L.O.G. 117 Responsibility Its Yours.

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media—the links are also in the episode details—and hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

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That means we're live, and it means we're recording. So welcome to everyone just listening. Just a quick reminder, you can always follow me on Facebook, and that way when we pop up live, you can possibly interact with us.

So today, Greg, a lot's been going on in the news. Just for you listening, we recorded this on a Friday morning, just prior, the week prior to being released. So a lot happening and a lot going on with some big shootings again, especially one in Boulder, Colorado, that we can get into. But what I've been seeing on the news are a lot of images of examples of fight, flight, or freeze, which is something a lot of people are familiar with: our physiological reaction to the stimulus in our environment, usually something stressful or chaotic. Right? We're kind of programmed, in a sense, in a way, for these very primal reactions in survival situations, especially.

But most of the time it is explained, or I've always had it explained to me, from my perspective, right? From our perspective, meaning like, "Hey, when these situations occur, these are the physiological reactions you're going to have, and you're going to fall into this fight, or flight, or freeze. Right? This is why it occurs, and this is how it feels." Like, your cortisol is going to release, you're going to lack saliva, you're going to have all kinds of different electrochemical neurotransmitters start kicking in. You'll get that adrenaline going, you're going to maybe get some dopamine; all these different things start to occur, right? And we learn how to feel that or understand that in our own selves.

But I've never really heard it like, how to identify another person who's in that. Because if I'm in my environment, and everything's good, and I'm shopping for my groceries, or I'm doing whatever, and someone else in there is in that fight, or flight, or freeze response, that means they're having some sort of reaction to their environment, or something's happening that I don't know about. So I kind of think it is one way is to, "How do I detect that in others?"

Whether that's your law enforcement who pulled someone over, and they're in flight mode, and you haven't even picked up on it yet. That's your... We see it all the time again. You're that HR person who has to, you know, you're dismissing an employee from your organization, and they're falling into a very primal reaction. I'm going to want to pick up on that, right? I'm going to want to see that. I don't care if I'm out and about, I'm walking in with my family to the grocery store, and I see someone else walking in, and they're having that same sort of reaction. That's anomalous in that baseline of that grocery store. So that's something I need to look for or understand. Does that kind of make sense where I want to take this from? Like, I've never really heard it explained like, "Hey, how do I see that in another individual?" We always explain it from the way of, "This is how it makes me feel, this is how it makes me perform." Right?

Right. So, if you think of human behavior and human performance, they're closely linked. They're opposite sides of the same coin, and if you increase one, you're going to increase the other. We've said that a thousand times. One thing that I think, as we drill down closer to the answer—the F to the third there—is: why do people do such a good job of writing about it? Because it's easy. It's science. It's high school science.

That's true, yeah.

People have made millions of dollars selling books on how your body reacts to stress, when every med student—every high school kid that went through maturation class—had to go through it. I think I want to couch it this way, Brian, if it's okay with you. First of all, you talked about the shootings a week ago: Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, a guy walks in, executes a couple of co-workers, then after a standoff shoots himself. Then you had the Atlanta shootings at the massage parlor. Then you had the King Soopers shooting in Arvada, Boulder, that killed the police officer and nine other people.

So, what are our big takeaways? You better study mission focus and predatory looks because when a person is mission-focused, your attention should be drawn to them because they are so focused on the mission that they're about to carry out that they'll stand out as an anomaly. Brian, you could see that, and that's a temporary break with reality, and it looks a different way. So, loss of control is a guy in a bar that gets bumped into, "Hey, what are you doing?" Right? Now we're starting to posture, right? So you've got agitated, impulsive behavior that's got alcohol on board, that's going to make it worse. It might be irritable, and it might be, you know, and then you try to calm the guy down, the guy pulls away from you. I mean, we've seen it; it's central casting Hollywood. But a break with reality is quite different.

Yes. And so, it almost feels as if the person has the thousand-yard stare, and they're not responding to external stimuli, or agitation, or people yelling. You know, one of the things about the King Soopers shooter, Alissa, they said he never said a word the entire time, from the parking lot all the way in. Why? Because there was nothing going on inside of his brain case, except for a cow with a ukulele that was playing whatever song he was dancing to that day.

You know, and you've got to think of that, Brian, that loss of reality, that break with what normal reality is, should "pop hot" if you're looking for "baseline plus anomaly." And nobody did that. So, as we're going down the path to the fight, flight, or freeze, I want to make sure that we get a "left of bang" on it. See it from the parking lot for what it is. And you've got a great line when you talk about parking lots and people carrying stuff, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that's... You don't, you don't carry bags into stores, right? I mean, that's a huge one you're seeing. You don't, you don't carry... You know, that goes back to Columbine, carrying almost 100 IEDs in around the school. You don't have to be an A-bomb expert to go, "Man, that's a lot of bags you're carrying into this place. That seems odd." But you, you wrote the great point because this is all prior to, right? You said a break with reality, and he said someone who is not responding or not reacting to the stimulus in their environment. And that's where we get that people talk about, "Oh, they had a thousand-yard stare." Then we talk about mission focus and predatory looks in class, and what we teach, because that's similar, but there's intent behind that. Meaning, the mission focus and predatory looks is, "I'm so focused on what my mission is and what's going to happen that I can't, I'm not responding to stimuli."

And to keep it on that, just the shopping, the grocery store example: when you're running late, and you're stuck in a super long line at the checkout, and now you're rushing out of the store, and you've got six bags in each hand, and you've got your car keys in the other, you're staring directly at your car and where it's parked, and you will miss everything in your environment. So it's something similar because you have that same mission focus. However, you probably lack the predatory looks, right? Meaning, does this flip the script? I just want to give everyone examples so, because we've all experienced you're lost in the moment, you're literally overwhelmed by the emotions or the moment that you're in, which means that everything else pales in comparison to your mission at that moment, which is, "Jimmy, I swear to God, grab your flip-flop and get in that car!" Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Yeah, the world becomes small, and now you're focused on down and in. So, let's look at a lapse in perspective. You're standing in the line, the lady says, "Hey folks, all the flights are canceled to Detroit!" You lose your mind. You start screaming at her as if she is the Heat Miser and the Cold Miser, controlling the weather. So that's being an idiot and losing perspective. Lost where you are in your moment, that's not mission focus. Now you've got what we experienced when we were on the ground in Afghanistan. We saw despair, just a loss of hope with everybody, right? If it were said, "Those people have been beaten up for so many generations, you know. You lost seven children? Yes, but three lived, so things have been good in my village." You're like, "Holy crap, how do you deal with that?" Right?

So what we're talking about is not a loss of control, we're not talking about despair, we're not talking about a momentary lapse of perspective. We're saying we had a break with reality, and we're now killing people like it's a contest. So how do you do that? And I say we flip the script when we're talking about fight, flight, or freeze. We're talking about, for example, freeze is a defense mechanism that's chemically controlled in the brain. That's the least worrisome to you if you're a first responder, but very important to you if you're a psychologist or work in HR. Why? Because whatever you just said, you just touched on something very important that shut me off. You know what I'm trying to say? Now the shields have come up. So that's less dangerous but more telling. "Brian, why are you running so much at the gym? What are you running from, son?" You know what I'm saying?

But like, flee can get somebody killed. And so I say we put at the top of the stack the flight. But one's even more important than that, and that's the fight. So if you were going to stack them at home, it's fight, then it's flee, then it's freeze. And if you see these in your kids, you know exactly where to be in the argument at home. It doesn't have to be... In other words, I'm trying to tell you, it doesn't have to be a combat skill. It can be a conversation skill for de-escalation. Now today, because we'll do the most good on it, we've got to talk about it as a combat skill. You know what I'm saying? Be defensive, make sure that you're "left of bang" so you can predict and prevent.

Right, right. And these are, again, the natural reactions that have happened to us, when we are all human. So it just depends on the context and what it's for. Like, the kid example is perfect. When your child freezes because of something, and they start looking around, and they're not sure, and they look down, you're like, "Oh, okay, they're reacting to something in the environment that happened. Like, who made that happen?" They saw someone that they didn't like or were uncomfortable around. So those small things that they can't control that... Because you, you actually said something just a minute ago, I wanted to touch on after you kind of made your point, because you said, one of the things, "loss of control of emotions." And that's a big one we hear. You know, some people control (using air quotes) their emotions better than others. Right?

But there is a large group of people who do think that like, "Oh, no, it's..." Which, which is good in a sense, right? So like, if I can say, "Hey man, if I, the less things I let affect me, well, I'm the less likely I'm going to overreact and stuff," which is true, which is great in theory and understanding. But the idea is you can't control biometric reactions, physiological reactions. You can't control... Now, maybe there's you can get to a certain degree of it, or know, recognize when things are getting out of control to go, "Hey, this is when my therapist told me I should take a step back and start breathing," right? But that, that's different. The idea is like this: "Hey, I'm going to be in control of my emotions, and I'm not going to let things affect you." Like, I, I love the reasoning behind it, and I get it, but I just, I feel that it's kind of unrealistic without a significant amount of training. Does that make sense?

Let's drag, let's drag this screaming vampire right into the light and watch it turn to fire. So you've got people now, and every damn thing that I'm reading is about stoicism, about being a stoic. And the idea is really that that's where in history, 3,000 years ago, where you threw the dart, and this is what you're going to be doing. So, I don't know if you've been to Greece? Greece... Shout out to our friends in Macedonia, North Macedonia specifically, and all of our friends in Greece. Today was yesterday, and thanks for everybody for everything that you've done, Admiral John, and Rada, and Teddy, and Nick, and all our good friends there. But the idea, have you been to Greece? Because we have. And I'll tell you right now, not everybody in Greece is Marcus Aurelius. So we don't have a lot of that. Everybody says, "Hey, listen, I want to be a stoic," just like everybody in my lifetime, when I was growing up, Brian, in the late 70s, everybody wanted to be a samurai. So there was the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and all of the Laozi, and people embracing the top knot, yet they had no idea what it meant to commit your life to being a samurai, did they?

Yeah, I, I, I see what you're saying with that, because that is a, that is a, that's a good example of the samurai one, right? It's everyone wants to quote these books or read Sun Tzu, or all of the... And you're going like, "Yeah, but you're not..." Take it for what it is, put it in historical context, and take the lessons learned from it. I get it. But unless you're going to devote your life to living in that manner, every second of the day, like, that, that's training, right? Then you'll get to that level, maybe a few decades later, maybe when you're the old man and have realized that now you can write the book about it. Like, that, that's the point, is that those guys were doing that. That was something that they, that code they lived by in everything that they did. It's not reading a book and then going, "Yeah, I got this. I think I can do that." It's like, right.

Right, right on my desk. And the reason why I sometimes have an issue with it, is kind of what I brought up at first, is like, you're, you're kind of just, you're saying like, you're, you're negating the fact that you have uncontrollable reactions to situations. Like your unconscious mind rules your conscious behavior. Like you have certain reactions to things that you cannot control, and you don't even know what's happening sometimes. I mean, you, you go eat because your body's telling you to. You don't go eat because you want to tell your body to eat food. I mean, you get hungry, right? So you can't control certain things. And then when you get into just emotional reactions to stuff, no, you're wired to have that way. Human beings are supposed to display and have emotion and read each other. Like, that's, that's the essence of reading human behavior, is understanding human emotion, I think.

Yeah. And I, I sit there during these arguments and I go, "Are you talking about patience or resignation? Are you talking about understanding this person or accepting their behavior? Are you saying I'm unflappable? Are you saying, 'Hey, I'm a pushover; I'll go with everything'?" And my thing is, you are meant as a human being to display emotions. So if you're out of control, that's good; I need to see that because that means that you're angry. And angry can turn to rage, but it's rare. And anger's a normal emotion that I deal with, and I know how to de-escalate. But if you're having a loss with reality, Brian, that's a completely different issue, and that's where it's coming from with the armed guy walking in, shooting the place, shooting his mom and dad, walking out, sitting in a car, and now the cops have to encounter him.

So we've got to balance that. And guess what? That's typified the lack of emotions that are congruent with the situation that you find him in. So if you're walking through that parking lot, a guy walks through you or walks past you, and they see right through you, and they're ice cold, and they're carrying a full cooler (you get what I'm trying to say?) into the business, something like that, that should start sending you messages: "Danger! Warning, Will Robinson!" immediately. So that break with reality, coupled with the fight, flight, or freeze, is going to do you more than reading any of these books on self-help.

No, I, and that's a good one that, because you talked about right there that we, we always talk about incongruent behavior, right? And that, "Does the emotion fit the event?" is the best way to describe that. And that's what, when you see people who do commit these acts, have that kind of break with reality as you describe it, which can be described a million other ways very accurately, right? I mean, like it's just they are not present in that moment. They are in a different world right now in their head than what is happening around them. Is not what you see, is not what they are seeing at the time. And I think it's hard for people to understand what that means, what that feels like, if you've ever had that experience. But the incongruence thing is a big one.

I always go to the, remember the, what's his name from Saturday Night Live had the band The Lonely Island and they did the song "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions"? Because in every movie it's like, you know, The Rock walking away and then there's a big massive explosion in the background, and that's a great example of incongruent behavior, right? He should be reacting to what's happening. Why is he not? I get it, it's a movie, but literally he, that means either some sort of sensory deprivation issue or can't hear or see or feel, whatever. Or, or they knew that was going to happen, therefore they didn't overreact, they weren't surprised by it. So I use that. I mean, I just use that as an explanatory tool for people to understand, like, "Look, that's an example of incongruence. You've seen it in every action movie where they don't look at the explosion when they walk away." That's the whole thing. It's like they, they knew it was going to happen, so therefore they're not surprised by it, but everyone else in the area should do what?

Spot on. Spot on. So, let's, let's poke the eye of the certificate mills and the people that are spouting garbage right now too. Because after the King Soopers shooting, all of the sites that were on the band of LinkedIn, that somehow I'm roped into (still don't understand social media), it was all about the gun and the knife and learning how to shoot and your killing skills and all this other stuff. Hey, a dozen-year veteran police officer with the best training in the world, the best armor and everything else, died immediately upon arriving on scene by getting shot in the head. I'm sure he's a hero. But if he fared in that manner, how do you think you'll fare? In the second part of that, Brian, coming down is: stop thinking that you can control or identify all of these things. It's like deception cues—a person's lying to you.

If you don't understand the context, and if you don't understand the environment, if you don't understand what that response was from, it's useless trying to pair that thing. And I'll give you an example. So, let's go to that King Soopers, and not this one, because you know how our emotions work. We're going to close it forever, then we're going to tear it down, then it's going to be a mountain of flowers, and then people are going to put a shrine. We do it all wrong, and we'll get into that on a different episode. But, Brian, you walk into a King Soopers anywhere. The first thing that you walk into, there's a little floral shop next to the bakery. All the stores are set up. So you're now trying to read the person at the counter at the florist shop. One's crying and one's ecstatic. Well, the one that's ecstatic is picking up flowers because they're going to a wedding. The one that's crying is picking up flowers because they're going to a funeral. So there's a panacea of emotion right inside of that Publix or King Soopers or Kroger's anyway.

But this is not what we're talking about. The person that had the break with reality is so mission-focused that they're carrying in the weapon. You know, they're coming in and ready to shoot and ready to fire, and they're not paying attention to any of that external stimulus. And people say, "You live in Colorado, everybody carries a gun." Yet, so when I go to King Soopers (our version is the City Market), everybody has a gun in some state of concealment, whether it's a belt, or in their cart, or whatever they held their prison wallet, wherever they can fit it. But you understand the difference, Brian: there's no intent being displayed. So we don't have the fight cues, we don't have the flee cues, we don't have the freeze. We don't have things that's typified by the break with reality, temporarily, where they're looking with the glassy-eyed stare as though they're in a different planet, in a different place, and at a different time. And why don't we look for that? Because nobody stopped and showed us what that looks like.

Yeah. And you know, we're so used to seeing some of these things. We don't, we don't pay attention, and we talk about attention and stuff, and everyone wants to talk about situational awareness. But like you, perfect example, you just brought it up again that I talked about, is like carrying a bag. We always see people carrying bags. Exactly. That's why you don't pay any attention to it. I see that. I get the little one when I come home, and she's out here playing with her friends, and then she's got a backpack on, even with her. Like, "What's in your backpack? What's in your bag?" Like, what could you possibly need in this situation that it couldn't fit in your pockets, and you had so much stuff to carry that you needed a backpack? You needed a reception. And it gets bigger as you get bigger, you know? But that's what I'm saying. Like, "What do you mean?" It's like, "Oh, well, it's just, it's always girly stuff that you want, toys or whatever." You know? But the point is, like, we, even something as simple as like, "Hey, why is that guy carrying a bag into a supermarket?"

Yup. Can you walk up to someone and ask them, "Hey, what's in the bag?"

I do all the time. It's the, the, I was (thinking of the movie), "What's in the box? What's in the box?" (from Seven). I always want to know what the hell are you carrying. That's a great, great reference, man. But you know, I, I, I think that there, there's, there's... Yeah, that's what it's from. You know, a lot of the stuff we brought up about people want to go, "Hey, situational awareness, and you've got to read everything." And it's just, it's just, I see Instagram post after Instagram post of just platitudes: "Hey, you have to be aware in your environment." "Yeah, you've got to read a baseline." It's like, "What the hell is that, man?" Like, you're, you're making it more complicated than it needs to be. A guy walking into a grocery store with a bag is the only person when I scan the area. And what are most people carrying? They're dragging their kids in, or grabbing a cart from outside. Like, that's normal. "Hurry, because they're on their way to work and they forgot oranges." You get what I'm saying? Like, it's just, it, that's what it is. It's, "What's normal here?" "Hey, that's odd. Let's investigate." 99 out of 100 times, what, Greg? It's completely benign, and it's something, whatever is going on. But that, that's all it was. "Hey, I like..." I, I don't want people to, to get, I, I, I don't want everyone to overuse the word situational awareness.

And there's two situational awareness, which is one of my least favorite terms. What we've grown to revile it, only because people are so overusing it and misapplying it. What we're talking about, folks, is we're talking about something that I've endeavored my entire life to break it down to something so simple: "round peg, square hole." Listen, this doesn't fit. It's incongruent. So whenever you see this turbidity, this turbulence in your environment, that's where the change is going to come from. And not all change is bad. As a matter of fact, almost all change that you see in anomalies are going to be something new, and maybe it's going to be exciting. And the person you met and love at first sight, those are all anomalous behaviors.

Of course, we do.

But the one anomaly, see, the difference is most likely or most dangerous course of action. An anomaly always means a change. So it could mean a cathartic, catastrophic, or a dangerous change. So the idea is, of all of the things you're doing today, that anomaly is what you need to pay attention to. And the great thing about anomalous behavior, Brian, is if it's dangerous, it endures, it continues, and you can track it and go, "Everything else has calmed back down. Why is this still in my way?"

You know, right there you said, "An anomaly always means a change." And that's a, that's again how we always describe it, right? All human beings follow patterns. That's the essence of what we do, and what people do, right? So if you change your pattern of behavior, there has, there, there was a catalyst, right? There was a reason, there was some contributing factor, some cause for you to do that. Your brain and body just wants to stay in that record group, in that loop, and survive, and exist to procreate the species, and ensure the survival of the human race as a whole. So, doing anything outside of that, there was some change, there was some... You know, you look at all the stories of people who, "Man, I was never athletic, and I overate, and I did this, and then, you know, this happened, and man, I've changed since then, and this is what I've been doing every single day." There's always that. There, there's a reason. You don't just get up and go, "Yeah, you know, I'm just going to do this today." There's always something. So, in that, whatever that behavior is, I don't care if it's your friend, your family member, your loved one, someone you just saw, like, there has to be a reason for that change. Like, they're, they're in it. It must be explained in some way, unless there's just, you know, you have some sort of mental health issue or something, whatever, some drug interaction that you're just tweaking out, walking around the street, just doing crazy crap. But that's, that's a different situation, right? There's always a reason. And I, I think that just understanding that and going, "All right, well, why did that, why did, why did they change the way they did that? Why did that person go over there? Why did that person turn around and walk back to their vehicle when they walked up to that door?" Like, "Did they forget their wallet, or is there something going on inside there, and I should do the same thing?"

I mean, exactly! Why is that person running from the restaurant? Is it the credit card they left in their car, or is there an active shooter? Those are the things we're talking about, Brian. So, Rogue Manor West is at the end of the road, in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors, nothing around me. And so I've got motion detectors and driveway alarms set up, and a 360-perimeter all the way around, so I know when every deer, every rabbit, everything...

I just say your neighbors are mule deer and rabbits and chipmunks.

Exactly. But the idea is that every once in a while one of my sensors goes off, and so I get the binos out, and it's a UPS guy coming down the road. I go, "Well, that's great!" As a matter of fact, if you choose to attack me in a UPS truck, you'll probably get the drop on me until you get closer and I go, "I didn't order that." Right? Amazon. But the idea is I would have a completely different reaction if it's a vehicle I didn't recognize, or if it was three black Suburbans in a row, followed by a helo. The idea, Brian, is you have to sense-make your environment. If you can't sense-make, you can't problem-solve. Those things are inextricably linked. So this loss of reality, understanding that break with reality, and exchanging that for the normal behavior that you would expect to see inside that Piggly Wiggly, is hugely important. And most people go through their life, Brian, just reacting to the things that are going on. Pro-activity isn't even in their lexicon, so we have to make it in their lexicon. You can prevent pre-event. Just break that word down, and the way that you do that is by increasing your awareness, of course, but you have to know what to look for. You can't just say, "I'm more aware." That leads to hyper-alertism.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I'm going to, I'm going to try to use my peripheral vision. What was that movie that gets started? Yeah, it gets longer there. No, "Don't look, don't look, I'm trying to look like I'm just opening my eyes wider."

No. And that's what we're talking about. So, if we're going to talk about de-escalation, we're first going to have to talk about understanding. We're going to have to talk about actually being able to look at something and say, "This is the situation." So if we start off with fight, and one of the reasons I moved my chairs, I might have to take a bio break. But the idea too is that some of the people are probably watching, so it's going to be hard, Brian, because I'm going to try to say some of the things that I would be looking for and I'm going to try to act them out as well. And so if you're just listening in a car and you've got your yellow pad poised on your lap and stuff, don't worry, you can go back and check us out on the YouTube channel.

But listen, if I'm agitated and I'm angry, agitation and anger is okay. Remember there's a real break in reality when it comes to a person exhibiting rage. So rage is one of those things that has to run its course. You don't want to be there when the rage hits. So do everything you can. Always be considerate, de-escalation. So the first thing that's going to happen is my lips are going to tighten, and when I talk, I'm going to enunciate every word. And folks, if you were seeing me now, I'm leaning into the camera, pointing, and pointing a finger at you. I'm getting scared, right, Mr. Balding? And my shoulders are hunching up to protect my jugular carotid, and I'm jutting out my head because I'm ready to be confrontational. Now, in addition to that, I'm oriented towards you. I'm shaking my head no because now I haven't only lost control, I've also lost my perspective. Now you see how those are linked? If I just lose my perspective and I go, "I can't believe you're closed! I have to get my marriage license today!" That's just a loss of perspective. But if I've also lost control and I tip the table over and I go, "I swear to God, I'm coming in now!" Brian, do you see how we're going towards that?

So that's the fight reflex. And fight reflex in my brain is a chemical interaction, right? That's been on board, it's been hardwired to save me in situations. So I don't need to worry about when I see it in myself. I can, because that would be a good stoic thing, to calm down my emotions. But if I can't read it in you, Brian, that means I'm going to get myself (you know, get torn a new one) which already happened to me, and I don't want to do that again. But the idea is that I need to be able to read it so I can start calming things down and I can start using my mirror neurons in an antithetical way to say, "Listen, I hear what you're saying. We need to solve this problem. It's clearly got you upset." Those are the type of words and interactions I want to use. You know why? Because you know what you're going to do by saying, "Calm down!" You raise your voice and say, "Calm down!" That'll work. Here we are, we're already fighting. So you don't want to close distance, you want to increase distance, you want to slow time down. And you don't want to enter if you interject humor at the wrong time. The person may think, "I could go hide in the right light of the situation." You see what I'm trying to say? So the idea is to be able to see it manifesting itself and hit it early so you can kind of calm that down. "Look, I can see you're angry," that's the very first thing because you acknowledge it, right? "And just so you know, I've already called my buddies in because you're kind of scaring me. But I can guarantee you this: we're going to solve your problem today." Look what did I just do, Brian? I set boundaries, didn't I? And I said that there are consequences for your interactions.

Right, right. Sometimes people need to be reminded that there are consequences for their actions. Like you just said, anger and rage are very different. When it leads to that, you know, you're talking about someone who's angry, and this is why we're going over the fight, flight, or freeze from their perspective. You have to identify that, because if you see it, that's going to, that should determine how you're going to handle the situation. Because if they're in that mode, it can, it can go catastrophically wrong. Because like you said, once it gets to that rage, when, when you hit that point, and it, it blows over, the cup is full, and it's spilled. Like, that has to play out. You see that in these different types of rage-style attacks, meaning it will follow its course until it abates. You're not going to talk that down, you're not going to calm that situation down. That person will, will run its course at that point, and they're going to do what they're going to do. And that's the point where you can say, "Okay, now this is the time when we have to get aggressive, and we have to end this immediately." Or, or I mean, depending on your role in the situation, "Get the hell out of there," obviously. But, I, I think knowing those two is the difference.

And so when you see that, and when we're in this, because you, you just gave some great examples. I know a lot of people are listening, but, you know, those anger cues and following up. But now this is where it gets into, "Okay, so you want me to be, you know, you want me to be able to read microfacial expressions, and you want me to be able to pick up on this." And, "Okay, I'm going to go read Ekman, and now I'm going to be able to do this at a great distance." Like, I don't want people to go too far down the rabbit hole with that, right? These are very simple things.

Let's do something absolutely simple as well. You're going to lose the video for just a second, but don't worry about that. So you're in a laundromat, and while you're in the laundromat, you notice that your young son or daughter is sitting on a chair where their feet can't completely hit the ground. So perhaps their toes could if they stretched a little bit. And you see that little kid is kicking their feet straight out towards you while they're sitting there. Now, Brian, I can guarantee you that's not busy work. What's happening when you're watching your kid is they're pissed because they want to be on the playground, they want to be swimming, they want to be eating. So what they're doing is they're unconsciously kicking you.

So now, if you can read that—and that's a body language cue, that's not a guy walking in with the gun or doing something else—if you can read that, then what you're doing is you're saying, "Hey, wait a minute. I understand this enough that I could be proactive and say, 'Don't worry, Timmy, we're only going to be here another 15 minutes. Come help Mommy fold the T-shirt.'" Do you understand? We're not talking about a loss of hope there, or a loss of control. We're not talking about the temporary break in reality. What we're talking about is the kid's had a break in perspective. They no longer want to be at that gosh-damn laundromat. So you're picking up on it and reading it. I would account that with the same as being an HR person. You're sitting there across from the person, and all of a sudden you say, "Well, John, I, I know that we promised that you'll be able to take a vacation, but if you notice, you don't have enough and you used your sick days." And all of a sudden, we see that person push back from the table, and now their jaw starts getting tight, Brian. Now that's an anger cue, right? Doesn't mean that they're going to punch you or become violent, but that means that whatever you're talking about right now is causing distress. And if it's sociologically or psychologically distressing to you, then guess what? If you don't account for it, if you don't do something about it, that person could have a break with their self-control. And a break with self-control, Brian, means that I may lash out. So do you understand how that gift of time and distance allows me the ability to get something done to mitigate this before the turbulence creates a dangerous environment?

Yeah. And you know, this kind of gets into the another analogy we use. I know I always like the "cool guys don't look at explosions." But what you're talking about too is that kind of tuning into the frequency, right? You know, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" I mean, being able to read that kind of bandwidth of what someone else is transmitting, right? And you've got to tune in. Exactly. And that's where a lot of times these things are missed. And I, I don't care if it's missed because of a, you know, you're talking, I mean, you brought up an example even too, like you're at the ticket counter for the airline or whatever. You know, a lot of that stuff is missed. I see it all the time from that perspective when I go sit down, and you know how we can always do that. "All right, this guy's got to have a say. What's going on? He's getting angry," right? And then you see the person, the gate agent, is obviously busy because they're dealing with a bunch of stuff, and their head's down, and they're taking calls. And then you can see it happening when they, like, the gate agent looks up and then looks back down. You're going like, "They're not ready to deal with that person." And that person is not, but that person is also not ready to hear no. So, so you can just see it escalate before it happens. And that's the idea, is identifying that and being able to step in in those situations, or, you know, leave the situation, or go, "Hey, I can tell where this is going. This is what I'm going to do about it."

I think we, we forget that we're, you know, a lot of times people go, "Oh, yeah, that guy over there, well, that's, he's angry, going to do something upset," and then go back down to look in their phone. You're like, "Yeah, do you know what that is? Does he have a gun? Does he plan on anything? Are you in the way between whatever he's angry at and, and, you know?" Because you just might just get run over because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like, that's what we're saying goes beyond that. And I think even just being able to tune into those kind of frequency, because everyone's pushing out something, man. I mean, everyone, I mean, humans are constantly on transmit.

There's so many signals, Brian. The baseline is the cacophony of signals that are around us all the time. That's a baseline. Everything is transmitting. Motor vehicles are transmitting, light is transmitting, colors are transmitting. Everything has a frequency. But that's okay, because the normal baseline is the most likely course of action. What we're talking about, Brian, is we're talking about being able to pick up that signal, that incongruence signal, that anomalous signal in the baseline. And when that jaw is set, and that's tight, and the person starts answering that way, if we can defuse it at that point, Brian, we can actually bring them down to the normalcy baseline, you know, clinically normal, and back to reality of the situation. We can offer them perspective, we can get them back in control.

Let's jump for an example from the fight to the flight. It's hard when you're dealing with nothing, but I say (unclear, but refers to avoiding sudden, uncontrolled action). If Brian showed me—and there's probably a link somewhere on our site—a horrific incident that happened with a young female that gets pulled over because the motor vehicle license plates associated with a wanted, known felon, that's known to have done other things. I won't give you the probable cause, do your homework, do it on your own, grab a yellow pad. But the idea is that the female was giving this young officer the "I'm getting out of here" clues from the very beginning. So here's the thing: number one, she's tapping her feet, her feet can't stand still. Then she starts walking in smaller to bigger circles, and at one point she walks all the way around the car, and the guy's following her because he's not catching on. "Listen, put one foot in front of the other, I'm trying to walk the hell out of there!" Now, the other thing that she does is she picks up a phone, and she's just dialing anybody because she's got this nervous energy, Brian. She's on the treadmill, she's ready to go. Then she's stumbling to light the cigarette, she wants to go. Then she's moving towards her car, and she opens the door in her car. How many signals do I need before I see that that person wants to flee from me? So the idea is that when a person wants to flee, they've got this nervous energy and this motion. Why, Brian? That's a rehearsal. Your brain chemistry has already decided, "Run! We are about to run! We're going to run!" And so your body starts picking those up nanoseconds to seconds before you do it.

And here's the dangerous part of flee. If you're in a car, you could go out and kill people. You could be chased by the police. The police might not know when to back off. Or you're standing there, Brian, and all of a sudden you encounter a shoplifter, or you're talking to somebody that's talking to your daughter, and you didn't know, but this person is threatening her. And then you walk up, and the flee starts. A person to flee may go through you, they may push you on your ass, they may drive over you.

They literally will most likely not even see you sometimes, even if you're right in front of them, right? I mean, that, that's why, because the brain chemistry did what? The brain chemistry said, "This is all we need to do. This is the one place you need to focus on. That's the exit." And there goes your peripheral vision, and you're getting run over by that vehicle. And that person, they never saw you, did not even see you. And if they did see you, they're probably not interested in slowing down or stopping anyway.

Exactly! Let me tie that to a couple examples in cop work, because you're right on it, Brian. In my years in police work, what I would have to do is calm down other police officers that were much more senior to me that didn't understand human behavior. And so what I would tell them is I would say, "You have to understand that that flight is also tied to hide." Because people would say, "You mean freeze is hide?" No, freeze, you're trying to hide in plain sight. You're literally right there going, "Oh my God, I hope they don't see me." We'll get to that in a minute. But what I'm trying to say, to flee from you, "Oh my God, the cops are at the door!" We had some of the best people in the world; they would hide in washing machines or dryers. They would hide between the mattress and the box spring on a bed that was already made. They would do things that you never saw before. So when we were in a house, and I said, "What happened?" And they said, "Hey, the guy fled from a (specific officer's name). He fled from us on foot, and we saw him going here." Well, guess what he's going to be doing, Brian? He's going to flee from you by absenting himself, by disappearing. So those are ways that you could anticipate what's happening. Or look, if I'm starting to get those signals when the person is driving the car, and all of a sudden they start to accelerate their thinking, which means that all of a sudden you're going simply like, "Hey, so where were you headed tonight?" And they're going, "Oh, traffic stop, license plate, what's happening?" They're already thinking of other things, Brian. I can calm that down, "Shut off your car now." Now, do you notice when we're doing the fight, I'm going to be careful of using those words that might accelerate it. Here, when the person's ready to flee, I'm back to command language. "You need to stop. You need to slow down. You need to sit down and cross your legs." Why? Because again, I need to interrupt that break with perspective and get that person back under control.

Yeah. No, I, I think that, you know, you talk about that, that nervous energy. You know, when there are situations where, you know, being nervous is one thing; nervous energy is another thing, right? That's like you said, those the, the feet tapping and moving around. Like, "I'm going to keep talking," or "speed up the rate that I'm talking," and you're just like, "What is going on?" It's literally their mind is racing because, yes, they're literally thinking about running. "All right, I've got to get the hell out of here. I want out of the situation. I want out of this situation." Whatever that is, it's already running, Brian, that's why it's rapid. So you see what I'm saying? They, they have lost their perspective on the situation at hand, and instead of losing control, their brain is already sending them the chemicals that they're in full. And that's why people have all that extra energy, right? It is because their brain has already pumped the adrenal cortex to give them the skills to run.

No, no. And you, you're, you're giving it in these, a lot of times, often, you know, dangerous situations, or life and death things. And I, same experience, but also that, that happens in, in completely, you know, normal situations. I've been talking to, you know, prospective clients before, and giving a brief. We're about to start one, and someone comes in, and they're doing that same thing, fiddling with the phone, doing, you know, "I've got this and this." Okay, you know, "Hey, I'm so sorry." They're going a million miles an hour, and then I'm not going to jump in. I've literally said, "Hey, you know what, I completely get it. I understand you're very busy, and if now is not the right time, I would rather do it when it's at the right time." And sometimes that's all it takes for them to go, "You know what?" Their typical response is like, "I'm so sorry. Let me set this down. Give me one second," because they realize they're being rude or being an ass. Because they're so mission-focused in their mind, they're not even present. They're just not even existing in the time and space that you are.

So how could you operationalize that information to deny them winning that business meeting in the boardroom? What you do now is you exploit that. And as soon as that person's all disheveled and they're in the area and everything else, you go, "Hey, we're going to get started in just 10 minutes. Now you just relax for a sec." What you do is you exacerbate the situation. You get what I'm trying to say? By the manipulation of time. And I'll give you a perfect example: in Detroit, we didn't catch everybody we were chasing. Sometimes that person would get away, but it was important to understand that this person had fled in a car, fled on foot, and it was now hiding somewhere near you. But the fresh pursuit, that hot pursuit aspect has changed by the way you do a Supreme Court decision, and it's talking about that today too. It gets really cool today, huh?

So the idea is that now I'm in a backyard somewhere, it's pitch dark, no streetlights, anything. I've got my SL20X flashlight in one hand, I've got my gun in the other hand, and I go, "I really need to catch this person." So what I do is I get inside their head. They've fled, they're born to flight. Now they're hiding. But guess what's going through their mind? "I've got to get out of here! I've got to get out of here!" So what you do is you yell, "Freeze! I see you!" And you put your light wildly left or right through the bushes. And guess what that person wants to do, Brian? They're primed to run. Their brain chemistry says, "Run!" They jump out of that hedge and they start running again. I go, "Oh, thank God! There it is." The idea is, as rotten as that is, Brian, it's true, it works. I would psychologically manipulate them, understanding their physiology. Look, sociology works, that sets my environment. Psychology works because I can get a view inside of your skull. The great thing about physiology is I can tell that it's working immediately. And a temporary break with reality would be a physiological response. I would see how you manifested that.

So that only leaves us the one: the freeze. And Brian, you said it best, you know. You're sitting at a family gathering and all of a sudden Uncle Joe or Aunt Polly comes in, and all of a sudden you see one kid that's not even in that orbit yet being infected immediately by the freeze. They're kicking that one toe into the wood floor like they're going to be able to make a letter. They stick their hands deep in their pocket, they hunch their shoulders (you don't see a lot of hunchbacks). They start to try to get smaller, they look down. You get what I'm trying to say? Maybe even orient away. A lot of people say when you freeze, you orient towards the threat. I've never seen that in my life. In my life, I've always seen that person cower away from that threat as if it was a too-bright light. You get what I'm trying to say? As if the waves were coming at them too strongly and they had to turn their back to protect themselves against the next wave. That's how I've seen it, and so that's how I teach it.

No, and that, that's a, that's a, that's a good example. You know, in those, depending on the severity of the situation or how strong they're going to demonstrate it, but especially with kids, man, they, they don't, they're still learning how to communicate their thoughts and feelings and actions. So it's mostly manifested on their body. I mean, I see that when I'm taking the little insurgent to school. I'm like, "What are we jamming out to on the way?" And she starts to shrink in her seat because she's already getting embarrassed. Like, "No, we're not pulling up to school listening to music and blasting and you singing along." I'm like, "Hey, you better get used to this because it's going to get worse when you get older." You know, I mean, like, "I'm here to embarrass you." But the idea, she will shrink in that seat. Like, "No, no." It'd start to push away, even though she's in the seat in the truck and can't go anywhere. But that's the idea, is that that will manifest itself physically.

And kids are great sensors, you know what I'm saying? Because they don't understand everything, so they have to take the time to try and figure it out, and their body will react to it before it ever says a word. So as a parent, be careful, because if you mix these up, for example, I see my kid, I think that they're freezing. I know that something's wrong, and I want to talk to them. So I go over and I go to put my hand on their shoulder, and they pull away. That's not flee, that's not fight. What it is, is they've gone internal, and now they're shrugging you off because they want to hide in their own skin. That's when you've got to take a knee, get on their level. That's when you've got to give them a little bit of distance and sit in that chair. That's when you've got to take a look at the person talking to you, notice that they've turned the chair around, they're sitting in a folding chair, Brian, and now they've got the back of their chair in front of them by their chest, and they're actually leaning on it when they're talking to you. Brian, that's a barrier, that's a barricade. They're trying to show that I'm sheltering my emotions. And freeze is all about regaining control because I'm feeling helpless, I'm feeling fatigued, I'm feeling despaired. And I'll tell you why do I want to know that? Because if you lost hope, you may be considering suicide, you may be considering self-harm, you may be considering giving up. So, as a team-building skill, on my day going into that big gosh-damn boardroom on that, that talk, and I see that, that sense of fatigue and sense of despair coming from you, Brian, I've got to tell you, "Hey, do me a favor. There's that big client coming in. I want you to meet him in the lobby. I need to get you the hell out of there," yes, by any means, because you might jeopardize what's happening with the business.

So, Brian, a simple understanding of a psychological stance can help you manipulate the reality of the now by understanding what happened before Left (of Bang) and predicting what's going to happen in the future. That's all this is: it's predictive analysis based on the understanding of human behavior. You're pattern-recognizing, and then you're analyzing that to come up with a likely conclusion.

Yeah. And the, the again, to kind of like reiterate with the, because we're, we're generalizing it on this, this particular episode about, about into fight, flight, or freeze, or those are the buckets kind of we're talking about now because those get thrown around a lot. I know your, your buddy, Colonel Grossman, is a big fan of...

All right. Colonel is a great guy. You, you want to make money, invest in his book sales. And he's a great guy, and he's a great American. The reason I have fun with that is I could either push... I hope you've got a better sense of humor than I do. But the idea here is understanding psychological stances, Brian, is like understanding stoicism. My favorite stoic tale that nobody talks about was written by a slave back in Greece 3,000 years ago, and he goes, "Remember that Alexander the Great was buried in the same manner as the person that handled his mules for his wagon train." And what that means is that when we get thrown on the funeral pyre, Brian, we all burn the same way: baseline. The understanding of human behavior and how it affects all of us, every one of us on the face of the planet, is more important than me selling a book on, on, on so... And people are going to go, "Yeah, but we need that." Good, but don't go here, don't go to Arcadia, because that's not what we're all about. What we're all about is to tell you, we can save your life on the way to work this morning by showing you some of these things and showing you how to de-escalate them. Because when that guy's walking in and he's in front of you, it's too late to go, "Holy, what was on chapter four?" You know what I'm trying to say, Brian? Either you know it or you don't. Why do you think our tagline is "Training Changes Behavior"?

Yeah, you know, yeah, it does. Yeah. And, and you're, when you, you go back to the, to the, I mean, to the stoicism stuff, and with the Greeks, and obviously we, we are big fans of the Greeks, given, given our company name, I mean. So, so I just don't want people to get butt-hurt, but, you know, you're trying to take these historical examples, or, you know, "You don't provide any historical context." We talk about, "Oh, well, exactly. Back in the day in the, the Fall of Rome, and, and then you had the Greek thinkers like this." And you're like, "Hey, man, like, you know, I, I, you're, you're, you're drawing, you're comparing apples to oranges here. Like, conceptualize it for today and understand what that meant back then." I mean, you, you even just said it, like, it's like, you know, "Yeah, these guys, these great thinkers in Greece." So, yeah, there's also a lot of like slavery going on, and a lot of, a lot of, you know, crushing a foreign empire. Just like, like, weren't always the most enlightened people. Like, it's like, and it's okay to embrace certain things.

Brian, you're so spot on when you say that. Go back to the samurai. I'm much closer to samurai than most people because I, I endeavored an entire section of my life to studying them more than somebody would in martial arts.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

And the idea is I still place it in the period when it was popular and when it was outlawed, and how people dealt with the ronin. And here's the thing, here's the takeaway that I take away: they were masters of origami and gardening and language and literature and all these different things. So when I say, "Be the samurai," I don't mean be the warrior. Musashi said, "You win or lose before you ever draw the sword." What I'm talking about is predictive analysis and being good. That's what he was talking about.

Yeah, exactly. So, so it's okay to go back to the Stoics and say, "Hey, listen, I appreciate this part of Stoicism." You see? So, but my thing is, you can't hold it off like a cross in front of a Nosferatu when a guy's killing people like it's free. What you've got to do, Brian, on those situations, you've got to anticipate well ahead of the curve, and you've got to look at things like fight, flight, or freeze. So, Brian, a rehearsal is a dangerous period in a person's life, and you've got to be able to see that. That's at the assessment stage, right? So the family of a shooter sees that guy having a break with reality sitting at the kitchen table, disassembling the new weapon that they just bought, and the ammo, and having a vest and a bag on the kitchen table. Now, because most people have dealt with that, with that person and that break with reality, their entire life, what do they want to do, Brian? They want to forget part of that. They want to think, "This isn't the time," because they've had so many close calls before. But I'll tell you, they make a panic button for a reason. And panic buttons and cameras, like surveillance cameras, do a great job of showing you after you're dead, showing all the victims' families what happened. You get what I'm trying to say? We're talking about proactivity, and proactivity comes with predictivity. And guess what? Sometimes we predict wrong. But in a violent encounter, when we predict we're wrong, we can say, "Look, folks, sorry about that. Let's chalk that up to knowledge and experience, and let's get back to it," rather than going, "Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you, we've got another dozen Americans killed." Does that make sense?

You know, because it, it, it does. And you know, you, to, to give the historical perspectives of whether it was the Greeks, or Musashi, or Sun Tzu, or Clausewitz, or Boyd in the OODA loop, like, that, that's what they were all talking about. Like, the whole, that's the whole thing about the samurai. It's like, "I want to be this badass samurai." It's like, the point is, "You've won or lost before you ever draw your sword." Like, that fight is, is has already been determined, so it was up to you whether or not you missed it or you picked up on it. Exactly. Because no matter what it is, if you're always reacting, we, we've gotten so much better and better and faster and smoother and stronger at reacting. So, so we're now, instead of weeks or months, we're days, and then minutes, and then seconds. Like, good. But, but you're still, you keep going down that timeline, is what it is. And if you're reading all that stuff, it's really, really good. Now conceptualize it. Now I actually put it in action. What does that actually mean? If you, you're, if you're, if someone you're reacting to, whatever the situation is, someone else has already determined the outcome. So you've got to change the game, right? You've got to change the game. You've got to use, how do you upset that? How do you upset that logic? But that goes into even the military planning, and like, that's, that's about gaining the initiative. "Oh, we got attacked. All right, how do we maneuver and move and do something else so that we can regain that?" And that's all of these situations. That's, that's a conversation. That's, that's driving on the freeway. That's this. Like, you, you're, you're, you have to be ahead. You're, you're looking two, three, four cars ahead. You're looking three lanes over. You're constantly checking your rearview mirror. It's not because I think someone's following me when I need to do a surveillance detection route. It's because I'm trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B in the fastest manner possible. And, and I wanted our good buddy Mike Syracuse, who quoted us on and say that that line between point A and B is a series of concentric circles and rings. Like, it's not a straight line, it's a consistent loop of decision-making and decision-making and decision-making. Now what that leads you there.

So, so I would fight you on that. I would say that they're not always concentric either. They're oblong, sometimes they're narrow. So, so let's, let's do that for just a minute. Let's talk about that. If you've ever gone to a college dorm or seen somebody at a college dorm or visited somebody at a college dorm, you've likely seen pieces of wood and cinder blocks to make a shelf. In other words, you've seen those plastic milk crates. Remember what a milk crate was? Most people don't understand milk came in crates. And then you would see the wood stacked up on them. That is exactly what you're getting, folks, if you're buying somebody to come to your organization and tell you how to use the OODA loop to increase or improve your manpower. You can't put a round peg in a square hole. John Boyd's a genius, and OODA loop is his genius, but it's meant for a specific example in his life, and he was trying to theorize it. So what I'm trying to say about the milk crates and the cinder blocks, I think you're going to do a lot better spending a couple extra bucks and buying a cabinet. It'll last longer, it'll do what you want, it'll do everything else. So why cobble together somebody else's idea, your mantra for your company? That's not right. We learn from those examples.

Look, during the assessment stage, when that person walking by you in the office, in the parking lot, you're seeing them park their car, you've got to quickly say stuff. You've got to say stuff like, "Hey, listen, does this person want their say or their way? Are they exhibiting mental illness? Are they exhibiting ETOH (alcohol) or drugs on board? Is there a criminal activity that I'm seeing?" Because if there's a criminal activity already, there's nothing stopping them from doing further criminal activities. So what I mean by that is they're already parked in the handicap spot, and it's a stolen vehicle, and the license plates are obscured. Things aren't going to get better. He's not going to come out and go, "Hey, I just wanted to find a police officer, and here I am. Open your door or I'm going to climb in." The idea is have somebody on the way already. Because if I'm on the phone, and this is the way you started, "Dispatch, I don't know if it's an emergency, but listen to me. I see this guy doing these things right in front of me right now." I will tell you, you will be the hero for preventing stuff if you understand how to assess it early enough.

And Brian, this is hard to say, but we had to teach Marines and young soldiers how to go in combat and engage, have an engagement with the person that they thought might be a trigger man or a body bomber. Why? Because if they did, maybe they would die, but they would save the lives of the squad, the platoon, or the people in that village. And that's hard. So are you saying I'm telling you to go up and drive over the guy carrying a violin case into Publix? No, that's not the message at all. "What's with the case, Louie?" Do you see what I'm trying to say? And Brian, that's still an engagement. And guess what? Don't worry about angry people. You have the absolute right to be angry. Worry about the people that are angry and want their way. Because even the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have come down, the U.S. Constitution says you have the absolute right to be angry. And you can request redress. Redress means, "I want my day in court. I think this is..."

Yeah, you're entitled to that, but not right now. Not at my counter.

Not at all. Not at your whim. Not on the plane. You get what I'm saying? And so there's a process. That's the fine line we have to draw with assessing potential danger because a person's had a break with that. Brian, we're back to the break with their perspective. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Break with hope, that means a person may be suicidal or despondent. A break with perspective, that means the person is on cloud nine in their own mind, but it has nothing to do with the facts at hand. So you've got to ground them. You've got to tell them, "Listen, this is the McDonald's, it's not the U.S. Supreme Court. You have to leave now." Right? So why wouldn't we want to do the same thing with fight, flight, or freeze? We want to get it so we can rehearse it. Why? So we can see it in another and then anticipate what's coming next, whether that's going to be danger, death, mayhem, or whether it's going to be an argument with my teenage daughter.

Yeah, no, I, I think that's, that's kind of a good point to start to sort of bring it in for a landing, I guess. Because, you know, it's knowing who, who wants their, who just wants their say and who wants their way. And that, that is not, I don't think, is not as difficult as people want to make it out to be sometimes, or think it is. You know, it's like we, we create solutions to these problems when they come, right? And even if that solution means absolutely nothing. Like, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's the perfect example is the Boulder shooting. "It's okay, it's, it's, that's, you know, a terrorist attack because look at his name." "Okay, that's kind of a bit of a stretch." "Oh, it's, it's, it's white supremacy, it's that." You're just like, "Wait, it's, it's a guy who's a broken human being lashing out. Okay, let's start there." Now we can start to understand what the flipping problem is here. And, and, and now solving those things at scale in terms of policy, that's very difficult. That's much more difficult than people realize. But the idea is you, you as an individual can understand that, and that can make you, "Oh, that makes me safer. That makes me see it for what it is. I can sleep at night, not worrying about every time I step out."

Brian, one of our great friends, Abigail Manning, quoted somebody that quoted somebody that quoted somebody, because all, all knowledge is already out there, it's already been written. That hurt people, hurt people. And that's exactly what happened here. You've got a broken human that didn't know how to express other than in a violent fashion. And it's not unlike Atlanta, Brian. You had a PIO at Cherokee County that was almost 30 years on the road, they got set down. And I, I called their chief, Cherokee County Sheriff's Office. The sheriff never called me back. I'm sure he was too busy.

Yeah, probably taking a lot of phone calls.

And the idea that I wanted to talk to him about is, "Listen, you've got to get back up on that PIO because the PIO said, 'This guy had a bad day.'" Brian, it sounded like we would have said that. That guy looked at them and said, "Look, I had a bad day. I acted out." This is what... Remember, I wanted to have my say. That's absolutely normal. But when I want to have my way, that's when that anomalous behavior starts, and it's incongruent. People don't act like that. And guess what? This guy had a break with reality. And it involved people dying. What we have a problem with in this country, Brian, is mental health crises, because they don't have to be protracted mental illness. Do you see what I'm trying to say? You have a break with reality. What do I do about that? And people go, "Oh, there's, there's myriad numbers for this and that." How is that helping suicide prevention, Brian? Right? Numbers.

That's, that's it becomes those platitudes, and everyone keeps saying, "Oh, it's this," and we, we all want to throw on, "When's it going to stop, Brian? When's it going to?" Yeah, you know.

Well, I think that takes it back to the title of responsibility. You're not accepting, you're not taking it.

Yeah, that's, that's the thing is everyone wants to point to these, "Oh, look at this individual." And then they go into their, man, how they're like, "You know, oh, they're just some poor, uneducated this, that." Like, "Jesus, man, like, who the hell are you to talk crap about that person's life?" Like, you just look at what they are and what they did and go, "Hey, this is clearly a broken individual. If, if you think that that's a way to deal with your problems, you, you are so far outside of what is acceptable in our society that absolutely you clearly have issues." So, so let's take it at that and address it that way versus putting in our, what our own freaking beliefs are on top of this.

So, so for the first time in a long time, I'm going to give you a piece of opinion-based testimony. So I would ask you to get inside my head for just a second, and we'll talk about Alissa. The reason I'm saying it's opinion-based testimony, I haven't studied the case, haven't studied him, haven't interviewed him, haven't interviewed the Arvada community.

And it hasn't all come out yet.

Exactly. So, so this is the best information I'm acting on at this date and time. So, would you as an objective, reasonable person say that his family members that were with him in the days before this shooting knew him better than the person that six days before the shooting sold him a gun? Absolutely. So, would you say that the people in the parking lot knew him better than his family? Would you say that the police knew him better? Would you say that Al-Qaeda knew him better? The idea of these spirals going ridiculous things. Who knew him best? His friends, if he had any, and his family.

So if you're now telling me that the manufacturer of the bullpup gun that he had should... We're a gun culture, it's just like we're a TV culture, and just like now we're a dope culture. We love smoking the gangs, right? So don't go back and try to rewrite those things. Try to say, "This person had a break with reality." Who is most likely to see it, and why did they not take action? And Brian, I'm not blaming them because it could have been money, it could have been knowledge, it could have been training, it could have been myriad ideas. What I'm saying is, it doesn't make it easier to fix.

No, I don't blame everybody. Well, if you're casting blame, you're clearly not accepting responsibility. And once these things occur, I go, "This is partially all of our fault. This is, we are all responsible. We didn't cause it, but our, the way we approach these things, makes us responsible. And it's our society. You don't get to sit here and say, 'Oh, that person did this,' or 'No.'" Like, if they're not, if they're doing something outside of the normal, we either have to bring them back in and figure it out, or they've got to go. Like, it's just, "How dare you sit in judgment if you haven't done something to try to fix it?" Right?

Isn't it what we're talking about in this episode, is that part of your responsibility as they're your fellow man? And so if you can't increase their human performance, then at least be able to tell their human behavior that something is wrong. And if you could, you could fix it early.

You know, and if, if you're not attempting to fix yourself and your family and your own friends, then you're, you're not being part of the, the solution, right? Like, that, that's why, like, it's, it's, I think like, you know, you look at a really good analogy, I always see, because I had to drive yesterday. It was driving me insane. Obviously, it's horrible driving in Southern California. I think it's the worst I've ever been. I'd rather go, you know, to Kabul, Afghanistan, because at least there are no rules there, and you can do whatever you want, and I'm okay with that. Here people are doing whatever they want, there are rules, so that's, that's the problem.

But the idea is, you know, Greg, because of cell phone use, and how often people are on it, and distracted driving, you know, you're at a stoplight, and you stare, someone's staring down at their phone. The light turns green, and it's gone. It's been green for 10 seconds before they move, and everyone's honking. Okay, that one little act that you do, that if someone's listening to this and they just did that right now because they're staring at their phone, you go, "Well, that's not much. Oops, my bad." But now let's take the pro view from a, you know, a macro-level economist. What does that mean for lost productivity over the, over in one year in the United States of how many times that? Billions, if not trillions. And you're going, "Yeah, but that's like big picture." It's like, "Yes, but you and your five-second delay to a stoplight contributed to that." Now you don't see it as that. But at scale, when you multiply that, even let's just stay in the United States, times that by a few hundred million people a few times a year, you have any idea how much time that is? Like, that's an extraordinary loss. So, so when you look at these situations, I look at it the same way. It's me not trying to make myself better and understanding those around me better. Well, if, if we all did that, if everyone just focused on themselves, then, then we wouldn't have these issues.

It's the same thing I look at with, with in the healthcare industry, Greg. Everyone's going, "Oh, these big pharmaceutical companies, they jack up the prices, and they do this, there's these evil corporations." I'm pretty sure it's like 70 to 80 percent, I think it's close to 80 percent, of all medical costs in the United States are from preventable diseases. Things like different heart disease stuff, overweight this. Like, what I'm saying, it's like, it's like, "No, we're worried, we're like, we are, it's not the system. Twitter isn't the problem, the people using it are. Facebook isn't the problem, it's people using it." Like, that's what it is. Like, you have to like not just try to like, I just hate this random, "Let's just assign it to this, and now I can sleep better and know, 'Well, it's because this is the reason why that happened, and those people are to blame now.'" Dude, you're at a blind.

Yeah. So, so Brian, back in the day, we always had regional training, no matter if people want to say it or not. So I'd be at Quantico, and so we'd have a class at Quantico for the Marines, and then weapons training battalions off of the Triangle. It's a different location. We'd go over there, and while I was in town, I was always welcome to, to go over the FBI National Academy and teach. And when texting had just come out, I was trying to explain to them exactly what you just did so succinctly and so intelligently, but from Greg, because I don't understand all that mathematical and algorithmic. And so what I told them is, I said, "Next time that you see that person fail to drive off the light, I want you to think..." And I'm going to get my numbers wrong, but it's the theory, not the numbers. "When you're driving 60 miles an hour, it's like 185 feet to stop when you finally recognize and hit the brakes. So that three-quarters of a reaction time that normal humans have, with your sympathetic and parasympathetic, comes down to a number: 185 feet." Let's say, and walk that off, Brian, and see how far you'll go. "Well, I want you to count one thousand one, one thousand two, before that person hits the gas in front of you." And imagine how long it's going to take them to stop.

And I said, "One of the most dangerous things, equaling drinking and driving, will be texting and looking at your phone." And Brian, this was 10, 12 years, 15 years ago, whenever texting started. I had no concept of time. And I got her "rumped out" of the FBI National Academy because they were going, "No, you don't know what you're talking about, there's nothing..." Brian, we're going to steal, just like my thing, "It's going to be a homicide on a flight." We're there because that's human nature. I'm doing predictive analysis. And how? Because people say, "It's not this," or they say, "You shouldn't be on your phone and drive," and they're the biggest person that's doing it. Stop. Stop. Back up and say, "I'm either part of the problem or I'm part of the solution. And go to your community and say, 'How do I help you? You want to volunteer time?'" You go to your community right now and go, "This is, pardon my language, how do I help you? How do I help you fix it?" If not, what you're going to do is send a bad message.

This morning, my whole day was ruined this morning, Brian, because somebody said, "Hey, listen, if you're willing to send your kid into combat, be willing, when they come back, to help them with their mental health issues." And then the first person that wrote back said, "Hey, last time I looked, it was volunteer military." First of all, pal, kiss my ass, the fattest, dirtiest part of my ass, because what are you thinking? The person that wrote that, the intention behind it was, "We have to do a better job at mental health." And for the person that wrote it, stop with the platitudes, folks. Let's get right to the heart of the issue: we have broken humans in our midst. And if we don't take steps to fix those broken humans, some of them are going to become problems like we saw in Boulder.

Yeah. And then there's, there's a lot of, there's still a lot of kind of misconceptions about a lot of that stuff, and what it is. Again, it's assigning blame. That's the whole, "Oh, yeah, trust me, the mental health thing." The mental health thing. I'm not saying this is a mental health issue with these shootings, Brian. Some are, and some aren't. And as a matter of fact, fewer are responsible because of the mental health. But you can be in a mental crisis, you can be in a manic episode, and there's got to be a way to identify that and fix that without allowing me to go off and do something stupid. And doing something stupid is including shooting myself, self-inflicted wounds, drinking myself to death, you know, beating up my wife or my significant other. That's not good.

Well, that's, that's the, "It's not my fault, it's everyone else's," or "I'm going to take it out on them." And that goes back to what we were talking about yesterday, that hurt people hurt people. I mean, absolutely. And I think it's, it's taking that approach is going to help us understand and solve the issues, not just start blaming people and, "Let's pass more laws," because that's what we need, we need more laws. We already have them there. They're already there, it's already been written.

And we're not Republicans and we're not gun nuts. We're scientists, and so we don't...

Brian and I aren't endorsing a way of going other than science.

Well, it's, it's, it's just an over-reactionary way of, you know, looking at an issue, and then you're not taking into account your second, third-order effects of what that overreaction is going to do. So, I, I think that that's probably a pretty good, good place to, to land on here.

Sorry for being angry. You're angry this morning.

I'm trying to be angry. You are. It wasn't this way. I was surly. You just want your say, not nothing.

Yes.

I wouldn't say you didn't raise to the level of cantankerous.

It was a great word. It was very curmudgeonly. Because yes, my daughter Andrea... By the way, Andrea, good luck on the doctorate. My daughter Andrea calls me the curmudgeon. So, yeah, you were a little curmudgeonly.

Well, it was a, it was a descent into curmudgeonry. It started off, it was, it was a downward spiral that ended with the curmudgeon yelling at somebody that he's never met before because I didn't like their opinion.

Yeah, that was mature.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we're human beings as well. So, how do you, why does Brian keep Greg off of social media? Tune in at seven.

Yeah, that's exactly. Well, that grinds my gears.

You're doing the Peter Griffin. You know what grinds my gears. So, all right, hey, real quick before you go, because I know you're going to go, "How do I get a The Human Behavior Podcast coffee mug?"

Oh, yeah, folks, if you want to go to the website, the link will be in here for the podcast, the Arcadia website, the podcast page. I'll have a link. But we, we have started making the official The Human Behavior Podcast coffee mugs. More coming later, hopefully here. But you can always go, go pick one of those up and help support the show. We make literally no money on it. So I think if you get on there now and get one, you're going to get it before I go in and change and figure out these settings because after someone ordered one, it said, "Net pay minus $1.15." I was like, "Huh, wait a minute, what's going on here?"

Exactly. How could this be costing us money? I got charged something when someone else wants to run, so tell them, "Why, why, why am I not carrying our coffee mug?" You were nice enough to send me, yes, the three corners of the box open to go, "My coffee mug is here." I haven't seen it since, just so you know.

All right. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in. Check out the episode details for more links. Like the show, follow us, give us a, give us a review on your podcast listener, that would be great. Share it with your friends. We appreciate everyone tuning in. Don't forget we have our Patreon page as well with all kinds of extra stuff. So thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior. All right, man.