When Sam Rosenberg was 20 years old and working as a bouncer in a bar, a disgruntled patron pointed a gun directly at his chest and told him: “Now I’m going to kill you.”

Sam survived the incident but it caused him to question what he thought he knew about self-defense and sent him on a decades-long quest to figure out how people can best protect themselves and others.

Today on the show, I talk to Sam, an expert in personal protection and the author of Live Ready: A Guide to Protecting Yourself in an Uncertain World, about his self-defense philosophy and how you can use it in your life to stay safe from violent threats. Sam makes the case that understanding how the mind works under life-or-death stress is the foundation of protecting yourself. We unpack that idea, as well as the phases of the timeline of violence, the phase you can exercise the most control in to deter a violent encounter and how to know when you’re in that phase, how to convey you’re a hard target that predators don’t want to mess with, and much more.