Left of Greg 019 Gunny of Arabia

Hello everyone, welcome again to The Human Behavior Podcast. As usual, I am your host, Mr. Brian Marren. Tonight, on the episode, we have a very special guest. We have Mr. Robert Newman on the show. He is a man who has worn many hats, so to speak. A long career in the Marine Corps, in the reconnaissance community, has a ton of experience—a ton of experience—in the counterinsurgency programs. He's taught all over the world, been through all kinds of different cool training. When I say counterinsurgency, that also makes him an expert at insurgency, so if you hire him, you also got to watch out for him.

He's also, he's also gone through the "train the trainer" process of human behavior pattern recognition analysis and was an instructor for several years on a number of different programs, inside and outside the Department of Defense, civilian sector as well, simply focusing on the human behavior stuff. So he did the insider threat training, suicide prevention, sexual assault, harassment prevention. So he has experience, not just what he brought to the table, but after going through training, becoming an instructor, he has a number of experiences within that. Now, he's working in the private sector for a larger corporation; we can talk about that, so that was a quick intro.

Also, we can't forget Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after, The Human Behavior Podcast. So if you guys are listening and you want more information, of course, always go to the website ArcadiaCognarada.com. You can watch this on YouTube on The Human Behavior Podcast, or listen and download on iTunes on The Human Behavior Podcast on iTunes, or go to the website and listen right on there. So we've got all kinds of different resources out there. Check out our lessons learned, good, fun reading, good, good takeaways on a number of different subjects.

So, that being said, real quick, we'll throw to you, Gunny, as I affectionately call you, of course. Please do elaborate a little bit more on your career and your experiences prior to even getting over into this strictly human behavior realm.

Alright. Well, I retired in 1996, primarily from the infantry, special operations, and reconnaissance field in the Marine Corps, and I've been contracting mostly overseas ever since then. About, about eight or nine months ago, I returned from Saudi Arabia where I was working for three and a half years for a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. And that was an eye-opening type of a place and situation over there, especially for a guy with my background. And there are plenty of people like me—plenty of Marines coming out of the Recon and Spec Ops communities, just loads of them out there.

But what geared me up for this job in Saudi Arabia that I just completed, that for three and a half years, was the two years prior to that I worked for Greg Williams in human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. And I'll tell you something right now, if I had not done that, I could easily be dead. And I don't say that being facetious or trying to dress up the danger over there in what we refer to as the heart of darkness, (apologies to Joseph Conrad), the city of Riyadh in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But it is a society over there that is quite different from many of the other societies in the Middle East, but also around the world. There are a lot more focus, it's more in regards to Islam. Of course, they're primarily Sunni there, but it's a, in regards to their intensity of their faith and how they believe, it's more like Pakistan, where I worked for several months as a Chief of Counterterrorism for a company over there.

You can feel it, it's atmospheric. You can see it, taste it, hear it. And walking off the plane there, it was almost palpable for the first time. And it didn't really matter about my Marine Corps background or how many wars I had been in prior to that. What mattered was the human behavior pattern recognition analysis training. And sure enough, I hadn't been there even eight months yet and one of my guys—I was in charge of 140 people, including forty-some-odd women, Saudi women, who we hired to work in the defense industry, first time that was ever done—but one of my guys popped positive in regard to anomalies on his behavioral baseline. And it was sudden. Nobody else really picked it up as far as what it meant. They just said that Salah was acting differently. And he really was. He had gone from this, easy come, easy go, happy-go-lucky kind of a guy, always smiling, nothing ever bothered him, to overnight switching to saying some very dark things, making public statements against the military for whom we were working. And I brought him outside and had a long chat with him once, and after that chat was over, ten minutes later I had him off the compound, and with good reason, because it went south from there after he got off the compound. And that's what human behavior pattern recognition analysis can do for you.

Yeah. Our viewers don't know, so I'll take a minute to educate them. First of all, you're, you're probably one of five, of the five most professional instructors and lucky enough to work with. You've got an incredible resume. Anybody, if you get a chance, look up R.P. Newman on LinkedIn just to get an idea, just to get a hair's breadth of the type of things that this man's been in. Thank you for your service. You've chased more gorillas than Dian Fossey. You know more about counterterrorism than anybody. An author, a published author. Just, just a fantastic human, and I, I would run out of adjectives and accolades, folks, talking about R.P. Newman.

R.P., I want to tell you one of my favorite stories coming out of Saudi Arabia. I chewed some of the same ground that you did in there, and I had a couple of return trips there. There was a young soldier sitting in the audience of one of the courses that we were giving, and as he was chewing on sunflower seeds, every once in a while he would feed a bird that was in his pocket, and the bird would happily eat the sunflower seeds as they were all engaging. And this is timeless information. What we teach is universal. You don't have to—I mean, it works with or without an interpreter and a translator because that's human data. All humans understand it, all humans are the same when you get right down to what matters.

So during the first break, I had to go over and I had to ask him, "What's up with the bird?" So he says, "Mister," he said, "on my way to the class, I found this bird and it was an injured bird and I picked it up and I put it in my pocket, and Allah be praised, he'll live and he'll be a successful bird and I can reintroduce him. But if he doesn't, he'll die and he'll be my lunch because I didn't bring any lunch today for your class."

(Laughter)

That's the idea. We loved it, but it just spoke so, it spoke volumes about the rest of our experience in Saudi Arabia. I love the place, I love the food, I love the people, but you can keep Oum Ali; I am not going to have any more ever on the menu whatsoever. But Newman, you've been everywhere, you've done everything. Marren and I promise to send you a photo of Newman holding a 155 shell in Afghanistan and everybody running, but he looks stoic the entire time. Bob, you had seen the dark underbelly of human behavior, and what was it, what takeaways, what thing most stuck with you, either after the academy or when you were out on the road teaching, or in some of the situations? I remember you and I were up in Seattle teaching a suicide prevention course and the alarm went off in the wee hours at the hotel. If you remember, it was just driving, raining outside and we three—I can't remember, I know Shelley was with us, I don't remember who else—we're the only ones standing outside because nobody wanted to go out because the fire alarm was going on, because the storm was raging outside. Human behavior twists and foibles always drive me crazy. What about you? What, what keeps you going or keeps you up at night?

Well, let's say in regards to things that in my travels and in my various positions that I've held—and it includes 53 countries and five wars—humans are the same everywhere, absolutely. The other little differences between them, of course, it has to do with their culture, religion, your background, your training, how you were raised, all sorts of things, your intelligence, your education, everything. But really, they're the same everywhere. And human behavior pattern recognition analysis, once you understand just a little bit of how one culture differs from another, you can apply it. It's like a template, and you can put it over it, but it's important to understand where am I? What am I doing here? What's everyone else doing around me? And what is different in regards to what I'm seeing? And then of course, when the hair stands up on your back, your amygdala is popping positive in your limbic system going, "Hey, you know what, you should leave now!" Exactly, first listen to it, and on your way out, be looking for why your amygdala told you that.

And Sara, you'd say it all the time, the bias for action.

Yeah, the program is running in the background and warning you, "Danger, warning, Will Robinson!" I gotta do something, I gotta act first and I gotta act fast.

And so one of the questions I always like to ask guys like you, Gunny, is, you know, so you had a long career in Marine Corps reconnaissance, Special Operations community, and then had even more experience training, doing counterterrorism stuff all over the world. And then you went over to this human behavior program, right? So then you were, you were recruited because of your background, "Hey, we want you to, could you, would you like to come do this?" And so I said, "Okay, what is this about?" So I always like asking guys like you, because you already had decades of experience showing up, and then you went through this training, started in training other people. That's folks. So what was it, what was your experience when you went through that? What was your eye-opener? Where did you then look back and go, "Hey, what, I would have done this different there, or this could have been, I could have learned this?" You know, what was your experience in that?

It was all day long. I was in Iraq, when I was hired away from a corporation that was there for three years working in counterinsurgency. You're a big counter-counterinsurgency school. That's right, we were doing that up in Taji, yeah. It was in a very kinetic place, adjoining the Sunni Triangle, about half an hour north of Baghdad, just, just north of the canal. And my, my old boss from the Marine Corps, Colonel B.P. McCoy, calls me up. And I was his company Gunny in the early 1990s, right after the Gulf War. He was on my right flank in the Gulf War. And he calls me up and he goes, "Hey, I need you to quit your job." And I said, "You know, you could mail me some of the alcohol you're drinking; I know it wouldn't get through customs." And he goes, "No, quit your job, I want you to come to work for me. We got this guy, his name is Greg Williams. I'm going to send you a link, look him up. This is the program I want you to quit your job and I want you to come here and we're going to, we're going to make you the Quality Assurance Manager for the company after you, excuse me, after you go through the training." And I said, "That's all I need to know, sir. I'm in. Roger that." And ten minutes later, I submitted my resignation and I was out 30 days later, and arrived back in the States and immediately deployed to scenic Columbus, Georgia, and attended the training. At which time, I was terrified because there was this little blonde girl named Shelley.

Oh, you're so bad, Newman. You're, you're a tough guy. War on terror, Recon, Airborne, dual-qualified, whatever.

She scared me so bad that I paid attention in class. I thought she would hit me. I didn't want that to happen because I didn't want to fall down in front of my peers, and crying was right out. And so when she started talking, Greg started talking, I understood what B.P. McCoy, why he said to me what he said to me, and what I said, "Because quit your job now." And going through the program, I realized I wasn't in it probably three or four days and I was kept thinking to myself, "Why didn't I know this before I went to Iraq? Why didn't I know this before I went to other bad places like the Congo, that place? Why didn't I know this in Zimbabwe? Why didn't I know this in Uganda?" But I was lucky. I was sitting there, managed to get through the training, and of course, once you're an instructor, it's as always true, you'll learn more as a teacher than you ever do as a student.

Absolutely.

Right, right. No, and that's, that's, that's it. And you've seen that teaching to experienced guys, too, and they're like, "Hey, wait a minute, I always did," like telling the story of when we were training the SEAL team and like, we know, we're down there and it's normal first, you know, a couple hours in the morning and it's rapid fire to get them that intro and get them hooked. And I'm looking around and I'm getting like kind of like anger cues, and I'm going, "Okay, well that's, that's not good in a room full of SEALs, where they're looking at you, you're picking up anger cues." I'm like, "Yeah, they're going to, they're going to eat me and they're going to just throw whatever else is left of me out in, out in the Coronado, out of the bay right there."

And your Rolex is going to be gone, too.

Yeah. And I'm like, "What," you know, I'm going, "What's going on?" And then kind of like, you know, we had a first break and the chief was like, "Hey, just, we're going to need a couple extra minutes here." And I'm like, "Okay, I'm kind of getting nervous and like, 'What the heck is going on?'"

You're on your way out.

Yeah, I'm like, "I'm, well, I'm planning my exit strategy right now." Yeah. And I'm in the clear, the car's running and I'm sitting in it, doing the Blues Brothers, you know. "I'll sit in there and co-sign the check," too. But, but he goes, "You know," and all of a sudden he's got ten more, more guys show up and he go, "They were brand new, you showed up to the team," like, I don't think they were still in their check-in process. Basically they just got through SEAL training (SUT), just got their Trident, all that stuff. So they're just brand new to the team and he tells them to sit down and listen to every word these guys are saying. And I'm going, "Okay, well, that's the good thing." So I went and talked to him and basically they were upset. You know, I walked around and saw the most meticulous note-taking I've ever seen in any course ever: college, master's level course, anything. These guys were writing down. And the chief was like, "Look, this is stuff like we're, we should have had this training a long time ago. I don't, I know this. I'm supposed to be one of the most highly trained, you know, this, the other thing, and I haven't, no one taught me this. I've been in 18, 20 years in specialized Naval Special Operations and no one taught me this." And they were so, they were upset. So they're angry that they hadn't learned that information yet. So and I know we all have different experiences going through it and, you know, when you come in with your experience and go, "What the heck?" So that always really, really attracted me. It's like, so everyone gets it. No matter what you're going through, no matter what level you come in and go, "Wait a minute, this is something I should have known," or, "This is something I need to know because this obviously applies."

Well, let me throw something at you there, Marren. First of all, I want to go back on what R.P. was talking about. Shout out for B.P. McCoy, obviously, Colonel. God bless. He, thanks for your time and your career and your patience with guys like me and all the great that you've done in the world. Shout out for B.P. McCoy's Passion of Command, an incredible book. It's always been on my "read" list. It's a, it's a seminal work that that will change the way you look at leadership and your and and changing the culture of your organization. B.P. calls you and you have enough faith to drop what you're doing.

Oh, yeah.

And head out. And my first experience with Colonel McCoy up at Twenty-nine Palms, and I'm just about to go into one of the largest auditoriums at that time that I spoke in, right off the beautiful Lake Bandini. They had just built a fort for building training area. They brought down all the walls and so I was doing brigade level training on pre-deployment. And they said, "You see that big guy over there?" I said, "Yep." They said, "That's Colonel McCoy. He has these little index cards he's taking notes on everything." And like, size six Helvetica font.

That's working. Absolutely loaded up, that's going on.

And they said, "He's going to be sitting in the front row. If he gets up during your speech and comes up on stage, that's to boot you out of here because he's got precious little patience and time for posers. So feel free to head out if he starts getting up." I was petrified. I, I hate public speaking anyway, but I, I was, I was scared to death. But it's a testament to the type of people that get into this work. There's a very, very small, select group of specialists that do this work. Newman, what type of people, and I apologize for not remembering, what type of people were in your academy down there in Columbus, Georgia?

We had, we had FBI. We had Chase Ford, of course, sniper from the Marine Corps. We had several SF guys, Special For, US Army Special Forces, the proverbial and legendary Green Berets. There you go. A lot of people like that. We had some other cops as well, who were there. I think we had one SEAL. And so we, it's a pretty well-mixed group. Oh, and we also had a Denver area cop as well, Eric, you remember Eric? I sure do. Monster, you know, kind of like looks like a tree and you know, he was big, you know. I could imagine him trying to haul you through a, you know, through a vent window and he could do it. And so it was a pretty good mixed group. And I didn't know what I was going to expect when I was in class. You know, B.P. McCoy said, "Hey, you know, quit and come over here and this is your new job and be there, be square." And I sit down and see all these people, but I was glad to see no other Marines, of course. But what I was especially glad to see was that we weren't all from the same cut of cloth, right? You know, everybody had different learning styles. And Greg and Shelley have different teaching styles, but they complement each other. It's not a conflict up there, although it was confusing when we're all sitting there and we're leaving class five minutes and Greg is up and and he goes, "Hey, hey, Dawg, I need this. Would you bring it to me?"

Okay, we're all going "Dawg." The funniest thing is as Newman's talking about our CEO, Shelley Williams. And hopefully she'll be on the broadcast tomorrow night. And when I first met her, Bob, she was the fastest, smartest, most dangerous profiler that was working eight mile in uniform and out of uniform. And she was kicking butts, taking names, throwing away the names. And I said, "Who's that? Who's that firebrand over there? Who's that that that that might take on the legend one day?" And they said, "We just call her the 'Police Dawg'." So I met her as the "Dawg" because nobody got away. And I still call her that to this day when we're running around somewhere. I never even think about it. I rarely call her Shelley. So that's hilarious that that was one of your takeaways that—

Well, here's the thing, too. The first time I ever went for a ride with you two, we, when we went to, you know, if we were going to some place to get something to eat or chow hall or something, and you were driving, I was in the back seat and Shelley's, you know, Shelley's riding shotgun, and she starts talking. And what she's doing is she's naming all kinds of things about people that were driving by that we've never seen before and have never had an interaction with them. And I'm listening to her, and after about the fifth one inside of a minute where she's telling me all the bottom, what their deal is and all this, I said, "No, it's just like a setup or something? Are you trying to trick me?"

She's easy to do anyway.

And she goes, "No, no," you know, "because I, this is what we do as detectives on the street in the Detroit area because, you know, you can nail people fast." And that's when I said, "This human behavior pattern recognition analysis thing, it's going to save my butt if I can get anywhere near what she's doing right now, I'll live." So, you know, she hasn't slowed a bit. Better than I have, too. We just sit in awe sometimes of her functional field of view. It's 93 degrees, not 11. Yes, on that.

That's what I always, when I introduced Shelley or talked about her when briefing someone or, "Hey, this is our CEO," I, you know, I, there's the first thing I say, "You know, I don't, I don't, I don't scare easily. This is the only, this is one of the few people in the world that intimidates me very much." Because she's only five foot tall, a little thing. And, but yeah, so, so, you know, you know, we, we've kind of been talking about different police work and military stuff and dangerous places and high threat stuff. And, and now, you know, taking what you know in the human behavior realm and going to, now you're in a corporate environment, right? I, you can get into or not as much of who you work for, what you do, but or you can just keep it general, don't, for confidentiality. However you want to do that, but you're now in a corporate environment, still in sort of the security realm, correct?

Correct. Security Technology Integration Project Manager. My company, I won't bother to name it, but the company that I work for, very, very well-respected. Right at many times in Inc. magazine. And all of that. And about four months ago, I was with one of my foremen, we're going out to visit a customer, a very simple job, just installing, you know, a card reader and a camera. And and and we also, they wanted a panic button. And so I'm in there and the lady said, "You know what, I talked to some of my bosses and what they want outside on the glass door is a sign that says 'Video,' you know, 'Video Surveillance'." And I said, "You know, let me tell you something about where you would put the sign, because remember it's glass. And one, to put the sign over here on the wall." And it was outside of everybody, male or female, their functional field of view. Her nails have averaged about six degrees, because of an anthropological throwback. Females average about 11, so they're looking as far as focus goes in a cone, everything else is peripheral and is out of focus. And I said, "It's not going to do you any good to put the sign over, to put the sign over there because they're not looking over there. They're looking for their hand to go out and grab the door handle and pull it open. They're not going to see it. And if a bad guy comes in with, with bad intent and he suspects us and there's a camera there, he's going to start looking up. He's going to direct his functional field of view because cameras are generally mounted up, either on a pendant or in a mount. We had ours just popping out of the ceiling, out of a ceiling tile. And they're going to start looking around like that, and you're going to see that happen." I said, "That sign would be seen by almost nobody who walks through your door." And while I was telling them this, about three or four of the other people who work there, walking by, and they stopped in their tracks and they're looking at me going, "Holy cow, well, where is this project manager for a security integration company getting this information?" They asked me that. And I told them where I got it. And they're all doing this one. "Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we need to know."

Well, and it, go ahead, Greg. I know you're, Brian, you, you're jumping on the same thing I am. Newman, how many times have we checked a place? It has a panic button. Panic buttons are useless. They're "bang thinking" if you don't know what goes into the few seconds or minutes before pressing it. What is the criterion? What are the baseline cues? What are the pre-event natures of those things? So we're so we think this is some sort of, uh, not to be sacrilegious, holy water or a crucifix against an asteroid that we're going to hold up there and say, "We have a panic button and we have cameras and we have," you know what, "even body cameras on top." You're going to record your own homicide if you're not careful out there. The idea is what you were laying down for him was the training that goes along with the material solution.

That's right. And that has to go along with that material solution. One cannot exist without the other.

Yeah, technology is a safety multiplier, but you have to start with a baseline of education. Right? And, you know, and when we go to schools or any, especially schools, they, they like the so-called panic buttons. It's really, it's a lockdown button where, and this was important for compartmentalization of a shooter, and I guess I understand the term "active shooter" because if he's not shooting, then he's not a shooter, and therefore he's not active, but anyway, it makes me insane. But if a guy comes in, your hands, you know, you want to be able to compartmentalize and protect the, the faculty, the students, and the staff. And so it, so you can, so you can narrow down where he is so the, so the cops can come in there and sort the situation out. That's what that is for. But it's not a, "Oh, I, all I have to do is push a panic button and I'm good to go," or, "I'll just install this, you know, there's a Vigilant, you know, two-meg pan tilt zoom camera and I'm all set." That's why we sell precise systems and training is critical every time in my job where we install, I don't care if it's one little thing that we are installing, we give training about it. How do you operate it? You know, whatever it's, whether it's foibles, you know, what do you have to look for? Where exactly does it really need to be for maximum effect? If you do have to lock all the doors in a particular facility, be it a school or a cop shop or wherever, or in Virginia Beach in a city building like we saw a few days ago. And, but you know, everything comes together as a unit. Not no one thing can save your butt outside of training.

Dad, real quick on that, Marren. The earliest days of your training, if you trained with me, I talked about people that check their six and people that look for the cameras in Walmart. That has been all over the world, 53 countries, that training has been out there. And you know what? It's as critical today as it was then. If you got a guy that's coming in and he's looking at your security, he's a cop or he's a bad guy. Do you got somebody that's walking through the parking lot and is actively checking their six? They're a soldier, sailor, airman, that's gone through this training, or they're a bad guy. And life is that simple. There's good and there's bad. There's, there's pure wonder and there's wonderment, and there's evil. And all you have to do is have somebody educate you so you can see the deer on the, when those scales fall from your eyes, then you can actually start seeing it.

And, and I kind of, to just, just lay it right on top of that, and I'm sure you're, sure, Bob, you see this, this all the time, you know, being in the industry that you're in, right? So you're selling, you're, you're providing these solutions to these issues, right? And, and I think a lot of people get, have a lot of misconceptions in terms of your customer embrace or what they're expecting out of it, right? So they go, "Oh, this is it. Now I have an answer to this. I press this button," or, "No, there's a camera right there." And we think that's it. And even, even you knowing that, that this is a, what do you call it, I wasn't a force multiplier, but it was, I think it was something I came up with, a few, "security multipliers." Yeah. Is they have to understand that there's an education piece and training. "Oh, well, no, look, we're giving you this. This is now an asset you have. Right? This is now a tool that you have. Now you're going to learn how to." I can't just, you know, give someone a hammer and then a screwdriver and this and go, "Hey, go fix this or go build this." So, "No, no, I got to show you how to use it first." Right? And I think that's an important part that people forget about, too, because we've, you know, working with some of the major corporations that we recently did, they had, they had stuff there too, and they go, "Oh, we were thinking about just hiring a guy and he's going to be our guy if it's a clog." "Okay, okay, good luck with that." Yeah. I don't know. And like, "Oh, okay, one, here's what that's going to cost you a year. And then that guy's going to come in and he's going to say, 'Hey, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do that, you need to do this,' and that's all, that's all going to cost you money." Sorry, I probably hear the train going by. This is all, this is a photo behind me. I'm living under railroad tracks, right?

Still, I got one for you here. We, we're on the road often. And, and it's hard to try to sell something to people that they should be finding you and looking for. But, but sometimes, you know, they, they just don't get it. And so after a long day of training and teaching and a bunch of different folks coming in, I always, you know, do my shout out for a thing that you should carry. Always carry your door wedge. Yeah, it's light, it should be in your bag or your pocket all the time. Always carry your tourniquet. Yeah. CAT tourniquets are easy, they're cheap, you can buy a bunch anywhere you go. I don't work for the company, but I'm always carrying one. You know, those types of things. And the funniest thing is that when we leave and we go back, they look and they go, "Yeah, we know we should have this training, but we just don't think it's going to happen here. So we're going to wait it out. But we did buy five of those tourniquets." Again, "bang thinking," or "right a bang thinking" with no critical thinking about, "What am I going to do to prevent it? What preventive steps am I going to take?" And that's my strong suit, because we can train almost anybody in how to recognize pre-event indicators. Right? It doesn't matter how old you are, anything like that. And a memory. It's intuitive.

It is intuitive. And, and sometimes, though, there are natural biases. Like, come on now, we all have them. We're human beings, we're fallible. And we were, Greg and Shelley and I, Brian, you might have been there as well, Chase Ford, and so whether and we're up there at, up in Seattle and we're out there on the base at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, on a misty, rainy day. Imagine that, Seattle. And it's just shocking where the palm trees. And we're off, we're on an observation post (OP) and this little Army girl, she's an E2, she had been serving food trays. So now it's Thursday. We're going to go out to the range for two days and we go out there and we're looking at the village and all the actors are coming out. And you've got some lieutenants and maybe a captain, a bunch of sergeants first class, a master sergeant, other sergeants, staff sergeants, corporals, specialists, and they're all there. Blah, blah, everyone was talking, not the little girl. She's sitting down with her binoculars and she's just watching. She's not saying a word. She's not listening to everyone run in their yaps behind her. She's watching. And then she starts talking in a matter-of-fact voice, not to anyone in particular, but to anyone who might listen. I was listening. And she starts going, "That guy is going to do this. That guy, he's okay over there. He's scared of the other one over there. Hey, look at that guy back there, why is he talking on a cell phone?" She's running it off. She's probably 18 years old, hadn't been in the Army six months, for crying out loud. And nobody's paying attention to her. And I stopped everyone from talking except her. And it took her about a minute to realize everyone had stopped talking except her because she just gone, "I see you. I know what you're up to. I'm doing this." And, and, and I tapped her on the shoulder and I said, "Private, stand up." And I turned her around and I said, "Everyone needs to be watching her. She paid attention in class and while you're all are speculating about things and talking about this, that and the other thing, she's nailing everybody and everything in the village."

It's in. And I think that's a, that's a great point and, and, you know, that we've had that issue where people go, "Well, you know, this is kind of a lot of education. It's a lot of sciency. This is a lot of, you know, pretty big brain stuff. You know, really about I'll get it, maybe some of these guys will." And you're like, "Look, if an 18-year-old cranially marine—" and I say that being one—"Oh yeah, who could barely pass high school, can learn this and and not only learn it, but but excel with it, you know, late, anyone can." Like you, you brought up kids. So, so I want to just kind of see if from an understanding of, "Hey, this is what people need and it's easy to learn, it's intuitive." What are some of those issues you see just being like project manager at you are at a very, very well-known respected company who's, you know, deals with, you know, infrastructure, security infrastructures, vulnerability, threat assessment stuff, and then it provides solutions for that. You know, what are some of the issues that you see that are lacking with some of the clients or in that industry or where they can improve, you know, in terms of training and education?

They don't understand how a bad guy thinks all the time. It's easy to sit there and watch on CNN or Fox News or ABC or, you know, look on a website, The Drudge Report or MSNBC, I don't care. We can get you news, but they don't understand how a criminal, how a bad guy or a guy who doesn't have a criminal record but is about to, as we saw last week in Virginia Beach, you know, and all of a sudden he very rapidly went downhill. He had behavioral changes, getting in fights at work, which is totally out of character according to reports about him. And then all of a sudden, I mean, one of them was a very bad fight. Then all of a sudden, just like that, he submitted his resignation. And now guys like us will pick up on that right around me. Like, something's going on with this, this guy's world and how is it going to culminate? And we saw bad. But people don't understand like what, what can happen to somebody, and our prisons and cemeteries are filled with criminals who were not criminals before they committed that one criminal act.

Yep.

And, and how they think is very, it's, it's predatory, and that's something you always have to look for. And we teach it in human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. Mission focus, predatory looks.

Newman, we talk all the time and try to explain to folks, "Stop looking for motive, start looking for intent." You separate those two. And for example, you know, the news media, please catch on when you're looking at these incidents and saying the police are still looking for a motive. His motive was to kill a bunch of people in a fascination amount of time. You got to stop that. What you got to do is you got to take a look at that. So simple, it's elegant: baseline plus anomaly equals a decision. And you know what, you're going to be right more than you're wrong, and you have the time and distance, that gift with which to de-escalate or get the person help. Look, the shooter's hurting, too. That's why they're shooting. They're a, you're a poor, sad, broken, needy human. And, and the island of misfit toys shouldn't be full of them. You should be able to find a place where you can get the type of help. And if you don't want to get the help, you should have people out like us, trained like us, aggressively looking for you and trying to find you and either getting you help or, or, you know, whatever the alternative is. But, you know, I do go by what's always the excuse we hear: "Oh, well, we can't afford it." Well, let's see if we can afford the losses. Well, how much for this?

That's, you know, that's a good point, and I like, you know, Greg and I have talked about this before, and you understand it, too. Is it's, it's simple, you're, you're going to pay either way.

Yep.

So how do you want to take? Do you want to pay in preventing something up front? You want to try to mitigate it? Or do you want to pay, like you said, in a lawsuit, pay with loss of life, pay your respect at the cemetery for someone who didn't, didn't live? You're going, that, that payment is going to is going to be made in some fashion. And, you know, there's the, the, you know, the stuff that you guys sell, and that you guys do is you have an incredible, you know, product line and services that you offer. Right? So you can, "Hey, we can come to your facility and we're going to do this, this, this, this." And even then, you know, it's, but that's only, it's so good to a point. You're right. If, "Hey, we can give you the best surveillance system on your compound or your facility," but if the guy watching the camera doesn't know how to look for things, well, when he finds one, we're just going to be, all we're going to have is good evidence for a hopefully follow-on, you know, a trial. But, but we're already accepting the fact that that something's going to happen, let's document it. It's like, well—

And that's the thing, too. When we were, Greg, Shelley and I, we decided to become part of a, of a communist parade on the island of Crete. And we walk out and there are, I thought they're all dead. I didn't know there were any commies left. They're going to have a protest. They got the red flags, and I don't mean five or ten, you know, Castro Street, filled with thousands of them. They're very well organized.

You'd see some of the photos.

Yeah, it was amazing. But we walked out there and then we're all thinking, "Okay, is there any, what's the intent here?" And we, within a minute or two, we realized there's no intent of crime here. Their intent is to have a march and have a nice time on a beautiful day on the beautiful island of Crete. And they go drink some wine and eat some eggplant or something, I don't know. But and we get out there, we're taking a lot of pictures and looking at people and watching, trying to find, "Okay, what are any anomalies among people?" And of course, I'm watching this, this one young lady, I would guess, what do you think? 23, 24 years old? Skin-tight jeans on, you know, because it's warm there. And I mean, and she's a very attractive woman. Watching her, and I just wanted to see how she was acting with people around her. The guy to her right was her boyfriend or husband or significant other or whatever. And in my camera lens, I whipped it up onto him. And he's got the war face on because he sees me. He thinks I'm eying her, so I ended up looking like a creepy kind of guy. But it was for science! It was for science, you know. This guy, I've got the picture and this guy, the woman is not the one, if anyone's going to throw a punch in this thousands of people, it's that guy right there. He's right. So I grabbed Shelley and put her in front of me. Yeah, Shelley, you kill it.

Old Kevlar Shelley. No, one of the, one of the funny things about that is Brian, Newman just illustrated what we do best. We don't just talk out of a book, we're out there on the ground every day and we're right in the middle of it and we're trying to capture the event as it unfolds so we can use it for training later on. And it's in it's funny, Newman, because, you know, how many situations did we walk back out of afterwards and go, "Wow, we're at the cusp of some very dangerous there, but we got some great photos."

We did, and they tell stories.

Yes, sir.

A photo is a moment in time and a moment in time can tell a lot, tell a huge story. But you have to know what to look for.

Yeah. And that's a, that's kind of a great point, I think, to kind of, kind of end down there. And I know, even, you know, I, on one personal, just appreciate you coming on. But I know you, just you're, you're varied experience. I mean, through military, military advising, private corporations, you know, it, and you still come back to, "Hey, look, you know, this is where it's at. If you don't know this, you know, you're not, all the rest of the training, all the rest of the whiz-bang stuff isn't going to help you, or it's only going to mitigate you so far." You know, but with this training now you can use that. Now that, so it's a, it's a panacea. Okay, we can use it here, we can use it here, we can use it on our loved ones, we can use it to prevent a suicide, we can use it to pick the one guy out of the thousand people in that crowd who most of them probably are just out there exercising their right that they have in that country, to the one guy I need to worry about. And now we've just taken out all that flak, all that stuff in the background, that noise. It's stage time. It improves your performance. It feeds information that can ultimately become intelligence. Newman, tell me you're going to be back. We need you on future pods.

I will be back. My doctor says I'll live until at least next week, barring any untoward incidents around train tracks. But I'll tell you, I'll tell you something, when you even think about this, remember context. Anyone can be trained. How much is a life worth? Then you, you pick the, you pick the number, you pick the value of them. And remember, remember this: Can you afford to not be with the training?

It's great. Probably that's a great point to end on. Thank you again for coming on. We really want to, we'd love to have you on again in the future. And everyone else, hey, by the way, everyone else listening out there, check out the website ArcadiaCognarada.com. YouTube, The Human Behavior Podcast YouTube channel. iTunes, The Human Behavior Podcast on iTunes. All that stuff, you guys can find it all. We'll post all this on there. And thanks again everyone out there. Be safe, have a great evening. Thanks again, Bob.

Shoot the mic.