Left Of Greg 065 FEAR Part 3 April is the cruelest month

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content down there if you're already a subscriber and a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead to below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like it, subscribe, follow us on Facebook at HBPRA. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis. So please, like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks.

All right, Greg. So, this is going to be our, basically, our third in the series on fear that we're doing. The overarching theme of today's fear episode – well, it's going to be a couple things, but it's, we're recording this on April 1st for everyone listening right now. That it'll be out shortly after that. But this reference is back to a Lessons Learned that you wrote. If anyone wants any more information, I'll put that in episode details, but always check out the Arcadia website. Greg writes up the Lessons Learned, but the title of one of them was, "April Is The Cruelest Month." And now we're going to get into what that means, especially related back to fear.

But, you know, dates have important historical, significant meaning for a lot of people. So, like, birthdays are important to everyone individually, right? More so in some cultures than others, but also significant dates that we celebrate, whether that's Christmas for religious stuff or non-religious Christmas, or Fourth of July. Well, I mean, there's the Santa Claus Christmas, the birth of Jesus Christmas, so take your pick. But all these dates have significance, and April is a very, very big month for dates. Now we did a podcast earlier in March called, "Beware the Ides of March," and now we have April, April signifying a number of things. You've got Easter, you've got spring being started. So there's been a lot of significant attacks in the month of April. There's a lot of significant dates. Even something – well, not this year, but normally taxes are due on April 15th, which is another big date, or the middle of April, I should say.

So, a lot of people like to attribute some type of kind of superstitious or, you know, some weird universal language of things of why those things happen. And it's partly true and partly complete BS for that. But the meaning—there's a truth in what people say about some of those dates coalescing and there being a pattern. Now, what sometimes you talk yourself into.

Yeah.

And what you attribute that pattern to can be complete BS. So let's, let's jump right into it.

So, it's wonderful, Brian. If you, if you didn't mind, can we just say a quick shout-out to our good friend in Alberta, Canada, Brian Willis?

Absolutely.

Brian Willis from I LEETA. Folks, look it up, I L E E T A, incredible source, training, trainers, instructors. Please go there. Also, I'll put a link in the description.

That's great. Thank you for doing that.

And Brian also hosts the excellent "Excellence in Training" podcast series. Brian, great stuff, and his own website, Winning Mind, with no less at the end. Just a great guy, had dealings with him yesterday, and I can't speak highly enough about him and his process. So, thanks for allowing me to do that.

But I would start with my opening volley, Brian, would be that names, dates, months, none of them are cursed. You have some people that are diagnosed or undiagnosed as mentally ill. A mental illness—people need help. You have other people that have mental issues where they're traumatized by, for example, depression or anxiety, which you bring up all the time, how important anxiety is, and they require intervention. Some folks are confused and need guidance. So what happens is that some of them go to the dark side, to the evil, and instead resort to violence, which we all know is a powerful language: hate, death, and fear. And so what we end up with, Brian, is that these folks will purposely seek out any bit of information as a cognitive bias to prove their point.

So, let me give you a superstitious one: black car, white car. More Americans—and I can only speak to Americans because of the study I read and some of the research I did—more Americans believe that good people drive white cars and bad people drive black cars. And so it permeates everything into television, into movies, into novels. What does the bad guy, who is driving the black Suburbans, circle the block? The black man came up. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Yeah, there's this link. And there's no truth whatsoever to the—

Well then, if you go a little bit further back to something that we learned in cop work a long time ago, they said that the drivers of red cars get more tickets in the faster Savannah, Georgia. There's no statistical significance of either of those.

So, two bodies of work, so to speak, to that. That was a term that I've heard being used for the color red that they used to use on Corvettes, and someone would refer to it as "arrest me red."

Right.

Which is hilarious because then people would say, "Well, red, color of blood. You have a bias towards that color," which in some cases kind of can be true, right?

But is it survival in advertising?

Yeah. And in certain cultures, red is the color of sacrifice. Like, I heard of a place where red, white, and blue is meaningful. Red is the color of sacrifice.

Nobody wants to hear that, though.

Yeah, yeah. So that, but you know, they get to the point of, you know, different how we attribute value to those things, right? So, so—

So my point, Brian, just to make sure that we loop back around: Have you ever—who I'm talking to—have you ever been in a broken relationship?

We don't have enough time for that. We don't have enough time for that.

There are people who walk around and people will say, "Time heals all wounds. It'll go away. You'll be stronger from the scar tissue." I hate platitudes. I hate, "Yeah, we come in and they put the holy water and they throw it around and they put a little incense and say everything's gonna get better to you." Those things will never leave because they're etched on a file folder that you're going to live with for the rest of your life. Now, you can manage those feelings. You can choose to put them aside because you love another person. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So just like I would fall into believing that a black cat is going to change my destiny, right? I could fall in and say, "It'll never work, we're all going to die, and it's not going to get any better." Those are fears that work to our core because we want to be part of the tribe. We want to be brought in. Why do you think my objection recently—not recently, but it's months old now—so this whole gosh darn social distancing? People are dying because there's only a distance from others when they need the tribe more than ever. So, very great—distance is simple. But—

So yeah, it's just the—I agree with that. So that's the wrong way to articulate the issue. Like you just said, "physical distancing" that makes sense.

But not social.

Yeah. And we're supposed to do that, right? Social distancing probably not a good thing to do right now.

You know—

I think we talked about this in the previous, but we need each other and fellow human beings now more than ever.

Yeah, now more than ever. There's over—you kind of get into the, I guess, the black car, white car, which reference to the black cat, kind of like a superstition thing. So, superstition come from fear, or what does it have to do with it?

So, fear comes from greed. So, an alchemist wanted to turn lead into silver or gold because it was close on the periodic table of elements. So that person didn't want to become the Rhodes Scholar and get a goddamn Nobel Prize; they wanted to get rich. So, I want to write a beautiful poem. Omar Khayyam, or whatever that guy's name was, the original Middle Eastern poet—

Just brilliant.

Omar. That's it. Omar Khayyam. And he did it because he wanted to get into some bins. He wanted to get a female to notice him, or get into a relationship with a significant other. So, we do things—we're motivated by things. So, to plant hate myself, to put up these borders, to put up this fence, a sneeze shield around me right now. That's really what I've done is I've said, "Well, these certain things occur because of something else." And so it's a precursor, like a robin as the harbinger of spring. So when I see a robin in my backyard, I know that these other things are coming. Well, just as much as I believe that in China—no offense to China, with all this that's going on—but I believe that in China that the chicken that plays tic-tac-toe can also predict an earthquake. I believe that because there's a scientific link behind it. But all this other stuff about walking under a ladder and, you know, triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), and all this other stuff, show me the money. Show me what, what the truth is behind the fear of 13 or this. It's all luck. It's like a lottery. If you're investing in the lottery as your retirement fund, you get what I'm trying to say, you're going to be sadly mistaken because you're not looking at something that's paid dividends over time, like the stock market. So, I believe in the science of it, not the "con science" of it that people are selling now.

Like every commercial that we're seeing now, Brian, every single commercial that I watched this morning trying to get some news, which I couldn't get, was polarizing because it said, "In these trying times," "in times like these," behind a commercial. Come on, offer your pulpit, you know, because what that does, Brian, it exacerbates the fear and anxiety of humans. And now they're using fear to summon. Okay, I saw that news media person today was broadcasting from at home, didn't do their hair, didn't have their makeup on, and was sitting at home like, "Hey, look, I'm Joey from—" because, "I want you to see that I'm just like you. You don't know me. We're all part of the same tribe. We should be pulling together." And you're polarizing me with your message of fear.

So, that, that is part of the fear message. I agree. But what about it that so, what would it mean when people now are like, "Is our way of coping or understanding or pacifying those fears calling things like, 'Hey, this is now the new normal. This is the new nature. This is the new'..."?

It's a "we'll overcome" which, yeah, that you can't pay two weeks later when I say, "Hey, this is how things are now." No, this is how things are right now. And you're just like every other challenge that's racing back to wherever it needs to be. We'll overcome, or, you know, you can call me out on it, but if we don't overcome it, you won't be able to call me out.

I like the way you're going, Brian. I'm going to buy it. No, no, but, but, but then why, why do we do that? Because, because, and this ties in a little bit to superstition. This is why I asked you what you thought, because you brought up kind of greed, and I this—there'd be a way to articulate it, right? With superstition and where it comes from, is it fear or is it like, but part of it is our, you know, our brain and us wanting to see a pattern in things, right?

Yeah, so that's like the making order out of chaos. You're exactly right.

So our brain is much more comfortable in less calories when we see a pattern, right? So like it, but so if also if I'm the, if I'm the athlete and I go, "Man, I forgot to wash my, you know, jockstrap, and then we won the game," I'm not washing my jockstrap for the rest of the season. Right? We see that type of behavior all the time.

Is that the smell when you were in the middle seat on the airplane on the way to Loser University and I look, it's my lucky jockstrap. That's great, folks, for anybody listening or watching, Brian was wearing nothing else. Just so you know, that was that not this, is that, does appropriate?

Or okay. Well, but because that is that, similarly now that's kind of like a different type of superstition than, yeah, yeah. So it would all fall, I want to say, I would liken it to falling under the same umbrella of us trying to, of us attributing value to something that has no value, or us, yes, going into the side of something that, that is unscientific and doesn't make sense. But, so that's what we think it is, so that's what it's got to be.

You're exactly right. So, look, if you can't invest 20 seconds into washing your hands two or three times a day, what chance am I going to get you to look in the mirror and say, "I'm morbidly obese. I'm not going to eat fast food three or four times a day"? Yeah, the idea is that there's a certain, there's life rules, let's call them. And you take a look at like the Mississippi or the Nile or the Amazon—we'll go geographic profiling for a minute. What happens is they all started out, man, there are geysers coming out of rock cases and they're etched in the ground, and we get the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a place that you could visit, Brian, next time you're in town with your lovely wife and daughter. And it's not too far from Roadman, just six miles, and it etches through stone and rock. And then, guess what, as you go further down the Amazon, as you go further down the Nile, as you go further down the Mississippi, all of a sudden that starts spreading out and it's more languid. And then by the time it gets to its delta, it's just that, a fizzle, and it's just kind of going in whatever that riparian area that's going in. We have a name for that where saltwater goes to whatever, and I just can't remember that name, right? That brackish water. But the idea is that's like this gosh darn new COVID, the new coronavirus. And I moved my hands and flash red, red, red danger, warning, Will Robinson. The idea is that sooner or later, this is going to go away too.

And I want you to liken it not just to the river, but to your relationship. Whatever relationships you ever had, they start off with a bang. And in your case, terminology is more than implied. Folks, plug the ears of your children. Brian, a bang, six pints of Guinness, and then Brian's married again. But the idea is that whoever that lucky man is, Brian, the idea is that your relationship starts off with a bang, and it's on fire. And we're sitting next to each other in a pickup truck and I've got my hand in your back pocket and vice versa, and it's wonderful and it can be no better. And then after a couple of years, you know, you and your wife are walking in, or your husband, or significant other, you're walking in to go shopping and you go your separate ways to grab things differently. And in a few years later, I'm sitting in the mall reading USA Today that I got on that from the hotel on the plane, and I'm going, "Were we going shopping today? I have no idea where Shelley is."

So people will come to me and they'll say, "I think my relationship is broken." No, your relationship is dated. It's called the entropic principle. And if you look that up, all you've got to do is add some spice to it. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So what's happening here now is all of a sudden nature's coughed or sneezed—no, no pun intended—and things are bleak right now. And everybody's going, "Oh my gosh, we have to do all of these ridiculous things." No, you don't have to do anything. You have to make sure that you improve your hygiene, you have to stay away from other people for a while, and this too will pass. But that's not good enough. They have to know that they have to link back to religious persecution, they have to link back to Armageddon, they have to link back to myriad things that are going on. And I'm not saying strain your faith, but I'm saying now you're saying, "Those people did it, and we did it."

But that's, it happened. That's part of our very, you know, egocentric view of the world.

Oh, absolutely.

And you know, we always think that whatever how it affects us, it's the worst. And that goes into, man, that just goes into everywhere because I kind of want to keep it on April here. We'll go back to the human behavior stuff. But meaning, meaning when we, when we constantly have that egocentric view—and remember, we all do it, it's nothing is, you know, "my pain is the worst, so you don't know what it's like. This is the worst thing to ever happen"—when you've got like, you know, I love like, you know, they're pulling out these, interviewing these 107-year-old people now, that or older, you know, that, that you, you know, made it through the Spanish Influenza, lived through World Wars, all this. And they're just like, "Hey man, it's, it's, it's another Tuesday." You know what I mean? They're just going like, "Yes, this is, this is by far gotten better."

But to go on a couple things that, that you brought up, and you know, I kind of want to get back to the kind of how I brought up like, "Hey, this is the new norm. This is what," yeah, "this bit—" that's us. Is that us trying to make ourselves feel better and cope with it so we can move on? I mean, meaning, why, why do we, why do the places go to? I mean, I understand why the news outlets do certain things. Don't know, you know, so sorry, sell advertising, get, you know, no knows what I mean, why does it fall that? Why did that producer come up with that? Why do humans keep a book of locks of hair and the sheep herd disheveled foreskin or the shriveled foreskin or the whatever it is?

No, I don't go into whatever you have. I have it within arm's reach just in case, and it's a five skin, by the way. But the idea is that if you take a look, people have memory books. Now, you take a look at Native American culture, and there's a thing called the dreamcatcher, right? And it looks like a spider's web, and it has all of these different twists and turns where significant events happen in your life. Why do people leave that, that time capsule behind? Because as humans, we want to be part of something that we can point back to and say, "We were part of a community. We did something as a family. We were a father, a mother, a brother, a teacher, a dad." All of those things are so hugely important to our egocentric view of life that we also want to be remembered for them. Why do we all have a wall of shame in our house? And now you don't. I've got our burro in the piñata, beta works guitar that's made out of a cinder block and two pieces of wood. So yeah, I did—

That's your whole house. Everything.

I have this. This is what I want to present. And what do I present the burro with piñata carrying M4s, RPGs and everything? Because if so, this to me is, is inset, is just, it's, it's wonderfully beautiful insanity, right? It goes act like a children's piñata celebration, supposed to be amazing, it's a donkey burro, and it's carrying weapons. It's the ultimate irony. Yes, what you don't understand is those are just three walls, and Brian is sitting at his local library just north of San Diego, and so he takes that with him. He folds all that up, puts it in his cart and goes back down the streets of the next—

Exactly. And—

But we love you for it.

Yeah. But you see, when, when you have to surround yourself with those things, it's, "I'm okay. All right, look, I, I am somebody. I feel something. Sometimes people cut because they need to feel something." So it has an opposite, a polar opposite.

And real quicker, I do want to mention too, is like, this isn't a judgment of someone who does that, right? We—

You're above me, of course. Normal, Brian.

But yeah, most people have like, you know, we put our accomplishments on the wall. Like, look, especially guys like you. Sure.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

This, the stickers on your car with your family. You're proud of that stuff. Like, and I get it. So I'm not saying that there's anything wrong, but why do I don't want to get it? Everything important for me is lucid. I'm not jacking it in a shoebox. And like a couple years ago, Micaela first started to say, "What is this?" And I went through with her. She's like, "These are the most incredible stories I have ever heard someone tell this stuff. And you have it all in a shoebox." And I'm like, "Well, it's for me. It's not, what's my life in there? No one would know what any of it is, anyways." That it's in a shoebox because it's your bug-out kit. Because folks, if you know Brian as long as I have, relationships are a little itchy, and in the Marren household, if you know what I mean. So you gotta be ready to go, Brian.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I did, I did used to live like that. But so now, so listen—

So I have to have like rings on a tree. I have to have the like sands in the hourglass, such are the days of our lives. I gotta have something to look back at. So what I want to do is I want to create an earmark, I want to create a bookmark, I want to create a dog-eared page on the novel of my life and look back so I can say, "Hey, do you remember when we were going through antivirus?" Because that's humans used to be, and we still are, storytellers. To tell your story, it has to be built around something. And so this thing that we're going through now becomes a source of community outpouring, and there's going to be some people that are remembered for it. Well, and there's going to be some people remembered for it as effing douchebags. And I'll give you a perfect example. Okay, so Kevin can't do my hair, so I got hair sprouting out in all kinds of different places. So what I'm going to do is get a topknot so I can be even more of a douchebag. Well, just like that is a bad thing to do. Okay, the topknot on the world's fattest—literally no pleasure unless you're a samurai or ninja. Exactly right. Why would you have your hat backwards unless you're a sniper or a catcher?

But the idea, Brian, behind that is that now I read some people again, with even the posts and the platitudes, "and be mindful of the akia around you," because the thing in this, "don't you dare use this," or the death of a family member or your dog, they told you that message on his gravestone. All that's horseshit, though. Those, those are not how you remember people. One, they're alive now. Remember him now. Call somebody that you haven't called in a long time to tell them how much you appreciate them. Yeah, bro, love of God. Our dear friend Ray K. is dying of the worst unknown brand of cancer on the face of the planet. And he still calls me once a week after treatment, and we have a good conversation for an hour, even though sometimes he doesn't know where the hell he's at. So do it now. That's meaningful. Do you understand what I'm saying? Right? And yes, we know people are dying, so, so don't make light of it. But are you going to stop humor and comedy and music and art? More and more now than ever. Now that some people are saying, "You got to relax and focus in on this. And like, now is the time if you're not on top of your workouts and eating it right." You can do it. All that stuff. Now, it's, "This is the absolute time you need," you know, "we give you a visa, you a pass to say that that right now you don't have to study, you don't have to do your stuff, you don't..." Right? You know, come the hell, I know that this should be the wake-up call to you. You should have been doing that.

But sit, all right, so to get, yeah, you know, so we kind of segue the conversation. I'm talking about a superstition, kind of brought up like little talismans that we all have, right? Little, little things that we like to placate ourselves and our world with. That goes into the, the, you know, 37 titles you see on someone's LinkedIn bio underneath their name with all the different acronyms and dots and letters and, "I don't know what, look at who I am there, but I'm more important than you are." When it comes to mind.

Yeah. Hey, but they're showing their accomplishments. It's not unless they're, you're proud of that stuff, right?

But, but in this, I'm trying to tie this into fear and where we're going. So let's go to the opposite side of that war. Hang on hand. Let's go to the of why it because you brought up all this, people collect this and put stuff on their walls and and kind of give a good explanation of why we do that to show this, "Hey, I did something. I was a part of something. I'm proud of this." Hey, that's all good. But because I want to keep it on, on fear and getting into the, the month of April and why, why certain things start to happen. So the, the month of April, right? We've got the, you know, "April is the cruelest month," not really. But, but a lot of dates start to coalesce, and we start to fear this type of stuff. "Oh, there's an increase of attacks. There's an increase of homegrown terror attacks. There's this." And we try to attribute to different things. And, and a good example, let's just think about it from a realistic standpoint of how humans used to live and, and you know, what, what used to happen and how we're primed to live, right? Meaning, because right now, what typically, you know, what happens around March and then in April in places like Afghanistan? Well, the, the fighting picks up, right? They call them the fighting seasons. No, the passes open, the mountain snow melted. There's a lot of environmental reasons of why this stuff occurs, right? We're holed up for the winter, right? Where we lay low. There's not a lot of daylight. We gain weight. We sleep more. We're circadian rhythms change. We do, we hibernate mentally and physically.

You're exactly right. And coming out into the spring, it's what? It's time to, it's a new year. It's a new beginning, right? A world—

When we made it through the winter, so we survived. Yay, we're good.

Now, we have celebrations at those two points, right? Harvest celebrations and spring celebrations. Agriculture has them.

And then, and then we get into so now you start to see an increase in like different types of terror attacks and things in the month of April. And really, that was no different than the increase in all productivity, to use a simple term, I guess, or all, all activity that you would normally see, not just from, from something illegal or terrorist or criminal. So, I kind of just want to segue into that April and why people do that. So let's think about that because what we did—and folks, if you, if you go back, thanks to Brian Marren, solely to Brian Marren, The Human Behavior Podcast podcasts are hugely popular. And thank you to Canada. We're 56th in Canada amongst John Deere owners under 35 years old.

Yeah. It is the top 50 podcast in the United States amongst those people that don't give a what they listen to, apparently. But the idea is when we wrote Lessons Learned 11, and everything I write comes from the massive head that should be on Rushmore, but I'd push the other four guys out. But the idea is that what I try to do is I try to pick a central topic. And on that one, "April is the cruelest month," what I try to do is pick these random events that happen to coalesce around a date and therefore the people put the the ominous dominance on it. Now that became the date. Well, here's the balancing point: if you create something like Saint Valentine's Day, February 14th, and you have unrequited love or a person breaks up, now we have a broken vessel, we have a damaged human. And that human sometimes will act out because most people want their say, some people want their way. And that person may act out. And guess what? A way to get noticed is violence—violence against myself or violence against others—because it's a powerful, strong language. And fear is a way to get things done. Fear is a way to sell your cars. Fear is a way to get people to eat at your restaurant. You don't think that, but take time and look at the advertising world when it's all in there.

Now, if I go back to February 14th and I play that forward to April, "April showers bring May flowers," right? Now, I could turn this into an episode about fear by saying, "Folks, if you really want to worry, worry about the nation's seeds. Listen, if the plants can't grow, and then if we don't have people to harvest because of this quote, 'social distancing,' the physical distancing, folks, if we don't have that, Brian, then the plants aren't going to grow, we're not going to harvest, and there'll be no food by winter, and we're going to go into the bleakest, darkest winter." Holy, I'm getting depressed just talking like that. And that's what's happening, Brian, is what they're going to do is they're going to take a look at things like in, in Germany, they have the Oktoberfest, you know, at the end of the harvest, the bock beer, all the stuff in Kingston, which is their Spring Festival. I would guarantee that if you look at every culture on the face of the Earth, there's, there's something similar, right? And, and, and a biker gang, you know, they're going to have their Spring Run or whatever. So everybody, every gangbanger, okay, probably got something too. They got that early spring drive-by walk. We're going to show you what a .22. But the idea is that we make jokes, but we're serious here. If you have certain events that coalesce and form that, the pattern, that groove in the record, that web, that goddamn dreamcatcher, then people are going to do things around it. So I have the decision to say, "You know, today is Uncle Frank's birthday, and I remember him fondly, and, you know, I have to commit suicide. I don't want to do it around Easter because that would really bump people out. So I'll do it in memory of Frank." We do those type of things, Brian. We get, we get flipping tattoos on our body that never go away in memoriam of something. We wear memorial bracelets of people that were meaningful to us. So if it's important enough to write on a wall or to paint on your skin or to wear some jewelry, it's important enough to pay attention. Meaning, other people can see that stress fractures are caused by those events and either lay low or, or say, "Hey, what's on your mind?" Do you get what I'm trying to say? So, so we can manipulate the, the strange course of April being the cruelest month by knowing that people think that and then de-escalating the situation psychologically.

Right. And, and so dates, dates are important, right? You know, for a number of reasons. But once something occurs, you know, then things start to, then people look back like you just said, "You know, that was what, you know, Columbine." People said, "Oh, you know, that was something on Hitler's birthday or something like that," which it had nothing to do with it. It was Jeffrey—but it was a day before. But, but the, the idea is we start to look too far into those things. And I remember sitting, it was we were down in Benning. This is Fort Benning. This is, eight, seven years ago. Seven years ago, right around now. It was right towards the end of March, and, you know, we had not a naysayer, but someone higher up at that, that building in, in that was a building for in Fort Benning. If anyone knows like, there's just a lot of brass in there, right? But a lot of high-ranking folks. It's a whole big huge army. A lot of train—

Lot of receive.

Yeah, yeah. So, uh, I think you have to have a star to even get someone to open the door for you there because there's so many people walking around. But, uh, but, you know, and it came in, "Well, okay, well, well, what's, what's coming up? What's going to happen? Give me a prediction." And you kind of went down the same route and said, "Well, look, it's, this is what's coming up in April. There's this, there's this, there's tax day, there's, uh, the, the, the anniversary of Columbine. There's this. You see a lot of homegrown or very right-wing extremist groups do have a lot of activity in April. It's probably this." And then you even brought it up, said, "Look, there's a bunch there. What else is going on? There's, there's a, the, you know, whatever was, uh, there's, you know, the, the Boston Marathon and all that stuff."

Yep.

And you know, I mean, all of those things start to, start to coalesce. And then, you know, the person kind of came back with, "Well, that's kind of a general, you know, statement." It's like, "No, no, it's, it's, it's, it's enough to go, 'Hey, awareness, sir, completion, Carly, right? I need to, you know, I need to increase my security posture enough to do this. I need to do that.'" And the conversation went back and forth. But the, the point I was trying to make is what happened on April 15th, 2013, two weeks after this conversation, was exactly the Boston Marathon bombing. And the person was like, "Oh my God, like you predicted the Boston Marathon bombing!" It's like, "Whoa, but we didn't, right?"

Hold you yet. If you increase your SA (situational awareness) based on world events, based on local events, based on the emotional temperature of the room that you're in, do you get what I'm trying to say? So, so it was Corny Copac (referring to a previous joke about a 'cop of comedy') where I was trying to tell this person, "Stop. You're your own worst enemy because you're trying to get me to tie the Mayan calendar to a specific date and say when these things are in line." That's not the way life works. Listen, there's going to be an elephant in the matchbook one day. You're going to be saying, "There are parallel universes. We just aren't smart enough to see them yet." And all those things are going to come to pass. But the predictive analysis part of human behavior pattern recognition analysis is when the scale is weighted with enough artifacts and evidence that a reasonable person would assume that something's going to happen. And Brian, that's why I brought up February 14th. I know we're playing it back.

Yeah. No, but look, 14th that's a mark.

Now April, the entire month has forever been upon, because somebody comes up and says, "Wow, that's the month that it's going to happen." So what they're doing, Brian, is they're calling their own reality. What you do is if you get enough people in a room to believe something is true, you call it out. I read that in the book Slenderman horror film. But you get what I'm trying to get. I have to make order out of chaos. And if my brain can't equate everything that I'm looking at, I will make something up even if it's a lie, even if it's unreal, to have a box to put that in. Because I have to, I have to have these buckets and boxes. And, "Oh, there's a leak over here. How am I going to fix that?" And even if I have to come up with something supernatural, even if I have to come up with something that's implausible, even if I have to create a lie out of that memory to get past that memory of that shitty emotion or that horrible divorce or that, you know, pederast that stalked me when I was 11 to 13 years old, I have to come up with some way of reconciling that. Because if not, just like a rotor in a car hitting those spark plugs to get that internal combustion engine working, I'll keep coming to that file folder, and it's blank. And it needs to be in a file. Yeah, screw my day up, and I'll screw my week up, and it might screw my life up. So don't allow it to create that anxiety.

Well, and I, and I know you it, because you know, your, your thing is always, "Hey, do your homework."

Yes, sir.

You know this, because a lot of these cases are, a lot of these situations or a lot of these stories that go around are very, very far from what actually happened, right?

Yeah. So, so we make the Muppets and grow larger than the pea under the mattress. You're exactly right.

And we got to stop doing that.

But it's historically how things are.

Yeah, that's how I'll think, you know, and then all sudden we everything from, you know, what became, you know, Thanksgiving in this country and what it was based on. And people said, "Well, it, that's, that's, you know, we, we gotta get, you know, looking at that first law, look at the history of what it was about and how it became popularity in the 1800s with a, you know, hey, we wanted to, we had it like a surplus of poultry and turkeys in the US. And they said, 'Why don't we have a day where we make everyone, you know, turkey?'" And get like, there's all these weird things that if you actually research some of the stuff of where Santa Claus—forget advertising people—and people were depressed because of the post whatever. Homework, folks.

Yeah, yeah.

So, but, but, you know, you, you brought in a couple things that to go into to April, because now it is April. And like we said, we're recording this on, on April 1st. So which we call April Fool's Day. I don't know if anyone's got anything for this year. It's kind of like a somber year for April Fool's Day. I thought about waking up like, "Hey, you got to get to school! They reopen school! We're running late!"

Oh my God, what a dick move. Hey, I would make sure that you got the gun locks. Yeah, so, so April Fool's Day is a perfect example. Very April fools are gullible people. So, we're switching from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, and some people fell back and didn't want to do it. So instead of January being the beginning of the new year, it was April to correspond with the harvest. But that wasn't good enough for some people. Right? Right? So these two factions now are fighting. And to this day, we have April Fool's Day, Brian. So that's a perfect example. Like, like Brian, in that, in that, in that Lesson 11, we wrote about Jeremy Delle. And you recently read a couple months ago, you had a douchebag incident of your own where somebody wrote something about—

Yeah. Oh, and, and how any better, in Pearl Jam wrote the song "Jeremy," "Jeremy the Wicked." And, and have you ever been in my class? There's a number of songs I sing. That's one of them. That's great. That one—

Enter the skies.

Hills.

Thinking of a repo opening riff. So let me give you an example of the facts versus the case. So now we take a look at what I just said about how April Fools, and many people are going, "Hey, we got it, we know that." So let's look at Jeremy. On the day that Jeremy died, he wrote what is tantamount to his suicide note, and he was late because he was waiting in the quad because he wanted to give it to his girlfriend. Right? Close. So many pre-event indicators, myriad pre-event indicators. He was already going to counsel. He was a broken human, Brian. He right now, he's a unique little snowflake. What happened is he goes into the room and the teacher merely says, "Why are you late, Jeremy?" Jeremy's about to speak, and she's like, "Yeah, I'm tired of this. Go see the counselor." She had no idea because her aperture wasn't open to see all the stress fractures and put him together. All she saw was a kid that showed up late. "He's always a problem child." That was her view. Okay? Now you got Jeremy going, "Hey man, all I was waiting for is that one straw to break the camel's back." Now Jeremy's got that. His girlfriend's going, "Oh my gosh, you know, I've got all this stuff, and I love Jeremy, but, you know, it's not quite the relation—oh, I did." It was this fire. Why? Because what happened is we are looking through a straw and we're looking down there, and we're thinking of "me first." If we open that aperture and we do a full 360, and we think about, "Well, what's the emotional toll of what I just said? How could I de-escalate that situation by going back and saying, 'I'm sorry,' or, 'How about going, okay, timeout. I know you're late, but step in the hall, tell me what's on your mind.'" Those type of things would save lives over and over and over. Those would stop workplace violence and domestic violence. But we don't do them because our ego system is too fragile and we don't want to walk across the street and give somebody the time to tell us what's on their mind.

Yeah, and then, you know, if anyone doesn't know the story, that was Jeremy Delle. He, he killed himself in front of his whole class. Then he pulled out a gun and shot himself in front of everyone. It's a horribly tragic story. It was one of the events which I didn't know until I, yeah, I'm like, I knew, you know, we knew this story from either a few years ago of Jeremy, of why Pearl Jam wrote that song about Jeremy Delle. They read it in the paper, just like other bands have done, you know, when they see something come across the, the telex machine, you know, like a Bob Geldof.

Yeah, it was in RT3. You're exactly right, Brian.

But, you know, it was also actually Eddie Vedder had inspiration from a kid he went to high school with, Jack something, that like, you know, he was kind of had issues with and this is what happened to the kid, but he kind of made it in the song about Jeremy. So, and so he said a very, and I don't know the quote, Brian, maybe you could post that quote.

Yeah, but he said what it was, is that on both of those incidents, his personal incidents and reading about Jeremy Delle, that entire child's life was relegated to this one thing in the paper saying, "So-and-so shot himself today in school," and that was it.

Yeah, yeah. And that's, no, how could that be? Yeah, those things that he tried to build in his life are now gone and it was relegated to one line in, in a local paper, right? And, and, and that was that was. This is another example of why we always tell people do your homework and don't, yep, don't take too much, you know, you got a deep dive on this. So you read something, some crazy story, or you see something, you have to deep dive and research it on your own because what happened, I came across an article someone had put out on Medium, that publishing site, which our stuff was on there too. And, you know, the woman had said her, oh, this little clickbait story, which I, which I always tell people, don't be clickbait. Stop reading those articles that say, "The top three things," or "The five things every Green Beret or Navy SEAL does," or whatever, or "The three things every CEO," that's junk. Don't even read it. And, and maybe they'll stop making it, but I doubt it. So here's the thing, and she wrote, her whole story was, "Hey, did you know that Jeremy, the song 'Jeremy' by Pearl Jam, was written about a kid named Jeremy who killed himself in front of his class?" That was the entire story. That was—

There you go.

And people, "Thank you," clapping and, "Wow, this is amazing." That woman made money off of that. That woman who wrote that article made money off of that. And of course, I was like, "Hey, you know what? I think there's a little bit more to the story." And I posted a link to yours about being April, like, you know, this kid. And her response was, "Well, what, what was wrong with my story?" And I was like, "Hey, you, this kid died and didn't need to. Someone could have intervened and saved his life and, and he could have been a contributing member to society and done great things. Um, but, but no one did that." That's the lesson learned. That's the takeaway. Not, "Oh, wow, did you know this kid inspired the song 'Jeremy'?" Like, that's crap. That's BS. No, what, what's the real lessons learned in that story is that someone could have could have stepped in and, and stopped that from happening. That's that, that's the lessons learned, that's the point. But now she's making a buck off of, "Hey, this is what it's about."

I mean, yeah, and Vedder, you know, here's a perfect point, Brian, to juxtapose that. Vedder never, ever, ever, ever wrote that song to make money on this guy. Well, he wrote it to scale the idea. You go forward and you could, you could go, "Wow, hmm, thought-provoking." And in some small way, Brian, I hope that our posts are that way. I hope that our podcast lets somebody that, in their, the rest of their day that's very busy and hectic, in the hour that they spend with us, they go, "Wow, I never considered that. Maybe Jack is hurting. Maybe Sherry does need an extra minute of my time," or whatever. Because that, that, that look, Jeremy Delle, an amazing human being, a wonderful kid, was just like all of us, had issues. And guess what? He didn't get the, the, the right amount or the right type of intervention at the right time because he was already going through counseling, but it just wasn't enough. And you can't save everybody. Some people are on that path to destruction, Brian, and no matter what Hail Marys were thrown, we can't. Okay, but thank God Jeremy Delle took it out on himself—it's a horrible thing for me to even say—and didn't kill everybody in that classroom because he had that chance to do it. And sadly, there was a cluster of other suicides there. And everybody goes, "Oh, you don't know about suicide." Hey, I know what it's like to hurt. And when I'm scared, and when I hurt, and I get depressed and anxious, and I see that the days aren't going to change, why do you think I'm so vocal about this social distancing? So there's people right now that think this event is the worst thing in their life, and they're going to blow their brains out because nobody's even covering those deaths. We got coppers whose cups are full, Brian. Their cups are full. Emergency room workers, nurses, Shawn's wife, Renee. All these other people that are going through all this tremendous stress, that they're one step away from that. You can change it. You have the power at home to look at April and go, "April itself is an anxiety producer. So I need to de-escalate April and find a new way of making everybody happy and, and, and smart and savvy, rather than fear it."

Well, and right, and taking away the right lessons learned and understanding what the story's actually about because here's the thing, when Pearl Jam did that song, "Jeremy," and then they made a music video for it. So one, they couldn't show the actual music video. I think MTV and VH1, back when they actually used to play music videos, it was gonna make it was too graphic. And so they did this edited version where it shows like blood going on the students, which actually changed the message. And now actually people thought it was, "Oh, he went in there and killed a bunch of people." And then when the next school shooting that happened after that video came out, tried parents—

Yeah.

They tried to say, "Oh, it's because of this song. They were inspired." Look, no one is inspired by a song to go kill another human being. That's it. They already had it in them, baby.

They already have that in them.

They already want to do them. So, so this, you know, a perfect example, everyone who's out there and listens, anyone who listens to, you know, Rammstein while they're working out. "Du Hast," you know, and said, "Wow, jam out metal music. It's your workout, too." I used to, until I found out, well, who else used to listen to that stuff when they were slaying bodies? Every serial killer.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and you know, I mean, you go back to the school in Beslan, right? And you had other Chechen terrorists and stuff like that. They were, it's the same thing. They're listening to that, that stuff too. And you're going, "Oh my God, adopted." It's the same thing that people love quoting the poem "Invictus," right? And, and constantly see that quote everywhere. What is it? "I'm the captain of my faith, the master captain of my soul, the master of my fate," or whatever, however it ends. And which by the way, the guy who wrote it, if anyone can write in to TheHumanBehaviorPodcast@gmail.com without researching it, actually tell me who it was. You don't know because that was the only thing that he ever did that ever got published.

You like the free red mouse.

But, but here's the thing. And then who hijacked that poem?

I just blinded myself. Yeah, you know, Tim, then when Timothy McVeigh is being executed, what does he do? He recites that poem. So it's weird how we pick and choose what's—

Worlds.

Manson's, "Oh my God." Great quote, Brian. Okay, when, "If I have, if I haven't seen it, it's new to me." There you go. I learned that new today, and I can't wait for sorrow. Even a broken clock, Brian. No, what happens is we cannot allow an event to hijack our emotions. We cannot allow a month or a day to be so influential to us that, that we have dread and anxiety come. What if you're saying that you've got a court date coming up or you're waiting for a test, a really important—do you get what I'm trying to say? Fans of Family Guy, if you're saying that, I agree that there's anxiety that goes with that date, and that's normal. Absolutely normal. And I mean normal in the clinical sense, Brian, not that there's normal and abnormal areas, people, right?

So, I'm talking medically and clinically.

In psychology, fall within social norms. And exactly said. So those type of dates, do you get what I'm saying? Like a harvest schedule. If my beans don't go to market on a certain day, I'm going to lose money. Those are normal things to have an anxiety about, and I would understand that. But projecting this image about, "This is the apocalypse and Armageddon and doom because April is coming." I say let's turn that around. Let's demonstrate how powerful humans can be in a community together, and let's not allow that to happen by reaching out. I use them this time, Brian. Podcast dropped off 60% because people are watching bad news. Yeah, the news is horrible, and they're treating it like the, the people in the hurricane, their weather people that go out with an umbrella and get drugged down the street just to get the ratings improve, just like your clickbait. Don't fall for it. And I say we should hold those people and our politicians and everybody else accountable because we control the message. They don't control the message. We control it. And it should be a message of hope and love and facts, not fear. That's what we have to change it to.

Yeah. And then part of that is if you surround yourself—well, you follow, it's like I always say, people hear, people bash social media and stuff that happens on Twitter. I was like, "Well, send you my Twitter feed because it is hilarious. I've followed people that are just wicked smart and super funny and post great stuff." And that's what I surround myself with. And guess what? It makes me smarter. It makes me happier. It puts me in a good mood. I go on there and laugh so hard. And of course, right now, laughter is the best medicine, there, Patch Adams.

Yeah, the Tiger King means going, "Oh my God, you got to link up with my brother Brian Williams," because Brian is on that all the way through, that upside down and everything. I do not have time in my life for all of those blunt skulls, so idiocy.

I watched, I watched the first two episodes non-stop. Didn't say a word. My mouth was on the floor the whole entire time. I mean, absolutely amazing. But we could do a whole podcast on Joe Exotic in the, in the time.

Oh, but the—

This was so fear playing into how we categorize and organize information, how we process it, how we look at a story, dates, times, locations, names is another one. So, you know, like, because we, it's all, you know, falls under, under fear. And one of the things, you know, you'd ask is, you know, can a name be cursed? You know, there we see different patterns of different names popping up, and they mean—

Anyway. Yeah, you know, what's in a name? It's the big thing. And then it does if we attribute value to it, and we say if we assign a value, "Don't Fear the Reaper." Okay, it's in the Bible, and I heard that's also a great, great song. Because death is a constant, and death is the only always fatal sexually transmitted disease that each of us share as humans that are going to kill every single one of us. So death is nigh. It's coming. You get what I'm saying? Look busy. But the idea of attributing my mortality to a name or to a product or to a date, it's not going to happen. I am the master of my destiny, there, Invictus. And I'm going to choose a message that, that helps me get to the finish line. Do you know that in ancient culture, sometimes they would have everything brought around their deathbed because they want to be able to see what they did? Okay, look, we're back to the douchebaggery. Live a moral, decent, legal life. Enjoy yourself. And then when there's time to trouble, go across the street and help your neighbor. Well, guess what? I can't go across the street and help my neighbor because there's restrictions against it. But now more than ever, social media, which you know, I completely don't understand, and I'm a neophyte at—

Yeah, I know.

I know. I'm about to reach out to people. It's going to remind you, "Don't, don't like your own posts and comments on LinkedIn. It looks weird." I don't know what I'm doing. And the other thing is I see people where they put that hashtag. Dang, that's the number sign for me. Yeah, I don't get that. It's power is, why are they highlighted? And, and some messages go everywhere. Mine, folks, my messages go nowhere, and I'm welcoming some cyberstalker, and I have no idea what to do when it comes down to that, though.

Yeah. I have opinions just like the next guy. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's always fun seeing your, your interactions on those things because here's another great quote by Charles Manson, "Everybody has an opinion. Opinions are like—everybody's got one, and most of them stink."

He said that just before he carved this.

The same thing with, with Charles Manson, you know, people think, you know, people, people think he was a, you know, that, what's that crazy serial killer? Right? Like he didn't kill anyone. Nobody nuts and didn't kill a single person.

Make some really good music today.

Yeah, no, but yeah, horrible, horrible individual. Manipulated other people to do his work. But, but that's, you know, it's again, it's another example of how these stories control their message. Do you get what I'm saying? And, and how stories over history, over time, take on different meaning and all the facts dropped on the side and this, it comes into, "Oh, this guy—"

Do your homework. Hold people accountable. Be transparent in your dealings. All great words of wisdom, and Brian, they've been around forever. Why? Because it's a social science. You know what I'm saying? They stick around because they're the right things to do. So this voodoo mystery history—and I'm not bashing voodoo for anybody that practices Santeria—I'm just saying that all of these things that are that are out in the show of noses that people fear, bring them into the light of day. Look them in the eye and, and not with the jaundiced eye of the gosh darn yellow journalist, but look them in the eye, and you'll find out they're not that scary. Did this—yeah, it's, it's killing people. And all projections should go up to 200,000 or 500,000 people are going to die. And guess what? This is the latest thing. If we work together, we can fix this. So that, that, know that.

And that's a good way, because I know this is kind of like our third episode on fear, and I think that is probably for now, but wow, the gosh darn Dr. Regan Anderson. Wow, Dr. Regan Anderson. Let's get into the because you just said, is, you know, "Well, then how do you get around this? How do we understand this? What am I supposed to do?" And it's, and you, you've brought in, it's that facing your fears, right? It's just like I read a book to Harper, and it's a kids' book, but it's a, it's a great story. And it's all about, "Everybody Poops."

No, I haven't read it. Okay, I'm sorry. That's the one I got on my desk.

And she, she loves, she loves reading it. Is there, you know, it's all about, "Hey, you know, it's about Mikey and the Dragons and I go fight the Dragons." And then when he gets there, he finds out they're like a foot tall, and they're adorable. They're friends. And the whole point of it, it's all in your head, right? And that's all the underlying message is face your fears. Go out into the fray and realize that, "Oh, you know what? It's not really as bad as I thought it was." But that doesn't mean do it recklessly or cavalierly. Do you get what I'm trying to say? That's what your .204, that's what bourbon is. Bourbon is the juice you drink just before you do those stupid things.

Listen to me, listen to me. G. Gordon Liddy wrote a book, it was important. Liddy, okay, used to want to be better at shooting. So he would shoot until he had cracks on his trigger finger in his hands from shooting so much. He would buy that liquid skin, put it in him and continue shooting. Just didn't get a better instructor. I don't know if you burn. Liddy was afraid of rats. So he beat to death a rat in his basement, cooked it, and ate it. G. Gordon Liddy was afraid of storms and lightning. So he lashed himself to an oak tree out in his yard and in a horrific storm that came through. Okay, folks, we're talking about extremism. We're talking about going to an extreme. You can do all of that same stuff. Like, like, do you remember that Maury Povich and all these other guys?

Yeah.

Okay, don't even get me started on those idiots. But, but you're more afraid of mayonnaise, and it would chase people around in the audience, or, "Oh, I thought he did," although "You are, you are not the father." Remember, you're controlling your own message. You're probably watching for very different reasons than I did. I hope I don't get invited on the show. Oh my gosh. Yeah, those are called phobias, right? And everybody has a phobia. People, elevators are really an agoraphobia of going outside or of heights. Listen, it's okay to be afraid of certain things, and even okay to have irrational fears because we don't really know all about our neurochemical transmitters, and some of those signals may have washed across from preyed on our DNA, right? Yes. Okay, it's safe to face them. And if you can't face them, Brian, this is what I would tell you: what would, what would Jesus do? What would your pet do? Whatever's on your wrist. Okay, I would say if you can't face them, at least talk about them. If you can't talk about them, write about them. Well, we can't write about them. Read about them. Because those are important things. When you socialize it, the problem isn't that big.

Well, "Dragons" actually, it ties right back to what you said earlier about, you know, "We can't let an event, you know, control our emotions or destiny." You know what I'm saying? That goes, it hijacks us chasing a fear, right? So, so if I'm less educated, and I have a lower level of training, I'm likely to have a higher level of fear and a higher reaction to an event, whether that's an emotional—if you're a cop. Then if you're a cop, right? You can tie those two points to the less I am trained, the less emotional stability and emotional readiness for an event that I have, the more I'm going to respond through fear with violence. So I'm going to increase the physical stakes of our encounter. When I'm in a domestic situation at home and I'm arguing with my significant other, and they bring up, which people are want to do, they bring up, "Well, when you were six years old, you wet your pants on the first day of school, and everybody laughed at you because you were wearing lederhosen." Really happened, folks. Thanks for that. Bring it back to memory or whatever. Why we fight dirty. We fight dirty because we want to bring up those episodes we're not so proud of that don't go on our wall of fame, you get what I'm trying to say, and actually populate our wall of shame. We have to stop that. We can control our message, but we're fragile, and guess what? There are seams and gaps in our cups. So folks, if you keep poking through there, you're going to break through, and maybe that's going to be too late for me. Maybe I'll, I'll hurt myself or hurt others because I can't control my message. So we need to see that, we need to feel that, we need to scale it back a little bit, especially during months like April.

Well, yeah. And it's okay, so given the, the current "new normal," the situation that we're in, right, all that, the fear. But, but this, this is what gets into it. And I, you know, perfect example, the other day, because you just brought up, you know, fear can lead to higher levels of violence, right? Yes. Overreact. Humans are, any human is, if you're scared and you don't understand something, you have a natural fear for it. That's why, that's, that's biology at play. That's your ancestors survived because they went, "I don't trust what's coming over there, right? I don't trust what's coming over that ridgeline over there. We better either take off and get out of here because I think they might bite us." And you'd love to survive another day, pass those genes along, right? So we still have that in us. And it, you know, just goes to when I texted you the other day, right? So we're in the middle of all this stuff of, obviously, you know, Kaylee's at home, I'm at home, we got Harper at home. I'm trying to do some schoolwork with her. You just hate death and fear on the news of everything that's going on every day. Then, and then what happened to us? Boom! Power goes out at our house. And I'm like, "Oh God, here we go." So I say, "God," I got the text out of the shoe phone.

And Shelley said, "If he leaves now, he could be here in nine hours."

Yeah, that's Shelley. 'Cause you know Shelley's heartbeat already had processed all that information.

Yeah, and I already know the way there. I've driven there, don't even need anything. I'm like, "All right, let's go. I can, I can load up that class to make it without. I could just pull over on the side of the road and fill up."

But anyway, but I immediately texted you, "Hey, if you don't hear from me in a while and you see a 4Runner coming up your driveway, don't shoot. That's me." Right? And you know, and then I made the joke to my fan group text message. My buddies are like, "Well, you know, this is it, boys. If you, if you hear any gunfire, that's just me leaving town. Stay put. I gotta grab some supplies from the neighbors that I saw them stuffing." It's, you know, stocking up on. But I couldn't make those jokes in front of, you know, Kaylee and Harper, right? I had to sit there and be like, "All right," because you can't see that human.

No, no, because you're an icon in another manner, in another fashion. But, and that's why you can't also ever get physical with Kaylee or argue or make her cry or have her make you cry instead of Harper. Because the minute you, the minute you do that, you've changed the wiring diagram.

Well, right. And the other thing was, too, you know, it's, they're going to be a little bit more scared, whereas you time, we, how many situations we're there were just like, "Okay, well, we'll figure it out," or, "We can move to the next place," or, "There's this." Everything goes wrong. We've been in a million chaotic situations, but other people haven't, you know, don't have a contingency plan. So it's like, "All right, so what do we do?" I sent you photos like, "All right, let's go out. We're going on a long walk. I'm going to go out, go over by the lagoon. Hey, I'm going to teach Harper this, this, and this. Hey, see how the current comes in? You can read that. See why it's different right there? That means that the, it's actually not very deep there. You could probably stand up, it's only up to your knees. How the little breaks over here," you know, she could understand that and get out and get your mind off things and come back. But, but it's just when you couple all those things. So my joke was to my buddies, I'm like, "Hey, I'm just gonna go start a car fire near me," because that's what it's over already to see once. Okay, pandemic, no power, there's a car on fire. That's it. Everybody's just waiting for that nudge, nudge, you know? Yeah. No, but that all comes from fear.

Does someone a lot smarter and a lot, you know, more experienced than me once said, "You know, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And, but that, that's my attitude. It's a platitude. Plus, we live it, right? But here, that's the, that's how, how complicated this is. It's like, yeah, like, it's actually harder to understand and deal with a fear that I can't really see or I can't process or I don't fully understand than it is to a guy trying to beat me up or take my money or something. That's a fear. But, but you, you got less and right lateral limits on there, some understanding even if you have no training and anything. You've seen something like that in a movie before, right? That's not an, that, that's not some alien life coming down, right? So, so when we have something like this that we're in right now, the situation where we can't see it, we can't touch, we can't taste, you can't feel it, man, that gets scary. So what, how do we bypass that?

Education is one. Education is one. The other is a yellow pad. Everybody's got a yellow pad. Take out your yellow pad and you start saying, "I control my own message." So today, I'm going (to say) is the message, "Ellen," and it's longer. Second, I am going to eat healthier today because I'm ready for whatever is coming down the pike. I'm going to send a text message to my neighbor that I haven't seen, asking them if they're okay and telling her I'm praying for them or whatever else. I say this. Now we do these empty gosh darn mission statements all the time. This is the first time that you write your mission statement. You, you put down on that yellow pad what's important to you, what's important to the people you love, and what you're going to do about it today. And, and all that hate, death, and fear will dissipate. It'll goes away. It goes now you're doing something else, Brian. I walk around in on the mornings that I work out later than other mornings, I'm singing the song from my run mix in my head because my brain is trying to tell you, "Get your ass down there, fat boy. It's time to run." And guess what? You can change your life and you can improve the quality of someone else's. When you want to do that, if you had that in your grasp, and you do, wouldn't you want to do that? That's that simple to me.

No, I think that's, that's the best takeaway. I mean, we always say, "Do your homework and yellow pad everything." Just if you didn't, not if you didn't—and a lot of people listening know this—if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen, right? So you have to actually take the time to write something down and say, "All right, this is like you said, we control our own destiny. We control our own message. All right, well, what do I want that message to be? Well, let me write it down." To go, "How do I—"

And then, the strange, Brian, it can change over time. It will evolve, and it will grow, and it will have filigree on it. You know, it will start getting a little bit of stain like copper turns that beautiful green, but it's your damn message, and you should be proud of it. You should wear it for everybody else to see like my stamp. You get what you should.

The dolphin riding a unicorn that you have tattooed on your lower back in full living color, buddy.

But I'm proud of it. I wear it like a flag. It says, "Follow your dreams." And—

All right. Well, I, I think that's unless you have something else to add, I think that's probably good.

Now that was a shocker if you know what I mean. Geez, look, I don't care what you—all right, Family Guy references. I'm—we do still want to get hired with all this books over, so we can't say too much. But are you, are you broadcasting?

So, uh, so that this, and I know we did kind of a three-part series on fear, and yeah, to all you listening, one, we appreciate it. Two, I hope it brought a little bit of light and levity and understanding to the situation. And three, if you guys have questions or want to know something or want us to elaborate on something, just TheHumanBehaviorPodcast@gmail.com or hit us up on Facebook at HBPRA. If anyone, those of you who have reached out, we appreciate it. Those of you going to the Patreon site, The Human Behavior Podcast Patreon site, we appreciate it. People are reaching out and asking questions. For some of you, I can get to you right away. Some might take a day or two, but I always respond. So please, those of you who have, you all know are like, yeah, he responds right away. So especially right now. Yesterday.

Yeah, that Marren, Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to responding.

Yeah. So, so we, we appreciate the interaction we do have. And those who are curious about something, please just email us. And I make a prediction now that I know better, I will never click a like on my own link to ridiculous messages anymore. Thanks, I'm so embarrassed for that thing. It is, it is April 1st when we're recording this, and I am the fool. So, okay, we'll call you, call you the fool, and then we'll direct to our normal episodes. But we appreciate everyone taking time to listen. And so, if you liked it, please share it, subscribe, share it with your friends, send them a link, go hit the like button, or give us a review, a rating. Just hit stars, however many you think we deserve. Please do that. It helps actually a lot more than you think. I know it. We're all right now, especially, I'm trying to, by me, is, you know, supporting local businesses, restaurants, and stuff. There's a lot of great cool places near me. And so, I'm still trying to go get takeout, order it online, and, and support them because they're having a hard time. While us, we have a small business. Simply sharing and liking our stuff on social media goes very, very far, a lot farther than people think because it creates that snowball effect, and then the next thing you know, it's, it's moving. So, so to all you already have like our stuff and follow us, appreciate it. Everyone else, please, please take a second out of your day. Help out a small business right now that, that does in-person training. We're a little bit on, so due to the current restrictions on blah, physical distancing. We, a like or a share goes a lot more than you think.

So, hey, listen. And, and I vow from this day forward, not only the LinkedIn thing, but Marren, I'm going to let that, that topknot grow out.

Go for it.

You know what I'm trying to say? I'm just going to have it in full effect. It's going to be flopping over the—

I think you should. I think it'd be a good look for you. Alright, so everyone else out there, thanks for tuning in and don't forget, training changes behavior.