Left Of Greg 093 Apocalyptic Psychology with Dr. Carlos Vazquez

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We should be live now. Does it say "live" up there? We'll just go live on Facebook, buddy.

All right, well, we are live and ready to go and recording for those of you just listening. This was recorded just a few days prior, but we have a very special guest on, Dr. Carlos Vazquez, someone who we know, have kind of done a little bit of collaboration with, and hopefully more in the future. But thank you so much, Carlos, for hopping on the show today.

Well, thank you very much, gentlemen, for having me here. I'm honored.

Well, yeah, we really appreciate. We love talking to you. We did some stuff. We'll get into kind of what we did later. But the reason I wanted to have you on was because you are a forensic psychologist and you've written a bunch on, well, one specifically you've written on, ISIS, about apocalyptic psychology and kind of their strategies that they use to manipulate people. I think those are seen across all different extremist groups or even sometimes political organizations, whatever it is. We see it and how they actually use social media. So we can cover this in depth, but I'd love to give this a little bit of how you look at it and how you approach it with ISIS, and then we'll jump into some of the things that they specifically do.

I'll give you a very small version of how it all started. I was always fascinated by the apocalypse and the end times, but obviously, being trained in psychology, I really wondered how it has influenced people's beliefs and behavior. I know you gentlemen do the same thing, and you're always looking to see what things can influence people's behavior. I see it with the apocalypse. I thought, "Well, if people believe in heaven or hell, what type of heaven or hell they believe in, that's going to influence how they behave." Then a friend of mine told me, "Well, you know, I should read about ISIS because I think they're into this apocalyptic stuff." And I said, "Really? I have to be—when I say, 'Okay, I read about it.'" So I started reading about them, and I realized, "Wow, they really are into this stuff." And then I realized they're using it to recruit individuals, and that's kind of what led to this journey of studying ISIS, what I call apocalyptic psychology, which led to phone calls from the FBI and CIA and talking about it, which was funny because they were asking me, "What does that mean?" And, you know, it never existed before that I know of. I couldn't find it. But it really is, it's studying the influence of apocalyptic thinking, and it has an impact on individuals, and that's what they—that's what they did, that's what they used.

Yeah. So can you define then what that is, what you mean by, like, apocalyptic psychology? I love the fact that you were able to coin a new term because that's awesome, right? So you, maybe you can't trademark that, and every time someone uses it. We'll just—we'll just steal it from you. But no, just kind of define what you mean by apocalyptic psychology because obviously, I'm assuming it doesn't—ISIS doesn't have a monopoly on that type of thinking.

No, and it's been going on for—since—it's been going on for a while, centuries and decades. We saw it with the Y2K. Remember the Y2K in 1999? Everything was going to go to hell in a handbasket. Oh, this is—well, this is Facebook, so everything's going to go crazy. You have to be careful. One of the issues, I mean, we saw churches doing a lot of survival kits. Sales were going up, bunkers were going up. People were saying, "Oh, you know what's going to happen when the computer switched to 2000?" But what happens is it puts people in an urgent mode, right? In this alert mode, as you folks know, in regards to the amygdala, everything starts firing, right? They go from this Condition White kind of area to like almost Condition Red because they're really looking for this threat, and it's persistent. The media is kind of constantly hammering it down, and we've seen it before with other people who said the end of times. We saw in 2012, I think they did a study, over 30% of people believed that the end of times was going to happen according to the Mayans in 2012 when they predicted the world was going to end in December. You might remember that. So you always have a cast of characters that come out and predict that the world is coming to an end, and a lot of people unfortunately do believe it for whatever reason.

But ISIS was using it, and they were very, very clever the way they were using it because they were distorting Islam. So Islam is not based on ISIS theology. They have the distorted version of it. And what they also did was they were looking at different manuscripts. It's kind of complicated because Islam gets really complicated when you start looking at the different books that they have, hadiths, which are like their commentaries. For people who are Christians, they'll have like their Bible commentaries. And they got really involved. They started cherry-picking what they wanted, and they started cherry-picking prophecies and accomplishing them. One of the big moments was Dabiq, I don't know if you guys remember Dabiq in Syria when they took that over. That was a huge moment in their prophecy, and that really got the ball rolling because people were like, "Oh, wow, these guys actually did what the prophecy said!" And they were wearing black, and they were running with horses and with flags, right? Just like what the prophecy said. So when that started happening and they started getting territory, which was another sign, it really motivated people to join them because they saw this as the winning team. And both of you and I know that you want to join that winning team.

Yeah, well, no, and you—all that symbolism plays a lot into it, right? Especially in very religious cultures like the Muslim faith. And like you said, they use their version of it. You know, that's the problem with religion is you get to interpret it, right? So even if it's far away from what the actual tenets of the faith are, and, you know, we see that in a lot of different cultures, a lot of different religions—the "hey, this coming apocalypse, we must prepare for this, this is going to happen." And to your point, too, I get that that's sort of, maybe that's part of just biology in us. We all know we're going to die someday, right? And we don't get to usually choose when. But my always saying is my counter to that has always been, "Well, so far, anyone who's ever said that has been wrong." So the overwhelming amounts of evidence show that, well, no, we actually might be here for a little while. You know, we might need to think like, "Hey, this is an ending. It's going to be here a long time." But that—to just kind of get back to that symbolism stuff is, you know, you see that with—with organizations will pick out different parts of the faith or different tenets of belief and then come up with some symbol or way to go, "Look, see, this fits with what we were talking about." And that's not just, you know, particular to ISIS. That's a lot of different extremist groups.

Yeah, and Doc, one thing—thanks, by the way, Brian. Oh, he always throws me right into the middle. You talked for five minutes; I've got a page of notes. I know, I already think I have a page. That's always going to be an earmark of a great show. So I want to hit a couple of things that you brought up, Doc, and it's really great because for Y2K, I was an area coordinator, so I got to fly the green flag with the white cross because I was the "shell answer man" for that to tell everybody, you know, what was and wasn't going to happen. And that's amazing. But I would—I would say that both of you brought up, and clearly because of the book—the fantastic book—Brian's going to have a link on there so everybody can look up the book and get a copy of their own. But we're—we're talking about Muslim from a Christian standpoint, let's say, or from a Jewish standpoint. But let's look at David Koresh. Let's look at the Branch Davidians. Anniversary recently passed. And there was—the opening of the show showed a beautiful farm with an Arabian horse running by, and then this woman was walking by talking to the interviewer, and she goes, "Hey, I got a chance to marry Jesus Christ, that, you know, the Savior that came back down to Earth. What would you do?" And she was still under that spell here all these years later. And remember Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Murrah Federal Building, was at the Branch Davidian compound outside with the news media eating the popcorn, watching what was going on. It fascinated him.

Some of the shows that are on television right now—and Doc, you and Brian are so much younger than I am—a compliment, so send them money! But back in the '60s, the late '50s and all through the '60s, the most popular television show, comic books, cartoons, everything were Westerns. We couldn't get enough of the Westerns. That's not so now because the times have changed a little bit, haven't they? And so now what do we get? Every movie on television seems to be a zombie apocalypse thriller. It's about a race to the bottom with, you know, apocalyptic things, and society is destroyed immediately. And sometimes I think that's wrought from despair. And you brought it up, Doc, psychologically, when we take a look at it, we've got the urgent messages that come along with the brain's chemistry, and we also have the procrastination messages that come along with the brain's chemistry. So when we get a little bit older, or when we have, you know, the brain hates divided attention. When we have divided attention, we don't focus on one path. But now all of a sudden, that—that seeming urgency forces us into that mode. And now we're preppers. Now we're survivors. Now we're members of some sort of militia. I just think that's a fascinating angle. What a great topic.

As a copper for three decades, I got to tell you this: everybody says, "Well, the full moon, you know, the lunacy comes from the full moon." And then there were myriad scientists that debunked that and said that's not true. Every scientist that debunked that wasn't a cop on the road during a full moon because it goes to hell in a handbasket. And you've got to know that too from all of your clinical work, you know, so those are true things.

Oh, you're absolutely right. You hit so many things I wanted to mention. One of the things is Have Gun – Will Travel is one of my favorite, there you go, Westerns back then. Paladin, exactly. Paladin was the show's name. It was great. The best business card ever. But even in 2020, now we're getting it. And what I've noticed too, some of these years that have a special kind of number to them, right, 2000, 2020, tend to maybe attract people. I think Sylvia Browne predicted something was going to happen in 2020. I just did a podcast the other day. We were—I was talking a little bit about it, how Sylvia Browne mentioned in 2020 that I think there was going to be a pandemic. Another person, another psychic, and it escapes me right now, her name. She said that in 2020 it was going to be Armageddon. So again, 2020, "Hey, it's provocative, sounds cool. Let's do it," right?

Let's see. Exactly. Right.

Well, they're good. That's right.

And that you—you see that a lot, especially when people make the generalized predictions. I mean, there was even one with someone who wrote a sci-fi thing about a coronavirus hitting around this time, and you're like, "I know, it sounds crazy to predict something like that," but it's actually not. These are things we've seen over time. So that's why I think it fits into when some of these extremist organizations come up with a very symbolic message, and they attach that to some prehistoric thing that they had written about, or that person learned about. "Oh, man, well, now I'm—I'm hooked in."

So kind of like you, because I know you break down specifically what ISIS did, and kind of like different stages that you would—you would say, like, satisfy my needs, right? If I'm looking around, because I would start there, and maybe you could—maybe you have a different opinion. But I always say, like, a lot of people who end up in those groups are looking for belonging to a group. So if you look for belonging to a group, you'll find one. So maybe that's the book club or the sewing club, or that's ISIS. And I know those sound so completely different, but a lot of the psychology behind it is very similar. So what are these stages, or what needs do I need satisfied if I'm looking for that? And so because, maybe I think for some people, they'll start to fall into this trap, and now if we teach them, like, "Look, these are some of the things that you're looking for, and if you're not careful, you'll find it."

Yeah, it's a great point. And one of the things I did notice—I mean, I read hundreds of books on not only Islam, I wanted to get immersed in the culture as much as I could. I interviewed soldiers over there. I interviewed Iraqi soldiers, Afghani soldiers. I interviewed people from ISIS. I interviewed American soldiers, British soldiers. Anything I could get my hands on, try to get an understanding of the individuals. And what I did learn was it's much more nuanced, like everything in life. I always say, "Life isn't simple, it's really just nuanced." And that's the problem we get because a lot of times we see this dichotomous type of behavior from individuals on social media. But the individuals satisfying the needs, as you mentioned, it depends on who you're recruiting. If you're recruiting the person who's going to go on the field to fight, that's a very different type of need. A lot of those individuals in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, a lot of those individuals were younger males that maybe had a hard time getting a, for instance, a wife. And one of the reasons because in that culture, at least in their area—and again, you can't overgeneralize because even people in Iraq, there's a lot of different types of ethnicities in Iraq, different groups. But in particular that they targeted, if you didn't have a job as a male, it was very difficult to get a wife. Very, very difficult.

So ISIS offered you a lot of things. They offered you, "Hey, in the meantime, we're actually going to give you a woman," which was what they considered an infidel, and it doesn't count, so it's not cheating, and you're not doing anything wrong because she's—she's not Muslim, so it doesn't matter. That's how they portrayed it. That's what they viewed it as. So they gave him a woman, usually it was, obviously, a hostage taken, kidnapped from somewhere. Yazidis were really common, unfortunately. They took a lot of their women. And so they would give them the woman, they would give him a wife eventually. They would also give him money. So these were all the needs they had. And then here's the other component: they targeted their family needs as well. So they had this young male who now they said, "Look, you can give this money to your family. We're going to give them a stipend." So they were able to provide money for their family, which is huge because now they become the breadwinner, you know, it was hurting. "Oh, by the way, if you were to die, don't worry, because you're going to be able to go to Jannah," their paradise, their heaven. "You're going to get the virgins." And there's a lot of different—every imam that ISIS hired, because they hired different imams and usually had to say what they wanted them to say. It was complicated because they had all different types of versions of how many virgins they would get or whatnot. But the other thing they would do, they gave them a free pass. They gave them this fast pass to all their family members, I think it was up to 18 or 20, depending on who you talk to, to go to Jannah, to go to their paradise, to go to heaven. So think about it, not only did you provide money for their family in the terrestrial world here, you gave the person a woman, your wife, you also gave them eternity for their family, you saved their entire family. You just went—so you're basically, this is, I guess, to use a modern term, you're going from zero to hero pretty, pretty quickly there.

And I—I see where that comes into play. So because I look at those as, like, man, these are different types of identity issues. These are socioeconomic issues. There's like the fit—everyone fits into this mold so much. And because I—and you know, a lot of people want to make it about, "Well, it's about religion and this." It's like, "Well, that's—that's a—that's the tool they're using, but there's a lot more behind it than what's—what's going on." And I think that you just—those different areas, I mean, man, you're a young kid, you don't have a lot going on, you're not fitting anywhere, you don't have a job, you don't have a wife. Now you get all of this stuff, and you get to be the hero that you never were, that—that you're now—that the central character in that action movie you've been watching your whole life, and you get to play that. I mean, that's, especially when you're young, that's incredibly powerful. Absolutely incredibly powerful. And I—I think we see that a lot with all kinds of different groups that are out there right now, maybe not to as much of an extent, obviously, or maybe not taking as much action as ISIS did. Maybe it's not someone literally going to fight in battle. Maybe it's just protesting on the street, but I see a lot of similarities in there, right? I don't know. Great idea.

My thing is this one, I want to disabuse everybody of the thought that it's a weak-minded person that falls for this, right? I don't know. True. There's a lot of things. If you take a look at, like, the Stockholm Syndrome, you know, you've got rational people put into an irrational, excited state, and they do certain things because of it. And I would say that there's probably the same type of thing with a gambling addiction where you see a person and they think, "Wow, I only have a couple of dollars, and I want to make something out of it." So despair drives that, not mental illness, and certainly not weak-minded folks. And Brian, I would—I would say, I wrote these ideas down. Again, it's a great guest, Carlos. When you come on, it's always a lot of fun. You're very inspirational. So if you had a bunch of people and you put them in a room and you gave everybody a laminated copy of Kübler-Ross, you know, the five stages of grief, and you said, "Do me a favor, categorize these five stages of grief in an incident that you were involved in that we all know about," and then have a counterpart somewhere else in the room write down what they thought those reactions were. It's going to be completely different. And the reason I bring that up is perception is the reality of the human at the end of the stick. So you've got the quatrains from Nostradamus, right? And I know we've all read those. And I would bring those into play to say that a light-haired stranger on the fifth day of the rabbit will come bearing gifts. And that through the ages—and folks, I'm paraphrasing, don't go look it up—that through the ages meant the typhoon was going to hit, you know, on this day. You can make sense out of it because it's—it's obtuse.

And what—what you got is now look at something that happened in your backyard, Dr. Carlos. You've got Isla Vista. That's not too far away in California. You got Elliot Rodger. Elliot Rodger, spurned by every attempt to get a girl. Every time he came up, they're like, you know, that he also felt that because of his race, his ethnicity, some other factors. He's a brilliant cat if you read any of the stuff he wrote. Okay, he was a little touched. He had a little mental illness that he—that he had to get reined in, but it wasn't to the point that that caused his psychopathy. What happened is he was—he could have easily been a willing participant as a body bomber in ISIS or as a sniper somewhere else. And your book outlines that. And I think that's important that we've got kids in Minneapolis, and we've got kids in Seattle, and we've got kids in Jacksonville. They can be recruited. And how are they recruited? They're recruited to the promise of something different, maybe something better, maybe somebody will remember my name somewhere. And, man, that's dangerous if you don't have training and education to counter that. That's a dangerous slippery slope.

If I could clarify one thing, too, the other thing I noticed the way they targeted American recruits was different than the way they targeted those recruits in the Middle East. Absolutely. There was a different target there. And what they were looking for here were individuals who felt marginalized. Greg mentioned it as well, people who didn't feel wanted, people didn't care about them. Yep, these were the people they were targeting. They were even existential in their magazines. When I read their magazines—yeah, folks, I read every single one of them unfortunately—but when I read their magazines, they were very, very clever, unfortunately. And one of the things I remember reading, it always stands out to me, they said they use a Barnum statement. I know you guys know what the Barnum statements are. It's always overgeneralized statements that it includes everybody, right? Everybody falls for it, like, "I don't take criticism," "You don't take criticism very well." And people think, "Yeah, that's me. That's me." That's the Barnum statement, folks, out there. But I remember one of them was, "Are you tired of working 40 hours a week? Are you tired of going home and there's nothing to do? And this is all in life? Is just work and watch TV every day?" And I'm looking at this going, "This is from a terrorist group who's beheading people, and you're tapping into this, I guess, this inner feeling that a lot of us do have at times, right? We're transient, so sometimes we'll feel this feeling." And I was like, "Wow, they're really going for the existential approach here." But anyway, yeah, they do target a lot of these individuals, and they don't recruit them in a day. It takes months to groom them, right?

And so—so, I—I know that that again goes into kind of once you have that hook set, then that kind of grooming process, it can take a while for them to go, you know, what we call "flash to bang," or from you reading an internet post to now you're getting off a plane in the Middle East going to fight, you know, the infidels. Like, that—that takes a while, and there's many steps in there. But you guys all just brought up something, you know, you talk about marginalized people, and, and, you know, Greg, you said the term "willing participant," yep, and I think that's important. So one of the distinctions I see with a lot of these different groups, too, is that same guy who maybe, you even just brought up with the Barnum statements, like that's how you sell a weight loss program, too. That's how you sell a gym membership: "Are you tired of this? Are you tired of looking like this?" Yeah, because it's so general and broad, I go, "Well, yeah, I guess I can identify with that. Yeah, I'm tired of working that much. I don't want to do that." And then that's Step One, and then it goes a little further, a little further. And if those slow, subtle changes over time, right, I'm less likely to even notice how far down the rabbit hole I've gone, so to speak, right?

So when you're looking for that, and that's why I say some of these people, you could have also got them to be active members of the community, I think. You know what I'm saying? Like, that same person that's willing to do that, well, that's the same person that's willing to join the U.S. military or become a police officer or get involved. And I—I think, or at least I would say that from basically a psychological standpoint, there's a lot of similar traits and characteristics in their behavior. So it's like, "How did they, you know, so if—if this occurs mainly today over social media, right?" It's not, especially when you talk about ISIS, I don't have to go to the mosque to get recruited anymore. I can sit at my home on Facebook, right? Or same thing, I don't have to go show up to a rally that I've got a pamphlet for at a gun show. I can just have access to it on my phone. So how, kind of specifically, do they use social media to do this?

Yeah, the other interesting thing too, you kind of remind me of something: they also target people who didn't know Islam well. Yeah, they did not want people who knew Islam well. That was very problematic for them. Also, another thing people always say, "Oh, there was a bunch of psychopaths." One of the things I want to clear up, they're not—most of them weren't psychopaths, because psychopaths are very hard to control. They're on their own wavelength. They don't want to work with anybody. They don't care about anybody. So they might have a few in there, and those are people who are probably isolated for some purpose. But yeah, psychopaths they were not.

Unfortunately, on social media, they did use a line. I think this is one of the reasons why they're almost gone now is because they were using social media completely free in a way, right? There were no restrictions for them. It was really bizarre. I would watch all their videos on YouTube, thankfully I was able to, before, right, while I was writing the book, because they took them all down, which was great. But they had people like Anwar al-Awlaki. And Anwar al-Awlaki, again, very sharp guy in the sense that he knew, "I'm going to target them, American, in an American sense." What I mean by that is he knew about burgers and hot dogs and holidays and TV shows. He knew the nostalgia around being an American, which is a hard thing to define anyway. But he knew what he meant, at least in the overall sense, and he spoke. He was articulate. He could relate to them. And he was very powerful in that. So they used YouTube for that with the sermons. They answered those existential questions that we all have, things like, "Where are we going to go after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people?" And they created a lot, too, this "us versus them" mentality on social media, which is happening today, this tribalism, I guess, as they call it. So they created this dichotomous view that it's "us versus Western culture." That's how ISIS viewed it.

So they were creating this—"these are the people holding you back." So what you would have, if you had an American who felt marginalized, who felt that the government was against them, who felt society was against them, nobody wanted them, they resonated with them. And if you're over in the Middle East, or whatever other country that you felt the West was holding you back, you resonated with them. So they would use Twitter, they created fake accounts, they created some accounts that were fake just to be able to show these positive messages, and then every so often they interspersed things in. They would create Facebook pages. They had magazines. They were really big on music. Yeah, because music had an impact on people. So they would create their own songs, right? Their brain remembers a lot more if you connect something salient. So they would tag these music—this music was a cappella music, which they thought was really powerful because you can't—in really conservative versions of Islam, you can't listen to certain types of music that have words, and they don't want that. So you can't do that. Then they lumped everybody together, and then they threw in a lot of Catholic stuff into there too, with the Pope and the Western culture destroying everybody, and all this was propagated through the social media, which was crazy. And then they jumped into a lot of the people who were anti-government, so it was kind of interesting how they piggybacked on those individuals and said, "Hey, yeah, we agree with you. Those guys are nuts up there."

No, and, man, you bring up some, like, each one of these—well, each, as I'm saying, like, each one of these points, we could probably do an entire podcast episode on, and, and meaning, because that's how deep they go and how much you've seen. But that "us versus them" mentality is very, very dangerous because it—it makes it that binary world. It makes it very, like you said, this dichotomous view. So now you're forced—now I have to make a decision because I'm like, "Well, I—I got to be on a team because we all have to be part of a group or a team," right? That's just innate in our human behavior. We like to fit in. Like you said, there are very few people who don't, and that's you—you like different people with psychopathic traits and stuff like that. No, they don't want to be controlled. They want to do their own thing. There's not a lot of people like that, right? And so, but and the beauty, too, of that "us versus them" sort of mentality is it—it makes it very simple, right? So now it's very—it's an easy view of the world. It's a simple view of the world, because as you know, there's, like you said, there's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of subtlety. All of these issues are very, very complicated sometimes. But we don't want that because I need it just on the tip of my tongue. I just want to be able to say this. And there's all kinds of different psychology behind that. You know, it's like the whole idea of—of, you know, someone living underneath a tyrannical rule, right? "No, when I'm under a tyrannical rule, I have this horrible government, you know, that's brutal dictatorship ruling over me. Not only do I get to blame, you know, my life on that." I mean, I literally get to blame everything on that. "I no longer have a bad marriage because it's their fault," right? "I no longer have, like, hey, I'm not strong enough in the gym. It's, oh, it's because I got this brutal dictator." So I kind of have this scapegoat where I can blame not just what I think is wrong with the world, but kind of what I think of is wrong with me as well. And now I go, "Well, it's—it's their fault. Well, if I just—if I just get rid of that, well, then I'm good." And unfortunately, it's—it's not that—it's not that easy. So I don't—I don't know, Greg. I see you, like...

Yeah, I—I'm feverishly writing to try to keep up with you jerks because you talk about such great topics that there's so many angles that I'd like to go down. So I got just a couple, and I'll throw them all out there for you cats. So one of the things is, you guys are so spot on to this, and this is why it's fun to listen and talk to this. And folks, if you're viewing or listening to us, jot down and do your homework because this is as much about your kids as smoking or vaping or anything else. It's, listen, when the message comes to me, and the message makes it feel like, "You feel my problems, and you understand me," I'm more likely to reach out because the mirror neurons in my brain and the electrochemical neurotransmitters make me want to crave that friendship, and the homophily kicks in. So trust me, Brian, I agree with you, we could do five more shows with Carlos on just these topics.

Here's one: Bloods, Crips, and the Latin Counts are easier or harder to get into than it is to get into ISIS, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda. That's a problem we still haven't addressed. The FBI's brilliant at tracking down people, that's why they're surrounding Dr. Carlos just when he was doing the research. But those organizations, homegrown organizations and gangs, are harder to get into than it is to go, you know, to Pakistan, let's say, and be recruited in one of these. And one of our good friends from Sri Lanka, Brian, Dr. Supan, and Samar Sakira—shout out to him if he's listening, great to him. So I spent some time in Sri Lanka and spent a lot of time talking to Dr. Supan. And I'm coming back from the airport from a recent trip, and at Denver sometimes you can't get into Gunnison, it's just not going to happen on that day, and you got to drive the five and a half hours one way from Denver Airport, and you got to pay $300 for a rental sled one way to drop it off. It's ridiculous stuff because you live in a remote area, apocalyptic thinking. Yeah, exactly, that's me. And so I got my pioneer kit in the back, and, you know, I got a hood on, black Nomex, when I'm driving. So the guy that's checking me into my car is on his phone and talking to somebody else, and they're speaking a language that I'm quite familiar with. And so I happen to say, "Hey, are you from Sri Lanka?" And he goes, "Yeah, I am." And I said, "Hey, hate to eavesdrop, but it's a long way. Can we get this along?" And so we started the conversation, and he hated America. And I said, "Well, you hate America? You got a great job, you're working at a great place. I mean, you've got great clothing." "Yeah, I'm still doing a hustle, and I'm 60. What are you talking about?" And he's like, "Oh, you know, they told us the streets were paved with gold, and they said all this." Listen, he was going through this buyer's remorse, the stages of regret. But a lot of those ISIS people found out too when they finally got on the ground, it's, "Shut your mouth and dig a hole, and you guys stand up there with the rifles."

So there's this balancing act when, Brian, as you were saying, "I need to find something that completes me." Hey, listen, the marketing up front is going to go right to your brain, but then when you get on the ground, that's when the bullet's going to go to your brain or the bomb is going to blow up. So how do we keep them interested? Well, it must be working because Adam al-Amriki, "the American," was from California. And he certainly wasn't from the Middle East. John Walker Lindh was captured up in Mazar-i-Sharif and was there when Mike Spann got killed at the former CIA. Sorry, all of his coming back. John Walker Lindh, he is a kid from America. Omar Hammami was born and raised in Daphne, Alabama, and that's not his real name. They assumed these identities because for the first time somebody handed him an AK and a radio and said, "Go lead the troops, buddy. You're in charge." And I think that's overwhelming.

And final point before I throw it back into the scrum, Doc, you were talking about music and how music appeals. Hey, you've got these Mexican gangs and Central and South American gangs. Corridos is a story song that's been around for generations. So how does that appeal to somebody? All of a sudden you're seeing a bikini-clad female. She's standing next to a Mercedes, that's a stretch limo, and the guy's got a band playing behind him and says, "All this [expletive] from slinging dope and killing on the streets." And you know what? I'm eating the popcorn, I'm going, "Wow, I want some of that stuff because, you know, I've lived in a barrio all my life. I haven't had it." So all of these are salient points. And again, Brian, to the readers and the viewers, and again, Dr. Carlos, for your book and for your radio show, listen, folks, tap into this because if you understand this, you'll understand how people get recruited to do zany things all over the nation, and how people fall into the trap. It's great stuff. I'm sorry, Brian, I just wanted to get all that out before I forgot it.

No, again, I'm writing notes too! [Laughter] No, no, and that's how we look at it too, right? So Greg brought up, you know, the Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings. We talked about cartels, you know, with the corridos. They all have different—now they have their own music and their own culture and their own language and their own beliefs and thoughts. And that's, you know, we—we do the general lumping them in as, "Look, it's all the same." Like you joined—you grew up and joined a street gang. I grew up and joined the U.S. Marine Corps. So it's not—it's not too far different. Our—our intent and our aims are likely a little bit different, but a lot of the stuff is the same, especially just the psychology behind it and how to do that.

And so I'm just curious, if you have, like, you know, how—how do I—you know, me, I'm sitting here in the U.S. and I'm going through Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all this stuff, and I'm just bombarded by these photons just all day long. And it's information, information, and I don't know the credibility of any of it, right? I don't know what's real, what isn't, what's just a video that's out of context, what's a real statement, what's the actual story, you know? And so I'm going through that as—how do—like, my other thing is because it's hard. I mean, I'll say that's a general hard problem we have in the U.S. for anyone. I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how dumb you are. Going through something and trying to determine fact from fiction and what you need to believe is very difficult now. So, and I think we're just still as a society figuring out the best way to do that. But how do you see, like, how do I prevent myself from falling into that trap? Like, are there some general indicators that I can look out for? I go, "Oh, I see a statement kind of like that. I know it must be because you brought up a good one." I mean, the overarching one, the apocalyptic one: if I'm telling you that things are ending, like, that's—that's, I'm trying to get you to feel a certain way. And if I'm leading with emotion and feeling, generally there might not be a lot of meat on the bone there. I don't know what your thoughts are on there or how to kind of like identify that stuff when you see it.

That's the million-dollar question. And if I could spend one minute—we're talking about my notes, and I can get to your answer. Oh, yeah, possible. Yep. Yeah, absolutely, go for it. There's a lot of stuff I want to throw out there really quickly, and Greg will have to grab his pen here in a minute. But fundamental attribution bias is another one, right? Yes, that's what we see a lot. People, especially with these individuals who go for these groups, terrorist groups, gangs, whatnot, and when they look at these things, they attribute their downfall, their downtrodden life to external forces. So that external locus of control has been given over to what society, what the environment is doing to them, and they don't take as much responsibility as they should. So the internal locus of control is really low for these individuals is what we found out. So the internal locus of control means you have control over your own outcomes, your own decisions in life. And a lot of these individuals believe they really don't. And it doesn't matter who you are. These people could come from wealthy families, they can come from political families. I've seen them all in ISIS, they had everybody. They didn't discriminate, got to give them that. There are no violations in that. So it didn't matter what race or ethnicity, what socioeconomic background you have, they could use you, what skills that you had. So that was interesting for me.

The other thing Greg mentioned about membership, getting into it. Yeah, ISIS was a lot easier than other groups, depending on where you were and what you were going to do in the organization. It also reminded me, some aspects were just as difficult as an outlaw motorcycle gang, right? Those guys actually have background checks a lot of times. They have former police officers that have retired that have taken and done their background checks. Really bizarre stuff. But also, you mentioned the news and how that alters America because the way they present things can alter—can alter your view and perception of the world. This is kind of leading to your answer now. So when you—like Facebook, for instance, was caught a few years back—there's an article on it—where Facebook was manipulating posts. So they posted a lot of positive things, and then they were analyzing the comments of people to see how they were influenced. And they realized, "Oh, look, they're more happy when we post a series of this. And if we post a series of negative things, they changed again." Then there are other things like search engine manipulation effect that was done a couple years ago in regards to politics, where when you search something—now look at it, folks—when you search something now, look at the same cast of characters that keep popping up. It doesn't really matter what side you're on, it doesn't matter left or right, it doesn't really matter. But you'll see the same newspapers or news sites coming up all the time, and you can see it on YouTube now as well.

No, and that changes even your location. So if I'm in—if I'm searching on Google here versus—we travel all the time—so I'll search something on Google like, and your suggested things that—that to finish your Google search, right, as suggestions will pop up. They're different based on locations. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I just—that one popped in my head. Would not come up with that.

Yeah, absolutely. And they are. When you look up things, you'll see and everything is going one direction or another, and it's really bizarre because our ability to access information isn't as free as it used to be, which makes it much more complicated. It's fast, it's fast and much faster, but not as free.

Great point, Doc, absolutely. It is. And you know what? 70% of the people don't read past the headlines and about the first paragraph. And if you read it—and I do this on my—on my show—if you read it, you read the headline. It's regurgitated in the first paragraph. Then the next paragraph, the majority of people won't pass the second paragraph. So all you did is reread the headline. Don't tell me that's an accident. They've done that on purpose because they know they're going to keep it regurgitated. And then the actual meaning or the other side of this coin is about five or eight paragraphs down. So you might have seen some kind of hyperbolic headline, and then later, about seven paragraphs down, "Oh, wait a minute, but here it says it may not be true." But the headline made it seem like it was true or was this fault or was this that happened, but then seven paragraphs down, it doesn't.

So I guess a couple ideas: one, I like, I'll tell people is read the whole entire article. You can't dissect everything in life; there's not enough time. So you're going to have to dissect things that are important to you, things that you feel that are important to you, things that you value, because you're not going to sit here, "Well, did the Dodgers really win by that much?" You can't sit here and start looking at everything. "Did they really lose because of that home run?" It doesn't make any sense. You have to look at things that matter to you. So if you, unless you lay down the political world, I'm not going to get into that. But there's—there's a lot of stuff out there that politicians will use, and their campaigns will use, and they'll use hyperbole. Look, I mean, last night was a classic example. You have a debate, and you got one side says one person won, the other side says the other person won. Yeah, now you're sitting there going, "Okay, they're not biased whatsoever, are they?" Yeah, that's going to be rare to find any bias.

I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead.

Yeah, so you have a lot of things that you have to be careful. I always tell people, look for local news. And look what's happening to local news. They're trying to squash them because you look, like these, for me at least, personally, it's harder to lie because the locals know it. So if you're in San Diego, and you're in Carlsbad, "That's not even in Carlsbad, that didn't even happen here," they know it. They can figure that out. But if you're talking about Carlsbad in New York, like, "What is Carlsbad? Is that a movie? What is that thing?" And they don't even know. So that's kind of crazy what's going on. Like I tell a lot of people, a lot of times, "Look how many people, how many cities are looting right now?" Maybe 5, 10. I want to give it to you. I'm going to say there's 30 cities that are looting. I don't think so, but I'll give it to you. There are 3,000 cities in the U.S. That's one percent. But if you look at the news, you look at some availability bias, you think it's happening everywhere, America's blowing up. There's no way this will find. I'll leave it there for now.

No, no, that's—that's all—it's right on, especially with, you know, you talk about fundamental attribution error and our biases towards that and how we digest that. Great points to the local news. I'd say that's one thing I love when I travel is that it'll be the only thing I turn on in the hotel if I want to watch something is like, "Hey, there's a local news." Plus it's obviously, too, because it gives me—I need to know what's going on in the area when I travel, and that's when you'll find out. But you find out about the high school team that just won, and you see cool stories about like Bill down the street that did something, and so the local flair. And like you just said, they're reporting things that are going on in their area, which obviously just in general for security, that makes sense. So you want to know what's going on, whether there's some big political rally the next day or a protest, that something's happened. You can avoid those areas. But so not just at a tactical level, I think it's a great point that I kind of didn't even realize is like they actually have to be more careful with the message because, like you said, the people watching it live in that immediate area will go, "Hey, what—what the hell is going on? That's—that's not true."

And so—so that—that's incredible. And, you know, you—you did bring up some good points. I tell people too is, you know, think about what's important to you, and if you want to deep dive that, you know, then—then go for it. Research all you can because there's so many issues now that we'll be bombarded with that we're supposed to take a stance on. We're supposed to know about. But how do I know about all these issues? Like—like you want to talk about U.S. foreign policy, geopolitics is extremely complicated. So you can't take a little click headline and go, "Yeah, this administration's doing something wrong," or, "Yeah, they're killing it, they're doing a great job over here." And they're like, "Well, hang on, that's a little oversimplifying the issue." So I—I think taking some of the information that way is good.

And, you know, one of the other things you said perfect about like the protests, too, especially, and I'm not trying to diminish anything that's happened anywhere, but when they talk about, like, Kenosha, Wisconsin, I'm like, "Kenosha?" Do you know—do you know how big—like, this is Kenosha, Wisconsin, because I just drove through there the other day because I was visiting my family up in Wisconsin. And like, literally, I was like, it—it's not—this isn't some major—this isn't New York City, right? There's like, how many blocks could there—how many people could have actually been there protesting because there's only so many people that live there. But we think like, "Oh, it's burning down, and this is crazy." And again, I don't want to minimize anything, but you just put it in a perfect percentage. Like, "All right, add up all the ones where this is happening at. How much—what percentage of the population or the number of cities that we have?" And that just puts it into focus. We can go, "Okay, instead of just looking through a straw," right, "I can pull back a little bit and take, you know, take a 30,000-foot view and go, 'Let's get some perspective here.'" So, I—I don't know, Greg, I think you were trying to...

No, no, no, I'm listening to your great points. I'm on page three now, for all that keeping track. So here we go. This is the way the broadcast is going to be: each of us throw out the things and then each of us react to the other. And I love that because there's so much great stuff. So shout out to—and I want to be the first to go on record, Brian, to say that Dr. Carlos is not afraid to take on ISIS, but he is afraid to take on American politics because that's where the real danger lies. Yeah, it's true, it's more dangerous. I think it really is.

So a street-level view of fundamental attribution error that causes a bias: if you're an injustice gatherer and you're one of those people that walks around the world saying, "You see? That's just another reason that this, and you see how they're trying to keep us down." Listen, it doesn't matter that it's the pandemic that creates the chip on your shoulder. It doesn't matter that racial injustice is what creates the chip on your shoulder. You're going to find something. Today it's mask-wearing. "I won't wear a mask! I'll be the nose guy," you know, that wears it under his nose. "That's not the way!" And I'm just waiting for a response. So if your locus of control is so internal that your confirmation bias leads you to make all the decisions in your life, then you're going to be susceptible to manipulation. I say for our readers and listeners, go after the intent. If it's intentional manipulation, that means that there's somebody like a marionette at the other end that's trying to control your strings.

And I'll give an example: fake news is something that's patently false. There is falsehood there. But again, what's the intent behind that fake news? To entertain? Is lampooning an issue? And there's plenty of magazines. Yeah, yeah, okay. So—so let's—let's get that clear. And Doc, what you call hyperbole and well-placed, and perfect use of the word at the perfect time, I call in many situations, propaganda, because propaganda has the same type intent. Hyperbole is to make me look better, so I get laid, get another beer, you buy dinner, maybe something like that, right? So the manipulation might be a much smaller span of control, but I'm using it for something. Whereas propaganda, maybe I've got an intent to do harm or to get people on my side or to win by being the loudest voice. And I would say that the hook works in America because we truly are—and I don't want to sound hyperbolic here—we truly are a melting pot.

And I'll give you an example. The other night, late night, sleep was overrated. It was one of those UFO shows, Brian, you know how much I love that. And this one had evidence; it even had "evidence" in the title. So I tuned in because I'm an artifact and evidence guy in support of a reasonable conclusion. So what they had is they had this windsock, two puppet-looking thing walking through a backyard. And they had like three different views of this. And then they had two, and it was clearly, clearly two tube sock, marionette-looking things out of focus, going through a backyard with some background lighting. And you're going to say to me—everybody right now that's listening—"Back up for a minute, don't draw your conclusion." You're going to say, "Hey, with that low sophistication level, nobody's fallen for that to be a UFO." There's a guy that's been on in L.A., and I swear to—I'm looking around for his answer. He does the UFO show from Mexico in Spanish, and I can't think of the guy's name, and he's been on for like 19 years that broadcasts out of his studio there. And he was called in, and he said, "These are accurate, this is aliens that have come down." Why? Because when you want to believe something, and when something is in your culture, then it takes on a reality that's greater than any news.

And I'll give you one more example of that before I throw it back to the team. Listen, there was a two-headed cow born just a week or so ago in some place in India. And again, I don't have my notes in front of me, and we don't have teleprompters, folks. We're just spitballing it out here. And that village said that was a message, and that message meant that this was going to go on. And you're going, "Oh, those are just old stupid people." No, folks, everything you are is how you were raised, and who you talk to by the water cooler, and the influences that you had from your local media. And just because that's a lower level of sophistication, you can't discount that that person can be recruited to your political or psychotic view if you're a mass killer or, you know, into, you know, hitchhiking and getting into Jeffrey Dahmer's car. It's easy to manipulate people if you know what to go after. So the signal here is that you've got to set the hook. How do you set the hook? You make it titillating, you make it interesting, you make it salacious, and now all of a sudden, they're over to your side. And Doc, I think your point is well taken, that's why they did such a great job commercial marketing in ISIS, right? Because they knew the hook. They researched their target market. These aren't stupid people, and they leveraged a lot of money and a lot of internet time and production value to get that message across. I think it's in the hook too, and I think we're susceptible to the hook. I think we go willingly towards some of them. Brian, I completely agree.

No, yeah, no, I think—and that goes back to kind of like their branding and their logos and the symbolism behind all of it, and how you—you know, how amazing and production value and everything. I mean, you—you know of all of these different groups. And that could be a political group, and I don't want people to get confused, just that when I throw this stuff together, I'm talking about behavior and their intent. Like I said, no, the Democrats or Republicans aren't trying you to be a suicide bomber. They're just trying to get your vote. But it's—it's the same—same process, right? So now how far I'm willing to go, that's where I get in. You go, "All right, there's some people that fall outside of, you know, one standard deviation of the mean," right, "outside of what's considered that kind of normal," right? And some people are—are more susceptible to falling into those. And you even got some great comments here about people following on the Facebook Live about, like, you know, "Hey, this is why people need a positive mentor. This is why you need—you need role models on stuff." And you're like, "You're absolutely right." Because if I—I need that belonging. So if I don't get it, I'm going to have to go look for it. And that's why from a behavior perspective, you know, I really like to look at all those groups, whether it's, you know, some group, they're Antifa and they're way out on the far left, or you're a white supremacist group way out on the far right. To me, you're just the same. You're the same person. You can go back and forth between any of those groups had you met different people. You would have fallen in that group, but instead you—you went left, and that person went right, or, you know, you walked out the door, that person stayed in the room. And that's sometimes kind of—it's—it's—it can be a little scary because then you're like, "Wait, so we're all susceptible to this?" And the answer is, or my answer would be, "Yes, to a certain degree." Now, what degree that is, is dependent on a lot of the factors you guys were talking about, just societal factors, environmental, biological factors, education level, all that kind of stuff plays into it. So I'm curious to how—how you look at that, Dr. Carlos, about the different groups and how we'd like to fit them in on different political areas or different ideological backgrounds where realistically, behaviorally and psychologically, it's almost no different. I don't know if you'd think like that or what your—what your thoughts on that would be.

Well, yeah, I'm going to do what I did earlier, and I hope you don't mind. I'm going to highlight a couple things that you brought up that both of you mentioned. Great conversation and thank you for everybody out there listening as well, I really appreciate it. We're going to get into that in a second. Media—and I know it's a corporation. Look, they've got to make money. So they have to do hyperbolic statements, propaganda, whatever you want to say, right? They have to do it. Their world has changed drastically in 30 years, trust me. Not defining them, but they're definitely—it's changed a lot. They've been—so they really play a lot of games now. They give you what I call—they don't even lie, because you can't call them a liar. They're really deceptive, and they have truth in everything. And that's even more dangerous because half-truths are more believable. People will tend to do that, right?

And one thing that you guys mentioned, too, is like a phenomenon that I've been seeing a lot over the last decade or two, and maybe it's always been around, I just haven't paid attention to it. I think Joseph Campbell talked about it, the myth of a hero. People like this magical thinking, people like to get certainty, especially with things like death. You know, when we don't know what's going to happen, there's a thing called afterlife time perspective by Zimbardo. You might remember Zimbardo from the Stanford Prison Experiment. And he created this concept, and it's really true because it affects the way you think, but everything is uncertain. And we also like somebody who's bigger than us, just like we were a child and our parents were taking care of our problems. We want something bigger than us to handle our everyday problems today as an adult. We want that Batman. We want that Superman. We want that powerful group. So if you're a marginalized individual and you see this ISIS or you see this drug cartel, which was really similar—I almost thought about writing a book because they use the same techniques, a lot of them—that's that powerful group that can help you. And it's really bizarre because we have these superhero movies all the time, Spider-Man, whatever it is. And they overcome everything that the regular police can't figure out, right? The cops can't stop the Joker, but Batman can. And again, it's a regular problem, and you have to have a supernatural hero to answer your question.

Now, we tend to categorize everything. You guys know this from your great program. We tend to categorize everything in our lives, right? We put people in groups. And I think society—there's a great guy, great book, it's a different an academic book for the listeners out there, but it's social identity theory by Tajfel (T-A-J-F-E-L). And he talks about this, and he talks about every people are categorized. And we do it to ourselves every time. When I asked my—my people who were in the groups for a lecture, I asked them, "What sport team do you like?" "Oh, I'm a Dodger fan. I'm a Yankee fan." And when you say, "Yankee fan," there's a Dodger fan in the room, you hear a grunt. There's a physiological change, right? It's like, "Wow." So you—this part of you becomes now a Dodger fan, part of me becomes a Democrat or a Republican, part of you becomes a Christian and a type of Christian. And I've always found out that sometimes there are more differences within groups than there are between groups, which is even phenomenal. I can't just be a Cuban. My family's from Cuba, background. I was born here, but my family's "Cubex" and I'm a Cuban-American. But people from Cuba, "Oh, he's a Cuban-American, so he's not a real Cuban." "Oh, he's a Cuban from Florida." "Well, that's not the same thing." In California, we're like, "Oh, wait a minute, you live in the cul-de-sac or you don't." You know, you know, this guy's like, "What in the world?" I remember Beverly Hills, 90210. People divided each other up by area codes, 909, remember that? "Oh, he's from the 909!" We tend to categorize people so quickly to all these different areas that it's mind-blowing. Or you're an only child, you're the youngest, you're the middle. And it's amazing. You guys know this, in seven seconds, right? We're trying to size up somebody and profile them and create these things by the way they look, their clothes, how articulate, unarticulate they are. So when it comes to social identity, I definitely see it in a lot of areas and a lot of groups, not just in terrorist groups such as ISIS, which they became their own group, and they had their own fights. And Al-Qaeda in them, actually, bin Laden did not like ISIS, no interest in it. He did not like al-Zarqawi, one of the first founders. He thought he was way out there. They didn't want to deal with it. And everybody wanted to identify with the winning team. And here too, we divide ourselves up all the time. It's really, it's quite unfortunate.

Well, that—that's an interesting dynamic too. Not just the group stuff and how we divide each other and all that, it's also, I mean, you just pointed out the difference then within those groups. So now you have Al-Qaeda, but then—then you have ISIS. And remember, ISIS was there, we were fighting them back in '04. And then they became, "Well, we'll pledge allegiance, become Al-Qaeda in Iraq." And then—and then when you get it, when you're getting secret messages from Osama bin Laden saying, "Hey, why don't you tone it down a little bit? You're a little too violent. Back off on the violence." Okay, that—that goes to show you where you're at. But that's now becomes the new standard. So—so that was al-Zarqawi doing the, "All right, well, he did that. Well, you know what? I'm going to go one step further." And then what's the next group going to do? "Well, okay, now we're going to go one step further." And so that baseline constantly changes when you have this overarching group, and then you have someone who has, again, the psychology, "Well, no, we're going to be even bigger and better. We're the new group. We're the new—" That you see that with gangs, the same thing. Like, newer gangs, like in Chicago, is a perfect example where I'm from. Like, there's just—you got 12, 10, 11-year-old kids now just killing each other, shooting each other. And you're going, "What the hell?" Like, back in the '70s, there was like, you know, 10 gangs at most, and they would sit down with people from the community and the police and go, "All right, you won't go here, and you won't do this." Well, then they came in and locked up all these big-time OG guys that were running it. So what did that create? That created a whole bunch of little gangs. And then they started arresting those leaders, and that created more little gangs. Now you got people fighting and dying over literally three blocks. Like, I mean, no jokes, we had—we have these three blocks, and we'll kill you for that. And you're going, "Holy crap!" Like, that's just how it gets to there. And that all comes into that same, "Well, yeah, I'm part of this group, but now I want to be part of that group." You know? And I—I think if—if we could all identify that way, or at least know that that's what you're doing, you know, then I think it becomes a little bit more clear when you see it somewhere else.

And that this sports analogy is a good one. I remember being, this is years ago, it was a Saturday night. I was out in downtown San Diego. My buddy was taking up some of this like rooftop bar thing, and you had to take the elevator up there. And the next day, the Chargers were playing the—the Raiders. So the other Raider fans in town—everyone knows about the Raider fans, they're like, you know, super hardcore into the Raiders, it's Raiders everything. So these drunk Raider fans get on the elevator to go up, and I'm stuck in an elevator, and they're going, "Yeah, we got game tomorrow." And they're trying to like—like talk crap to me. And I'm not even a Chargers fan. I'm not from here, I'm from Chicago. So I'm a Bears fan. And they're like, "Yeah, we're going to beat you guys." And I'm like, "Okay." Like, "I'm not a Chargers fan." And they were like, "Well, you shouldn't be!" Because I'm like, "Well, you're—you're just looking for a fight. This is nothing to do with anything else other than what's—what's going on." And I thought it was just a great way to look at how that group identity can become so strong to the point that this guy wanted to get an argument with me, and I—I wasn't even opposing his views. I had said nothing about him. So I—I like the sports analogy you used, too, as well.

I think one thing that's important to remember is I'm going to link ISIS to Jenny Craig for a moment for our viewers. So and—and shout out, Dr. Carlos, shout out for being human and Cuban-American, and the Florida connection, the Cuban being my favorite sandwich whenever I go to Ybor City down there. I just absolutely love that idea. Listen, the hook and the level of sophistication, we're talking humans, we're talking Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis, we're talking human psychology and sociology here. So when you see the Peloton ads, nobody that's in shape needs the Peloton ad to motivate them to buy a Peloton. They're already in good shape, and those people that are doing the workout, they're going, "You're—you're paying me to work out, okay?" So then you take the weight loss and Jenny Craig and all the rest. Why do they always show you the people having the shake or the candy bar? Because they know that we're never going to get in that kind of shape. We're not going to have the temerity to follow that. Yet the hook works, and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Listen, we are unique little snowflakes that have a bunch of fears of the unknown, and when somebody comes along and says, "You've got a way out, you don't have to play the hand that you're dealt," we get hooked, and I think we jump at it. And I'm not saying weight loss plans don't work because you always see the ones that they work for. I'm not saying Peloton don't work because if you work out, you'll be better. But every diet plan says the same thing: if you do a diet and you exercise, you're going to lose the weight. So what am I saying? We all want a drop on the tongue, Brian and Dr. Carlos, we all want to belong to something. And parents, if you're listening to this, leaders, teachers, coaches, it's a slippery slope and a very thin line that separates joining ISIS from joining the Boy Scouts, from joining—from buying a Peloton. And now the line is blurrier, Brian, I think than ever before. That's—that's—yeah, that's—that's a good point. I—I think it's a good way to look at it.

And I want to kind of, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but what I'm—I'm thinking from this is that why don't we do another one, and we'll just take one specific area that we discuss out of these pages of notes. I'll tell you what, one of my favorite guests, Dr. Carlos, you're—oh, yeah, one of my favorite guys. Yeah, we've already been on here for over an hour, and I don't want to take more of your time. We got other calls and stuff. So, but I think we'll—let's pick one of those to go to. And real quick to Dr. Carlos, because I'll—I'll put up all your links in—in the episode details, but tell everyone all the other stuff you have going on because we just did a video collaboration. You got YouTube channels, you're all over Instagram and stuff. So please tell everyone where to find that too.

Thank you very much. Yeah, folks, if you want to know more, we do a podcast. It's one of—one first thing I want to point everybody to, which is Forensic Psychology. So if you're into criminal minds and stuff like that, check it out. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, any platform. So again, look for Forensic Psychology. Also, he has another one called Inside the Criminal Mind. So you can check that one. That's a weekly podcast on serial killers. So yeah, hey, there you go. Always a lot of fun for people who are interested. You can find me on Instagram on The Dr. Carlos Show. I'm on over there. You can also find me on Twitter. It's under @insidethebadge on Twitter if you want to follow me there. And The Dr. Carlos Show on YouTube. We are starting a new channel, but we're still in effect, so I'm not going to send you there. It's Detect the Wolf if you want to check it out. So we're going to have—Greg and Brian did a great show for us to that too. So definitely follow me, Dr. Carlos. You can Google it. You'll see me there if you want to find me on LinkedIn as well. I'll be there. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, I'll get some feedback from everyone from this one, if you're listening, and if there's something specific you want us to cover, and hey, the three of us will get on here, and we can—we can do something like that. That would be—I think that would be fun. Again, this is really good stuff. I know I didn't even realize we'd been going for an hour, and it was like, "Oh, yeah, we got to—we got to bring this in. We got some other calls and everything." So, yeah, I'll put up all those links. Everyone listening, we really appreciate it. Dr. Carlos, thank you so much for coming on, and let's—let's—let's do this one again.

All right, absolutely. I'm game.

Awesome. All right, well, don't forget everyone, that training changes behavior.