L.O.G. 237 Music and Behavior

All right, well, good morning, Greg. I'm guessing it's still single-digit temperature for you while we're recording. Four degrees? That's amazing.

Well, we've got these massive swells coming out here in SoCal that are... I saw the news photos of the waves crashing into every place. It looked crazy. Lifeguards are going to be calendar... What's happening on the 30th, Brian?

Yeah, that's 3/1/23. That's the date. That's the date. I thought the Mayan calendar ended in 2012 or something, though. I thought we passed that.

Those gosh darn guys with the wild hair and the beautiful necklaces on Ancient Aliens said we're off by 17.5 years. Oh, okay. Yeah, maybe they weren't all that goofy. They weren't taking into account the 365 and one-quarter days that the Earth is, so that leap year, which next year is a leap year. Not what we're talking about today. Not at all.

So today we're actually talking about music. There are a bunch of great reasons why. One, most people are music fans; we're huge music fans. Everyone's got their different music that they listen to. We've incorporated music into so much of our different training courses for different reasons; we'll talk about that. But part of the reason is there's a lot of science behind music and why people are interested in it, and why there's so much universality in music across cultures. Every culture, no matter when they existed, had some form of music. It could have just been like banging something together, but they had some sort of rhythm in music. And music, if you're not aware – this is for any folks who don't play an instrument or don't know too much about music other than they have their favorite bands they listen to – music is just math. I mean, it is 100% just math.

So one of the things I want to frame this conversation with before I throw to you, Greg, is music. Certain songs become overwhelmingly popular for a number of different reasons, one being they're predictable. You can go to different famous songs, and they're literally sometimes the same chords, just maybe arranged differently or with a different style. But it's the same exact chords in every famous hit song, and that predictability is comforting to people. They like it. Then, what the really top musicians can do—what the famous folks can do—is they can stretch the limit of it. Maybe they create a little bit of incongruence there with your brain, but it still follows along that pattern. And then that to you is intriguing, and you go, "Wow, that's different, but it's still comforting, it's still the same."

Then you can go out to the different ends of the spectrum on music. For example, there's jazz, where jazz is very, very hard for people to get into. It's kind of an odd form of music because it doesn't fit that same algorithm, and the math is a little bit different, right? Only so many people can enjoy that. But the same thing with music like death metal; only so many people can enjoy that. But if you play an instrument or you really appreciate music, you can listen in. Because I listen to both of those sometimes, depending on who it is. But people don't know this about death metal: the drummers and the guitarists are some of the greatest musicians out there because they can play so quickly. They're doing like violin scales on the guitar. The drummers are doing things with just two hands and two feet that you wouldn't think are possible. So, if you don't know that, or if you're not into it, maybe it's not your thing; you just hear this noise, right? You don't hear this, you can't tune into the signal in there; you're just hearing all this noise.

So, there's a lot I want to get into with music, and why we use it specifically, creating memory-emotion links. But I kind of want to start with you, Greg, and throw to you if you want to start off. I know you had something in mind that you kind of wanted to bring up.

Well, no, I think that let's go to the science first, and then we can dance around a little bit. Everything on your body is amazingly complex. Take a look at an elbow or a knee. The more complex, generally, the more important. So, take a look at your larynx, how fragile and the location, and if you get C-clamped the wrong way, it can break your hyoid bone and cause all kinds of different stuff. Look this up, so I don't have to repeat myself. But let's take a look at the ear, Brian. We have the anvil, and we have the stirrup, and we have the drum. Why? Because, for the same reason I don't trust jazz, there's a sound, and sound is a wave, and waves vibrate at a specific frequency. Your brain, run by the limbic system—this part of your processing brain—understands the difference between music and noise. So it categorizes by wave, by frequency, and then seeks out those things that give it pleasure. Because the limbic system releases both memory-emotion endorphins, and music increases the blood flow to the limbic system and then to the other areas of the brain and the body that need things. So, if you want to soothe the savage beast, what do you use? You use music. If you want to reduce your anxiety, what do you use? You use music. If you want to increase your workout, the timbre and the repetition and the strength training that you're doing, you play some music and you're in that zone, Brian, because it actually reaches into your brain and changes who you are.

So if we were just going to go on, for example, the Mozart effect – you know, the people that make music are generally better at math. I think those are junk science biases. But I do know this: I do know when you do surgeries with music playing in the background, people recover faster. I do know that when you got somebody acting the fool, music, in many cases, if not most cases, can relax that person much more than you going in and saying, "Relax." So, when you take a look at why it's associated with the limbic, and why it's patterned with so many tiny receptors to read those waves, it's obvious that music and math both search for patterns. Math is math, and music lives in pattern recognition and analysis. You spend your entire life doing the analysis, but the recognition is why Muzak works on an elevator. You go in, and it's the lady from Enya, right?

So that's why a kid might not be able to remember his times tables, but he can give you every lyric to "I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie" (Sir Mix-A-Lot) or whatever it is, the music that you like. Because, you know where I grew up, I'm a product of the music that I grew up with. I'd run around with the bass kicking on the marked police car with the windows rolled down and sing along to every rap song. Why? Because that connected me to my age. It was part of the development of me coming into an environment that was external to the way I normally function. And that's why I don't like jazz, Brian. I have a principal problem with jazz because it confuses me. I don't know where it's going, and I certainly don't trust where it might be going. But the other thing is, with the other forms of music, I can see it, I can feel it; those waves speak to me. And guess what? I end up seeking out similarities. And that's why we get that wrong too, Brian, because we sometimes invest part of our brain into a memory and emotion because it's linked directly by electrochemical neurotransmitters to our limbic system, and we put too much faith in that.

You said something on a show, probably a couple of months ago, or it was in a class — I don't know, we hang around a lot together — and you said something that's happened to me many times. You said that you were recounting a memory, and your wife was in the room, and you were saying all this grandiose stuff about it. And your wife took you aside and said, "Hey, that wasn't me." Why?

Because what we do is we seek out those reward chemicals, and then we assign those memories that we most like to the person that gives us that warm and fuzzy. Now, if it was wife number two, our brain doesn't categorize that. Our brain says, "There was a time with my wife that we got to do this." And guess what happens? The person you're with now that you love the most becomes that person. That's how music is, Brian. We hear just the first few strains of that song, and it immediately gives us a memory, and it immediately assigns an emotion. And that could be good or that could be bad.

And it's so powerful, which is why it's always, like you kind of brought up the example, you're studying, and maybe you have to do some rote memorization stuff, and you've got to repeat it over and over again. But you'll listen to a song a few times and remember all the lyrics because that memory-emotion link makes it very sticky. The other reason why they're so powerful with memory-emotion links and what you talked about is that songs also are stories. Many of them are, right? The idea is, since a lot of how we teach and even what we talk about on here is storytelling, it's the oldest form of knowledge and skill transfer for human beings. So those songs can tell a story. And just like all behavior, and just like art, and just like anything else – any other story or statement – it's open to interpretation. People will take a song and assign value to it, and it will mean something to them that is so wildly different than the intent of the author, artist. Or the person, Jimi Hendrix, you know, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy," and it's like, "Wait, no, it's 'kiss the sky.'" Which one is it? And how you hear it is how you then interpret it. So, when it comes to perception and recognition, just like a human being trying to read the environment or read the situation, you can have critical errors in sense-making that takes it to a place that is just wildly different than what the intent was behind it.

So, let's go to St. Louis. Let's go to the 1960s. Let's go to Fontella Bass. And everybody in the audience that's listening right now remembers Aretha Franklin's one of her most famous hits, "Rescue Me" ("Take Me In Your Arms"). Oh, sing it, man. It's the best song that Aretha never sang! Because Fontella Bass was the one that charted. Fontella Bass, who is just an amazing vocal range and a great singer (folks, look her up, take a look), was the one that brought "Rescue Me" to the rest of the world. Yeah, but because you categorized and felt the pattern, you immediately went with the leading horse in the race, which was at that time Aretha Franklin. So many albums out, so many... She was popular at the time. It was kind of close enough to how she sounded; it was cognitively close enough. And so, guess what you did? You got on and you rode that horse.

Not too much later, when we take a look at the Jackson 5 coming out with "One Bad Apple Don't Spoil the Whole Bunch, Girls, Give Me One More Chance" – oh, the Jackson 5 never sang it! As a matter of fact, the closest the Jackson name came to that is it was written by an old Mississippi jazz and blues guy, and his name happened to be Jackson. And George Jackson wrote that song. It's very different if you listen to George Jackson's earliest recordings of that. Well, it was The Osmonds. And The Osmonds were relevant to a different sector of America. And all of a sudden, The Osmonds were searching, "How do we hit this, Brian?" So what did they do? They followed the pattern of "ABC, as easy as one, two, three." And what they did is they came out with the song, with the dance, and still to this day, people attribute the song "One Bad Apple" from 1970 to the Jacksons rather than to The Osmonds. Why? Again, you said it at the very beginning: that frequency, that pitch, that vibration. It's not noise, and it speaks to a center of my brain. And when the center of my brain heard enough of it back then – remember, it was on a closing play, or it was on a 45 that you were listening to, or it was on the radio. And guess what? Radio, the AM/FM transistor that you held, they replayed the top 10 songs – that's why it's called the Top 10 – over and over and over. So you didn't listen to the artist; you assumed it was the Jacksons and the Jackson 5. So, adding to the confusion, you got George Jackson. People go, "So why is that important to you?"

So I grew up in East Detroit, right? And at East Detroit High School, my brother Brian – I sent you a picture of his daughter at Hitsville, Brian, in case we want to add it to the notes there; it's important – Brian and I were going to visit Hitsville our last time in Detroit, we just couldn't. I won't get into that story. But during my brother Brian's graduation, during the year of his graduation and the graduation parties, Bob Seger played at East Detroit High School. Now, Bob Seger was a relative unknown at that time. He was very good. And one of the songs that Bob Seger is known for at every wedding you've ever been to is "Old Time Rock and Roll." ("Give me some of that old-time rock and roll to my soul.") And the funny thing about that is the connection to music: who's it written by? George Jackson from Mississippi. That's wild. So, the same rhythm and blues (R&B) player that was doing that, Seger picks up on that and uses that years later in East Detroit High School, which is right down the street from Hitsville, where the Jackson 5 and so many luminaries – Little Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin – all of the songs that you want to be able to think about. And why? Because music, like math, is a common denominator. Music is a universal language that everybody can get behind. And you sense music like you can sense what Russian marching songs sound like. You have a file because of the way culture works.

And the word I was looking for earlier: endurance. At the gym, music. Tell me you don't have a run mix. Tell me you don't have a certain mix for what you're going to do on a certain day. And I certainly do. And Brian, there are days that I do not want to go in the basement in my house. It's not the Uncle Paul basement anymore, it's the gym. And it's quite a great gym, I've sent you photos before, and I'm very proud of it, and you sent me some great workouts. And guess what? When I go down those stairs, I'm a different person. And for that hour and change, my world changes. I'm in there. Now, the days I don't want to go down, you know what I find myself doing? I'm walking the dog at four degrees, and I'm singing one of my run mix songs. I'm doing it! My brain, what is it doing? It's reaching for those chemicals. And the limbic system is saying, "Didn't you forget something?" So why wouldn't we use it in class? And we have, over and over and over, for memory-emotion link. Memory-emotion links come from the limbic system. Why? Because they want to make it sticky. So when you sense the pattern...

Can you just, because I know we talked about that before on different episodes, but let's explain what we mean by a memory-emotion link – kind of the terminology – because you can even use "emotional memory link." There are different... But please, please explain for everyone kind of what you mean by that.

The world, our lives, the universe – certainly everything that you're going to encounter before or after you listen to this podcast – has to do with waves and frequencies. It's either a particle or it's a wave, and as a particle, it moves in a wave fashion. So, what happens...

It can take on properties of both.

Exactly, and you really do at the molecular level. So, stop thinking in only binary. AI can't save you; go back to the old way. The idea is this: anytime something is important to your corporeal self, your body and your survival, the brain categorizes that in a series of memories. But memories are hard to retrieve because they're spread, loaded to different cortical areas of the brain. So what it does is it adds an emotion. Now, that emotion might be a taste or a smell, or a sound, or a like or a dislike – thumbs up, thumbs down. And what that means is that when you smell good food cooking, your salivary glands and everything start working, and you go, "Man, it's time to eat!" When you smell a human male or female presenting, you say, "Hey, it's time to go make love." Those things in your environment aren't accidental; they're prompts to get you to go toward something – to mate with it, or eat it, or fix it, or live in it, or drive it, right? But there's also the opposite side of that that says, "Oh, too hot to handle, let's not go near that!" "Hey, that smell's always associated with decay!" Right? And that's why my nose is so close to my mouth, so I don't actually eat fetid flesh, or fruits, or any of those things.

And those memory and emotions are stored and housed for survival in your limbic system. Why? Because your limbic system is constantly checking your environment even though you're not aware of it. So, it's constantly throwing a rock in the pond to see where the ripples go and what potential barriers to entry are going to be in your day. And so it sets up certain file folders for you to casually trip across. That's why, you know, we think that we come up with it; we think that it's all human thought and that we're running our day. But literally, we're knocking down a set of dominoes each time we do something, and those dominoes open a door to these three or four file folders that your limbic system hung for you saying, "Remember, it's cold outside, wear that extra jacket, that hat pays dividends." Now, do we fight our limbic system constantly? You ever see a kid at the bus stop on a cold day, and he's not wearing his jacket? Yeah, and he's freezing his butt off, Brian, but he wants to make that statement. So, limbic system memory-emotion links lubricate your decision-making to a higher level, starting with survival, then going to the "4 Fs" (fighting, fleeing, feeding, mating), and then going to, "Hey, how can I be a unique little snowflake?" And that's why there's so much different music, is because so many people want to express themselves in their own manner. And it's funny, name a culture that doesn't have music.

Nobody on the face is...

But not only that, but there are certain ranges and certain sounds you can get into, like, that are completely universal. That are the same as some ancient chant from a tribe; it's the same. It's like, literally, you can get discordant music at the other end of the spectrum – the stuff our brain doesn't want to hear – that we'll never categorize as music. You're exactly right. And it's culture-independent because wherever you go into that culture, these would be super soothing noises, these would be marches, these would be dances. There are absolutely universal ones. This is also why we talk about it; we're using this obviously as a metaphor for human behavior. But really, like you remember the NBC, like, "ding, ding, ding." And that's no different than, you know, "Ole, Ole, Ole!" It's all the same range when you're getting into those different notes and what it's hitting. And that's so universal to all. It's like, in a sense, to have a little bit of recognition of what that is and then to tie into that memory-emotion link. That's why those can be powerful. And those memory-emotion links happen with a lot of stuff. You know, if you're in a chaotic event or you're really sad, you're going to remember everything. You're going to remember a lot more about what happened. Your brain's still going to fill in the details, and it's not going to get everything, but it's going to remember more. You go to that comedy club, or you watch that hilarious movie, you remember all the lines out of there, right? It's encoded in a sense because of all those different electrochemical neurotransmitters. All the catecholamines get kicked out during that experience, and it basically helps with that memorization process much, much faster in a sense. And it endures longer.

Yes, so let's say that there are huge benefits to music because human memory is faulty. And your brain, your brain never knew we were going to live this long. So your brain has this categorization where it puts all fun things together because they derive the chemical reward for mating, for cohabitating, for gathering together, and creating something that makes our lives easier or protecting each other. So all of those are good things. So that's why sometimes we get it wrong, and we put those memories together. For example, in a dangerous situation, there are times that we distort sound. And everybody's going to say, "Oh, well, fight or flight creates that." That's true, but your memory is still faulty. So your memory goes back and creates an order where there was chaos.

Yes, and sometimes appropriates that.

Yeah. You said it earlier with, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy." You know, that's great. Hendrix didn't want to kiss that guy. He would have been fine with it, I'm sure that was what he was talking about, right? So what happens is, all of a sudden, we have video now, and video isn't 100%. It's not the 360 Vertra, Milo, Axon, and the people that would jump in there immediately and say, "Look at this!" Well, you're calling it for me, just like a John Madden, "Look at the play from here." But we still have refs on the field, don't we? And the refs on the field can call something. The camera doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Yeah, exactly.

So, listen. You're a human being, and a guy comes at you, and you end up double-tapping the person. And then you write your report subsequently, and the person asks you something. Well, first of all, we write our reports from an egocentric format, and we've been taught that since we were kids. The second thing is, my brain categorizes information based on its relevance to me and its context to my survival, not to external sources. I don't write it for the community; I write it for me. So, what did I do? I said, "Okay, well, then I saw the knife, and the guy closed with me, and I had no other recourse." Well, then all of a sudden, we add an element; we add an external, never-blinking eye. And all of a sudden, somebody goes, "Yeah, but look, you were 17.2 feet from you, and you had a frying pan that was on your left." Yeah, but I never saw it. I never considered it. And after the fact, ex post facto in law, what I did is I drafted my report, and I improved my memory. I improved, just like golfers improve their lie on the green. I improved my memory by kicking the ball a little bit downfield. Now, Brian, did I do that in a sinister fashion? Only if I knew that I was wrong.

If you did it intentionally.

I did it inadvertently. Most of the time it happens unintentionally, almost every time it happens unintentionally. And just like, "Excuse me while I kiss this guy," right? So the idea is that music plays such a significant role in forming a robust memory-emotion link, but even as powerful as it is, and that our brain is tuned to it, literally tuned to that frequency and finding patterns, we still get it wrong sometimes.

I think that's a great takeaway.

Look, we get different people to tune in to the podcast, right? Some just to hear your voice, some just to see my great jackets. I don't care why they tune in. But right now, if somebody was going to say, "So what?" That's a big "so what," right? Even as profound as math is, math finds patterns and opens up. Math shines light in the dark spaces that scare us. So fear comes from the unknown. So music helps us settle fear, and math helps us settle fear. And how does it do it? Through a language that our brain understands, and that's a wave. And so that frequency, that vibration – anytime that we see something that does that in our environment, we know that we can tune into that and use it in some way, shape, or form. But we also know the other side of the coin is that we can get it wrong. So that's where we need to be as humans if we're judging other humans.

And that's why music is such a great analogy for a lot of that, for failures in sense-making. You know, you're singing along to the song, and then you find out later, like, the lyrics you're singing are basically made up in your head, but they sound exactly like they go with the song, and you think that's what the singer is saying, and it's not. And think about that: that's in a sterile environment, hanging out at your house or driving your car when your attention and perception levels aren't affected by some major external arousal or chaotic event or something that's incongruent. You're in a completely controlled environment, and that's right there in it, and your brain is just going, "Got it, close, close, close," and it's filling it in.

And what happens with this too is over time – because now, over time, and this isn't just me making this up, a lot of people have studied stuff like this – is that you're less likely to sort of expand what you listen to. You actually narrow the bandwidth of music that you appreciate as you get older. So as you get older, it's actually harder for you to kind of listen to newer stuff or have something that's incongruent. I know one of the things you always do, like you always have music on sometimes when you're working on stuff or doing whatever, and it's just like the most random. It goes from one to the next, and you're like, "Where does this come from?" And I remember I asked you one time, and you were like, "Well, you know, maybe like the students will come in with this song, or someone shares a song with me, or this." And it's, "Here's what's new, here's the old stuff I like," and it's all in there so that you're sort of updating your file folders as time goes on.

Exactly.

But what you're doing there too is like you're stretching your brain a little bit because it doesn't want that new stuff. It goes, "Look, man, we've been in this game for a while. I want this repetitive thing. This is the narrow bandwidth that I like, so let's keep everything in there." And that's backed up by science saying, "Yeah, as you get older, you're less likely to introduce new music into your life." And so you really, as time goes on, like that repetitive thing, you want things to be predictable. Because as you get older, you kind of, hopefully, you get wiser and smarter. But you see the patterns more; it becomes a little bit easier for you because you've lived a longer life, right? When you're younger, you don't understand anything, and you haven't put those together yet. And then as time goes on, you start to go, "Okay, well, I know what this is. I know what that is. I've seen that before," because you can relate it to so much experience. Well, it's the same thing with experiencing music. And I'm using that sort of now as an analogy of how we learn, how we grow, how information... So, look, there's something that we have to unpack that you just brought up that's really smart and relevant.

So I wrote down John Sebastian. John Sebastian was the guy that wrote "Welcome Back" for Welcome Back, Kotter, if anybody's old enough to remember that TV show. "Welcome Back" – that's John Sebastian at the beginning. So, how did he get his start? Well, you got to start by starting a bunch of bands and writing a bunch of music. Look it up, take your time. But one of the bands that he played with was The Rascals, and The Rascals had a song that was called "Good Lovin'" – "Good Lovin', but good love." And it was very repetitive.

So, one day Nico is running around the ranch, and all of a sudden we hear him yell, "Toodle up!" And then he's going a little further, and we hear him, "Toodle up!" And so we go over, and he's dancing and having a great time, and we go, "What's with the 'Toodle up'?" And he goes, "The Rascals! You got it on your run mix!" You know, even back then, anytime we worked out, we'd have different music. To make love to Nine Inch Nails, "Downward Spiral," "Want to F you like an animal," or whatever your brand of stuff that's usually for the...

Exactly.

You get what I'm saying? But Nico had taken "Good Lovin'" and in his brain turned it to "Toodle up." So who was I to take away the fun of Nico dancing around on that day on the ranch and correct him? You see, so that evolution occurred, Brian, but it wasn't for me to bring that evolution to him at that time. And sometimes we have to be aware by giving somebody the "so what" in a book. Because like Hinton was a female, not a dude, and that wasn't important to anybody else but me because I didn't understand the perspective of the writing. You see what I'm trying to say? So that was a cathartic, that was a brain-changing moment for me.

So the idea is that you kind of have to let people develop their style. And what you said about old age: you're smarter, but you're also fragile, and you become more scared as you grow older. So those new things are things I have to investigate, and I might throw a damn hip, just like when I'm a baby and I'm learning, and I need those people around me to protect me. Look, when you have a long gestation period, or it takes you years before you can walk and talk and do those things in your environment, society has to take care of you. You're not just the foal that comes out of the mare and stands up on its feet, and hours later you're running in the field, and a month later you're eating solid foods, right? Human babies can't survive on their own, whereas many animal species could. So music has to develop in that young mind, and then as the mind grows, and now Brian, as we start categorizing things more clearly as we get older, we also have to deal with the element of fear. Our ultimate end. "You don't know anything! You should see all that I learned and how important this song!" Yeah, right? How many times do we do that? Do we choose a wedding song? Do we choose songs for a funeral? Do we mark...? I mean, music is so important. It plays such a significant role in both cultural and social context because it shapes our identity, and it certainly shapes what we think our identity is when we're giving it to somebody else. You know, "Hey, I can't write a song or play an instrument, but I recorded Peter Gabriel for you, and I'm going to hold up a stereo and play it in your window." Think of how profound that is.

Making playlists for people, burning CDs, recording stuff on tape, you know, even as a kid I would have to listen to some song that was coming out. I knew it was on the hit station, had to sit there and listen for hours, and then have a blank cassette in there and hit record when the song came on so I could listen to it. But sticking with that music theme for musicians, and why there are sometimes one-hit wonders and why people stand the test of time, a lot of times it's they kind of find what their algorithm is, right? They find what works for them, and they repeat that. But the ones that really keep going and keep going and continue to be relevant and get big for a long time, what I typically see is they adapt, right? So, my girl, Taylor Swift, when she first became famous, her songs then compared to now are completely different. Now she's continued to grow an audience, continued with even almost like the next generation listening to music, and the people that originally started with it. So you sort of grow with your artist in a sense.

And so it's interesting when you see that because actually, Michael was telling me today, in June, she was thinking about it for my birthday out here in San Diego, The Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins are playing together. I'm like, "What?!" That's like my childhood! Young kid learning to play guitar, and Smashing Pumpkins being from Chicago was the coolest thing. And then Dave Grohl was in Nirvana, then Foo Fighters, and like, I'm a big Dave Grohl fan, still relevant. But that's what I'm saying, he's like, back in his ability to just change. And they adapt over time, and so continue to maintain that relevance.

I'm getting excited, and I wasn't invited.

But just, I mean, you just think about that from... that's how humans survive. You had to adapt. A species survives by adapting over time and changing and being able to kind of stick with what made you successful or what allowed you to survive in a natural setting, and then yet continue to adapt to new incoming changing times, basically what else is out there and how things evolve. So they evolve, and I mean, really, just evolve is what they do. But they adapt to whatever that new thing is, but still sort of stay within. And then you have certain people at the right time nail it.

I just thought of, when we were talking about it, Kenny Loggins. Kenny Loggins wrote the themes and hit music in, I don't know, how many different movies from the '80s. Like, Footloose, Top Gun, Caddyshack, everything. Every hit song from those movies was...

We can hear the ear, we can hear it.

Yeah. And so there are certain people that meet it. And music is so powerful for movies; that's why there's always a soundtrack to every movie because it enhances and really sets the scene for everything. And it's funny, because people take some serious scene or something from a movie, and they'll just switch up the music and put something in. And it's hilarious because the scene still works, it just completely changes the entire meaning of that scene. So it's...

First of all, let's make sure that everybody that listens understands that we separate music – music notes, frequency, wave – from music with words. Because there's a whole bunch of music out there that we don't need to hear the words to be moved by it or have an influence. And I'll give you an example how it can go wrong. There's a commercial out. First of all, I don't understand what a blended whiskey is. I'll tell everybody right now, I drink more than you've ever drunk in your entire life, but I don't get it. And I also don't understand Hook (referring to a person). If you're out there listening, Crown Royal, is it the bag? Is it the odd-shaped body? I don't get it. So, you have to for me. But there's a commercial out now, and I'm thinking that it's Crown Royal, or maybe just because I hate Crown Royal and I hate the commercial, I've bunched them together. Where they have a whole bunch of different individuals in a bar, and they're singing the chorus to "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond. "Sweet Caroline!" Yeah, now listen, that "Bum, bum, bum" is the only part that's important. That's the pattern, that's the hook. No offense to Hook, that also drank Crown Royal, and his sack was probably blue over the years. But listen to me, Brian, they played that commercial – I want you to watch it – and they play that chorus line like three times during the commercial. It's two times too much because once you get the memory-emotion link, "Oh, I get it! I love that song!" Move on! That's what your brain wants to do. Your brain doesn't want to stay in that moment for that entire period because do you know the rest of the song? Now you start feeling stupid, right?

So the earworm, the thing that grabs us, the memory-emotion link that we create – once we get it, we're satisfied. And then, guess what we do? We actively search for those patterns in other things. We don't want to. Like, somebody goes, "Yeah, but when I was a kid, I would play my record 'til it was a groove!" Yet the entire record, you wouldn't go back and play that one time unless you were The Beatles playing it backwards for, "Paul is dead!" What you did is you would play that entire song. I remember that, one of my good friends, Ronnie Raswan, died young, actually a shooting so long ago, and it corresponded with the song, "We Had Joy, We Had Fun, We Had Seasons in the Sun," which was a French song, a dirge, like a funeral dirge about a death in France. But some American one-hit wonder added it to their B-side, Brian. I couldn't stop playing it! Why? Because it made me sullen in that emotional state that I wanted to stay for days. And finally, my dad came up, and my dad grabbed the record player, threw it out of the room, grabbed the record, broke it, and says, "I'll give you 15 minutes, cry that out, and then you're done!" And then he walked away, and I was like, "Wow, Dad understood what I was doing!" And I was trapped, Brian. I was trapped in that emotion. That feeling is something for me to process; it's not something for me to return to and feel horrible. But then, what did I understand as I grew older? Maybe that is... maybe I buy myself flowers and I eat a chocolate and I read a chapter in a book because I need a good cry. So it takes time to develop the understanding, and music is a perfect way to learn about yourself because it really is about your identity, isn't it? It really is music you choose.

So, here we are talking again about external and internal. Externally, think of the most, like, Boston. I do Boston in class all the time because Boston was my love song, man. I can think of all of these tales that I had in a dark basement in East Detroit with Boston on in the background, right? "More Than A Feeling," "More Than A Feeling." And the idea is that anytime I go there, it's sort of a form of therapy, isn't it? Right? So, advertisers know it. Did the band Boston expect Greg to be in that basement? Or was Boston talking about a broken heart, and I attributed those details and factors? You get what I'm trying to say. I mean, I'm stealing liberally from other people's Sudokus to create my own crossword. And that's what is amazing about music. Music and math are the only two genres. Do you not think it's odd that even in countries where they read from right to left, math is from left to right? I mean, numbers still go... numbers still go right. To sit down and smoke a good cigar and have some brown liquor, the stuff they talk about on social media, this should be one of them because music is so important.

It really is. It's central to a lot of people's experiences and their times in life, especially when you go back to when you're a kid and you're listening to stuff. And then people would just be like, "Man, I know every word to that entire album. I know every song by that artist. I know every..." because you were in that moment in time, and it was so powerful, and that memory-emotion link really just encapsulated all of that together. And so when you hear that, you get to sort of go back and relive part of that. You know, it's... And that could be good, bad. Like you said, growing up in an Irish neighborhood in Chicago, the funeral when you got bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" – you're like, "This is the saddest!" I don't care who, just overwhelmingly emotional. And you're like, "Geez, why do we got to do this? Like, he's already dead, and it's a sad thing, we're going to make it, like, we're just going to make it worse and worse." And bagpipes always bring a rainy day, don't they?

Yeah, always rainy.

So you've got all of those experiences that are so incredibly powerful. Oh, I did want to... The Crown Royal. So, the Crown Royal was... it's Crown Royal, and so it's not very good. Sorry to anyone out there who loves this stuff. But it was kind of failing as a whiskey, and so they had a rebrand. And they made that cool-looking bottle, and they put it in this little velvet purple sack, and they just repackaged what it was and made it kind of... And that just, it blew up after that. Everyone loved it. And so that's all it was. It was still the same stuff that was doing poorly prior to that, but then sales went up.

But just because you brought up the advertising/marketing, I got one for you while you were talking that hooked me to Cream, the band, Eric Clapton, right? But Eric Clapton was only one band: Little Stevie Winwood, Ginger Baker, you know, think about all of those guys. So my brother was the only one in the house that had a separate bedroom. And it was more of a modified closet that he chose to be alone because he didn't want to sleep with Jeff and I. And Jeff was a sleepwalker, so I grew up scared of any bumping at night because it was Jeff, like an ogre looming over you with the big moon face and the butch cut. So Brian, in his own room, he still has to this day, and he knows what I'm talking about. So Brian had this record player, and he had these two amplifiers that he hooked to the record player that you could move. And so he found out that amplifier cords were just two wires, so he got bigger and bigger amplifiers over the years and wired them together. One morning he gets up, and Brian is playing Cream's "I'm So Glad." Now, great song. This is the song: "I'm so glad, I'm glad, I'm glad, I'm so glad, I'm so glad." And then you do it in all this kind of harmony. That's the lyrics, man. My mom came unglued! She's speaking in her half-German, half-English with the F-word every other word: "I'm glad he's glad, but I swear to Christ, if I come up those stairs, right!" I still remember my mom yelling, and Brian, that was 55 years ago, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. That's what we're talking about, a memory-emotion link.

Now, I'll give you another one: how important was Cream to my understanding and Little Stevie Winwood and all that other stuff? So, working with the High Country Drug Task Force, and we have this deal that's going down, and we're following not only the cocaine coming in from Denver but being distributed and then arresting those people that were distributing it. Our intent was not to use personal use; it was to use weight with intent, right? So again, intent meant so much to me all those years. So at one house we did the search warrant – I'm not going to say who it was – but it was a member of the band Cream that lived in Vail and also had a nice ranch that was outside of Vail.

I think I know you're talking...

I go, "Holy, it's you!" And so here I'm having, "I'm so sorry, I got to put these handcuffs on you. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry we have to do this search warrant. Listen, you were my '60s and early '70s! I love everything you did! I was such a fanboy!" That finally one of the detectives, who had a very distinct name that I won't say because they're still around, probably those bastards, comes up to me and goes, "Hey, I'll take it from here." He actually had me step back because I was not thinking, Brian. I was like, "Holy, he's right here! I'm with him! I'm in his house!" And I was asking him to sign things. And this was before the advent of cell phones, so I was like, "Can I use the evidence camera?" And they were going, "No," because I wanted to use the evidence camera to get a selfie with me and this person.

But think about that, Brian: all of those great memories, all of those love-making sessions, all of those times we, right after a funeral, are all thanks to the music that broke down to a wave and a vibration and a frequency that was unique in some manner to us. And what you told us at the very beginning: but it wasn't unique, it's a pattern, right? It's a pattern that's repeated over and over and over, and every time it is, we get hooked. We get brought into that. I love this topic because both you and I love music so much. It's amazing the variety of music that we listen to. And I also thank you for my playlist, because every once in a while you'll say, "Have you heard this?" and I haven't. And it's sometimes a unique take, or a different take on a song that I know, or I didn't know, from a band that I know, or I haven't listened to all of the stuff they do. And I like that too. And you know me, I like obscure stuff. I like dogging the Slugs. Why? Because, you know, I go back to that, and that beat took Philly and the Eastern Coast of the United States right back to the invasion of English music back in the late '60s and '70s. I like that stuff. I like influence, even though it was in a different timeline, it recreated that magic.

No, that's why, like, I'll come across something, you know, randomly on TV, and it's a symphony. And you know, it's not my type of typical music, but especially when you watch it, because there are 60 people in there all playing different instruments, but they're all on the same time, and they're doing their own thing within this overall. And so it's like, it's so amazing to watch. It's just... And listen to how it, how it... I just, it's so cool to sit there and go, "Holy, this is unbelievable!" And it's taking you to these different places, and you're on this... And because it's outside of what I typically listen to, like, I don't know what's coming next. So, but I know it fits within a certain pattern, so like, it's exciting. You know, it's like, "Oh, wow, wow, what's that? I didn't know. Okay, I didn't expect that."

So, a good way of thinking of it is if you don't understand the role of a conductor to a symphony, you haven't listened to enough music. And the other thing is, I won't ever not listen to something a suggestion a person gives me. Sean's constantly giving it to me. His son now is playing the guitar, and just great, Christian is knocking it out. And my nephew is playing the drums, which I think is an amazing thing. Why? Because music has been such an important, innovative part of our life.

So, I'll just say one thing that I don't want to bust, like, what we're doing in class and our delivery and stuff. But there are songs, Brian, that we have people that we attribute a song to a memory. We use the term on here what I think we can do at least one because we have a little playlist – a link to it, it's a spot if anyone listens on Spotify, just a little HBP (Human Behavior Podcast) RNA playlist. And if you've been to a course, you'll understand it. Most of... there's some on there you might not. But there's one that's powerful: "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (The Clash). I think that's a good one to explain.

Yeah, and I will. So, back when I was a cop, I used to look at every younger cop that I was training as an FTO (Field Training Officer). And before the San Jose model of FTO, we were just older vet cops, right? We didn't have that procedure, we just did it. You stuck with the older cop. And I would stop during an event and take a knee, and I would look at the guy and go, "Should I stay or should I go?" Because if we... and I would give them an allegory of what we were seeing play out. And after a while, that rookie would look at me and go, "Should we stay or should we go now?" And I would say, "You know, if we stay, there would be trouble," and they would say, "If we go, it'll be double." The idea, Brian, was, "This is a critical moment, and I want you to make sure you separate this moment in time from this convoluted incident, and I want you to think harder because this is about to change somebody's life. We're about to shoot and kill somebody, or boot a door, or ram, or breach constitutional law." And so I would always use that song.

So much later, we were training SEALs for a tip-of-the-sphere mission that were going into a place in Afghanistan, let's say. And what happened is I would drop that every once in a while, Brian, while we were in the classroom. And you remember, then we would do it out on the "one bullet, one flex cuff, one question" out on the range. And so here we are in this large interactive range and stuff. We call it "TAC Freeze," by the way. Now they're calling that a "TAC Pause." Thank you, we all know where it started. But we called "TAC Freeze," Brian, on the radio. And you remember, we would look at our team, the unit that we're embedded with, and we'd go, "Should I stay or should I go? What would I do at this moment?" And we would sing that part of the song and dance around. We even said at T3, if you couldn't do that part of the song and dance around the classroom, then you were out. And because music was so important to this memory-emotion link, we got a letter from that SEAL Commander after that mission, and he said, "We avoided walking into an ambush because everybody started singing that song, just like we did in class." And they go, "Wait a minute, our brains caught on to something that we're not seeing." So they took a knee, Brian, and they avoided getting chewed up. And they attribute that song, but it's not the song, it's the memory-emotion link. It's the memory-emotion link that allows you to access so much information and process it. And not just that, but transmit it, put it in a big file folder – a big, never-ending file folder – but also transmit that to another human being who knows exactly what I mean at that time.

And we've done that before; we explained that where we see someone who, like, they're not sure if they're going to take off and run because the police are showing up, and they're doing the look around, and we're like, "Okay, they're doing the 'Should I Stay or Should I Go'!" They're weighing out potential outcomes. You tell them you can see it. But you can see someone doing the... and they're like, "Oh, you're doing the balancing act here, you're trying to figure out." So that recognition of that allows you to kind of intervene sooner, de-escalate, whatever. But the idea is that allows me too. Now, what you just said: why you taught that other person that, why we taught that specific... why we teach that specific one in class. When those people go together, I can just look at you and go, "Should I stay or should I go?" And you know exactly what I'm thinking, exactly what's going on. We need no further explanation to make a decision. And so that's... it's so powerful when you can encapsulate information like that and communicate it effectively. I mean, the information exchange on that is just massive. And so it's just a drop on the tongue, which is why I love that stuff.

Yeah, words are hard. And when we go into class and we try to explain things, we generally explain the same topic over three days, probably 30 or 40 times. Yeah, why? Because repetition isn't redundancy. You have to understand the totality of what it is that we're talking about. So we consistently give you a photo, then we give you a video, then we give you a song, then we act it out in class, and then we go, "There it is, over there! Yeah, there's Waldo!" Why? Because the more you see it in those different manners... Why do you think we're working so hard to try to get Axon and Vertra and every other place to listen to the work that we're doing with Milo? We're doing it with Milo because Milo's listening! You folks, you're not listening! What we're trying to tell you is these little pieces woven into the great system that you have – you have incredible systems, they're amazing – will help your people in their critical thinking, and it'll help them respond faster when these situations happen because the memory-emotion link doesn't... The synapse is already lubricated with music and with memory and with chemicals and with emotion. So if you tap into that, Brian, that's more important than the muscle memory that we're talking about that they get wrong anyway, right? We're talking about how your brain processes data, reams of information, quickly to get to that point quicker than a likely opponent or competition.

When you're talking about tying in, from a training/learning perspective, if you make an emotional connection... your brain has to make an emotional connection with the content.

Yes, it makes an emotional connection with it. And anyone – I don't care if that's from a training standpoint, that's from anyone in gaming or VR – will tell you that because they spend billions of dollars researching that. And there's so much that goes into it. One, is it... do the graphics have to be perfect? Nope, no. Otherwise, otherwise, Duck Hunt wouldn't have been... would never have made it because... yeah, it would not have been exciting. So what it is is the emotional connection from the amygdala, from your primitive brain, to what it is that you're doing. And your brain goes, "Got it!" I don't care about all that other stuff. The details don't... because the details don't matter to your brain. It doesn't need the fidelity because it never has that fidelity. It makes up that fidelity in your daily life. So it's unnecessary for the purposes of realism. That's not what realism... But it's necessary for the program developer who thinks they're onto something. And I would say sometimes groupthink is so powerful that you're not thinking well.

And I would say, do this, I would say do this to everybody listening to us: have yourself a challenge this New Year's. I want you to go out: why is "Auld Lang Syne" still popular? Answer that question. Why, if we're watching a daytime soap opera or a scary movie, do we have that musical refrain just before something happens? How do they hook you in with Halloween or Michael Myers or a character? Come on, and you know who that is. John Carpenter came up with that music: Escape From New York, John Carpenter; Escape From L.A., the musical soundtrack, John Carpenter; The Thing, John Carpenter. What did he loop into, Brian? He looped into that series of emotions that come from that wave that resonated at a pitch, which is a frequency that caught you, and it hooked you. And every time you hear it now, you go back to it. Jaws – "Bum, bum, bum." Oh, yeah, boys and girls, that's what we're talking about.

So I would say, do a challenge: yellow-pad it while you're out partying safely and driving around and doing your own thing. See if you can come up with music that can lighten your mood or reduce anxiety and depression, or music that can get you amped up to get a better, more efficient workout, or a harder workout, or one that means something to you culturally or the context shaped you in some way when you were in high school, Brian. I say that would be a great project. You know, come up with 10. And you're going, "I'm human, I'm lazy, we'll line them up with four, one, whatever." We're going to get one out of you. But then share it with us because I think it's that important. And I want to thank you personally and professionally because these are the type of podcasts that I so enjoy doing because, Brian, we just touched... it's an iceberg; we just touched the tip of this one.

Well, every point we brought up, you could get in and do an entire podcast on those. You could do an entire study because of the power of music and the universality, and how it's inextricably linked with humans and our behavior and our emotions, and everything. I mean, it is one and the same. Humans are music, music is... it's so great because it's so analogous to how we approach human behavior. Because look, there's a math part, there's a science part. Hey, guess what though, there's a big art part of this too, right? There's creativity.

Absolutely, absolutely. You can't...

Well, music is one of those things where to be great, to make really good music, you have to be both an engineer and an artist. The really greats are actually both. Now, maybe the rest of their life is a mess, but when it...

And you have to know fun and pain, and you have to know longing, and there's so much. And so if you wanted to talk about why we bring up math and science and music so much, all you have to do is think, "Conjunction Junction, what's your function?" Everything around us is tied to those little things that have played such an important role to evoke those emotions and memories in humans, and their repeatability, Brian. Right now, each of us, what would you answer is the best song? There's no such thing, man.

Oh, God. I... that's what... even get down to what your favorite music, or what's your favorite song, what's your favorite band? I was like, "Well, right now, I always give the 'right now I'm listening to a lot of this' and that's usually my answer because I can't... how could you ever do that?" I don't know. That's why when people are like, "Oh, this top 10 songs..." I'm like, "Okay, I can get... I could probably give you top hundred songs that are my favorite, like, maybe I get it down to 50. But after that, I'm like, 'Look, who are you going to cut out? Lil Yachty?'" I mean, think about it. There are so many artists that are out there that we really respect and admire that other people have never heard of. And it's like, "How do you make a list when you haven't even heard his album yet?" Right? So there's so much more. It's like, saying, "What's your..." I would, I would know where to start being like, "Alright, let me start with what I'm listening to right now," and I'll go back in life.

Well, I mean, you...

Because that's so, that's so difficult to do. But that's just me. When it comes to school, "Give me, give me your top 10..." Whatever, dude. Like, I can't, I can't do that, man. I'm sorry. Top 10 in this classroom right now, talking to you.

You know what I mean? Exactly. It would be deliberate, buddy.

Here's my top 10 this week or something. But which is actually cool, a lot of those apps now, they do a year wrap-up, and it shows you what you listened to over the year, and how many minutes, and which artists. And it's really... Spotify does that. It's really, really cool because you're like, "Wow!" And it learns, you know, obviously what you're doing. So it knows, "Okay, you..." It knows, because your phone does the same thing too. So when it's time to go work out, since I typically do it around the same time every day, when you go to open up, it suggests, "Oh, you want to open up Spotify?" It's like, "Yep!" And it's like, "Boom! Workout mix!" It knows, right? Because we're just setting patterns. But it's so funny. But it's amazing.

And there's so much more we can get into. I would love to do the randomness. But that's a whole special topic. Because let's do that. Let's do that and endeavor next year. I'll tease it out: you know, when the first iPods came out, right? And they had the big block iPod, with you put all the songs in there, and they had... they have a shuffle. Everyone has a shuffle mechanism in there, so you shuffle through your songs, right? Well, and it was... it was done when the first iPod came out. They had that on there, and everyone loved it at first. And then they were like, "Hey, I don't like this," because it was completely random. So it was mathematically completely random. Well, guess what happens? They're like, "Well, I kept hearing these couple songs over and over again a lot," or, "Then I would land on this and over and..." And so it's hilarious because Apple had to change that algorithm. So when you do shuffle, it isn't random at all. It's actually making sure it gets a good selection. Because if it was truly random, you might hear the same song three times in an hour, right? And people didn't like that. So we actually don't... That's a whole separate thing. That's such a great potential topic to end with.

But, yeah, no, we went through a lot today. We talked about a lot of this. I'll have the bullet points, and I'll have actually a link to that HBP RNA playlist. And those of you who've been to one of our courses, you'll love it. And then if you haven't, take a look at it; you'll get some of it. You'll even probably recognize some of the stuff or what we're talking about. We talked about some of the songs on there today. It's something that we could... I could go on about music forever, and link it to human behavior. But that's, I think that's good for today. We brought up enough. But I would actually ask everyone listening if you have some feedback or some specific questions. We'll obviously cover all that stuff on the Patreon side as well. But that can maybe formulate what we want to do for that next kind of topic or drill down into something because then we can bring in all the different examples. So, do you have any final words here, Greg, before we close out?

My final words: "Kill the headlights and put it in neutral, the stock car is flaming with the loser at the cruise control." So you figure out where that came from, and that'll write your January. This is a fun episode for me, buddy, and I'm thanking you for that. I wish everybody, including you and your amazing family, a Happy New Year.

Yeah, hopefully everyone's listening to this the day after New Year's Day, and you're feeling a little bit better and ready to start the New Year. But happy...

We'll be in the air, we'll be traveling to our next... And come see us! Buy a book that'll motivate you to get your butt out of your house and come and see Brian and I on the road. We'll both sign it, we'll take a nice picture with you, and you'll get some great training.

All right, well, thanks everyone for tuning in. And don't forget that changes behavior.