#175: Texas Association of School Psychologists

Hey everyone, this is Brian Marin, the host of the Left of Greg podcast, and we have a very special episode this week, which is why the intro you were hearing is slightly different than most episodes. This week I'm releasing a podcast we did with Christopher Ponce, Brooke Roberts, and Dr. Rachel Thiem from the Texas Association of School Psychologists. They have their own podcast called TASP Talks. We recorded this episode back in April and they released it on their show back in June, and due to the overwhelming amount of feedback we received, I wanted to release it as a Left of Greg episode as well. This was originally released as two separate episodes, so there's a small transition halfway through the show, but it's hardly noticeable and you'll be able to follow along easily. I would also recommend listening to the episode in its entirety because it gets even better as the conversation progresses. I want to thank Chris Ponce and his team not only for having us on the show, but I also wanted to thank them for their service to the children of the state of Texas. They have an incredibly difficult job, and you do not get the recognition that they deserve. If you'd like more information about the Task Talks podcast, you can check out the link in the episode details. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Sorry, sorry on that tangent. But all right. So let me tell you about these guys. So I stumbled on these guys while listening to another podcast, just listening to them in the way they kind of do what they do. And I'm gonna let them kind of talk about what they do. I was like, these guys are right up our alley. So I emailed them. And I'm assuming I talked to you, Brian, through email, correct?

Yes, that was me.

Yeah. So and once we connected and had a little sit down, I was like, these guys are 100% they're coming on here to talk about what they do for a living. So let me introduce Brian Marin and Greg Williams Brian did I say your last name correct

You did. Thank you very much for that.

did I say your last name correct I don't want

No,

to leave you out here

no,

ah

it's pronounced Wyams. No,

I'm on it I'm on it I want

no,

yeah

no, it's just Will.i.am. Anything.

fair you

You'll answer anything.

will answer anything all

Exactly.

right so let's talk about what you guys do and your company that you guys have and kind of your background and you know I'm looking at Brian so let's go Brian we'll go you You first. So tell us your background Sure, and what you.

I'll start off. So I'm the senior VP of operations for Arcadia Cognerati. Arcadia Cognerati is a small consulting and training firm that Greg and I run with a small team of folks. And what we do is we are subject matter experts in what's called human behavior pattern recognition and analysis, which is kind of a scientific term for something most people do or born knowing how to do. But what Greg did, Greg is the president and founder of our company, I call him our code writer because he's the one who has written a whole bunch of very successful human behavior-based threat mitigation programs for everything from Department of Defense, Department of Justice, schools, hospitals, churches. We get to work within a lot of areas because we study and teach about human behavior and we provide non-material solutions.

We provide a thing with a K rather than a thing with a G and we train people how to mitigate catastrophic events, how to look for danger and opportunity in any situation. So we really get to kind of play, as we call it, in a whole bunch of different areas. But this kind of all basically what Greg did a long time ago was take a whole bunch of science from all the biggest brains in the face of the earth and go, well, so what? How do we get this off the shelf, right, like everyone has in their bookshelves behind them? How do we get it off the shelf and operationalize this information and kind of create a format and a process to do that that's very intuitive and it works, it's been proven to work, it's been scientifically vetted and validated. We're one of the few people that can actually say that and it works no matter your religion, culture, political affiliation, ideology, any of that stuff we care about. intent not your motive but that's kind of a general uh you know about arcadia nas and you know i originally met greg uh probably back in 2006 or 7 when he was implementing one of these programs into the marine corps it was a highly successful combat hunter program i was uh either still in the marine corps or working for the marine corps at the time uh and we ran into each other then kept running into each other in all the strangest places and finally in 2012 in afghanistan he's like hey we keep keep running into each other uh why don't you why don't you start working for me and we're working for other companies before and now we have our own that we do and and greg is also several decades in law enforcement and and a former soldier as well so that's kind of a little bit about us i think you started talking about greg too so

That's okay. That's it. That, that.

No, I can go now. Yeah,

that's

yeah,

a great hey thank you for giving us an introduction to your guys's meet cute right the rom-com term that you use

yeah,

like

that is exactly it

oh

yeah

great hey how you doing good man

yeah and that's exactly how it was in afghanistan he goes hey man what are you doing you want to come work for me i was like hey uh i'm working right now and technically i'm not supposed to be here right now so can you back off a little bit

All right. Okay. So great. So Brian gave us a primer for you. So let's go.

So all I do is tell stories. So I'll give you the first one. Brooke told me about Lubbock, Texas. So I'll give you a quick Lubbock, Texas. Shelley, our CEO, and I had to go down and pick up a person on a homicide warrant from Colorado all the way to flipping Temple, Texas, if you guys know where that is, and outside of the kingdom of Dallas somewhere. And the kid we picked up, I'll call him Zach Lanoue because I don't want to get him in. You get him in any further trouble, he's not doing well in prison. But on the way back, we're in plain clothes. We've got a raid vest on with our little badge on and a white unmarked sled. And he's in the back all chained up. And we get to Lubbock and there's a University Avenue. I think the place was called the Breakfast House. And we pull in and we're going to buy him breakfast. And so we go in and Lubbock is a beautiful place and everybody's so friendly. and we take a minute it's like hey

I've

don't

never

run

heard anyone say that.

from colorado and originally from detroit remember and so we sit down and we've got to change under the table so he's not embarrassed or anything order him a big breakfast and every single person in the lubbock diner came by and go what did you do and smacked him said you shouldn't be you should be ashamed of yourself young man because everybody was ancient like me you know and every single person person so so finally zach looks at us and says was this part of the plan i'm like no it was just breakfast sorry about that but uh i thought he immediately broke and i thought if that place is still there please go in and uh have a couple eggs in my honor uh

I'll do that. I'll do that. It is still there.

chris christopher honored uh uh to see you again uh rachel honored me uh i hope you didn't pull off the side of the road and like kick it Kick a dog while you're listening to our podcast. And it has different reactions on different people based on what their level of expertise or history is. So I'm nothing. I'm a hood rat from Detroit that grew up running from the cops. I learned that there was a better way. Spent some time in the military. I enjoyed the United States Army quite immensely. There came a time that I had to go, went back and thought, okay, I've got General Motors. First, I've got being a thief again, or maybe I could try something different. Tried police work, fell in love with the premise, understood that I had some special skills of being able to spot bad guys before others could see it happening. Started calling those pre-event indications, studied absolutely everything. My mind was transformed reading the works of Marty Seligman. Started looking at what Klein's early work was, understood that he was a boob. boob that was only going to write stuff and put it on his shelf he was never going to go out and test his theories so challenge those theories by going out and getting tested by officer naval research army research institute everybody else who validated every one of the theories that i had come up with luckily again 16 ounce gloves swinging in the dark room i hit on some sheer genius from other people and used it as a catapult to start developing programs where you could see and mitigate and mitigate and avoid danger or spot opportunity well before the average human. Brian's right. I was lucky enough to write some programs for the United States Army, United States Marine Corps. That got me the attention of the USDOJ and DOD, and now we do it privately, only because every other company we worked with exploited. It's like taking Harry Potter's wand that you found while you were cleaning the room and going out and doing stuff on your own. And so... We didn't like the Beltway as much as other people do. And now we do it singularly on our own. We do a lot of free stuff. The pro bono work is because some people can't afford the ridiculously high prices we charge for companies that can afford it. And I think that's probably how we found you. Our ad is in the back of most comics right next to the seeds and 3D vision glasses. So if you remember, that's likely where you saw it. And I completely believe in fate. So meeting Brian all those times in Iraq and Afghanistan and finally being the village idiot that walked up and said, hey, peanut butter chocolate today is the anniversary of Columbine, the Columbine tragedy. And if you don't believe that that was I mean, none of us planned to talk today on the anniversary day. It's also 420 for those of you that imbibe. But I mean, when you think back on that, I mean, there was God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah, somebody brought us together on this date. It's from Remember Columbine as well.

didn't think about that yes um so you guys have created a company called arcadia cognorati and i remember from listening to the other podcast that to say it like maserati so that's what i've been saying in my head while you've been talking greg so i don't mess it up and that's just that might

Luminati.

have been or illuminati yeah whatever yeah

That's where it came from. You know, Arcadia is a real place and we love Arcadia, Chris, but the paparazzi part of it, the Cognarati. was I was thinking okay so we're around scratching our chins thinking deep thoughts how do we set ourselves apart so we made up a word cognorati so if anybody's like I'll give you something that's only for your show so in every powerpoint that I've ever built to support the instructor guide for any program I've ever designed I have my family members hidden in the photos And that's because people steal so liberally.

Yeah.

Oh, I came up with that idea, you know, and the idea is, okay, well, who is this? And if they can't explain to you who that person is, it's like a Where's Waldo, but it's a revenge thing, which I don't know a tempi or not, but I do it. So.

No, it's not. I like it.

Oh, yeah.

That's incredible. There's a professor tip for you, Rachel.

Oh, yeah, I'm telling you. Well, have you ever two times that plagiarism? I don't know if that. a plagiarist call it that uh but the two times that it rears its ugly head one in cop work and so as a copper for 27 years and you'd read an article and you'd read all the heroic things that people did and you'd go hey that's my caper and your name wouldn't even appear in it right

Yeah.

because somebody thought wow that would be amazing and the other is in human behavior pattern recognition analysis i hear people coming out of the woodward and claiming that they're good at that well i invented the name okay and the reason i invented the name is to become a gating mechanism again against people that would claim that they're experienced and professional in it well listen if you don't know me and if you didn't go through one of my courses it hit the road you know so i

I

guess

wish

it's sneaky but you know

you could have put some more words in there though, Greg.

yeah well brian says it

all homeo sapien

the time brian says all the time he says if you can say it uh human behavior pattern recognition analysis he said if you can say without screwing it up then you've graduated so

yeah

in science

it's the hardest

it's

thing it's the hardest thing you have to learn in the entire program

Program.

exactly and and this year i'm celebrating where uh my 60th birthday and my 60 inch waistline meet uh or some sort of at some sort of it's

congratulations greg all

got to be a historic event somewhere you know let

right so so tell us a little bit what you guys kind of do you know we we have the meet cute we got your background what do you guys do with your company

me start first on the notional and then brian will dial in on the laser focus, because that's generally how we approach anything. So I started finding out that people would call me and contact me and say, hey, listen, you're the guy that either wrote this white paper or proposed this theory about how humans react in certain circumstances. Would you take a look at whatever program we're doing? So that got me into cahoots with some people like IRPA and DARPA and different colleges that wanted to do studies. And I fast found. that my hood rat upbringing. was good for something other than bond money and so I started becoming engendered to the folks that said hey you got this natural aptitude of this do you know what that's called And I would say, no, I don't know what that's called. So they would teach me about stuff like confirmation bias and different theories of how intellect is formed and how people make decisions and then game theory and then, you know, all of this spiraled out into me actually taking it out on the road because I lived in a really rough area so I could conduct limited objective experiments. Then the Marine Corps was nice enough to say, hey, you have a visa and sent me into Iraq when it was the most fanatic and then in Afghanistan. and to go outside the wire and test my theories. And I'm nobody. I'm nothing. And I've never been anywhere. But the cool thing is that anything I postulated, I was able to actually go out and test in the real world while being surrounded by experts and studied by. So that sort of became the consulting side of what we did. And then Brian and Shelley and I and then Martin, our overseas counterpart, started saying, hey, wait a minute, we could we could actually put this in digestible chunks for humans. And that's why, Dr. Keene, thanks for staying quiet and not poking a bunch of Swiss cheese holes in any of our podcasts. We can't go with the exact scientific definition on everything because we're kind of moving and we're kind of in a group of people that are constantly moving and they won't sit still long enough to study it. So we can't go into like all the electrochemical neurotransmitters in the brain. So we stick to some basic ones. We can't go into every psychological bias. I think that. I think that every graduate student gets to name three, you know what I'm saying, because the list grows every year. So the same thing, you know, we try to street psychology, sociology, human behavior down to the level that everybody can understand it and therefore become a purveyor, actually go out and use what they learn. I learned a lot of stuff in school that I've never applied in my life. Human behavior. Here I have to use every day. Brian,

Yeah,

you can record?

no, that was, I think that's pretty good. And so we take all that and like Greg said, put it in a usable format. And so what we train people how to do is how to mitigate potentially catastrophic events for the most part. And we call it, you know, how do you identify a danger or opportunity because they're almost one in the same. And what that means is we... Our whole thing is how to be left of bang, right? How do you mitigate something from happening? Well, whether that was with the Marine Corps and military units and stuff and going overseas and how do you not walk into an ambush simply by reading the environment? Well, some people are naturally better at that than others. We all have different experiences in file folders. So what we do is train people how to put words to that using a scientific lexicon for the observations you have.

right and then how do you put that in the usable format to then intervene now and go wait a minute this is happening let's arrive at a decision and make it now and change the circumstances to a better outcome for ourselves so whether that's in in combat right in those situations whether that's raising your kids whether that's identifying you we've done programs the military for identifying sexual harassment assault you know before it happens how do you identify the perpetrator of that well there's prevent indicators this is what it looks But it looks like, how do you identify prevent indicators someone's likely to commit suicide? Well, it's the same thing that we're looking for an insider threat, you know, in Afghanistan and one of the partner forces that you're training. It's an insider threat because now that person committing suicide isn't a threat to society, they're a threat to themselves, but they're still part of the team, they're still part of the group. So that's an insider threat. And so the idea is how do we mitigate this stuff before it ever happens? And

It can be both naturally intuitive and also a little bit counter to how humans think in the way we process our world just because of sort of how we're wired, right? Greg talked about different cognition biases, you know, denial is very powerful. We don't want to believe things are happening here. A lot of times people misunderstand threats or misunderstand situations and they don't, since they don't understand them, we're naturally scared of them. them? So when we naturally fear something, what do we do? We raise our level of how we respond to things. We raise the level of violence even sometimes. And we also miss opportunity. So we try to provide an understanding. And I always say, Greg said, we do HBPRNA, human behavior pattern recognition analysis. So quick street definition of that is human behavior pattern recognition. Everyone listening, think back to when you were a little kid. kid, a real little kid. And you knew no matter who raised you, whoever it was, mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, aunt and uncle, neighbor down the street, whoever it was, when they walked in the room before they ever said a word, you knew whether they're happy, whether they're sad, or in my case, I got to go run and hide. My mom's about to give me a whooping for something, right? That's human behavior pattern recognition, right? That's it. What we don't get the training in is the analysis. So what comes from the analysis is a lot of really, really smart. smart people spend a lot of really really time you know a large amount of time researching different things and coming up with different theories and explanations and we latch on to one of them maybe for a while then we go oh that one isn't great then we get to a new one we go okay this is the answer we go oh no they're really that's not great but what it is is they all have their place somewhere right but but it doesn't necessarily explain anything because people are very focused on what is this person's motive motive why would someone want to do that uh is it because they're angry because they weren't hugged enough as they were kids is it because they've been radical and we're like yeah we don't care about any of that stuff Yeah that's all motive right that's all your your ideology could be anything we care about intent what is someone likely going to do in this circumstance and then over time you can conduct predictive analysis on that there's only you know everyone says hey humans have free will we can randomly choose to do things but you don't right there's only a finite set of things that all humans can do now it may have there may be a large number but it's a finite data set which means you can crack the code on it and you can figure it out and that's kind of what we come in at a very tactical operational and strategic level so so literally down in person one-on-one to all the way organizationally how do I design something for this how do I how do I create a strategy around this and then really just saturate my organization with people who think like this. And we teach advanced critical thinking and resilience.

So you guys do training. So can I call it a curriculum that you guys do? Is

Yeah,

that fair?

there's both training and consulting. Sometimes it's just advising on projects, but using the same science that we use when we train people on it. Just maybe we might be training a bot or drone to identify human behavior and creating an algorithm for it. So yes, it's training and consulting. But we have a curriculum.

And you guys basically primarily are concerned with threat assessment, yeah? Or just in general?

We call

Threat

it

or

danger.

opportunity?

Yeah,

Or

we

opportunity?

call it, you know, threats or opportunity. So for some of our private sector clients, it's how do I not leave money on the table in a negotiation,

right? Okay.

How do I identify risk before it happens? So or how do I capitalize on something that's happening in the market? And the beauty of what we do is we have a curriculum and a process. So we don't have to be experts in that. Typically, when we go to an organization, you're already the expert at what you do, whether that's school psychologists for you guys, whether that's, you know, a Fortune 100 company, whether that's a SEAL team, it's like, great, you're already experts at you. So let's use this framework to take what you already know and apply it, operationalize the information you already have.

How do you guys develop these skills? Like, is this just experience over time doing this or what?

So everything is a product of tacit knowledge and experiential knowledge, but there's also a tremendous amount of research and then there's practical application to learn whether a skill is valuable or not. So this isn't something that came up. As a matter of fact, I've been doing it over 40 years, you know, so it's something that's been around a good long time. But people that do it well generally sit on the information and become. a genius that we sculpt and put out in front of a learning institution and that person will fish for you like flip palette all the time but never teach you the secret to how to fish the river that you're on so we've we've tried to turn this form of training on its ear and appeal to everybody and say look this base knowledge will help you no matter what you're doing whether you're raising your kids stopping at 7-eleven in the morning to get a slurpee and a in a couple gallons of gas, or you're running a Fortune 100 company, or you're a battalion commander about to lead troops into combat. The idea is that there's different levels of cognition that play into your decision making. And normally we go through life just repeating behaviors. And those behaviors release, in most part, dopamine. So we release that, we repeat that behavior even more so. And then it becomes entrenched because the axons and the dendrites link together and now the synapses myelinated and then all of a sudden before you know it, you're on death's door. You get what I'm saying? Saying I could have, should have, would have all those things that you pass by. So we want people to embrace those things that are passing them by. Before, I'll give you an example. Columbine is a perfect example of it. I was working D.E.A. mobile enforcement team. team in Denver when Columbine went down. Really hard to talk about, but let me tell you this. Can we predict danger or opportunity? Both Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris's parents called in to the sheriff's office, one stating, hey, listen, I think that's my kid in the school. And they said, yeah, there's a lot of kids in the school. And he goes, no, I think my kid's the one killing. And the other one said, I hope my son dies because I think he's the one that's killing her. So did the parents know? Yeah, the parents knew a long time ahead of time. There were pre-event indications. The parents sat on the information. Why? Because we do that. We fall for fundamental attribution error. We fall for confirmation bias. Why? Because it's the easy road. It's really hard getting up in the morning and saying, I'm going to do something different with my life today. That's why we have PTSD. That's why people commit suicide. We become caught in this Mobius loop of repetition. And you know what? It's close enough. So it's kind of a life. And then we take a look at the, what do they call that thing on the wall that, you know, they have that little thing into the center and it goes out and it's like a, they call it a God's eye and some other thing that you hang on the wall and,

Oh,

you

yeah,

know,

yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

whatever that thing is. I look at that and all of the chaos that I see in that, that's my life. All of these different directions and I've tried every one of them and, you know, Walden, let's go out and do that. do that well human behavior pattern recognition is that humans are easy to pattern recognize very easy all i got to do is talk to you follow you around take a look at your wastebasket take a look at your car and i can draw a reasonable conclusion and you know what it'll stand up in court it'll it'll stand the test in time but as brian said it's the analysis portion okay so now what i do with that information how can i use that information to make my life better my school safer my kids smarter faster harder to kill You know, and that's what we've devoted our time to.

You know, Brian, one of the things that I think clicked for me was when you talked about your history and your experience in the military as a sniper. And so could you talk a little bit about that and how that has informed some of what you guys are doing now?

Yeah, and so, you know, everyone.

think Sniper and they probably think of some movie that they saw that was said was based on a true story but was probably very far from it but most of what you do as a sniper is is collecting and reporting information because the whole point is you're you have this unique perspective of the battle space because no one knows you're there and you're observing what's going on so so you literally have the fly on the wall right so the whole point is that so that's really where it comes from then see me too you know i grew up in the south side of chicago as a kid i was i was i was a punk Punk kid got in trouble, ran around the streets. And so when I was deployed in urban environments, I had a little bit of an advantage to my buddies who, let's say, grew up in the farm, grew up out in the sticks because I knew certain things. I had tacit knowledge, you know, of a city and how humans interact, even though I didn't speak Arabic, I'd never been to the Middle East before, everything looked different, I was able to assimilate some things better than others.

because i went okay this makes sense based on their behavior so what you get is and this is this is when we train a lot of law enforcement and military they have a similar experiences you get a ton of of tacit knowledge right i get a ton of experience observing humans but but no one taught me what any of that meant no one taught me words to describe it how to articulate it using a scientific lexicon that can work anywhere in the world until i ran across you know i watched greg speak one time and it went like things just started to make sense i was like dang that that i've seen that before i know exactly i still actually have it the first time i ever saw greg speak it was on camp that was like a page of notes that i took in this little 30 minute or one hour thing that he had and of course me being me i went all right this guy's full of it i'm gonna go find out about this right i went like yeah i don't think so that's too simple and the more i researched and read the the like the i felt like the less i knew who right i went oh my god i'm opening up a whole new book and then i went to the next book went oh my gosh there's another book i have to learn then i went to the next book oh my god all right then i was like all right this guy's clearly onto something so so but but that's the idea is you get that experience but no one ever explains to you what that means that's why i give the little kid analogy you know when mom's mad but you don't know why and you don't know even know why you know you've just seen it before and and mimic iniquity is so powerful in human behavior and how humans learn that you know you you can identify that stuff in your environment and so a lot of what we do especially with those like you know tier one military guys that have a ton of experience they i've seen them in class during our intro one time starting to get upset and i'm like uh this isn't going good because when a navy seal team is upset at you you're just gonna like you're just gonna disappear off the face of the earth right and i had to come up and ask after our break and their team chief this guy had been in the seal teams for over 20 years was like hey can you give us a couple extra minutes on this break and we're like yeah he went and got 15 more people to sit in a class and he came up to me angry and i'm again like nervous now because this guy's angry and he's like i've been in you know naval special warfare for 20 years and no one ever taught me this stuff why wasn't so he was upset that he didn't know i mean he knew he had all this experience and couldn't describe some some basic things using terms that everyone could understand and he was immediately like you got to come teach my wife and kids you got to do and it was it was hilarious but but the idea is we all have so much experience as humans but we don't always often get words to that and and like Greg said we have things like fundamental attribution errors and confirmation bias well that person was nice to me they must be a nice person and we're like no that could be completely wrong and

Right.

and so we we just that that's that's what works for me and what I got from the military was There was all that, that knowledge and experience that allows me now to, you get to go back, once you learn about human behavior pattern recognition analysis and what we do, you get to then retroactively go through your past life experiences and you, you, they're now richer, they're now fuller, you get more value out of them, you get more understanding, you get the lessons learned because you go, oh, wow, I saw that back then. So now I have all of these experiences to draw on in some new novel environment that without learning this, I never would have even been able to draw them because I never would have. ever would have connected the two. Does that kind of make sense?

Absolutely.

Yeah, I would just add to that. So I would be embedded with sniper teams that were in ridiculously dangerous places. And I had the unique opportunity to be able to interview them in the moment. Okay, what do you see? What does that mean? How do you feel? And then we would go out on patrol with other units and I would come back and I would sit down and watch how debriefs went, hot wash and AAR and there's a bunch of different terms for it. It was always the same thing. It was always the senior leader. would dictate to everybody else what they saw remember when we saw this you remember when you saw that when we saw this this means this well okay that's part of the solution and i would say hey time out a fat guy in a corner's got a question and they would always defer to me because i was the oldest one in the room and i would say a young kid over there that doesn't have any stripes on what did you see and he said well every time that we had this patrol in this village the kids were out playing soccer in that field and today there's no soccer in that field and all the shutters are on the coffee shop, you know, and it would be this valuable information that was left behind. Why? Because you were the second or third person in the stack and nobody valued your judgment. Well, sniper teams did it better because sniper teams only created information. That information was then processed by others to become intelligence. The signal to noise ratio, they didn't separate any of the pure signals. Somebody else did in the intel community. Well, without that kid saying, hey, those kids aren't playing soccer here on that day, we didn't understand the pattern of life, which means that we were missing cues that our environment was screaming, you know, open, closed, danger warning Will Robinson. So all I try to do in my entire life is tune people into their frequency. I was born and raised in Detroit. So if you're walking down the street in Detroit and a car pulls up to the curb and the music's blasting and they start slowing down, they're not asking for directions. It's time to hit it because they're going to do a drive-by. You know, those type of things might not occur in Kearney, Nebraska, or maybe they do. So tap into the resources you already have. The subject matter experts on the ground do teach you about their environment. And we had a place called Keokuk back in early kinetic Iraq, and Keokuk is probably still around. I have no idea, but it was one of those beltway companies that was trying to teach you everything that there was about the culture. And, you know, the... The thing is they would have an entire section talking about color. Red is the color of sacrifice because it determines blood and this. Well, wait a minute, that's the American flag too, isn't it? You know what I'm saying? Colombian flag has gold in it. Why? Because there's a lot of gold in Colombia. So the idea of sitting there and teaching me stuff I don't need to know or thinking I'm going to become fluent in the language is ridiculous because I'm already on the way to the landing zone in a dangerous area. So why not teach me that almost everything in the world is exactly how. How I learned it when I was growing up, look for those patterns in your environment, and you'll be able to understand it much more quickly. Now, there's probably a tribe somewhere that yes is no and no is yes and up is down and cats sleep with dogs. But you'll be able to assimilate that very quickly when you see it because of its novelty, because it's so nuanced. So the life that you lead is very simple and basic if you get down to the elementals. and that's how you find danger listen danger always comes in incongruent signals but so does opportunity you know so you have to be aware of them or they'll pass you right by it's like the some analogy i'm sure about knocking on the door and you didn't answer and there was your only chance at doing it i would be the opposite person i would say there's chances that you're walking by every day uh

Yeah.

that you could avail yourself of or situation that you can get out of very quickly just by recognizing them and being well before the incident left the bang was a term i coined to describe what i did because i didn't know anything better that turned to somebody taking it and turn it in and left a boom because of explosions and then a couple of kids that attended my class actually writing a book called left a bang uh and giving me credit credit marginally in the very back under like thanks to herman melville greg williams and uh you know simpsons something like that but uh yeah but you get it i mean this doesn't have to be rocket science it's science right you all teach science every day but it doesn't have to be rocket science and only for the cagnerati uh

So what do you say when people, so I'm just thinking because you guys go to Fortune 500 companies when they're like, well, your background is in military and, you know, police, like, how does that relate to what

let

we're doing?

me Yeah

let me throw one in here okay if anybody if anybody after we brief comes back and says well I understand that, but, you know, that still would work in Afghanistan. But we almost never talk about military except in these things where people go, hey, what's your background? And so we have to disclose. We have a police and a military background. In class, if I'm taking, let's put it this way, when I was working DEA met and Columbine was going on, I had a Motorola flip phone. OK, now I have an upgraded phone. So if I'm still thinking about the world in danger and opportunity. and that 20 or 30 or 35 year ago mentality i'm wrong so every psychology book i ever read was written by some old white guy you get what i'm saying i say if you open your aperture a little bit you're going to find out that there's a whole bunch of stuff that's out there like i read cigar aficionado i don't smoke a cigar i read it to see what people are thinking how other people live their lives that's where it's at where it's at is to go out and sample and and test your environment every single day. You work a lot in a school. A school is a petri dish. I got corrected in Detroit about that. I say things the way I read them. I still say iron because there's an R in there. But the idea is you're likely going to school with the same kids that you went to

Yeah.

school with from kindergarten. So how does the school shooter form and you don't know it? How does that insider threat, it's the cheapest and easiest. This form of insider threat, how does that develop right underneath your nose and you don't see it? Well, every interview, every investigation we've conducted is everybody knew about it well before it happened and people just didn't share information. They sat on information. They weren't believed or somebody said, well, I'm not sure the law allows me to search or go into these things. And guess what? The incident happens and now retroactively we go back. Wouldn't it be beautiful that there was a program where we could be predictive and proactive? rather than retroactive and it only happens after we're carrying body bags out of a school or from a foreign environment. So that's what we want to do. When we go into those companies and the Fortune 500 and 100 listen to us, if any one of them says something about the military, we know that they didn't catch our meeting and our goals because that's an easy one. People, remember, every human sets themselves up for failure. So let's say you're having a martial arts demonstration at the mall. mall and everybody shows up and they go hey i want to pick you for the tackling dummy and you get up the first thing you say is well you know i got some arthritis and i'm a little older and you know i didn't sleep well last night why because you want to have your fragile ego system set up for potential failure we want to turn that around we want to show people that listen you can thrive in these environments uh competence and confidence go a long way and almost always if you would walk across the street and talk to the person that's spooking you out and freaking you out you'll find out that you have a lot more in common than you think and now you'll understand them more and there won't be that element of fear or anxiety all the time we as humans are ridiculous at these tools that this computer that we carry around with us all the time makes us dumber because we're always looking down and in we're never looking up and out have you ever tried to order food in the last year at any place now that covid's opening up and you walk up and the And you say hello and the person looks at you like, you know, the waiter or the waitstaff looks at you like, oh, where's the app for that? I have no idea how to respond to it. I mean, come on, we get that all the time. So if you're not looking, you're not going to see it. A part of what Brian did as a scout sniper is look at an environment very critically. So if you look at your surroundings critically, if you check the tread on your tires, for example, if you answer the little warning light above your perndle in your car. You're going to be more aware and your car is not going to break down on the freeway. So why would it be different with humans? That's all I'm saying.

i think that was a great answer thank you greg i feel like that was kind of a passionate answer too yeah

Right.

well no when people are asking like well where where's your history why do you why do you have the knowledge to be able to tell us this and then

So I'll give you exactly that. You know what the worst part of finding out that your dad had a completely other family and another city and that he was doing it without anybody's knowledge and doing it well, the worst part of that is finding out you're the other family.

Oh

So that was my dad. And my dad had a number of families that were set up. My dad was First Marine Division Raider Battalion. He taught with his fist. My mom and my aunt, we called them the Twin Towers, first generation German. They lived right across the street from each other in East Detroit. Every morning they would get together and they would have their meeting on what they were going to accomplish terrorizing the community on that day. I'm telling you, I came from a hitting crew. So I had a very structured upbringing. that was replete with violence. We had to act out for us to be noticed. So I chose a path of violence and thievery. I decided not to do burglaries because I thought that was like a horrific crime. But back then, stealing cars, stealing car radios, stealing hubcaps, those type of things, made you some money on the side and it gave you a degree of notoriety. So did carrying a gun. So did doing those type of stupid things. And you know what? It took me a while to find out that those were ways to achieve a goal, but there were consequences with those outcomes that you didn't have when you were a good human and you followed the structure and the rules and sought out the life of going to school and learning more and getting a job. So that's a precarious balance. And when you're a kid, your brain's chemistry supports you going out and taking chances. So that's really hard, too. Because you learn through your scar tissue. You want to talk about resilience. We're each born with resilience. The idea is as a kid growing up in a target rich environment like Detroit, I mean, it was a challenge that I accepted willingly, freely. It took me almost my entire developmental years to decide that the way I was doing it was wrong and this HBPRNA was the better way.

What switched?

And I think it was a thing called wearing handcuffs in the backseat of a police car and actually having to go in and be told that I was going to go to a place called back then affectionately Dehoco, Detroit House of Corrections. When I finally knew my dad wasn't the first or the last one to beat me. So a beating, I could take a beating. But when I find out they were going to take my time and they were going to take me away from things that I like to do, smoking. and dope, screwing around with women and chasing people with guns, that terrified me. So immediately I was thrust into an environment where I wasn't in control anymore, and it fascinated me that there were other choices that I failed to investigate.

Interesting. All right. Well, thank you for sharing that, Greg. I appreciate that. So this company you guys have grown and it's not just you two, there's other people involved as well. Right. But you guys don't live in the same area either,

Thank

correct?

God, no. I would wear poor Brian out. So this is how hard it is to keep my op tempo. Shelly, our CEO, lives in Gunnison, has got a full-time. I'm alternate jobs. She follows the pattern of my dad. Brian lives out in California. Martin Willey lives in London, and he's building our operation in Saudi Arabia at this time. Brian and I are leaving in a couple of days to go down to Columbia. We do a lot of traveling. So having a brick and mortar thing, we did seven weeks of travel before this call that we're on today. So we get kind of goofy about that. But the idea is that we give it 100% when we're on the road, then we go home. home and we live our lives and and that works for us we really enjoy doing that uh and and also it keeps us honest because i give just a funny story we're uh in bogota a couple of weeks ago we were having a meeting between all these u.s federal agents and and some uh and some locals and the guy next to me is a U.S. Secret Service agent we were talking about when I trained the Secret Service and he leans over while we're in this meeting goes hey how do I know you're still relevant and I leaned back and I said because we're in Bogota I'm 60 and we're having this meeting in Bogota it would be different if we were sitting there at the Starbucks with Brooke you know what I'm saying then you could ask that question but so we try to stay relevant and part of that is this what would you call it Brian distributive ops that we have where we live in different in different

Yeah,

places.

we're fortunate enough that we don't really have to have like a brick and mortar place and we travel, which is great. So we can work from home and we just kind of both happen to be on that similar schedule where we're kind of up and moving. I used to always be getting up first thing in the morning, work out, do that kind of thing. And then once we had our own company, suddenly that kind of takes over your thoughts and your entire life. So I'd be waking up at 430 or five and immediately thinking about work. work so i just continue with that now i do that so it works out well for me i'm on the west coast so we're on calls by like 5 30 in the morning sometimes which is great because you know we get folks on the east coast so it's just we can we can handle that stuff and we have a similar schedule like that and then it allows us to get really really hyper focused with our clients and then we can kind of pull back and i literally we take time off we spend time with our family and we get right back into the groove so it's we're fortunate not a lot of people get to do that but

Right

it also comes with a lot of A lot of stress and headaches, so yeah,

When you're your own boss and you

it's

make it out of your worse. house, you're always at work.

Yeah.

You know, always.

Brooke, you guys have deliberately made the decision to travel and to provide your trainings in person and face to face. And I'm assuming, and I really don't know the answer to this question, but I'm assuming you really, you made that decision based on some science. What led you, I mean, this would be an easy, I would think it might be appropriate to provide a lot of your training and a lot of your workshops and seminars. you know remotely via zoom what what made you decide

there's

to to

there's really there's

focus on the travel but

really only so much you can do over a zoom call or an e-learning platform i'm not going to start knocking that but but honestly most of it's junk um there's not an actual lot of skill transfer

he's not going to start knocking

i

it

didn't knock it i didn't knock anyone specifically but but even when i but but even when i've seen like good good stuff my

Yeah

wife has a corporate job i won't mention her company and when she has to do some e-learning type stuff to go through it's clearly like checking the box they're trying to cover themselves for some hr purposes but even when i was like oh this is actually pretty decent and what is she doing just clicking through waiting to get to the next one i mean uh and and there's some stuff we do but but anything like that that's why we try to do a lot of that stuff for free like webinars and the podcast all that stuff because those will stimulate someone to go hey this this this is a different way to look at things or this is interesting and they'll take away i mean we do that stuff because there is a little bit but to actually transfer knowledge and transfer a skill set to make it usable um yeah you got to get in there in person and rearrange some axons and dendrites and get people to to take a different perspective that well you all know that psychologically speaking taking another human being's perspective is extremely difficult well that's what we teach people how to do and and you know so Everyone wants something simple and easy. And for those people, great. We're not for you. And I don't think those things are going to get the results that you want. I think in some limited cases, they're fine for certain areas. But for the most part, you really got to do something in person. And maybe as virtual stuff gets better, there will be something like that in the future, I think, but it's still limited in its capability. And we,

All

you know,

right.

we. That that's

kind I

of our thoughts on it, I guess.

would add, Brian, I would add mirror neurons, a perfect

Yeah.

example. We could do an entire show on why in-person was better than just a podcast or a Zoom or a webinar. But just those two words, mirror neurons. When you're talking about psychological de-escalation 101, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah has given you mirror neurons. So when you're an empath, when you act out how you feel around other people, they feel the same chemical reactions. And therefore, now you have this group dynamic. Then you add part task training and practical application. You can't do that. You can't just say on Zoom, now go out into your backyard and act as though, you know, whereas in a group we can do that. And we do the old, I know the terminology isn't hip anymore, but we do the old shirts and skins instead of bringing in role players. The best role players in the world are the people in your organization. They're the people that you're trying to reach anyway. And so all of those culminate. Like I don't understand social media and I'm not part of it. Brian does all of that kind of stuff. But I will tell you this. I understand that there's like emoticons or emojis on my phone. So what I do is anytime that I send a message, I pick five at random and I hit send. And people always try to contact me and go, what did you mean by that? Because we got the first three, but then you go off the reservation. You know what I mean by that? That's not how humans communicate. And you know what? that I'm trying to poke you in the eye. Why? Because you're thinking, well, listen, the message might not be pure enough on its own with just words, so I have to add an emotion. Well, that's called a phone call. And if you can't do that on a phone call, which somehow we can't do with text anymore, then go visit the person. Most of the people we're contacting are right down the street anyway.

I love Greg.

You

I love

know what?

Greg.

Think about it. What's

Just

your mom's phone

pick

number?

up the damn phone.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't know my mom's phone. phone number harder yet because she's dead now but if it doesn't say mom on the phone how the hell are you going to reach out because we don't remember numbers anymore so the idea of being in person and seeing when a person's not following what you're saying and being able to speak to that person directly or or hear the group think happening and be able to intervene man that's you only get that and well i'll tell you what we risk a lot because when we go out there not every one of our audiences is bought in especially when we do the the we do regional training and uh for those regions that can't afford us we do it for free so we'll have a couple of dozen people in the class and a few people show up just to throw the the tomato at you you know and then they all leave thankfully they all leave going damn this was a really good course we didn't know anything about it so so we love that too you don't You don't get that. Like social media gives people a platform to poke you in the eye without any consequences. Therefore, sometimes you're not getting the full message, but in person, it's really, really hard to hide.

Yeah, and I'll say Brooke and I have had many 35-second phone calls because it's a lot easier just to call instead of just texting him real quick, and we have a lot

so

of different projects.

much easier yep yep well a picture sometimes Brian and I will just communicate with pictures so I take I'm guessing 150 120 150 photos a day and then Brian and I will come to a point where he's working on project I'm working on project and instead of doing a zoom which we do every single day to call try to catch up i'll send a photo and he'll send back a laughter or something well how the hell does he know what i'm thinking well because we choose human behavior photos that are very explicit in their meaning so sometimes you need a guide like like uh you go to the met you can't read all of the pictures and the paintings on your own you need a dozen to walk you around and go this was the blue period so that's kind of what we do for humans you know we tell you when you're in your blue period

So when you're providing your trainings, you're also conducting and engaged in human behavior pattern recognition and analysis.

Amen.

And I think what I hear you saying is that by doing so virtually, you're missing some of those data points. Would you say that at some point we will have to engage in this digital format and we will find other ways to bring those? was to bring in alternative data points when we can't.

Make those in-person decisions.

It has to happen. I think it already is. That was Greg's whole why are emojis? Why are GIFs popular? Why are memes so popular? This is now us as humans adapting to a new form of communicating. So those but if you look at it, all of those things must happen. Why? Because of context. So there's so much important information within the environment, the sight sounds, but your five senses pick up. pick up more information than you can possibly ever imagine the brain is the fastest computer on the face of the earth and you take all that for granted because you've never really attended to those things you don't really pay attention to that unless you're naturally a person who really kind of takes a second to walk into a place and take a big breath in through your nose and look around and feel that area right so unless you're doing that you're you're you know you don't always notice everything you're picking up on so what are we doing as humans to adapt well just like i said greg brought up the perfect example of emojis there's a little gifs little photos uh memes all that stuff is is faster ways to transmit a signal from me so you understand what i'm in so um the problem is is can can can technology replicate everything that thing that a human does? Absolutely not. And I don't think we should try it because it's going to be a long time before that happens.

Well, and I would tell you this, I had to learn PowerPoint because when I was selling what I do, PowerPoint was the medium. You had to do a student guide, an instructor guide, a smart card, a PowerPoint. And Brian was the one that educated me saying, listen, you teach with stories and pictures anyway. It's just what you do. And just like a cave painting, it's just an extension of who you are. And everybody's heard of death by PowerPoint, not in one of our classes, because the idea is what we evoke and what we stimulate, it's like the allegory of the cave. Brian will dance around the campfire like this. I'll take the broom handle and I'll show where the, you know, to hit the elk at its most vulnerable and everybody that's sitting around like this at the campfire learns that that's learning has not changed. We continue to try to make a structure of everybody sitting. And staring straight ahead and, you know, being locked up, your best teachers, the best students that you deal with are the ones that are acting and emoting and involved with their students on a day-to-day basis. I think that interaction is absolutely essential. And we do it through pictures and stories. And then we also hit the axon dendrite loop by using, you know, chemicals and brain reinforces what you want. We sometimes use fear, sometimes we use emotional content, sometimes we use laughter just to make that point, and I don't think it's any different than any good teacher on the face of the planet.

And so probably a lot of our listeners are like, why do we have Greg and Brian today?

yep

And this is what we're going to call a to be continued or a cliffhanger. So we're going to have a second episode where we're going to have Greg and Brian come and talk about threat assessment in the schools and a variety of different subjects. But, you know, we're kind of getting to the end of this first episode, and I really want to kind of touch on, you guys have a podcast of your own. Us podcasters always look out for each other.

always

Can we get a quick tease on that before we end this episode for this week?

So our podcast is called The Left of Greg Podcast. It's kind of a take on a few things. One, whenever we go somewhere, I'm always driving and Greg is in the front passenger seat. So I'm sitting to the left of him. That's kind of where they named the podcast because we

No, no, it's photos.

have a lot of conversations in there. I've always said, hey, you know, years ago, this would make a great podcast. And Greg's like, what the heck is a podcast? And I was like, okay, this is what that is. and and then i said people will listen to this conversation it's very informative and it's us figuring out and pushing the edge of our own uh kind of way of doing things and our own beliefs like we that's when we we kind of bat stuff around internally is in the car when we're talking right to go are we do we want to talk about this theory whatever but to take on i'm always sitting to the left of him but the funny thing is greg's like can't hear very well out of his left ear and i'm sitting to the left of him and i can't hear very well out of my right ear sometimes so so at one point we had a five-minute conversation going where i thought we were talking about one thing and he thought he was talking about another so i was like okay and we have to do this and it's also a take on the whole left of bang uh concept and and and so that that's

what A

it is

lot

but

of explosions caused that. Yeah, quite a podcast.

we we we just talk about either different topics uh it could be some a case that's in the news it could be a topic that people are discussing it's something from our class and we bat it around and just use our lenses So you're basically getting a conversation almost that we would be having with some students after a course or something, after we taught some elements. It's kind of what it's like.

And I also appreciate the call out. I know we're almost done with time. I'll tell you a quick hearing story with the left of Greg. So we're teaching a counterterrorism seminar to the Irish Defense Forces and we're downtown in an industrial district and the guy that's driving the cab that we're in says, yeah, and that's the famous salmon boat and talked about the salmon boat. I fish. I enjoy fishing. It's how I relax. I go, this guy's full of crap. Brian gets out of the car. I'm ready to fight the guy. He goes, what's the matter with you? I go, that's not a salmon boat. You couldn't catch a salmon. He goes, no, it's an Irish salmon boat. It's from the Irish potato famine. So things like that happen all the time.

It can

And

spin wildly

they're our best

out

episode.

of control. Yeah.

They're generally

Yeah.

our best episodes, the

Greg

commentary.

looked right at me and goes, there ain't no way you can catch a fish off of that slipping boat. And I was like, okay, let me tell you a little bit about Irish history and the great potato famine. Because he said famine boat and he just, oh my God, I'm so sorry. But that's what those conversations are. are on our podcast uh

And where can we find that at?

any podcast player um it's hosted on buzzsprout but we're all over any podcast player look up left of greg podcast and then scroll through kind of look at the quick description of each episode find one that you go that sounds interesting and start there that's what i always tell people just like anything else you're coming to find something that you can relate to and you'll hopefully enjoy the show

And it's up in our description too. So you can go read it there as well. Before we finish this episode, if there's a way to contact you guys for any. Anything, how do they how do people get in touch with you guys?

Well,

So

before Brian answers that because he knows how to do that and I still haven't found our website Just know that our just know that our bios around there as well So if you want to learn more about what Brian and I do and where we've been trained and stuff just read our bios I'm sorry Brian go ahead

No, the best way is one, we're all over social media. So you can look up Arcadia Cognorati or the Left of Greg podcast on there and connect with us on there. Info at Arcadia Cognorati or just. Do your best to try and Google Arcadia, A-R-C-A-D-I-E or I, excuse me, Cognarati, C-O-G-N-E-R-A-T-I, but Arcadia Cognarati, you'll find it because there's no other companies named that. So we rank high in Google automatically. So you can find us on there and reach out and I answer every email that someone sends in. If it's just some questions that you have on something we talked about, it usually takes me a little bit longer. If it's business related, you're going to hear. hear from me right away um but i i will contact everyone eventually like greg said we're still in the middle of a ridiculous travel pace right now so um but please feel free to reach out anytime no

Is this one of those things where you guys initially were like, man, we got this badass name and now like years later, like it's so hard to spell. Nobody knows how to say it.

i know

No,

it's

we love

it's

it.

good

It

you sets you

us apart.

and it's and it's it sets us apart from anyone you know we don't have these cheese ball clickbait eight names that i Exactly. see everyone having and and it's got story behind it when i tell greg the name of our company is the most greg williams thing you will ever understand people like why and sort of explain like well it goes back to arcadia so you can research about the greeks and and kind of the first people that really wrote all this stuff down and so he always throws back that this is who went before us and again they're like what about kagan rad a completely made-up word and they're like if you know greg williams like that's the most greg williams thing you could ever imagine imagine it's

I'm wrong. It sounds like something that would be on like one of our pseudo word decoding assessments.

it will be eventually people

That's what's really

will

cool

start using

because sometimes

it yeah

we'll be in a room and a person says, I looked up Arcadia, but I can't find Kagnerati. And we're laughing, we're smiling all the way to the bank. The idea is do what you feel is right. And so if I come up and I can't find a word for what I'm trying to express, I just make it up.

That's awesome. That's badass. All right. So I know Rachel's got a really good. Really good question. So let's kind of start off with that and we'll just let the conversation flow. Rachel?

Yeah, well, and I wanted to say, you know, kind of as I'm listening to you guys and like I said before, I listened to your most recent podcast yesterday on the road. You know, I think there's a lot of overlap between school psychology and what you guys do. I mean, I think it was Greg that talked about, you know, you don't just have one chance to get on the train. training you get you see that behavior come and come again and and as a professor teaching my students about counseling we talk about the same thing that yeah your client may give you

a teaser or give you a hint that something's going on and you might miss it the first time you might miss your adolescent telling you something but it usually you can come back around they're going to give it to you again and so I just think there's just a whole lot of overlap and I appreciate that but one of the things I thought a lot about as we touched on Columbine in the last episode was just how do we get we know that Our students are the ones who often know the first, see the first signs, know the first things that something's likely to happen. If it's suicide, if it's a school shooting, any of those kinds of things. But how do we get them this information? Do you guys do trainings for high schoolers, middle schoolers, younger kids? Can I, I was just, you know, those were my thoughts, my questions. Definitely.

Yeah, and that's such a great question, Rachel, if I can call you Rachel instead of doctor when Brian forced me to call him doctor, even though he isn't one. But I teach through stories. So yes, yes, we do that. Yes, we do school curriculums and we try to get the kids involved. And a lot of times in and around the Dallas area, we were shot down because we didn't we didn't the school administrators didn't want to put ideas in their. and their kids had if you don't think the ideas are already there

Yeah.

you've failed miserably and you shouldn't be in the profession that's just my personal opinion so when i was growing up as a kid there was a thing called the bill goodman gun and knife show at the light guard armory in detroit that's where i bought all of my guns i was uh 13 to 15 i already had facial hair i went up my dad had another family like i said so uh one of them was in the united states army said they had this wallet from vietnam that had all this military stuff that was on it I ironed my money in the basement so my money looked like it was fresh and crisp and clean that went in with the idea that I would need a fake ID to buy guns. The whole idea to buy guns wasn't to rob people or to, you know, use them against my school. At that time, I was in very depressed period of my lifetime. And I knew that the 32 Irish Johnson and the Zebra 32 Auto that I had bought for like 50 bucks on the street. weren't going to do the job with this immense German-inspired head. So what I was searching for is a rifle or a shotgun to do the job because I had this suicidal ideation and not a homicidal fascination. Then what happened is I had to grow out of that because the alternative was not. And so I started talking to people and people said, no, that's natural. I feel that way too. I'm strung out. So we went and saw the NAC. back at the Temple Auditorium in Detroit, stuck and struck and snuck in backstage, went to Harpo's Disco, found things to do. I got involved with a thing called the Civil Air Patrol that came into the schools, even inner city schools where people didn't have the money to do stuff. And all of a sudden I found out that, wait a minute, if I was involved in these different groups that I had less of an ideation or fascination with hurting myself or hurting others. The other thing is I found that every other kid had the same story. So I'll touch on it briefly. I know we could do an entire episode on bullying, okay? I was both bullied and the bully. Do you know how you become a bully? From being bullied. So the idea is that if you make that transition and say, hey, I start threatening a kid in a hallway and I was a little bit of a bigger kid, so I had to start taking martial arts to be able to do these other things. You do all of those things because your chemistry is screwed up when you're a kid and you're looking for structure and you're looking for leadership. And sometimes that leadership can't come from your family. Emily, so I would ask everybody that's listening right now to the podcast to tell me one of the names of the teachers that you had early on or a counselor that made a difference in your life. I, to this day, remember Arlo Antio. Nobody else, not one teacher in any of my schools, but Arlo Antio, because he would take a knee and go, what's on your heart? What's on your mind today? What are you thinking? You're messed up. Look, you're screwed up like a football bat. Sit down here for a minute, young man. What's going on in your life? He reached out to me. He asked the right questions at the right time. And you know what? First couple of times I told him to go pack sand. Next couple of times I was crying like a baby and telling him everything. So I would tell you, one, never quit trying. Two, all the signals are there. You just got to learn how to read them. And that's what Brian and I are trying to teach you. I hope this isn't a surprise to tell anybody on a call or anybody that's listening in that the same grooming behaviors for a drug mule would be the same grooming behaviors. for a sexual predator or for anybody else in those type of environments there's a certain sequence of events that have to happen for me to cut myself or for me to be a bully or for me to shoot myself or for me to do those things and what happens is of course we try to keep those hidden but there's always leakage there's leakage because our mind doesn't want us doing those things it's just like telling a lie and you you cover up your your mouth or or you you know you're you're touching your erector Dr. P. Lake, as your hippocampus is saying, danger warning, you're about to tell a lie. But they're so subtle and nuanced that if you don't see them repeated over time, you might miss them. But that's why a school is a perfect place. A school is like a test bed for that because it's all these kids to measure against themselves and you have the kids to measure against their history with you or with other teachers. So if you take accurate notes, if you compare those notes, you can find a kid in trouble early. I did stupid things when I was growing up. I was given a second and a third and a fifth chance. That's why I'm here trying to give back to my community.

Yeah, no, you bring up a lot, your question brings up kind of a lot of different points and a lot of the issues we see. So as parents, as teachers, as adults now, we're not very good at really remembering what it was like for us back then. I mean, we kind of have this different view of it now, now, oh, now we have more experience, we're educated, we forget how to see the world through a kid's eyes. And we want to reinvent the wheel and want to come up, well, now this is the problem. Well, this is the new thing. Or now kids are more confused than ever. What kid at 16, 15 years old isn't confused? I'm 38 and I'm constantly confused every day. Okay. So imagine how I was 25 years ago. You get what I'm saying? And we don't do a good job of that because humans have a very fragile ego system, we call it, right? And we... we we think things are everything that's happening us is the worst thing that's happened ever or it's new or it's novel or you don't understand right we forget all this stuff so it's now 2022 so 100 years ago in 1922 there were parents yelling at kids and telling them that jazz music is the devil and that's going to you know you're going to do all these jazz music so arguably today one of the most boring obnoxious forms of music

I mean, that's just my thoughts on it, was the worst thing that ever happened to that community. So that means 100 years from now, someone's going to be saying the same thing to the kid. 4,000 years ago, I was very fortunate to spend a lot of time in the Middle East. One of the places I got to go to was the ancient city of Ur, which is the supposed birthplace of Abraham, the father of all nations, the Sumerian civilization. And 4,000 years ago, there was a Sumerian. in saying a proverb you can uh worship your god and you can praise your king but the man of fear is the tax collector so what that means is 4 000 years ago people were complaining about paying taxes what do you think they're going to be doing 4 000 years from now so let's not reinvent something so you have all of these issues that kids have to you folks you working in school as a teacher as a college have to deal with uh you got to deal with kids bullying got to do with suicide ideation a kid that man might come to the school and shoot up the place oh we got kids Is it normal developmental issues? We got kids failing out of school, poor stuff going on at home.

And so what do we do? We go, oh, we need an expert in this field and we need an expert in that field and we need a new form of training in that field. It's like, well, no, what we come in is here's HVP RNA, here's human behavior. This is how this works. We're going to get really, really good at understanding this. And now all of those other areas you can apply it to. So what we kind of talked about, about danger and opportunity on the last episode and what we meant by identifying these things and kids will look, I don't know if I'm going to find. find a kid who who's thinking about killing themselves or killing their fellow classmates but i'm going to find them right and i can articulate it i i can't tell if it's a kid who who's bullying someone or maybe being bullied but i'm going to find what those incongruent signals are and then the the context and the facts and artifacts of evidence will reveal what the likely outcome is so i i think we've got to take that we take what greg always says hey let's take a giant evolutionary step backwards backwards

and get to the core competencies that all humans inherently can be good at and let's focus on those.

Well, and I don't know your situation in your school because we didn't come in and do a cognitive task analysis. We certainly didn't do any sort of vulnerability assessment. So I'm just saying topically with what we've been talking about, I will tell you this. Violence is a language. I would speculate that you're seeing a state. eight of more violent offenders in your schools than you have been and that the levels and thresholds of violence are greater than you saw in the last five or ten years why well covid's not helped okay the other thing is the anxiety hasn't helped and we're treating children like children and they're not anymore uh we have to kind of change the message in the delivery system and and the idea is that everybody's going to listen i can't spend all this time with all these over full full class with the unique little snowflake that needs your help and you know what it's the antithesis that's true those are the ones that you have to pay attention to because those are the ones that when not cultivated when you don't go in and prune the the weeds from the the root ball that are going to grow into something that's going to say so there and and when a kid finally has enough and their cup is full they will act out now they're going to act out on the school through a malicious destruction of property or on another student through a fight fight or on themselves through cutting or committing suicide and they're screaming at you every day i'm misunderstood nobody's listening to me i have to take and and people say to me all the time when we're doing our investigation there were no signs there were no signs whatsoever then we go back in we do a timeline with them and we show them all the things that happened sometimes years before and then they go oh i should have had a v8 you know they slap themselves in the forehead my thing is why don't we do the intervention now Why don't we have groups of people that go through different types of training? Ours is a much more scientific and, dare say, philosophical approach of how humans think in certain situations and address them. And what we do differently, too, we do a lot of practical application. We don't get actors and act things out. We have the people bring the stories to us and we say, okay, what are the key elements of those stories that we can recreate so we know how to. to fight that if it should come up? How do we address that? What are the words that we're using now? Sometimes we're just sitting there watching the television and eating the popcorn. How do I get into this scene? How do I forge an alliance and have everybody there want to work together to tell me what the plot is, what's going on, what am I missing? And sometimes I think we're adults and we assume that because we're in charge, we have all the answers. We don't have all the answers. We don't have all the novel situations that the kids are facing these days. So sitting down and telling them, hey, listen, you know, open kimono, what's happening? Let's, in complete transparency, what am I missing here? And there's a great visual for you, Christopher. But the idea is that we have to stimulate dialogue. If we're not talking, if we're not sitting face-to-face and talking about the situation, then, you know, is there social leakage? Of course. But most time that comes just before an event. An event is going to peak. There's a threshold of preparation and then the violent episode. We have to intervene well left of that, well before that occurs if we're going to do something in our schools.

Yeah. And I think so just kind of going into our introductory meeting a couple of weeks ago, we talked about, you know, as school psychologists, we have a thousand different things we do throughout the day, right? It's not just assessment. It's not just counseling. It's not just consultation and behavior, academic, whatever. So we're looking at things that almost like at a micro individual level, right? Essentially when they come to us, but you guys are kind of looking at the system approach, correct?

Yes,

Right.

yes.

And by the time it gets to you, it should be you're the subject matter expert,

Exactly,

right?

yes.

The idea is everyone, this is something that everyone should learn and can know and to look for, right? And that information sharing is where it's at. You know, even the teacher sitting around having a conversation about something. Hey, do you notice anything? I don't know if it's anything about Billy. Yeah. You know what? Come to mention the last few weeks, those things are what lead to what you guys as the experts,

Precisely.

as the school psychologists can come in and do that intervention. But that has to happen earlier. That has to happen often. And, you know, people don't want it. Well, I don't want to get this person in trouble. It's like, look, what's the worst that can happen? They have a conversation with a school psychologist. We're going to maybe talk to their parents like we have this stigma of why don't want to like you're not going to. to ruin someone's life or their their their you know career or something later on

There

down the road

is no

because

permanent

they're because

records,

because

right?

there was 50 there were 15 years old and you said they needed to have talked to the school psychologist like that's part of the issue is we just need to make it not a thing these conversations need to happen so that it's no longer a stigma it's no longer i mean that was a big thing with mental health and stuff especially with military even folks stuff like that it's like hey you you had to we had to change the way this discussion happened happen, you know what I mean, so that people were okay with it, that it didn't become a negative thing. And I think, you know, the younger you are, the more that should be involved with it. I think it should just be part of a normal daily conversation.

I would add this, Christopher, I'm feeling that you're also talking about stuff like a thing like having armor guard on schools and having walls and fences and, you know, offset parking lots and increased surveillance systems. You know why those help? Those are the last ditch effort before the situation occurs. Those are literally the, hey, the body bomber's already in the marketplace. Is there a way we can identify him and the clock is ticking? Way too late in the game. So if you're talking about a structural thing that's going to inhibit the shooter, it's not. The shooter's going to shoot. But I'll tell you what's at the end of every one of those, a human. You take a look at every time a human intervened at bang when the shooter was going on and tackled them or stopped them or talked them out of it or hugged them and stole their weapon. Yeah, those things work. But listen, if you're training for that, that means you're presupposing that it's already in progress. It's already happening. We're talking about rolling back that dial and talking about every time that school has a function, every time parent teachers going, every time that we're reinstalling these values, these things and what to look out for and how to intervene well before it happens. I'll add one more thing. Brian was angry, angry. Brian went to sad, sad Brian. because a lot of his friends in the military committed suicide and he came back and he said something that he didn't know that it's now doctrine he came back and he said wouldn't it be great if all the wonderful things that everybody told about that person and after they were dead when we're all sitting around there doing the wake that one of them took the time to say something to him when they were still alive never miss an opportunity to go over and intervene in somebody's life and say you look good today hey how are things today Hey, I wrote that essay. I read it twice. Great job. Because if you do that kind of thing, the endorphins that are released in that human brain, the electrochemical signatures can help balance out the fear and the hate and the death. that they're thinking about every day. Kids have to act up so we kick them out of the nest so they go and start a new tribe. It's how life works. So if you're wondering why I don't understand my teenager, your teenager has to act up so you go get the hell out of here. I never want to see you again. And they go breed with somebody else and form a new tribe. But now that we know that, let's wind back that clock and say we need to sit down at the kitchen table and have a conversation about this. We need to share a meal together. We need to go to the. the park and throw the ball around because those moments we don't get anymore unless there's an app for them and that's taken away from that that face-to-face time to share those mirror neurons and those electrical responses.

So a generalized question, this isn't for any particular level, elementary, middle or high school, but so you guys are coming in, like what are things that you are at risk of also giving us a free training on your guys' stuff? Like what is some of the foundational stuff you're telling? in schools sure

So with talking with kids and then anything is school related, you know, it's really no different for us, right? We get to go to these different with these different clients from all over the place. But since we we view it as all the same, then it's it's the same to us. But, you know, no one knows another student like another student. So open up that dialogue with them is extremely important and getting teachers and caregivers and the custodian and the schoolwork. workers all there on that same page of this this is part of a developmental process it's not just about security this isn't just about preventing a school shooting right this is this is understanding the psychological and sociological needs of of the people in your environment we are all whether we want whether we like it or not are connected and and dependent on one another you know everyone want thinks especially kids oh i'm special and i'm going to do things on my own and i can do it you know Yeah, okay. That doesn't work, all right? There is no such thing as a self-made – well, the self-made people are like the Ted Kaczynskis who go off into the cabin in the woods and build bombs and said those people are self-made. Everyone else learned sociologically how to become successful or what they had to. So I think we kind of misrepresent this stuff, but it's the same thing with kids. It's just they'll tell you what's important. They will show you and demonstrate what's important. that's important to them and and that if that might not be important to you but but it should be if you have have a child and you know i i take it back to parenting so i i have a nine-year-old insurgent at home and she she's um she's just absolutely amazing but you brought up something uh christopher when you ended the episode you said hey make good choices and you know it's that's one of the greatest things you could ever say to a kid because if you're demonstrating what good choices are they know what what they are kids know the difference between wrong and right it's a very very small amount who don't understand it very small amount and you can identify that easily so when you say something like make good choices that's a challenge because now they know when it comes to that choice they hear your voice in the background going make good choices man this isn't one of course they're going to make the wrong choice some of the time right you're supposed to as a kid that's fine did they know

that they that they their decision led to that that's called learning responsibility right so they don't get to blame it on other people but those simple things um are you know i always talk to the little one hey what do kids talk about on the playground or what's the craziest thing that happened in school hey did anything scare you this week what was this and and kids they can't not tell you what's going on they'll scream it out in some way whether whether that's through

telling you everything that happened or keeping something guarded where i'm like you're holding back some information there i'm going to circle back to that a little bit later you know what i'm saying so you can identify that and then same stuff like because of social media and technology and stuff you can't hide anything you can't you cannot hide anything so the beauty of all that stuff is it's all out there it's up to you to find it so if you're a parent your kid has tiktok and you don't have a tiktok account you don't know how to use it

you're the problem right you gotta get on there and figure so i took my little one what is this stuff can you show me oh i go through here and of course i search everything that she has right of course what do i find you know she's looking for cute puppy videos like funny

Ah, the

funny

works!

so i'm just like dying laughing like that's so adorable you know what i mean but but like you you you leave a trace with everything it's so much easier to identify this stuff now now the problem is there's a lot more information out there because of this stuff so it's So it's hard to filter, but individually in your own kids' lives, you can see all that stuff and they build a pattern of behavior. And when you're looking at a pattern of behavior, I have to concern myself with, is this behavior, you know, is it a standard? Is it pretty much that they're the negative Nancy every day and this is who they are? We all know people that have that certain bandwidth and they operate at that all the time. That's fine. Or is this escalating? Or is their behavior de-escalating? Like where's the direction here? Because then I can just plot it out on a graph and go. and go hey you know what this is headed to a really bad place let's get this on track right now with a little bit of adjustment so we don't have to do a major adjustment years from now

Let's talk a major adjustment briefly with what Brian was saying. If we take a look at Elliot Roger with the Isle of Vista killings, Elliot Roger is an insult. And if you look on online, you can see any numbers of his manifestos or his videos, and he's sitting there talking to the camera, holding a Starbucks. Well, we know that Brooke is at a Starbucks right now. Can you imagine that you were standing in line ordering your drink when Elliot Rodger was just about to go out and launch his killing spree? Same thing with Cho at Virginia Tech. Cho was in the library, then went to the post office. He was out in public just before he did his event. So if you're going to take a course that's going to say, hey, listen, you can see in a person when they're evil, you'll know when that person turns. That's horse crap. That's parlor tricks and that clickbait sells books. But when it comes right down to it, their behavior, like Brian was saying, plotting it on a graph, I would say your pen and a yellow pad, you can do the same thing. Every single day Jimmy sits here and does this. Today they're not doing that. That means that something is altered. And we both jot down every facet of our life on our yellow pads. Why? Because then you have something for comparison. And Brian talked about responsibility. I would say. You could say in your children, no matter what age your children are, you have to instill a sense of responsibility. And then you have a choice. When they do something wrong, you can judge them or demonstrate that there's consequences for their action. Nobody wants to be judged. Nobody. That's why kids continue to act out. Almost everybody in your life wants their say and not their way. When you have a person that's trying to demonstrate both, you have a problem child and you have to address that. And somebody would say, oh, do we really want to call them problem children? Your child has a problem. Look it up in the dictionary. It's clinical. Okay. We have to address that situation. We're not trying to say there's something wrong with your child, maybe there's a mental health issue, but the idea is that we have to know that there's clear consequences for our actions, and there's certain places that we don't act up. What Will Smith did at the actors, why did it bother me? Because that's not the venue, that's called an assault, that's workplace violence, he shouldn't be doing it, because that's not the venue where you're supposed to do that. If you or I would have done that, we would have got tackled and arrested, but because you're notoriety, we're not. Not those messages. Our kids learn that way. They're certainly not learning everything from their parents or from their schools or from their their teachers and your teachers and you psychologists are doing so much great work, but it's being lost in just the volume of message that's out there. So I would say grasp on, you know, Shelly says all the time, celebrate the little wins. A grasp on the small things that you can see every day in your environment that would lead a reasonable person, artifacts and evidence that you're seeing that are incongruent, that would lead a reasonable person that that student on that day is having a problem. And if you see a pattern form, then you have to intervene. If you don't intervene early, then you are truly going to reap the whirlwind.

But what are you looking for, I guess? Like what patterns am I?

So Brian says it in incongruent behavior. For example, again, I told stories. So Shelly and I were walking up to the detective bureau and we saw a female that was wearing a track suit, you know, the jogging suit that was oversized. It was filthy. Her hair was filthy. She had gained pounds since the last time we saw her in a police athletic league and she was chewing on her hair. Clearly, all of those signs together meant there was a change in this young. 15, 16-year-old girl's life that we saw her degrade over time to the human that was in front of us. So we walked up and Shelly goes, hey, how are things at school? And she goes, oh, I almost never go to school anymore. I spent a lot of my time at home. Immediately we knew whatever was happening is going on at the school. And now we had an incongruent signal, a mention of the school. So Shelly sat down with her and Shelly got it out of her that she was in a. an abusive relationship at school. She let herself go because she didn't want to continue to be sexually manipulated. And that was her outward cry for help that everybody else in her chain of command was missing. It can be something that simple. It can be adding tattoos, a change in haircut, a change in clothing style, becoming militant when you were very quiet and mousy, becoming quiet and mousy when you were loud and boisterous. And you know what? We change every day, all of us, but we follow a pattern. So it's okay, like I like bright colors, but if I'm wearing nothing but black the next couple of days to school, might be time to walk up and go, what's with the Johnny Cash? And it's okay to act like I'm the Columbo, I'm the stumbling bear. When I go up to interview people, I always ask like an idiot and have them educate me. And people like doing that, right? So I get a lot more out of it. Brian's very clinical. Brian mimics emotions of humans. But he doesn't have any real emotion. So Brian is very clinical when he goes through it and he asks very probative questions, right? So your style doesn't matter as much as getting in there and saying, what's the reason for this difference I'm seeing? Now, of course, if you front somebody, what are they going to tell you? It's nothing. Well, you got to get past that veneer, don't you? You have to find out what it is. And that's where your interview strategy is going to pay dividends.

When what I hear you saying is the biggest thing is that relationship. Right. If we don't

Exactly.

know that somebody's different, we don't realize we don't see that they, you know, we're wearing bright colors for the last three months and then these days they're wearing black. If we don't have a relationship with them, we're not going to notice that. And I think that's where we are stuck sometimes in the schools is that there's so many pressures on teachers, on school psychologists, on the counselors, on the administrators. to do 150,000 things that that relationship falls by the wayside and

Yep.

there's a lot of research that says you know it's not just reading writing arithmetic it's relationships and if we don't have those then we're not able to see when somebody's not eating lunch anymore and they used to or that they you know are only on their phone and they weren't before or all those things that you talked about out.

And then.

Go

No,

ahead.

and that's everywhere we go because we're so hyper focused on what our job is and what we have to do. And look, I've got these 10 things to get through today and we've got to learn this and I've got to bring these folks up to speed because we got to get them to perform well in this test because if we don't get them to perform well in this test, we're not going to get the – it's like we have – what we're really bad at is measurement and assessment. We're really, really bad at that because measurement and assessment is far more complex than – than anyone who does it realizes right we come up with these metrics to go this is what success looks like or this is how we're going to measure successes it's like well what is that really measuring what do you because because you know you get so down in the weeds especially with teachers and schools and everything you have to learn and do well what are you really trying to do like are you are you are you training the next uh nasa astronaut here in the eighth grade no you're not okay so what are we trying to do here we're trying to and prepare someone for the world outside and and what they need to do well what does that entail like i was not the best student i could always i was one of those kids that like i could do real well on tests right but but i i hated doing my work and unless i was interested in something i would have like an two like an a plus on a report card and like a d and they're like how is that possible right be like well i really like this i don't like that other stuff and it wasn't until later in life that i learned it but but that's fine so i yeah i went and and got an education later in life i went and got a graduate degree later in life because that's when it worked for me and and so back then what was it really focused on and what are you really trying to do because especially if you're talking about you know troubled kids or we've got all these resources we need to allocate but you know what if you get them through high school

chances are they got a really they're likely going

Great

to be successful

chance.

or or at least be contributing members to society in some way because it's such a rough time so if you can get them to the point where they're they're a little bit more developed i mean even men your brain aren't in prefrontal cortex is even fully developed to like your mid-20s or late 20s sometimes or me maybe yet i'm hoping not yet is where i'm at so so the idea is is you're trying to get them to that page with And what are we focusing on? Well, what's important? Communication, right? Understanding other people. You know, I tell my little insurgent, you know, she gets told three things every morning before she goes into school. Hey, work hard, be kind and make good choices. And you know what? If you can do those three things, that's a successful day. That's a successful school. She'll figure out what she wants to do later in life. And then guess what? She now knows I got to work. to work really hard to get at that so and that's hard to do you know you're a teacher you're you're hey look i have this is my subject i have to teach and that's important but it's you can do all of this stuff on top of that i can be a better human i can communicate more and still do my job if i just happen to what i'm good at as an individual how can i how can i just read the room how can i understand a student what their needs are a little bit because if i focus really really hard and all my effort and just getting the the information out that I'm trying to like well I might miss the mark because I didn't read the room I mean we do that in our courses like

Yep.

we have to take a step back or take stuff out and go you know what hey we're not going to get to that we got to slow down today because I'm having a hard time reaching the section in the back of the room and and if you constantly evaluate that you'll get really good at seeing it

And you know what else you got to spend time on? read up and study up on survival and how humans have evolved the idea is this if you've tried to evolve with just platitudes you're going to find yourself in a dark corner alone surrounded by skeletons because platitudes get us nowhere platitudes don't help us you're saying oh it's my morning motivation no it's not that's the coffee that's that's you getting up and going to the gym that's you choosing tangible things to go out and do every day vulnerability is how we would pick on people in our smaller tribes to weed them out because they weren't going to help the group survive. Well, that's still going on in the classroom today. And you have other people that are vulnerable that you don't look at. Your creative person that's up there that's running for school president, walk up to them one time and you've got rules to follow, of course. But listen, limited objective experiment, sit down with one of them and say. And have you ever thought of suicide? Do you think that they're going to say, no, my life is rosy and happy? They thought of suicide just like every other kid in that school has thought about it. And the idea is you're saying, oh, my God, do you think my kid actually has thought about suicide when they're growing up? Yes, all kids do. The idea is that what was their outlet? Did they have a chance to talk to you about it? Did they say today I'm feeling vulnerable and the only thing that got me through this week, this month was my God, my book, my teacher, my whatever. Find out what those things are because. Because that's how you build adaptation which leads to resilience. You got to have that scar tissue. We all have to fall down once in a while. We all have to fail in a group and have the group pick us up and dust us off or at least model behavior that we can follow. And in high functioning groups, you're going to have some kids that are left behind and those kids may be your vulnerable set or it may be the ones that are pushing so hard that they're not taking care of themselves. So you got to sometimes shake the fishbowl to see what's going on in there. Because it's not always what you think it is. The highest functioning kid with the greatest grades may be the one with the most emotional turbidity. And so we have to challenge the assumptions that we've been given by testing it. And the way to test it is take a knee and talk to kids, talk to kids individually, talk to your kids, talk to your neighbor's kids, talk to kids in a group, get it out there. Because when they're transmitting, they're much less likely to use violence as a language and act something out.

So I'm a mom of three girls. I have a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old, and just nine-year-old, like just turned nine a couple days ago. And, you know, I think this is very,

I like Brian's terms better.

yeah,

Insurgence.

insurgents. Definitely, especially the 12-year-old is there. But, you know, I think it's interesting because, you know, in our world, there's nothing off limits. We talk about it all. you know you

Yep.

you know it's just how it is but so many other parents are not that way I've earned the designation of one of the top five strictest parents in the world because my kids cannot have their phones in their rooms at night they are checked on a frequent basis and and they're like that's so embarrassing I'm like tell your friends I want them to know that I check your phone because I don't want them to send you stuff that you shouldn't see that you shouldn't get that's a good thing so many parents are afraid of that so many parents are feel like they're intruding that they're not allowing their

Yeah.

child to grow up

No, they are intruding and they should intrude. This is what we're talking about at an individual level is you have to get involved and involvement means asking questions and being probative and it doesn't even matter what the response is necessarily. people know like hey you're not going to get away with this stuff around me and that that's what builds and people understand boundaries and a bit you know they they understand what's important like we all hated that stuff as a kid but you know i got in trouble and my old man took away everything i had took the door off my room so you want to act like a criminal i'm gonna treat you like one and like you're never going anywhere and i was complete lockdown i was like wow this really this really sucks and i could argue with him on why i should be able to go see my friends again and and get my you know cd player that i paid for back you know i mean he took that stuff for me so like those little things were were what established you know you know learning boundaries and understand what consequences but with all that that's how you get good at understanding and predicting human behavior is just

asking questions to everyone you meet you know if you ever saw greg like every single person whether it's the barista at starbucks the person checking at the hotel the person who's standing in line he talks up every single person why because you're going to find out a nugget of information that's going to help you out or you know what maybe they just need an outlet you help them out i mean the idea is it's just that it getting informed like that. So with your own kids, does it suck? Yeah. Guess what? The little one knows you don't have privacy in this house. That is a privilege, not a right. If you want to earn some more privacy, okay, we can talk about that. Parenting is that's how that works because now those kids know what right looks like compared to other kids and they're going to then go forth and do that in the world. So you're helping not just inside your own house, but sociologically. logically as well with the entire community.

Doc, you're spot on. What you're talking about is having an environment where you can operate at the speed of trust. Listen, we all trust that what's coming out of our mouths is going to be the fact that you don't have to worry I'm not secreting clothing somewhere and changing on the way to school. I don't have cosmetics or marijuana in my locker and I'm going to alter my behavior when I'm outside of your realm. That only occurs when a person understands that first I learn my boundaries. Then I test my boundaries, then I push my boundaries. So if you're a parent, you know your kid's going to push the boundary and you know the tricks that they use, you can bring it up in a conversation and say, hey, I want to be transparent with you. I'm afraid that this behavior is going on. Prove me wrong. There again, I'm not judging, but I am showing that there are consequences. What are the consequences? Well, my oldest kid is 40, older than everybody on the call, and she's got a PhD in philosophy and special education. Well, I started off as a hood rat. Right. How can that happen? It happens because my wife and I work in behavior profiler. Kids got away with nothing. You get what I'm trying to say? So there's nothing wrong with saying I'm in this strictest house. But then a movie like Carrie comes out and, you know, Stephen King, and then we're all afraid, oh, I'm going to push my kid away. Your kid's going to leave anyway. And if your kid doesn't leave, they're going to be a failed to thrive living in your basement. You get what I'm trying to say? Say, don't worry, mom, just seven more years. And, you know, I'm 35, but seven. Seven more years and I'll be out. Listen, you have to say, what am I creating that I'm giving to society? And that's your child. And schools are creating those children as well. I would rather give your kid an opportunity for midnight basketball than have them in the back of a patrol car going to the detention facility for juveniles. I would rather your kid and your adult go on a police ride along and see the consequences of other people's actions together so they can have a point of clarity to talk about. Now, did you see what just happened? Why? Because domestic violence happens in relationships and I love you enough that. of the I don't want to see you in that relationship. A workplace violence happens, and I want you to know what anger looks like so you never have to face it on the road. That's what we train. We train in stuff that everybody already knows, but we've evolved past because we've said, give me a number three supersize in a clown's mouth for so long that we think somewhere all that learning is occurring. And I'll tell you right now, it's not. So go back to your family. Go back to your church. Go back to your school because we assume that stuff is happening. and it's not right

I know Brooke has a question, but just to agree with you, Greg. So I'm obviously what I do and my wife, much like Casey and Leon, our mutual friends as a BCBA. So we hope that we have everything taken care of about raising our children,

no

but I guess you never know. Yes.

and it's okay to make mistakes raising

Yeah.

your kids you

Yeah,

know what you

it

do I

really is.

would walk in and I would sit down at the kitchen table with my kids we know something's up it's not just a holiday and we sit down and we bring those things out and and I remember choices that I made and I'll say Hey, I made this choice and I know it didn't seem fair at the time. And now upon retrospect, I probably wasn't the most fair, but I'm a human just like you and I make mistakes. So if you can forgive me, we can get past it. All of a sudden having a parent say something like that to a kid, that's transformative, but it needs to happen because if it's not happening, the kids are assuming that you've got it all figured out and you know, we don't teachers don't psychologists don't doctors don't. That's why they call it practicing. So it's okay. To be vulnerable around your kids.

Well, and that models that for them, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

For me that that's okay. It's okay for me to say I made a mistake and own up to it

Yep. And I'm

and you

sorry.

brought up

Those a are...

perfect word is that that's how humans learn and so you know people tend to over complicate things is they're they're learning right you're teaching your kid whether you're doing that actively or nothing at all you're teaching them something so what is it that you want to teach and it doesn't have to be perfect you just literally model the behavior that that you want them to see like there there's just ways you can do that that very simply right so anytime we go anywhere i always you know open the door for my wife my daughter and i should not explain to her hey when you meet a guy later in life he should be doing she's learning that i don't have to say it to her she knows what right looks like there's certain things that i say and don't say around them you know i try to allow her to always know that she can talk what whatever she wants to talk about she can say in the house that's our safe space right she's

Right.

so funny she makes jokes sometimes that that my wife and I will die laughing and we have to be like hey you cannot say that outside this house that was wildly inappropriate let me tell you why but

Yeah, yeah.

then she's like but you laughed I go because you have comedic delivery that is far beyond your years and and I hope you do something with that but I need you to understand this and she goes got it she knows she can say stuff in front of mom and dad and it's okay now we have to teach her what right is but just modeling the behavior that's it you just demonstrate it through your through your action

Actions.

Irony and sarcasm are signs of a healthy kid. If you see that in your kid and your kids are laughing at those and they can get those references, you know you're doing the right thing. But we're so afraid to model this 1950s persona, the Dick Van Dyke show in the 60s, sometimes it's okay to show them that you're learning things every day too. I think that's a good thing.

I can't tell you how many times I've purchased. I'm sorry, flowers for my wife, but now

Yeah.

I, you know, now that my daughter is almost 21, she's received a healthy,

There you go.

you know, and so,

Nothing wrong with that.

no,

I send out sorry flowers to me for stupid things I do, you know?

so I'm going to, I want to switch a little bit here on you and I don't, there's a tough, one of the toughest situations that I kind of get, and you guys have talked about some of the foundational psychological principles and theories you've talked about. confirmation bias one of the toughest situations that I tend to get into with teachers is when the teacher comes to me and says this kid is going to be the next and then fills fills in the blank what what kind of guidance or advice or how would you coach us as school psychologists and coach our listeners when we need to respond to teachers like that

So, Rick, that's such a great question. I'll say this. It is first just initially, sometimes they're right. So

Yeah.

here's the standard. And Brian, I know Brian's a genius on his delivery. My thing is it's all down to artifacts and evidence in support of a reasonable conclusion. There's a baseline behavior for all humans. If that human's so egregiously outside of the baseline behavior, specifically in that venue, a school, a church, a 7-Eleven, if they're acting out. outside of the constraints of that you have artifacts and evidence that demonstrate that it's been more than three times which is generally the charm that I found in my investigations then you got to do something you have to act first and act fast or it's going to be a bad situation perfect

One of the things we always use is prove it. All right, if that's what you think, and that's what Greg's talking about is like, well, prove it, write it down, write down everything that you think, every indicator you're picking up on, what you feel, what you sense, what you. what you what you hear everything and then we can investigate that and and you know when you've got kids like this people make those statements you know kids know like oh yeah if you if you went to any school right now in the entire state of texas and you did a poll of all the students there and you said write down the three people in this school that are likely to come in and and either kill themselves or kill other students or do something you

They they're all going to list the same people. So the idea is how many what do we we all have finite limited resources, especially in school. So who do we have to focus it on? What we have to focus on the most likely people that are going to do that. Now, you can't maybe legally do that. I'm not suggesting that as a course of action for anyone listening. But the idea is the kids know teachers know and people can change and people you can have you can intervene with someone. someone um we were teaching a course at a university and one of the students came to the course and you know we picked up right away on him you know because he was dressed a little bit differently act a little bit differently but you can't always tell why like you know is this person has autism spectrum disorder do they have that you know they could be a million different things and they're a little odd people would describe me as okay there's nothing wrong with that description just

Not

a little different

a little odd.

and then you had at the other table where these like three jacked you know swat hot cops who've been you know running and gunning for 20 years and you know they were just like meat eater guys you know really nice but the i said hey everyone don't forget we're not getting started here for another 20 minutes go ahead get to know each other and the kid the odd kid got up and sat right down at the table and he was so out of place there and he just engaged them so i was like okay well that's kind of interesting so over the course the next couple days we talked and the kid came up and he was literally like hey look i was that kid in my mom's basement wanting to go shoot up a school school. I wanted to go kill everyone. I was depressed. I had this going on. I had nothing. And I hit this point and I realized that like, I'm the problem. I need to fix this. This is going nowhere good. And he said, I didn't know how to talk to people. So I just started, I went to the mall, I'd see an old lady sitting in the food court and I just sit down and say, can I talk to you? And he started doing that and he started doing that over and over again. Then he got out of high school, he joined the military and he was involved in some mental health stuff in the military helping people out. and creating these programs and stuff and like so what he was is he was taking that path he was what you depending on again what someone's motive is you'd say he's radicalizing himself to go do this or he's amping himself he was that person but he made a choice and said you know what i'm not going to go that direction so the idea is when you come across these people we look at it as they're broken human being but we're all broken human beings that are on the unique little way way right so what is it about this person because you're working with kids they're in school every single one of these school shootings a teenage suicide can be prevented every single one of them can be prevented that's a person that needs help they're not a terrorist they're not a evil you know reincarnated they're a broken human being who's mimicking behavior they saw and they're relating to something that they they They don't need to relate to. So how can we change that course? And that's, you know, everyone's going to know who that person is. So let's allocate our resources to the individuals that we need.

So two quick things on that, Brooke. What Brian is saying is that if all the serial killers, if all the school shooters, if all of those folks sat down and wrote a novel about their experiences, you wouldn't be able to tell where one author started or stopped because they all have that same. a root personality disorder that drives them to do this so what I would do the second part is Brooke I would go out and I would buy a spray can and I would go to a a big wall at the school and I would spray paint on there you can fix you and I'm here to help and I would stand there and I would say come get some because those people that are broken know they're broken they're they're not delusional they know they're broken

Yeah.

Okay, a delusional person will stick out over time above the baseline, and you'll get them help because they're not the ones that are going to come back and do this. But that kid that's standing there that's reading that and seeing you standing next to your workbook is going to come over and go, I'm broken, man. How can you help? That conversation alone can save lives. And why are we not having that? Because you can't afford the spray can because you don't want to have that rough discussion? I'm saying go out there and get some every day.

I think another thing you guys, you're kind of bringing this up and alluding to it, Greg, is that there's no stereotype person

Nope.

that will do this stuff, right? I mean, yeah.

Oh, I'm odd. I wear odd clothing. So you know what? If I'm more predisposed to be a school shooter, no, it has nothing to do with it. You know, some people smell. Some people look funny. Some people have long hair. That doesn't mean anything. Okay. Those behavioral traits have nothing to do with what's inside that human. And that's where we need to get to. We need to get what's on the inside that's trying to fight its way out.

Well, and even after, and you guys correct me, anybody on this, correct me because of my age, let's be honest. But after the Columbine shooting, right, there was a lot of stuff like it was violent video games. It was heavy metal music. It was, you know, their loners, all that stuff. And that's all just jazz

it goes back to jazz music you know what i'm saying it's that that darn jazz We music

have to point to something,

you know

don't

that

we? Don't we have to vilify something?

well that's the thing is it's much easier and and and i i we don't even get in those discussions it's oh it's the the video games and it's well it's it's guns and well it's it's uh it's what was the big one they oh this satanic ritual like a lot of this stuff is such junk and and we we glam onto that because If we put all the responsibility on that individual, it means we're putting responsibility on ourselves. And we don't like that. We don't like to know that we could have done something and prevented this. We don't like to know if you're that teacher in that school go, oh, well, yeah, it's because of this. It's not because I saw this coming a mile away and didn't do anything because we don't want to live with that. And it is our responsibility. It's OK. We miss things sometimes. That's why we have a team. That's why this. I think sociologically, humans need other humans to survive. You need help. We all need help in some ways. It's very easy for us to point to something and say, yep, this is it. You know, it's that darn Facebook. Come on. People have been writing things on walls for like a few thousand years. I don't think that's changing anytime soon. But, you know, I think it's I think it's behavior and it's the individual and it's not the medium or whatever. the thing you want it to be.

I think you need to take that one step further. The reason that we have that monster under the bed is because we're afraid of the dark and it's got to be the monster. It can't be me. I'm such a fragile egotist that I can't have it be my problem. So the reason that I can't assume that Billy down the street or Susie is a school shooter is because then it makes me vulnerable that my kid could be.

I can

OK,

do it.

so you understand that we don't want to talk about those things and those are the vampires. Those are our all science toys in the attic. flowers in the attic that we got to yank out into the sunlight because the longer that we keep believing that horse crap that was written by somebody 172 years ago that didn't have our insight and our ability look i look at every day you show up for school as a challenge to write in your diary what happened that day so you can impeach somebody's testimony or you can say look at the pattern the trajectory this person's life is on and you know it takes a few minutes every day I do that with my own employees. I do that with my friends. I do that with my family. Why? Because then I see things before they occur. I can cushion them. I can buffer them. I can stop them. I didn't get fat all at once. It took a team effort. Do you get what I'm trying to say? It took a team effort and now losing the weight. I'm into my third year and yeah, I've lost a hundred pounds, but it's hard as hell. So the idea is what do I want to do? Do I want to keep up on the hard stuff that's going to have the results? faults and I'm going to see the consequence of my actions or I want to just default to human behavior patterns so so the idea is yes it's a challenge but it's doable thank

Hey, Greg, I support you on your weight loss journey, man. Congratulations on

you my friend

that.

thank you I'm going down it's not easy we work out everywhere we go we don't eat healthy on the road we have these things that that Brian and I do to build each other in teamwork and then Brian being the realist I said hey I got to go for a run he goes Greg it's it's It's more of a walk. Just your arms are moving faster, you know. So I did Brian to bring me right back down every day.

it's good to have that person in your life right yeah fair

Where it's horrible, I haven't decided yet. What do we have?

so we are getting kind of towards the end of this episode you guys have really given us a fraction of the knowledge and application of stuff that we need is there any lasting thoughts or last

statements that you would like to say closing

All

arguments

human beings set patterns, right?

Yes.

All human beings set patterns. You can't not set a pattern. It just becomes who you are. And people like Greg mentioned it, it's a really powerful one. Most people want their say, not their way. Most people just want to get off their chest and shout out and shout into the void. So we only need to worry about people who want their say. and people who want their way as well, because that's different. So we all set patterns, we all create habits, most people want their say, that would be my kind of takeaways for everyone just to think about what that means to you in your life if you're listening to this.

Yeah, and I would say the only thing that I would add to it is that the most important person in your world is you. That's the way you see everybody else in the world. That's the way you think about the consequences of the things that you're about to do or you're not going to do. I would say change that up a little. I was at a meeting very briefly and this guy was spouting all this win all the time, win everything, win, win, win, win. And so I was up next to the speaker that was coming up next and the guy walked by and I shook his hand. And he goes, hey, Pete Carroll. I go, yeah, that's great. So later I was telling somebody about Pete Carroll. They go, oh, Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seahawks. You don't got to be Pete Carroll's win-again strategy coach of the Seahawks. You don't got to be good looking. Clearly, I got a face for radio. You don't have to make a lot of money to make a change in your life or make a change in the world. You can help others. You can help yourself. You can get educated. You can go to training. You know what? Sometimes it's expensive. Sometimes it's going to take longer than you plan, but small, subtle, incremental changes every day and you're going to get to your goal.

I appreciate that. Also, you don't have a radio face. I have a radio forehead. It picks up signals from like 16 planets away.

That's hilarious.

So, but you guys, I really want to thank you guys for coming on here and helping us out. You know, we are trying to push school psychology out into the world and what we can do and how we can help. help there's a huge shortage of us clearly with Brooke our traveling school

Yeah.

psychologist and Rachel as well

Yeah.

you know we need school psychologists we need mental health professionals in schools you know and if we had if people just understand that we have these abilities and this knowledge I mean hopefully we can get some more out there absolutely

We appreciate you guys, all of you guys doing what you're doing in your roles as educators and really shaping the future of our nation, not just your. Your communities where you're at in the state of Texas, but we appreciate that and appreciate you letting us take up two episodes of your show.

Of course,

It's

of course.

a lot. Thank you.

We feel really important right now, but we're vulnerable. So don't pull the rug out from under us just yet.

Every season needs filler episodes, right? So, you know, I get it.

And there it is.

But yeah, so I want to thank Brian and Greg. I want to thank our special guest host this week, Rachel, for coming on and giving us some knowledge and some tidbits. It's you know you're always welcome and if Greg and Brian if you want to listen to Rachel's episode she did an episode earlier this season and she's phenomenal and Can't we usually

wait.

kind of just like you guys we ask a question and sit there for 20 minutes while she just gives us the information and then

Can't

my wait. co-host my partner in crime Brooke thank you for joining us from your Starbucks that you're at right now.

All right. So Brian added a couple of things for you to tack on to your make good choices. Do you remember what they were?

that be good right be

Be kind.

kind and what was the second one it was be kind

Work hard.

work hard and make good choices hey

Make good choices.

I was trying to let him hit a home run, but there we go.

Yeah, he said it.

ouch hey

Ouch.

you know what in home run derbies even when they were juicing in early 2000s not everyone went out of the park all right

That's

so i'll

true.

remember that

That's true.

um but for all of our listeners again i thank you for listening to us i know you got a lot of stuff to do on your time but we all have long commutes so thank you for for putting us in while we're commuting and for all of our listeners make sure you follow us on our social media channels facebook instagram at txasp and until next time be kind work hard make good choices

Love it. That's all for today, folks. But if you'd like even more content, you can head over to our Patreon page. The link can be found in the episode details. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, follow us on social media, and please tell your friends about the show. Thanks for tuning in and thank you for your support.