123： Left of Bang ｜ Patrick Van Horne
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Summary
Patrick Van Horn is a former Marine Corps Combat Hunter and author of the book, "Left to Bang." His book teaches us how to use non-verbal communication to assess threats, the common physical language all humans use, and how the Marine Corps' Combat Hunter Program could save your life.
Transcript
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Gentlemen, we all know the world can be a dangerous place. Some would argue that it's
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becoming safer and others would argue it's becoming more dangerous. But either way,
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the potential for you and I encountering a threat in our day-to-day life is a real possibility and
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one that we as men should be prepared for. My guest today, Patrick Van Horn and the author
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of Left to Bang teaches us how to use nonverbal communication to assess threats, the common
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physical language all humans use, how to use combat profiling to keep yourself and others safe,
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and how the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program could save your life.
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You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly charge
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your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time. Every time. You are not
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easily deterred or defeated. Rugged. Resilient. Strong. This is your life. This is who you are.
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This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,
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Men, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Mickler and I am the host and the founder of the
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podcast you're listening to right now, The Order of Man. Whether you're new or you've been around
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for years, I want to welcome you to the show today. My job here, guys, is to interview the
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world's most successful, intelligent, and interesting men on the planet, get them to tell us how they've
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done what they've done, and then share that information with you so you can produce the same type of
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result in your life. Now, some of the guys that I do interview, you are going to know and they're
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familiar, like Lewis Howes, Jocko Willink, Grant Cardone, Andy Frisilla, so many more, and frankly,
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some of the guys that I interview, you won't know yet, but either way, every single person I bring on
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this show has some incredibly valuable insights to share with you. So just a couple of quick
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announcements before I get into the conversation today. We have our first live event in Kansas City
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going down on August 12th, 2017, and we have five spots available, just five. We've got over 70 men
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coming in from all over the country. They're coming into town. We're going to have a killer day with a
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live podcast with me and Steven Mansfield. We're doing breakout sessions, conversations with me.
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We've got some shooting and self-defense options. Trust me on this, guys. It's going to be a killer
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event, and this is the last time that you're going to hear me talk about that. Some of you are going to be
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grateful for that. We only have, again, five spots available, and we are going to be shutting down
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registration on August 1st, and we're going to be shutting it down with or without you. I hope
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it's with you. You can get the details for that event at orderofman.com slash event, orderofman.com
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slash event. And the second thing I want to make mention of is our ever-expanding, ever-growing
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exclusive brotherhood, The Iron Council. I've just got to say, I am blown away with the caliber of men
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inside of The Iron Council. I know you will be too, but regardless of whether you're blown away
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with those guys or not, I know we're going to help you produce some big results in your life,
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and I imagine that's what you're after, or you probably wouldn't be listening to this show.
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So if you want the specifics of what we're doing there and how specifically we are doing it,
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head to orderofman.com slash Iron Council. Again, that's orderofman.com slash Iron Council.
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Now, guys, I am really, really excited to introduce you to my guest today. His name is Patrick Van
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Horn. He's a former infantry captain with the United States Marine Corps and has been instrumental in
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helping develop and teach the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program to Marines and military,
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law enforcement, government agencies, and civilians like you and I. His book, Left a Bang,
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has been recommended to me over and over and over again. I finally decided to pick up a copy
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and I think I read it in two days. I just could not put the book down.
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And since it was one of the best books that I have read so far this year, and I do read a lot
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of books, I decided to reach out and extend an invite to have Patrick on the show. Guys,
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let me tell you this. He does not disappoint as he talks about how he helped implement and develop
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and train this course to his Marines during his two deployments to Iraq. And more recently,
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his work with his behavioral analysis training company, the CP Journal.
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Patrick, thank you for joining me on the show today.
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Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you. I didn't tell you this, but we've got a membership group
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called The Iron Council. It's our mastermind group. And last month, we read your book,
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Left of Bang, which is what triggered me wanting to reach out. So I'm glad we could connect. And I
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want to set the framework for our conversation. When you say Left of Bang, what is that even referring
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Well, the title of the book itself was about preventing violence. And so if you think about whatever event,
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whatever act you don't want to happen in your life, that event is bang. And when you take bang
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and you put it on a timeline, bang is time zero. It's directly in the middle of that line.
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So when we talk about getting Left of Bang, what we're talking about is that you have the ability
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to recognize the pre-event indicators, the warning signs that exist that let you know bang is about
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to happen and provide you with enough time to intervene so that it doesn't actually occur.
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What are the bangs that people would experience? And when I say people, I probably ought to say
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civilians because you wrote this book, which is basically the Marine Corps combat hunter program.
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And now we're transitioning this information into civilian life. What are the types of bangs
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At the end of the day, it's whatever you don't want to happen. It could be something like violence,
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like being around a terrorist attack or some of these active shooter incidents that we've seen
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in our country, but could be on the other end of the spectrum as well. It could be
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little things like getting pickpocketed or getting mugged. If you're in business,
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it could be losing a sale because you blew the presentation or didn't realize you weren't
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reading the room very well. And you missed those cues that could have let you know,
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hey, there's still time to bring this back on the path. So it's really just whatever
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So are the cues then, and this is really fascinating because I spent some time in 2005,
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2006 in Iraq, in Ramadi. And of course we were faced with dangerous situations, life,
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life and death situations every single day. Is there some commonality between botching a
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presentation, for example, or somebody not resonating with that presentation and then
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being faced with a life or death situation in combat?
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Absolutely. And it comes down to situational awareness. And when you think about what situational
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awareness is, it's really two things. It's knowing what it is that you are looking for
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and how are you going to put that information together so that you can make a good decision?
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So if you think about, you know, that worst case scenario, something like an attack,
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how are you recognizing people with a violent intent? And the way that we taught that in the
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Marines was here are these, what we talk about in the book as six domains of human behavior,
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six different ways you can break a situation down to really identify the component parts.
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And then how do you use that to establish a baseline so that you can identify what's normal
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in that marketplace? And, you know, for your case, Ramadi, Iraq, the same process and the same
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behaviors apply to something like a sales presentation. What behaviors are you reading
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in the room and how are you putting those together to determine what's normal? And how are you looking
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for those things that are not normal or those things that might provide you that advanced warning
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that, Hey, something's going bad here. So I want to break down these six domains, but before I get
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to that, because as I read the book, I thought this is really valuable. There's a ton of information
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that's really pertinent. I think even more so probably today than it's been maybe even in the
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history of us being a species. But is this something that can even be like, how quickly can somebody
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process all of this information in a real time scenario? Because there's so much going on here and we can get,
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get into this a little bit. Uh, it seems like it might be difficult to do everything that you talk
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about in the book in the moment. It could be, but think about when you first learned how to drive a
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car, right? Like driving a car is one of the most complex things that you can do. You have to figure
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out how much pressure you put on the brake or the gas to go as fast or as slow as you want. How far do you
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turn the wheel to, you know, change lanes versus turn a corner, uh, turn signals and checking the
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mirrors. There's a thousand tasks required to drive a car to make it go from A to B. And that's
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why as you know, 16 year olds first learn how to start doing this, they get into so many fender
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benders because the act of driving a car is so complex that they don't have any mental energy
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left to look further down the road or really take a look at and see who's about to cut them off or
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that traffic is slowing down. It's really the same thing when it comes to this behavioral approach to
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situational awareness. At first it can seem a little clunky because we're going to start to
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identify or establish some words and some terminology to simply define what it is that
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you're seeing. But once you get comfortable with the mechanics of it, then the process is natural,
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just like it is to drive a car. And then you can really start to really see some of the benefits
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that, you know, just that increased level of awareness of the people around you.
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Yeah. I mean, this makes sense because if I were to go back 20 years, I'm 36 years old. So if I went
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back 20 years, I can vividly remember going through the steps of turning the vehicle on,
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taking the brake off, putting it in gear and checking my blind spots, literally going through
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step by step. But I don't do that now. I just turn the key on and go. Although I probably still run
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through all of those steps I did 20 years ago. Absolutely. Now you can do it while texting on
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your phone, eating a cheeseburger, steering with your knee while still seeing that car, you know,
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20 feet ahead of you that's about to come into your lane. Yeah, that makes sense. So one of the
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things that you talk about in the book is that all of us, and I think this is going back to our
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previous discussion, how all of this permeates across every facet of life or every situation
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you may find yourself in is that most of us, if not all of us as human beings have this common
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physical language. Can you talk to me about that and how we might be able to recognize this in other
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people? Sure. And one of the other things that goes into, as we start to talk about what these
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different indicators are, think about the fact that you're not starting to drive today. You've
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been people watching your entire life. Sure. Right. What we're going to do is maybe just establish a
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terminology so that we can make a little bit more objective sense of what we're seeing and also
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communicate it to someone else. Can I, and let me stop you right there because this was actually
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really fascinating to me before you get into the common physical language you talk about, and you've
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mentioned it twice now during our conversation, the terminology. Why is it so important that we
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actually have some of this terminology? This was a really fascinating component in the book when I
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read through it. The biggest thing that comes down to the, or I guess the benefit of the terminology
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is simply a matter of confidence. And I'm talking here mostly for civilians, not police officers,
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not security professionals, not Marines or soldiers. But if you've ever gotten into an elevator and you
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went, man, just this guy makes me feel weird. Or you've been in a restaurant or a bar and you went
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like something's going on here. And then you went to tell one of your friends and the moment you
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couldn't explain to someone why you had that weird feeling, you erase it. You just go, oh, it's just in
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my head. This is, this isn't anything real. And because you couldn't even explain to the person that
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you're with why you got that feeling, they don't know what to be looking for either. They're looking at a
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person for the first time and going, ah, I guess, I guess he looks normal. Like what's the big deal? And when you
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can't communicate it, I think the biggest impact is on your confidence to trust what it is that
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you've been seeing and to really believe in that feeling that you have that, Hey, something might
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be going on here. And, and I guess the followup to that is to be able to react confidently based
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upon your intuition or your feelings. Absolutely. Yeah. I know I was down in, uh, in Arizona this past
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weekend and a man was walking past the hotel and he walked past the doors where there's automatic
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doors and my children were playing right there. And I said, kids come over here. And I immediately
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thought about your book and I thought, why, why did I say that? Like what triggered? And I told my
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wife, there's something suspicious about that guy. And she said, really? What? Just like you're saying,
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but I was able to tell her, well, he was shifty. He was not concentrating on what he was doing,
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which was walking. He was looking at different things. And so there was a few elements that really
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stood out to me that said, I need to go on alert here. So this is how, what you just did your brain
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or as a human being, your brain is naturally pattern seeking. We love to identify patterns
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and we naturally focus on those people or those things that break from that pattern.
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What we talk about in the book is how to replicate that same natural intuitive process
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in a little bit more of an analytical way so that when you get that feeling, you can kind of revert back
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to looking at it objectively. What's the baseline here? If this is what's normal, what's going to make
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someone stand out? And by doing it analytically, we can improve our intuition. And if we get that
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intuitive feel, we can also back it up with the ability just to simply explain to someone, this is
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why, you know, I'm doing what I'm doing now. Do you find that most people, this is maybe a tough
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question, but do you find that most people trust their intuition or they try to validate or justify
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I think that depends on who I'm talking to. If we're working with people from the military or
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police officers or security professionals, they have a tendency to trust what it is that they're
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seeing, but they also see a lot of bad things and think of, think about a lot of bad people all day
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long for their job. For most people though, you don't, you know, you didn't go down to, you said it was
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Arizona. You didn't go down there to hopefully identify a shooter. You went down there to have a good
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time. Right. So you're not really looking for, I mean, you're aware of it, but it's not your purpose
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for being down there. And you don't want, like, I don't want something to go wrong. So I feel like
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I might try to justify away something that is actually going wrong because I don't want it to
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actually happen. Absolutely. I mean, you don't want to be in the spot where you have to do something.
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You can get a go a day without having to defend yourself. Sure. That's better off. All right.
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So let's go back to then some of those common physical characteristics or language. I interrupted
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you and went off on a tangent, but I wanted to come back to that.
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Of course. So I want to, I'm going to distinguish between the way that we wrote about it in the book
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and the way that we teach it and talk about it now. So in the book, we wrote about the,
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what we refer to as the six domains of behavior, which are six different ways we can take a scenario and
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really look at the individual behaviors based on a field of science to identify some objective
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terminology. Since the book was written, we've evolved the program quite a bit to make it a
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little bit more functional. And so I'll kind of translate between the two, but there are now what
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we refer to as these four pillars of behavior that we can use to analyze people. The first is how we
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assess an individual person. So every single person at every moment in time can be categorized in one of
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four ways. Their behavior shows that they either are dominant, submissive, uncomfortable, or comfortable.
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And every person at literally every second of the days in one of these four groups in the book,
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this is what we refer to as kinesics, which is the study of body movement, which then gets interpreted
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into body language and biometric cues, which are the uncontrollable physiological responses to stress,
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things like blushing or sweating. So we've put those together just to simply assess an individual
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person. Yeah. Because when I hear, I hear those two. I, in fact, as I was going through this and
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thinking about what I wanted to talk with you about today, I thought those were very similar
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and wondered how those actually differentiated from themselves.
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So one is just more internal to the, or things that are happening internal to the body,
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the biometric cues. Something that you can't necessarily control. It just happens because.
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Correct. Okay. And then the kinesics are the physical movements in your, that your body makes.
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Right. Okay. That makes sense. But now we don't even distinguish between those any longer. It's simply,
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we've put all of those indicators together to make an assessment about an individual person.
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Okay. And from there, we can take a look at groups, essentially identifying the relationship
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that people have between them based on the amount of space and separation they keep in the book. This
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is what we refer to as proxemics. Then we can look at how people relate to their environment,
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which is from the book geographics. And then we can take a look at the atmospherics, which is how we now
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assess the collective mood. And so these four ways are just simple facts. You can state about your
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surroundings to simply make sense of it, to establish what's normal. And then a person with
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a violent intent is going to stand out from that baseline. Once you've put that together,
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how do you begin to establish the baseline or establish what is normal? Because what is normal
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at a soccer game in South America versus what is normal at a baseball game in Arizona might be
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completely different? 100% correct. And so we start with how we assess the collective mood,
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which in the book is the way that we define positive and negative atmospherics. The first
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thing that you do when you walk into that soccer game is determine, do people here feel safe? And if
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they do, we're going to start to see these indicators of positive atmospherics. If the area has positive
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atmospherics, that's going to mean that people should be comfortable. And because people can be in only one of
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these four groups at any moment in time, if the baseline is people who are comfortable, I'm now
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searching for people who are dominant, submissive, or uncomfortable as the things that are going to
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attract my attention. But if you go into the example that I always like to use as an airport baggage
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claim, when you go and you start to assess the collective mood, you're going to see a lot of
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people who are displaying what we refer to as the uncomfortable cluster, anxious, nervous, jittery.
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And so that area has negative atmospherics when people don't feel either safe or if they're
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feeling stressed because these are perceptions of stresses and threats. So in an airport baggage
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claim, people who are uncomfortable are what are normal. So that means we're searching for
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dominance, submissiveness, and comfort as things that are not normal. So what's the baseline in one
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area could make you stand out in another. So we always start by with that collective mood. Is it
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positive or negative? And does that result in people, you know, should people be comfortable
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or uncomfortable in the situation? I like that you use the term cluster too, because if I remember
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correctly, if you just see one trader characteristic or biometric, whatever it may be, that's not enough
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information to make a correct decision on the situation you may find yourself in. Am I understanding
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that correctly? Absolutely. You know, if you think about a person who's standing with their arms crossed,
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that person, the fact that their arms are crossed can mean a thousand different things.
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Right. And so if we're making a, an assessment about someone off of only one indicator, we run a
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pretty serious risk of being just completely wrong in our assessment. And so if we find three indicators
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that all lead to one of these four conclusions of dominant, submissive, uncomfortable, or comfortable,
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then we can be reasonably certain that what we're seeing is an accurate reflection of what's going
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on in their body and in their brain. So by finding three, we kind of reduce that risk of just being
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wrong in our assessments and minimize the number of false positives that we have about people.
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This is the biggest hangup I've always had with the quote unquote body language experts,
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because I grew up in sales, essentially commissionable sales. And so we'd have body
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language experts come in and they'd say, well, if you fold your arms, that means that you really want
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distance between you and your client or your client wants distance between you. I'm like,
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it might just be that they're cold. So I think there's a really good distinction here when you
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start operating in clusters. You know, I mentioned that we use clusters for accuracy, but the other
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thing that we, that it offers is that it allows for speed in our assessments too. When I was first
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learning how to do this before I became an instructor in the combat hunter program, you might read that
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book on body language and you see there's a thousand different things a person's body might do. And
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you'd go out to a restaurant that night after reading the book and you try to put all this
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together and you stare at someone for 15 minutes and you're no closer to making a decision about
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them just simply because you're overwhelmed with information. By establishing these clusters, we
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quickly identify, you know, based off of three indicators, which one that they're in. And then we can go
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back to our purpose for being there. If you're in a sales situation, you can't dedicate that much or that
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amount of mental attention just to reading the person that you're talking to. You have to deliver
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your pitch and you're trying to remember what's next. And you're looking at multiple people in
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that room. And so by establishing these clusters, you can quickly assign someone to it. And then you
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can always just come back to make sure that they're still there. So it's not just accuracy, but it's
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also just speed and functionality and understanding that we're human beings and we can't process an
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Right. So when you talk about being a combat hunter, what is that? How do you tie that all
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together? I mean, how do you define that? What does that look like?
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So the combat hunter program was created in 2007 based off of what was happening in Iraq at the time.
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And you said you were there during, uh, in 05 and 06, which was especially in Ramadi, the peak of how bad
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the situation got. Right. The Marines and the army as well, but mostly the Marines in Ramadi or in
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Western Iraq, we'd become very reactive. We were essentially waiting to get shot at, waiting to get
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hit with an IED so that we could respond because our enemy had taken off their uniform. We lost our
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ability to identify who they were until they chose to open fire on us. And 2007, then General Mattis,
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now our secretary of defense. So this is unacceptable. We can't tell Marines go get shot
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at, but I know that. Yeah. And so he directed this creation of the combat hunter program, which was
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solely designed to teach Marines. How do you go out there and look at these marketplaces and identify
00:22:01.340
people with a violent intent before something bad happens? So we can take the fight to them,
00:22:06.860
or we can start to change what we're doing or force them to adapt instead of us simply reacting to them.
00:22:12.900
So what is your role in this? I mean, did you help build the combat hunter program? Were you
00:22:18.160
instructing? What is your role in the whole thing?
00:22:20.440
I came into combat hunter a little bit after it was created. So I wasn't there for the creation.
00:22:25.780
I came in and then ultimately became the lead instructor in what the Marines call combat profiling,
00:22:31.640
which is just the behavioral analysis portion of the course for the last three years that I was in
00:22:36.440
the Marines. And after being the lead instructor in the program and having to help recreate some of the
00:22:41.860
content as there were some changes and some turnover, that is what led to the opportunity to
00:22:47.940
write the book and then continue to teach and train people how to do this today as a civilian.
00:22:53.860
So let's talk about that term combat profiling, because I think anytime you put the word profiling
00:22:58.800
into any context, it has a negative connotation, but what you're talking about is not a negative thing.
00:23:05.180
It's a positive thing. And it goes so much deeper than racial profiling or any of these other types of
00:23:10.240
profiles we could create as human beings. Racial and religious profiling, it's not a matter of being
00:23:16.080
politically correct for the reason why we don't use it. And it plays no part in our process.
00:23:20.760
It's simply one of effectiveness. You know, when this program was created in Iraq,
00:23:25.720
everyone was of a certain religion. Everyone was of a certain ethnicity trying to recognize threats
00:23:31.140
in Iraq based on racial or religious, you know, segmentation would have been just extremely
00:23:36.460
ineffective. And plus, you can't choose the color of your skin, but you choose to become violent.
00:23:42.200
So we don't look at race. We don't look at religion at all. The reason it was called combat profiling,
00:23:48.020
to be perfectly honest with you, is if we called it behavior pattern recognition and analysis,
00:23:56.880
Oh, yeah, completely. You call it combat profiling. Marines would fill the room
00:24:00.200
every single time. But again, it's not race. It's not religion. And so I wouldn't get too
00:24:06.360
wrapped up around that word profiling, but really look at what we're talking about in our process.
00:24:12.560
And I think the danger too, in just limiting to the way somebody might look or religion they may
00:24:18.400
subscribe to is you miss a lot of what actually could be happening. I mean, I know when I was in Iraq,
00:24:24.340
you know, you'd have women and children that would pose a threat, but typically and traditionally,
00:24:28.720
you don't look at women as children as a threat in war.
00:24:32.080
Absolutely. We were looking for military age males.
00:24:35.540
So, and if you're between like 15 and 75, you probably got searched most days that,
00:24:40.500
you know, Americans were over there, but we were getting attacked by women. We were having
00:24:44.960
men dress up as women to avoid detection. And they did avoid detection simply because
00:24:50.300
someone wearing traditional Iraqi female clothing couldn't possibly be a threat.
00:24:55.740
We missed a lot of the people that we probably should have, that we, not probably, that we
00:25:02.260
And so how would that have differed had the combat hunter program been more readily available
00:25:07.920
and combat profiling would have been more well-known?
00:25:11.600
I think the biggest thing was simply the mindset that it put Marines in was that we didn't have to
00:25:17.160
wait. We could go out there and hunt for these insurgents and these people who are planning attacks
00:25:23.180
against us. And if we could do that, we didn't have to let an attack ever happen. You know,
00:25:28.960
especially when fighting a counterinsurgency, you're better off when the more days you can
00:25:35.080
string together where locals don't hear the sound of an explosion or they don't hear the sound of
00:25:40.120
gunfire, it leads to the stability that you ultimately need. And by being able to go out there
00:25:45.800
and identify when something was being planned, we could control how that kind of played out.
00:25:51.580
So maybe the explosion didn't go off. Maybe there wasn't gunfire. And the greater the sense of
00:25:56.420
stability, the better we can ultimately, you know, allow for the conditions that you need to
00:26:01.180
stand up a government, which obviously, you know, they're still dealing with and still having some
00:26:05.940
problems with today. But if a Marine, if it means that more Marines and soldiers or contractors
00:26:12.740
and everyone else gets to come home, that's certainly a win for us.
00:26:16.360
How does a civilian apply this without allowing it to dictate a lot of the way they function,
00:26:22.400
I guess? And maybe that's not the right word, but almost take this to an extreme where it actually
00:26:27.140
reduces functionality in their life. Because as a Marine or a soldier, that's your job full-time.
00:26:33.420
That's what you do. There's no other consideration, but as a civilian, you're a father, you're a husband,
00:26:37.860
you're an employee or a business owner. And so there's so many other things that we are
00:26:41.580
constantly consumed with. The goal by establishing this process is to simply let you know, like,
00:26:47.680
let's say you walk into a restaurant with your family, you can look around and quickly go through
00:26:51.960
this process and go, yeah, we're safe here. There's no one here that attracts my attention
00:26:56.440
and sit down and enjoy your meal and your time together. But by going through the process,
00:27:02.140
you can also be confident that when you walk into a room and you see something that doesn't make sense
00:27:06.640
and something that doesn't fit the baseline, you know that there's a decision that you have to make.
00:27:12.120
It doesn't always mean that you leave. It just, maybe it's put yourself in a spot where, you know,
00:27:16.600
if it does go badly, you can protect your family or position yourself to the opposite side of the
00:27:21.660
room. So you're not near an argument. It doesn't mean that you have to live, you know, a paranoid life
00:27:26.740
by defining it the way that we are. The goal is simply to make you confident that, yeah, there's
00:27:31.820
nothing here I have to worry about. Or, hey, this person is, you know, might be up to something.
00:27:36.440
We got to take a look at them a little bit further. And so our goal is simply not, or surely not
00:27:42.100
paranoia by any stretch of the imagination. Before I moved to Colorado, I was living just outside of
00:27:48.360
New York City and my wife spent a lot of time on subways and trains throughout the day. And sometimes
00:27:53.060
she would just be on the subway platform and look over and a guy was acting a little strange and
00:27:58.240
because she could kind of articulate it to herself of why that person attracted her attention.
00:28:02.860
She would just wait for the next, you know, train three or four minutes later, not just choose not
00:28:07.460
to get on that one. So it didn't really change her life. It was just a little bit more confidence
00:28:15.880
Guys, just a quick pause to tell you about our elite mastermind, the Iron Council. I am sure
00:28:20.000
that you know by now, and you've heard all about what we're doing inside the council,
00:28:23.640
but we have been adding so many new features inside the brotherhood. And I want to make sure you're
00:28:28.040
aware of those. We now have a 30 day quickstart guide to get you headed in the right direction
00:28:32.480
immediately, immediately, and speed up the amount of time it takes to see big, big results in your
00:28:37.920
life. And that is exactly what we're after. We're after results. You're busy. I'm busy. The men already
00:28:43.440
joined up with us inside of the council are busy. We don't have a lot of time to talk about or do
00:28:48.520
things that aren't actually going to work in your busy life. So we spent the last couple of years
00:28:55.100
honing and refining and testing strategies that are going to help you produce those results in
00:29:00.600
your relationships with your wife and your kids and your friends and your colleagues, your level
00:29:04.720
of fitness, nutrition, sleep, exercise, diet, your business, growing your bank account, any facet of
00:29:10.280
life that you are interested in improving. We're going to give you some strategies and some tools and
00:29:14.400
some resources. And more importantly, the accountability that you need with other brothers who are extremely
00:29:20.880
motivated, just as motivated as you are. So if you're interested in seeing what we're all about,
00:29:26.300
head to order of man.com slash iron council. You can learn more there and claim your seat at the
00:29:31.340
table. Again, it's order of man.com slash iron council. And now let's get back to my conversation
00:29:36.340
with Patrick. You talk about predetermined decisions. And I think this is so important
00:29:42.440
because you might get caught in the moment and not really know what to do. And so with the example,
00:29:46.740
with your wife, she would just wait for another train. That was probably a decision that she had
00:29:51.720
already made in her mind so that when it came time to make that decision, it was easy. Talk to me about
00:29:56.080
the importance of those predetermined decisions and maybe even what some of those might be.
00:30:00.960
So, you know, when we look at a person's situational awareness, the more focused you get on a person,
00:30:07.100
the less awareness that you have of everything else going on around you. And it also starts to elicit
00:30:12.300
what happens inside your body during the stress response. So if your decisions are not pre-planned,
00:30:19.100
you either one risk hesitating and delaying your decision because you're not sure what to do,
00:30:24.180
right? Or you're just not making a high quality decision because you're making it under stress.
00:30:28.760
And so when we would think about what you might expect on, let's say a subway platform,
00:30:32.780
you identify someone that doesn't look right or someone that attracts your attention. As long as they
00:30:38.100
get on that train, then you can just simply wait for the next one and not be too worried.
00:30:42.300
If they don't, if that train comes and goes and they haven't gotten on it, maybe that decision
00:30:46.040
changes. Maybe at that point, she leaves the subway station or it gets near, you know,
00:30:50.620
sees if there's any police officers around or anything like that. But thinking through exactly
00:30:55.540
which course of action that you are going to take, this makes it a little bit more simple.
00:30:59.200
And then you don't, you don't have to worry so much about hesitating or delaying either.
00:31:03.460
What role, and I'm going to come back to something you talked about earlier in the term was
00:31:06.720
political correctness. And this is just run rampant in society and it's getting worse and worse.
00:31:11.060
What role does this have to play positive or negative in what we're talking about?
00:31:15.400
We always kind of ignore that politically correct, you know, those conversations we,
00:31:20.060
because we started, because this program was created in the military and because of the threats
00:31:24.720
and the risks that our country faces right now, we're not making any, at least internally to our
00:31:29.560
company. We don't make any decisions that are politically correct. We don't recommend those
00:31:33.260
for our clients. We simply look at what's effective. We don't use race or religion,
00:31:38.600
not because it's a bad thing to say, but because it's not going to help us recognize threats.
00:31:44.060
You know, when you look at some security companies out there that use fear to try to get people to
00:31:48.780
make some changes in their life, fear is a very short-lived emotion. It doesn't really
00:31:53.120
lead to behavior change. So it's not a politically correct decision to not market through fear.
00:31:59.840
And so when we hear these politically correct conversations, you know, we kind of just listen
00:32:04.180
to them to see what's, what the sentiment is. But at the end of the day, every decision that we make
00:32:08.780
and we do it because we believe that we owe it to the students who come through our courses or the
00:32:13.920
companies that we consult with, that we owe it to them to be effective, not to be politically
00:32:18.720
correct. And that's how we kind of judge what we're going to do or not do.
00:32:23.420
And that's such a good point. I mean, we, we talk about this a lot in the conversation of
00:32:27.180
masculinity and manliness is it's more important to be effective and get the job done than maybe
00:32:32.560
even necessarily to be right. And I know that sounds funny, but we're so worried about our
00:32:36.840
ego or offending other people. And it's like, is this going to help you get the job done? Yes or
00:32:40.820
no. That's what we want to do. Well, think about what you see right now with police officers. And
00:32:46.000
there's a lot of deescalation training that's happening in law enforcement right now. And all deescalation
00:32:52.560
is, is taking someone displaying the dominant cluster and getting them into the
00:32:56.820
comfortable cluster because the dominant cluster reflects and is the manifestation of the fight
00:33:02.180
response in your body, getting them to the comfortable cluster where fight or flight has
00:33:06.660
not been triggered is simply a matter of safety, right? But it's oftentimes presented in this way
00:33:13.200
of, Oh, it's a politically correct thing. No, it's, I don't want to get punched in the face. I don't want
00:33:17.380
to get attacked. And I don't care how I have to do that. I might have to suspend the ego for a little
00:33:23.000
bit, but as long as they get to that end state of not being dominant, that's a win for me any day
00:33:28.720
of the week. How feasible is that to take somebody who may not be clearly thinking or, or deep into
00:33:35.060
that dominant position to move them to a completely different state? Is that something that's very
00:33:42.000
likely and feasible? Sure. You know, if you think about the fact that every person is in one of these
00:33:46.400
four clusters at any time, dominant, submissive, uncomfortable, or comfortable, let's say, uh,
00:33:51.280
you said, do you have a son? You said, I have three sons and a daughter. How old's your oldest son?
00:33:56.040
Nine. Oh, perfect. So let's say you, you're, you come home and your son is angry and he's yelling and
00:34:02.460
he's being aggressive for a nine-year-old. You have four choices to make. Am I going to get him from
00:34:08.600
dominant to comfortable being dominant myself by being submissive myself, by being uncomfortable
00:34:13.440
myself or being comfortable myself? And as the dad, you might walk in there and say, he's being
00:34:19.340
dominant. I'm going to be more dominant than him. And if that works to get him to calm down,
00:34:24.620
that's great. There's other times where you might walk in, your son just might be angry
00:34:28.740
at something, you know, external to your house, something happened at school or, uh, with his
00:34:33.880
friends. And it might take a submissive approach of being non-threatening, making yourself look a
00:34:38.520
little smaller to make him realize that you are not the focus of his anger. You are
00:34:43.420
not the reason why he's mad. And by making yourself a little smaller and less threatening,
00:34:47.900
you get him to open up and then he begins to transition from that dominant cluster into the
00:34:52.820
comfortable cluster. And so you get to choose which of these four postures you take that are
00:34:58.360
going to be most effective. And by defining behaviors the way we are, it also provides you a
00:35:02.880
feedback loop. If you are talking to your son and you start off and you're noticing four or five
00:35:07.940
indicators of dominance and you take on a dominant posture yourself and you look at him and all of a
00:35:12.740
sudden you're seeing six, seven, eight indicators of dominance, you go, okay, that's not working.
00:35:19.220
No, you have to switch, you know, tactics. But if you take on, let's say a submissive
00:35:23.400
posture and you notice, okay, we started out, he was at like six indicators. Now he's down to
00:35:28.340
three or four. He's not calm just yet, but he's on the path. He's at least making progress
00:35:33.960
towards that. Maybe you need a little bit more time. And so it's just, when you think about how you
00:35:38.300
deescalate or how you calm a situation down, it's just choosing one of these four clusters
00:35:42.760
and thinking through your body language and your words and your actions to figure out,
00:35:48.380
is this going to work or not for this situation for this person?
00:35:52.760
Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because I think as men, we're so, whether we are doing
00:35:58.320
it consciously or subconsciously, manipulating other people. And I don't say that necessarily
00:36:03.120
as a negative thing, but we want them to do what we want them to do, especially if you're
00:36:06.500
in a leadership role. But what you're saying is rather than focus so much on that, yes,
00:36:10.460
you have to understand what the indicators are, but turn that internally and focus on yourself
00:36:14.780
and people will respond to that. I know, for example, with my son, one thing that I know
00:36:19.520
just works really well with my oldest, not so well with my second son is I can go up to
00:36:24.780
my oldest and just give him a hug and say, let's breathe. And that will calm him down. If I did that
00:36:30.640
to my second son, he would probably want to punch me in the nuts or the face. If I tried that
00:36:34.820
with him. Yeah. So that's a pretty comfortable way. Almost saying like, there is no threat. There
00:36:41.100
is no stressor here. And by you almost not acknowledging it to a point of listening or
00:36:46.200
like the words themselves, that works for him. And your other son, that display of comfort
00:36:53.140
when he's mad might just incite him even more like, I want to get mad. Right. Exactly.
00:36:58.600
And that makes him more mad. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, I want to bounce back. I know
00:37:02.760
we've kind of bounced all over the place, but man, I was so blown away with all the information
00:37:05.880
in this book. One of the things that you talked about was Cooper's color code. And I'd like you
00:37:11.120
to go through that because I think that gives us a pretty good indicator or at least a framework
00:37:15.160
for us to operate as to how comfortable we should be or should we be on alert or where
00:37:20.160
we should be in any given environment. Sure. And so Cooper's color code was originally
00:37:24.980
created by Marine Lieutenant Jeff Cooper, since expanded on by Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman
00:37:30.420
on his great books that we have had on the show, actually. So perfect. Yeah, you make that even
00:37:36.220
better. But they identify these five different conditions that we could use to assign someone to a
00:37:42.020
different essentially classification for their situational awareness. At the low end of the
00:37:46.320
spectrum, you have condition white, a person who is situationally unaware. These are the people
00:37:50.800
walking down the sidewalk, texting on their phones, playing Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, whatever it is
00:37:55.520
that they're doing on their phone. And because they have no situational awareness, should a threat
00:38:00.480
present itself, they're completely unprepared to deal with it. They're very often the first victims.
00:38:05.380
From condition white, you have condition yellow, which is a relaxed alert. This is when you know
00:38:09.680
there's bad stuff out there and you are actively scanning your surroundings, trying to find it.
00:38:14.320
But you haven't found anything specific yet. As soon as you do find something specific that attracts
00:38:19.200
your attention, you escalate into condition orange, which is when you create your plan.
00:38:23.400
And then after condition orange, you have condition red, which is when you put your plan
00:38:28.700
into action. And the reason we talk about these conditions, especially in relation to
00:38:33.640
situational awareness, is you obviously never want to be in condition white, especially if you're with
00:38:38.920
your family, out in public. You know that there could be something bad happening out there. So if you're
00:38:43.320
unaware, that's usually a bad thing. But by being in condition yellow, this is the peak of your
00:38:49.760
awareness. And this is a relaxed alert. It's something that you can maintain indefinitely.
00:38:55.120
So by using this process of establishing a baseline and using these behaviors, what we're doing
00:39:00.560
is teaching you what to look for and how to look for it so that you know when you have to go into
00:39:06.840
condition orange. As soon as you go into condition orange, you begin focusing on a person, your overall
00:39:12.540
awareness goes down. You don't want to stay in condition orange for too long simply because of that
00:39:17.440
limited bigger picture. But if you don't know what you're looking for other than visually seeing a
00:39:22.820
gun or seeing a knife or seeing a fight, you never get into condition orange soon enough. And so you
00:39:28.760
end up being very reactive. And so our goal is to simply, again, just kind of go back to instill
00:39:34.260
confidence to know when, yeah, there's something here that's going on. We have to do something about
00:39:39.480
it. Or, hey, there's nothing happening here at all. There is no reason to get into condition orange
00:39:44.140
here in this situation. So let's just have a good time.
00:39:47.280
And I imagine this comes with experience too, because one of the things that you talk about is
00:39:51.400
that experience is better than intelligence. For example, I know a lot of smart people probably
00:39:58.060
get caught with their pants down. And you're talking about being more experienced. How can
00:40:02.000
one get more experienced with this stuff without putting themselves in life and death situations?
00:40:06.680
We just like to, the way we often recommend it is to go to a place that you feel safe and where I
00:40:13.760
usually end up at coffee shops when I'm out practicing this, because you can sit there for
00:40:17.100
a very long time and not attract any attention. But just simply every person that comes through the
00:40:22.180
door, practice assigning them to one of these four clusters. And each time you identify a different
00:40:28.340
factor that shows dominance, a different factor that shows discomfort, your ability to recognize
00:40:33.820
these goes up exponentially just because it becomes more and more natural. So you don't
00:40:39.060
have to do this with solely recognizing threats. Do it with, definitely don't do it with your family,
00:40:44.220
but do it. I almost said that. That would probably be the wrong advice. But do it out in public,
00:40:50.680
a place where you feel safe, where there's a low risk of getting, you know, attacked or drawing
00:40:54.820
attention to yourself. Luckily, most people are happily in condition white. So you can sit there and observe
00:41:00.260
people. And most people around you are not going to even notice that you are, you've been staring at
00:41:05.680
them for too long. And so just the better you get at the, again, these are the mechanics of
00:41:11.820
observation. So assigning people to these clusters, the more natural it becomes. And you'll be able to
00:41:17.180
do it even more intuitively over time as you get more experience. Well, Patrick, we'll wind it down on
00:41:23.740
time today. I want to ask you some, two other questions. One of them we talked about, I gave you 30
00:41:28.740
minutes to prep for this, which I know is not adequate, but I feel like you can do it. And that
00:41:33.280
question is, what does it mean to be a man? To me, it means to be capable, whether it's, and it could
00:41:39.980
be any number of things, whether it's something at the home, whether you can fix something or cook
00:41:44.280
great dinner or capable of work, the guy who's just trusted, or is what we've been talking about
00:41:49.360
capable to ensure the safety and security of your family. And so the reason that we teach what we do is
00:41:55.560
simply to help people and help your listeners become more capable and more well-rounded in
00:42:01.500
their ability to be that man. Right on. How do we, how do we connect with you and learn more about
00:42:05.880
what you are up to? Everything that we're doing is you can find on our website, which is cp-journal.com.
00:42:13.100
And that dash is really important. Otherwise you'll end up on the, uh, confessional Presbyterian
00:42:17.940
journal, which is something that's completely different. Like what? So these guys have pivoted what
00:42:22.900
they're talking about completely. Exactly. So cp-journal.com. And, uh, from there you can find,
00:42:29.760
uh, links to, uh, pick up left to bang or courses or a lot of the free articles and videos and pictures
00:42:35.080
that we have up on our site. If you want to practice. Right on guys, make sure go out and buy
00:42:39.900
this book. I promise you will not be disappointed. I've got mine tabbed, highlighted, folded. I mean,
00:42:45.340
I've got notes in the margin. I really appreciate Patrick, your work and everything that you've shared and
00:42:50.420
your service to this country, of course, as well. Uh, thank you for taking some time and sharing some
00:42:55.180
of what, you know, in your wisdom with us today. I appreciate the opportunity to come on your show.
00:43:00.860
Gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Patrick Van Horn as much as I did. Like I said,
00:43:05.320
in the beginning of the show, left of bang is one of the best books that I've read all year. And I know
00:43:10.500
you're going to want to read it for yourself. You can head to order of man.com slash one, two,
00:43:15.960
three as an episode 123 to get the links for this show. In addition to a link for the book left of
00:43:22.360
bang. In the meantime, make sure you get your last minute registration in for a live meetup in Kansas
00:43:27.680
city. Again, August 12th, 2017 at order of man.com slash event. And also go find out what it's like
00:43:35.700
to join our exclusive brotherhood, the iron council. And you can do that at order of man.com
00:43:40.340
slash iron council guys. I will look forward to talking with you on Friday for our Friday field notes,
00:43:45.560
but until then take action and become the man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the
00:43:51.880
order of man podcast. You're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant
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to be. We invite you to join the order at order of man.com.