L.O.G. 133 How can I make this about me

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

All right, Greg, so we're starting this recording off. Once again, I'm on the road; your family's out, I'm still with mine. I'm now in Wisconsin. But the big news of today is it's your birthday, and we're recording a podcast on your birthday, which is amazing!

So, it is right to give him thanks and praise. First of all, my birthday month then is a birthday week, which now is a birthday weekend, which will culminate in the birthday day. I celebrated the fuck out of it, Brian! I woke up Lanny (Greg's neighbor) this morning and said, "It's my birthday! What did you get me?" Yeah, Lanny's a surly, surly drunk. He's not up yet all the way until he gets up. Thanks for that, Brian. Do me a favor, you're on the road. You're on the balcony of a Motel 6 somewhere in downtown Chattanooga. Where are you right now?

No, I have been—I don't know the map real well. I am in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. For those midwesterners who know this area, it's a great time during summer. But I got a family thing going on for my grandpa who died. We couldn't go to his funeral; 93 years old. So we're doing a thing for him this weekend. So, a lot of beer, a lot of brats, and a lot of fried cheese curds, which is great. A lot of people, a lot of people wearing bikinis that probably shouldn't, if you get what I'm trying to say.

So I spent a lot of time, and I love Wisconsin. My little favorite, Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Stevens Point beer, there you go. Door County – not only the cheese, but the Cherry Festival, Baraboo, incredible P.T. Barnum Museum. I could go on. Wisconsin is one of my favorite places in the whole world. The only place you can walk into a bar and get a Schell's beer for under a dollar and get a slice of a football pizza and watch the game.

Yeah, and you'll spend all afternoon there with good friends and come out still with money in your pocket. I love that. Or they'll give you a Hamm's beer and not open it so you can shotgun them with your cousins right at the bar, who's also your date, if you get what I'm trying to say.

We're not in that part of Wisconsin. We're not—we're all in that part of Wisconsin, Brian, at one time in our lives.

So, Brian's putting nickels into the Wi-Fi and also into the vibrating bed.

Yeah, absolutely. You can hear the delivery truck right now in the background, which is wonderful. I'm going to have to try and edit that out later and probably won't be able to. But today, to jump into it, Greg, we're kind of talking a little bit about resilience, and I would say adaptation, adaptive traits in humans, and some who lack them, and some who have plenty of them. It's kind of—we both talk about two different stories that run along that line. Where you brought up to me recently, out of Texas, I believe, where a man saw his ex-wife with her new husband having a baby at the game. He just couldn't take it and killed them in the parking lot and then went home and killed himself.

And then, just later that same week, this week, we had possibly the greatest gymnast who has ever walked the face of the planet, Simone Biles, who's at the top of her game, doing things that literally no one else in the world can do. She had to step back, had to step out of the competition due to mental health reasons, and was not in it. We don't have a full explanation really of what it is and what she's going on in her head, and only she knows that. So, it's incredible because you have two different ways of handling that type of stress, that type of pressure in those situations—opposite ends of the spectrum there. But there was also some blowback and people saying all this talking crap on Simone Biles, who, once again, she's in the arena. You're a critic. Maybe I can't do anything that you do. I have never accomplished anything you've accomplished yet, but I am here to call you a [expletive] person. Yeah, exactly, walking off. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. How can you call somebody [expletive] when—

But what you're talking about, listen: high-functioning people respond chemically differently than the rest of us. And the essence of training and rehearsal is to be able to ride that euphoric wave like a runner's high. You've got to hit the wall, and you've got to get past it. Now, we're talking about two sides of the same coin. The guy that shows up at his kid's game, and while he's watching his kid, the sports figures play, he looks up in the stands and sees his ex-wife who is now pregnant with somebody else, and decides right then and there, "This is it. This is—" Okay, now, I wrote you, it feels like rage, but it's not. Because what you have here is the electrochemical neurotransmitter sending a message and saying, "I am going to allow you to focus better now than at every other—than any other state in your life because the stresses, the demands on you are greater than usual." Does this sound like Simone Biles?

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to put you in a survival state of mind, and I'm going to give you more pressure than usual, but I expect you to be resoundingly better. Okay? In this moment, you've heard about the people picking up the piano when it falls on a kid or the group getting together and moving the car. What happens is your brain gets this—your brain starts feeling that all these pressures are coming, and she had enough pressure on her to turn her into a diamond, right?

Yeah, yeah.

But so did this guy. So did this guy! He's watching his kid play and he's got the "Should I stay or should I go?" sees the wife instead of saying, "Look, good on her. God bless her, she's going to have another kid. Maybe they'll have a better marriage. Maybe I can—" What happens is he gets that same flood of chemicals, and chemicals that Simone did. And Simone goes, "You know what? I'm not operating at peak performance. Resilience is the long game, Brian. It's a marathon, not a sprint. I have to recuse myself. I have to step back." What he did is he looked at it and he says, "You know what? This is a marathon, and I can't even get out of the [expletive] starting gate, right? Where's my .38?"

That's what we have to challenge going forward. We literally have to take a look at reimagining the word resilience, because I think we use it right in the terms of adaptability, creating a balance, sustainability, long-term sustainability. Okay? And I don't think people do that. I think people just look at it and go, "Oh, he bounced back from this. Oh, you know," no, it has to be—it has to be a series of peaks and valleys throughout your life that demonstrate that you can roll with the punches, even if the punches keep coming. And this poor—this poor guy couldn't.

And so what you have in there in both those situations, you have, because when we talk about stress and performance and behavior and all that stuff, there's internal and external factors, right? So the Simone Biles one, she's at literally the peak pinnacle of competition in the world, in the history of the world. This is it. This is a stage. But at the same time, she has a lot of experience in that domain, and she knows where she's at. She's like, comfortable in that. But still, so then you have all the societal pressure too, because the way they build her up is like—I mean, beyond—I really think there's a lot of people that shouldn't be writing the things they do about her, even though they think they're writing good things, they're adding to this stress. They're saying, "You're here, you're representing this community in the United States, you're doing this, you know, you're at the—" And so now she's reading that stuff and hearing that, going, "Okay, wow, I got even more weight on my shoulders." It's even building, it's building. So she has those external factors, right? And then now the internal ones start going, and she realizes she hits a point that she's like, "You know what?" And I read a little bit about it, and not knowing much about gymnastics, she landed some incredible, incredible move, and she did. But what they said she didn't—even though it looked like she landed it fine, she actually didn't. And every other gymnast was like, "No other gymnast in the world would have missed what she did in the air and still landed that. That would have killed someone. That would have broken someone's leg. That would have done this." But because she's so good, she did. Then she went, "You know what? I wasn't there. I have to step out."

Whereas this guy in Texas had how many internal factors did he have? I mean, I would say it was the opposite with him, meaning he had largely internal factors and then probably some external stressors as well. Maybe he just lost his job. Maybe he was having a hard time building a relationship with his kid, or there's all kinds of those factors in there. And so when both of those are playing, they build and build and build. And in her case, she went, "I'm done. I've hit the threshold for what I know I can do." Where he said, "I'm done." But he acted out versus just acting in, right? I mean, he went external instead of going internal. I don't know how to describe that. No, no, no, you get what I'm saying. I'm trying to form the right way to describe that of how he acted versus how she acted. Do you get what I'm saying?

Both of them had a temporary break with reality. Okay? The reality of the situation that they were in. Now, I want to give you perception for a minute. You grew up in a different era than I grew up, but we both grew up understanding how communication has changed our world, right? Back when I was growing up in the '60s and the '70s, the Olympics was this elusive water balloon that you kind of understood. It was almost like the elections where people got into a fervor every four years. But the rest of the time, nobody talks attention. And then all of a sudden, you had this thing that took up all the good channels for four or five days in the winter or the summer, and nobody gave a [expletive] about the Canadian curling champ. But all of a sudden on the nightly news, you saw a guy crash, or you saw the luge go through and kill a bunch of people in the stands, and you were riveted for that moment in time. And then somebody said Olga Korbut, and they showed a pretty gymnast or something like that. I'm not being misogynistic or pedantic. I'm just saying that our information came in these little chunks, and we never really knew what it was.

Yeah, okay.

Nowadays, okay, those same people that you see for just a minute, look, whatever the chick was that smoked the ganja and didn't get to get in, she became an international story. People are still talking about that. That's going to be book deals and movie deals. She didn't even make it to the finals. So the idea there is that this instantaneous communication put an additional set of pressures on Biles and her team. Now, COVID, now the Atlanta-based Delta variant, now all the other good joke in there somewhere, all the other [expletive] that's going on, is leading up to it. So now let's take a look at the microcosm that our friend in Texas is founded. He comes to watch his kid play a sporting event. The stands are full. Everybody in town knows everybody. He looks up and everybody goes, "Not only is she with somebody else, but she's pregnant!" Which as a man, do you get what I'm trying to say? It's like, what do we—if you have a daughter, which you do, you understand when your daughter comes to you and says, "Dad, I'm pregnant!" The very first thing you want to do is grab a meat cleaver and go after—I mean, you don't think, "Oh, this is glorious!" and have this gender reveal party. You're a dad, somebody messed with my daughter, right?

So this guy has that pressure that's on him, and we don't know if there was a mental illness. We don't know if there was ETOH (alcohol) onboard, alcohol, drugs, or anything else, right? But I will tell you, Brian, you've got to tell me what it feels like to be that guy at that day in that rock tumbler and have nobody to reach out for in his system. And because he wasn't resilient, he cannot bounce back. He cannot transform this into a learning experience. He cannot achieve long-term sustainability by learning from the events. So part of training is that you can teach yourself to be resilient and be euphoric in the moment. You can stimulate that with a good book or a favorite film or a poem, or exercise like Eric Collier. Now, he is just—he looks like a cartoon comic version of a muscle builder. In the center of his chest, bench presses a thousand pounds and curls 500. Why? Because for him, whenever he needs to relax and go internal, Brian, he does it at the gym. And God bless him, he's a wonderful person. He doesn't manifest the stress because he has an outlet, right? How many of us need that outlet and haven't found it? And Biles needed that outlet, but she was her own best friend, and she was good to herself by stepping out of that limelight.

Well, and she also has a network, like you said, no one to reach out to. Well, she did, right? In that case, she has an entire Olympic team and nation to, I mean, she's got this huge support. And I think that's another important thing to realize is you have someone at that caliber. So yeah, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably not at that caliber of whatever, neither am I. I mean, you're at such a level that you're so far beyond, like, the—in terms of human performance. They're—I've got the landscaping going on right now, so this is great. Speaking of performance and resilience, it's driving me during the leaf blower incident.

Yeah, you're going to hear about—if you hear about the Wisconsin leaf blower incident on the news tonight, that's me.

Exactly. So, no, but she had all that. She had that to reach out to. And when you don't, obviously, it's got to go somewhere. Like you said, she said something to someone and probably had immediately had a team and a doctor and this, I mean, to go with. And you know where the guy in Texas doesn't, because that's what most people don't. And all of those pressures just build and build and build, and it has to come out. Like you said, the decision is—it's two sides or two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what they did and how resilience works. But you bring it back to what that state of performance is that she's talking about that she's in, and in a way that almost makes it harder for her to take that step back. Yet she did, if you get what I'm saying. But he's in that same moment, but for all the wrong reasons, where an Olympic caliber athlete is getting all those catecholamines on board, in that flow state, that focus, and that visual perception. We talked about that, that when everyone talks about that, "Oh, that's like time slowed down, and I didn't hear that." Well, no, time didn't slow down. Your brain said, "Here we go. I'm going to focus more intently than you've ever focused before in your life." So what does that feel? You perceive that as—what you perceive it as time slowing down, when in fact, you're just rapidly, rapidly firing sense-making and problem-solving faster than you ever have in your whole life. Well, this guy, in a sense, is in that same zone, but for all the wrong reasons, right? For—he's in that same time, that tunnel vision, "I can't get out of this little window," and it leads to him killing someone.

And remember, when we call it a temporary break from reality, we're doing ourselves a disservice because we keep trying to name stuff and we try to put it in terms that won't affect us. So we're trying to say, "Hey, he broke down. He had a breakdown. He flipped out." The idea is there's times when you feel alive and fully attentive to what you're doing, and he had one of those moments. The distortion in your sense of time, it can go very quickly or very slowly. The bodily sensations, the sensory perceptions are a response, an electrochemical response to a changing challenge. So it's already a challenging environment, you're handling it, right? And now this additional layer of challenge comes in, and this is where we have this bifurcation, Brian. This is where we have this break with reality. Now people are going to say, "He turned into a zombie. He walked back. He didn't know what he was doing." I counter that. I say he knew exactly what he was doing. Yeah, that absolute moment of pure clarity and said, "This is the path that I need to take. I'm going to be single-minded purpose. Please don't get in my way."

Because, Brian, that's why I'm talking about interruption versus disruption. Both Simone and that guy could have been interrupted. Simone started internally, her team jumped on and helped, and it got her to a good place. This guy went internal. He was single-minded to purpose. His space-time was all discombobulated, and those people around him because they weren't trained to see that—his friends because they weren't trained to see that—allowed it to go to a point where you couldn't unring that bell. Once he pulled out the gun and he started capping rounds into those folks, you can't take that back. And he knew that too. And rather than kill himself at the scene, where did he go? He went to a place that he was comfortable. Even the ancient Siamese leaders surrounded themselves with the things that they had gotten during their lives, so as they died, they could see all the amassed wealth. Our brain wants to do that too. Why do you think cops are killing themselves at police stations? Because it's a sensory input that they're familiar with and that calms them, just like crossing their arms, just like reading a good book, just like watching Princess Bride. You hear what I'm trying to say? It gives me a feeling of euphoria.

No, and that's the—these are all great points because, you know, like we said, we're taking two completely different cases. To us, it's the same thing. And I think if people could understand that a little bit more, so let's maybe explain that a little bit more. Let's go in depth in terms of, you know, you're telling me that this guy was in the same point of performance, the same kind of state, we'll say, almost that you said, a moment of clarity, not unlike a gymnast hitting some incredible routine and nails it. It's that same moment of clarity. So we all have those, but they can very easily be corrupted by a horrible, horrible decision where her decision, in this case, is to, "Hey, get help," or even if she's in the middle of a routine like, "Oh, I need to back off here," or "I need to go do this in mid-air." I mean, making those moves, where so why is it—why did he go to, and I understand it's a lack of any type of coping mechanism or skill or other thing, but why did then this guy go to, "That's it, man, here. This is the option that I'm doing. There's no other option but this option." Because that's what partly fascinates me as well too. Even though I understand it to a point, it's still, it's like that, "Why did we go here?" Because in that moment, he couldn't get out, and he had no other options. He wasn't shown something. He only knew that, you understand? It's like, what if I'm cycling through that rolodex of where I'm going to go and what I'm going to come up with, why has it gone to her to him, then to me?

So, for those deep thinkers in the audience, take a look at situation and situational awareness and its origins. And what I mean by that, Brian, is I was the one that turned it into what it is today, and it didn't have a definition. So I had to look into how machines learned and how computers learned, and there was a thing called situational awareness in the newly found computer milieu, right? And I started talking to people, and I go, "Don't humans do that too?" And that evolved, right? So this is—we're talking about a situation here where resilience is about transformation. More than that, resilience is about evolution. So where Simone Biles had the capacity, in machine learning, think about how machines learn. Resilience means the capacity to persist, adapt, transform in a way so the machine maintains its identity, and the system goes on. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So resilience is about a transformation and an evolution, but you have to maintain how the entire system goes. Now it might not go back to the way it was. It's not like a water balloon where you squeeze it and then if you let it go, it goes back to homeostasis. It may become a whole new organism. That's why I mean evolution. So Simone had that ability. Why? Because she'd been tested and she'd come through, and she'd been tested and she'd come through. She had scar tissue. And so did our guy in Texas. The difference was that each one of those layers of the onion, Simone continued to build on those and evolve out and transform out of that. That guy maintained that mushroom in the dark room with, "It'll know, it's going to be worse, it's never going to get—" And each one of the things that he found, confirmation bias, made it look like, "He's right. Another reason things are—" Now he's at this penultimate event. He sees his wife, and he is now in Las Vegas pulling the one-arm bandit. Follow me here. You don't play a Vegas machine because you win. You play a Vegas machine because you almost win. And the feeling, the euphoria again, that runner's high that you get by almost winning the jackpot, keeps you putting in the money until you're out of money, and you're blowing somebody for another five dollars so you can go hit the high limit slots. Life is like that. So we become more resilient when we step back from the machine and say, "Wait a minute, this is a gag, this is a routine, this is a groove in the record I have to get out of." That's where addiction comes from. So what was his addiction in Texas? His addiction in Texas was her, and he couldn't move forward. He had to live in the present or live in the past. She had already moved forward. As a matter of fact, being pregnant demonstrated that she had moved forward. Simone Biles not only transformed, but she adapted, she evolved, she came out of that situation stronger. And people would look and go, "Well, how strong is she that she walked off?" Dude, that's ultimate!

Instead, she had everything in front of her, and she took a step back and said, "Not today." Everything I should work for in life, all the social pressure, everything's building to tell her, "This is what you're going to do. This is what you're here for." Everything said she should get back out there and do it. And to just—I mean, that is so powerful to be able to sit there and go, "I can't do it." It's like, when Michael Jordan retired from basketball two years after his dad died, he was like, "I can't. I can't do this."

Yep.

"Like, you're at the top of the game, we're winning, you have a couple of good years left. What are you doing? Look at the billions that you'll make for what? For all of us!"

So the real question here for Texas, Brian, is why didn't he just blow his brains out? Because he was willing to kill his son's mother in the parking lot, right? He was willing to do it in a public place, which signals that he wasn't coming back. It's leaving your running car with the door open, if you know what I'm trying to say. But how come he didn't just shoot himself? Because he had to send a message. So the message was, "I'm broken, and you [expletive] didn't see it, so I'm going to make you hurt as bad as I hurt." Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to rewind the tape and see all that pain and all that anguish, and actually be able to do something about it before it got to that point? Isn't that just like suicide? Isn't that just like any of the other addictions that we talk about?

No, no, it is. And when you look at it that way, and you know, that's the same thing. It's like, you know, you had—you had to—you know, for example, you quit smoking a long time ago, and you had to train yourself to quit smoking. You just said, "Okay, well, I have X amount of cigarettes left. I have these packs every day. I'm going to have one lesser." I can't remember what exactly it was, but you went through and you said, "I know when I get to this number, that's it, that's done. So I'm going to slowly go down." But that's a training program. And the idea is that's adaptive. You created—so if you break everything down to like an adaptive trait, right? As resiliency being an adaptive trait, well, the opposite of resiliency would also be then an adaptive trait, right? It would be something you—you've gone the other way. You didn't—you didn't say, "F it, I'm going to start smoking more." You—

And I'm going to go down, I'm going to teach myself, right? But that's the end. I'm going to go, "What is this saying, uncle [expletive]?" I quit smoking cigars, then I'm going to go to a pipe, then chewing tobacco, and then I'm going to go to cigarettes, and that's when I'm going to quit. Sometimes it's the hat.

So no, but that's that adaptive trait. I look at it that way, right? So if you can do that for smoking, then can you do that for everything else? And absolutely, the answer is yes. I mean, that's the whole thing. If it's the same thing, right? You learning that to do that is no different than any other type of "I'm going to learn a new behavior," and it's going to change the neural pathways not just of how I behave, but then how I think and how I look at things. So each one of those, whereas, you know, she had to do that in that situation to learn to go, "Dude, I'm done. I got to take a step back." Where he did it the same thing, but everything he had built himself up was—it was all negative. So he went negative from maybe the time their relationship ended or even before, and kept going and going and going and going. Well, fast forward whatever the timeline was, I don't care if it's a month or six months or a year or two years or 10 years, that's now where you end up. And I think your point is all along that way is you see the de-evolution, right? So rather than evolve, I devolve into something else in the manner of thinking that will lead to this. And it's—I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but it is that simple sometimes.

It is. I mean, it is. It's both very complicated. You talked about it in terms of machine learning, but it's also, you know, we have that other conversation about how human behavior works. It's incredibly, incredibly complicated, and it's also incredibly, incredibly [expletive] simple. You hurt me, I hurt you back. I smash.

So, of all of these things, it's like, how do I do this? Because you talked about the disruption versus interruption, and I kind of want you to elaborate on that a little bit because you brought it up, and it's kind of an interesting way to look at it. So, let's do this.

Yeah, let's go—let's go back one sentence and let's go back to your comments, which are amazingly poignant on adaptive leadership. So, adaptability and adaptive leadership—creating the ability to embrace change, learn from change, turn it into something positive by experimentation and innovation. Meaning that not all change is bad. You got a melanoma that's changing color might be a bad change, you get what I'm trying to say. But not all change is bad. We naturally fear change, of course we do. But you have to—you have to embrace certain changes. Like, for example, I remember being in the military, finding out that I was going to go through a divorce, that I was so close to that I was too blind to see a bunch of different stuff. And I was devastated, and I thought my world had ended. And all I could imagine is, "What's going to happen to my kids? What's going to happen to my family? What's going to happen in my job? What's going to happen in my career?" All these different things were flooding in. And I had a sage greybeard that sat down with me and goes, "Right now, this looks like your universe is imploding. It's a black hole. Nothing's ever going to be the same. But I can tell you in a year, and in two years, and in five years, life is going to be better than you could ever have imagined it. You're going to have all these opportunities." Brian, I told that guy, "He's full of [expletive]." I wanted to reach for the bottle. I wanted to reach for a gun. Okay? But the idea is that that interruption has to happen early in life. You have to teach kids that not everybody gets a ribbon. You have to teach kids that when you climb higher, you fall down, you'll hurt worse, but the view from up there is flipping amazing. So you have to teach kids young that you're going to get knocked down, and a lot of times it's going to hurt. But take a look around you at these role models in your life that have turned adversity. You ever watch the movie My Left Foot and just go, "Holy [expletive]!" Do you ever watch Helen Keller? So when you think you got it bad, the greatest thing about the Combat Hunter program is that I got to see vets coming back from combat, and our good friend, the legless Sergeant Major, that had made seven trips into the war zone, and on the last one lost both of his legs. And what was he doing, Brian? He was teaching at the IIT. He was a tactics leader. He was telling people, and you're sitting there going, "Oh, I have a headache today," or "I have a toothache today." But that is the ability to interrupt that thought and say, "There is a way out of this."

Okay, but the comment on that, though, is always, you know, these things are inherently subjective, right? Meaning the experiences are. So, which I agree, there's always—but you know, when you say like, "Hey, someone always has a better or someone who someone hasn't worse than you," it's like, "Okay, but not in my situation right now." And you know, you also on the flip side wouldn't tell someone who gets a job, "You're now head fry cook at McDonald's," and they're celebrating. You wouldn't say, "Hey, don't celebrate because someone else has a better promotion." And I think that that's difficult for a lot of people to understand because then, you know, if the car accident that you were in that scared you and set the airbags off, that may be the most traumatic thing you've ever experienced in your life. And so that's what you have, and that's great. There's—there's a lot of us who've been through much, much, much worse. But it's inherently subjective, and I think that's also why people do the—that's why everyone has a comment on it, you know what I mean? It's like, "Oh yeah, you're so smart, Brian."

But what's happened is you have put yourself at the center of the orbit. So what you're doing is the constellation is spinning around you. You're the central planet. That's what we get wrong in life, right? Okay, you're part of a big thing. Yeah, and everything matters. So what right did this guy in Texas have to take the life of the unborn? Oh, yes. Now what spiral spun out of that? The kid is never going to be the same. The people that were at that game are never going to be the same. The whole community, the school, not just that community, that school system, and the next school is going to say, "Well, we need to brace for this storm because it might happen here." So what you don't think is you don't think of those spirals that emanate from absolutely everything that you do. So that's what I mean, interrupt. You have to interrupt bad decisions right in the moment. You have to stop in the airport and say, "You can't say that or do that or be there." You have to do that at the 7-Eleven. And people are going, "Wait a minute, you're saying, you know, be the ostrich, stay out of trouble, do all that other stuff." Yeah, but when it comes to resilience, when it comes to a broken human that needs help, if you don't take action in the moment or at least get somebody to take action in the moment, you're going to foment this—this situation that's going to—it's going to be an experiment in violence, Brian. Why? Because violence is the easiest way to solve an immediate problem. I'm sitting there and I want to punch my wife or husband and say, "So there!" Okay? Why? Because it's easy, and I get the satisfaction. Now, do I think about the spirals later? "I'll never be able to have a weapon again or go hunting, right? Not even bow hunting. I'm going to lose my wife. I'm going to lose my house." No, we don't think about that. That's what I'm saying is what we have to do is take a look at space-time and say, "Giving myself the gift of time and distance, not hitting send." Listen, maybe I have to absent myself from my kids' first couple of games because I need therapy, and the therapy I'm going to be is playing pickleball with my best friends who talk me out of eating my gun. That's what we're talking about here.

Because, look, disruptive is completely different. Disruptive is this: you and I have decided to embrace a disruptive innovation in how we do situational awareness and human behavior pattern recognition analysis. I'll give you a perfect example of that in a very simple sense. We've partnered with Thin Blue Online. Why? Because their product is good enough. Everybody else is racing to get the best thing in the world, and all this, and they don't give a [expletive] about price point or how heavy the system is or anything. We saw that with DARPA. What we're saying is their product is good enough, and guess what? We can give it to a low-end customer. When I mean a low-end customer, I mean one that doesn't have the type of budget necessary to sustain. So what we're talking about is the guy in Texas didn't have the budget to sustain because we didn't create his savings account by building in little things, making a deposit here, being innovative there, adapting to change here. So how many times have you heard me say, "Hey, you still got money in that account?" When somebody comes up and apologizes and says, "Man, sorry about that mistake." "Hey, man, you're good. You still have money in that account." That's what I mean. I mean that you have this—

Exactly. Oh yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, he went to the ATM, Brian, and his was empty. So he made the only choice that he knew. The gun was in his pocket, and he said, "I'm going to use this gun because everybody's going to hurt as much as I'm hurting right now."

No, and it's no different than I always try to relate these things to my own life so I can see it when it's happening, right? So perfect example, we just drove down from the U.P. (Michigan's Upper Peninsula) here to Wisconsin, three-hour drive. So, not bad. But I'm used to driving how I drive, so I got pulled over in the U.P. right before leaving Michigan. I was doing 73 in a 55. Thank you to the officer who pulled me over. He was very polite and was just like, "Hey, do you know why I pulled you over?" I said, "I was probably going over the speed limit." And he said, "Yes, you were." And he was actually like, "I understand there's not even a lot of people out. There's no reason for this to only be 55 in here, but that's what it is." And he ended up giving me a lower ticket. Had to still wrote me a citation for like five over, just saying, "Hey, you know, slow down."

Did you give him a The Human Behavior Podcast?

Of course, of course. So, thank you—thank you to him. He both did his job and did me a solid at the same time. So, but here's the thing, obviously that sucks. I don't pay the hundred and whatever dollars it is. But hey, I did it. I was definitely going too fast. But then, you know, we get all the way down here. We got this thing with his family coming in—cousins, aunt, uncles, my parents. I linked up with my brother and his girlfriend. And so we're trying to link all the stuff together. We got a dinner we're supposed to be at, so we got to try and get cleaned up while the hotel—they were like, "No, we called and said, 'Yeah, you guys can check in early,' that's fine." Well, not only can we not check in early when we got here, but they didn't even know when our room was going to be ready. Nothing, no timeline. So now I'm pissed. I want the girls to get some food. It's just amped, right? And I'm sitting there like, "I'm [expletive] pissed! I'm [expletive] furious!" Because one, we paid a lot of money for this place, this is not cheap, right? I want things to go smoothly. I'm coordinating 37 other people, and I'm like, "What the—yeah, we did everything we're supposed to do!" You know, and it wasn't there. And it's just like, "This is no different. I'm going down that same path as the guy in Texas." Now, I'm not going to elevate it to that—to that level, right? I'm not going to go, "Yeah, he wants quantum leaps ahead of where you are." I'm not grabbing the Glock out of the truck and coming and shooting, right? But the idea is you're still there. And then I realized that, you know, the time, it's like, "Okay, this situation will get resolved. We paid for a room here. They literally just had this massive turnover to clean, like, it's fine. I'm sure they're going to take care of us in some way. I'll talk about—" But taking that step back, it's really in that moment when the kid's screaming because she's hungry, my wife's pissed because she works real hard and paid for this. We went across country, all the stuff. We're sitting there feeding off of each other. And it's like, "Okay, let's—let's take a step back and walk down the lake here for a second and just take a breath." But it is really hard to do that in that moment. And this isn't even, look, I mean, I'm talking about a family vacation in Wisconsin, right?

With this line of reasoning, what happens is now that person that's in your position, so let's take that out and take a look at the galaxy again. Yes, and say you're just a player. You're not the center. And everybody that's getting paid as a life coach is telling you, "You are the center. You're entitled. You're this and that." Stop that thinking first of all. This is how you could take that and turn it into a positive and put it in your bank account: one, go and don't talk to the person at the counter because they're not vested. Go say, "Hey, listen, I'd like to talk to the owner." And the guy said, "Yeah, but the owner's in Chicago. He's not even on site and everything." "Yeah, but I need to talk to him. Can you set me up with that information?" There's a way to get to the owner of any company anytime, anywhere. I do it all the time. And I'm not a handful. I'm not that guy that they go, "Here he comes." What I would do is I would say, "I want to share a situation with you from a business perspective. This is what happened to me. This is how it made me feel. So just going forward, you know, you could stop somebody else from having this crappy day." And I'll give you a perfect example of that. Shelly's mom's in town, Patsy (Shelly's mom), 83. Shelly and her mom are set up for an appointment. I won't say who or where or what they were going to do. But all that day, when I was having a very busy day, the place where they had an appointment called me four times, and each time gave the wrong number and the wrong time and everything else. And I said, "No, we set it up. Shelly paid in advance. This is the time." Okay? Because Patsy isn't as mobile as she once was, and Shelly had to work, and these times had to be set, and we did it weeks ahead of time, right? So on the fourth call, I was livid, and I said, "I'm about to explode. So I have to interrupt, Greg, actually, and I have to take a step back." So I said, "Hey, I'll call you back." And I went and I talked to two other people about the situation I was in, and then finally called the owner and said, "Hey, listen." Now, the owner describes, "Hey, look, I'm so sorry for this. Didn't know what was happening. Four different people got the same information. Computer is acting wonky. All this other stuff." And it got fixed. Why is that important? Because some owners, like maybe where you are, are going to say, "Kiss my ass. Take it or leave it. There's a bunch of people in line." But some will evolve. You're evolved from that situation, right? Your family learned, and the little ones that are with you right now, your little buck had learned a great thing. So what I'm saying is everything in life is a teachable moment. And if you take a look like that, there was people on the street in Warren, in Detroit, that when I hooked them, and I was transporting them to jail, they go, "Hey, you're that guy!" Because I was always giving them a history lesson. "Do you know where the name Outer Drive came from? Do you know that the General Motors plant? Do you know that this—" I would have hated you if I know. But I had them in the backseat anyway, and so I would say something. I could either—I could either do with what cops do on those shows, "So, man, why'd you run?" Who gives a [expletive]? He's hooked. You see what I'm saying? It's games. So we'd be going north on Mound, I would say, "Did you know that the Studebaker plant?" And so it was actually the running gag on the street that "that's the guy!" Why? Because life doesn't have to be miserable. And when you put the pressure of being the center of all the attention, in the center of the universe, and gravity and entropy happens around you, you're going to fail. And what did Biles do? Biles had that epiphany moment, right? Heeded by what? By stepping back. Andy Reiss, I love Andy, yeah. And Andy caught it right away. I think that was great. And he's been in the life-or-death arena a bunch of times, right? And so I had to read all the comments. I love—I don't understand LinkedIn, but what I love is somebody puts—first of all, I hate the platitudes, so I don't even go there. But you get somebody like him or Drum, or any of the other deep thinkers, and they'll put a post on there saying, "Hey, listen, if you recalibrate this, you're understanding that this will be better." Then instead of somebody giving them a thumbs up or saying, "Hey, great insight," they come in and they go, "Oh yeah, well, once when I was nine, I did that. You [expletive]!" What you just did is you just said, "This is about me. How can I make this about me? Enough of you talking about me. Let me talk about me." And that's what that guy in Texas did. The guy in Texas said, "How does this affect me? And I hurt, so everybody else is going to hurt." And Brian, you do not have that right. And if you see a damaged snowflake, fix it. We've come to the society where everybody's afraid to say something. You know how empowering it is to say, "Hey, I noticed—" Like I live in a smaller town, there's only 6,000 people. I noticed nuance changes. So I'll tell somebody, "I like your hair that way. Your hair has changed." And the person will go, "Thank you." And somebody's going, "Oh, man, you're trying to get an advantage." Not trying to get an advantage. I'm trying to be a nice human. We live in tribes. We live in small groups, and we rely on the other person. And if that person lies to me and tells me the silo's full and it's not, guess what? We're going to starve during the winter. We're going to turn into cannibals. So we can't have that. And there is a better way, and Biles demonstrated the resilience that's necessary, the adaptive leadership traits that's necessary to thrive and adapt in an environment.

And I don't know, I just wrote that down because it's perfect. It's another one of those two sides of the same coin: "How can I make this about me?" There's—like, I mean, you're—that's what that person does, right? That was me in that situation downstairs lobby where I'm thinking about me. And it's like, "Okay, how am I doing that?" But then, like, it's almost the same thing with Biles, right? Where she's doing—she had to make it about her because there's so much social pressure. I don't know, like, I think that's another good—good thing because he can get into—

She had to be the instrument for change. You could have changed that traffic stop in the Upper Peninsula. You could have said that [expletive] pulled me over because of my beard, and this is exactly what's wrong with cops. "Don't you have something better to do?" Well, actually, no, I don't, because the safety on the nation's highways and this and that and the speed. But do we think of that, Brian? No, we don't think of that. We think of me in that moment getting that ticket and that money coming out of my account. We have to think globally and not think locally.

I apologize. This is the police union right now that's calling me. No, no, that's—these are—these are good. I like these for in the moment looking at these situations right there. Like it's the, "Am I making this about me?" You know what I mean? Because that's what most people do, and unwittingly some of the time. Why? Because that's who we are as human beings, right? We are—we are so concentrated. That's why we get offended or upset. That's why I got upset when I couldn't check in on time. Like, "What? Like, I called, and I did this, and I paid. You also—I have the right to be upset because I made plans, I paid money!" But—

But that's it. It's got to be, was it survival-based or was it personality-based? So here's my thing: if it's entitlement-based, in other words, personality-based, you've got to interrupt that way of thinking, okay? Because now what you're doing is you're not thinking clearly. If it's right because it's right for everybody, and the next family—like, for example, if you think, "I need to say something because I want to make it better for the old couple that's coming next, right? For the young couple that's on vacation," then you're thinking globally, and you're probably thinking right. If you're thinking like Greta Thunberg, you get what I'm trying to say, that just has an outburst. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Did she send you a birthday card? What is she doing now? No. Did she—but the idea is you have to say, remember this folks, interrupt bad trains of thought because if the train continues, it's likely to crash. And a train has built up a head of steam that you're likely not going to be able to slow down quickly. So the sooner you interrupt that bad chain of thought—"This sucks, here, have a drink of brandy, things will get better." What are you talking about? Or "I'm under a bunch of stress, and I quit smoking, but man, if I had a cigarette right now, everything would be better." That's where you got to interrupt it, Brian.

And I'll give you another one. That euphoria that Biles felt that almost got her killed is the same euphoria. We lost another cop overnight to throwing down the stop sticks in front of a fleeing vehicle. Geez. Okay, I'm not talking about anything other than the same happy head that criminals get. "I'm doing my job. I have this tool. I'm going to get in front of a fleeing felon. It's already demonstrated he doesn't have the capacity for advanced critical thinking, and I'm going to stand there and throw out this thing and then retrieve it so the other cops don't run into it." Brian, it's a symptom. It's a symptom that those cops and those librarians and those 7-Eleven clerks get into because they've repeated behavior. And when we repeat behavior, our brain gets dumber. Our brain assumes and subsumes different things, and then we don't react at the right time. Biles could have got up there and failed, and it would have been a dramatic failure. She chose—she knew it. And she would have known it going in.

But that's another—she knew it, and she had the experience to make that—well, this is the guy, this is what I'm saying. She had the training and experience and the high level of expertise, and you brought it right back to even the police officer example with the stop sticks and the pursuit and what people are doing. But Greg, this is my thing with this, with—with, whether I say the same thing to police officers and to people who aren't, is like, "You're at the absolute limits of human performance, and guess what? You didn't get—you didn't get a U.S. Olympic training level [expletive] education and training. You didn't." And that's what I'm saying is like, we're outperforming where we're actually at what level. And stop sticks, you did earlier, and all that other stuff. They don't make you better because you've done it correctly so many times and done it well and learned and done this. Like it's—it's in our benefit. Same thing with like, you didn't get to get the level of training and experience that Simone Biles did, so you didn't have that thought of making that decision, just like our guy in Texas. When he did it, he didn't have all that stuff. So we forget sometimes where we're at, and if you're at your limit of your performance, you're right there. You're at that—you're so hyper-focused that you can't get out of that loop. And so the, "Am I—how can I make this about me?" I want to—I'm going to use that line. When you see that person yelling at someone or yelling at the manager or doing those different outbursts, it's like, "Okay, you'd really like to make this about you, don't you?"

Well, exactly. You know what I mean?

No, you got to be careful because that could—that could throw gasoline on an already raging fire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what happens. Interruptive strategy, yeah, not a disruptive. Folks, stop using disruptive. Disruptive technology doesn't mean what you think it means. It's interruptive is what you're thinking about, and it's a healthy thing. Interrupting bad behavior, interrupting a bad relationship, interrupting some of the drinking that goes on after a training course because we think it's great and it'll foster camaraderie and all that other stuff. And then the next day at the airport going, "Oh no, here we are again!" You can't do that, right? But why do you do that? You do that because it mimics the feelings that you had the night before. It mimics the good stuff. And when that guy was there, all he could think of is what he could think of backwards. He could think of historical perspective when things were a better time, and "I'm never going to be able to achieve that again, so this is my limit." Folks who don't know your limit, okay, there's a lot of people out there that would have loved to have that extra month or year with their loved ones or with their children. So before you do that, interrupt that chain of thought. And literally, that guy where he was at that day in that parking lot, he should have just sat down on the ground and said, "I need help!" Because somebody would have reached out and helped them. In today's society, where communication goes so quickly, people have more experience helping. Forty years ago, they would have said, "You know, the power of Christ compels you! You've got a demon!" And they would have put leeches on it. Yeah, if it worked out, it works. I'm okay with these if they work. We got vets killing themselves because they say nobody else understands. Somebody else understands, and somebody else feels just as shitty as you, but they found a way to cope. And the strategy to cope isn't mainline and blotter acid or sticking a needle on your arm or smoking crack. I don't know if that's how that works, but I get where you're going with. But the same thing like evolution has to change how police work works and how town managers work. What we're doing right now is we're nitpicking, and we're saying, "There, look, there's an example of racism!" We don't have to do that. We—we can collectively be better by opening our ears, letting the scales fall from our eyes and looking at these situations that affect all of us, not that affect us individually. And anytime we look at individual, we're going in the wrong direction. It has to be interrupted.

No, and there's different indicators of this stuff at scale. You know, I've had different conversations with different people about everything that's going on, or, you know, people call me, talk about whatever the issue. "Hey, man, I got this." I know, because I got buddies that will reach out because they're like, "Hey, I know you're under this human behavior." Because, like, you know, my friends are just the knuckle draggers like, "Hey, what does this mean?" Or, "That's a great question." And it's like, and you know, I always tell them like, "Hey, man, like, you don't—just having this pandemic and COVID has put far more stress on you than you realize." Like, "Well, no, not on me. You know, it's actually—" I'm like, "No, no, you're not getting it. Getting this pumped into your [expletive] head every single day on the news is horrible for your mental health. It is not good!" And guess what? It's been going on every single day for a year and a half now. That takes a toll. We're at that point. I mean, and you look at all these different indicators, stuff going up. We talk about communication breakdown. One of the big things is—we talked about this—where you reach out to someone, and then you're talking, and, "Yeah, hey, I'm interested," and then I just literally never hear back. Like, nothing. You get ghosted. And you're like, "This is insane!" And I'm noticing it. The more I did start talking to other people, there's places now—employers, employees—just like people going through an interview process with a company to where they get a verbal job offer and then never hear back from them again. I mean, people are just complete—"Well, I don't feel the need now to talk to you anymore." So rather than end the conversation, rather than say, "Hey, you know what? We're not interested," or "We're moving on," it's just, "I'm not going to even say anything. I'm just going to completely ghost you," which is—I look at those one of those little symptoms in there. It's like, "Wait a minute, what is this? What—what's causing this to where people suddenly even in—and even in a business environment, Greg, to just not respond or just say nothing?" I mean, that—that's unheard—that was unheard of years ago. You'd at least reply back, "Hey, the professional thing to do is, I know this is a difficult conversation," or whatever. But you do that. Now it's just, at scale, people are just, "You know, [expletive] it, I don't respond."

So look at a symptom of that with social media. Social media puts who at the center? You're at the center. You're controlling the message. You're on transmit. Okay? You can't wait till the other person stops typing so you can send the emoji or the response or an answer to it. You can't. You get a learned journalist that writes something and you spend the next 15 minutes sniping with that person said, from whose perspective? From your bully pulpit. That's not life. And what's happening is the pendulum is coming back. So all of the stuff that you're seeing now that's unhealthy will be interrupted by time because bad things don't last the test of time, they go away. But I say that you can live a much more full, rewarding life by interrupting it early enough. And Brian, we say it all the time, sometimes vote with your feet, sometimes the phone in the drawer, sometimes go out of your way to find somebody doing something right and tell them about it. The one thing is I don't have a lot of money, but I tip big. Whenever I tip big, that means you've done something significant, and I also tell the person, "Listen, I like the way you did that. Thanks for treating my parents in this way. You did a good thing." You saw me yesterday, I ran around town yesterday making people feel good because they helped out in a situation that we had. That's life. Life is all about paying it forward. If you're introspective, you're down and in all the time, and all you think about is how I'm going to fare, you're going to have a much less fulfilling existence. And this poor guy in Texas saying, "I'm going to take my ball home so nobody can play." That's a non-starter.

That's—that's what it is. And you know, in these moments, we also want Simone on the show. So, Simone, whoever was talking to you, Rulon Gardner was in Gunnison, that's the name I was trying to think of at Western, and I didn't know in time because I had had him on the show. But Simone, come on the show! We want to hear you. If anyone listening has a—has a pathway to the U.S. Olympic team. Actually, I might know on the lifting side. That's funny. Okay, we'll—I'll try and I'm going to track that down. We'll see if we can pull on that thread. But no, these are—I like to give, you know, you're good at giving those sound bites that are don't—you know, it's not a platitude, it's something to key in to remember in those—in those situations. And I like to, you know, thinking globally, not locally, just what's—what I'm part of the larger universe. So, maybe—maybe this is the time where I take a step back for a second and go, maybe—maybe it's someone else's turn to get whatever it is, the attention they need.

That talk about exactly the temporary breaks with reality and how easy it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, absolutely. We have them every day. So it's okay. Listen, Witcher, McGregor made a coffee table book on killing on Grossman. Grossman made a living off of telling people about perceptual mirroring and labor focus and all this other stuff. Listen, that doesn't matter because if you didn't know it when it was happening, how the hell can it help inform the decision that you made? Then I say think about forward. Neutral gets you nowhere. So think about your next encounter and stopping in the middle of saying something and interrupting that train of thought before it derails. It's a healthy thing. And I'm telling you, try it. I've transformed people that knew me then go, "You didn't know what you were like." "35 years, I knew what it was like and I had to get up and out of that." Yeah, you're not the same person. And the idea is, okay, either we're growing, you get what I'm trying to say, or we're dying.

Yep.

So we're innovating or we're stagnating. Where do we want—where do we want to be tomorrow? Where do you want to be?

No, that—that's good. And you know, I like that these are just good things to, like I said, remember in the moment, you know, the disruption versus interruption, adaptive traits and leadership, and what am I adapting to? What—where am I—where does this go from here? Is this going down or is this going up? It's just going to give you that one—

Let me give you one on adaption. So there was a gosh-darn TV show on late last night. I can't sleep, so I got to take more pills for this gosh-darn thing. And there was a show on and a guy opened up a briefcase, and inside the briefcase was a chameleon, and that was going to be the new friend. So it was some kind of cartoon show or whatever. And I thought about that for a minute. I took a knee and I said, "Chameleon. A chameleon blends in with its background so it stays hidden from a predator. But a chameleon doesn't get anywhere." Okay? That just gets a chameleon another hour, another minute, another day. That's the guy in Texas. The guy in Texas hid all that anger. He hid all that stuff, and then sooner or later, it had to come out. So if you're just going through life playing the chameleon, that strategy is not sustainable long term. You have to live in the moment. You have to live for your tribe or your set or your group or your family. Part of what you did was your protective instinct kicking in because you had your family with you. But once it turned to personality-driven and was just about you, you have to interrupt that. You get where I'm going? So chameleon gets nowhere, baby. Chameleon is not the way to live your life. Ostrich is not the way to live your life. Okay? And you also can't be running at full tilt all the time because that's not sustainable. Who does that? Zebra. You get what I'm trying to say? And sooner or later, cheetah shows up.

Right. We've all tried that. It only works for so long. It is what it is, right? I mean, that's what you said. You can't—you can't be constantly that at bang, right?

The whole—the whole talking about sustainable change, baby. We're talking about sustainable change of the entire system. Let's go back to machine learning because if the system and all the key components aren't running optimally, the system will fail. And you're part of a much bigger system. You're a cog in something that's always—

That's always a good thing to remember. And again, I know because it's hard in those situations sometimes to realize that, but when you take a step back, "Okay, I'm one spoke in this wheel, so let me—let me stay where I belong here." That's—that's a spot on, good—good way to look at it and remember stuff like that. So, and I think that's kind of a good spot to sort of bring it in for a landing, Greg.

I love it. What else do we want to shout out for anyone real quick?

If anyone's listening—we've been having some issues for some reason this week, well, we're recording this week, the podcast didn't load on Apple Podcasts, but it did on all the other podcast players, which I don't know about. But I can only—they, what happens in these situations is everyone places the blame on everyone else. So it's like, "Okay, basically, it'll be on there when it gets on there." No idea what happens. But if that has happened, because most of our listeners are on Apple Podcast, you can also listen right on Spotify too. I don't know, it's the same—same thing, same show, same everything, just different hosts. So if that happens for some reason, I don't know what happened this week.

But instead, to explain that, Greg, so you can do that. It's perfect. We rarely dedicate an episode, but a good friend, a good human, great former FBI agent and father and husband, Ron Nesbitt. Just an amazing human. And the world is less somehow today than it was yesterday because of his passing. So remember him in your prayers today, folks.

Yeah, no, that's—that's a good point. He's a great—a great guy and Ron did a lot for this country over his lifetime. So that's—that's always important to remember those people. So that's—that's, I think—I think that's it for today. We can—we can end on that, Greg. Next one we're recording, hopefully I'll be back in the studio, not on the road.

Exactly. And I'll be wearing pants, folks, for the first time this year. I will be wearing pants on that episode to celebrate, Brian. Oh, thank you.

Well, and a very happy birthday to you, Greg.

Thanks. That was, by the way, that was Lanny on the phone. Everybody knows my poor, drunken neighbor, Lanny, just woke up and is wishing you a happy birthday and wants to go drinking. What are the big birthday plans for today in Gunnison?

Well, let's put it this way, Brian. You and I have three more Zoom calls today. Yes, and Shelly gets home, and I go to bed. We're going to eat dinner around four, you get what I'm saying? We're going to watch Murder She Wrote at five. Exactly. And we'll be asleep by six, Brian. It's going to come on. It's true.

All right, man. Well, thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed it, please, please share with your friends. You can also check out our Patreon page and follow us on social media. Tell everyone about it. Give us a little review down below. Thanks again. Don't forget the training changes behavior.