Tony Blauer - On being your own bodyguard, mastering fear, understanding violence and developing situational awareness in business and life.

Tony Blauer is an entrepreneur and world-renowned personal defense and combatives expert. He's started hugely successful businesses--but he's also had the unfortunate experience of trusting the wrong people and having one of his businesses implode at its peak. He has created truly world-changing technologies and ideas, but his inventions have had challenging births and the world didn't always understand what he was doing.  Tony is the founder and CEO of Blauer Tactical Systems, the host of the Know Fear podcast and the creator of the SPEAR system, a personal defense system rooted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience that leverages our innate, instinctive response to being surprised.  For the past 40 years, Tony has taught his system to everyone from youth and soccer moms and dads to law enforcement officers and tier-one operators in the world's most elite special operations units. He also taught his system to me in 2009 as part of a story I wrote based on my experiences living in an area with a gang problem in Los Angeles. What I learned from Tony during a short period of time a decade ago transformed how I thought about violence, personal safety and situational awareness. One of the reasons I started this podcast was because of the experience I often had as a journalist where the best, most interesting I learned while researching stories often didn't belong in the stories I was writing. So I'm happy to share this in-depth interview with Tony about some of those things including the harsh and unexpected bumps he has hit along the way during his career as an innovator and entrepreneur.  You can follow Tony on Instagram and Twitter @tonyblauer. Find his company at https://blauerspear.com/start and check out his Know Fear podcast. If you dig this episode, please pass it on to a friend, hit subscribe and rate the show. This show is about more than me, my guests and an idea. It's about the community that you all have created around it, and I love to hear from you. Drop me a line at [email protected] or @hardwaypod on Twitter or Insta. Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter and get cool stuff worth knowing + updates on new episodes.