L.O.G. 202 April Is The Cruelest Month

Alright, Greg, we'll go ahead and get started on sort of the second portion, or I guess the next chapter, from what we were talking about last week that aired. We just actually recorded yesterday, so it's easier for us. But the last episode, we talked about "beware the Ides of March" and kind of what that means, the meaning behind it, all this kind of significance, and how we sort of get things wrong sometimes. Things get, what we call, hijacked by history, and we kind of attribute different values to things, and the stories, names, dates, significance of things change over time. So, I figured today we'll hit the next one, which would be "April is the Cruelest Month." I'll go ahead and open up, Greg, unless there's something you want to throw in.

Yeah, I'm excited. I'm rare on the go.

Alright, so today we're going to be talking about what we would call "April is the Cruelest Month." To start that off, I will say, "April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." Which, of course, we all know is the first line of the T.S. Eliot poem called The Wasteland, which is where we get the saying "April is the cruelest month."

It's a poem at least about a hundred years old, so you can interpret it in a whole bunch of different ways. But one of the interpretations that line refers to is sort of the irony of the spring season, which obviously, just like March, is generally associated with new life and growth, but also brings the pain of rebirth and the realization of your own mortality. So T.S. Eliot chose to use sort of April to kind of represent that paradox.

This was written, I think, right after World War One, not long after it came out in 1922. So, a lot of it deals with sort of the trauma and the devastation from World War One, which had a profound impact obviously on T.S. Eliot. April sort of being not just the month when the war began, but kind of the symbol of the destruction and loss that the war brought about. So, the poem is about kind of despair and disillusionment, which are central themes throughout.

T.S. Eliot also had a lot of kind of historical references in the poem. I mean, he goes all the way back to King Arthur. He talks about some of the Greek mythology in it, obviously World War One and the imagery, and even kind of references different significant battles in the poem, and also all the way back to William Shakespeare and some classical literature, referencing Dante's Inferno—all these sort of themes of this decay and disillusionment and different types of philosophies that T.S. Eliot was in at the time. A lot of folks analyze this type of stuff, and they talk about illustrating the fragmentation and dislocation of modern life, as well as the search for meaning and spiritual renewal in the aftermath of the Great War.

So, this poem was written a hundred years ago, Greg, but you could take those same central themes and be immediately applicable today. So, we're talking about April today, and kind of like we talked about last week, dates start to coalesce around certain things, and they could be significant sometimes by pure happenstance, meaning one thing happens and then someone chooses to use that date as a remembrance for something, and it then becomes significant. But again, kind of like we talked about on the last one, this is spring; we're coming out of the cave as humans. So, we have that, the days are starting to get longer.

The Roman calendar, April, was technically the second month of the year. This was named after their Aphrodite and Venus, and there's different festivals during that time. Well, I guess since we're Arcadia, we have to be more on the side of Aphrodite, right? Pick whichever one you want. But I just want to give a couple quick significant dates in April, Greg, and then we can jump into it.

You had April 6, 1917, was when the U.S. entered World War One. April 12, 1861, started the American Civil War. April 14, assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. April 15, obviously your taxes—Tax Day, your taxes are due by that day if you didn't get an extension. Also, the date of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. April 19, in general, has been a significant date that we'll probably discuss quite a bit in this episode. April 22, Greg, that's your and Greta Thunberg's favorite day, that's Earth Day. April 23, 1564, the birth of someone who came up on the last episode and this one, William Shakespeare, or Bill Shakes Beard, as some people know him as, right?

And then April 26, 1992, there was a riot on the streets. Tell me, where were you? From Sublime taught me that actually, about the April 1992 riots in Los Angeles, which is funny because it fits into the theme of today, Greg. Those riots started April 29, 1992, which is the name of the Sublime song, but in the lyrics, he sings April 26, 1992, because he screwed it up. But that track, that recording, was so good that they decided to keep it and put it on the album, which is amazing.

And the last one, Greg, did you know this, but April is the birthday month for many of the Marren family. So my sister's is April 7th, my brother's is April 9th, and my mom is April 10th. And then mine's in June, which is why my old man just said, "Hey, can you just have yours in April too, because I won't ever remember your [__] birthday." So that's so funny. So that's the sort of preface to the show, Greg. That's the show. Thanks for tuning in! Exactly. We'll see you next week. So we'll talk about May on the next one. No, but that's a big significant. So again, it's still in that same theme of March, April, spring, coming out of the cave. So again, do these dates coalesce by happenstance? Is there a reason behind it? Do they become significant? Is April significant, or has it just become significant in recent history more?

Yeah, so again, leave it to me to throw you a curveball, because all the stuff that you said is logical. It's in a temporal order that our listeners can follow. But I want to say that you skipped over, either intentionally or accidentally, April 1st, April Fool's Day. We're all April fools when we don't take a look at the facts.

I'll give you an example. The next line of T.S. Eliot, "His winter kept us warm, covering the Earth in forgetful snow." So, what does that mean? Well, I've been cold. I live in Gunnison where eight months out of the year is winter, and winter snow, what do we call snow? The blanket of snow. It's so quiet that when you walk outside, you can hear noises off in the distance that are so amazing, and the crunch of the snow. So while we reveled in that, Mike Warren, from the Between the Lines podcast, shout out to Mike, we have to read between the lines for T.S. Eliot. Eliot says this birth comes after this long death, yeah, forgetful snow, right? And so that's hugely important.

I pulled up a quote—I hate reading other people's work, but Southern Poverty Law Center's Chuck Vance over there does such a great job—"Domestic terror runs from early April into early fall. Our center's research showed that 78.9% of lethal attacks and 81.8% of lethal Jihadi attacks—so you got lethal far-right and lethal Jihadi, all in that same bucket—have occurred from April to September." Okay, boom. Factoid number one. When weather gets better and we can move, that's when we start to attack. So, temperature, serotonin, light have something to do with it.

Then let's throw this in: several terrorist attacks, several school shootings have taken place in April. Okay, yeah, that's fine. But then the media coverage of the mass killings might lead into that, Brian, by inspiring the copycats. But guess what? The Southern Poverty Law Center says of April, quote, "But really, it's just like any other month." So what does that mean? Because we want to fit things into a pattern, because my brain must make order out of chaos.

So I would throw this out there for you: tornadoes, as destructive and deadly as they are, they start kicking off in April. And the three most dangerous months for tornado death and attacks—I mean, if you call them an attack—get thee to cover is April, May, June. Okay, so what happens is there's certain life imperatives, for lack of a better word. What we want to do is we constantly, like gosh darn popcorn on a Christmas tree, we want to string them together. So, why do we do that? What's our natural instinct to do that? One, memory means a lot to us, because our electrochemical neurotransmitters are constantly trying to create fire folders for potential danger. We're still linked to our survivability. So what happens is when we have certain scent triggers or societal triggers or, here, a seasonal trigger, Brian, all of a sudden, the snow melting, the leaves starting to come out, what happens is that triggers us to remember. Remember what happens in April? It's the cruelest month. Whether it is or not, it doesn't matter to our psyche. It is. And therefore, what we're going to do, unintentionally, is use our biases to put as much information in those sacks, even when it's extraneous.

Can I give you one before we start? Okay, about it. So here's a great one. You know how I feel about Tim McVeigh. You and I talk a lot about Tim. And McVeigh did the Murrah Federal Building bombing. Okay, that's April 20th. That's a very big thing, right? Yeah, exactly, April 19th, 1995. I'm trying to think of the answer that I want to give you, not the date. So you know me, I'm profoundly dyslexic. But I want you to take a look at the date. April 19th, 1995, was significant and an attack that he did with significant afterwards. But the two things that he railed against all the time was Waco, the '93 Waco Siege, and in addition, the Randy Weaver compound in Idaho, Ruby Ridge.

Okay, so why am I trying to make a point here with my gosh darn mixed-up numbers? Because had he picked Ruby Ridge, which in my memory happened in August, we would be celebrating the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in August, rather than April. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? If that would have come first? So, you can't, you can do whatever you want, but what's happening now with rewriting history is that we start putting things in bins that they don't belong, and that rot, that taint, just like we were talking about ethylene, one bad apple can spoil a whole bunch. What's going to happen then is you get an altered view, a skewed view of history, and therefore your outcomes, your answer at the bottom of the page, is going to be different.

So, Virginia Tech, April 16th; Columbine, April 20th; Oklahoma City, April 19th. People said right away, Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris) attacked on the 20th because they wanted to—Hitler's birthday. And it had nothing to do with that, Brian. What it had to do with is they were going to attack on the 19th, because they, like a lot of other people, consider the date significant. So you have McVeigh who goes, "Hey, listen, this is a significant date." The kids said in Columbine, "It's a significant date." But their stoner, doper, Colorado connection with the ammo didn't come through on the date. And they go, "Listen, tomorrow's a significant date for us on that weekend." And he goes, "Oh dude, I'm not going to be able to get this stuff till sometime on the 19th." So what happened is they had to move their attack a day.

So Brian, if we think that the day, the 19th to the 20th, is significant and it was Hitler's birthday, the look that we have at McVeigh and the Columbine shooters is going to be very different. You know why it's going to be different? Because now we're going to start saying things like, "Well, there was one time when they were bowling that they said 'Heil Hitler.'" There's not a kid in America that wasn't growing up that looked at the Nazi uniforms and the tanks and World War II and all that other stuff that didn't go, "Wow," and was enamored with the Nazi party, but there's no link to him saying, "Hey, you know, white supremacist National Association." It's exactly it.

And because people focus a lot on motive. So you just brought up that, okay, so the actual day of the siege at Ruby Ridge, down in Waco, Texas—Ruby Ridge was with your Randy Weaver was in August, you're right. That, wait, the French meeting component (likely referring to the Branch Davidian compound) in Waco was on April 19, 1993, which McVeigh was there during the siege at some point, I don't know that day, but he was there handing out pamphlets with the name of the sniper from the federal agency that shot Randy Weaver's wife and kid. So he was there. So it became, this is what we're talking about, that became—he chose to make that a significant date. Tim McVeigh did. So that's why he chose April 19, 1995, two years later, right? Because that Waco event was, he's now all in, he goes, "I've been talking about this and handing out the pamphlets, I'm done doing that now." Right, "I'm going to go do something." And he had been planning all kinds of stuff for a long time. So he does that.

And then now, then a few years later, it was in 1999, was Columbine. Every year, I can't remember, the same thing, they chose, they chose April 19th, had an issue with their plan, and then couldn't execute until the 20th. And then so everyone was, "Oh my gosh, April 20th, that's Hitler's birthday! Is there some significance?" So we look for that significance that often isn't there. And what that does is it—this is why we suck at analysis in general. We don't take the right takeaways from these issues, from these cases. We look at it as, what was their motive? Okay, they wanted to do this, they're a white supremacist. Well, they're bad. Okay, well, of course, white supremacists are bad, and if you think that way and you're a racist, you know, right, but but you're [__] oversimplifying or overcomplicating it.

Well, you're too stupid. Well, you're throwing this big search.

You're throwing this big bucket that doesn't help understand what to do next. Like, because the simple thing is, so now for a lot of people, for a lot of movements, April 19th is a significant day. So, does that mean I have to have, if I'm working in or near or at a federal building on that date, is there or should there be a heightened sense of security and alertness? Absolutely, right? I mean, but the idea is like we misattribute some of these things, and we put them in the wrong areas because it suits our story, our need, not the actual timeline or reason behind the events, which is why exactly we care so much more about intent than we do motive. Because any pundit, any [__] can get out and write a theory.

I was—there's one now I was just watching about this MH370, the jet that, you know, crashed, disappeared. Exactly. They're going through all these things that they, the Malays, they have the Malaysian one of what could have happened, and then people are going, they're looking at this data, and this is weird. So then they create a whole story based on—I fell asleep watching it last night—these, okay, well if Russia wanted to do this and distract us from their invasion of the Crimea, they could have put three agents on board, and they could have had access down to here, and he could have controlled the flight system, and like, you're like, "Holy [__]! Like, all to distract them from going." Why? They were going to go into Crimea anyway. Like, well, they don't need a distraction. Like, I mean, because why do we do that?

Because we have to. The electrochemical neurotransmitters, the chemical urge that creates the synapse in our brain that says we can't leave this open end, we can't have this waving shoelace, we have to tie it up and neatly, and about. So our brain goes, "There's an end to that." We can't have that uncertainty. And Brian, we create all kinds of crap.

Let me give you an item in support. Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris), the first line from Eric Harris's diary is, "I [] hate the world" with hate all capital. Then in his journal—okay, which every student that was in the journalism class, his teachers, even some parents read what he posted online and in his in-class journal—"I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to grab some weak little freshmen and just tear them apart like a [] wolf." His words, not mine. "Strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half and show them who is God."

Now, Brian, that's the first couple of paragraphs of what's in this kid's head. And where was it, "Heil Hitler, here's your birthday cake"? The idea is we conflate things. And when we do that, we weaken the argument on both sides, and we bolster misinformation, which goes right back to a podcast we did a couple of weeks ago where that line could screw us.

And I'll give you an example. Sandy Hook, Adam Lanza plans are idolized. Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris), he had a Tumblr account where he paid him homage and had a graphic collage of victims. And you know, the Parkland shooter, 14-year-old says, "Hey, I want to be the youngest mass murderer. I want to beat Eric and Dylan at their numbers." Those type of things happen when we sensationalize a date or an event or a place, and we don't say mea culpa. We don't say, "I'm responsible." And what do I mean by, "I'm responsible"? If I was reading a kid's journal that had that much hate, death, and fear, there's no, there's what I'm trying to say.

Are you saying that was a missed signal?

Yeah, that those issues, those parents weren't doing that, they, they knew what was going on, and they chose to...

Well, they knew, they knew what was going on was bad. They just, they just chose to do the [__] ostrich method and didn't get involved in their kid's life. But, you know, you bring up some good points about all those things being on there, and then how people start to idolize them, and they see, you know, even Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris), I think was the guy, his name, in Germany, who, who they, forget his name, but it was even before then, that's kind of where they got the whole Trench Coat Mafia thing came from, I remember, because I was in high school during that time, in the '90s. And so like, you know, you're looking at that, that was that became a thing. And someone wearing a trench coat was then a big deal because it was like, "Oh, they're Trench Coat Mafia, they're going to shoot up the school." And it's just a kid being a kid at that point.

And so, you know, we start to, and what, when you do that, you know, obviously now we start looking for the bogeyman. And if you're looking for the bogeyman, you're going to miss the actual threat in all of these situations. And we'll use historical dates constantly. I mean, people still do that. People choose certain dates even to carry out significant attacks, to do things on a certain date, because they know, they know their history, where we'll miss that stuff, or people won't understand that or look to it where we should have gone, "Man, hey, that date was coming up. You know, that's a pretty significant date for a lot of people. We probably should have been paying attention to that." But we didn't know this historical fact for this group of people. So we completely missed it because we're putting our own lenses on these when we're looking at these different different attacks or we're looking at groups of people, and that's changing the perspective. It's never going to understand or see what's—it's a failure in predictive analysis.

But even to go back to, you know, you talked about the popcorn kernels on the Christmas tree and stringing them together, exactly. That's what humans do. We're primed for pattern recognition, right? Like we have to do pattern recognition. Yes, that's what we're allowed to do. But if we don't have some framework, unless I have some niche area of expertise in something, anything outside of that, I'm not very good at that pattern recognition. I mean, how many, how many experts do we know that are unbelievable in their field, and they're some of the best at it, and then you throw in something else, a different domain, and they're like, it's like watching a child. You're like, "What do you, what do you do? Like, you know nothing here. You're coming up with all these ridiculous ideas." And it's like, well, yes, I, because they're so good in one area that think it translates over, and it often doesn't. Because we don't understand the underlying architecture framework of decision-making, of pattern recognition, of how we do this. And that's kind of what we talk about as much as we possibly can on this podcast: it's, you know, it's what am I actually looking at? What are the artifacts and evidence that support a reasonable conclusion versus why would someone do that?

Right. [__] Man, I don't know, there's a million reasons why someone will do something.

Alright, but there's only so many ways in which they can do it. There's only so many possible locations to carry out a school attack, and it's probably going to happen at the school that the person went to. Why? Because they seek familiarity, and that's what they know. Like, the answers are simple. It's not always, it's not easy to prevent it. It's going to, you got to burn some calories, you got to put some time and effort in, but the problem is itself is simple. It's that simple. Yeah, yeah.

So, so look, everything you say, I would add to just a few things, because you're on the right path. That, I think, 100%. One, why do we have an autopsy protocol? We have an autopsy protocol because we can't go, "Oh, Jim just died of old age." Yeah, it had to be some factors. What were those factors that came together? We have pareidolia. Pareidolia says that I'm going to see Jesus in a potato chip. Why? Because of pattern recognition. I have to see faces in certain things. They spur on their face on the moon. They're not sure what the memory is right now, but we know that it's significant, so we got to pay attention to that. Then all of a sudden, we take a look at your comments, and let me go to Columbine, because Columbine's a pretty significant event for me, yes, personally.

So, yeah, when you take a look at Columbine, the Klebold parents and the Harris parents would say, "You're a liar," and they would sue you for your comments saying that they missed all the signals, being in their room and in the kids' room. And the basement tapes all were taken in their house. Now, the brother and the sisters say, "You don't understand, it wasn't like that. We never did." Look, they went to the prom. Yeah, of course. And the day after sodomizing and then strangling and burying a kid in his basement, John Gacy went to church. And after eating one of his neighbors, Jeff Dahmer went to breakfast at a diner before he hit work, because he was hungover.

Okay, you have to stop putting round pegs in square holes. You have to take a look at what the evidence says. So, of course, as a parent, I'm going to tell you, because it's a survival mechanism, nobody could have told me that this was going to happen. But this is what we know: the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office (Jeffco). So, they knew Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris) for making pike bombs. They had credible information, and a detective was assigned to go to the court and get a warrant so I could go search the houses, Brian. It was almost a year before the incident happened, and you know what? Slipped through the cracks. There was a lot of [__] that was going on, and they forgot to execute those warrants.

Cleveland Harris (referring to Eric Harris) worked together, in fashion, a first-person shooting killing game, hurting people with the live library in the cafeteria, herd, H-E-R-D, herding them into an area where they could easily kill them. Okay, everybody that looked at that said, "It's just a game." They did videos on being these emotionless killers and walking in their steps, and everybody said, "Look, what, what's the, what's our fascination with looking away?" We have a fascination to look after the accident, Brian. But in these incidents where information is stacking up and a reasonable person would say, "We need to intervene here," we look away. If we can solve that in the human condition, we know it causes it, but that doesn't solve it, does it? You know what I'm saying? We know we can have the, we can have the theorem, and we can have the mathematics, and we can do countless tests and say, "This is likely the cause." But when it comes to talking to fellow humans, we want to look away. We do not want to say, "Give you one more and let's talk about that."

Is it true—I'm deposing you for the podcast—is it true that we've come to know that a number of schools, including Uvalde, Oxford, have had active shooter training, whatever you call that, because now there's a million different names for, you know, active killer, active shooter, school shooter, whatever you want to call it. Is it true, Brian, that some of those schools had training within a year or a few months or days before an incident?

Yeah, several of them within single-digit days.

So let's take a paintbrush and let's paint on the side of our semi-sized white bedsheet: We know that preventative measures work. We know that predictive analysis works. And we know that training changes behavior. But it must say something about the training if training occurred and there was no difference and people still died. Do you get where I'm going? Like this is what you can go back and see what you, you can go back and see what works and what doesn't work.

Yes, you can. Right there. See, okay, you went through this and then this still happened. So clearly this had zero effect. Right? Right. I mean, I mean, you can, you can mathematically show that.

I can put that on a [] actuarial table and explain that no value added here. And the point with the stylus to the points, okay, well this occurred, and then you can go back and, as horrible as this sounds, okay, well, what did we do right? Okay, so these things actually did work because we were able to get this element here first, but look at the rest over here, this failed. What were the points of failure? The problem is no one wants to accept responsibility and say, "Well," or they go, "Well, let's not, that person was trying to do a good job." Look, get it. This isn't about that person, it's about the process and the training. And it is, I don't take the people out of it. Take to put a blackout the name. I don't give a [].

Everyone wants to blame a person, well, except for the person that did it, right? The, we don't want to do that. They all want to hold someone responsible, we can burn at the [] stake or we can hang from a [] tree, right? Because that makes us feel better, right? But it doesn't solve the goddamn problem. And this is what we're talking about. We talk about the simplest things, and then people love it in some ways, they go, "Wow, you guys really break this down simply." And then we go, "Yeah, so go act on those things." Like, "Well, we got to do this," because, I like, because everything comes full circle, right? It is, first everything was, "Oh, we're going to do this, run, hide, fight." What's everyone saying about that now? "Hey, that doesn't work. It's []. This [] doesn't help." It's a, so, so we keep creating these systems that everyone goes, "Yeah, slap the table, slap the table." And then they put it in, and then it happens again. And then they go, "Oh, well, hang on, we need more of that training." And then they do more of it. And then they eventually get to the point where we go, "Oh, wait, wait a minute, I don't think this works." Oh, wow.

And, and so we're not oversimplifying these issues. In fact, the exact opposite. We're saying, here are the simple things you need to look at, here's how you train for that. Now you have to go do it. Now you have to go put in the time. This isn't, "What, we hired a company and they're going to armor up the windows? We went through our mandatory four hours of this or that. I clicked on the website and I did the online training." Like, then that's what you're going to get. And, and so, you know, you're right back to the to the to the, you know, Sue Cleveland (referring to Sue Klebold), who's out on the speaking tour, getting paid to talk about, you know, her son who murdered all these kids. And, and like, I get it, she's a parent too. Her kid died, and that's awful, and he did an awful thing. I can't imagine what that's like to deal with. But like, you're not, you're not, how you, you should be, she should be screaming at parents and administrators, saying, "You need to get into these kids' [__]. You need to be all over it. You need to be reading everything they write. You need to be looking at everything they post. Absolutely. You need to be all over this because this is about safety, this is about security, this is about them, this is about us as a society going forward." But we don't. We just normalize it. "Hey, this system worked at Oxford, Greg, because only how many kids died that day?"

Well, exactly. "It would have been more if we didn't have that training." That's, that's an unacceptable standard, and completely ridiculous. And so, so let's talk about that for a minute, Brian. Let's talk about that from the perspective of training. So I spent a lot of time at the Infantry Immersive Trainer on Pendleton. I spend a lot of my free time there, you did. And once, one day, we were doing a debrief and after-action, and I happened to be part of it. And the people that were sitting around in the semicircle in that little room in the back, that all pulled their chairs together to hear what gems people were saying. And the guy that was a tactics subject matter expert there at that time was going after it. And it was all TTP, all TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures). And I'm looking at it, and I'm going, "Okay, not a lot of these guys have the blue or the red Sim rounds on their chest, on their face mask, anything else. That's good." I'm thinking this in my mind. But what I noticed is a whole bunch of them had them on their gloves and on their fingers and on their weapons. And I'm thinking, "Okay, that's the exposed part. The way your vision and your brain works when you're an enemy and you're shooting, yeah, that's what you're shooting at." Yeah. "How many of those folks in that room had a plan?"

And that's what I posed, "If you lose your fingers, how are you going to shoot your weapon? If your weapon gets shot up and it malfunctions, what's your backup weapon?" Now, everybody goes, "Well, what kind of tangent is that?" No, what I'm saying is training is aligning your team's values with your team's behavior. What do I mean by that? Take a look at the training that they were given. The training these schools were given was on the X, Brian. So all of the training that there was given was, "Okay, now we have a school shooter, now what do we do?" That's way too late in the game.

Now, there's another school of thought that you and I have studied and we've seen a lot of where it's, "Let's put checks in certain boxes. Oh, they swore, there's a check. You know, they were bedwetters, there's a check. Oh, they they made a threat against the teacher, there's a check." And what happens is you, you know, when we're doing the whack-a-mole, you counted more moles whacked, so therefore you're the higher threat. Well, Brian, that's too far left. You get what I'm trying to say.

So the idea is, folks, if you want to know why we guess more right than wrong, we say that when somebody is walking backwards dragging a duffel bag full of objects that are scraping against the ground to school, that's abnormal. That doesn't happen every day. That's the kid that you got to exclude for that day, and you'll be a lot safer. So you, you see what happens is the value of the team here, the school, is misaligned with the training of the team. So, so we're not training for the real event. And then when we say training for the real event, somebody goes, "Oh, so you mean the fidelity has to be so good that the realistic training is the most important thing?" No, where did, where did we take that exit? Do you see what I'm saying?

So we're talking about April, and we're talking about April starts a lot of things: tornadoes and terrorist attacks and school shootings and all that other stuff. And we know that that sometimes they end by September, even though there's been school shootings in December. So even that vein means look out for special dates. But don't make it the 20th or the 19th, because sometimes they can flip-flop because of issues that are out of your control. "Hey, the door was locked that day, I went to the other door." What we're saying is that certain days bring with them a greater degree of anxiety and fear, sometimes because of the human condition, we're not sure what's around that next corner, so we create it. But we also are saying at the same time that your training design has to be specifically tailored to the need of the institution. So as rare as school shootings are, you need to have a plan for them, right? But the plan can't be after the first student is shot, we do so and...

And that, that happens a lot with a lot of different training programs. I don't care if that's your, your HR at a company, your military, your law enforcement, or your workout program. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's that, this is what happens, is we, you, you know, we go, "Okay, these are the things I need to do." And they often fall under, "Well, these are the things that I know about or have access to, or I'm already pretty good at." So we start to overstress those things. And so I'll give you, and and what, and the other thing that comes into is you have constraints, right? So there's time constraints, there's, there's resource constraints, there's, there's monetary restraints on things. So you have to choose what you're going to invest in. And what we're saying, I think what I'm hearing you say is, everyone's investing in when this thing occurs, and everything after. And, and which is weird, because we're actually fairly decent at what happens after. Things will go wrong sometimes, and there's simple things that didn't fit into the plan. They over-train in certain areas and under-train in others.

And this is the thing: why aren't, for this, especially for something like that? Look, if you're protecting a federal building, there's only so much you can do left of bang, right? Because your, your job is right there. You have this, this is it, right? This is my block that I have to protect. I can't really project out far that I don't have the resources. I can, I can do as best as I can right here, right now. Okay, but that's very different than what we're talking about here with with, you know, you're bringing up the school shooters here. That's everything. Like, it, it should be everything left on that timeline. Everything to the right of that, we have resources for, we have plans for that, we have training for that. Training already occurs for that type of thing. And it's like, not at a school. We're not focusing on that, that everything up front there. Yeah.

And so we're losing it, and we, because it, like you said, it's a low frequency, high impact, high magnitude event. Right there, the impact is so great. But, but that, that's the point. That's the point of even some of the stuff with the law enforcement training, is yeah, too, is like, look, the cost—the physical, mental, emotional cost, and financial cost—of doing the wrong thing, right, far outweighs the benefits of doing the right thing in some situations. You know what I'm saying? It's like, "Well, we have to go arrest this guy now." You know, he robbed the bank. Okay, but, but what we're saying is that if that goes wrong, right, the, that, that the spirals there, the aftermath there, the second-order effects are far worse than the benefit of everything going right. And, and that's not what people are taking into account. They're saying, "Well, you know, we have to do this now," or, "We have to focus on this." It's like, "No, no, no, no, the cost of these things is so great. It fundamentally changes the DNA of everyone in that [] community and city and country so much for now, that that we're, we've gotten so far off track of what we consider normalcy because this is continues to happen and it's a high—or we see it all the time. What we think is normal now, that's what happened, that company came out and said, "Look, only a few kids died at the Oxford shooting." That's now the standard. That's a success? [] you! It's like, it's, and we're so, and this is what happens, people get so far lost into this stuff. You don't realize when you become, it's like the celebrities who you see that are like, you know, it's like it's Madonna. Okay, have you seen what Madonna looks like now? It's not even a human being. Why? Because, well, it started with a little bit because she was trying to stay young and wanted to get some surgery or some Botox or maybe a little bit of lip filler, or maybe the maybe now this here. So her what she sees in the mirror is now what she's comparing it to. So now she goes, "Well, now I need this." She's not comparing it to when she was 19 or 20 years old and what her face actually looked like. Her comparison is so off now that the deviation she creates with a little bit of surgery isn't that much to her. But if you compare it to back where she started, it's, "Oh my God, you'd look like an alien now." And, and that's where we're at, that's where we're at with these things and why this occurs.

That's, first of all, it's, lay off the Detroit girl. Statistics-based profiling is a huge risk at wrongly identifying kids that would never commit a violent act, and excluding kids who might. So, National Association of School Psychologists has a great line there: "There is no profile of a student who will cause harm." Yeah. And they add, Brian, they add in quotes, "Any attempt to develop profiles of school shooters is an ill-advised and potentially dangerous strategy."

But you know what happens to that line? Okay, that's National Association of School Psychologists, the 2004 report on best practices for school shootings, I still have in my school shootings file all of the Secret Service stuff, everything that we do. What we're doing is the gap in the perfect storm that we're creating is the gap where the kid makes an explicit signal of an imminent threat, and we're not doing anything at that time. So, so what does that mean? That means an intent. That means writing a hit list. That means sharing pictures of my gun. That means telling other kids, "Stay home next week." That means saying, "Hey, Valentine's Day is coming up," Brian, there's one, yeah, Valentine's Day, February. You get what I'm saying? And so should we think that bad things are going to happen around there? Yeah. Now it has nothing to do with the seasons, Brian, but it has to do with the heart. And more movies and poems are written, and books are written about you breaking your heart or falling in love and everything. So what we have to do is we have to look for the nexus of bad things. We have to look for, we profile anomalies, not humans. And the anomaly is when these things start to coalesce. "Today is more dangerous than yesterday."

I'll give you an example. I'm running late this morning. I go out, the tire looks a little low, and I know that I can pull up and put 25 cents in a machine when I'm getting gas and pump that tire up. But I go, "It'll last today because I'm running late already." Okay. I also noticed that the kid needed this for whatever, so I'm going to drop in just for a minute at the local 7-Eleven to grab that thing and drop it off on the way, which is going to make me later. But I tell you what, if I can go a little faster, Brian, what happens is when we have a rough plan, we're more likely to follow that plan and succeed than when we have a plan that we disregard at hello. And now we're just knee-jerking it and calling in plays from the sidelines, because what happens is you get further and further from the mark, and you take bigger and bigger risks. And guess what? You forget things. And when you forget, "Oh, [__], that was a kid that said so and so," the next thing you know, you got, you know, the muzzles blasting. If we make all our choices at our front sight post, yeah, we're never going to get ahead of this problem.

And the problem is that, that, that March is dangerous for certain times. April is dangerous. May is dangerous. Let's take those out of the spectrum and go, "Why is this period of my day more dangerous than anything?" Brian, what's the most dangerous time of day for going to a fast-food place? Lunch hour. Why? Because everybody else takes the same lunch hour. And guess what? I'm going to rob a place. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to rob it when everybody's there with all the money, and everybody's in a hurry. So if you step in front of me in line, that could be a death sentence. We know these things. We, this is just like the National Association of School Psychologists saying that the profile is ridiculous, yet what do we try to do? We try to profile the human rather than looking at the event. We don't think temporarily. We don't take a knee and take a look at the big picture.

And guess what happens in every one of the ones that we've studied? Somebody goes, "Well, they all knew." You know that McVeigh was going to, we all knew that this guy was going to pop out, we all knew this kid was going to come to school with the gun. The kid in Oxford had the gun in the bag while they were all confronting him. And you know what they didn't do, Brian? They all had a flag, but nobody said, "Hey, open the bag." Right. So, which is the simple way to determine where you're at.

Well, we have to take a look, yeah.

And the, the, this isn't that scientific. That's science, isn't it?

You just quoted the scientific method.

We have to take a look. We have to look in that bag. Schrödinger's Cat 101. That's, yeah. "Open the box, see if it's [] dead." You know what I mean? And so, so that, that's the thing is that we're not willing to do, and there's a lot of [] reasons out there for that. And I mean, they are [] reasons. You know, "Well, you know, we don't want to, you know, we don't want to get in someone's business, and they're not, they have their rights, and they're." No, no, they [] don't. Not in a school they don't. Like, you literally don't. You're, you're, the Supreme Court is, you know, clearly established that you have less rights in certain areas, right? And especially in a school system where safety and security of a child is the number one, that's number one. Because, but, but even from, you can't learn, you know, if, if, if you're under, if you feel threatened or you're scared or fearful, you're not learning. So, so there, it's everything you're doing there is, is does, doesn't even matter, because it's a moot point, because if you don't have this rule number one established.

But that's in general, and, and you know what everyone does is, "Well, you know, I don't want to end up on the news and someone filming me in this." It's like, you're not beating the [] out of the kid, you're searching their bag for safety reasons. Like, you're like, who's, don't fall to some BS pressure that isn't even real half the time. It's just people making a fuss about nothing. And, and, and you have, you have to do these simple things. Like, the reason why, okay, everyone hates TSA, but you know what, it, it prevents X amount. You don't want to live in a world, like, if it wasn't there, you could do whatever. So, yes, does it, was I pissed when, you know, my, my mom sent me from Chicago one time when I was visiting over the holidays, and she was, a Tupperware pan full of these like bars that she makes, and because she's my mom and wanted to be perfect, she took the frosting and put it in a separate container and closed that and said, "When you get home, then you can put the frosting on so it doesn't get messed up when you travel." And then they didn't know what that was in TSA, and they confiscated my mom's frosting, because they're probably eating it in the back. That pissed me off. Yeah, but you know what also meant someone didn't get something else on that plane they would have blown out of the [] sky. So you went with it.

Yeah, you're right.

So you weren't that, you're called trade-offs, and people don't realize that that's what life is about, trade-offs. Right? It's, it's, you know, if you want safety and security, you have to do these things. If you want more freedoms, well, you're going to get more of this. You know, it's, it's that's the, that's the mathematical equation. But it's, it's these simple measures that that we're looking, we're overlooking or we, how many times we've gone a place where they're overlooking their own playbook? We're like, "It, it's right here in this binder you have on this shelf right here. You actually have really good SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). Let me show them to you." And they're going, "Wow, where did you come up with this stuff?" And I'm like, "I, I stole it. Your manual. You're just not implementing this policy correctly." Because we'll write it up, and we'll pay a lawyer to do it, and we'll pay a company to write that nice binder up. But, but it's useless information if that's all it is.

Brian, two of the places that we strain to get into to conduct training are California and Texas. And the harder we push, it's almost as if their classic obstruction is pushing back somehow. Yet facts show that California, Texas, then Florida, in that order, have the highest number of school shootings. Okay. Number of mass shootings outside of schools, in this order: California, Texas, then Florida. So why does Colorado pop out all the time? Another school, because the mass, the number of deaths from a place like Columbine skew those results. But there's no question that California and Texas are the two top ones. We get the most replies from those two places saying, "Hey, we want to implement this." And then when it comes down to it, there are bureaucratic red tape nightmares that are in the way to get a new idea in there. They go, "Hey, we got this." Clearly, you don't, because if we take a look at the statistical analysis, there's a problem there.

The other thing is we have to stop shooting, thinking of these shootings as as an event that's some sort of austere, antiseptic, sterile environment, like a petri dish, Brian. These are humans that are disenfranchised, for whatever reason, that get angry and either shoot themselves or shoot everybody else, because the most common outcome of these type of events is what? The shooter taking their own life.

I now have April, and I woke up this morning, and I look, and everybody's cheering, and the birds are chirping, and there's bright colors, and I saw a rainbow. And you know what, Brian, that just makes me want to walk into a place and start shooting people at the Walmart. That's what's happening. And we missed that. We missed it. Not everybody, not every unique little snowflake is having a good day. They're walking around with a broken pot cobbled together, spilling some of their essence out there. And where you could have walked across the street and go, "Dude, let me give you a hand up there." We don't do that. And, and so those type of things, the "act up" versus the "act out," Brian, will take their toll. When somebody's acting up, if we don't notice it and step in, then the next thing that they're likely to do is act out. And, and when they act out, we all look surprised.

So, so we have talked about March and now April, and we have put together some things. And we've shown you that the logic dictates that we're going to put things in the wrong bin because we're not paying close attention. And we're all talking about that awareness of issues can arm us well before an issue ever happens. But what do we do? And, and when we look at stuff like Lanza, and we look at stuff like Cho (referring to Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech), Cho's another one, Virginia Tech, saying, "Hey, listen, these guys had it right when they were talking about Columbine." Why do I draw all things back to Columbine? One, I've got skin in the game. Yeah, yeah, it's very close to where I am right now. But Columbine should have warned us about a bunch of things that still happen every time we have a school shooting. And, and that, I'm prefacing what we're going to talk about in round three, Brian. Well, because this is only round two.

Right. And that, and that's, that's, that goes back to my Madonna analogy, yes, right? We're not comparing how far things have come since Columbine. We're comparing things now to Oxford or Uvalde. But we can't use data that way. What happens is we're using, we're changing the baseline. Yes. And, and we're constantly moving the baseline forward. And what that does, it skews the outcome. The results are different. We have to take a look—Bath, Michigan, folks, 1925. Yeah. You get what I'm trying to say. Andy Kehoe (Andrew Kehoe). And yeah, you've got to be able to take a look backwards and see where we've come since then. And when the gosh darn pot on the stove is whistling, it's time to take it off. Because if you don't take it off, something bad is going to happen. And that pot is going to deform, and it's going to burn the stove, and do all these other things. So if we know that much, why can't we do that with fellow humans in society? No.

And, and you know, we, we talked about it on past episodes before. We look for technological solutions, because again, that's how we are as innovative humans and have had to survive the world. So we look for a thing, you know, "Well, what, what can I buy? Can I, let's get, let's put the shot spotters in the school. Let's put cameras with weapons detection technology built into it." Let's, and again, it's either all at bang or right of bang thinking. You're not going to prevent anything. Like, tell me right now, if, if you're looking at mitigating something, you're in risk mitigation, you're trying to prevent something from happening, and you're about to purchase something, will that prevent or stop something from happening? Yeah, I get it. I have cameras at my house, Greg, and maybe they're just going to record my [__] homicide, right? But it's not going to stop someone from trying to come in, right? That won't do it. The alarm going off might. The locked door will. The standoff I have from the street will prevent something, the time and distance. But that camera is going to record what they're going to do. And, and, and I don't care if it had weapons detection technology, the person is there, there's their insight of the camera. So they're, you, that you've already lost. Like, they're already there. I mean, and so, so that, that's the idea is what, how is this going to prevent something from ever happening in the first place? And 99 out of 100 times, none of the solutions do.

And, and who, and you keep bringing up the, the Association of School Psychologists. We've talked to the Texas Association of School Psychologists. We've talked to those. They're the ones sitting here going like, "Hey, if we just start way back here with these kids and we get better funding and programs for them for intervention strategies at an earlier age, this will never happen." I mean, they're even farther left than we are on that timeline, right? And, and, and again, it falls on deaf ears. It's like, "Well, no, we got to have, let's arm teachers." Okay, so last year you were pissed that they, you, you said they suck and you don't like their political ideology and they shouldn't be teaching your kids. But now let's give them guns. Okay, there we go. There's, there's the solution. What are we already seeing happening with that? How many accidental discharges, what, people dropping guns in the what?

Not even that. That, that is huge and I agree with you on that. Look at your own results, folks, to go out there and search how many times they cranked off a round or, you know, something happened with these, that's a gun in the bathroom. But just in the last three weeks, there's flooding incidents and some occurred all over Colorado, some occurred all over Michigan. And during those responses, cops hit other cop cars. Guys cranked off rounds in schools. All things happen if we're doing that during training. And somebody would say, "Well, that's why you do training." Yeah, yeah, I get it. Okay, let's not kill a bunch of people in training, right? Let's save that for the real event. But I also think that some of these people are dinosaurs and have to move out of the training, and that's the movement to contact mentality.

And folks, I'll give you one story. Brian and I are in Detroit. We'll never be able to go back to the building. And we're going up on a federal building in Detroit. And on the four corners, there's people, and we noticed that on each one of the four corners, those people would rotate on a time schedule. So we, we paid attention to that. Then it would go inside and rotate with somebody that knew would come outside. Well, that's great. We went over and talked to them and the different grab sample that we got from the different people all experienced prior military or prior coppers that were now retired that were doing the plain clothes security for the places, even though they were all wearing their blue blazers, blue shirts, everything. Yeah, right. They're very professional. But right across the street, okay, where the parking lot thoughts are, there was nobody walking. They didn't go on patrol away from their base. They didn't go looking for trouble.

And that's what we're saying. We're saying that all your cameras are great. The Ring camera on your door, those people being in a phalanx at the very last moment before your car bomb explodes are all good. But you have to probe. Science says, "Send out a probe." We call it the rock in the pond. Watch where the ripples go and watch what happens next. If you're not grab sampling your environment, if you're not testing for what might happen, if you're not trying to solve for X today, then guess what? You're complacent. You're going to walk right into the [__] and you earned it because you're the person that's responsible for your own personal safety. So take it by looking at the calendar. Some days, look, there's a whole bunch of things, Brian. Do we have to check the weather? Yeah, because the weather can kill us. Okay, we just talked about the tornado, but snow can kill you, too much rain can kill you, the flood can kill you. So there's a thing that we got to think about. And then people are going to go, "Oh my God, now you gave me one more thing to worry about." No, that's what life is. Life is waking up, going down to the gym, and while you're at the gym, prioritizing your day, Brian, so it fits into your week and month. And your homicide isn't part of that. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You're, you're not going, "Well, you know, I'm probably going to die today. What do I do?"

You know, my Mondays I don't work out early on Monday, why? Yes, most people my age die of heart attacks on Monday. I push my workout later in the daylight savings, you can control.

Yeah, exactly. Setting the clock back. What, what happens every time? There's an increase in all of those things because of that.

Yeah, no, and well, in Charge, we talk about time a lot. And, and, you know, everyone is, "You can control time much more than you think you can." I mean, you, that's the, the, the, time is perception, right? It's all about perception. So everything is, "Well, we got to get this done," and, "Well, we got to get that done," and, "You got to understand, we have all these." It's like, no, you don't. You actually don't. You got to do this one thing right now, and then when you're done with that one thing, you got to do the one thing after that. Then you got to do the one thing after that. And it's, but you know how that starts? That starts because we talk about hacks. So we got Rachael Ray saying, "Look, I'm going to show you how to save time because we're going to spend all day Sunday cooking meals for the rest of the week." What you're doing is trading time. Yeah, you don't, you don't gain time. Yeah, that's a physical impossibility, I mean, from physics. So what you got to do is you got to use time. Yeah, so that's what you're doing. It's a perimeter as a weapon. Can you use it during planning? Of course. So, so every second matters. You know, in everything it matters.

And well, that's a thing. And it's not about, it's the same amount of time, it's about your perception. And when you have it so that Sunday when you have nothing planned, well, sure, it's easy to get all that stuff done and prep all those meals, right? But you used your Sunday. Exactly. But Monday, so that way Monday you're not rushing, you're not stressed because, "Oh, I got to pick the kids up, then I got to finish this work, then I got to make dinner." I think it's like, no, that part's already done, which then removes that cognitive load. And you perceive yourself as having more time, when in fact, all you did was trade the time. You traded the time.

But the idea is if you're an expert at trading time, look, how important is time when an event occurs? Your brain will slow time down so you can take in as much information as possible to draw the best, most reasonable conclusion for your survival at that time. Okay, it will exclude noise so you don't have an additional thing, a prompt, an external causation to focus on. Those things don't happen because you're afraid of the incident. They happen because your brain is going, "Okay, I got to be the best me right now. Let's drop all this other []." Why do you pee and [] during an incident like that? Because I got to be prepared to fight and run.

And so if we go back to the basics, and folks, we don't go out of our way to try to be salacious or drop the F-bomb or anything else. We're passionate about what we do. And when we see imbeciles out there saying the opposite online or conducting a training event where the training is only for the X on the bubble, that, that's, that's wrong. And we're trying to warn you that if you put all your eggs in that basket, that basket's got a hole. And it's like a little kid. You remember that the, the, the Easter kid that's picking up the eggs? It was the thing on YouTube like ten years ago, and he'd pick up an egg and put it in his basket and fall out. And he'd have the same egg, but he got just as excited every time. Okay, sooner or later, man, you're going to reach for that egg, and that egg is not going to be there. So, so your ability to train for the real event, your ability to think through problems and plan ahead of time are, are paramount. That's what you should be spending your time and money on. And guess what? Then your life is much more fun. You're not walking around waiting for that other shoe to fall all the time, Brian. Yeah. So I get passionate about that too.

Yeah, you know, it, it only gets me mad because how many books do we have to read? How many examples do we have to see where people try to say, "So the lesson from this one is now," the lesson from all of them. All of them have always been the same way. They're, they're unique because we, we get interested in certain stories because there may be some unique, seemingly unique element to it, but there's always going to be some little unique element to every story, right? And, and right, and we, we glom onto those things and think that's the important part, when we're missing the fact that here's the three, four, five things that were present in every single one of these cases. So, so those are the things I need to look for, not this little, you know, secret handshake or saying or new thing, because there's always going to be that new unique element involved, right? But, but what were the, like, there's the same elements were involved in the 1925 Bath Township school shooting by Andrew Kehoe that there were at Columbine. So the same elements were there. There was explosives, there was time for this, he had initial warning signs here, they use these elements, the same elements, the element of distraction, modifying your clothing to carry more weapons. So you just have to focus on those things because they're present in every single one, and they stand the test of time.

So, to maintain your vehicle, you know me, I go back to things that everybody can equate on the ground. To maintain your vehicle, if you don't check your oil, if you don't add windshield wiper fluid, if you don't get the right fuel, sooner or later that vehicle is going to break down. That's a fact. If you chain smoke and you don't watch your fat and you're eating too much sugar in your diet, you're, you're headed for a fall. And we know that heart disease is going to kill you faster than a school shooter. If we park too close to a place and don't park further and walk more, then we're going to have a sedentary lifestyle, and we're going to get diabeto (diabetes), taking my leg. Those things, Brian, are imperatives because if we take a look at it, the pattern tells us that these certain patterns lead to this outcome. So why don't we do that in our own lives? Why don't we take a look at these situations and instead shred all the other crap away?

And take a look, look, when you show up on a scene as a copper and you've already got your mind made up on what kind of call it is, are you at your best? No, you're not at your best because those biases are now running it. So all we're saying with these last two podcasts is take a look at the evidence. The evidence is out there. And Brian, we're also saying it's hard. Living this type of life isn't easy. Fasting isn't easy. Training isn't easy, right? But it's much more fulfilling than just laying around and being a slob.

Yeah, and I, I, you know, the, the people that are listening to this podcast are, are probably not in the lazy category, right? They know that, and this especially if you're interested...

It's probably not lazy, though, yeah.

You know, but, you know, if you're, if you're an hour in at this point, you're definitely not lazy. So, no. You know, we, we covered a lot and we front-loaded it with this, this T.S. Eliot poem, right? And the saying of "April is the cruelest month," and, and I, I hope by an hour later we have sort of dispelled that myth and, and to not look at things that way. That was the point here, right? It was, "Here's, here's what T.S. Eliot and society says," and we glom onto those things. It's very attractive, and it's very understanding, and it hits me at an emotional point. And I go, "Wow, yeah, that's, I see that. Look at all these areas in my life that are so similar, and this happened in April, and that, and oh my gosh, I brought you someone, so and so broke up with me, and that was the worst time in my life in that year." And then, you know, it's like, don't, if we go down that path, we're never going to learn the lesson, right? We're just going to continue to repeat that cycle. And so I, I hopefully, I think that that point was, was made directly and indirectly. And sorry, Madonna, and sorry to you, Greg, from yeah, Detroit man.

No, no, hey, so it's already not welcome in Detroit. So listen, what we're saying is your own life, your own school, your own business, you should have an on-duty roll call every morning or every night before you go in. And you should discuss those things in your own mind before you bring them out to anybody else. What might today bring, and what are those type of issues that I should be looking for? And prevent indications of anything always look the same when a vehicle is going to slide off the road. Nothing comes out of nowhere. There is no Yeti or a UFO. Take a look. Prioritize them. Yellow pad them. It takes five minutes out of your day, and you'll feel less anxious, and you'll feel more, more in control, and you'll be safer. It's a fact, we know you'll be safer and harder to kill.

Yep. No, that's the, that's the, that's the morning if I'm not on a call with the—insert, you know, if I'm not on a work call, then yeah, right before the Insurgent is off to school, she hates it every day. "Okay, did we get this? Did you make your bed? Did you pick everything up? Did you fill up your water bottle before you went to school? Is that computer in there? Did you pack your lunch? Did you remember the sandwiches in the fridge?" And she'll ask, "How, why do you always ask me these questions?" It's not about asking the questions, it's about me, and it's not about you, it's, it's making sure you went down that morning checklist routine that you're supposed to do every single day because it sets you up for success. And you know what, every once in a while, she finds one. She goes, "Oh, man," she, she has that look like, "Damn, I just got spanked on that one. I forgot to do that." And she knows. And so it just reinforced those habits, and reinforced it over time. And to the point where she's now doing that to me. "Do you have, before we go anywhere, do you have this? Did you make sure you have this? Did you pack this?" And I love it, right? So, so that, that's, you know, and that's it. That, that, you know, but that, that's what it's about. Those things are still true today for a reason.

So, thanks everyone for tuning in. Yeah, that was the kind of the second part of this episode. I think the third part will be a little bit different that we're going to talk about, but, but more of a solution-based, or, or the things that we focus so, right, we talked about today, those, they, there's certain foundational elements. This is what we should be focusing on. We do all these things, and then in the moment, those things can go wrong sometimes, and we'll, we'll kind of talk about that on, on the next one. But, you know, we, we appreciate everyone tuning in. Don't forget, we have more on our Patreon side, and you'll be, you're, you're in the know, so to speak, on that side if you're following us on anything else we have going on. You're going to be the first to hear about it, including our textbook that we have coming out, and all these material we're going to have with that. So, so, you know, check out our Patreon. Follow us on social media—either The Human Behavior Podcast's social media accounts, reach out to us, one of the questions, thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. You know, follow us, look us up on LinkedIn, follow us, connect with us, all that stuff. We, we love hearing from you. I got some good ones today, Greg, we got to talk about from the folks on the Patreon that we're going to have to do a deep dive on. It's a good one.

Oh, great.

Oh, so folks on the Patreon side get a little bit more behind the scenes. Just, it's, it's not a lot of money, and it's, it helps pay for the show, and it, you know, kind of allows us to put a little bit barrier before we go into too much detail with everything, or, or give some more advice, or answer specific questions. So we want to put that behind that because that's all it is. It's a little barrier to entry to keep some of the riffraff out, and that's, that's about it. But we, we appreciate everyone tuning in, and please don't forget that training changes behavior.