L.O.G.

Good morning, Greg, on this wet and rainy morning for me. Finally, it's three degrees here, no rain. I don't believe they would call it rain if it was happening at three degrees. It would be called something else. And that's Fahrenheit, you bastards. Yeah.

So, we're going to be talking about a few things in general about human behavior. We'll probably get into some, maybe, some specific cases or examples, but today's discussion is generalized. And I wanted to have this with you because we get a lot of folks who write in an email and have some questions about things. We always try to answer them specifically. Especially if you're on the Patreon side, we definitely go like, "Hey, here's your questions, here's how we'd address it, this is what it looks like." But in general, people have a lot of questions.

And I get people that I meet or something, find out what I do, and when I have questions, there's general stuff that I look at, and I always try to stay on top of it because I want to answer some of those in the way that we do it and we see it. So today, sort of the three general questions I kind of want to answer, or discuss, really—I don't know if you need a definitive answer, but an explanation, I guess I should say—is there's three things. And the first one would be, what drives human behavior and decision-making? So we could talk about what defines human behavior versus other behavior and then decision-making, but there's a whole science behind decision-making, right?

Then, how do our past experiences shape or impact our current behavior? And then the third would be, how do the social influences, how does societal shape or impact our behavior? So those are the—those are the three, and I'll put those in sort of the episode details as well. So we're going to go back and maybe put some time markers on them and get to it.

So there's a lot of places we can start, there's a lot of things we could talk about in this, but before we even answer the first one about what drives human behavior and decision-making, we kind of have to, I think, initially talk about sort of what people call genetics and personality. Who we are as a person, how that forms, because that informs all of these things, right? So my personal behavior is affected by who I am as a person, which comes from both nature and nurture, right? Biology.

Exactly.

The electrochemical neurotransmitters in my head, what the chemical makeup is, which is different for me than it is from you, slightly, in some ways. And then how I was raised, and all those influences, especially when you're young, right? Those formative years, even before you're a teenager, are the most formative for how your brain, in a sense, starts its wiring process, we'll say, how it starts to create neural networks. Happens so young. And, you know, we tie everything back to your survival and limbic system. But I do want to start there. So I'll actually throw to you, Greg, to start, and then we can sort of go down from there if that makes sense.

And no, it doesn't. I might interrupt you or say, "Hang on," you know, "explain that." Of course, do something like that.

So let's use a Flinstonian perspective. Let's get back because the idea for the questions that you're asking, I have two sides of the same coin. I'll give you the first side. The first side is the basic source of personality development is obviously heredity and environment. And when you talk about genetic codes, heredity means the genetic code that we inherit when we're conceived. So genes are passed on. Hereditary characteristics include that of the donor, and then that code is passed on with the other donor, and now that continues to be passed on with those personality characteristics attained through heredity, but shaped by environment. So environment means that societal influence that you're conceived into.

Yet we have to go further back and say that, listen, when you're first conceived and you're a zygote, was the mother or the host sad or happy or healthy or on drugs? So all of those contributed as well. Then when you're growing inside. Then when you're popped out and you're growing on the outside. So you're exactly right. And then there are key markers along your evolution from, let's say, a childhood, to a late child, to puberty, Brian. Oh my gosh. The brain of a teen compared to a preteen or a late teen. So the very simple thing is, together, heredity and environment form your personality, and your personality forms your behavior.

So the other side of that coin, just very briefly, people argue with people, talk to me all the time, but they bring up a shitty argument. They start to bring in stuff about their, you know, emotion, meaning not clinical emotion, their personal emotions. "Well, I don't feel that's as powerful or important as this." Well, you don't get it. You don't get a choice. Okay? The way that you're raised contributes to how you produce in a society, and whether that production is good or bad for the rest of society. What I mean by that, there's an evolutionary imperative to live in teams, tribes, gangs. Yes, and cohabitate.

And real quick, you just explain it because evolutionary imperative, meaning it's an—it's imperative for the survival of the human species to have—

Exactly.

Exactly.

So, cohabitation. I'll give you an example: you cohabitate, I cohabitate, many of our friends cohabitate. I could go down the list of people that don't, that have a manifesto and become a serial killer. Yeah. Or say that they're an insult. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, it's healthy for you to cohabitate, because my gut microbes make you sick and that makes you stronger. And my reticence to clean the bathroom drives you insane, and that changes how you teach our children about cleanliness.

So, real quick, what you just did there is you went exactly what you mean from, but before even our genetic code and heredity, our hereditary traits from our parents that we get. He even went one step before that. In general, there's a general wiring, sort of, code for all humans. So you started there and went, "Okay, well, we need others to survive." Right? That's an imperative for, literally. So, there's the biology that underlies all of this is the same biology for all of us that is basically tied to keeping the human race alive. That's number one priority, is to survive. Any organism wants to survive. So as a human, he did that. Then he said, "Okay, that goes into, then we have my parents have their DNA and their hereditary markers that could mean like,"—that gets my eye color, skin color, hair color, whether or not I have hair, all of that stuff to include the chemical makeup of me. So maybe I don't produce as much dopamine as you do, or oxytocin, or cortisol, or testosterone. There's all of those in there. And then that all informs how we act around each other, which then influences our behavior. I love your bathroom example.

And, you know—

Yeah. And that influences me, my wife McKaylee. I influence her, which influences how we raise our kids. So, it has to, right? I think that that's a great intro for what we mean when we say it, which is also why we tie a lot of our stuff that we talk about back to survival in the limbic system. In that—

Exactly.

Because everyone likes to have the debate, "Is it nature versus nurture?" Get rid of the verses. It's nature and nurture. It has to be, and they influence each other. Now, when you talk about biological traits or hereditary traits, I would say that if I have some sort of hereditary trait that that caused me like—like alcoholism is a good one. If you have that sort of genetic makeup or are predisposed to that, it's very, very difficult as a human to sort of overcome that or fight that. Like it's going to be a constant struggle. So, what I'm trying to get at is that, you know, biology, nature—if I was a gambling man, I would say I would gamble on nature over nurture for most of these situations.

Exactly.

I wouldn't be always right, but I would probably be right more than I'm wrong. Maybe it's only five percent of the time, but—

But I would tell you, you're on something. And I would tell you this: sometimes we look at something like a person that's predisposed to diabetes or a person that's predisposed to the gout. Those things don't happen accidentally unless you're like the dog in Cujo that gets bit by a bat and becomes rabid and then does all that other stuff. What happens is, those things are put into the human code at certain parts in our development to create something, to create a smarter or a more resilient human, or to disrupt something to form a genetic code that will burn out more quickly and not be as strong going forward.

And people hate that. This is—you get great questions. I get the person sitting next to me in the airport and they say something like, "Hey, I read your stuff about the Coolidge effect, and that's total horseshit." Well, no, no. Emotionally, have a bad reaction to something. Yeah. So, real quick, folks, Coolidge effect: you're walking with your significant other, a breathable person that walks by you draws your attention and you actually turn, no matter what you're doing, and glance at that person's secondary sex characteristics. One, it's science. Yeah. So cut it out. Don't be thinking we're trying to be salacious. The second part is, it's an imperative. You have to constantly look for a breeding model to push your seed going forward. Now, I'm old, I don't look for those breeding models anymore. Why? Because it's unlikely that I'm going to breed and create progeny that's going to go forward. You get what I'm trying to say? So these are logical things. People look at me like I'm the Antichrist because I bring up something. No. One, stop naming biases because you're just renaming.

Yeah, yeah.

And look back at the true science here, Brian. What we're talking about is that hereditary characteristic of the donors will take precedence all the way through the life cycle of that family, right?

Yeah.

So therefore you say that when something upsets the apple cart, like alcoholism, that's a genetic twist, a modification to the code that it's going to be hard to overcome. Yes. Every single day that you get up, that's the most important day to influence the rest of your life and your family, and how your kids see the world, or whether they're adopted or they're genetic. Why? Because if you don't constantly push back in between the lines—you know that little game with the balls and the eye and the cat, you know, the little pellets that you get in? That's what life is. Life is designed for you to make little adjustments over your entire lifestyle. That's what behavior is. And if you have good foundational elements for your behavior and your personality, you'll succeed. Guess what? If you have bad ones, Brian, you'll be a social pariah. People will hate you. You're not going to get those opportunities to breed all the time. Coolidge effect isn't going to be as profound for you. You know? And you get what I mean? We never set out to insult somebody, but there's a lot of times that we've had people that we know really well that come up to us and they're bent out of shape over science.

Well, yeah, it's like, "Well, sorry. It rained today, you bastard." Yeah.

And then these are factors that are out of our control. Like, I never—I realized a few years ago, probably about six or seven years ago, after trying for a long time, is that I'm never going to be able to dunk a basketball. I'm only five—

That long, huh?

Well, let me explain why. I'm only five foot ten. And so I was doing a lot of workouts, a lot of plyometric stuff, and I got to the point where I wanted to build up. I was like, "Man, I wonder if I could touch rim." And I did it one time. I touched a rim. And I was like, "Holy crap, it's within reach!" Mind you, I can't. I'm not a basketball player. I can't. And so I'm like, "I'm going to do this. My goal is to—I'm going to be able to take a little ball and dunk it and score." Well, then I start realizing like, "Wait a minute, to actually be able to get up to that height and jump that high, your hand has to come up and over the rim." And I'm like, "That's never going to happen to me."

Exactly.

So, I can't. There's certain barriers to entry into different parts of society that you're just—

Yeah, yeah, you're a little "Doctor of Island Moreau" (referencing The Island of Doctor Moreau). They wouldn't be grabbing, you know what I'm trying to say, to steal your genes for the NBA. No.

But that's a—and listen, there's another example. We use storytelling. We try to make stuff sticky by bringing up movies or film or those things. That's the best way to learn this stuff, because if you go in in a clinical sense and just go back and, like, some of your patients who are looking up zygote, what happens is it gets boring real quick. And then you start reading things and you go, "Wow, I don't truly understand why tyrosine is responsible for making this." Yeah. Settle down. Get the basic fundamental knowledge here and understand that it's going to drive you. Listen, how do you think we do the best interviews with people? How do you think that we watch and make predictions that are better than other people? We go all the way back to that Flinstonian and then we work forward because as you've said a thousand times, "What's the best predictor of future behavior? Your past behavior?" Right? So, I loved your bringing nature and nurture into this because, again, why does it have to be an argument? Nature and nurture are opposite sides of the same coin. Yeah. The same coin is what you've got to put into the slot to get the candy or the soda. You get what I mean? You can't put half a coin in, you know? So, now with the whole coin. No.

Okay, so that's sort of a good, I think, start to then maybe the first part of the question. So we kind of cover a little bit. I mean, and all of this stuff, folks, you can—I mean, obviously, you can get a PhD in ten of the things we just talked about. So you could go like you said, you go into it as far as you want. But there's certain rules that apply that you cannot change. You can try, but it's—or you could influence it. But if you try too hard, Mother Nature always wins. Mother Gaia is the one. Whatever you want to call it: God, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Mother Nature, or whatever, they always are going to win. And so, but this goes to sort of that first question: what drives human behavior and decision-making? So we covered it sort of in a sense from there's nature and nurture, there's genetics, there's hereditary traits that influences. So, what else drives our behavior and then sort of specifically our decision-making?

Yeah. And so, if we want to go back and forth, maybe the best way to keep our op-tempo, I'll go back and give just the clinical side of it, and then we can discuss it. Okay? Because, like, on this one, it's a pretty big setup because what drives human behavior and decision-making?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, decision-making in its own is like, again, each one of these things are concepts we could do an entire podcast on. So let's just try to see how we can loop it all together, if we can. We'll drill down to the most basic chunk, and then you and I can extrapolate. So—

Okay. Emotion plus motivation create affect (A-F-F-E-C-T instead of E-F-F-E-C-T). And people get bent out of shape about it. It's a clinical term. Go look it up.

Or the psychology, meaning basically, kind of how your emotions influence. So, real quick, psychology generally talks about affect, cognition, behavior—which is basically what you're feeling, what you're thinking, what you're doing, right? So that's kind of what you mean. But affect also is in the verb, how it affects something.

Exactly.

Because it'll have influence. So, yeah, yeah.

Let's do emotion first. So emotion is the mood, the feeling, the emotional response that you have to something. So it's not reason or logic or knowledge-based, right? You don't really know why, but you know that you feel better because it's happening. So that feel. Okay, we could break down into the chemical side, but if we don't, if we just classify it by, "I feel warm when I'm around you, I feel comfortable and less anxious," that's an emotion.

Yeah. Or being a kid, when I feel good when we climb the ropes in gym class, that's another one.

Let me chalk that up to your father and his drinking. So, love your dad, by the way, John. Don't hold it against me. So, motivation. Motivation, again, clinically, psychologically, sociologically, how it works in science, means the conscious or unconscious incentive that drives our direction, that forms our behavior. And then now we need the effect, which is the influence. So if we have the mood plus we have the incentive, then what did those things drive us towards? That becomes your affect. So we put them together: emotion plus motivation, psychologically, physiologically, that's going to guide our behavior. And our behavior therefore would guide our decision-making. That's the lowest level. So now we've got a good stable base to go from.

Okay. And, to, I know we've—you defined this actually on a podcast a long time ago. It's probably one of our first ones. But when you talk about human behavior, so what's different than human behavior? Because human behavior, when we say human behavior, there's sort of intent behind that, right? What's the difference between—what do we mean when we say human behavior? Because it's separate and distinct from an animal, let's say, you know what I mean? Animal behavior. There's some sort of intent behind it, meaning it's the behavior driven, it's driven by all of the things that we've been talking about so far, specifically what you just said. Does that kind of make sense, or no?

Makes absolute sense. And this is why we get hung up about Maslow. Maslow isn't wrong, but Maslow is the lowest level of potential simplification of a vast college class.

Right. Exactly. A small control group.

But more importantly, Maslow is like somebody saying, you know, again, I know that we're retreading a tire here, but look, I saw it again where a person's having a class on Boyd's OODA Loop. Yeah. Or where somebody answered somebody on LinkedIn that came up with this really, really good idea and the guy said, "Oh, it's just Boyd's OODA Loop." You don't know what you're saying. Stay in your seat. You get what I'm trying to say? Eat your lunch. Because what you can't do is you can't oversimplify human behavior by just saying, "We have the need to breathe?" Yes, of course it's an imperative. "We have the need to breathe?" Yes, of course it's an imperative. So we have all these onboard systems that are there.

But human behavior is so intrinsic and unique, like a thumbprint or a snowflake, yes, or a fingerprint. Because your incentives, Brian, and your intent is vastly different from mine. So we have these basic things. We have the basic ones are all the same, right?

Right.

And identical and even across culture, even in, you know, a thousand miles or six thousand miles away. But those things that make you get up in the morning and value your hair, or your uncontrollable public masturbation... for your, you know, "Hey, I did my time and I paid my dues to society." You look good with a tether program. But the idea, though, listen, every single one of us, what defines us, what makes us us? That's human behavior, right?

Right.

And so when we say we can predict it, we can pattern analyze your behavior, we're not saying that you're simple. We're saying that there's certain things that you love that you will choose even when faced with alternatives. Now, what changes that? Cops chasing me, I'm a criminal, I have blonde hair, I've got to change to black hair, or yeah, I'm in a white car, and I've got to change to a black car. You get it? Those are the simple things, right? But the central focus of who you are, how you live, the things you like, what gets you off, what you enjoy eating, those become your human behavior. They become your personality profile, right? And your behavior is repeated. It has to be because scientifically your brain will always choose the lowest caloric intervention to solve a problem. You know, if you could crap in your bed and not have to worry about it, "Homer, that thing breeds for me!" Wait a minute, that, you know, the type of conclusions you would eventually make. And people go, "Why? Because I'm a slovenly, you know, unshaved ape?" No, it's because your brain doesn't want to waste calories because it continues to think that there's an emergency nigh. There's an emergency right outside my door that I have to be ready for, and I don't want to waste any superfluous calories.

And so that's the, again, it goes back to, that's the underlying framework of all human behavior. And then, like you just said, what makes me unique is what I've learned throughout my life. And I've learned that through people either mimicking others or not doing what I've seen someone else do, or learning it the hard way, and what I value. So like, I want to get up and move. Like, I have to—I've trained myself to get up because, and move my bike. So I got up this morning, I did a couple minutes on the assault bike to warm up, and I stretched to get myself ready for the day because I've learned I'm physically, mentally, and emotionally better when I do that versus what. So even though I'm still tired and I'm groggy, I don't want to do it. Like, I force myself because I know the outcome of that. But then, because I've done things like that, over time, it gets easier to do it. I don't think about not doing it now. I'm just waking up and I'm two minutes into that assault bike and I'm like, "Oh, where am I? You know what I mean? Oh, that's right, I'm already in my warm-up for the day." Right? So, those things make me unique versus what someone else's morning routine is, to where it's, "You know what, I'm going to sleep until the absolute last second. I have to run out of the house to get to work." There's some people that do that. And that's unique to them, and that's what makes our behavior different. But those underlying causes, or that underlying framework, the underlying, literally, neuroscience behind it, we get to influence that. But that DNA that's sort of going in the background, that operating system, is the same.

Exactly.

So let me add a level of complexity because you were spot on with every one of your comments. And folks, don't just think that things that you do repeatedly form a habit. It's much deeper than that, right? Okay, so I want you to think about growing up, Brian, back in Chicago, and having your little brother standing next to you, and both of you got caught for the same thing. And here's John Marren on one knee, ready to give you a pair of "Irish sunglasses" (euphemism for a black eye). And you were the bad guy in this. And your brother with his hands behind his back and head down got away with it. That was two brothers with the same genetic code, with a father with the same genetic code, in the family, but you had two vastly different outcomes.

Yes.

So your life from that moment on, from that nanosecond, changed. And in a relationship with your brother, changed.

That's a great example because, so, one, my brother's eight years younger than me, right? So that's a big, big gap, right? Right. So, and obviously his personality is very, very, very, very different than mine. But we still, even though he's like twice my size, he's like the same build, we also are very good at the same things. Like, there are certain things in the gym or something that we do that we're both naturally like, "Oh, I could always do this." Like, "Oh yeah, so could I." There's all—and then there's random little things we'll find like that we both have very, very similar things. Yet, if you met us... I was hanging out with him years ago when he was still in the military, too, down in Pacific Beach, and we had to prove to people. There were people like, "You guys aren't brothers?" And people literally thought we were making this up and lying. We're like, "Are you kidding me?" So that's a great point because it's like twins, too. It's like the story I tell about my buddies back in Chicago, Mike and Pat. Same thing. They're twins, right? Right. And they're two vastly different people, but in some aspects, they're exactly the same. And I think that that goes into explaining what you're talking about.

Exactly. But I would go to those people that have been listening since the beginning—thanks, would stick. And what I say, when you talk about hereditary and genetic similarities, I can't use recombinant DNA. I could use that to link you and your brother together and find out that your sister or your father were involved in a homicide, right? If I only have a bit of genetic code. Yeah. Put it in a blender and go backwards or forwards in time and figure out who my likely profile suspect is. But the emotional and the motivational that create Brian Marren are vastly different in that family. Yes. And for each time you have one of those experiences, that rich tapestry of life changes you. And so when you're talking about your decision-making, that getting caught with your little brother doing that thing, but you being blamed for it, and then coming back and saying, "You're the older brother, you know better." Yeah. Don't let any things that go with it change how you will process similar instances in the future. No two things are going to be the same, but a situation is going to come up and it's going to hit that mental file folder, and you're going to go, "Close enough. These things are starting to happen. How did I handle it before?" So how you handle situations before and the outcome of those situations are largely going to drive what your decision-making is going forward. And what do I mean by that? If you leave your door open and run from your car, you're not coming back to the car. You left the car running? You're not coming back to the car, or you're coming right back in the next few seconds, or you're never coming back, right? Yeah. You ran a short distance and then went to ground. Not going to continue to do that. You're going to get caught somewhere by the dog that's going to catch you under the porch or by the jacuzzi. Your behavior is limited in scope. And you're saying, "Yes, but we have free will." Yeah, but you don't have a bunch of file folders.

Well, they have a limited number of file folders. And the more, I guess, the more of a survival situation you're in, the less options you have, and you go primitive, right? So those are things you just gave. Like, I can't—I'm not going to come up—I can't solve calculus on the fly when there's a police officer chasing me, but I can think about my survival and I can base it on. So this goes right into the second part of that question about decision-making. So it was, "What drives human behavior and decision-making?" It's kind of a shitty question, I'm sorry for posing.

No, no, it is.

But it is our behavior and our environment, and everything we've talked about so far for the last thirty minutes, or whatever it is, informs and influences our decision-making, does it not? So, what is—I guess we could start with—what is decision-making? Because there literally is decision science you could study and go—

Yeah. And yeah, take your time and do your homework. We're not going to go there. We're going to give you a basic, street-level definition that makes you smarter and stronger and harder to kill. So I'll give you one. Okay? It's three degrees. I had to go out and walk the dog. So the dog takes a poop and goes to the bathroom. So dog much likes fur and inside and warm and happy. Okay, so first of all, getting to the threshold and the dog having to decide, "Yeah, it's three degrees." Then the dog going outside, then the dog finding the location. So I'm looking at what I'm wearing and I've got a hat on, I've got a pair of gloves on, I've got a jacket on, I've got my boots on. I've got furry boots that are in the other room that I got right by the door to go on. Why? I took the time knowing it was three degrees and I planned to go outside with the dog, not knowing how long it would take.

Then I think of myself back in Detroit, Brian, when I was twelve years old. I was waiting for the bus and I was headed to Grant Junior High School or East Detroit High School, and it was cold as hell in Michigan. But I wasn't wearing a jacket. You know why? Because I wanted to show off my ripped chest with my polo shirts to all the little girls and boys that were there, right? And even though I was cold and I was shivering, and I had my book bag jammed with my jacket, my hat. Yeah. Why? So my decision as a child was based on me showing that I was resilient and viable and I was a breathable male, even though I was twelve and I didn't know why I was doing it, Brian. Okay? And friction was giving me the erection. I didn't understand all that. But my decision was based on those factors in that environment, at that time, and at that place. My decision this morning to take the dog out were based on my view of the world at this time, in this place, in this environment. Sorry. Decision-making is driven by those if you're a thinking human, because there are certain people that in our society, and many of them are in prison, that go, "I want immediate gratification." So that's not a decision. It's a poor decision.

Right. Well, okay. So that—no, no, that that's a good example when we're talking about decision-making in general. We always tied decisions, sort of, in some way, can get tied to, like you said, survival or basic human needs within a given context. So when we look at decision-making, you have to look at it, all right, in what context are we talking about? So you grew up as a kid, maybe I'm a CEO of a company trying to make a decision based on new incoming information, a commander on the battlefield, you as an individual going, "How should I approach this?" There's—so you sort of have to define the context to really dive deep into it. But what you brought up a great point is, sort of, the lower level of education, emotional development, and training and life experience I have, the less informed decision I will make. So you go back to like a lot of people, especially prison population or mental health issues, it's like, "What do I need right bleeping now?" And there's never a thought past that. There's never a thought past, "What do I need right now?" Because I'm tying everything to survival. And so that's how I'm going to make these decisions. "Oh, you know what, they saw me now I've got to kill them because I can't go to jail." You know, "These are very, very, very, very primitive decisions. There's not a lot of thought. And I'm already going to jail, so I might as well carjack that next vehicle. And I'm going to jail, so I'm going to kidnap and delay it so I can smoke the bong." Someone in those moments, and this is why, so that moment right there, it's mostly going to be, the decision is going to be made based on the immediate survival needs of that individual, versus I'm sitting here reading through a bunch of stuff, Greg, and we're going to approach a problem, and I'm reading through and I'm thinking about it, and I'm taking notes, and maybe I'm going to call you and ask you for your opinion on this. That's a much more informed decision because, one, I have the time clearly in that example to make it, and I have some distance from the problem so I can make a more informed decision. Yes. Versus, "I'm right here, it's up in front of me. This guy just got up and slapped me and said, 'What are you going to do about it, expletive?'" Okay, I'm not—completely different. So now everything that we talked about with our hereditary traits, our environment, how we grew up, is still going to inform what decisions I make and how quickly I can—

Sense-making. People are like your Christmas tree: stable stock, or core, or center. And then these limbs, these branches that go out. So this core will largely stay the same, but your branches are going to grow and reach for the sun, or hang down to the ground, based on the environment, nature and nurture, and experiences. So, if in your family you don't have a lot of mentors around you in the house, you have to get them in society, school, church, somewhere else, or you won't be as diverse. So when we talk about diversity, what? The more diverse you are, the more different friends you have, the more different foods you eat, the more different experiences that you garner, you're going to be vastly better at decision-making than a person that doesn't have the same amount of file folders. Now, there are canny people that only have three file folders, right, and go up to you with your fifty-two. But guess what? They were brought up by their bootstraps hard on the street and had to fight for everything. And they're so remarkable that we make movies about them, we write books about them, right? And that's definitely not a good life having to fight for absolutely every, you know, inch of moving forward that you have to get, or your food. So what are we saying? We're saying that if you want to make better decisions, you need to be more diverse because the more diversity means the more file folders, means the more decision points that I've seen, right?

More perspective, yeah.

And now I can—and now we can say time is less important than precision. Because some decisions cost us our lives or our friendships or our jobs. So we have to be more precise. And what do we learn? The gift of time and distance means if I'm more diverse and I have more options and I can go through more file folders in the same amount of time, get it? The same relative time, and that's going to be smarter.

And then there's not only obviously an entire field of decision science, but then there's, you know, every self-help guru or book or thing or whatever fad or trend that people are. And I'm bashing them in a joke because they're basically all the same, and just someone's come up with something that like, "Okay, great. You cracked open a few textbooks or a few books that were written a long time ago, and you found something that's applicable today." That's what we're talking about, right? But the idea is, you know what they're trying to do is sort of make your—it's trying to get you to make a more informed decision. So if I look at, we make this—I don't know how many decisions a human being makes in a day, but it's probably in the thousands, tens of thousands, from small to big, to whatever, constantly. And we don't ever put a lot of thought into how we came to that decision, or why we did certain things. And so there's all of this complexity behind it, and based on the situation and who you are, is how you're going to recall, maybe something from your past, or, you know, have some sort of heuristic that you've built over time to allow you to make a quick decision. But all of this goes into it. So it can be incredibly complex.

Yes.

Until you sort of put the squeeze on someone and you put them in a survival situation, then it can become pretty simple sometimes. Does that make sense, or no?

Absolutely. So, you go to a party and you're holding it together and you're not drinking too much and you're not smoking the reefer and you're not doing whatever, and now it's legal, I guess you can go do it. And then all of a sudden you're saying, "Hey, I'm doing pretty good. This is part of my New Year's resolution." Then you go down to the basement where the bathroom is, and coming out of the basement you see your best friend's girlfriend and she's giving you the eye. And you immediately abandon all of those file folders, the rational decision-making, and everything else. Why? Because certain things in your environment scream to you and they are decisions, even though you don't think of the long-term ramifications because of the immediate gratification. So what separates us is what we have to do is stop and go, "This decision is weighted more heavily than other decisions that I made tonight. I'm not going to drink and drive, it's a heavily weighted decision. I'm not going to bang my best friend's girlfriend like a Salvation Army drum. I'm not going to do these things that have long-term repercussions." And Brian, that's what separates us. That's where you get the human behavior, because a dog or a deer aren't going to make those choices.

No. That's the—the animal comparison is always great because it's like—it's like my wife, I love her to death, but I have to tell her like, "Hey, you've got to stop feeding the dog." You know, like, "You stop giving it food." It's like, "Well, I sometimes I'm not sure, like, because she always comes up and begs, and like, 'Is she hungry? Did she get enough food?'" I was like, "The dog, well, if I dumped out the entire bag of dog food, it would eat it. It would try to eat the whole thing to the point where it would throw up. Like it's never going to stop. Then scan the barcode." Yeah. "How many times a day does a dog like that eat?" Yeah. "Okay. It just wants you." Oh, okay, okay. So, but that that's a great example of that, you know, "Hey, we," you know, doing the animal-human stuff is great because we're, we're sort of that animal in a primitive sense. Yet we have a prefrontal cortex. We have a developed brain to where we can do a little bit higher level thinking and understand intellect, where they rely on instinct. But everything we sort of just kind of talked about actually leads in, and again, this is why each one of these sort of questions are interwoven, basically. But how do our past experiences, you know, shape or impact our current behavior? So that's everything that we're talking about because those experiences add to, we always call them, sort of, those file folders. But if you think of, you know, your brain creating a neural network of storing information and then recall that for use later. And it's got this little network and the wiring. Well, like you just said, the more experiences I have, the more experiences I can draw from, the more, you know, I practice something like this, recalling different things, or the more times I take the time to understand something complicated, right? The more things I can rely on and say, "Hey, you know what, that's not—this isn't the same situation, but this reminds me of a time when I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the guy said this and that led to this." And now, even though it's ten years and ten thousand miles apart, I can use that so I can pay that forward. Yeah.

Every Friday, you just hit on why memory blows. Yes, memory—memory blows, because memory is designed to create a Panacea—a panorama, rather—of file folders that you can choose from. And memory changes to put you as the lead player, to put you as a more important person. And you go, "Well, why would it do that?" Because you are—you have an egocentric view of the rest of the world. And the less you worry about other people, the more you can focus on you. You're the most important part of your universe. So when you think about decision-making, it's rare, and that's why we make movies and write about it, for somebody to land on a grenade to save the rest of the troops, or to go into a house over and over to save kids from a burning fire. That's rare, Brian.

Okay. That's done through chain training. You override the natural need for your survival in order to do something that—but that's typically done, those examples, especially too, like the firemen running in a burning building, someone running into a house where people are getting shot. Like, you're overriding something because you've trained to that standard. But it does happen. Yeah. Rarely and occasionally.

Yeah. Okay. In society. Yeah. For somebody without—

Oh yeah, yep.

So that shows that we have the capacity for that. Yes, which also shows that we have the capacity for self-harm or suicide.

Yep.

You get what I'm trying to say? Yeah. There's your decision tree, let's call it, right? Yeah.

And you look at that and you go, "Well, why would somebody?" Well, listen, why wouldn't they? Based on the amount of information that they had taken in at a certain time. That's why the best way to spot somebody that is thinking about it is what they're giving away. They're stopping their social intercourse. They're giving away things that were very important to them. Why? Because there's no future plan. Do you see what I'm trying to say? So when we're thinking about our survival, our survival is to protect us because we have a future, even if the future is sitting on the couch watching TV with my loved one, you get what I'm trying to say? And vacillating and getting old and fat and not caring. That's a future. That's what we have to be on the lookout for. So any anomalous behavior in the arch that you created from past experience to current behavior, future behavior and decision-making, we have to encounter that as well. What factors in that person's life led them to think that suicide was a better option than going and getting mentored or counseled, or coming up and saying, "Hey, I think I'm going to blow my brains out." And so, you know, everything we've experienced in life affects our current behavior. Every single thing that we've had. And we don't always weigh our experiences in a logical manner. Well, we never really do it in a logical manner. We do it, you know, based on how it affected us electrochemically, meaning what was the emotional response I got during something will inform and affect my behavior in the future given a similar situation. Especially if I don't, you know. And it ties back to survival. It's like people who have, you know, bad post-traumatic stress or survivor's guilt or anything like that, it's like, "Okay, well then I'm going to start to avoid these large areas with a lot of people gathering," because that starts to affect me and I don't like. So my brain's trying to say, "Hey, that's kind of close to what happened that last time something really bad happened, so we're going to want to stay away from that." You're going to want to protect. It's trying to protect you, but in protecting you, it can be—it's a simple way to protect you, but it's not a good way in terms of living your life, right? Or in terms of having a fulfilling life. It can negatively affect your emotions, and your negative emotions will then affect your behavior. And that cycle will continue. That becomes a feedback loop that builds on each other. So all of those things from our past, whether it was good, whether it was bad, whether it was funny, whether we're sad, it literally affects everything that we do on a daily basis in our current behavior. So it's all of the genetic traits and the hereditary traits and our environment and our experiences. All of that can inform, which is, both, it's a double-edged sword, right? It sucks because if I've had a series of negative experiences and that's the way I view the world, it's going to be hard to get out of that loop because that's what I know and my brain sticks with familiarity. But what it also shows is you can—you can change behavior. You can change, and rapidly, and throughout your life, even at an old age, neuroplasticity can happen, right? You can rewire yourself, your brain, those connections in a way to think, act, and behave differently than you did before. Is that? I mean, it's spot on.

And that's why you've got to get rid of this, gosh, and New Year's resolution mindset. Yeah. Memory is biased. Memory is biased. So you have to resort to the use of HBP RNA (Human Behavior Podcast's "Research & Analysis" or similar, an in-joke term) and let that guide you. Let that be your template or prototype. So it becomes a heuristic for how you see and how you make your way through the dissonance that you're going to be experiencing with memory and emotion triggers in your environment every day. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that you can read the environment, compare that to the positive negative feedback loop that you've created over your years. And this is why we have to teach kids how to do that. Like meditation is great, but it doesn't go far enough. Okay? We develop these beliefs out of necessity. So we have to drive a response metric. This is the response metric. When I see a template match on this, I can't immediately think that this is always going to be the answer. I have to compare it. I have to compare the known unknown against the baseline of what I'm watching. I also can't come in and be so willy-nilly (your favorite term) that when I see something in my environment that I assume it's a prototypical match and force it to go into an ice cube tray. Life moves. It's particles, it's waves, it's constantly evolving. And time is shifting. Time isn't a constant; we create a constant. Yeah. With time, if we then look at the lens of our past experience, a best case model, a subject matter expert model, we're going to make better decisions and we're going to rise like cream to the top. "All boats rise with the perfect tide," or whatever that is. You know, but you get where I'm going. So, you're talking about behavior modification. Why behavior modification is not brainwashing. But it is brainwashing. Yeah, it is, because what you have to do is you have to choose your mental model and make sure that the mental model is one in line with your beliefs and two, in line with your needs. And that's where Maslow didn't go far enough.

No, that's it. That's a great example of what you mean when we, when we sort of bash Maslow in a way. It's not, it's like, "Hey, this would have been a great discussion." I don't think it should be something that turned into a theory and taught to people like you. I mean, it's exactly—it was the world.

Yeah. What Maslow did is go, "Hey, I've noticed that there's a consistency to color." And somebody comes and goes, "Yeah, that's Reggie Bibb." And he goes, "Holy crap!" And that became his entire life.

Oh, yeah. Okay. But wait a minute. Yeah, but there's infrared, there's ultraviolet. There's exactly—there's all this spectrum here. Yellow and blue make green.

Yeah. So the idea is that, you know what we don't like is people stating the painfully obvious. And like that—that's why, you know, if folks—I don't know if you know I'm an ass because I send a thousand messages to Brian a day, and I expect Brian reads them and has my reaction to everything. So my worst is platitudes. So some soothsayer on LinkedIn will write that, "You know, more people affect your outcomes." And that's the same old crap as "It takes a village to raise a child." Yeah. So what they do is they take it, they rewire it, right? You know what I'm saying? "Be the change that you want to see." Yeah. And then they put their name at the bottom. And I'm sitting there going, "Okay, if you're a self-help guru and you're not writing your own shit, and I'm not quoting you, then we have a problem." That's what I'm talking about here. Because what happens is we want to go for that low-hanging fruit. We want to go for that, you know, how Spinners to catch trout and fish were invented? The Irish or Scottish guy—depending, they're still fighting about that—was in the boat, handing the lunch, dropped a spoon in the water and noticed as the spoon twirled down, fish were striking at it. And goes, "Oh my gosh! Now I've got a new thing!" Brian, that's genius. So build off of that and you'll always have a business. Daredevil lures, all that other stuff. But if you're building off of this ethereal thought somebody had in the past, they're not going to be able to behavior modify because guess what? At the end of the day, it's hollow. It's a big box of Montana air. Yeah.

It's habits of thought, habits of action, right? I mean, yeah, absolutely. You can read all the books, you can say all the mantras, and you do all that stuff, but if you're not changing your behavior, you're not going to exactly see that change, or you're not going to really benefit from all that, right? I mean, it has to be both and they can influence each other. That's the thing about behavior. Your behavior is obviously influenced by your thoughts, and then your thoughts are then influenced by your behavior. So that's a feedback loop. So it can be a negative feedback loop, or it can be a positive feedback loop. It can—so negative is good, though. Negative is good because I used a negative feedback loop to quit smoking, right? Positive feedback loop can also be bad because we talked about it yesterday. It was one of the finest scientists I know, and two doctors on the call that we were talking with, and we talked about the gym equipment in the basement. And if it's used to hang your laundry? Okay, then you had a positive feedback loop. "I know that I want to go down and work out and be stronger and be healthier and do all that other stuff, but it's hard. So instead, it's by the washing machine. That's where I'm going to hang my linens to dry." You get what I'm trying to say? So you can have the best intentions, Brian. You can have the absolute best intentions, but if it's not coupled with action, with that decision, and with that motivation and emotion, then you're never going to get anywhere. You're just going to be a, what do they call that, a "silly heart"? Another reason... No, I'm an Uncle Buck today. Yeah, sometimes it's the hat. Maybe it's the hat. What's your name?

So, on that, then, I guess the third one we did want to discuss is, how do the social influences shape, impact, or affect our behavior? So, sociologically, and I'll start just in general. Yep, it's damn huge. Meaning the people around us. You could be in your own head, in your own mind, alone in your house, an amazing, wonderful human being who thinks great thoughts and wants to do great in the world. And even thrust in the situations, depending on the context, you'll do things that, if five minutes ago I'd ask you, "Hey, would you ever do this?" You'd likely say no and could never picture yourself doing it. But those—and especially the younger you are—those social cues, the environmental things, and sociologically, and what everyone's thinking and doing around you, is a massive impact on the decisions you make, on your behavior, how you react to things. And you could see all the different studies have done. I know the big ones, people like, "Oh, the bystander effect." And they kind of get it wrong when they explain it. They get it wrong when they explain it like it's just, or I think they get it wrong. They say, "Oh, because it's the — it goes back to the..." Remember the woman in New York who's brutally murdered, and supposedly everyone in the apartment saw, which if you actually dig into the story, none of that's true. And it really didn't happen that way, and someone did call the police, and it did. But it creates a story, and then we have this whole, you know, body of work behind it. And I think it sort of misses the point.

And what I'm saying is that, you know, it's like if you're in a crowd of people, and someone starts acting a certain way, or — oh, remember we were talking to one woman, another doctor, a brilliant person at that school that we're at, and she said, "Yeah, like we're standing here, and this guy's just berating this woman, and looks like he's about to physically assault her, and everyone's standing around looking, and no one's doing anything." Okay, sort of that bystander effect. Everyone's looking around, taking their social cues. And then what did she do? She said, "Hey, stop! What are you doing?" And I yelled something. And then what did the crowd do? Well, all of a sudden they got in, and now they're helping her fix the situation. So, when we talk about that, I just think it's a good anecdote to explain how strongly we are affected by—

Look at social influence now and look at fast food restaurants. It's absolutely okay to take a swing at the counter person, to jump over the counter, to throw your food, to act that way. I've seen it before, right? So, in a closed environment, Maslow in your class, with just your students, you can have social influences that are a detriment to the rest of society. That small experiment in that McDonald's or at that drive-through, it's going to race across the country, Brian. Why? Because we model bad behavior, but we also can model good behavior. We determine our needs, therefore adjust our thinking, and then develop our individual personality traits to achieve whatever desired outcome, the actual outcome. The desired outcome we have to build towards. It's about, how do we do it? We go, "Today I'm tired of my job, so I want to get a better job." So I'm going to dress for success. Well, there's a great thing. But I'm also going to rewrite my resume. Well, there's a great thing. And I'm going to do what we want. We want those things to change by just thinking about them. And we see success stories of other people that write books or have movies or something, and we think those things came easily to them.

And what did we read yesterday? The "Win Wednesday," gosh darn, Brian wrote, "You know what we don't do? We don't see how many times the orchestra practiced before they played." No, we don't. One that was recorded. We don't see how many cut, reset, that went into that last movie that you want. And that's life, Brian. Life is that we have to adjust what we do if we expect a different outcome. And if we just allow social influences to take a lead, then what we're going to do is we're going to constantly be chasing something. We're going to get blue hair and say, "I got blue hair because I want to be an individual." And there's a thousand people with movies. Yeah, I'm going to get a mullet because I want to. I'm going to get a tattoo. You see what I'm trying to say? And all those things are fine, people. I'm not making... Yeah. But what I'm trying to say is, who are you? Yes, what you want to become is what you have to work on every damn day.

But the reason—well, the reason social influence is so powerful, it's because humans learn through mimicry. We—that's how you learn growing up. Maintain Goodall's monkeys. Yep, with the mirror and with the stick, with the ants. Exactly. I mimic what my parents did, I mimic what my siblings do, I mimic what my friends do because I have to learn how to navigate the world. So now you're spending more time—where are you spending more time? With your family and talking to the kids at the kitchen table, or are you spending more time on social media, right? Which you're going to look at and say, "It's my mentor."

Hey, TV raised me as a kid because my mom and my aunt went shopping on Saturday morning. My dad was at work on service calls. So I sat in front and watched Sir Graves Ghastly and old black and white horror films, and that shaped my destiny. It shaped how to see the world. This is why I use movie references constantly. You know, I love old film and I love horror film. Okay, something happened to create that. Now I can either nurture that and help that make me successful, or I can just be a vegetable and look at that and go, "I'm never going to go any farther, right? My life blows. I can't get out of this. Come on." Well, you know, but you're right, the influence becomes from the societal pressure.

And no, it is. And this is why a lot of people can make those decisions. They get caught up in the moment, you know, and it's like, "Okay, I suddenly went to a protest exercising my First Amendment right, which everyone in the United States is allowed to do, and it was peaceful at first, and then things got heated. Then I ended up punching someone or throwing things." It's like, "Okay, you're taking... 'We rolled over a cop car!'"

How the hell did that happen? Right?

Right. Yeah, exactly. "Hey, where'd you get a grenade from?" You know, "You killed... kill the guy. Played it quickly."

No, no, no, no. Right.

And because—because they're so, so powerful because, like everything you even talked about at the beginning, sociologically, we have to fit in with a group. We have to be... There is an imperative. There are no "self-made" people. I hate that term. It's like, "Oh, this guy's self-made." No, he learned from everyone who showed him what right looks like and everyone who showed him what wrong looks like. Everybody. And then the punches he took. And then the choices that person made. So everything that we're talking about makes up a lot of how humans behave. Now, absolutely. Still comes down to choices. That's the beauty of all this. You can either do really well or really poorly based on those choices. And those are decisions that you make. It goes back to the decision-making.

But everything sociologically, especially this is why you constantly see, you know, the fast food example. "Well, I see this on social media, people going crazy at McDonald's." I go, "Holy crap, that's ridiculous! These people are out of their minds!" There's all these, you know, you can explain it a number of different ways. Other people see that and go, "Now that I have a file folder, now I have an idea. The next time someone messes up my order at McDonald's, I now have a choice that I didn't have before."

And so what's the trend with news media, Brian? Here's the thing: they used to be, "I want to do an interview." "Yes, how are you?" Even Bill Maher, who I've grown to love, has manipulated his environment. And yeah, sometimes they're aggressive or they disagree. But now what it is is the talking heads on the news channels go after a person. They ambush that person. They're disagreeing. "Well, that's not right!" "Well, you're a liar!" Okay. Why? Because that got a bump in the ratings. And because he got a bump in the ratings, which means money, now everybody's going to do it. And they're all going to flood to that. And it's going to increase the bad behavior. Because now you're going to think that you can argue with your teacher. Now you think you can write that bus driver off. That's not how society works. So societal influences can create, again, what Brian said: the positive or the negative feedback loop. And you don't want to be at the epicenter when somebody goes, "Timeout! That ain't right!" and pulls a gun, or rams a car. That's where anxiety manifests into anger, which manifests sometimes in the rage.

No. And then you see that—you said this is why, like, I have my, and I'm sure people have studied it—actually, should look into it because I'm sure people have studied it and written about it and everything—but why I think like these reality shows are far worse for society than anything else. Because, of course they are. Well, but that also goes into your brain. All right, when you're watching, like, the movies you watch when you grow up, or TV shows, or something, you'll get into it. And you may see some similarities between you and the characters. You may want to be that or see some similarity in what's going on in your life. But at the end of that, your brain knows it's a show, it's a movie. That's why scary movies work, right? Because at the end, we know the lights are going to come back on. We're going to walk out of the theater, right? Go home. But with the reality shows, which is also now following people and seeing stuff on social media, your brain goes, "Well, wait, it's a reality. This is real life." At the end of the day, it doesn't understand that this is not how humans actually behave. So you can use them to mimic that stuff. But you'll see that mimicry is so strong.

Recently, right before the holidays, unfortunately, there was a Chicago police officer that killed themselves. What immediately happened after that? Two more killed themselves. Do you think that's a coincidence? No. I look at that and go, "Well, if they can't take it, and they're the same as me, and that's what they did, and they're not able to get out of the situation that they're in, well, how the hell am I going to be able to get out of it?" And exactly what's happening in society right now: the two things that are most prolific right now are hatchet attacks and machete attacks. Two homicides with machetes in two different parts of the country in two days. Hatchet attacks from Christmas till New Year's? I can't count how many there were. Somebody's going to go, "Well, why? What was the motive?" Stop for a minute. Understand it's a trend. And once you see the trend, human behavior is like a fuse; it has to play out. What happens after every school shooting? There's an immediate increase in them, or there's people that now get caught bringing guns. That always happens. Immediately found that. Then someone goes, "All right, hey, let's actually do that now," or, "Let's—some sort of threat happens." It's going to... This is why those things work. It's how, you know, we... how primitive humans really are. And exactly, we learn by wiring, testing our environment. We test our boundaries, we push, we feel, we learn. So, obviously, when we have something so powerful that it can have a direct effect on our attitudes or decisions, like social media, we have to be in fear of it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, be in fear of the weather. We understand the weather, but there's still people that die. Be in fear of the water. Floods kill people. People still haven't learned how to swim. What are we thinking? So, it's... fear is healthy. Yeah, fear is one of the smartest, healthiest triggers environmentally that you have, because if you're trained, and you get fear, you should say, "Ah, whatever's giving me fear must be some pretty badass important because I'm pretty trained. I better focus on it." If you're untrained, fear is to guide you to get back to the cave so you can, you know, build a wall, or build your strength, or enlist the aid of friends. So, that's all we're talking about. We're talking about life is pretty simple when we break it down that way. And specifically here, when we understand that there's certain rules... Well, you did today, Brian, and I applaud you for it, is you gave us certain rules to live by. These things influence our outcomes and our decisions, right? And therefore, if we affect them early enough, we can make a change, right?

No, and that's the key to all of this. And that's why our, literally, our company motto is, "Training changes behavior." Training is not something that has to be formalized and written in a lesson plan. Like, you're training yourself every day. Every day, training yourself to think a certain way, to act a certain way, to respond a certain way, to feel a certain way. You can change all of that. Yeah, well, you can change all that. If done correctly, you can become more informed. You can get better subtle changes over time. You can get better every time sense-making and problem-solving. You get better at learning new things and understanding your environment, which will inform your decisions better. And because it's very easy to get stuck in that trap of what we've been doing all the time, or the way of thinking, or your perspective. Because you can't not do that. There are certain rules. You can influence the game, but there are set, defined rules in that game. And sometimes you're not going to be the one that they're going to—you can't be the one to dunk the basketball. You better get good at taking those outside shots. You know what I'm saying? So, that we're wiping up the sweat on the field, keep watching the game. You can, it's okay. You should be watching, right? Right. Any role in there. And so that's kind of one of the points about human behavior, of how fascinating it is. It can be both incredibly complex and just very, very, very simple at the same time.

Absolutely. How many episodes we've done? 190 episodes. Yeah. And Brian, we still love absolutely every minute that we get to talk to somebody about this because it is the most amazing thing that we'll ever do in our lives. That's why we want to create a legacy of people thinking about advanced critical thinking. Because thinking about thinking, okay, is what we do. Yeah, you've got to take a step back.

So, I think we definitely hit all three of the topics, the three questions, in this past sort of hour. We do have more, but I would, you know, a similar thing. I've got a few more questions I'd like to answer in a similar manner. But I would love to get some feedback from anyone listening right now with questions, comments, concerns. Always, you know, TheHumanBehaviorPodcast@gmail.com. We'd love to answer it. And then there's even more on the Patreon side. We kind of go into detail of some of these or give some personal examples or something we don't want to talk about openly on the air. We do that behind just a very small paywall for that reason, because it's just a gating mechanism. You know, you go on there, and there's definitely more value than what you're paying. So, I've been told by everyone on there, but... There's some nude selfies of me. I mean, why wouldn't you?

So, I don't know how to tell you this, Greg. You keep sending me those asking me to put them on that site, and I posted them, right? No, no. I have no... on a different website. That's four years of shame! A different website! I have an entire OnlyFans website for you set up. And it's a very select niche audience, we'll say. Yeah. Audience. Hey everyone, no, no, this is a good one. Shout out to Tila Castle. Tila Castle from Gunnison. We were talking over Christmas, and Tila has watched every single episode. She actually has favorite episodes and could quote things from episodes. Brian, it doesn't happen often when you meet a no-crap fan that's as bright and intellectual and wonderful as Tila. So thanks, Tila. Try to get your husband Kevin back on to listen to the podcast, but appreciate it.

All right, well, I think that's a pretty good, you know, pointer to a pretty good place to wrap for the day, Greg, unless we have any other final words for folks other than, "Please keep the questions."

Exhausted. Yeah, that was time to eat or something. Gotta get some pants.

All right. I'm fine. Thanks again for tuning in. We very much appreciate it. And don't forget that training changes behavior.