Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a leading expert in the field of psychology and physiology of violence, shares with us why homicide rates are skyrocketing, why the world needs more sheepdogs, what happens to our bodies when we re in combat, and how to handle yourself when confronted with violence.
00:04:39.800And I tell my cops, you know, I said, look, you know, you and your partner walk up to the front door with your suit on and your big red tie on.
00:04:47.500And the monkey brain, the reason why the tie stayed in fashion is because at an unconscious level, the monkey brain looks at that and is intimidated.
00:04:56.380We turn all this off when we go to the tuxedo, you know, when we all wear our tuxedos, we all put our ties away.
00:05:04.720When people are wearing tuxedos, the tie looks really weird.
00:05:08.560But the rest of the time, we're all in this kind of posturing mode.
00:05:12.200And I tell my detective, you come to the front door with your big power tie on and the other guy doesn't, the monkey brain is immediately intimidated.
00:05:19.400But be careful who you try to intimidate.
00:05:21.280You know, don't stand up in a tie in front of a bunch of cops.
00:05:24.460You know, when you're the only one with a suit on, they don't because you can't push cops, they push back.
00:05:29.400The point of all that is, number one, I want to be the first one to go on record saying the emperor has no clothes and, dude, why are we all wearing dicks?
00:05:38.040But number two, it's really, really hard to look at yourself, to look at your culture, and to truly see what's there.
00:05:50.640And the tie to me is that evidence that, you know, I've been given a little bit of a gift in a few areas to be able to see things clearly.
00:06:00.400Violence is that area that I've dedicated my lifetime to, and there's other areas.
00:06:04.400And I was a young paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, 1974, Vietnam veterans all around us, and we wanted to know what combat was like.
00:07:16.400If I'm going to study psychology, I want to study the psychology of killing.
00:07:21.600And not homicide, but lawful killing, cops and military.
00:07:26.560When I first began to study it, I thought what is at the heart of the military and the heart of combat was the killing.
00:07:33.460And my first book on killing translated to eight languages, Pulitzer, nominated by the author, by the publisher, international bestseller, perennial bestseller, just established itself as a true work in the field.
00:08:21.680Because if you understand how we teach soldiers and cops to kill and how we have to do it, how it's not a natural act, then we understand how the video games are doing the same thing to our kids and what violent visual imagery is doing to our kids.
00:08:35.860And as men, I tell you that we need to protect children, first and foremost.
00:08:40.760That's one of the definitions of a man is somebody who's dedicated to protecting our young.
00:08:45.800And violent visual imagery inflicted upon children is child abuse.
00:09:12.520But if you inflict it upon your children, it's like inflicting alcohol or tobacco or sex on your children.
00:09:18.480And that's what this study made me so intensely aware of is how we teach people to kill, what it does to people, and how it can become terribly harmful to our children.
00:09:29.740So my second book, I retired from the Army.
00:09:46.720Yeah, I have an intense sense of urgency.
00:09:49.160I love my high school sweetheart, my bride of 41 years.
00:09:52.260I get home one, maybe two nights a week.
00:09:54.180Conjugal visit, clean underwear, back on.
00:09:57.020But in that time, I retired in 1997, late 97.
00:10:01.580And in that time between 97 and 9-11, I became aware that what was really important was all the things around killing, auditory exclusion, slow motion time, tunnel vision, memory loss, memory distortions.
00:10:22.680The fact that the vast majority of people in combat don't hear their shots.
00:10:26.960We have got to know these things before we get into combat.
00:10:31.440We get into any life and death event, whether it's you using a firearm to defend your loved ones, whether it's you just standing up to protect others, how the body responds to violence, what the body does.
00:11:02.520And every day, people who have been in life and death events, people who had to take lives, people who are shot at, were talking to me in this interactive feedback loop.
00:11:12.440And that became my second book and my most important book on combat.
00:11:15.480And the only area where we could get that information was law enforcement.
00:11:20.100When the war began and suddenly we're deploying people in combat for the last 15 years straight, my book became truly the most important book that we have to give to our troops.
00:11:32.480Marine Corps Commandant's required reading list, Army and Air Force recommended reading list.
00:11:37.260In all those cases, both on combat and on killing.
00:11:40.260But far and away, on combat is a more important book.
00:11:43.720So that's a long-winded way of going about my study of this taboo topic of lawful killing and then the reality of what's in combat, how my book on combat came about, and how it was just almost magically there.
00:11:59.380This clear insight into what happens to the mind and body and how it's been validated in 15 years of war.
00:12:06.320You know, in time of war, the things that don't work are gone fast.
00:12:11.820The stupid stuff that gets you killed is gone in the first couple of years of war.
00:12:18.640And my books on combat and on killing have really vindicated themselves across all these years of war as key tools for anybody to use to prepare themselves for that life and death event, to function under stress.
00:12:31.140Yeah, I mean, this is a book I wish I would have had in 2005, 2006 is when I went to Iraq.
00:13:09.580And then how did you finally get to this position where you could have some of these real conversations?
00:13:14.820Because I know you've interviewed hundreds if not thousands of soldiers about the idea of combat.
00:13:18.940Well, you know, what happened was I was an Army Ranger, an infantry captain, en route to be a West Point psychology professor,
00:13:27.580getting a degree and writing a thesis on the topic, and suddenly they would talk to me.
00:13:33.440You know, it's kind of like if somebody on the street or one of your kids wants to ask about your sex life, you're not going to tell them.
00:13:40.700But if Masters and Johnson is doing some scholarly work and they're, you know, this question is about their work.
00:13:46.920But the point is, if it's some accepted scholarship about sex and about somebody who truly has a scholarly reason to use and to assess the information,
00:13:58.620all of a sudden they're willing to talk to you.
00:14:01.620That was really the amazing thing was that as a young private, as a young sergeant, they weren't going to say.
00:14:07.640But as a West Point psychology professor, as an Army Ranger, as an infantry officer, these Vietnam veterans, these cops were willing to talk to me.
00:14:17.820And then there was this interactive feedback loop in my presentations where I would do a presentation to a veterans group, to a military unit, to a law enforcement unit.
00:14:27.200And then they would come up and say, here's what happened to me.
00:14:30.260And suddenly we had a frame of reference.
00:14:32.180My first book on killing was in a draft format for years, and it rotated among the veterans community.
00:14:40.220And these were the 18-year-old Vietnam draftees, and it was hard for a lot of them.
00:14:46.000And it would go from veteran's wife to veteran's wife, and early draft copies of copies.
00:14:50.640Back in the days, we had to mimeograph, you know, Xerox them off.
00:14:53.760And the wife would come to her husband and say, is this what it was like for you?
00:14:58.060And he'd say, well, let me read the damn book, and then I'll tell you.
00:15:00.500But suddenly the husband and wife were talking about things that he could never talk about before, because now they had a frame of reference.
00:15:09.260Yeah, and it's been, you know, I talk in on killing how sex was a taboo that had been largely overcome, although it's still got all kinds of hangups in our society.
00:15:20.800But killing and violence, interpersonal human violence, is a taboo that has not even been scratched yet.
00:15:29.560And so on killing was the first step in that.
00:15:32.000On combat was the second step in that.
00:15:34.300I have a book coming out right after the elections from Little Brown, which is one of the biggest publishers on the planet, called Assassination Generation.
00:15:43.800And it is the definitive work up to this point on violence in our society that the homicide rate last year, Ryan, exploded.
00:15:52.440You can go online to Amazon.com and preorder a copy right now of Assassination Generation.
00:15:58.060But we've been building up this very long time.
00:16:00.620Homicides, and this is terribly important for anybody who wants to understand violence, just burn this into neurons, never let go of it.
00:16:08.880The number of dead people is being held down by medical technology.
00:16:13.660The leaps and bounds of medical technology is holding down the murder rate to an extraordinary degree.
00:16:23.060If we had 1970s technology, the homicide rate would be four times what it is.
00:16:28.860Take the number of dead people in Chicago this year, multiply it by four, and that's how many would have died with 1970s medical technology.
00:16:36.860If we had 1930s technology, no antibiotics, no phones for most people, no automobiles for most people, the homicide rate would easily have been 10 times what it is.
00:16:47.820Comparing this year's homicide to last year is a pretty effective assessment.
00:16:52.660Over any period of time, it breaks down.
00:16:54.300Homicides have been coming down for decade after decade, not just the per capita homicides, but the raw number of people murdered has been coming down year by year.
00:17:06.020And last year, that turned around for the first time in almost half a century.
00:17:10.680Homicide rate last year exploded 17% across the top 50 largest cities in America.
00:17:17.820We have not seen an explosion of Americans kill each other off like this since the American Civil War, and this year's worse.
00:17:25.280Chicago's already had more homicides this year than all the last year put together.
00:17:29.020Last year was a hard year, but this year, more cops have been murdered in the line of duty than all of last year put together.
00:17:33.980These are scary times, and this is a time when we need our sheepdogs, we need our paladins, we need our protectors, we need our men who are going to stand up and protect what's right and protect our loved ones and protect our children.
00:17:49.460We have fed death and violence to a generation, and now they're feeding it back to us.
00:17:54.380The director of the FBI said, you know, it's the Ferguson effect.
00:17:58.460We cut the legs off from under our cops, we empowered our criminals, but we've also been building up to this for a very, very long time.
00:18:21.660In 2013, 2015, they still released a report.
00:18:26.240They said there's more gang members, they just wouldn't say how many.
00:18:30.020You know, the number of gangbangers no longer reported, but without a doubt, it's at least 2 million, true blue, full-time criminal gang members in America.
00:18:39.280And that's an explosion, a doubling in just a couple of years.
00:18:42.520When I was a kid, I sincerely wanted to be Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke.
00:19:30.320But the slights of our generation that immerse themselves in Breaking Bad and Sons of Manarchy and The Sopranos and whatever sick movies out there today, we could not have done a better job of recruiting a generation of gangbanging killers if we'd have tried.
00:19:52.100You know, I tell the men out there, judge very carefully what movies and TV shows you inflict upon your children because they will shape their future.
00:20:02.560And, you know, they don't want to see Saving Private Ryan until they're a very mature teenager.
00:20:07.620The kids who died on Normandy Beach traveled to a distant land, laid their life down by the thousands to stop the horror of war from coming to the children of America.
00:20:18.740If they could see you inflicting the horror of that beach on their great-grandchildren, they would be outraged.
00:20:27.080You know, choose the movies and choose the time and choose the TV shows.
00:20:31.080And, you know, name me one cop movie in 30 years that didn't have a bad cop in there somewhere.
00:20:59.020Freightly, greatly limit the violent visual imagery inflicted upon them at a young age.
00:21:06.060The best thing to do, and I did this with my grandson, it's been an amazing thing, is to keep them completely TV, movie, video game free until they're old enough to read.
00:21:18.060Our little grandson graduated from kindergarten reading at second grade level.
00:21:27.240The next weekend, we're going to watch James Shitty Bang Bang.
00:21:30.960No, he wants to watch Mary Poppins again.
00:21:33.900And at that age and at that point, as a kindergarten, Mary Poppins is about right.
00:21:40.940But make sure that they can, at the baseline, the research tells us, your children should be able to read before they see visual media.
00:21:51.940But they should be able to read before you do it for them, and then the research keeps showing that the definition of man is one who protects his civilization and protects his children.
00:22:06.660And we have failed as men to protect our children from this violent visual imagery.
00:22:13.280And then the sick criminal images and the sick nihilistic images that, you know, there are no good guys and the criminals are the heroes and the cops are the bad guys.
00:22:25.320We're paying a terrible price for that.
00:22:27.260If violence has exploded in our civilization like nothing we've ever seen before.
00:22:31.740And I've been telling my police audiences for years that the Latin American model is our future.
00:22:37.880We think the most violent nations on the planet are Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:22:42.080But Mexico has been at war with the cartels.
00:22:45.720When Mexico's war with the cartels has been more loss of life than Iraq and Afghanistan put together.
00:22:51.740One nation, Mexico, has had more loss of life than Iraq and Afghanistan put together.
00:22:56.160The seven most violent nations on the planet are all in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Mexico is not one of them.
00:23:47.340But rather than taper off, I want this to be the best quarter of your life.
00:23:51.200The problem, though, is that if you don't have a plan, it's just not going to happen.
00:23:54.800So inside of the Iron Council, you've got 170 men all working hard to become better men.
00:23:59.660But even more tactical than that, we're developing and implementing our plans for the fourth quarter.
00:24:05.020So it's not too late to jump on board with a group of brothers, a group of guys who are going to help you develop what we call your 12-week battle plan and then hold you accountable to actually completing it.
00:24:14.320This is an opportunity for every man inside the Iron Council to identify some key objectives and get very, very clear on exactly what you want in your relationships, in your health, in your wealth and financial situation and, of course, for yourself.
00:24:28.580So if you want to access the tools that we're going to be using to make this the best quarter of our lives, again, it's called a 12-week battle plan.
00:24:34.380And you want to connect with other men who are doing the same thing, join us inside of the Iron Council this week.
00:24:39.260Head to orderofmen.com slash Iron Council and we'll get you added immediately.
00:24:43.180Now, let me get back to my conversation with Colonel Grossman.
00:24:48.400Because I look at – I mean one of the things you talk about is this interpersonal human aggression I think as being the number one phobia.
00:24:54.980So if we have this phobia of this, why is it the case that we see so much increasing violence?
00:24:59.360Well, we know how to overcome that phobia with training.
00:25:03.640It's extraordinarily rare for members of their own species to kill each other off.
00:25:07.580In the wild, chimpanzees and gorillas do kill each other off, but it's extraordinarily rare.
00:25:14.940Members of their own species in their territorial mating battles almost never kill each other.
00:25:20.300If they did, the species would be extinct.
00:25:23.420In territorial mating battles, the loser slinks off into the woods.
00:26:08.860Cops firing blanks at a movie screen in order to prepare themselves and to rehearse the action of killing and make killing a conditioned response.
00:26:18.940And we know that the video games and the violent movies are doing the exact same thing to our children without the safeguard.
00:26:27.180That the safeguard in military and law enforcement training is, A, we're doing it to adults.
00:27:40.620But when this killing enabling is given indiscriminately to the children and teenagers, the result is an explosion of violence.
00:27:49.340It is eating away at our very civilization.
00:27:51.400These Latin American hyper-violent nations.
00:27:54.220It's hard to wrap your mind around the fact that seven Caribbean and Latin American nations are more violent than the most violent nation in Africa or Asia.
00:28:08.600And we need men who will protect their children and lead us home from the dark and chatted place which we travel.
00:28:15.880So if you talk about the standard that you're talking about with the military and soldiers adhering to a standard, I guess the question is who defines that standard?
00:28:24.620Or maybe even more importantly, how do we redefine and then hold ourselves to a new standard in wake of escalating violence?
00:28:30.960You know, when I teach my cops, towards the end, I talk about two things.
00:28:38.400I talk about the fact that we've all sworn an oath to justice and not vengeance.
00:28:48.480And most people think I'm talking about their oath as a police officer.
00:28:52.460That's not the oath I'm talking about.
00:28:54.640I'm talking about an older oath, a deeper oath, an oath we swore from a younger stage, an oath that says everything it means to be an American.
00:31:49.400But in the heart of darkness, when no one will know, why will men and women go to their death?
00:31:53.060And in nature, the one place where the instinct of self-preservation is canceled across many species can be seen in the mama critter, will die to protect, what, her babies.
00:32:05.640And in combat, you throw a bunch of strangers to the front lines together.
00:32:09.180As soon as it's dark, as soon as people are dying, they're out of there.
00:32:12.620You put together a band of brothers, men and women who know and trust one another.
00:32:17.100They'll fight long and hard for each other.
00:32:19.480Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier of World War II.
00:32:22.820Audie Murphy was asked one time why he did it.
00:32:24.980His answer was, they were killing my friends.
00:32:27.280And I tell him that all of this research revolves around one word.
00:32:32.720And the book, The Gates of Fire, about the Spartans at Thermopylae, magnificent book.
00:32:38.340And at the beginning of the book, it poses the question, what is the opposite of fear?
00:34:04.380But then I wrap it up by saying that sometimes the ultimate love is not to sacrifice your life, but to live a life of sacrifice.
00:34:13.040To place the wealth of others ahead of your own, to dedicate yourself to do a dirty, dangerous task, whatever's up before you, to the utmost of your ability every day of your life.
00:34:25.740Because you know if nobody did it, our civilization would not survive.
00:34:30.700Not to sacrifice your life, but to live a life of sacrifice.
00:34:35.840The Pledge of Allegiance and a dedication to sheepdogs living a life of sacrifice, placing the wealth of others ahead of your own.
00:34:45.800To me, that's the definition of American man.
00:35:55.220You don't just wake up one day and start doing the right thing.
00:35:57.800You can, and we want you to, but what it takes is years and years and years of doing the right thing to prepare you for that one moment of time when doing the right thing is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.
00:36:12.840And that's kind of the meta answer, but zoom in.
00:36:16.320There's lots of nuts and bolts on this.
00:39:15.120But even if you fail, you can live with yourself because you did everything you can do.
00:39:21.200The next step, and we can go on for quite a while, but I think it comes to a conclusion.
00:39:27.060I believe that in this day and age, if it's lawful and legal, the lawful carry of a firearm, in this day and age, in this time, is something we should all be looking at.
00:39:39.120The final step in the equation is if you're going to carry a firearm, you need to be extraordinarily well trained.
00:39:45.100Now, don't be a bigot that says if you haven't had 10,000 rounds of ammunition, you can't be trusted.
00:39:52.140You know, grandma with the revolver and the bedside stand is a force to be reckoned with.
00:39:56.720But if we're going to carry that gun, I tell you, the final step in the equation becomes to seek mastery and to be truly proficient.
00:40:03.480To go to the range, to do dry fires, to seek, you know, laser systems that allow us to train, to seek, you know, can't afford ammo, can't buy ammo, airsoft and paintball.
00:40:14.260My grandson in the basement with a pellet pistol.
00:40:21.640And I think the tool for our age is the firearm.
00:40:23.780And I think we need to all seek training and come to that highest level.
00:40:29.060At the moment of truth, the skills are there for us.
00:40:31.540There's a whole lot more to cover, but we laid a pretty good foundation, I think.
00:40:35.660Yeah, I think we gave the guys enough to get a taste for this and obviously follow up on some of the things that you're doing.
00:40:41.880I want to wind down with a couple of questions.
00:40:43.920And I think we alluded to this quite a few times within the conversation, Colonel Grossman.
00:40:47.480And that is, what does it mean to be a man?
00:40:49.580You know, I think there's a lot of males out there, but not all of them are men.
00:40:55.360What it means to be a man is to protect your children.
00:40:59.240To be a man is to dedicate yourself to something more than yourself, including your nation.
00:41:05.720The Pledge of Allegiance to me is what it means to be a man.
00:41:09.280An oath that we swore to ourselves every day from our youngest days.
00:41:13.380What it means to be a man is to have the skills and tools of the moment of truth to protect your loved ones.
00:41:18.000To take your nation and your civilization and to protect that which is innocent from the evil that is strong.
00:41:26.520To seek the tools and to seek the training and to seek the mentoring from organizations like yours that are helping us understand what it means to be a man in these dark and desperate times.
00:41:40.240And as it continues to get worse, and it is, it's bad right now, it's going to get a heck of a lot worse.
00:42:53.860One of the leading online training resources has taken just go grossmanacademy.com.
00:43:00.200They've taken my most important book on combat and turned it into an online course and pick up, get an e-copy of the course, a lot of video from me, a lot of audio from me.
00:43:11.060And it's a great opportunity to really get that knowledge of what's going to be like in that life and death event that will inoculate you and forewarn you to perform well at that moment of truth.
00:43:22.260We didn't get a chance to talk much about it.
00:43:23.840But one of those insights that I've had, I patented a firearms training device, a finger off the trigger.
00:43:31.760The greatest innovation in firearms safety since the trigger guard is keeping a finger off the trigger.
00:44:57.520And I've got to say that this is probably one of the most powerful conversations in the 85 or so conversations that I've had since I've started.
00:45:04.820I really appreciate you and your time.
00:45:12.320Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman talks with us about the psychology of violence, how we can be better prepared, and literally probably, and you can agree to this, gave one of the very best answers I've ever heard for what it means to be a man.
00:45:22.740So I encourage you to go check out his work and his offerings.
00:45:24.940In the meantime, make sure that you go learn about our elite mastermind, The Iron Council.
00:45:28.800Again, it's comprised of 170-plus men, all working to be the very best versions of themselves and committed to helping each other succeed.
00:45:35.400This week, we're talking about our relationship objectives.
00:45:38.180So whether that's with kids or whether that's with your wife or coworkers or colleagues or neighbors, that's what we're talking about.
00:45:42.520So make sure you join us at orderofman.com slash ironcouncil.
00:45:46.080Guys, I look forward to talking with you on Friday for our Friday Field Notes.
00:45:48.620But until then, take action and become the man you were meant to be.
00:45:52.240Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast.
00:45:54.640If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be,
00:45:59.220we invite you to join the Order at orderofman.com.