on the one end. , it is designed to be able to hit vulnerable areas, nerve areas, things like that, that you could do.
Force or deadly force, depending on how you wanted to use it. But as a very, very powerful force multiplier, , one of the key aspects though, is that it also has a little key fob [00:42:00] and that key fob, which normally there'd be a set of keys on this can affix to the pen and sort of turn it into a Kubiton. , and the reason why I invented that was because when I was teaching the improvised weapons.
A lot of women would ask me, well, this is all cool, but like women's clothing, don't have a lot of pockets. How am I supposed to carry a pen? It was just practically difficult. And I don't wear women's clothing. So I couldn't like figure out the problem entirely, but my best solution was to affix it to your key chain or fob so that you could have quick access to it.
If it's, tucked into the waistband of your pants or on the outside of your purse. You could grab it and have it in your hand very quickly. , but what I like about the pen as a weapon is it is a very, , skill based tool, meaning it's a smart tool. If it falls on the floor, no one can use it against you.
 You gotta know how to use it and how to strike with it. , and it can travel with you anywhere in the world. Whether you're on an airplane or you're going to overseas to foreign [00:43:00] countries, whatever it is, you can always be armed. And that goes back to that idea that when you're prepared and you know, you're armed, even if it's just a pen, if you know how to use that and have a massive force multiplier in your hand, that , you can.
Easily incapacitate people with functionally speaking, you're not giving off easy target vibes. So just that one tool, that one concept indoctrinated into your life is a game changer in many ways. And of course it applies to anything. Once you know how to use the response pen, you can put anything in your hand.
And use it as an improvised weapon because the knowledge of where you're trying to hit, how you hit, how you use it is there. And, , for higher level training, this can be used as a control tool, you can leverage whether you can pull people out of vehicles with it,, it can break glass and an emergency, all that kind of stuff.
So it's a pretty cool tool. I'm proud of it. We've never mass marketed it. I've always just sold it to my clients, but it's available on my website. [00:44:00] 
Kellene: Well, let's finish up there. Let's tell people how they can find out more about you and your book, your trainings, et cetera. 
Sam: Thank you. Yeah. , go to my website, live ready.
co or you can go to live ready book. com. They both get you to the same place. , you can see all about me and my company. We do seminars around the country. We do training in Pittsburgh where I'm from. That's where my studio is. I work with workplaces and individuals. We have an online training program that's going to be coming out very, very soon.
I'm talking in the next maybe four to six weeks, it's going to be rolling out, over a year in development. And it's, it is a very comprehensive online curriculum of not only everything that I teach in terms of the soft skills, but a lot of the physical skill sets too. . Live ready. co. You can find me on Instagram, on Twitter, on, whatever, Facebook, all of the social media platforms.
, live ready. live ready. co is the same, you know, [00:45:00] the same thing on my handle on all of those. , I look forward to. To engaging with more people. 
Kellene: Well, Sam, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you so much for your vast amount of knowledge that you were willing to share with us.
Everybody go check out live, ready. co and again, Sam. I appreciate it. 
Sam: Thank you, Kellene. It was a pleasure.
Kellene: Thanks for joining us today on Preparedness Pro. I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned something new. Want more Preparedness inspiration? Join our live shows every Tuesday and Thursday at 11 a. m. Eastern on YouTube or Facebook at Preparedness Pro, where we can answer your questions live. Looking for a community of like minded people who understand that preparedness is about freedom?
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Until next time, remember preparation brings peace and peace brings freedom. See you soon.