Rage and Randomness

Alright, Greg, we just wrapped up a little course, our every-semester course we do at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, which is always fun to travel into sometimes. But on our way out, we come through Roanoke, and so we've decided we'd record this episode at The Music Lab here in Roanoke. For this week, we want to talk about two topics, basically, but the overall theme is the randomness of rage. So we'll talk about two things about randomness in human behavior, which is very hard for people to understand, and then rage as well, which is its own distinct thing, and what forms it. I wanted to base this episode off of something you wrote not long ago, about a couple different stories, and you tied them together, so I thought it'd be a cool thing to start with.

Then, of course, folks on the Patreon side, you can read it and check out the photos; there's all that extra stuff in there. But we'd start there, and then I'd like to pull out a bunch of things within there, and then get into both of those topics and tie them together with the discussion. So I guess I'll have you start off if you'd like, and read it for our listeners.

Sure. So this is from Lessons Learned, Volume 9: Rage and the Ghost of Rogue Manor West.

It starts off at The Road to Rage.

A quote from an article: "Trooper Palmer was found wounded and still buckled into his patrol car, according to Montana Highway Patrol officials. The suspect had fled the scene, and after an extensive manhunt, the sheriff's office took the suspect, identified as Jonathan Burch, into custody without incident Friday morning. Authorities found Burch with the help of his father, Burton, who said his son had called him and told him, 'I had a road rage incident. I think I might have shot a cop,' according to charging documents."

Off to See the Wizard I have probably 10 hours of music on my current run mix, and that means that, mathematically, combinations of songs based on the shuffle feature should be completely random. Further, repeats of certain combinations should be rare indeed. My mind is wandering now to L. Frank Baum while I sing out loud, "We are stardust, we are golden, we're a billion-year-old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden."

If you want, you can go ahead and sing it.

I absolutely can, because I'm a huge Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fan.

So in early 1900, Baum chose the name The Wizard of Oz while his mind was wandering and he leaned back in a chair and noted that the file cabinet next to his desk had a section for A to N, and then the next one was for O to Z. So for whatever reason, on that day and at that time, L. Frank Baum was inspired to create The Wizard of Oz rather than The Wizard of Anne. And I believe in subtle environmental messages that influence human behavior.

Woodstock By this time in my workout, I'm convinced that the ghosts of Rogue Manor West are trying to speak to me through this shuffle function on my iPad. Case in point: two songs just repeated back-to-back in the same order. The song that just ended was "Woodstock" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: "And I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm," (the venue where the concert was held, Woodstock), "and going to join a rock and roll band, and I'm going to get back to the land and set my soul free." The song succeeding "Woodstock" both times was The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." Four weeks after Woodstock, the free concert at Altamont Speedway in California was held. The Rolling Stones' song lineup for Altamont included "Gimme Shelter," and that became the title of the 1970 film documentary about the concert held there. Both the Stones and CSN played both Woodstock and Altamont, and the crescendo of violence that defined Altamont stopped The Rolling Stones' performance during "Sympathy for the Devil." A few songs later, the Stones' performance was again stopped, this time during "Under My Thumb," when a homicide occurred just a few feet in front of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

And Now the Street Fighting Man I had an incredible friend. Don't worry, he hasn't died yet. We're merely, apparently, on the outs as he changes moods and social affiliations like I change my socks, who regaled me with tales of the Altamont concert. He was a SME, a Subject Matter Expert, and he was in attendance during a long road trip in 2005 or '06. And my friend, let's call him Cutter, was at both Woodstock and Altamont. And unlike The Rolling Stones or Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Cutter was merely a shirtless, stoned hippie attendee rather than a shirtless, stoned musician attendee. We were headed back to Camp Pendleton, and this was the long period leading up to the creation of Combat Hunter, as you remember, during which we conducted many LOEs (Limited Objective Experiments) demonstrating the usefulness of human behavior-based predictive analysis. So Cutter insisted on driving us back and forth from Colorado to California, as the money paid back to him by the government for utilizing ground transportation was a few dollars more than the per diem and M&IE (Meals & Incidental Expenses) from flying.

So during this specific trip, I remember Cutter telling me that the vibe of Woodstock had been completely different than the vibe at Altamont. So good or bad vibrations, Cutter was telling me about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and they were paid $500 to keep people from messing with the speakers on the concert stage. And the Stones' U.S. tour in 1969 was managed by a guy named Sam Cutler (Cutler, not to be confused with Cutter). Cutler related that "the only agreement there ever was was that the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators. But that was the extent of it. But there was no way they were going to be the police force or anything like that. That's all bollocks," according to Sam Cutler, confirmed by Grateful Dead manager Rocky Scully and Hells Angel member Sweet William Fritsch. All the bands that played Altamont were supposed to share the $500 beer cost.

Under My Thumb Cutter told me that the seventh song in the Stones' set at Altamont that day was the ill-fated "Under My Thumb." He remembers that Mick Jagger was in fine form, even though he remembered that Mick had been punched straight in the head by a fan when Mick Jagger first arrived at the Altamont Speedway. Cutter related to me that the Altamont crowd was totally out of hand, and he felt that violence would occur at any moment while he was there. Cutter and his small band of friends picked this time to leave the concert. They feared that they would either get into a brawl or a riot, or get arrested as the police came in to quell the violence and perhaps stop the concert.

Concertgoer Meredith Hunter (I have a photo for those on the Patreon site) was drunk and high, and for whatever reason, left the side of his girlfriend, Patty Bredehoft, and attempted to climb onto the stage at Altamont. Reportedly, and again corroborated by witness testimony and video, Meredith Hunter was punched and then dragged off the stage by Hells Angels Motorcycle Club members. Witnesses say that Patty Bredehoft walked Hunter away from the stage, and she and others state that Hunter had become so enraged that he was irrational and looking crazy.

Let's Talk About Meredith Hunter's Rage Hunter's rage was short-lived. The Grateful Dead manager, Rocky Scully, said Hunter was "crazy," he had "murderous intent," adding that "there was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in The Rolling Stones." Hunter was enraged that he had been beaten and treated roughly in front of his date, witnessed by thousands of people attending the free concert. And Hunter seethed after being mistreated. His pride had been challenged, and with alcohol and drugs intensifying his feelings, he was inconsolable. He acted out.

So Meredith Hunter then pulled a loaded gun from inside of his green jacket and approached the stage with vengeance. Hunder began leveling the pistol in the direction of the band. Hells Angel Alan Passaro spotted Meredith Hunter and, mission-focused, headed for the stage. Passaro stabbed Hunter while grabbing Hunter's pistol to avoid what Passaro felt would be a shooting tragedy. Hunter died within minutes. Videos of the incident show that the crowd momentarily spreads apart, allowing the action to occur as the Stones stop "Under My Thumb." Seconds later, Hunter lies dead and the crowd re-envelops, and the concert goes on. The Rolling Stones start "Under My Thumb" over again, and the remainder of the concert is calm. The violence abates and the concert comes eventually to a close. The video makes it appear as if Cutter and the concert crowd could feel Hunter's rage and were reacting to avoid him in unison.

What's the Frequency, Kenneth? "Well, rage is a frequency that can be read." William Tager uttered the famous line that began his paragraph on the night of October 4, 1986, in New York when Tager attacked and beat the journalist Dan Rather. Dan Rather may not have been able to predict the future and avoid getting beat "like he stole something," yet Cutter and the Altamont crowd seemed to know that it was time to leave seconds to minutes before the fatal encounter with Hunter. So how did Cutter and his crew know it was time to leave the concert? Was there a poltergeist controlling Cutter's movements at Altamont, much like the ghosts of Rogue Manor West who even now are manipulating my iPad shuffle feature?

Let's compare it against a baseline. Many people still don't seem to understand that life is a frequency. Life, meaning in this context, the actual animated reality of individual human beings, is comprised both of particles and waves, creating an observable and measurable existence. If you had a good dose of electrochemical neurotransmitters, and you had the emotional content that creates the human condition, if we baseline human behavior measurable means something quantifiable, something repeatable. And if you can measure something, you can compare it against a baseline to determine anomalous or incongruent behavior. For example, here Cutter, unknown to him back then, had created a series of comparative behavior baselines. What was normal for certain situations in which he found himself, and his brain had categorized and arranged them in a series of mental file folders for efficient recall. To ensure prompt retrieval, Cutter's brain had combined emotion and a survival-based chemical cocktail so that Cutter would be able to retrieve memories of past events triggered by similar actions or smells or repetitive patterns, and so on. In this instance, Cutter's training and formative experiences had occurred prior to his trip to Altamont. As a Rocky Mountain big game hunter, as a Vietnam combat veteran, young Cutter's brain had become tuned into the frequency of both turbulence and reverberation, the frequency predicting impending danger. "War children, it's just a shot away."

Detecting rage is all about baselining human behavior, and we teach that in class. Suppressing rage is about understanding the internal dynamics of intense human emotion. Processing rage, like all human emotions, can be managed. It's the nature of critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is analyzing incoming artifacts, evidence, and information, then determining whether the incident at hand is an MLCOA (Most Likely Course of Action) or an MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action).

Now, rage is a spontaneous, violent, uncontrollable anger. Clinically, depression and intense anger are often interrelated in the psychological spectrum. Rage is perhaps more closely related to Intermittent Explosive Disorder, sadly remembered by the abbreviation IED. This type of IED, the mental IED, relates more than one episode of violent, aggressive behavior which, when you analyze it, are wholly out of proportion to the situation and the environment at hand. We're not talking about a temper tantrum. Rather, the intense emotional commitment to violence that accompanies road rage and domestic violence, sometimes leading to a homicide. And if you can manage the anger, you can control the rage. The difference between critical thinking and advanced critical thinking is that advanced critical thinking allows you to modify perception and control emotions, giving you the gift of time and distance, combined with the ability to imagine and create and enact and forecast likely outcomes, successful outcomes, as alternatives rather than succumbing to the predetermined MDCOA which an incident portends.

Let's Talk About Jonathan Burch's Rage The lack of advanced critical thinking skills likely led to this case involving Jonathan Burch, the subject of our introductory paragraph of this lesson learned. Burch, confronted with some insult to his pride and now overwhelmed by emotion, mentally convicted Julie Blanchard of a driving-related civil infraction that Julie Blanchard likely had no idea she had committed. Julie Blanchard was driving a pickup on a road near Ivaro, Montana, about 10 miles from Missoula, when her and Jonathan Burch's paths intersected. Burch became so enraged by his emotions over the incident that he perceived that he followed Julie's pickup truck, flashing his headlights on and off until she pulled over to see what was wrong. Burch then fired a number of rounds into Blanchard's vehicle, killing Shelley Hayes (I have a picture for the Patreon viewers) and injuring Julie Blanchard and her daughter Casey. Trooper Wade Palmer pulled into a parking lot, perhaps an hour later, and he saw a black Cadillac Escalade fitting the suspect vehicle description. And Trooper Palmer was radioing in that information to dispatch when Jonathan Burch engaged the law enforcement professional with gunfire. And as the report states, Trooper Palmer was found gravely wounded and still buckled into his seat.

Rage as a Chemical Cocktail Experts agree that rage starts in the hypothalamus, where oxytocin and corticotropin-releasing hormones and vasopressin influence the adrenal cortex into releasing additional corticosteroids. And they combine with epinephrine and a bunch of other hormones already on hand in the pituitary gland, and rage is then present in one form or another in the anger and anxiety related to things like premenstruation, menstruation, bipolar disorders, and OCD. The specific chemical chain reaction can prove to be so intense in certain humans that the individual in its clutches finds it impossible to counter the effects of the rage during, and many times immediately following, the event or incident.

So as humans, whenever we feel our position of authority or our pride has been threatened or challenged, the teacup kettle of emotion begins to boil. And rage is a form of cognitive dissonance, a cognitive illusion that's so strong that we believe that others have conspired to put us in this situation, that we are, in essence, under attack. And rage convinces us that acting out violently is the only recourse to undo this wrong. Trained humans are demonstrably more resilient and tend not to succumb to the primitive necessities of rage when confronted with anger-producing external schemas. In the Ivaro, Montana, incident, it appears that Jonathan Burch took over an hour to contact his father after presumably gaining control of his emotions, telling his father that he, Burch, "thinks he shot a cop during a road rage incident."

Let's Talk About Time and Distance Rage can manifest itself in a flash, like a matchstick, or over a long period of time, like a tea kettle boiling over. And anytime the proximate cause of the stress, perhaps combined with alcohol or anxiety or undiagnosed mental illness, they continue to contribute unchecked, the individual is going to continue to boil. So training can be a productive deterrent. There's a large body of evidence demonstrating that both behavioral and cognitive therapy techniques can help promote advanced critical thinking skills to offset that chemical cocktail associated with rage. And addressing rage through training and education is essential. Multimodal approaches, including role-playing, personal awareness, situational awareness, sense-making, problem-solving, and advanced critical thinking, seem to be the most helpful in overcoming the stress response for rage in those humans most susceptible.

Incidents of violent outbursts are most associated with rage. Rage is a human's inability to manage momentary feelings of inadequacy or terror. And rage can occur virtually spontaneously. An outburst can be momentary or last for hours, creating havoc, causing danger, injury, and death. Some people have a bigger tea kettle, and those allegorical repositories can hold more water. For example, Klebold and Harris's rage fueled an attack on Columbine. Or Cho's rage exhibited during his assault on Virginia Tech. Each of those actors assimilated their rage over time and ultimately reached a boiling point from which there seemingly was no return. Their pre-event indications of rage went largely undetected.

So what? Rage is a human behavior certainty. All humans come equipped with the hardware and software necessary to produce rage. The potential for rage is available in each of us, and many of us have likely exhibited rage in one form or another, at one time or another, in our lives. But perhaps our individual coping mechanisms, like Cutter's training and experiences, better prepared us for an alternative, less destructive outcome. So training and situational awareness techniques can help overcome the emotions and train your body and mind to be more resilient and less inclined to experience, or at least to act out, rage. Situational awareness and human behavior training can be used both to harden human targets and promote safety and security in law enforcement professionals, first responders, military, security personnel, and to promote increased cognitive performance. In this manner, situation awareness training and human behavior pattern recognition analysis can give trained personnel a range of options with which to modify the situation they're in or to modify their own behavior rather than resorting to violence.

So the ghosts of Rogue Manor West have now influenced my shuffle feature to play "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and that's apparently my cue to sign off for today. "Relax" is good advice. Knowing that training can actually counter the effects of rage is much better advice. Training changes behavior. Study hard and teach harder.

So there's a ton to unpack in that, and so I want to try and do as best as we can with keeping in what you gave. I mean, you know, one, we're in Virginia right now. So, and we were talking about the Virginia Tech shooting and Cho actually this week, so it really resonates with where we're at right now. And the other thing, besides the fact, let's skip over the fact that let's pay the Hells Angels to pull security in alcohol. Not even in cash. Here's a handful of meth, be my personal security. Here's some booze and meth, and why don't you keep an eye on things and make sure they don't get out of hand? Okay, so let's skip over that error in critical thinking.

But you brought up so much in there, and one of the things that really stood out to me is right at the beginning because I love the story of L. Frank Baum and how close it could have been to The Wizard of Anne versus The Wizard of Oz. But you said, "I believe in subtle environmental messages influencing human behavior." So what do you mean by that?

So, shout out to Dick Marenco. You know that Rogue Manor West is our house. He had Rogue Manor, so I chose Rogue Manor West. He's a great guy. He died, sorry about that, not long ago. And I would give you three quick ones.

One, while I'm running, listen to my run mix, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. "Come on" and the song is "Woodstock." Okay, so it's a bunch of people on a pilgrimage to find themselves, right in the line, "We're stardust, we're golden, we're a billion-year-old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden." Okay, when we're hearing that, sorry everybody, it made me think immediately of the parallel between this Woodstock journey and the journey Dorothy and the kids made to Oz. Okay, okay, so that's inevitable. That's inescapable, right?

Right.

So then part two, Baum leaning back in his chair and just simply by random, while he's in his most creative, what would we call that, Brian, a flow state?

Yeah.

He looks at two file cabinets, one on top of each other, and one is A to N, and one is O to Z. And for whatever reason, on that day, he chooses Oz rather than Anne. And you said it perfectly. Look how close we could have come to The Wizard of Anne being the movie we watch every Thanksgiving or Christmas. Oz has got a better ring to it, maybe that's why he chose it, I don't know. I mean, you and I continue to joke about The Wizard of Anne and nobody gets what we're talking about, so I like that it's sort of an insider.

And then I would say the last one: so Frank Morgan, incredible actor, and he played five different roles in the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. So during a film test for his makeup and costume, he discovered that the jacket that he was wearing for his Professor Marvel character (the one that was in the wagon, that was looking into the crystal ball, and Dorothy's there), the jacket that was selected for this second shot and ultimately used in the film is an old, tattered coat selected randomly by a local secondhand shop by the MGM wardrobe department. And as they're opening up and cleaning out the jacket, they find a letter inside and figure out it's a jacket that was originally owned by L. Frank Baum. Now, nothing in life happened for a reason. There's a strong pull in the cosmos if that happens, that's incredible.

And we hear, we all love stories like that because it's wild, because it ties everything together that everything's connected.

And you know what the beauty of that story is, Brian, it doesn't matter if it's true, because I had nine different accounts that say it's true and one person that was skeptical. It doesn't matter, it makes an incredible story, and now those three things are forever intertwined.

No, and that often happens where there's, and we even talked about that last episode, where certain elements come together, they start out with certain elements are true and then the whole story, not all the details are maybe, but there's elements in there and then we choose which ones, which is great, and that has to do with sometimes the randomness of things.

Of course it does. And now we call them urban legends, but we also call them mythology or folklore.

Yes. Okay. So there's a real fine line there.

There is.

Because an urban legend would be a modern version of that, that get oral tradition passed down. That's how the oldest form of knowledge and transfer was, was oral tradition before writing. I mean, even still, countries today, there's a lot of people that aren't literate, can't read or write, so it's still relying on that even now. But we also as humans have a hard time to understand that there is randomness. There's only so many things that can occur. So, like the example I use, and we've talked about this before, is like when they first came out, the Apple iPod. Yes. And then the shuffle feature, and it was completely random what song was going to play next in your playlist. And everyone complained because sometimes you'd hear the same song twice in a row, or hear a bunch of songs a few times and nothing happened.

Yeah. And a rental car is possibly haunted.

But, you know, that's a perfect example. Then Apple literally their engineers had to go back and say, "Alright, we have to make this not random." So when you kick shuffle, it's actually not random. It's actually trying to play various songs so it's not just spinning and seeing where it stops, and spinning where it sees, because randomness will start to create a pattern or we'll hear one more than another. We can't, we can't, but that's hard for the human mind to comprehend.

And that's why you have to take the time to take a look at it. You got to "yellow page" it and then go back and point.

And to back directly into the article, and folks, I suggest hopping on the Patreon obviously too, to check it out because the photos and everything on there are cool and the story. But how do you interpret this connection between the randomness of your music playlist in this example and then environmental influences? Like, what's the connection there?

That's an excellent question. So I would say, and this isn't going to satisfy everybody in the crowd...

It rarely does.

Everything is everything, and nothing happens for nothing. We're all interconnected at an atomic level and at a, gosh, a universal level that goes all the way out to the ends of space. And whether we're influencing the environment around us and confirming the information as a message for just us (that's called confirmation bias), or the environment around us is influencing us and we're confirming the information as a message, like a chemical cocktail on board as I walk by Panda Express and then later I'm craving rice, we're at the beck and call of those influences around us, and they're presenting and creating, knowingly or unknowingly, those things that we do. They're influencing our decisions. And guess what? We don't pay attention to that randomness. Those are absolutely random things, and they only form a pattern after we pick and choose them or they pick and choose us.

And if I can give you an example, if we make the people around us mad, we can do that by just acting mad. If we start bragging about the president or taxes or a crappy restaurant or whatever, and we're flinging bad waves around and saying off-colored things, the people, even if we were buoyant and happy and energetic, we're going to bring them down. Now, if we change that and we start acting happy and full of energy, we can buoy them up. So if it's possible for us just to convey through our mirror neurons happiness and sadness, then it's possible for us to become happy and sad just because of a song or a smell or an encounter. And what are you getting from this is the way I talk about it or describe it, you tell me what you think, it's not just that yes, I influence the environment around me and the environment influences me, but that's just it, that's an interaction, that's a two-way street, meaning it goes both ways all the time. So I, because what I see is some people like, "Well, the world's just telling me this." It's like, "Well, no, the world is telling, you got a lot of people in line, right? The world is busy, sir!" You know what I'm saying? "Can you hear that? The number you have reached..."

Yeah.

No, the world, I love it. No, but we take it from there. And then other people that go the opposite, it's like, "Well, I influence everything." It's like, "Well, it's a two-way street." So, and that's constant, and it's actually that engagement where these things come out of it. It's not one or the other, it's between.

Go to McDonald's, and the old-style McDonald's had the ball pit. Okay, when you jump in the pit, the balls move you, and you now you add other people or other influences in there and you have to account for that. So it goes out, that's where the wave and the particle comes from, it goes out, it comes back, and things are not as clearly defined as we make them. So we make them clearly defined because we're afraid. We're always afraid. So when we look at our environment, that message has got to be for me. That flat tire means I'm not going to work. It's raining today, that means that whatever. We and those symbolism or symbology, iconography, being so meaningful, man has a historical perspective. Early man, "It's dark, don't go outside, there's animals howling. Hey, it's light, we can probably walk around," right? There's no difference. And we think those things are random until we find a pyramid that was built thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and we figure out it lines up perfectly with north, south, east, and west, and then it blows our mind.

Yeah.

And then we're like, "What the hell is going on?" And that's when you get the busy signal again. "Okay, we're sorry, universe is busy."

So no, I, that's actually a good example of it. And sometimes then we attribute value, and sometimes, you know, we don't even, that was conducted without that even being known sometimes. And then that turns out to be true when that literally was not the even the, and retroactively find out we knew that, we suspected. We add value retroactively. But I want to go to this, obviously this, this, this Altamont concert, because you got this great story about Cutter, who I know, and, and, you know, what he did and, and, you know, "I'm getting this bad vibe and I'm getting this feeling." But, you know, you got this, this Meredith Hunter and, and he's, you know, tries to get up on stage, the Hells Angels kind of knock him down, drag him out, you know. And so he's embarrassed, and in there you said, "You know, he seethed after being mistreated. His pride had been challenged, and with alcohol and drugs intensifying his feelings, he was inconsolable. He acted out." So, so what is this? Is that, is that the definition of rage, or what, what is that? I mean, because like, not everyone chooses to do that. Some people are like, "Well, I, that was stupid, I'm going to go home."

Yeah, rage is kind of like a ladder that every once in a while has a trampoline hooked up to one of the rungs, and you go up and come down fast. Okay, so I would say, if you allow me, I'll tie this question to my last answer.

So why was Altamont so violent? The concert promoters and the Stones knew or should have known that the Hells Angels as a security force was bad. That was, that was, that was bad decision number one. So these types of motorcycle clubs are attracted to incredibly violent people and they're attracted to incredibly violent situations. So the simple choice sent a subtle, inevitable environmental message: anything goes at the concert. Mick Jagger himself applauded the decision until he saw the level of violence around the stage. Then he wanted to pop smoke and get out. He actually called a helicopter before he and the band were killed, right?

So now let's talk about Meredith Hunter. Meredith, to his friends, was known as Murdoch. So he was always known to carry a handgun, but the handgun was for self-protection. Murdoch only used it or called to use it when he was forced into a bad situation or cornered, right? So Murdoch had never shot anybody, killed anybody. He's high on meth and he's continuing to climb on different stage equipment and speakers because he wants to get on stage with the Stones. Innocent enough, people do that even now. And the Hells Angels had been drinking and taking drugs and partying all day, all day long. They had fistfights and had used blunt objects to beat up people in the crowd. And so when Mick Jagger climbed on stage, the first appearance at Altamont, he was punched square in the head by a member of the audience, and the Angels beat that guy down so badly, it's remarkable.

So Murdoch, after repeated attempts to get on the stage, is pummeled by the Angels. That's completely expected, it had been building up all day and it happened. So how does he retaliate? Well, he retaliates by pulling a gun. And before he gets a chance to wave it around or fire even a shot, one of the Hells Angels, Alan Passaro, blocks his way and stabs Murdoch to death. On one of the photos you can see what appears to be the gunshot going off nowhere near anybody, probably in response to the fatal death blows from the knife. And it's literally feet away from Mick and The Rolling Stones.

And again, I would say, so had Murdoch not been drunk and enraged and armed, he would have probably gone home and never been known as the man that was killed at the Altamont Speedway. Had Mick Jagger paid a real security team, because he had plenty of money to do it (he paid for a private helicopter to bring him out of there, by the way), they paid the Hells Angels $500 in beer, think of that. What is this, Blues Brothers?

Yeah, go get... I thought that first round was the...

Exactly. But you boys drank all the beer. So they wouldn't have likely been in this incident. So had the crowd not been pushed around by the Angels all day, no one likely would have raised their level of anger to rage point. Within a point, Passaro didn't try to disarm Murdoch, he stabbed him to death. I want you to think about that for a moment, right? He didn't grab the gun, he didn't try to do a wrestling maneuver, he didn't punch him. He ran in and stabbed this guy moving toward the stage to death.

And that goes back into the it's an interaction, so it's not just one side. It's an interaction. But meaning it wasn't just Hunter, had there been a professional security staff or this, and he was doing this, okay, yes, he still would have escalated and gone beyond what you're supposed to do, but nothing would have meant that.

You remember SEEPed, the guys that we talk about, and Stefan and our good friends, well, SEEPed means the safety comes from the two "ed" at the end, and environmental design. So had the people set up the stage, set it up so they could see 360, so the person couldn't climb on the generators or the speakers, this was a non-incident. Now Mick and the boys have culpability. Now the Stones have culpability. We know that Murdoch has culpability. And what happens is all of a sudden the wind blew left instead of right, and the sun went down instead of coming up, and the barometric pressure changed. There's your randomness. And now it's a homicide. So that's what I mean. And all of those contributing factors add up. There's a sum there, adding all those things up.

So, so to rephrase it, it's not always 1 plus 2 equals 3, or A squared plus B squared. This time it was apple plus lawn chair equals baseball bat.

Right.

And so on each side, you have this building, this almost coming to a crescendo. So had it not been, like you said, if the wind blew the other direction, if they had a different team, or if he maybe didn't take that night...

Yeah.

Well, the song list had been different, and the beat had been different. He did "Wild Horses" instead of "Under My Thumb" or something. You know, whatever it was, all of that contributes to that. So you subtract one of those elements and it could completely change the outcome of the situation. And I think that's where the randomness comes in.

Right. There's certain random elements in your environment. Randomness when you're outside looking in is different than randomness when you're inside looking out because of your perspective. So when I'm thinking everything in the world is, when I'm thinking everything in the world is about me, I make the mistake of using my internal perspective rather than seeing things as they are. And now guess what's knocking at the door? Confirmation bias. And all of a sudden, I'm only looking for those clues that prove it was just for me.

So, let's talk about rage, because can you sort of, you sort of did in the article, but like sum up, like, can you define rage and, and I guess this is sort of a multi-part question in a sense. You're defining rage, explaining the difference between rage and anger, and then, like you, you kind of said, "Rage can ebb and flow," or something, "Rage can form so quickly." So how can rage form so quickly? Like anger can take a while to build up, maybe I'll get a little angry.

He's angry all the time. We always say "Angry, angry, Shelly." So I would say it this way, I would, let's street it up, Brian, because our listeners and viewers are used to that. Anger is an emotion. Rage is an activity.

Anger is an emotion, rage is an activity. Define that. Like, they don't have to be exactly the same thing.

Anger is a feeling or emotion that comes from being marginalized or annoyed, irritated with someone or something. And rage is the uncontrollable violent outburst as a result of reaching my emotional limit. I've reached a threshold, and each of us has a different rage quotient or threshold or capacity, right? Some of us never know what that is until we reach it. And rage must run its course. So if you try to intercede with somebody that's in full-on rage, that state can get you, them, or both of us killed. And if you look back at Meredith Hunter, that's exactly the perfect cocktail, the perfect storm of emotions leading to rage.

So the way I look at it too is sort of, you know, anger, like I can come back from anger. I can, I can do some breathing exercises, I can, I can calm myself down. I can figure out a way to become less angry. But what kind of what you're defining here, once it leads to rage, because you said it in here, one, obviously uncontrollable, but you said, "Rage must run its course." What, what do you mean by like, what do I do? I hit this threshold and then that's it, it has to go until it all comes out?

Yes, yes. And for some of us, that can be nanoseconds. For some of us, like Burch, it can be an hour. So the difference is that what happens is we're so immersed in the chemical cocktail of rage that we fall victim to it. We don't know that we're in the state, and now we feel persecuted. Everybody's against us. It's immediate, it's overwhelming. And guess what? All of a sudden we look around and we go, "Oh, man, I smacked my significant other, I busted up the car, I'm in the yard wearing no pants." That's the kind of stuff that rage does to us. So we have to understand that when we see a person, if we're trying to defend against it, when we see a person in a rage state, if we go up, we're only going to add fuel to the fire. But if we understand internally how rage feels and when it comes, it's a darkness that overcomes us, and then we start acting stupid. We can actually say, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm getting to that point where I slipped into rage." You know, the last time. Now, again, it's a, it's a meter, right? So, so it's a threshold. So sometimes I'll slip into it a little earlier, sometimes later. So what happened to Murdoch is Murdoch is at a concert, the music is blaring, he's been drinking and partying all day long. He's with his girlfriend. All of these emotions are right there at the tip of his fingertips, the tip of his tongue. And all of a sudden, here comes the gun. And the next thing you know, he's being stabbed. He had no idea that that was going to be the likely outcome. It certainly was never the intended outcome, but it was inevitable because of the situation. So those things coalesced out of nowhere, seemingly. And we know what they were, right? But those things came together, and that cocktail was so powerful that he drank it fully and then reaped the whirlwind.

So you, you bring up this, because you did the R.E.M. reference in this, you know, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" in a sense. So what, you know, let's sort of talk about that, meaning you said in there, "Many people still don't seem to understand that life is a frequency. Life, meaning in this context, the actual animated reality of individual human beings, is comprised of both particles and waves, creating an observable and measurable existence. Add a good dose of electrochemical neurotransmitters and you have the emotional content that creates the human condition." Yes, sir. So what, what, what do you mean by that? You know, by like everything, you know, by, by the frequency?

I mean, because you and I love the same things. We love film, we love music, we love fine novels, right? So I would give you Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the fictional character, main protagonist of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. So we think that Dr. Frankenstein believes that by creating a monster, he can discover the secret of life and death. Okay, well that's pretty noble, except reanimating dead tissue takes a big hard right turn. Okay. And then all of a sudden he's not going to play with the monster anymore because the monster didn't conform to his ideal.

Yeah.

So, so look, this came out differently, and, you know, I had sort of an idea of what was going to happen, so now I'm bored and unhappy. And so Adam, the Monster, has to live the rest of his life as a lonely, what would you call, like he's never going to die, I can't think of the word right now, criminal vagabond. And he's persecuted, he's, everybody hates him. Yeah, everybody that sees him is afraid of him. So what we have to think about there is that Frankenstein is trying to tell us (that Mary Shelley knew) is that all emotions affect our brain waves and particles. And a high-frequency brain wave occupies more of our mind and our brain space. So if we think of anger as a separate frequency, remember everybody's on transmit all the time, the particles and waves could be measured in degrees, and they're growing as your anger is rising. Okay. And when it's so hot or high, now that anger occupies so much of my mind that I can't think clearly. I can't overcome the event, and so I jump to rage. So that jump to rage is exactly like Frankenstein using the spark of electricity to bring life to the monster, right? The brain uses an impulse, many times unknown to us at the moment, and that sparks us into rage.

So was it with Murdoch the fact that his girlfriend saw him differently at that moment? Was it the fact that he so wanted to meet Jagger? Was it the fact that he was a merry trickster and just wanted to screw with the speakers, right? The idea is that if you can raise or lower your blood pressure, then you can raise or lower your brain waves and allow for a sort of internal de-escalation. He never thought that, nobody showed him how to do that, and it turned fatal.

And, you know, you talk about in there too, you said, "Rage is a frequency that can be read," right? Cause he's, let's say, to go to, you know, Meredith's example, you know, he's drunk and high and, you know, acting out at a concert. Like what, like that, that's not rage yet. That's just, no, that doesn't, that's just a drunk idiot, you know what I mean? Like, who, who hasn't been one of those before, whatever. But, but meaning like that, so, so you said, "Rage is a frequency." So, so when he gets to this level, obviously we know the story, what happened, he gets beat down and it's in front of this. So now he internalizes that and goes, "Oh, my God, this is, this is completely out of control mentally and emotionally at this point," partly due to the drugs and alcohol on board. But then, you know, when you're saying almost like, "Rage is a frequency, can be read," so I can, I can, when it gets to that point, you're saying me as a human, I can look across and see, "Well, wait a minute, this has now reached the threshold of rage, and, and, and we're at, we're at a catastrophic point here."

So we talk in class about mission focus, we talk about predatory looks, we talk about electrochemical neurotransmitters that are racing through your brain, that are creating autonomic reflexes, autonomic fluctuations. And if I understand that the rate at which those vibrations occur can be constant or consistent or random, what I can understand is that the wave, like a sound wave or electromagnetically like a light wave or a radio wave, what's happening is they're going through the crowd and affecting everybody differently. His distance to the stage, Meredith, his fact that he knew he was armed, his fact that the Hells Angels are now confronting him, all of those things are adding. And now all of a sudden, instead of happiness and sadness, now we've got anger and fear. And so what's happening is if I don't have a coping mechanism for that, the repeat insistence of that vibration at that frequency on that day, at that time, the essence of randomness took Murdoch from being a high hippie having a ball to going on a murderous rage, apparently pulling out a gun, I mean, there's no other thing that you could determine from that, and then getting stabbed to death.

So the more I understand my rage, my anger, my insecurity, the easier it is to read and compare mine against yours. So my internal baseline is important to control me, but if I see it in another person, I can go, "Wow, that person's acting out of control." And that comparison alone can say, "They're on their way up, or they're on their way down." If they're on their way up, I would say rage is nigh, it's inevitable. If they're on their way down, I would say, "Okay, we have to continue this de-escalation process, get them away from the stage, turn down the music, sober them up," whatever else it is. And I think that's a hugely important thing. If I can see it in me and I can control mine, I can likely see it in you. Whether I can control it or not is a completely different...

That's a different. It's a lot up to you. Well, yeah, and, and, you know, you, you brought in there too. And I know we kind of on last episode talked about things like internal and external baselines. And so you brought it up in there in your reference to Cutter using what you call comparative baselines. You said, "Cutter, unknown to him back then, had created a series of comparative behavior baselines. What was normal for certain situations we found himself and his brain categorized and arranged them in a series of mental file folders for efficient future recall." So what, what, what does that mean? And what is the comparative baselines? Like, so I get this like, "I've been, I've have certain experiences so I can go, 'Oh, man.'" I even though he hadn't seen that specific event before, he had seen certain elements of that event and compared it to some known that he had in his past.

Yeah, so let's talk about exactly that. So Cutter is an important case study because while we were driving, he was telling me that the vibe of Woodstock was completely different than the vibe of Altamont. You know, I'm a historian, you know, everyone's had a feeling like, "Man, something felt off," or, "This is a weird feeling here."

"I didn't like the feeling of it."

Yeah, exactly. But think what he set up for you, Brian. He set up the fact that he was at two of these concerts, Woodstock, Altamont. Okay. Now he meant that the frequency was somehow different. He meant that the people were acting differently. Maybe the music was louder, maybe it was cleaner or dirtier or higher or more drunk or whatever else. But a stoned, shirtless, Sharpie human straight out of Vietnam attended both concerts, and he wasn't a concert promoter or a musician or a soldier at that time, he was a hippie. And so he compares the baselines, his internal baseline, he's reading these external baselines and going, "Wow, this feels somehow off. It's dangerous." And so, guess what? You know, it's similar enough to things that I've seen before, temporally, sociologically, okay, that my basis for comparison becomes a comparison baseline, a comparative baseline. So he goes, "Okay, this is nothing like Woodstock, and guess what? I think I'm going to get hurt," where he was saying, "This is a lot like Woodstock, and I think I'm going to get laid." You see what I'm trying to say?

So, so, so now if I can compare them and I can take a look at different things, like Cutter was so stuck, Cutter was so stuck on his internal baseline, he was haunted by the way that he got into a lot of arguments and was angry and surly all the time. And I loved him to death because he was a true SME and a historian as well, and a great surfer, and took me to the Trestles and stuff. But he had so many comparative baselines, but he always looked at them from his internal. That's why he was angry all the time. Okay, this doesn't conform to what I like, this isn't how I think, this isn't the music we should listen to. I remember he came into my hotel room one day and I was watching a television show and he walked into my hotel room, okay, and shut off my TV. And I go, "What's going on?" He goes, "That's garbage, you shouldn't watch that."

Well, well, thank you.

But that's what I'm talking about. His frequencies were aligned in a specific order, and when this chaotic frequency of Altamont came along, immediately he tensed up.

Well, yeah, and he knew had the wherewithal to say, "Okay, I need to make a decision on this. It's probably time to leave or I don't like this and I'm going to go." A lot of people don't do that, and then they look back and say, "Wow, I should have, if I had," over. Yeah. "I, I saw that and I felt it." But if you do nothing about it, then you're, you're rolling the dice at that point, right? But, and this kind of leads into sort of, sort of, I guess trying to tie these together in a sense, the, the randomness and rage. And this is goes back into the Trooper Palmer case, is sort of like this case study that we did. And then you again brought up like sort of Columbine at the end, but, but this ties into what you started the article with and then what you, what you ended with is this example of, you know, this interaction between someone a road rage which ends up, you know, this now law enforcement guy, officer gets shot. Like, so it's, it's all a matter of random timing.

Well, that's what I mean.

This is when you've got someone with rage and then the randomness that occurs is you happen to be at the stoplight next to them, you happen to be intersect with them at some point.

Order Starbucks right next to you, where the best pro shops.

Together, you know, they don't know, you don't know that their cup is full, they're at that level and you're just going, and that's, that's the part that I think is hardest for people to understand too when those things come together. And that's why I like how you outlined it here, is like, "Well, it's this sort of intersection of this thing that was already going on," right, that you may not have known. Right. And, and, you know, maybe if, if Cutter had come into that concert a couple hours later and just walked in, he wouldn't had the time to realize what was going on. Right. So it's, it could have been different.

So that's where things would have calmed down and the playlist was different.

And that's where the randomness comes in, is that what if the Stones decided to do an acoustic set that night? You know, you know what I mean?

So, so look at the randomness of the caper that preceded all of this. So, we have Wade Palmer, that's a cop, and he's a good cop. And he hears on the radio that we had this road rage incident. Now we've got Burch who still hasn't come down from it. Burch was driving around, whatever happened, he shoots into the other vehicle. And now he's still driving and he pulls into the back of a parking lot and he's still going through his rage. He's coming down from it, of course, but he's still in the rage moment. Now we don't know how long that's going to last. And what do we do as cops? Well, we don't take our time, that's why we have lights and sirens on our vehicles, right? Our job is to get there quickly and solve problems. And so all of a sudden what we got is we have Burch sitting in the parking lot and he sees a marked unit pull in and he knows it's for him. And Wade, Trooper Palmer, is calling on the radio going, "Hey, I think I got that vehicle." And pulling up. So what does Burch do? Burch does what any trapped, cornered animal is going to do, he lashes out.

Yep.

Why? Because he hasn't called his dad yet. He hasn't said, "I'm sorry." He hasn't reached a penitential state. The rage is still right there and it's so palpable that all he can think of is shooting this cop. What he does next is important. Now he goes back to his vehicle and he phones his dad and says, "Wow, I, I think I just did this." The realization, Brian, is so powerful now that it forces him to come down for a minute and look around and see all the smoke and the bodies, you know, and the shell casings. And he goes, "Oh, my God, what have I done?" I think that's important, a lot of people will never get that. His options closed in on him. He's in the parking lot. Let's say it was seven minutes later. Let's say it was 15 minutes later. Let's say the trooper, Wade Palmer, decided to call somebody else and corner the vehicle and do a felony stop. So much could have happened at that moment. Now we're not saying that you have to consider all of those. We're having to say to you now that rage is very random and if we confront rage temporally with the gift of time and distance, we're likely to abate rage at a rate where we can then go in and affect the arrest or solve the problem.

It goes back to the interaction of all of the elements in the environment, is that you do have a say in those situations. It might not be a lot, right? You might not have a lot of options, you might not have too much. But, but you, you actually can influence the environment and the environment can influence you.

So, so listen, even allowing Burch to sit in that car while Wade Palmer is in the parking lot for a little bit longer. Burch could have committed suicide. He could have called his dad and his dad would have said, "Hey, son, you got to do." He could have driven away and caused a high-speed pursuit. The idea is those are so many spirals, but we're not sure which one's going to come next. So what's the best one? The best one is the least caloric input or output, and allowing distance and allowing rage to run its course. Now if the person's going to drive, of course we got to stop them. That didn't happen in this case, Burch got out of the car shooting. We knew he had a gun, we knew he likely had a gun because he had shot people that were before. So what we have to stop doing is stop influencing the environment by poking it like jello when it's moving around and then being surprised at the outcome. We have to understand that there are certain things that are going to occur when we poke the bear.

And you know, this kind of ties into to the sort of the, the "so what" of this. You know, you got into even, you mentioned the the Klebold and Harris and Columbine. They had a similar dilemma. You know, things kind of got to the end of what they had planned and they, they're sitting there, they're out of options, they're, you know, counting down. They committed suicide in front of each other, right? And it's almost like, you know, similar to a Burch sort of in, in a sense, right? We talked about it, you just brought it up right there. He could have done this, he could had these options, called Dad. But, you know, again, we, this isn't bashing the decision-making process that happened in the incident. Some, we're doing, we're just, or bashing the trooper. No, we're picking it apart, saying big picture across time and distance and across scale and how all of these events tie together because we're tying together a bunch of seemingly non-related events, but they all have similar contributing factors that lead to a very horrible outcome in all of them. Of course. And so the basically is the, in, in the "so what" of this, you know, you talk about the, and we said it here, the gift of time and distance, critical thinking, advanced critical thinking, you know, situational awareness training. Will it help identify things like this? You know, what, what sort of is that, that "so what" in, in, in all of this? I mean, because these are random, but, you know, they can be influenced. So I guess I can be part of the randomness.

Of course you can. Life is a series of experiments. Stop for a minute, and if you think about it that way, it's going to open your eyes. I would quote Smashing Pumpkins: "Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage," which means that I'm scampering around my environment and certain things happen and they push back.

Certain part of the soundtrack of my youth on that one.

Exactly. Okay. So, yeah, that's great though, because identifying rage is like suppressing rage, you have to understand the internal dynamics of intense human emotion processing, and that's exactly what we try to teach in class. The difference between critical thinking and advanced critical thinking is that in advanced critical thinking, it allows you to modify your perceptions and control your emotions and gives you personally the gift of time and distance. Now if I combine that with the ability to imagine, create, enact, forecast likely outcomes, successful outcomes, then guess what? Those are alternatives. And if I can create an alternative, which Trooper Wade Palmer had no alternatives, he committed himself. He pulled into the parking lot, he was on the radio. And guess what? Burch had a plan, Palmer didn't. And in that nanosecond, guess what? That rage and that random encounter in that parking lot turned fatal. So, so we have to intercede before it becomes the most dangerous course of action. We have to project future and anticipate what likely could happen. That's exactly where our shortcomings are in the inability to control emotions in others.

Look, I'm going to be able to perceive the pre-event indications of rage faster if I can see them in myself because now what I'm doing is the tactical cunning portion of our course is I'm perceiving what it would be like if I was in this person's shoes. Brian, you've never succumbed to road rage and shot three people in a car.

No, it's never going to get there for me.

Then you never drove the next hour around thinking about that, backed into a parking lot and said, "Should I stay or should I go?" Burch did. So what we have to do is we have to stop thinking of what procedurally we need to do to bring Burch into custody and what we have to start thinking about is this just took a turn at the random exit. So I need to slow time down and consider options and alternatives. If we did that, this would have had a drastically different outcome.

No, and that's just it. And I think that's where people, because it is hard, and we talk about that too sometimes in class, like to psychologically to take another human being's perspective, especially it's what you, you, it's technically almost impossible, but it, it's not.

Because I have to say in that Burch situation, "Okay, what options if I'm Burch, what options do I have right now?"

Yep.

"I can kill my way out. I can kill myself," meaning I can shoot my way out with the police. "I can kill myself," or, "I can give up." I mean, that's it. I mean, that, that's literally. Those aren't weighed evenly, and I agree with that. But remember, the spirals that come from that can be many.

But, but how, but there's still only a few options that I have.

Exactly. If Wade Palmer would have thought of that at that moment in time, one, I think this is a suspect vehicle, I think this is going on. It's the same thing, look. Your buddies Klebold and Harris had an agenda, and when their agenda was going their way, okay, things were wonderful. They were laughing, they were joking. Listen, it went just as they had planned. Hurting people, everything was fine. And herding, I mean, herding them into the kill zone. Now all of a sudden, things started changing. One, a couple of people took a shot at them. That kind of changed the math a little bit. Their bombs didn't go off. Okay. And then when they came back to the killing field that they had created, all the students had escaped. Now all of a sudden it got real.

It, it got real.

And what did they decide to do? "Well, now that our plan's changed and it was inevitable that we were going to kill ourselves anyway, might as well carry it out." Had we, I want to make sure that you understand that rushing into a situation forces randomness to spin faster. And when it does, it's the Wheel of Fortune, baby, you're not sure what's going to come next. So you can limit the option by increasing distance and slowing time down, and I truly believe that. So now as random as it can be, at least there'll be some modicum of understanding, some modicum of transparency so I can look at it and going, "This is turning into a crap sandwich. I need to back up." Maybe that's all it takes, Brian. Maybe all it takes is to say, "This isn't going the direction I was thinking it was going. It's no longer an MLCOA. I need to slow time down."

Which is what Cutter did at Altamont.

Which is what Cutter did at Altamont after being at Woodstock. So he received the training of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and a whole lot of reefer. And that training allowed him to make a comparative baseline for danger. Okay. He knew what fun was like, he knew what a hand job was like, he knew what smoking a bong hit was like and surfing was like. But when he went to Altamont, the music was the same, Brian, but there was a vibration difference, a frequency difference. And that's what he picked up on. So the best of us pick up on those frequencies and we anticipate that things are going sideways and we rein them back in by allowing rage to run its course and accepting that randomness is the order of the day and therefore giving ourselves time and distance to anticipate the thing that's going to happen next.

Yeah, and it's the using the information to make a decision on it and actually you deciding differently based on what's happening.

Cutter was an information scientist, he didn't know at the time. But what he was doing, he connected data points because of his tacit and experiential knowledge, and it drove him to the decision, "We would be better served leaving." And you know who didn't do that? Murdoch didn't do that. Right? Meredith didn't do that. And all of a sudden, all the good intentions. The Stones did that, they knew it at the time, yes. And the Stones never anticipated this as a likely outcome, but they should have. Okay. They should have said, "What if randomness shows up and bites us in the ass in the middle of 'Under My Thumb'?" And they never did. They never did. And to this day, they can live with that on their conscience. The Hells Angels don't care. They moved onward and upward. And our, you know, the Hells Angel that stabbed Murdoch, he died a very short time later in a suspicious accident, you know, drowning in a lake. But there again, that was randomness. You know, one person becomes famous for dying, think about that. And then the next person has forgotten to history. So randomness can, can really, really put us on the rail to inevitable danger, but it doesn't have to. We can anticipate it and slow time down.

Yeah, and we can, we, it's an, it's an interaction, it's not an inevitability.

Nope. Doesn't have to be. It could be, yes, but it doesn't have to be. That's the difference.

No, it doesn't have to be. You said something and you know that we consistently fight about this, and it's a good fight. You say it's almost impossible to walk in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes, but I say then you said, "But you have, but you don't have to."

Exactly. Because you can get close enough, and cognition, cognitive ability allows us to, Brian. We're given mirror neurons. We're given the chemical cocktail to be able to influence others, just like we said earlier, by being happy or being angry. And we can change that environment. If I would have known that at Altamont, could I have stepped in and seen that and changed it? If Wade the Trooper would have seen that early enough, could he have said, "Not today, not tonight. I don't think I have a full grasp on the situation." And again, it doesn't have to be inevitable, but it could be if we're not paying attention to the cues.

I think that was a lot that we unpacked with that and, and, and, you know, again, if you're, if you're listening, you can go read that. I would suggest rereading it on the...

Lot of great photos.

Lot of great photos that tie it in together, that really get the feeling across too. Because without that, you know, it's, it's just, it's just a spoken word, which is, which is effective, but, but when you, it adds more color to it and adds to the story. And obviously we have all of our other stuff on the Patreon. But, you know, I did want to talk about this one because those two things, and, you know, it's obviously fitting, we're in Virginia and then we talked about Virginia Tech and Cho, so it's kind of, we're so close, the randomness showed up and said, "You know, here, here we are." So let's talk about rage and how that affects it. So again, I, I think we, we covered a lot of ground. You know, if you're listening, and if you have any questions, you can obviously always reach out to us at thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. And go to the Patreon site, sign up, and ask us questions. We always answer questions on there for, for all of our followers. And, you know, let us know what you think. I'd love to get some other opinions or feedback on it. And I don't know, you have anything else to, to add to that?

Sorry, shout out to Cutter, I still love you. You taught me so much. Thanks to everybody for listening. It's our second episode, we're having a ball. Yeah, we're no strangers to this. We've been doing it for a good long time in a different format. And thanks to everyone to help us make it better in Roanoke and Brian here at The Music Lab at The Jefferson Center. It's a really cool spot. And I think that's good. And everyone listening, don't forget that training changes behavior.