The Fake Hundred
A counterfeit doesn't announce itself. It looks fine across a bar in bad light. The whole skill is doing three small things with your fingers and your eyes before the man across from you notices you're checking.
ScenarioReading a Neighbourhood
A bad street rarely announces itself in words. It announces itself in details — who's outside, what's boarded up, how the place holds itself. Learn the signals and you'll know within two minutes whether to stay or go.
ScenarioThe Fake Badge
The costume is the easy part. Anyone can buy a jacket and a piece of tin. The tell is never the badge — it's the behaviour, and behaviour is far harder to forge than a uniform.
ScenarioHands Off Your Pockets
Pickpockets do not steal from careful people. They steal from distracted ones, and distraction is something they manufacture. Here is how the trick is built, and how to be the wrong mark.
ScenarioGetting Out of a Riot
A demonstration becomes a riot in the space of a single decision somewhere you cannot see. Your job is to be a street away before it does, and to move like a man with somewhere boring to be.
ScenarioThe First Sixty Minutes
People believe a crash is unsurvivable, so they do nothing, and the doing-nothing is what finishes them. The impact is the part you cannot control. The next sixty minutes are the part you can.
ScenarioThe Wrong Dog
There is no clever technique here, no hero's stand. An aggressive or rabid animal is a problem you solve with distance, terrain, and a closed door — and with the discipline not to run.
ScenarioWhat a Taser Does
The films show a man gritting through it. There is no gritting through it. Here is what the device actually does to a body, and the only honest thing to understand about the window after.
ScenarioThe Flash and the Bang
A stun grenade takes your eyes, your ears, and your balance in the same instant. You cannot train the senses to resist it. You can only train what you do while they are gone.
ScenarioTalking Past the Ticket
This is not a trick and it is not a loophole. It is composure, an honest read of the man at your window, and the quiet art of making the warning easier to give than the ticket.
ScenarioThe Best Seat
The movies put the hero with his back to the door because it looks good. I sat with my back to the door exactly once, and I learned everything I needed from it.
ScenarioThe Cab in a Bad Town
Anyone can flag a cab. The trick in a city that doesn't like you is getting into the right one, in the right place, looking like a person nobody wants to bother.
ScenarioCash Out Clean
You cannot stop being watched at an ATM. You can stop being worth the trouble. The difference is a few habits that take no extra time.
ScenarioYou Think You're Being Followed. Read This First.
The feeling of being watched is common and usually wrong. Here's how to find out which, without handing the answer to the people who'd most like to have it.
ScenarioThe Second Location
There is one rule I would keep if you forced me to throw the rest away. Do not let yourself be moved. Not to the van, not to the back room, not to "somewhere quieter." This is why, and this is what it costs you to refuse.
ScenarioSomeone Broke Into Your Home
You come home and something is wrong. Here is how to read the signs from the kerb, why you do not go in, and what actually buys you safety — none of which the alarm company will sell you.
ScenarioStopped by the Police Abroad
Being stopped by police in a country not your own is a negotiation you did not ask for. Stay calm, stay brief, understand whose authority you are actually under — and let the other person have the easy decision.
ScenarioYou Think It's a Honey Trap
The beautiful, attentive stranger who appeared at exactly the right moment and likes exactly what you like. How to tell elicitation from attraction, and how to leave without a scene.
ScenarioYour Phone Is Compromised
The signs that your phone has been turned against you, what it actually costs you, and the unglamorous clean-up. The short version: the phone betrays you even when it's working perfectly.
ScenarioLost in a Strange City
A dead battery in an unfamiliar city is not an emergency unless you make it one. Orient by the sun and the bones of the place, read the streets, and remember the way you came.
ScenarioCaught in a Crowd That Turns
You did not come to the square for trouble. The trouble came to the square, and now ten thousand people are deciding your direction for you. Here is how you take it back.
ScenarioA Stranger Knows Your Name
A pleasant person you have never met says your name, and your whole nervous system relaxes. That relaxation is the product they are selling. Here is what to do with the half-second before you buy it.
ScenarioYou're Being Doxxed
Someone has decided to pull your home, your number, your routine out into the open. Panic and feeding it both make it worse. Here is the cold, dull work that actually shrinks the damage.
ScenarioDetained at a Border
They pull you out of the line. The small room, the questions that circle, the bag emptied onto a steel table. Most of what happens next, you control — if you understand what they can do and what they cannot.
ScenarioYour Partner in a Deal Is Lying
Across the table, the story has gone thin in one particular place. Tipping your hand costs you the read and the leverage both. Here is how to keep the first and protect the second.
ScenarioGetting Mugged the Right Way
Someone wants what is in your pockets. Give it to them. The one thing you fight for is the thing you must never hand over — and that line is clearer than people think.
ScenarioAfter Dark in the Wrong Area
Wrong turn, wrong hour, wrong street. Most of your safety here was decided before you ever set foot on it — in how you move, where you walk, and what you let people assume about you.
ScenarioThe Tail in Traffic
A car cannot pretend to window-shop. That's the gift, and the trap. Here is how you make a follower commit, and what you do — and don't do — once he has.
ScenarioProtecting Your Family on the Move
The people who hire me for their families want a panic room and a tactical course. What they need is to leave the house at a different time. Here is the difference.
ScenarioWhen to Call a Professional
Most of what keeps you safe, you can do yourself. Some of it you can't, and pretending otherwise is how people get hurt. Here's where the line sits.