Gavin DeBecker is widely regarded as our nation s leading expert on the prediction and management of violence. He s the best-selling author of The Gift of Fear, and several other books on violence prevention. His work has earned him three presidential appointments, and he s been on the President s Advisory Board at the U.S. Department of Justice. He's also worked with the Governor of California, corporations, and celebrities too numerous to name. And Oprah Winfrey dedicated a full hour on her show to commemorating the 10th anniversary of that book. And now, without further delay, I bring you Gavin Debecker, who has handled security for me for many years, and is a great source of expertise on this topic. I m a huge admirer of his work, and I consider him a friend at this point. He is just exactly the person I want to talk to about this issue, because he is a fairly unique position with respect to violence and prevention, and his advice in this area is extremely good. And there are millions of kids who have learned to make a certain way. And we are in the business of predicting human behavior. So we predict the behavior of our siblings and siblings and teachers and teachers. And what I did what children do, which is: I learned to predict human behavior for my own safety and for the safety of others particularly a certain mood, particularly when dad comes home from work early, and has a certain attitude at you and he looks at you at you in the other in the family there are a remarkable way, there are remarkable things that I do a remarkable thing a remarkable prediction by a crisp prediction by me in the making sense that makes me a remarkable human being or . This is not a question of prediction, but a question about their own destiny What do you do? - Sam Harris, making sense of the world to you, the Making Sense Podcast, by me, by you, my friend, the listener, the reader, the reporter, the writer, the maker, the researcher, the learner, the skeptic, the student, the teacher, the scientist, the philosopher, the wise old man, the all of it all that you s got it all of that so you s a good one, right there, you s not going to get it all, right, right in there?
00:03:27.840And many people who may not know that about you know you from your book, The Gift of Fear, which is, if I'm not mistaken, the best-selling book of all time on the topic of preventing violence.
00:03:40.660And you've written a couple of follow-up books, a book about specifically protecting kids, titled Protecting the Gift.
00:03:47.220And even more recently, you have a book about how protective services of the sort you run prevent assassinations.
00:03:59.100And you've worked all over the place with the State Department and the Department of Justice and corporations and universities.
00:04:04.740And you've really dealt with security and issues of violence at every level.
00:04:10.260So my first question, just by way of welcoming you onto the podcast, is how did you come to be in this role?
00:04:18.880Because you really are in a fairly unique position with respect to violence and its prevention.
00:04:25.800So like everybody, my work and my life's path began in childhood.
00:04:30.140I witnessed and experienced a lot of violence, and I did what children do, which is I learned to predict human behavior for my own safety and for the safety of others.
00:04:43.680There are millions of kids who know that when dad comes home in a certain mood, from work early, with a certain attitude toward the other people in the family,
00:04:52.520and he sits down and he clicks open a bottle of beer and he looks at you a certain way,
00:04:56.980there are millions of kids who have learned to know that trouble is coming today.
00:05:00.980And we are in the business of predicting human behavior.
00:05:04.080So we predict the behavior of our siblings and our parents and our teachers and each other.
00:05:10.780And what I did is, by accident or by intent or by fate or destiny, I systematized and really studied the ways in which human beings make predictions.
00:05:24.560And there's no prediction that is more crisp than the prediction that someone makes about their own safety.
00:05:31.200You could say that of all the remarkable things the mind does, it brings its greatest resources when the host itself is in danger.
00:05:39.780And so the kinds of things I did at 10 years old in predicting violence and sort of madness in my own childhood are not terribly dissimilar to the kinds of things that I do today in terms of applying strategies that I think all of us,
00:05:57.000and really it's a key message of my work, as you know, is that all of us have these resources, these intuitive resources inside us.
00:06:03.900But how is it that you became the go-to guy on this issue?
00:06:09.080I don't think the history is so entirely unique because I think of, you know, a kid who saw his grandparent die of cancer and then becomes a cancer expert or somebody whose father died of a heart attack and they become, you know, a heart surgeon or somebody who experienced or witnessed some kind of victimization or criminality and they grow up to become a police officer.
00:06:31.880My point is that your ghosts can become your teachers and there are plenty of people who decided, hey, I'm going to be a psychologist because I think there's money in it.
00:06:42.340And there are other people who decided I'm going to be a psychologist because I sense and introspectively perceive the challenges that, you know, that I have myself or that other human beings have.
00:06:54.800And if I, Gavin, were choosing a brain surgeon, I don't want the one who's there because he thinks he can make a good living as a brain surgeon.
00:07:01.640I want the one who's there because he's been absolutely fascinated with this topic his whole life.
00:07:06.880So for me, at 10 years old, I was home from school and I saw on television the assassination of President Kennedy.
00:07:14.480And my father was not in my life at that time.
00:07:17.480And Kennedy was a kind of father figure to me, even a similar appearance.
00:07:21.200And it really knocked me on my ass that somebody young and and and in the prime of their life and involved in my life as a public figure, of course, could be assassinated, even in the presence of what at the time was the highest level protective coverage in history.
00:07:40.060And so, you know, I asked myself the question at 10 years old, as I looked around and saw people crying and saw people upset.
00:07:49.440And you could see how this event came into our homes and our school and our community.
00:07:54.660And it made me wonder forever about the best strategies for for protection.
00:08:01.740I never followed, you know, an interest in in the conspiratorial aspects of the Kennedy assassination, though I have opinions on it.
00:08:11.720What fascinated me was the physical on the scene aspects of how people could be protected.
00:08:18.020And and eventually, as I got into that field more and more by being the best kind of student, that's not the student who goes to a college class necessarily.
00:08:28.160That's the student who never leaves the college class.
00:08:30.640I did it all my waking hours, everything I saw, everything I read, everyone I met.
00:08:36.840I extracted something that was relevant to my fascination.
00:08:42.260And so as I developed strategies and ideas and began to write on the topic, I saw that the strategies that applied to the people we protect the most presidents, vice presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, etc.
00:08:56.220They also applied in far larger numbers to regular people.
00:09:01.980For example, a public figure in America is attacked, you know, on average every five years.
00:09:07.180But a woman is murdered by a husband or boyfriend on average every five hours.
00:09:13.040So the same strategies can be applied not in terms of physical protective coverage, but in terms of identifying the pre incident indicators associated with violence.
00:09:25.660And no crime in America is more preventable or predictable than spousal homicide because all the pre incident indicators are there.
00:09:35.400So that's a long answer to the question of how it is that I followed this path.
00:09:40.620I can give you some, you know, steps along the way that maybe make it seem like less of a magic trick if you want me to.
00:09:46.380But I think it's like everybody's life.
00:09:47.920I think you take the next step one after the other and you I'm going to use the word destiny for a moment because I do tend to believe just about everything is predetermined.
00:09:57.860But I think you, you know, you're going to do what you're going to do with your set of circumstances and your biology and your meal that day and your amount of sleep and your age and your place of origin, birth.
00:10:09.760I think you're going to do what you're going to do.
00:10:12.280Well, let's just jump into a discussion of violence because that's there's so much to talk about there.
00:10:19.200And I want to have this conversation not merely as an intellectual exploration of the topic.
00:10:27.600I think violence is incredibly interesting just as a topic.
00:10:30.600But I want this conversation to be useful to people in very practical ways.
00:10:35.180And so I want us to give people a deeper understanding of violence and how to avoid it.
00:10:40.940And when I mentioned that I would be talking to you in a previous podcast, I said that given the numbers of people who are listening, it doesn't seem far fetched to say that this is the kind of conversation that could save a life or two or at least prevent some very significant suffering.
00:10:56.100But before we begin, I think we need to deal with the what's essentially a statistical concern that I think many of our listeners will have in their heads, which is that violence is now rare enough in our society that there really is no reason to think much about it.
00:11:15.640I mean, to have a conversation of the sort we're about to have is essentially morbid or is a kind of fear mongering.
00:11:24.260Why do you think people at this moment in a society like our own, speaking now of, you know, the developed world, even the safest places within it?
00:11:34.960Why do you why do you think people should think about violence?
00:11:38.460So, you know, I actually have to laugh at the idea that that people think an experience that has been going on throughout human history and is not only unabated and uninterrupted, but that they think a political statistic.
00:11:54.460Remember, statistics from the federal government are often highly politicized in terms of how they're developed.
00:12:00.520For example, there was a moment when rape statistics went down because they redefined rape.
00:12:06.720So rape involved it used to involve any form of penetration.
00:12:10.780And then they defined it in a slightly different way in terms of penetration.
00:12:14.340And guess what happened? Rape decreased.
00:12:16.640But we are talking about a human behavior, rape, that has gone on throughout human history.
00:12:22.760And so the idea that politicians say, as many speeches have been given along these lines, you know, we must stamp out rape in our culture.
00:12:34.400And we're talking about behaviors that while violence may tick down slightly, we'll say there's 26,000 homicides in America.
00:12:43.600And so a 10% reduction means that there's closer to 23,000 homicides in America.
00:12:50.100And that's not relevant to the individual who's facing a circumstance in which the pre-incident indicators of homicide are present.
00:12:59.740So for me, for example, a white male, I might walk around all day, every day, and go years without experiencing something that makes me raise my eyebrow and say,
00:13:10.940hmm, this dark alley doesn't feel right.
00:13:13.820This circumstance, this person, this employee we're firing, this moment, for some reason, gives me reason to respond.
00:13:22.200And I get a fear response or an intuitive response about safety.
00:13:28.380But a woman, if you ask, for example, I did a thing a couple of years ago where we asked random men and filmed them and said,
00:13:37.400when is the last time that you experienced fear about your own safety?
00:13:42.240And the men tended to answer, hmm, eight months ago or when I was in Iraq or, you know, when I was first on the police force or never.
00:13:51.420And then we asked the same number of women and the women said today or last night while I was walking to my car after our company party or yesterday when that ex-boyfriend called me again after I asked him not to.
00:14:05.220My point being that it is a totally different experience for women than it is for men.
00:14:10.660It's a totally different experience for minorities than it is for white men, you know, ages 25 to 50.
00:14:17.680And so the idea that violence, which is an enduring element of human behavior, is affected because a statistic goes down.
00:14:48.860And it's almost like a car accident injury or slipping in the shower.
00:14:53.680But nonetheless, there's a thousand people who are shot in California every week.
00:14:57.640And so you now have a circumstance in which that statistic is worth avoiding, meaning I'm just as interested in avoiding being shot as I'm interested in avoiding being killed.
00:15:10.780And yet what's happened in America, and this is really key when people think about this topic, what you ought to look at is not the rate of, let's take firearms deaths.
00:15:27.140What changed in the last 40 years profoundly?
00:15:30.4809-1-1 service that calls ambulances and police officers to us more quickly, even if we can't say the address.
00:15:37.220Ambulance services that get us to nearer emergency rooms than ever existed before because Americans are so unhealthy that one of the biggest growth businesses is hospitals.
00:15:45.500Emergency room strategies refined by the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq so that shooting trauma is dealt with.
00:15:53.340So the odds of dying from receiving a bullet are vastly lower than the odds of receiving a bullet.
00:16:00.060And so my view is I just want to avoid tissue damage.
00:16:04.320I'm not really interested in whether it's good or bad tissue damage.
00:16:07.040I'm in the business of helping people prevent tissue damage, and in my case, with my clients, to prevent targeted tissue damage.
00:16:16.140So this is a long way of saying that statistics that say the crime rate is down do not change the relationship between me and that guy standing in front of me in the dark alley at 2 in the morning as I come out of a late party somewhere.
00:16:32.420One must always measure what's going on in their environment without regard to statistics.
00:16:42.320Years ago, there was an actress, you'll remember, some audience members might not, named Teresa Saldana, who was stabbed by a mentally ill man who stalked her for a year, traveled from Scotland to kill her, tried to buy a gun but couldn't, and so he used a knife instead.
00:16:58.580And she called the police, the sheriff's department, actually, about the fact that somebody was calling her mother and trying to get information about where she lived and then was calling her agent and trying to get information.
00:17:13.360And the police officer said on the phone, look, 99% of the time, in these cases, nothing happens.
00:17:21.560His statistics were right on, perfect.
00:17:23.54099.9% of the time, with media figures being stalked or pursued, it doesn't end in homicide.
00:17:30.12045 minutes later, she walked out of her apartment, and she was stabbed 18 times through the chest and spent the next two years dealing with that surgically.
00:17:38.520And so the statistic was not valuable to her.
00:17:43.180And statistics, you know, you're sitting on a plane and you look out the window and the left engine is on fire.
00:17:48.520You don't say to yourself, hey, you know, flying is safer than driving.
00:17:51.960In your moment, in your circumstance, there's risk and there's danger.
00:17:56.980And that's where we live, in our moment, in our circumstance, in our situation.
00:18:01.640And a quick thing is that on the actress I just talked about, Teresa Saldana, when I interviewed her assailant in prison years later and asked him, you know, would you kill her if she were—he still wanted to kill her—would you kill her if she were in this room right now?
00:18:19.500And he said, no, not unless I had a gun.
00:18:22.240Because he regretted and was disappointed that he'd had to use a knife.
00:18:27.780My point is that Saldana, anybody in the world could have said to her, hey, young actress who's, you know, barely known at all, forget about it.
00:18:36.52099.9% of the time nothing happens, and their statistics would be accurate, but their outcome would be grossly inaccurate.
00:18:43.160I do want to talk about these specific cases of public figures and the difference between men and women in their relationship to violence.
00:18:53.020Just generically speaking, there are different types of violence, and this is another source of confusion for people.
00:18:59.820So there are things like there's social violence, like two guys in a bar, you know, one says, what the fuck are you looking at?
00:19:05.600And then it escalates from there, and that's quite different from predatory violence, like rape, as a prime example.
00:19:14.300And these are both different from ideological violence of the sort that we see in acts of terrorism.
00:19:21.540And acts of terrorism are only superficially similar to mass shootings by mentally unstable people of the sort that we tend to see in schools or, you know, movie theaters and shopping malls.
00:19:33.860These are, they're obviously surface features that lead people to think that someone like Jared Loeffner is doing something analogous to what al-Qaeda is doing.
00:19:45.060But these are fundamentally different acts of violence, and this tends to confuse people.
00:19:50.200So is there anything you want to say about the general landscape of violence before we get into some of the more fine-grained considerations of the sort you bring up in your book?
00:20:03.100And I'd like to express, because going with what you said about making this useful and providing some practical information that people can understand about the resources they already have, I know we'll be talking about intuition.
00:20:16.480But one of the reasons that we say things like, this is the safest city in America, so my odds are better living here, or the statistics are down, or this is the least, you know, violence we've had, I mean, high-end violence we've had since, you know, 1957, is we are all automatically looking to exclude ourselves from the population of the stories we hear.
00:20:41.580So, for example, if I hear that a guy was eaten by an alligator in Florida, I can write that off quick because I'm not swimming in the Everglades.
00:20:50.680And if I hear that a woman was raped, I can write that off because I'm not a woman.
00:21:16.820The difference is the moniker that the news media gives to it.
00:21:20.620Another school shooting today in Omaha, Nebraska, another workplace violence event in Omaha, Nebraska, it's a faster way to tell the story.
00:21:28.700But those two are remarkably similar, right?
00:21:32.360The student almost is an employee in the environment.
00:21:35.720The workplace violence perpetrator is dealing with relationships and dealing with feeling alienated and things aren't fair and others don't treat him well.
00:21:49.180Now let's go to the shopping center shooter.
00:21:52.600Is the shopping center shooter different because he's in a shopping center versus in a workplace versus outside of school?
00:21:58.540See, my point is that the choice of venue for explosive acts of violence, and I'll speak specifically now about multiple victim shootings, which are nearly a weekly event in the United States, so much so that they are not even national news anymore.
00:22:14.220They are local news, so a multiple victim shooting, a guy who shoots four people at his workplace, if they don't all die, and if there isn't any video, that won't be on the news nationally.
00:22:25.220And so a lot of it is driven by the video, and you know the video I mean, the helicopter shot of the school with all the police and all the firemen around, you know, after a shooting like Newtown or any other school shooting.
00:22:37.820So speaking of school shootings, is a shooting like Newtown inherently different from a shooting by students like at Columbine?
00:22:49.060Yes, they have different motivations and they have different reasons, but a good way to look at this, and this is, I'm going to go a level deeper when I say this, is that during the year that 9-11 happened, and there were in effect 2,200 homicides at the World Trade Center.
00:23:06.460So that the homicide rate in New York City just went up by 2,200, and what changed?
00:23:12.560You know, nobody thought of it this way because they isolated that mass murder from all the individual husbands killing their wives and girlfriends and robbers, you know, inadvertently or intentionally shooting, you know, shooting victims of their robberies.
00:23:26.980But an interesting component that I believe in is that if 2,200 people are killed all at once in a big violent incident like 9-11, mass incidents of homicide will go down in the United States for a while.
00:24:10.300School shooters like Columbine intended not to survive.
00:24:13.780And my point is that this categorization business is a news media artifact.
00:24:19.460It is not really about human behavior because if we take ourselves back 1,000 years and we're living in the village and somebody gets killed, we ask a few questions.
00:24:55.520What's going to improve slightly is that we will have better strategies for predicting who among our population needs help, in effect, is most likely to act out.
00:25:06.160For example, the crime rate is down or the violent crime rate is down.
00:25:17.640But we have to also recognize that the strategies for doing tissue damage have profoundly improved in the same period.
00:25:26.020So we're talking about crime against us in our own society, and we're not talking about war, which is another way that people meet their end.
00:25:34.040And so the instruments of violent death, everything from the style of how handguns operate better and better to what will soon be weaponized component drones, weaponized consumer drones, those have gotten so much better that we really have to factor that into the equation.
00:25:55.560Now, you say, well, I'm not going to get killed by a drone because, you know, I'm not a public figure at risk of that kind of thing.
00:26:07.640It's just to say that in a very real sense, you know how the surging water in an ocean doesn't really move, but what's actually happening is energy moves through it.
00:26:18.040In that exact same sense, the energy of violence moves through this culture.
00:26:23.720Others as well, but I will say more in this culture than in any place on Earth other than warring cultures.
00:26:29.780And so some of us experience it as a, you know, an unpleasant breeze that we can tolerate.
00:26:37.220We hear a story of a friend's daughter in college who was sexually assaulted and others of us are absolutely destroyed by it as if by a hurricane.
00:26:46.520But nobody in America is untouched by the reality.
00:26:58.880And so whether we were the recipient of tissue damage or not, we're actually experiencing more violence than any other culture in human history because we experience it through television.
00:27:10.360Yeah, well, I do want to talk about the role of the media here and how the Internet may have changed things or amplified things.
00:27:16.680Just to revisit the logic of my question for a moment, because I totally take your point that the categorization of violence can be misleading and seem to remove us from the epicenter of the problem just by the words we choose.
00:27:34.000But I think there are clearly different pre-incident indicators for different kinds of violence.
00:27:41.220So, for instance, as you said earlier, men don't tend to walk around worrying about getting raped and for good reason, because men out, you know, unless they happen to be in prison, aren't often getting raped in our society.
00:27:54.600And so there's a reason why women uniquely inherit that burden.
00:28:00.360And I mean, there's other differences that are relevant that we could talk about.
00:28:03.420I mean, women tend to be outweighed by men, you know, virtually all of the men they're around.
00:28:10.280The men are taller, bigger, their upper bodies are stronger.
00:28:13.200If you're a man, to imagine what this would be like, you have to imagine that every time you get into an elevator, every man in that elevator is 60 pounds heavier than you and obviously stronger than you.
00:28:26.200Right. And, you know, women don't tend to challenge other women in public places and ask them to go out on the sidewalk so that they can get into a fistfight, as dumb guys do.
00:28:38.380And when violence is directed at women, it doesn't tend to be of the sort that is a fight among apish guys.
00:28:47.440It's an effort to physically control her, to move her to another location, to sexually assault her if it's stranger violence, very likely.
00:28:58.640To add one more variable here that I mentioned briefly, there's a big difference between a mentally ill perpetrator of a workplace,
00:29:08.380shooting or a school shooting or a mall shooting and a perfectly sane, ideologically driven terrorist.
00:29:17.980The pre-incident indicators will be different.
00:29:21.720They'll be in the backstory of the terrorist.
00:29:25.620There may not be any of the things you hear in the backstory of the mentally unstable, you know, mass shooter, because he's not mentally unstable.
00:29:38.040I was kind of pushing you in that direction, but that's actually, in my view, not in contradiction with anything you said about the other ways in which our categories mislead us.
00:29:49.020Well, I think that's all of that's right.
00:29:50.840And what you said about the woman in the elevator and for a man to have the same experience, everybody would have to be taller and 60 pounds heavier and muscular.
00:30:01.440And also everybody would have to be familiar with the territory of violence and force in a way that we're not.
00:30:09.940They'd all have to be martial arts experts because women traditionally in Western culture have been told this is not for you.
00:30:17.960You're not supposed to understand the code of human violence.
00:30:21.960And a big part of my work is to say you do understand the code of human violence and you have all the resources that are necessary to protect yourself.
00:30:32.300And the protection might not come in the form of upper body strength and disabling your assailant.
00:30:38.320It might, by the way, but it might not come in that form.
00:30:40.860It might come in the form of intuiting earlier than a man might that you are at risk.
00:30:46.880And that's a skill and a resource that's been developed, you know, what I would call the wild brain, developed over millions of years, that is slightly more tuned in women but also used more often in women.
00:31:01.740But let's go to a different category, not just women.
00:31:04.160There are other kinds of people who are victimized more easily, and it'll be obvious why that is.
00:31:10.220So children are the subject of all variety of physical assaults more often than people like you and I are.
00:31:16.520I'm speaking about, you know, people our age and socioeconomic environment and the kinds of lives we live.
00:31:25.200So, you know, something like 15 kids are killed every week by their parents in the United States.
00:31:30.720So I'm not speaking to children here where I could say to them, you know, you have nothing to worry about from your parents who love you and the odds are so overwhelmingly out of 60 million of you right now.
00:31:43.040The odds are so overwhelmingly low that you would ever have an experience with your parent trying to harm you.
00:31:49.640However, if you have ABCDEFG pre-incident indicators, then you have a reason to be concerned.
00:31:57.940Well, again, we're not speaking to children who are inherently, throughout human history, life's miseries have fallen disproportionately on children.
00:32:06.060And so the various categories of who we are and the demographic that we fit into is relevant depending on where you put us.
00:32:16.160If you put us in Iraq, all of a sudden, you know, we're in great danger or you put us in Afghanistan.
00:32:25.560But I think what I want to say that's important here, and it just goes to your observation about the terrorist or the ideologically motivated violent actor, you know, the terrorist is very similar to the soldier.
00:32:39.640Both people, you know, we take young men who would never kill anybody.
00:32:44.020And if we thought they would kill anybody, we'd be scared of them.
00:32:46.540And we take young men and militaries throughout human history have developed strategies for getting young men to be willing to place themselves at risk of being killed and to do this unspeakable and unforgivable thing, which is kill another person.
00:33:02.060And that requires inculcation and training that militaries, I'll choose our military for a moment, have gotten so good at that today we have a far higher participation rate in combat.
00:34:02.480So 90% of American soldiers participate in combat, which is against our nature, you understand.
00:34:09.000And that's why when people come back from the trauma of war and they suddenly are without this great family of men and women they served with, we see so much PTSD.
00:34:20.360And it's why suicide rate has killed the suicide in soldiers has killed more people than combat, as you may know, coming out of Iraq.
00:34:28.060Now, I don't want to, that's a tangent we'll avoid for right now.
00:34:31.280But the broader point is that, and this is an important one as we move into, in this discussion, as we move into the good news, we're still on the bad news right now.
00:34:42.960It's important that people realize that violence, not only part of America, but part of our species.
00:34:49.340And ultimately, as the most powerful people in history, Americans, we've climbed to the top of the world food chain, you could say.
00:34:57.820But now facing not a single enemy or predator who poses us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left, which is ourselves.
00:35:25.480The number of young men shot to death in a year in Japan is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single busy weekend.
00:35:33.720So all the stats in the world will not change the fact that America is a particularly violent culture.
00:35:43.800And, you know, by the time your podcast is aired, thousands more Americans will have suffered a shooting injury, for example.
00:35:51.040And thousands will have will have faced a criminal.
00:35:53.060And hundreds will have been raped by strangers and thousands will have been raped by boyfriends and spouses.
00:35:59.800And so that's what you have to believe.
00:36:02.620In order to bring your resources to the table, because if you actually believe what a politician says or the crime rate is down, didn't we do a good job?
00:36:11.800Didn't the FBI and this administration do a good job for you in stamping out violence?
00:36:16.140If you believe that, then you tune down the radio channel that has to be the highest, which is your own intuition.
00:36:24.600Let's talk about intuition, because we have just said that people are fairly confused about violence and tend to be bad at dealing with some of the information that's out there about it.
00:36:37.360But this point you make again and again, you've made it here, and it's the very title of your book, The Gift of Fear.
00:36:44.420There's one thing that we are actually very good at.
00:36:48.180Evolution has made us experts at detecting danger and detecting shady people, feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people who are liable to do us harm.
00:36:59.440Talk about intuition here and what it means to trust it and why so many people are unaware of the validity of trusting it, the reasons given for not trusting it.
00:37:14.040Talk about the primacy of intuition for a moment.
00:37:16.620Well, here we get to, I think, the biggest gift we can give to listeners.
00:37:21.540And this goes for female listeners and male listeners.
00:37:23.840This goes for decisions you make in your work and decisions you make for your safety.
00:37:29.460Ultimately, the biggest decision we all make is who to include in our life and who to exclude from our life.
00:37:35.600That's choosing friends, spouse, neighbors, coworkers, et cetera.
00:37:43.620And so my advice always is to make very slow and careful decisions about whom you include in your life and very fast decisions about whom you exclude.
00:37:56.560So if you have that nanny that you're uncomfortable about, she goes quickly.
00:38:04.240I mean, I've had people through my career say, you know, should we put in a nanny cam because we're worried that this nanny is doing something dangerous with our kids?
00:38:13.440And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is going to thank you in 20 years.
00:38:19.240Gee, mom, thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired.
00:38:25.100And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I want to focus on for a moment, because America particularly or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us.
00:38:41.020And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going to protect you because they're not going to be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation.
00:38:52.120And government's not going to protect you.
00:38:55.100It tries to pretend it can, but it can't.
00:38:57.700And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment.
00:39:08.800And I think, as you said, Sam, it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on, you know, as with some contempt.
00:39:18.640It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable.
00:39:21.920And husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition and they don't take it seriously.
00:39:25.960But what I can tell you about intuition, I learned from the origins of the word itself.
00:39:33.140The root of the word, inter, means to guard and to protect.
00:39:37.660Super interesting that that's what it means.
00:39:39.560We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions.
00:39:43.060But what it's built for, what it's in this system for, is to guard us and to protect us.
00:39:49.660And what it, you know, what it does is, and I'm really going to quote you for a second here because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this.
00:39:59.300True, true, we didn't get the biggest claws, we didn't get the sharpest teeth or the biggest muscles, what we got is the biggest brains.
00:40:07.960And the idea that we use the, you know, the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog.
00:40:18.400So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on.
00:40:23.360That's why, you know, you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you, this danger.
00:40:44.860The idea is that this is a process, this process we ridicule, intuition, is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical.
00:40:55.960In the natural order of things, it's more logical than the most fantastic computer calculation.
00:41:01.340And it's our most complicated cognitive process.
00:41:05.500And it's also, in some ways, it's the simplest, which I'll explain.
00:41:08.220But what it does, intuition, is it connects us to the natural world and to our nature so that when we are free from judgment and we've got only perception, we say that thing, you know, in recounting what happened to us, somehow I knew.
00:41:24.220So if people will do these two things, one is to pay attention to intuition.
00:41:31.300It's, in my opinion, it's always right in two important ways.
00:41:35.480One is, it's always based on something.
00:41:38.640And two, it always has your best interest at heart.
00:41:52.200Something, they get anxiety about it and I shouldn't get on this plane.
00:41:55.440So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling's coming from.
00:42:02.020And if it is coming from a news story you saw, you know, two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru, that is not in your, based on your environment or your circumstance.
00:42:17.840It's based on your memory or your anxiety and that's not actual fear.
00:42:23.540If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport and, you know, make his way slowly down the jet walk, now you've got something that's in your environment.
00:42:36.040And the question to ask always, this is how.
00:42:39.540You tell the difference between true fear, like I'm afraid of getting on this plane, and unwarranted fear, worry, anxiety, etc.
00:44:08.600Because she says, I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby.
00:44:15.000I don't want to be like that or I don't want to offend him or I don't want to make him angry.
00:44:18.340She talks herself out of what I call prosecutes her own jury's conclusion.
00:44:24.680And she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator.
00:44:28.320And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate.
00:44:32.900And human beings do it every day, participating in their own victimization.
00:44:36.960The elevator example brings up some other issues here that are hugely important.
00:44:43.000And this is the other side of the balance that causes people to not value intuition or to prosecute their feelings, as you say.
00:44:53.740And it's that these moments of negative intuition can be in contradiction to a variety of social norms that well-intentioned people want to adopt.
00:45:09.120So if you're a white woman and the elevator door is open and the man on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable is black, well, you may just get on that elevator perversely to prove to yourself and to him that you're not racist, right?
00:46:03.960We've all been trained to ignore those facts, which, again, we can, in many cases, just instantly and intuitively surmise.
00:46:12.600So what are good people to do with that?
00:46:17.260Well, I mean, the best gift any of us can give to not only ourselves but our society is that we take care of the person whom nature has made us responsible for primarily, and that's ourselves.
00:46:32.320And so what I like to do, and in my own life, believe me, I'm no different from anybody else.
00:46:36.680I make mistakes all the time, where afterwards I say, damn it, I knew better.
00:46:40.700I shouldn't have talked to that person.
00:46:45.300And I didn't want to, and I overrode it for some reason.
00:46:48.560You know, a typical example would be you're invited to dinner at somebody's house and you just don't want to go, but you go.
00:46:55.540I think those are, these aren't violence issues, but I think they're always mistakes.
00:47:00.920And there was, in the Friends television series years ago, Phoebe, the character played by Lisa Kudrow, taught me something really important once.
00:47:11.600Somebody invites her to dinner and she says to them on the phone, oh, it's Tuesday night?
00:47:20.120If we would all live that way and say, I'm going to listen to myself, I'm going to listen to the voice that's a little bit more important than the voice of political correctness, which is a bullshit scam that is going on in every culture to one degree or another and very, very hot right now in the United States.
00:47:38.240The significant issue isn't the branding of myself in this moment based on my behavior.
00:47:45.320The significant issue is listening to intuition and have the dialogue with yourself later about why you did or didn't do that.
00:48:19.180And so I said to her, listen, the dog is not an expert on contractors or people.
00:48:25.380The dog was reacting to you when the contractor came over, right?
00:48:29.840You were the one who knew all about contractors and this guy.
00:48:33.700The dog didn't know that his car was too expensive for the, the, the level of bidding that he was doing or that his proposal was a little bit sleazy.
00:48:41.920The dog knew you and the dog doesn't have better intuition.
00:48:47.140It is not bothered by the way it used to be, the way it could be, the way it should be, the way it ought to be.
00:48:54.340The dog doesn't ask any of that question.
00:48:56.600The dog looks and says the way it is reality in this moment.
00:49:01.020And for that reason, animals don't even go into this mental exercise of, I don't want to be this kind of person.
00:49:08.780I don't want to be the kind of person who's suspicious, for example.
00:49:12.260I want to interject a quick thing here about, about words is that the root of the word suspicion was also a big teacher for me.
00:49:19.860That root suspicion only means to watch.
00:49:24.280It doesn't mean to hurt somebody like, should I feel bad because I'm suspicious of my neighbor when my kids are, you know, playing over at their house and I'm wondering about whether he's an alcoholic or whether he's violent or whether he's, you know, a child molester.
00:49:38.920So I say, oh, I don't want to be suspicious of everybody like that.
00:49:44.100It is curiosity with the added imperative to watch.
00:49:49.800And so if you're suspicious of that guy you're getting into the elevator with, you watch and you change your, you change your demeanor.
00:49:56.920But listen, changing your environment by getting into a steel box with somebody, that's a pretty radical decision when nature has just told you, you ought not.
00:50:08.080I mean, you're going to argue, you're going to argue with that because you don't want to be that kind of person.
00:50:12.380Well, which kind of person do you want to be?
00:50:29.040Is this feeling in this moment something that I am, as a general lifestyle choice, am going to push down and ignore?
00:50:38.000Or is this feeling in this moment something that I am going to listen to as a general lifestyle choice?
00:50:43.740Well, I think we should add one more principle here, which you do talk about throughout your work.
00:50:49.340It really is the foundation of almost everything you recommend.
00:50:54.300And it's something that people who prepare for violence, who train to defend themselves and others, you know, whether they're martial artists or they get into firearms training, you meet a lot of these people.
00:51:06.920You can see that they not only don't spend time focusing on this principle, but their training tends to, in many cases, teach them to ignore it.
00:51:21.680The primary goal here, the first move to keep yourself and those you love safe, is to not be where violence can happen to you.
00:51:32.260Insofar as your training to protect yourself leads you to be the kind of person who's more likely to put him or herself in the path of violence, then that's obviously counterproductive.
00:51:44.880This principle of avoidance, when you marry that to what you just said about intuition and the validity of intuition, that's so much of the story of what it takes to not be a victim of violence and why you cannot afford to be politically correct at all about this.
00:52:05.100Be politically correct after the fact, as you said, right?
00:52:07.620Feel guilty after the fact, but if you're not going to be motivated by a split-second sense that the person who's just come into your presence doesn't mean well or represents a physical risk to you,
00:52:24.100if you're going to forsake that signal based on some, you know, larger social concerns that have been drummed into you,
00:52:33.480you will be the sort of person who never acts to avoid proximity to violence at the first opportunity.
00:52:41.680Well, I love the way you said it, and I agree with all of it.
00:52:44.960And I think here I can sell this idea a little bit by offering a value add that has nothing to do with violence because, as you said at the beginning,
00:52:55.040most people assume that it's so rare in our culture or in their lives that they don't, you know, you would think it's morbid to think about it, or they would, not you.
00:53:05.520And so, you know, the sell is that the same resource I'm talking about, intuition, is how you get rich, it's how you choose a great spouse,
00:53:18.140it's how you fulfill your purpose here on Earth, it's what Steve Jobs had and listened to, it's what Jeff Bezos listens to.
00:53:27.500If you had all these guys in a room, and by these guys I mean people who've changed our lives and who've contributed a great deal,
00:53:34.700they would all tell you that their decisions were not made on the basis of spreadsheets and logic and slideshows and calculators and all of that.
00:53:44.380Their ultimate decision to do something that nobody had ever done before, so logic would tell you don't do it, right?
00:53:50.900If Jeff Bezos came to me and said, I want you to invest in my company, I'm going to sell books on the Internet, you know, he'd have to say to me,
00:53:59.040the odds are 99% you're going to lose all this money, and the only reason to do it is if you feel intuitively to do it.
00:54:05.760If Steve Jobs were to go somewhere, you know, there's a story of Steve Jobs saying to a friend of his,
00:54:10.300whom he invited to be in the beginning of Apple, that guy was going instead to work for Coca-Cola Company, which he did.
00:54:17.760And Steve said to him, do you want to change the world, or do you want to put sugar in water?
00:55:22.100But it's a way of expressing a concern.
00:55:23.900So I want to know where'd that come from?
00:55:25.380Oh, well, you know, we got this employee and he's a former Vietnam vet who carries guns a lot.
00:55:30.080And he's been talking about shooting his mouth off about how much he hates everybody.
00:55:33.960Ah, so let's talk about that because it'll either be resolved that it's not likely to produce violence or that it is.
00:55:40.380And then of all the messengers of intuition, I talked about curiosity, suspicion, hesitation.
00:55:46.660The one that must never be ignored is fear.
00:55:51.700I mean, fear is it may be whispered or it may be screaming in your ear.
00:55:55.840But fear basically says, shut up, listen to me, and I will get you out of here.
00:56:01.320And if you listen, but if you don't listen, then you remain in an environment, and this goes to your question about simply not being there, you remain in an environment that is, you've already been told, contains the ingredients of violence.
00:56:19.700And I want to talk about, because you said, you know, social conditioning and political correctness and what have you, what is the opposite of intuition?
00:56:31.600Because if intuition is knowing something, but not knowing why you know it, then denial is choosing not to know something and having all the details, right?
00:56:43.640Like, my boyfriend has hit me before, he's, he just lost his job, his drinking has increased, he's just bought a third handgun, he beat up his last girlfriend.
00:56:54.860I know all that, and I'm going to act like I don't.
00:56:59.080So I ask, you know, our listeners today the question, which of those two features of human behavior, denial or intuition, is likely to be more relevant and constructive for your safety?
00:57:11.440And also, for that other thing I'm selling, which is all the quality in your life, because the quality of your life is completely determined by one thing.
00:57:21.980And that is, let me make it clear, after you have food, after you have shelter, after you have your immediate physical needs met, the quality of your life is determined by the choices you make in terms of relationships.
00:57:34.120Employees, employers, family members, spouse, all these choices that we make.
00:57:40.000That's including the choice, by the way, of who to get into the elevator with, because that's a relationship.
00:57:44.780Obviously, when violence occurs, there's very often a story to be told about the signs that were ignored, but more often than not, you're seeing these signs in other people and often taking steps to avoid further contact with them, and then, you know, nothing bad happens.
00:58:03.800But the signs can be fairly subtle, and I think if you're not someone who has your head in this kind of thinking, it can seem kind of paranoid to be viewing the world this way.
00:58:17.800I don't know if this is the greatest example, but this is something that just occurred to me.
00:58:21.380I remember I had a problem with my cable at our house and scheduled an appointment for the cable guy to come over and fix things, and, you know, I don't have a standard relationship with the cable guy.
00:58:35.320This is the kind of thing that happens, like, once every five years or so.
00:58:38.620Somebody shows up, and it was one of these moments where he comes through the front door, and, you know, I immediately had an intuition that there's something off about this guy.
00:58:49.060Anyway, and here were the following moments that became salient to me.
00:58:55.300He comes through the door, and he looks at me, but then immediately looks around the house.
00:59:00.660He's kind of surveying the house, right?
00:59:02.760So he's looking around at an inappropriately early moment, looking at objects.
00:59:08.560I mean, basically just trying to see, in my interpretation, what else is in the house or who else is in the house.
00:59:13.780So it's just this very subtle, like, failure of ordinary social behavior, looking past the person you're meeting in his house at an earlier moment than you otherwise would.
00:59:26.300And then when he introduces himself, he says, hey, hi, you know, I'm John.
00:59:29.720But in the act of telling me he's John, he shows me his name tag as though to prove that he's telling the truth, right?
00:59:39.760So this struck me as this is a kind of cascade of impressions that's coming.
00:59:44.340It was later that I unpacked them in terms of why they struck me as wrong, but, you know, struck me as odd in retrospect that he would ask me to verify that he is actually John by showing me his badge.
00:59:56.960And then the final kicker was that, you know, I showed him the television that was having a problem and then, you know, went off elsewhere in the house.
01:00:06.820I wasn't going to ride shotgun with him every moment while he's fixing the television.