L.O.G. 201 Beware The Ides of March

Good morning, Greg, and fair warning to you on this March 14th that we are recording this. I should probably tell you, "Beware the Ides of March." That's great! That's a 24-hour warning. Yeah, technically, it's historically been thought of as the 15th. It's right around this time, in general, so that, I guess, is the topic du jour of what we're talking about. We'll get to the reason behind all this stuff and how significant dates start to coalesce during certain periods of the year and what that means. You know, everything from people saying there's some significance to it, some by happenstance. We'll get into all that, but it's important to understand sort of where this saying came from of "Beware the Ides of March" and the significance overall. So, I'll kind of give a quick background and then we'll kind of start from there, if that works.

Okay, so first of all, obviously, we're right now in the middle of spring. We're recording this on March 14th. Spring is about to start. The spring equinox is coming up. I think I said "solstice"; I meant "equinox." Sorry. But this is the Northern Hemisphere, for those of you taking notes. Yeah, whatever, it's early. I woke up at 2:00 AM this morning. But it's a big, big astronomical, astrological — if that's your thing — significance.

Spring is that kind of renewal, growth season. The change has huge historical significance throughout human history. It's a fundamental changing of the seasons. You can go into all types of different reasons why. There are agricultural cycles, so in ancient societies, spring was the beginning of the agricultural cycle. The days started to get a little bit longer, so you could start to plant and grow crops for the year. There are huge religious and cultural celebrations, not just Christianity with Easter, but also Jewish with Passover and several others. Even religions that predate those or aren't in existence anymore always had huge spring celebrations. Then, with astronomy, and even what people, you know, in the past would call astrology, the Spring Equinox is happening here in a few days.

Then, historical events: all kinds of ancient wars started, like the Persian Wars in ancient Greece, the American Revolutionary War, the Arab Spring. All of these different events are sort of influenced by the change of the seasons.

To get to specifically the Ides of March: The "Ides" was literally part of the ancient Roman calendar, indicating the middle of the month. So, the Ides was always the middle of any month, and then depending on how long that month was, it fit in right around there somewhere, the 13th or 15th day of the month. But the Ides of March, which would fall on March 15th — which would be tomorrow from when we're recording this — was an especially important date in the Roman calendar. It marked the first full moon of the year and was traditionally associated with the settling of debts. And, obviously, the springtime and the harvest, everything I just talked about.

But in the context of Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, the phrase "Beware the Ides of March" sort of has this sinister connotation because it was used to warn Julius Caesar of his impending assassination. It told him, "Beware the Ides of March," and he, of course, chose to ignore that and found out what happened. But since Shakespeare used that, it's sort of been used in film, literature, all kinds of stuff since then to convey some sort of sense of impending danger or misfortune. It has this bigger kind of significance, like a cautionary tale of, I would say, overconfidence and complacency, maybe. So, that's sort of the historical thing, where it comes from.

So, going back from starting with the Ides of March, this is a little bit behind it. I just wanted to give a little bit of the background of that because what's happened now is people start to say, "Well, you know, there's an increase in attacks or significant events in March." This is throughout history of what we've seen, which is technically not true, but I also get why people say that. So, I want to start there, Greg, and I'll throw to you before I go any further, of how we want to discuss everything I brought up and what we're going to talk about today. Why do people do this? Why do we go, "Okay, beware the Ides of March," Greg? What does that mean in today's terms, I guess?

So, here's the thing: Not a lot of our listeners or viewers, Brian, know that you're a cosmetologist. So that was great today, I think. [Laughter] I'm just messing with you because it's an early day and meth is a hell of a drug. It is.

You went over so much just then that I've got a third of a page of notes. I want to go unorthodox. This is why: because I want people to listen to the words that are coming out of your head so they can understand what significance March truly has in the "Ides."

So let's go to Finland. In Finland, a lot of the food, especially the baked goods they eat, are made with different rye and other grains because they have a shorter, colder, wetter season. Just because you look at your calendar and think, "Oh, this is the beginning of my growing season..."

I would say go to a thousand years after the death of Jesus Christ. The first reference of the Hindu Kush, which literally means "Hindu killer" (deaths), right? In China. And why? Because anybody that was trying to come in and out of Afghanistan, or in and out of Pakistan, or in and out of China through the Kush, depending on the season, they died en masse. That was a great killer. It was wicked hot in the summer and it was wicked cold in the winter. So it named a thing, right? So we knew to beware. Just like you would say, "Beware the Ides of March," there's some guy in India that was telling another guy with a mule and his wife, "Hey, if you're going through the Kush, be careful because it's the killer."

A couple of nights ago on Turner Classic (Movies), Brian, there was Pacino and Dog Day Afternoon. That is like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I'm a film buff, but I hate that film. But there's something very important about it. We call the "dog days of summer" the hottest, most unbearable days of summer. So where's it come from? It comes from one, Canis Major, the big dog, the star in the sky, and Sirius, the little dog, coming the same thing. And that's normally during July and the first part of August when it's the hottest. So we have a history of humans looking at stuff and naming it and equating it with something else, whether it fits or not. And once that's stuck, Brian, it's hard to unstick.

That's what I wanted. It is. And, you know, you went to the cosmology there during this that type of year too.

And so they start to name things. Now, here's why I said there sometimes is significance even though it doesn't really correlate to something over time. As you know, they're more likely to have some in March. The idea is like you just brought it up, the Hindu Kush up in the mountains in between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well, when does the fighting season start? It starts in spring, when the snow thaws. That's what picks up. They harbor up during the winter because it's hard to move around, it's hard to stay warm, it's hard to get supplies. So you have to. It's just the way of life in that area.

But that's all humans in a sense are like that. We're wired that. What do we do? We fatten up during the winter, right, to survive. We have to gather up what we need to make it through. And then when that spring comes, man, that's that rebirth, "Hey, we made it, we lived!" Some people might not have lived, right? And we did. So, one, we have to celebrate that. And so that's where all these different traditions come from. And then it's literally significance. The weather changes, we can get out more, we can start to plant, we have to start to prepare for the year. And it's almost, it's actually typically the New Year. So, spring was always the New Year. It wasn't January 1st, the middle of winter, some random time because of Pope Gregory and the Jesuits making the record.

Yeah, well, it's the most accurate calendar, you know, we have.

But it was always in the springtime frame. Because why? Because of that, because that was the New Year. We made it through the death of the winter, and now we're going to survive hopefully another year.

So we look at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and we say that the rat that comes out of the hole, if it sees its shadow, right? And then we have the time change that we refer to as "spring forward," right? And everybody's, "Well, it's associated with what?" Well, generally, the first day of spring, right around there. You know, it's very close. And that's why the Ides of March, and you're exactly right, that's when I pay back a debt. Why it's significance at Caesar? Because the debt was being paid, right?

Yeah.

But that's that 14th to the 16th. And generally, what's the middle of the 14th and 16th? The 15th. And most months are about 30 days, right? So that matches.

So when we take a look at something like the term "spring fever," there's a term that's right next to it that's called "cabin fever." Now, it's a copper in the windswept streets of Metro Detroit when you had a thing called lake effect snow.

Oh, yeah.

And that in Chicago, we're out there and they had a shovel, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I shoveled their parking space and put their folding chair out there so everybody knew that I shoveled that space for me. Homicides that you would not believe! Why? Because spring fever hit and cabin fever meant that I was in the house too long. And the great thing about them is both of them are psychologically based and physiologically based. It's based on your serotonin levels, it's based on your sleep cycles.

So when you take a look at your mental calendar, when you have better sun and you have better temperatures, you're in a better mood, Brian. You sleep better, you eat better, you have a wider variety of food than you do during the winter, and you're generally more amiable when you don't. Than the neighbor. You remember the horrible video that I hate to look at and watch, where shoveling snow and a little bit of mouth-mouthing turns into a homicide-suicide, and three people are dead five minutes later. It was in Pennsylvania.

Yeah, yeah.

Think about that for a minute. What happens is all of those things that you would have taken lightly if you were in Barbados, that you wouldn't have worried if it was 75 and you're having a lemonade, and your neighbor chunks a bone from their dog with their lawnmower and it goes through your picture window. If that was a snow blower and a month earlier, you'd be hacking in death with a machete. And people go, "Yeah, but is that really based in psychology and physiology?" Yeah! Where have you been?

Where have you been, exactly! You know, so what we have to understand is that sometimes there's a root, like Punxsutawney Phil, that isn't historically accurate, but it's historically significant. Then there's other things which are historically, physiologically, psychologically, sociologically accurate and significant as well.

That's why, you know, when I was building it, I still go back to some of the Marine leaders that didn't understand me back in the day. And when I came up with "the Combat Rule of Threes," and it was "threes" with an apostrophe "S," they go, "You can't apostrophize 'threes'!" I've been doing it. First, it's already multiple, my entire life.

Exactly. But the idea is that threes matter. And so, the Combat Rule — and they go, "So you mean the combat?" So, still to this day, that's a gating mechanism. If you don't understand that part of it... Like I was on LinkedIn the other day, and some guy is a combat hunter instructor trainer. "How? How can you be? I know all of them! I've never heard of you!" Well, I would call that guy and ask him about the Combat Rule of Threes. Why? Because Brian, if you pick three things that come together in that time frame: the longer shadows, the cloudier sky, and these rodents coming out of their burrows to look for food, what do you got? You got the story of Punxsutawney Phil, right? The most famous groundhog in the world. And people center their lives around that stuff.

It's, you said it earlier with the pagan celebrations and Christmas and holidays. What happens is we marry ourselves to a date. Now, why do we find it to be surprising? Like, I think it's — and without referring to the calendar or anything — I think it's like the 31st. That's near the end of March when Reagan got shot. It's also the last quarter when Bush launched the invasion against Saddam. Yeah, why is that significant? Because let's put the foot on the other shoe, let's wear a sandal for a minute, and let's think about that day. What was that day? That's the day of "shock and awe" when hell rained, you get what I'm trying to say? And then I remembered that years ago, during that period, an American president was almost killed by just a man on the street. And what did that turn into, Brian? Now I'm looking at my mud hut and I'm going, "Hey, [ __ ], I could take on America!" Do you understand how that coalesces?

Yeah, what happened is it simply turns into this thing, and then every year when the grandfather is sitting down with the grandkids, and all of a sudden those days are getting longer, right? What's he saying? "Well, now you can't go to bed because it's still daylight, and you know what happened 27 years ago on this day?" And it becomes that significant event. We have to understand that sometimes we co-opt an event — a date, rather — and sometimes the date co-opts us.

Absolutely. That's what I, you know, I always talk about it too. It's not kind of a little off-topic, but with historical sayings or quotes or something where it gets, I call it, kind of like "hijacked by history," where it gets taken to a completely different direction or under a different meaning, and you don't always know that meaning.

It's funny because on this one, I always see people quote that. What's that [ __ ]? It's that poem that, though, is it the guy wrote it as a one-hit wonder? It was, "I'm the captain, I'm the captain of my soul, the master of my soul, captain of my fate, Captain of my soul fake," or whatever. It's really early in the morning, but you know what I'm talking about. I hate because everyone loves that. It's Invictus. And everyone's like, I was like, "Anyone who loved Invictus?"

Well, that's what I'm saying, he has two sides, buddy.

Yeah, so here's the thing. Everyone loves that, and I always ask him, "Who wrote it?" No one ever knows because the person who wrote it was, like, it was literally a one-hit wonder. But you, everyone likes using that term. But that was Tim McVeigh. Tim McVeigh recited that poem before he was executed. And, you know, then said, "167 to one, like, come get some." But yeah, so that stuff gets hijacked by history. And so what we start to do is, like you said, we go, "Well, this is a significant area," and it is. And here's why I think that time is significant: It's simply a transition period. And it's a transition period right from winter to spring, like from coming out of the cave, out to starting that sort of next year.

And we talk about transition periods are always — there's uncertainty, there's anxiety, right? So, of course. So that's the, to me, that's the underlying "so what," or not just "so what," but that's the underlying cause of this, the way we think about this, the psychological and sociological reactions to it. Because I don't know, well, we're coming out of the cave. And, you know, and we all know, like, if the sun's coming out, it's like that. If I remember, are you sure you had the same thing when you're a kid? And like, it's that first day, maybe in March, where it's sunny out and like 50 degrees, but there's still snow on the ground, and you're all out there, you're wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and you're having snowball fights because it's the coolest thing ever. And you think, "Oh my God, it's so warm out!" And it's literally just barely above 50 degrees, but the sun is out, and you feel that those transition times are significant.

You're talking about something that everybody has noticed; they just haven't looked at it the right way. So let me polish their lens for just a second. Have you seen early in the spring when there is still snow on the ground, and it's that 50-degree day, and the kids lined up at the school aren't wearing their coats? And they're wearing their shorts, and they're freezing to death, but they're rocking back and forth? Why? Because I have to show off my spring body because I'm getting ready in a few years to, you know, try to populate the species. And so, you know, you're trying to look good, I'm trying to look good for each other, and the bus stop just happens to be our bar or our church for that day.

So what does that mean? Well, let's go back to Invictus, which is great. You finally got that one. That is how you — that was the final question on your cosmology degree. Yeah, and I would talk to McVeigh because McVeigh is a good guy to think about because McVeigh was a thinker. He is an animal, he's a monster, but he's a thinker. When he's an investor...

Yeah, he was.

When they talk about, you know, people who made it on their own, that's resilient. Absolutely. So when he's arrested, he's wearing a shirt that says "Sic Semper Tyrannis," it's got a picture of Lincoln on it. It's also got a picture of John Wilkes Booth on it, and it's a wanted poster. Why is that significant? Well, if we think of "Sic Semper Tyrannis," that's been around the term for thousands of years. And most of us associate it with the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, Brian, but it's been around forever. It's been — it was in Homer's Odyssey. It's just a term that people would shake their fist at and use for government. And so what is it? "Thus always to tyrants." So, "Don't push me around, you can't hold me down." I'm sure during the Boston Massacre, which happened in March, by the way, somebody yelled "Sic Semper Tyrannis." Do you get what I'm trying to say? "No taxation without representation." You see what I'm saying? So it's a theme, right?

So now we take a look at that and we say, "Okay, well, why was it significant that he had, you know, that photo on there?" Well, Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theater during the play My American Cousin, right? Shoots him, dives, later jumps off the stage, yells it out. What's John Wilkes Booth's father's name? Junius Brutus Booth. And they're all actors. And it's Junius Brutus Booth because, yeah, early in their career they said, "You remember that play by Julius Caesar? Use 'sic semper tyrannis.' That's how you say 'thus always to tyrants.' You kill them. That's how you pay them back on the Ides of March." Look at that string! Now, I just played that string backwards. But do you think that was significant enough to those families that they were willing to die for that? Do you think when Invictus was written, that guy played that forward in his mind? Now, he was writing about a lost girl or a broken dream or something that happened in his own life. He wasn't thinking about the world in its condition at that time. But McVeigh was.

But you got to think about Brutus. When Caesar allegedly looks at Brutus and goes, "Et tu, Brute? You're one of these guys?" Yeah, Brutus had a long, rich history of killing people. He did. And he had a long, rich history of saying, "This is [ __ ]. I'm going to fight you over it." So that it happened in the Senate, and that Brutus was part of the cabal, that's no surprise to anybody. But we want to take, when we co-opt history, and history doesn't hijack us, by the way — great, great episode title — what happens is that we get caught up in the moment and we start using confirmation bias to make the story fit what we want to preach. Yes, so we can't have a rough edge, so we sand down the edge with time. You get what I'm trying to say? And now, all of a sudden, Invictus is written for me. Now, all of a sudden, the groundhog was the one that, you know, old Josiah saw when he was coming out of the John Deere plant. And none of that horseshit's true, but it's still significant.

And so it's almost these are significant dates for some people, which in certain situations may cause, like, we do take into account significant dates because they mean something to people. But at the same time, I can't then extrapolate that data set or that one piece of information, that one area of significance, across a population. Or it's almost like the, "What's going on? It must be a full moon tonight!" It's like, "Okay, okay."

Yeah, I don't know if I should...

Yeah, she doesn't listen to the show, which is, "Oh my God, Mercury! It must be a retrograde! Everyone's acting crazy!" And I, I, it drives me nuts when she says, right, spits like that. Because I'm like, they're, you're, you're attributing significance to a series of events that have nothing to do with one another. Yes, I understand why you would think that way, but you're starting to grasp at these things.

But that's the thing. Even going back to astrology, which is just, it's astrology, so sorry to bash anyone here who's into astrology, but when that was the original science of what became astronomy, right? So, meaning there were people who were originally looking at the stars for significance and the way to hand down stories and explain things over time. So it had significance. Now, that doesn't mean you go get your [ __ ] palm read and that lady knows what you're talking about, but 2,000 years ago, that was the best that they had.

Okay, so...

You're making me read a book that I'm halfway through about Everybody Lies, and it's not about everybody lying. What it's about, it's about data.

Yeah, and I like the data set the better.

And I read it because I like you and I want to know what you're reading. In Mad Magazine, that's what I'm reading, and Brian never reads it, and it makes me mad. But when I look at the theme, I would call your attention to me laying on my back and looking up at the stars and saying, "Well, there's Orion's Belt, and here are the archers' bow and all that other stuff." Look, what happens is the sky is too vast for me to understand. So I pick a smaller data set within that large data set, and I claim it. And it's like, I can't claim it thinking about where you are in the world, I claim it from where I am. So if I'm in the Southern Hemisphere and you're 6,000 miles away on the other side of the equator west of me, for example, it wouldn't have the same significance. But there's certain things associated with those dates that are bigger than both of us, no matter that 6,000-mile distance, right? Because of the big data set in the sky, right?

So what happens is now when I build my form of pyramid, that's kind of a pyramid like you, it's stacked rocks, right? Yeah, yours is more pointed, mine is more layered. Okay, when you line it up, it goes north, south, east, and west, and you're going, "Wow, that's significant!" And then all of a sudden you go, "Well, if you look through that hole at the top, when the moon is in that hole, it's time to plant, right? And when the moon is in that other hole, it's time to reap what you sowed, or it's going to go fallow, it's going to go bad." And you're going, "Holy [ __ ]! So there's got to be a UFO!" Because everybody... So, do you see what I'm talking about? What happens is there, we have a smaller data set that you can draw reasonable conclusions when compared against the big data set. Things fall out of it, and they're right or wrong, and we learn over time from that, right?

But the geographics and the astrology, which became the astronomy, gave us a good start on when to plant and when to harvest, when to get married, when to have kids. Because if you had a kid during the wrong month — which doesn't matter much now, but if you're in Senegal, you get what I'm trying to say, it might matter a lot. Back to my Finland story about the wheat harvest versus the rye. You have to understand what your role is in the world, in the time, in the place. So sociologically, you might have an imperative. But Brian, if you have the kid in the wrong month, and you're all of a sudden somewhere out in the back of the Yukon, and you don't have the type of milk or fat or warmth or fire source or something like that, the kid might have a deficit or the kid might die. So everything happens for a reason.

Why, I'll sum it up by this: being an investigator my entire life, and you are as well, that's why we get along so well. Shelly, Sean William Atkinson, a couple of people that we really, absolutely love. Jim Chunard, Rocky Mistretta, I could go on and on. Those people that we love the most are lifelong learners and their investigators. So when you see somebody clubbing somebody like a harp seal, and there's a homicide, you have to stop and say not what the motive is, but you have to stop and say, "Okay, I saw the demonstration of intent. Where did that foment? Where did that truly start?"

And now you talk about like, for example, March is another date significant to the Nazi Party — those that are still around and those that call themselves Nazi — because it was an invasion of Austria. Not a shot was fired. Invasion of Austria. Significant from your point of view because it was too much snow to go over the Alps to go in and take Zurich, you get what I'm trying to say? But it's also significant that that was a beginning of a push, right? And so now those dates, just like in America we talk about Pearl Harbor, there's other countries in the world that don't give a [ __ ] about Pearl Harbor, right? Because it never impacted them, and they didn't lose a soul. That's what we have to balance, Brian.

So an investigator and a learner doesn't just look at the date. They go, "Before I go to work today, were there any significant events that happened on this date that I can co-opt? Can I use them to my advantage?" And say, "Hey, thank God for all you women out there, because it's National History Month for women." Or you say, "Hey, today was the biggest airline disaster in history, and I'm going to the airport." Probably not the time to, you know, joke about the small seating on a plane. Do you see what I'm trying to say? How you could use life to its fullest by just understanding some of the stuff that keeps us going every day through dates, through times, through seasons.

No, and you brought the historical, you know, understanding, understanding the historical significance of something, using intent versus motive. I mean that, you brought it up with the whole, I love watching Ancient Aliens on History Channel. It's hysterical. And if I fall asleep to it, I like the one guy with the crazy hair. But we're looking through it from that perspective. So you just gave a simple explanation where they said, "Okay, the intent is, I need to measure things so I know and pass down to the next generation when we plant the food, when we harvest the food, when this is going to happen. So I have to measure that because that's my whole entire life, my whole entire world. And, you know what, I can see the moon. I can see the moon, and I can measure where that's at in the sky over time." That's very simple, right? So let's develop a lunar calendar that tells us this stuff.

And then because we have a different way of doing it now, because we have our technology, seeing it through our perspective, we go, "Oh my gosh, they built this! This is incredible! Why would they do that? What, what is the point? You know, what if this came down because they need a landing pod to control?" So it's like, "Wait, what? Like, hang on!" Like, it's usually the simplest explanation.

And then what happened to humans? Someone came along and said, "Hey, wait, the lunar one isn't as good as, you know what? I don't think the Earth is the center of the universe here. I think it might be the sun." You know what I mean? And then our measurements got different. Had to happen. And so that will evolve over time. And now maybe we're in the multiverse, and there's something at the center, and our universe is on the out. And maybe a thousand years from now, someone will crack the code on that. But today we have what we have.

And so you're spot on. And let me throw in Al Gore. Let me throw Al Gore under the bus. Al Gore, who was roommates with Lee Jones — what's his name? The actor, the... Oh, Tommy Lee Jones. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah. So they were roommates, but every — briefly — every Al Gore theory and projection about what was going to happen and when went to the wayside, just like Greta Thunberg's that "world is going to end" in 2023. Why? Just like the Mayan calendar, Brian, we're looking at too small a data set. Yeah.

So when we take a look at weather and we take a look at the Earth, we have to understand it's been around for a good long time. So if we only took the stock market from last Tuesday till today, or we took the stock market from, you know, a hundred years ago till today, we're going to get different calculus, we're going to see a different trend emerge. And that's my second caution. My second caution, other than being a lifelong learner and lifelong investigator, there's always something there, is don't put all your eggs in one basket. Because again, you're, or thinking that it's this because this has happened. I would say expand your data set and don't just look locally, look globally, because there's probably a precedent that's been set somewhere, or a theorem, or somebody tried a hypothesis, and you need to know about it. And if all you're doing is going to Wikipedia for your research, you're never going to hear of it, and you're never going to understand it.

And there's times that we've been in the room where somebody was talking about something like a Steve Drum. We're going to have him as a guest. And the first couple of pages of Drum's book, he talks about "Left a Bang" — not the book "Left a Bang" — he talks about him, the mindset. Yeah. Okay. So every time I read that, I grin because we've got, you know, we knew the bet that was coming in. We were Martha Stewart. We had insider information on that, and that feels good. So I would tell everybody that's out there: Don't just go blindly into it and read the, the, what's that road sign, you know, what's a big thing that they have on the highway that you look at, a billboard? Okay. The billboard. And back in the day, what was it? It was the barn with Burma Shave. And back in the day before that, it was "Pompeii, the wine sucks," after you get into the side of the building. That's always been out there, Brian, but that's one person's opinion. What I would say, I say, you need to back off the gas a little bit, you know, pump the brake and take a look around and go, "What's the rest of the world saying about this event? What, what really is here?"

Well, that's almost back to the sort of meaning behind "Beware the Ides of March," about warning against overconfidence, right? I mean, that actually ties into sort of what the saying has become and grown to. But that, that has nothing to do with this time of year as it is with anything, right? You want to warn against complacency and overconfidence. Those two, you got to balance those things out, where you can't just be sitting on your [ __ ] thinking everything's fine, but you can't just be so confident in what you're doing, you know what I mean, that you're sure of yourself. It's always that balance.

That's the MLMD KOA, right? It's exactly. What is it that were? That's where these things come from. We didn't make this [ __ ] up. It's been around forever. We just happened to be the first to name it, first to point it and go, "That might be more important than something else." But we weren't the first to name it because that's why we're called Arcadia Cognorante. I call it MLMC MD KOA. So a lot of other people do, but "KOA" was already always around. I just added the "ML" and the "MD" because it made more sense in my brain. People adopted that. But guess who else talked about that? We're back to the ancient Greeks that used a different word, but they meant the exact same thing.

So the answer is being held up a cat and looked at the shade on the cat rather than the groundhog because they didn't have a damn groundhog. That's what I'm talking about. You have to take a look at the wisdom behind it, right? And not, not to bag on our stoics again, but the idea is that if you're looking at somebody else's quote and you're adopting it and saying, "That's what I'm going to base the rest of my life on," you can't. What you got to do is you got to say, "What's your quote? What's your dojo insignia? What's your Brian Doe karate?" Yeah, you're going to attack the world with? And that's life right there. That, that's figuring out...

Well, that's why everybody that's gone before, take everything that you've learned and figure out how it works best for you. Not what's the best one thing to do for you. It's going to be a mix of everything. And I think that's, that's sort of part of what we're talking about because that allows you to face the uncertainty and anxiety of a transition period that we're in, literally, for the seasons right now. I mean, that, that's, that's why there's that unsettling feeling sometimes. That's why when fall comes in and you get that little chill and the air changes a little bit, and you feel that, you don't just feel that as a temperature. Like, you feel that in your body, you feel that at a DNA level going, "The weather is changing. Storms are coming. Winter is here." Like, we need to be prepared. That's a, that's a feeling. It's a warning to your spine, right? But it's, it's ingrained in your DNA in a sense. Now, some people are more attuned to that than others. But it's, it's, it's inside you. And so that's kind of what we think.

And it goes back to even we said again, I'd bring up the intent versus motive of what all of this means. And, you know, you can, you can pick any cluster of dates and say this is significant. And that's why Combat Rule of Threes was so important because we said, "Not all of those are important. They're not all significant. This guy is eating with his left hand because he burned his iron on his right hand, not because it's a social message." Right? So what you have to do is you have to take a step back and you have to say, "These three things keep coming up in my environment. Are they significant?" And then you say, "No, one, it's random. Two, it's happenstance. But three keeps coming up." Now I take a look at it, and I go, "Okay, there is a reason for this because these folks know sun rise in the East and sets in the West. So this is the best place to put my plant. And in the morning, and if the water is too brackish, the plant is going to die." Why is that important? You know, thank you, write down. But why is that important? Because March is important.

And if you plant at the wrong time, okay, we're back to Finland again, and your plants die because you get the first frosting. You didn't have the little smudge pot up there, warming up your plants. Then, Brian, that might be the only seedlings you have. Why do we have a seed bank? And why is that seed bank built into some place? Yeah, they keep. Because look, if we [ __ ] around too much and make a mistake, we could all die. So the same goes right back to the breeding. It goes to the feeding, it goes to the marriage, it goes to the "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," not understanding that one of the most famous songs in that musical is about the rape of the Sabine women. Do you get what I'm trying to say? To procreate a species. Not being punitive, or, you know, we don't understand sometimes how simple the world really is and how absolutely obvious these warnings are.

So when you talk about the chill in the air and the first frost and everything else, Brian, that's supposed to go to your brain. That's supposed to go to your grade, your prehensile tail, and it's supposed to scare the [  ] out of you so you go out there and start storing those things. My dad, for his entire life, couldn't eat smoked meat or salt-cured meat. And I would always ask him, "Dad, why is that so much?" Because he was shooting, yeah, he was shooting squirrels in our yard in Detroit, and he was shooting bunnies out of the garden, and we would eat those [  ]. He would gig frogs, Brian, we'd eat them. But he wouldn't eat salt meat. Why? Because during the Depression, that's all they had.

That's all I had. He's grown up, everything had to be smoked. Why? When you take a look at something like a recipe for jerk chicken, or you go to Saudi Arabia where we've eaten some incredible meals, but like the "dub," you remember that little lizard thing?

Yeah.

You got to cook some [  ] a long time. Yeah, my dear friend Bob Sunderland, God rest his soul, when he would cook venison, and he goes, "First, put some vanilla in there, then you got to put a lot of beer, then you want some cayenne pepper, and let it set for three weeks." Wow! Because his face is so [  ] that you had to do that. And we don't understand that, but that's right back.

So everything, our religion, our choice of not our planting seasons, the poems, "Ring Around the Rosy, a Pocket Full of Posies," has nothing to do about posies. It has to do about the ashes that are falling down because we had to burn the bodies during the plague. So, and there's another March: Spanish influenza came to the United States from Europe in March and started killing soldiers because they were the first ones that were exposed to it during the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, so think of that. And if that's the only thing you get on the news of your day at the reading wall, maybe that becomes how you break in the New Year. Right? Okay. No, it's not the plant, it's the death. It hurts too. The ground's too hard to bury. Don't so much as the burying month.

Alright, so are you saying I look at this, don't go into... We get so wrapped around the detail of a specific belief structure when we don't look at the underlying tenets of, they're all the same. I mean, everybody hates us now because you said that, but it's true. It's deeper than psychology, it's deeper than neuroscience, it's deeper than human religion, right? It's deeper than, exactly. And, you know, paganism or atheism or Christianity or anything like. It's so, it's, it's deeper than that because it's about survival. It's about the set. It's survival at a cellular level for the entire species. And that's when we get into these periods of what, what the importance or the significance is. And so I want to be aware of that.

And then now, will it start to become, will those dates start to coalesce on their own? Well, yeah, of course. I know from time in Afghanistan that, "Look, man, when March starts rolling around, that's when the Taliban start coming down from the mountain." They start cracking open up. Where were they in the mountains? They weren't hiding in a cave; they were home. They went home because they knew they couldn't fight.

So, yeah. So I'll give you one Afghan story, and I'm not going to violate any sacred trust. So all of a sudden, in a Hilo (helicopter), looking down at the road — you remember this? The road, snowy, the snow is deep. And all of a sudden, where they had dropped the ammunition crates of the Russian 7.62 by 39 and different ammo, the 54, the ammo strewn about. And you can see the snow has moved. And the Hilo pilot is talking, and he looks at the guy and he says, "Hey, take a look down there. They abandoned the ammo. They must be withdrawing."

And I'm looking at it. I'm going, "The only thing that's missing down there is the wood from the crates. The wood for the fire because it was cold as [ __ ]." You can't eat anything with a 5.56 (mm round), do you get what I'm trying to say? And so what that pilot did is that pilot created an alternative reality, and he doesn't understand that that resonated with that scared people that were in the Hilo. It became the truth of that village.

Well, it tells you what's important to the people in that environment. The wood and that ammo is more important to them than the ammo itself. Flip an ammo a foot, right? That tells you what's important to them. That tells you what they're going to do.

But do you see how that could have been an urban legend? Do you see how that could have been the, "Oh, you don't understand, that's this." No, it's not. And I would say my third and final admonition for this episode is most things are exactly what you think they are. So sometimes reading too far into something and trying to make the connection... That's why your favorite show about the American aliens, or whatever that is, Ancient Aliens...

Yeah!

What do they always do? They always ask a question: "So could it be that Stonehenge is really the land..." Look, you can come 30 light-years across space, but you have to lean two rocks together to, you know, mark your space? That's the...

Yeah, well, I just, what I love about that show specifically is because they'll have some person on there who's some expert in whatever this thing is they're going to talk about from whatever PhD, university. This person, their whole life is researching this. And they go very clinically like, "Alright, here's what we know. Here's what we can prove. Here's what we think it was used for. Here's why we think that. Here's the evidence to support that claim." And they go through it. It's awesome. So it's really cool, you'll get to learn about something. And then they cut to the guy and he goes, "But what if shell necklace?" I laugh every time. I love it. I just, because I love the story and I love how people question that stuff, and they want to create this, you know, and they, they, the person's not being, you know, he genuinely thinks that that could be true. Good on them. Like they're not being the fairies, not trying to sell me some product or something like that. He's just, you know, coming with this alternative belief.

I do too, because it's suspension of disbelief. So you understand that the bread box and the cookie jar had a role: it kept the insect larvae off your food. It kept it fresher, longer. But if you're a kid and you look at those two items, their boxes intended to keep you out. So if you took that head away, I informed a society after that, and he wrote all the history of the society. Look at how different a cookie jar would have been in his history.

No, I say, it's funny. I still remember my grandma's like that. Like, to me, it was like the heaviest thing on the face of the planet was the lid of that cookie jar. To me, I just still remember the noisiest too. It was super loud.

You were sitting there. You wrapped towels around it. Try to make sure that when you lift it. And then all of a sudden, it wafted the smell of the cookies. And you're like, "Somebody's who's in the cookie jar?" And you're like, "Yeah, they were so good. I could smell the ginger ones, the ginger snaps."

Yeah, 1990, Brian.

You've written our history, Brian. Why do you think that I'm so careful not to take stuff off the internet? Because I, I'll leave stuff on the internet. I will correct stuff on social media, but a lot of times we adopt something that is horseshit without doing the right amount of research. Or we do too much conjecture, and now we've got a conspiracy theorist. And in this day, with humans nowadays, they would rather scan a headline and believe it.

I feel sometimes. And that's with a lot of stories, a lot of things where people ask us, "Hey, how come you guys don't comment on this or comment on that?" And it's like, "That's not really the story." Like, there's deeper. They, even some of the, you see that a lot in politics or different what seem to be politics, which aren't even policy issues, with different cultural issues. And you're like, "You're arguing about something. Why don't you just talk about what's really going on?" Like, "You're choosing this thing together or something else, but it's not really what you're upset about." And that happens all the time, and it's, it's unfortunate that people see things that way. But that's how, that's how humans are. That's why we're discussing this.

Exactly. So, you know, we, we talk about, you know, how words matter and where these things come from. And it's why we use roots, sometimes a seemingly odd lexicon, because it, it allows us to not fall into that trap, the cognitive trap, the language trap that we all act as humans. You're going to do it to some extent anyway. We all have terms that we use that, that once you find out the history behind it, like, "Wow, that's, I didn't know that!" You know what I mean? Like, but it didn't mean, I meant anything by it. It just meant I was using a term that I learned, and I thought it meant one thing, but turns out the history behind it is much worse. So you do have to be careful about that.

And, you know, going back to this, this idea of "Beware the Ides of March," it's, you know, it's really just, "Beware of the historical significance of everything around you."

I, I, I think, "Beware of serotonin," you could have said.

You get what I'm trying to say. I, I mean circadian rhythms, right? Elaborate on the serotonin part. I, I know I get what you're saying, because it's more like there's more serotonin.

Yeah, so I eat better. I sleep better, getting more nutrition. And I'm happier. So we could, we could put our face... Let me give you two off the cuff ones if I can. So, the "shave date," you would think that Eric Collier is a term for one of our good friends. The greatest human ever, and he's so simple. So one day we were walking around in Indianapolis waiting for a building to open where we're going to do training an hour and a half away at Muscatatuck, but we had to buy some gear because around Muscatatuck there were no stores. So he goes through, and as he's going through, he gets an eye patch, and he puts it on. He's wearing it through the business. And so I look at him and I go, "Do you know the significance of the eye patch?" He goes, "Yeah, it's National Talk Like a Pirate Day." And you know Collier, it's hilarious. I go, "Stop for a minute. Do you know why pirates wear eye patches?" And everybody out there that's listening to my question right now is going to come up with, "Yeah, you get [ __ ] in your eye and it's bad and, you know, you got to cut out by some pirate with a hook." No, you wear the eye patch because you're going down into the hold where the ammunition and the sleeping area and the food is, and then you're coming up into the bright sunlight. So what you would do is you would cover one eye, so when you came up, you could switch the eye patch and you wouldn't have your eye blown and be, you know, snow blind or light blind. And Collier knew the answer. And I sat back and I go, "Why does he know the answer?" Because he's a scout sniper, and it was imperative that he knew, or he could die. You see the difference? So that's important thing.

So joking about International Talk Like a Pirate Day leading you to understand that the eye patch was just a cop needs an eye patch if they're going to be chasing a suspect and the suspect goes from outside, inside, and then to the basement, the unlit basement. Well, we have another thing. What's that equalizer? It's called a flashlight now, right? They didn't have the flashlight. So again, whoever wrote that piece of history, if it was 1990s Brian, again, it might be very different. So why did I bring up the shave date? Because the shave date knew of the significance because it was a matter of life and death. And whatever things, and that's March. Whenever it's a matter of life and death, we take it more seriously. If it's born out of necessity, then we are always going to attribute significance to it because it is, because it's literally, it's, it's necessary for our survival or, you know, to innovate for future survival of all of us.

No, and that's, that's where this stuff comes from. And, you know, I, I think, there's, you know, talking about this, there's a whole bunch of other things that are linked to what we're talking about because I think this episode of "Beware the Ides of March" is going to be the first. And I think the next episode should literally be, you know, "April is the Cruelest Month" kind of thing, right?

Absolutely love it.

So much. Because, because "Beware the Ides of March" is big. We talk about the significant dates that happen in April all the time. You know, we've mentioned a few on here, and there's going to be a few more that we mentioned as well. But that they, they kind of lead into one another, right? And that...

Exactly. That's a great, great chain, Brian, that that time.

So I would, I think this should be sort of like a two-part episode at a minimum to get into, okay, if I have to "Beware the Ides of March" and everything we just talked about, what we don't really have to. I just have to understand the significance behind it. Then, why is "April the Cruelest Month?" And I think that that could be the next one because you, you did mention, straight segue, some of those significant events. And so I, I think we could dive into deep on those.

But, you know, what are, what do I need to take away from this episode, right? You know what I mean? After everything. So, what, what's the, what's the so what? What's the, what's the bottom-line takeaway?

So let's do a, "What's in it for me?" So you and I have talked about an hour, and during that hour, every incident that we talked about was in March. The only thing that didn't fit the March incident when we talked about the dog days of summer, and we gave an explanation, was imperative for July and August. It was a comparative to Ides of March to balance that, right?

Yeah.

So now we're talking about March, and why March, and why this part of our awakening is important. So I would tell you that you can go one of two ways. And I'm oversimplifying the [ __ ] out of it, but for a reason. So in March, the sarin gas attack, Tokyo Subway. Exactly. I remember that. So 12 died, 5,000 were injured. So I can choose to know that that happened in the next few days, and I can let that change how I approach life over the next few days in the subway and everything else. Or I can think about on the same exact day, at the same time that the attack happened, B.F. Skinner was born in 1904. And you know I'm a Skinner, right? I am our American psychologist. Yeah, you know, his behaviorism is the fundamental underpinnings of a lot of conditioning for training, especially. I can either think, "Hey, it's Skinner month," you get what I'm trying to say, or I can think, "Hey, it's, it's sarin gas attack month." And I'm telling you, life is that simple sometimes, Brian. So I'm not going to let the wrong things coalesce and create my reality. I'm going to understand my life, and I'm going to write my own reality based on accurate time, place, data, calendar dates, history, rather than just have the, "Oh, the wind blew from the west this time. That doesn't happen. That means the UFOs are coming!"

And I find it. Is it, is it, you know, is it random or is it significant that you just brought up Skinner, but before we hopped on here, I talked about a 20-minute Simpsons recap thing that I saw with Principal Skinner as one of the main characters? So think about that.

Yeah, yeah. So, but the string theory behind it is Skinner's behaviorism was a big part of the early Simpsons because you remember Skinner had the Skinner box, the controlled environment. And on The Simpsons they had that wild scientist that had the box, and they were all sitting around and they could buzz each other. And so Bart and Lisa were just buzzing each other to make them shake, and they are all buzzing Homer just to make them laugh. So much of what we find funny is funny because of our history. It's funny because of our science, because of our understanding. And guess what the other part of our deep, rich interest in comedy is from the stuff that scares us, that we don't understand. Yeah, we didn't understand for a long time where the sun went, so that was a large part of our religion back there. When the moon came out, we weren't sure what that. You were talking about the lunacy. Lunatic, those come from lunar. They talk about the moon.

So sometimes, and just the last thing I want to hit on too: You brought up such a great point with the lexicon. I created "Gregisms" because I didn't know what things were. And so the word I came up with ended up having more significance and meaning to me until later in life that I found out there were actually already terms for some of those. What do you think I used? Do you think I adopted the new term that I just learned, or do you think that I used the thing that I've been using for 60 years? So it doesn't make something wrong just because a person explains it differently than you do. If the core competency is right, then I give him credit for it.

What do we always say, Brian? "Show your work." If you can show me how you drew that reasonable conclusion, and you can point to the artifacts in evidence, then you're right, even if you got the answer wrong. And what I mean by that is we don't rush the conclusions. We take a good, long time to draw a conclusion. That's why we don't just get on and say, "Hey, hit play and talk [ __ ]." What we do is, yeah, make sure we're talking about stuff that we have researched and known and lived and seen, you know.

Well, that, that, that's that comes with being, you know, responsible with how you, you know, distribute, disseminate information. And I, I agree it's important, especially now, because everyone's confused as to what's real, what isn't, what's up, what's down. And we're going, "Look, just stick with what's been true throughout history and throughout time, and that's likely to be continued to be true tomorrow." That's why, "Wow, all these cultures worship the sun!" Well, if the one thing that you knew, that that was, that the one thing that you could rely on every, like, I can always, that's the joke I make is, "Do you know, I know one thing absolutely true has been true every single day of my life: that the sun has risen in the east and it's set in the west." I can prove that's happened every single day that I've been alive. So guess what? That's pretty damn important to me. More important, that's the only thing that's that I can tell you is happened every single day in my life, right? So it, it just goes into, to, you know, what, what we attribute value to again. And I think we, we hit on a lot on this March subject. So I'm excited. I love it. So I'm anxious for April.

Yeah, if we got this much out of March, wait, wait, folks, wait. A lot more connections until you see April.

Um, "How's that Ambrosia, Brian?" Exactly. That is a deep Family Guy reference that I will not be repeating on this episode. I guess I'll be looking that up. I know. Um, so that's, I think that that's a good spot to bring in for a landing. Again, this will be out next week, so I guess it'll be the 21st of March when everyone's listening to this. Hopefully you listen to it when it, when it releases.

We have more coming, everyone. If you're listening, one, we appreciate it. Two, please share it with your friends if you enjoyed the episode. And also, reach out to us: thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. You know, we get to people's questions, we love answering questions that people have. We love getting to topics that people want to hear us talk about. Again, I kind of, we, I mentioned it briefly earlier, sometimes we don't always cover everything right away, or we wait till something comes out, that kind of thing, because there's usually we see something in it where there's an ongoing or there's going to be more to the story.

Precisely. And it's not that we're waiting to be secure in our prediction. It's what we're waiting for is the other shoe to fall because many times the journalists rush to get to be first, not to be most accurate. And Brian and I truly believe in being more accurate than being first. Accuracy wins gunfights, I know that. And, you know, I think quality is always better than quantity. And that's not always prevalent today, but if we, if we stick to that sort of theme, you really can't go wrong.

So I agree. So we'll, we'll continue to stick to that. So, any last words, Greg?

I think that's good. Yeah, I, I would say this: I would say, folks, our McGraw-Hill textbook is coming out soon. Start saving your money. It's going to cost about the same amount as your first car or your first house, but it's going to be, it's going to be not the origin, it's going to be the, the where everything started, and you're going to love it. But you may have to pay in installments, just like your college education. It won't be that expensive. It's just, I don't know, we're limited in what we can do with the price, so.

Because it's just us. Exactly. Yeah, well, that and there's, you know, if there we have so much control over it. But we'll, we're, we're getting that out very soon. So stay tuned. Sign up, the website. You can reach out to us and check out the Patreon side. Those, those folks on the Patreon side have early access and discounts, everything, so.

Everything. And they get pictures we send them and show them pictures sometimes they don't want. Exactly. So contact them at their work.

Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We do appreciate it, and don't forget that training changes behavior.