#438： Developing Real-World Situational Awareness
Episode Stats
Summary
Dr. Gav Schneider has spent over two decades teaching people how to deal with threats and why understanding that criminals have an advantage is foundational in keeping you and your family safe. He then walks us through how to develop situational awareness that we can avoid problems before they occur, why it s important to have multiple plans of action for when an attack happens, and why realistic training is crucial in being ready to defend yourself.
Transcript
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Hello, Brett here. Before we get today's show, got a quick favor to ask of you. If you've been
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you found yourself
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in a situation with a violent attacker, would you know what to do? While it's easy to think you'd
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instinctively make the right decision, the truth is if you haven't been formulating and practicing
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a plan ahead of time, you'll likely make the wrong and possibly deadly choice. My guest today has spent
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over two decades teaching people how to deal with threats and even more importantly, how to avoid them
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in the first place. His name is Dr. Gav Schneider and he's an expert in personal risk management
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security and the author of Can I See Your Hands? A guide situational awareness, personal risk
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management, resilience, and security. Today on the show, Gav shares the biggest mistake people make when it
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comes to their personal safety and why understanding that criminals have an advantage is foundational
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in keeping you and your family safe. He then walks us through how to develop situational awareness that
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we can avoid problems before they occur, why it's important to have multiple plans of action for
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when an attack happens, and why realistic training is crucial in being ready to defend yourself.
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After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash caniceeyourhands, all one word.
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All right. Dr. Gav Schneider, welcome to the show.
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So tell us about your background. You are involved with security training and consulting. This is like
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bodyguard stuff, executive protection. How did you get involved in this?
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So I started training martial arts when I was about five years old. The career in martial arts
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has been awesome. It led me to travel all over the world, and I spent a lot of time as a live-in student
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under an Israeli great-grandmaster known as Dennis Hanover. I then spent time traveling around in the
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U.S. and through Thailand and various other places. While I started studying academically,
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my first qualifications were in marketing and management. I got contracts training bodyguards,
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police and military back in South Africa, where I'm originally from. Started working as a bodyguard
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shortly thereafter. Set up my first business providing close protection and training services
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about two decades ago. And I've never formally served in the police or military, although I've
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worked with many special units and awesome operators. It's not the common pathway into the security world.
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So I started focusing on academics and got a master's degree and later on a PhD
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in criminology focusing on security management. And now I teach a course in a postgraduate course
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in the psychology of risk. And I'm the CEO of three or four businesses that work across
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risk, insecurity, safety, emergency response, and overall risk integration.
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Yeah, that is an interesting background because most people who do what you do, they've had some sort of
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military or police background, but you went at it from a different angle.
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Yeah, and it's been a great journey for me. And I think I've been very lucky and also sometimes
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right time, right place for things to happen. But also sometimes it's incidents that aren't so lucky
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that happen. When I was, I think I was about 21 years old, I was a full contact jujitsu champion
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in the style I was training, a professional bodyguard and living in South Africa, which is a very high
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crime rate environment. Got a phone call one night from my mother who was on the way to hospital
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after my stepfather had been shot in the head and attempted carjacking. And I rushed to the scene,
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almost nothing I could do there. Rushed to the hospital, almost nothing I could do there.
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And what the worst part about that for me was that, you know, it actually doesn't matter how good
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professionals get in many cases, because the professional is not likely to be there when
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people need them. And it steered my career in many ways, but particularly focusing on how do
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you translate the knowledge and the skills that every person needs so that they have it when they
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need it. Because, you know, as we said, the specialist or the sheepdog, as David Grossman refers to them,
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it's not usually going to be there when the bad things come.
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Right, right. So you wrote this book, Can I See Your Hands?, which you basically distill or make
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explicit the skills, the knowledge that you have, and then a lot of operators have, or people who do
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what you do have. And you were talking, I was talking to you on the show before, I think you did
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a great job making a lot of these things explicit. Because one thing I found, you talk to these guys who
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are in this field, and they're super good at what they do. But a lot of the skill they developed,
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it's almost like it's intuition, right? It's like fingertip feel. They don't, if you ask somebody
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what exactly you're doing, they just know, right? Which that's an advantage, right? When you're in
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that situation. But when you're trying to convey that or pass that information on to, say, a layman,
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you have to kind of approach things from a beginner's mindset. And I think you did a good
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job with this book doing that. So let's talk about from the beginning. In your experience with
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training individuals, and maybe we're talking like just regular citizens here,
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what is the biggest mistake you see people make when it comes to their personal security?
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Thanks, Brett. I think there's, it's hard to put your finger on one thing. But if I had to put it
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down, I think there's two real variants that we see of this. One is absolute ignorance and denial,
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where, you know, people are going, this won't happen to me, nothing bad will ever happen to me.
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You know, so I'm never going to bother to prepare for that sort of thing.
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So they absolutely disempower themselves and actually make themselves an easier victim for
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somebody who would want to do something bad because of that denial. And then the other side
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of the spectrum that we do come across a lot is, is overconfidence. And, you know, when you look at
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the two, you'd rather be overconfident than underconfident, because at least that creates a bit of a
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deterrent for most would-be attackers. But, you know, overconfidence without the ability to follow
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Gotcha. So that combination of negligence and overconfidence and just, just denial that bad
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things are going to happen. Why, what do you think people deny? Is that like just willfully,
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like they're willfully trying to be ignorant that bad things can happen to them or they just,
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it's unpleasant to think about bad things happening?
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It's a very good question. I spent a lot of time doing research onto this issue because,
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you know, I'll just give you a few examples that have fascinated me around this, you know,
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decision-making and the psychology of risk over the years. During my bodyguard and clutch
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protection career, you know, you'd see crazy things. We'd have people phone our office and,
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you know, the conversation would often start, I need, I need a bodyguard. You know, money's not an
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issue. You know, someone's trying to kill me. I need help right now. And, you know, we had a
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standard process that when we got those phone calls, we would ask a few questions really to
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verify as much as we could, but we would never normally send less than four people because if
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it's a confirmed threat and you don't know what you're facing, you know, at the very least you need
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a minimum number of people to make sure it's safe for the people you're deploying.
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And all of a sudden, you know, people who had, you know, two minutes before said money was no
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object, we're starting to try and bargain us down to go, oh, can't I just get one or maybe just
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two at the worst? You know, other experiences in the bodyguard world where, you know, people pay
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for all this protection and then see if they can lose their protection team as some sort of game.
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And you sit there and you just wonder why do people make decisions like that?
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So it's quite interesting. There's a part of our brain called the reticular activating
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system that sorts all the information that we bring in through our senses all the time.
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And it sorts it really on only two things, what we're interested in or what could hurt us.
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So for the most part, people aren't interested in safety and security because it's not as much fun,
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for example, as going on holiday. And on the other hand, if people haven't actually been exposed to
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something, they truly in many cases don't believe it will happen to them.
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So the biggest challenge is exactly what you said, you know, step one is people just learning
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that, look, sometimes you could do everything right and you might be in the wrong place at the
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wrong time. So if you accept that that could happen, you then empower yourself to be able
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to act on it. The biggest challenge is avoiding the myth of somebody else will take care of these
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things for me. And in most first world countries, you know, we've been very lucky. I now live in
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Australia, spent quite a bit of time in the US. You know, there's competent first responders,
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there's great law enforcement agencies. But, you know, by definition, the first responder is always
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the person who's on the scene when the incident happens. And, you know, it's a two way thing. We get
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so caught up in talking about personal security. But the thing that's likely to kill most of us is
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probably a heart attack, cancer, or some sort of other illness. And, you know, to stay healthy,
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we know what to do. We just got to exercise, eat right, and visit the doctor regularly.
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But even that, we often find, you know, people are just in denial and don't accept that it's
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Right. Yeah. I imagine the idea that something bad happening is so abstract.
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Just like, you know, dying of cancer, getting diabetes is so abstract. You just don't even
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think, ah, I'm not going to worry about it until it actually becomes a problem. So let's talk about
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sort of the mindset shift. So if we realize that bad things can happen to us, and then that
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also understanding that when that bad thing happens, like an attack on us, typically police aren't going
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to be there to help us. Like we're on our own, basically. Like, let's talk about understanding
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the mindset of a criminal and understanding the situation. So you talk about in the book,
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one important thing to understand is when you are in a personal defense situation,
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So it's a critical piece to understand. I think this is something, even people who are really into
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personal safety, you know, people who train martial artists or go to the shooting range,
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they often forget the fact that, you know, they get attacked on the terms of the attacker. So the
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attacker picks when the situation actually happens, they pick where the situation really happens,
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and they pick the manner in which the attack will manifest. You know, those are all variables
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that are difficult to control. As you saw in the book, we talk about three things. We talk about
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capability, opportunity, and intent. And we very rarely have the reach to influence people's
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capability. You know, somebody can go and buy a gun. Somebody can go and train martial arts.
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You know, even somebody with ill intent who has no skill can drive their car into you. They just have
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to wait when they need it. So capability is hard. Intent is equally as hard to manage for the average
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person. Although, with a lot of experience, you know, you can learn to determine the early warning
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signs that somebody may actually harm you, or maybe looking to harm someone else. It does take a lot of
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work. But the easy one that we can control is this idea of the opportunity. Most criminals, even deviant
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criminals, will take the path that leads them to the highest likelihood of success. So, you know,
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why pick a hard target that will see me coming, has created enough space to run away, or has
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potentially got an improvised weapon at hand to defend themselves when I could pick somebody else
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who doesn't have any of those things in place. Gotcha. So understanding that, that the criminal
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has the advantage, you make the case that instead of spending your time or most of your time training
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or preparing for when you have to fight back, you'd be better served spending more time, like just
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avoiding those situations in the first place. Absolutely. And I think this is an interesting
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challenge. You know, having taught martial arts for nearly 30 years now, and I've trained thousands
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of people and had many of them involved in pretty serious incidents, to get really good at self-defense
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is not a quick thing. You know, despite the fact that people do online training programs or want to go to a
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one-hour course, you know, realistically, you have to train enough so that your instinctive response
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is a response that works. And that, that, that takes, you know, thousands of repetitions done perfectly
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under simulated stress situations, which the average person just won't put the time, effort, and energy
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into doing, even though it's not that hard and you get the health benefit with it too, and you get the
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confidence, which means you're less likely to be attacked. So often when I run face-to-face
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seminars, I'll ask people how much time they would be willing to give to their personal risk management.
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And if you look at your personal risk management, you know, first and foremost, as we discussed,
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probably the biggest risks of getting hurt or killed come from medical issues. So, you know,
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eating and living healthy is probably the first starting point that might take, you know, three,
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four hours of effort a week, staying in shape, running, going to the gym. The next step would probably
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be making sure you could provide decent level of first aid to people and loved ones around you if
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something happened based on this medical risk. You know, next, next is probably if people live in a
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place where they commute, learning how to drive properly, you know, you're more likely to get
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into a car accident than you are to get assaulted or attacked. But very few people ever go and do,
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you know, regular defensive or advanced driver training. You know, then, then next on the list would
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be self-defense training. So without trying too hard, you might actually need about 20 hours a month
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to be really on top of your personal risk game. In talking to most people, you know,
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we've trained thousands and thousands of people. Most people will, at best, give you 20 minutes a
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week if you're lucky. So, you know, the question comes down to what do you do in that 20 minutes
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that will give you the best bang for buck? What will give you the most effective chance of minimizing
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the risks you might be exposed to? And that's situational awareness. It's knowing how to scan your
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environment, look at who's around you, work out who may be a threat, forecast the probability of
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that happening, plan an action, and run it through in your head a few times. So if you actually had
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to do it, you could. You know, that process, you know, earlier on, you spoke about how it becomes
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intuitive for experts. It's because they've done it so many times. But learning how to visualize is a
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great cheat for everyone. You know, the world's best athletes do it. Why shouldn't we? And if you can get
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good at that, you know, it just makes you a much harder target for people that have never thought
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about it or never actually look around with what could cause harm. And so I like how you break it
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down in the book. You bring in the, what is it, the Pareto principle, the 80-20, right? So we should
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be spending, you know, basically 80% of our time that we have on learning how to avoid these situations
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in the first place through situational awareness. And then the remaining 20% would be spent preparing
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on, like, how to actually handle that situation if it ever occurred to us, correct?
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Well, what's interesting is that it merges, right? Because we actually, I love the term
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pre-silience instead of resilience. You know, the idea of resilience is I can bounce back after
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something bad happens. But the idea of pre-silience is that the ability to bounce back is formed by all
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the effort, work, and initiatives I put in ahead of time. So when I look at this idea of where I put my
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energy, it's not just focusing on, you know, what do I do when this thing happens? You know, for
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example, if I'm walking down the street and some guy, you know, jumps out in front of me, puts a knife
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at my throat, most of the time it's a compliance process, right? If he wanted to kill you, he probably
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would have just killed you. It's about how do you stay calm enough to give him your money. But if you were
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situationally aware, you would have realized maybe that's not the street to walk down or when this guy's
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approaching you, potentially he's a threat. So you move yourself out of the situation.
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But what gives you the confidence to be able to act under pressure is the physical training.
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So the biggest benefit of, you know, self-defense or martial arts training is that if I get really
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good at it, I actually probably never have to use it because I'm able to focus on the pieces
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beforehand. And it is a challenge, you know, in a world, and don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of
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mixed martial arts and any sort of combative training. But in a world where we've made combat
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very sporting, it takes that pre-phase out of it. And the pre-phase is where the average person can
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avoid these things. So absolutely putting your energy into the focusing before something happens,
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as opposed to responding and recovering, just makes sense. The challenge we've got, as we spoke about
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before, is that if people are in the stage of ignorance, negligence, or denial, the chances of
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them doing something proactively are very, very slim. And while, you know, luckily, bad things won't
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happen to most people, if you're sitting there without any pre-thought of what you do, you know,
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it's the equivalent of never having any insurance for anything, you know, a car, a house, your health.
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And then when something bad happens, going, oh, man, I should have had insurance.
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So, you know, if we're not even going to invest in our own well-being, how are we going to ensure
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we have a great life? Yeah, and I think another challenge of why it's hard to do this pre-
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resilience you talk about, like avoiding the situations in the first place, and then instead
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focus on, like, what do you do when the thing actually happens, is, like, the training for what you
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do when the event actually happens, like, it's, I mean, it's fun. Let's, I mean, I think we should
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not downplay that. Like, I like taking self-defense courses. I like doing tactical gun courses where
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you're running and gunning, and it's super fun. But you make the case, like, okay, it's fun, and
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it's interesting, and it's engaging. But in order to get really good at that, like, you have to do that
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training a lot. Like, I mean, make a big, big investment. I even realized that after a while, it's like,
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yeah, I mean, this is fun. I'm doing this. I'm doing pretty good in this sort of simulated
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situation. But it really isn't, like, an action. It's not simulating closely, like, what an actual
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situation would be like if I were to have to use my firearm. It's a very valid point, and, you know,
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I'll loop back to a few things. You know, I've trained in many styles of martial arts and
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tactical firearms instructor, and I've been in a few situations over my career. And when violence
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actually manifests, it doesn't really manifest the way you practice it in a gym or in a dojo,
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even on the shooting range. Things happen way differently. It's messy. It's erratic. You get
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time distortion. All those adrenal factors kick into play. So one of the goals we have when it comes to
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practical training, the goal is to get as close to reality as safely as possible. And that's a very
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difficult thing to do. You know, what's the point of going to learn how to defend yourself if you keep
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getting hurt during the training? But conversely, if the training never actually puts you under stress
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and simulates, you know, the need to read body language, the need to respond, simulates resistance,
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multiple attackers, dealing with weaponry, if it doesn't have some of those variables in, you develop
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that false sense of security. And, you know, it's quite an interesting example that if you look at a lot
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of self-defense systems, it's something that drives me crazy. Most, you know, sporty martial arts,
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you know, work on some sort of resistance or, you know, somebody challenging, hitting back, trying to
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choke you, et cetera. A lot of self-defense systems, you know, still have this idea that techniques are
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so deadly we can't actually practice live, which is a real cop-out. We find, you know, that the one or two
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live situations where you get adrenalized and you force people to respond are often the most important
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aspect of a short self-defense course because it teaches people how to manage the adrenal response
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as opposed to apply techniques. And we've had some amazing cases over the years where people have
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been attacked. They really couldn't do any techniques, you know, in the one-hour or one-day
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self-defense courses. But because psychologically, emotionally, and mentally, they'd made the decision
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to fight and they saw that trigger point where they had to fight early enough to respond. They
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survived and many of them did quite well. So it really is a challenge between finding that balance
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and it's awkward because quite literally being paranoid is worse than not being aware at all.
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If you borrow a little bit from the field of sports psychology, they found that, you know,
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athletes who play games such as, you know, baseball or in more British-type countries like
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Australia who play cricket, you know, the people who are on bat and do really well are usually people
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who are able to raise and lower their awareness. And the challenge we've got is it's estimated we've only
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got between 30 and 45 minutes of laser-like focus a day. So if I'm paranoid, I chew through that
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laser-like focus instantly, which means for the rest of the day, I actually have no ability to
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cognitively function at a very high level and be vigilant. So it's really important that that point,
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you know, people often confuse the idea of being aware, situationally aware, ready and capable
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with being paranoid. And it's almost the exact opposite. Because I'm aware and situationally aware
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of what's happening around me, I know when I actually can relax. But I also know when I should
00:22:45.860
potentially be more prepared. So I ration that level of awareness more effectively. And you can
00:22:51.720
have an overall much higher quality of life and much more effective daily engagement. Psychologists
00:22:58.160
talk about being mindful. But it really is more effective when I learn to manage and moderate,
00:23:04.560
you know, what I'm doing based on what's happening around me.
00:23:07.900
Well, so let's talk about that. So just so we understand, we're going to spend, you know,
00:23:13.960
understanding that the criminal has the advantage in a situation if we're being attacked, we want
00:23:19.120
to spend most of our time, like 80% of our time learning how to avoid that situation in the first
00:23:24.320
place, because that'll give us the most bang for our buck. So let's talk about how we do that.
00:23:28.580
What's the first step of establishing situational awareness in any, like, no matter where you go?
00:23:34.040
So we like to talk, in the book, I try to summarize it as the awareness toolbox.
00:23:40.200
But it really starts, first and foremost, with a little bit of knowledge of your own internal
00:23:46.320
context. And I'll give you a simple example of that. You know, if I wake up in the morning,
00:23:52.340
I have a bad night's sleep, I might have a bit of a head cold. And on the way into work,
00:23:56.460
I get cut off by somebody and I land up screaming at him. For the rest of the day,
00:24:00.860
I'm probably not going to be that effective at being situationally aware or at making good
00:24:05.860
decisions in totality. So if I don't take context of where I am mentally and emotionally,
00:24:13.320
I might miss what I should actually be doing. So, you know, people, for example, who work in
00:24:19.200
high-risk environments need to be so attuned to their internal state first. Otherwise, they might
00:24:26.140
expose themselves to risks that normally they could deal with, but in a different state might
00:24:31.940
not be able to deal with. And the way we see the world is always governed by how we feel.
00:24:37.820
So if I'm feeling good, I'll look around and I'll actually notice good things, not bad things.
00:24:41.960
If I'm feeling bad, everything I look at is a problem or an issue.
00:24:45.980
So it starts with that internal baseline. Once you have that, you can then try and generate an
00:24:50.420
external baseline. And that external baseline is knowing what's happening around me.
00:24:55.920
We teach a tool called the three-point check system. There are many tools like this, but
00:25:00.880
the history of the three-point check system is an interesting one in that roughly 20 years ago,
00:25:06.280
we set up a bodyguard training school. And we would get sent these guys to train in 10 or 20 days.
00:25:13.520
And many of them were not the perfect specimens for the job. They weren't academically capable.
00:25:21.240
Many of them weren't physically capable, but we had to train them nonetheless. And the timeframe was
00:25:25.980
really short. So we actually went on a research process and we interviewed around about 150
00:25:32.060
experienced operators, the people you spoke about earlier who do it intuitively.
00:25:36.540
And asked them, what is it that you do? What do you look for? How do you look for these things?
00:25:43.760
What tells you that this place is good or this place is bad or that guy's dodgy or he's not?
00:25:49.580
It was a very frustrating research process because many of them just looked at us and said, look,
00:25:54.260
you know, I don't know how I know. I just know. And if you want to be like me, you've got to do this
00:25:57.900
for 20 years. But in the end, we pulled out that basic three-point check system, which is the ability
00:26:02.980
to scan your environment, scan the people there, and come up with a contingency plan.
00:26:07.920
So we simplistically talk about places, people, and plans. And then there's a few subcategories
00:26:14.200
under that. The next aspect is if I get good at doing that, I can program my intuition because most
00:26:20.220
assessments and most activities are all done intuitively. Daniel Kahneman, who's a really famous
00:26:26.620
behavioral scientist, likes to divide the mind. He talks about a system one aspect of our mind and a
00:26:32.720
system two. The system two is our deep thought, cognitive, intellectual decision-making capability.
00:26:40.840
And system one is our reflexive, intuitive capability. And it takes so much energy and
00:26:45.520
effort to engage system two that we almost always default to system one, which is our intuitive
00:26:49.840
decision-making. So the better we program our intuition, the more likely we are to actually not
00:26:56.880
have to do anything because we'll naturally be scanning the environment, naturally be evaluating
00:27:00.780
people, then naturally be coming up with a plan. But it takes quite a long time to program your
00:27:06.000
intuition to work that way. We also, you know, we know we make decisions primarily based on
00:27:11.540
biases and heuristics. So, you know, if I don't like the look of somebody, I might not know why I don't
00:27:17.760
like the look of them. And they may actually not even be a threat at all. So I'm wasting all this
00:27:22.140
energy, you know, being biased, thinking somebody's a threat when they might not be. And I might be
00:27:26.640
missing the actual thing that is a threat because of where I'm focusing. So learning to manage our
00:27:31.100
own biases is really important. We like to divide decision-making into sort of two categories.
00:27:37.520
You know, I have to make the call right now or I have time to analyze it. If you have to make the
00:27:42.380
call right now, then going with your gut is almost always the right call to make, particularly when it
00:27:47.800
comes to personal safety. There's really only two downsides usually about going with your gut, even if
00:27:52.720
you were wrong. And they are usually, you might offend somebody and be rude to them, or you might
00:27:58.420
inconvenience yourself a little bit. Whereas, you know, if you ignore your intuition, you might land
00:28:02.740
up having something really bad happen to you. The flip side of that is obviously if I have more time
00:28:07.380
to evaluate what's going on around me, I'm probably going to make a better decision by actually thinking
00:28:11.880
about it than just reacting on gut instinct. We also leverage off Jeff Cooper's color code system,
00:28:17.920
which is a really useful tool to learn how to raise and lower your awareness based on what's
00:28:23.560
happening around you so that we don't work around in a state that's too paranoid or too
00:28:29.260
stimulated when we don't have to. Also, so that we're not walking around in a state of non-awareness
00:28:36.860
at all when we really should be. You know, a good example is driving a car. Most people who drive to
00:28:42.600
and from work will have had an experience where they get in the car and don't remember the journey
00:28:46.920
home at all. And that's a pretty risky thing. Bear in mind, you're driving or operating a tool
00:28:54.200
that could kill you and kill other people. We should at the very least have some level of basic
00:28:58.200
awareness. You don't have to drive around like you're paranoid all the time, but being cognizant
00:29:03.460
of where you are is pretty important. So these things do become life skills once you embed them.
00:29:08.660
All right. So yeah, there's a lot to break down there. Let's talk about sort of some specifics.
00:29:12.700
This places people plan. Let's talk about the place. What sort of things should just regular
00:29:19.660
people be looking for in their environment when they go to a restaurant, the grocery store,
00:29:25.440
wherever to be better situationally aware? Sure. So the starting point is just to make sure
00:29:33.360
you know the entrances, exits, escape routes, and hiding places. And it's one of those questions
00:29:38.660
often asked people just to ask themselves a very simple question. If you go to a shopping mall
00:29:45.060
often, do you know where the fire escapes are? And it's quite shocking that people will go to a place
00:29:51.340
hundreds of times, but they park in the same place, they go in the same entrance, and they leave at the
00:29:57.100
same entrance. And they've never thought about other ways of getting out if something went wrong.
00:30:00.420
So the most basic things of knowing how to get in and how to get out is where we start. But it also
00:30:07.400
enables us to know where other people would get in or get out from, where other people might be
00:30:11.960
hiding to hurt me or where I should hide if something went wrong. And it just takes a little
00:30:17.380
bit of practice, not much, to get good at that aspect. And just knowing where to run to could be the
00:30:24.000
most important thing if something bad happened. The next stage is actually being able to understand
00:30:29.100
structurally what's around you. You don't necessarily have to have a blueprint map of
00:30:34.300
every building you go to, but just the ability to be able to tell, hold on, this is a five-story
00:30:38.980
building, and I'm on floor five. So if I hit the staircase, I better run until I get to the ground,
00:30:46.360
but it's five staircases. It often becomes an argument of, I really thought the penthouse was a
00:30:53.120
good idea, but if I've got to run down all these stairs, maybe it's not if something happens.
00:30:57.780
The other challenge is if we were looking for something out of the ordinary, it's really hard
00:31:03.860
to tell if something's out of the ordinary if I don't know what the ordinary is. So if I'm looking
00:31:07.600
for an object that looks out of place, it's important to know what is in place. Airports are
00:31:13.720
a great example of that. At airports, they always go, make sure that you don't leave your baggage
00:31:18.520
unattended. Yet, I'm sure you travel a lot, Brett. I do too. And I'd probably say almost every trip I'm at
00:31:25.200
airport, I see baggage unattended. And it's just one of those things that we fall into
00:31:29.280
normalization when actually we should be noting these anomalies. And the last part of scanning
00:31:34.060
the environment, we talk about improvised weapons or defensive tools. What in my environment would
00:31:39.880
somebody potentially use to hurt me? Or what, if I had to in my environment, could I use to protect
00:31:45.400
myself in a worst-case scenario? And I know when you run through this environmental scan, it seems
00:31:50.800
long. But in reality, most people do this anyway. If I want to cross the road safely,
00:31:56.480
I'll actually do a scan like this anyway. I look at what's coming, I scan the environment,
00:32:00.980
and I make a decision. And once we've built a reflexive capability, environmental threat
00:32:05.880
is often much easier to manage than the next level, which is when we integrate people-based
00:32:10.420
threat into it. Because with the exception of natural disasters or a total unforeseen event
00:32:15.200
like a building collapse, environmental threats are often slow to manifest. I'll give an example.
00:32:20.700
Say you walk into a building and you need to go to a meeting on floor three, and you look at the
00:32:25.640
elevator and you're going, if I get in there, I probably will die. It doesn't look like that
00:32:29.540
elevator has ever been serviced. Most people would just logically take the stairs instead of rolling
00:32:33.780
the dust and taking the elevator. If you walk into a restaurant and you sit down at a table and you
00:32:38.520
sit on the chair and the chair feels very rickety and you think you're going to fall on the floor,
00:32:41.680
most people would just swap chairs. So those slow acting environmental risks are easy
00:32:46.440
if we are aware of them. It's usually the combination of people and place that pose the
00:32:51.480
challenge. And this is the interesting part. One of the things that drives me crazy is where,
00:32:57.260
you know, you have a serious incident, whatever the incident was. And after the incident, everybody
00:33:02.900
becomes either masters of hindsight where they're going, oh, yeah, yeah, we knew there was something
00:33:09.220
weird about this guy. Or people will go, yeah, I knew this guy for ages and, you know, he seemed
00:33:15.260
totally normal. And we've kind of built this false sense of reality where we don't think that
00:33:22.640
potentially violent or dangerous behavior is something we can tell in advance, which is just
00:33:28.140
a real inaccuracy. You know, we can predict likely outcomes of the way people behave quite easily.
00:33:34.320
What we don't do is take the effort and energy to evaluate people around us regularly enough to
00:33:40.060
actually assess whether they're displaying any of these characteristics. And what's interesting with
00:33:45.600
this is, you know, somebody who is paying you undue attention might be dressed in a way that they're
00:33:50.640
concealing a weapon, is behaving erratically and following you while you walk to your car.
00:33:56.020
You know, we can all say, yeah, that's pretty dodgy, pretty threatening. But if we're not looking for it,
00:34:01.560
we won't even see it. You know, if we don't even accept that this stuff might happen to me,
00:34:05.440
I'm going to miss all of those cues. You know, even, you know, these, the terrible cases of these
00:34:11.380
kids that land up, you know, conducting shootings at schools. There's many indicators. And a lot of
00:34:17.320
those indicators, you know, are the early warning signs of disassociation. You know, people feel
00:34:22.180
isolated or they feel alienated. They're just behaving differently from the rest. And it's those
00:34:27.740
differences that trigger the need to look deeper. So, it doesn't actually mean that this person is
00:34:33.240
an attacker or they're dodgy. Maybe that person just needs a hug or someone to talk to. But if we
00:34:38.660
don't actually learn to spot these anomalies, we can never actually act proactively and focus our
00:34:43.460
energy before. And it's a pretty convenient excuse. It kind of covers off everybody who didn't do what
00:34:50.440
they should have when we go, oh, there's no way we could see that coming. You know, there's nothing we
00:34:54.560
could have done anyway, which, as I said, for me, I think is just an excuse. I reckon the vast
00:34:59.420
majority of situations, we can do something. We can see the early warning signs. We just don't look
00:35:03.860
for them or know what to do when we see them. Sure, there are, you know, the very limited number
00:35:09.760
of situations that, you know, just instantly manifest, but that's really small. And then the
00:35:16.100
last part of the situational awareness piece is just this ability to come up with a plan.
00:35:19.560
And, you know, we often find this is where most organizations fall really short. They come up
00:35:26.580
with these really complicated plans of what they want their people to do that'll never work. We use
00:35:32.220
the acronym in our corporate consulting business, CYA, cover your ass. And we find most organizations
00:35:40.000
focus on CYA instead of actually empowering their people to be safe in and out of the workplace,
00:35:45.220
to be safe online and physically. And a lot of that becomes, you know, how do we actually
00:35:50.800
practically apply the skills as opposed to how good do they look when we put it down on paper?
00:35:55.240
We're going to take a quick break for you, Ward, from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. And so what does this planning process look like? Does it take
00:37:46.800
a lot of time or is this something you can walk into a building, you scan your environment,
00:37:52.460
you scan the people, and then you can just quickly come up with a plan based on that information you
00:37:56.000
have there? You're exactly right. Because the problem is if you can't do that and you're the
00:37:59.980
first responder, it actually doesn't help that somebody else has built this detailed plan that
00:38:04.320
you might have never seen or can't be explained to you quickly. And this comes back to that idea
00:38:09.280
of personal power. If I've owned the fact that my safety is my business, I should make it my priority
00:38:17.480
to have a plan if something happened. And there's so many examples of this, but just think about
00:38:23.220
something simple. In the middle of the night, what happens if one of your loved ones needs to go to
00:38:28.260
the hospital? So most people go, oh, we'll call the ambulance. But for whatever reason,
00:38:34.140
what happens if the ambulance is not going to get you in time and you want to jump into your car and
00:38:38.720
drive this person there? Proactive practices like just making sure you've got a little bit of fuel in
00:38:43.340
the car as opposed to leaving it overnight with just the reserve tank light flashing and no ability
00:38:51.940
to drive thinking you're filled up in the morning disempowers you. So it's quite a simple way to
00:38:57.720
actually think about it that if you just think about what are the basic responses I might need to do
00:39:03.440
if something bad happened. And we like to use the run, hide, fight, communicate model. There are lots
00:39:12.060
of variations, but I like that approach because it aligns back to our adrenal response. And our adrenal
00:39:18.600
response really, under stress, will have three instinctive responses. We would fight, flight,
00:39:24.840
or freeze. And fighting alliance to fighting, freezing alliance to hiding, and flighting response to running.
00:39:34.860
So it's a good map. But because in the modern era, most of the time, our first response
00:39:41.100
happens with some level of communication. We've got to have this communication ability built in.
00:39:47.220
And communication works at various levels. But the first level is, there's nothing more powerful
00:39:51.380
than the voice in your own head. So if you can't even articulate a plan to yourself in your mind,
00:39:58.080
the likelihood of you being able to actually carry it out under stress is very slim.
00:40:01.620
So that's why this planning ahead is so important. But calling the authorities, sharing information
00:40:07.200
with the authorities, warning people around you, those are things that save lives. But equally so,
00:40:14.380
if I couldn't get away and I saw this attacker coming at me and I decided my only choice is to fight,
00:40:20.440
me warning the attacker, loudly telling them, no, get back, stop, can actually make a massive difference
00:40:27.500
in the aftermath of the situation legally. Again, it also tells other people around you that you're a
00:40:33.420
victim. You're not the attacker. So understanding this run, hard, fight, communicate model,
00:40:39.300
we make these things complicated. They're not. You know, that's just tied back to our instinctive
00:40:43.640
response. The challenge we've got, though, is if we look at a societal level, most of us, roughly 98%
00:40:51.900
of the population are flight dominant. That when something bad happens, our instincts tell us run
00:40:58.020
first. We'll only fight if we are absolutely cornered. It's that reason why it's so hard to
00:41:05.520
train soldiers or even train law enforcement officers or security personnel to run to a problem as opposed
00:41:10.820
to run away because we have to actually train them to overcome that flight response. The exception
00:41:16.140
to that 98% are usually people that exhibit sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies doesn't
00:41:22.180
mean they always become criminals. It's been found that many people that are sitting at 2% of the
00:41:26.780
people who become special forces soldiers or, you know, half-lying corporate CEOs. But the real
00:41:34.760
challenge for the everyday person is to try and make sure that they can fight flight or freeze or run
00:41:41.980
hard or fight and try and make sure they can avoid the number one challenge, which is to panic.
00:41:48.340
Because panic is a killer. You know, if I panic, I can't think and I can't act. And that's why this
00:41:55.360
planning process, as you said, it doesn't have to be a big deal. If I walk into a building, all I need
00:42:00.440
to do is have a look and go, right, there's the fire escape. Awesome. If something bad happens, I know
00:42:05.820
where to run. If I'm looking at a guy and I go, this guy really looks dodgy. My plan can be as
00:42:12.120
simple as if he gets up and he comes close to me, I'm just going to leave. And because I know where
00:42:16.240
the exit is, it's much easier to leave. And if you mentally role play that just once or twice in your
00:42:20.980
head, all the research has shown you're far more likely to respond that way, the way you've just
00:42:25.840
visualized, than you are to respond randomly because of association. So we can get a lot of bang for buck
00:42:32.620
just by actually leveraging basic awareness around us and just having a little bit of a plan
00:42:38.260
that we role play in our heads a few times. Right. I think you also talk about this goes back
00:42:43.800
to the OODA loop. You talked about this in the book. We've written about it on the website pretty
00:42:48.480
in depth. For those who don't know, the OODA loop is Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And in a self-defense
00:42:54.600
situation, the attacker, like his OODA loop is like already going before yours is going, right? But by
00:43:01.880
having a plan, you kind of speed up your own OODA loop in a way, because you've oriented,
00:43:07.200
you've decided like what you're going to do in a certain situation. So you're able to act
00:43:11.180
and respond much more quickly. And if you can do that faster, you're more likely to
00:43:15.860
come out the victor in the situation. Exactly right. And it's interesting. So
00:43:21.620
during our career, we've done lots of interesting things. And one of them was that we actually got to
00:43:26.180
rob a bank. And this was a bank in South Africa that we were developing an armed robbery management
00:43:31.300
program for, bullet-resistant glass, armed security, five-minute tactical response.
00:43:38.160
We had 30 people who participated in the exercise as volunteers, obviously. And we only had one
00:43:44.200
chance to do it right because we were breaking the bullet-resistant glass, which was pretty expensive.
00:43:48.840
The bank said you only got one chance to do it. I'll ask you the question, how long do you think
00:43:53.760
it took us to rob the bank, to overcome all of those barriers and successfully pull the robbery off?
00:43:59.000
Let me say two minutes. Pretty close. I hope you've never been a bank robber.
00:44:06.420
Which we reckon we could have shaved a bunch of time off that. We've also spent tons and tons of
00:44:11.980
time training people on how to manage carjackings. So with the context of the bank robbery, how long
00:44:17.300
do you reckon it takes to pull off a carjacking? It's like 30 seconds.
00:44:21.540
So we've averaged that out at about 8 to 12 seconds. Wow.
00:44:25.660
The last piece of thinking about that is, imagine somebody standing in front of you being verbally
00:44:30.800
aggressive. And you can see this guy posturing up. How long does it take from that person to go
00:44:37.620
verbal, from verbal to physical and strike you?
00:44:43.140
Realistically, between 0.3 and 0.6 of a second if they're in touching distance.
00:44:47.360
Wow. So the biggest problem we've got is this fallacy that we actually will have enough
00:44:52.480
time to evaluate what's happening around us and decide on a response when something actually
00:44:58.080
happens. The truth is we won't. And this is where that performance ahead of time is so
00:45:04.240
important. If we haven't thought about this stuff beforehand, the way we respond is random.
00:45:10.640
Now, we might be lucky and our random response might be effective. But what happens if it's not?
00:45:16.260
What happens if it's a panic response? What happens if it's a flight response and I run the
00:45:20.980
wrong way? Conversely, what happens if it's a fight response that could have been avoidable?
00:45:26.960
Having taught thousands of young men over the years, most young men get into fights or engage
00:45:33.900
in violence because of ego, not because they have to. And the best way to manage that is to get people
00:45:39.380
to understand ahead of time what the difference is between having to fight for survival, which
00:45:45.100
you know, is because you have no other choice and you've tried to avoid every other possible
00:45:48.660
recourse. And, you know, throwing a punch because this guy looked at you funny and you felt
00:45:52.980
cornered. You know, one might save your life, the other might land that you're up in jail.
00:45:58.180
So this ability to actually understand the way things manifest is so important so that we can
00:46:04.120
be realistic about the way we visualize our responses. And it's a really hard thing to do because,
00:46:10.280
you know, let's take an active shooter situation. In hindsight and after situations, it blows my
00:46:17.240
mind and I'm sure you've experienced this with many of the people you've interviewed and what you look
00:46:20.780
at. Everyone's an expert, right? You know, oh, why didn't somebody take this guy out? You could
00:46:26.160
have tackled him. You could have thrown a chair at him. You could have done this. You could have done
00:46:28.860
that. But when these things actually manifest, it's exceptionally difficult if we haven't prepared.
00:46:35.620
I don't know if you're familiar with the case of Andrus Brevik. Andrus Brevik was the guy who shot
00:46:41.000
all those kids in Norway. Right. Yeah, I remember that. And he actually claimed that it was so much
00:46:48.760
easier. He trained using first-person shooter TV games, which came out in his inquiry. And he said
00:46:56.340
it was so much easier when he was shooting the kids because most of them froze and they were just
00:47:01.700
standing dead still so it was easy for him to shoot them. Or, sorry, and nobody was shooting
00:47:07.680
back at him. And when he was playing his TV games, you know, people were shooting back and running him.
00:47:12.500
So, you know, just a little bit of pre-thought around what's real and what's not. And this is a
00:47:17.440
hard thing to do. You know, people don't like to think about worst-case scenarios. And this is always
00:47:23.340
the challenge, you know, in terms of writing the book and trying to put some of the stuff down,
00:47:28.040
we've probably trained about 50,000 people and at least one of our face-to-face versions of some
00:47:33.720
of the stuff that's covered in the book. The challenge you've got is, you know, this stuff
00:47:38.060
is actually a practical skill. It's not a theoretical subject. It's about doing the things. And it's about
00:47:43.220
practicing them until they become repetitive and just become naturally ingrained in the way you live.
00:47:48.680
And when you get to that level, this is easy. They just become intuitive, you know, much like
00:47:53.040
looking left and right or right and left depends which country you're in before you cross the road.
00:47:58.040
And that's where we want to get to. But we need to get there from a response capability first.
00:48:03.440
You know, we need to look at what actually will work as opposed to what is perceived.
00:48:08.080
And maybe you've seen this in the years. You've spoken to many experts.
00:48:12.960
You know, there's so many experts out there who can do stuff that layman can't.
00:48:18.040
You know, so somebody who's a master in whatever martial arts you want to talk about,
00:48:22.660
you know, can actually pull off stuff the average person can't. Therefore, they think that that's
00:48:26.400
effective. And for them, it might be, you know, a good example. I trained taekwondo for many years
00:48:32.440
when I was young in my career, and taekwondo is a kicking system. And, you know, lots of self-defense
00:48:38.000
experts go kicking in, you know, high kicking in the street or self-defense is a bad idea.
00:48:43.140
It is a bad idea. But if you're an expert in it, you probably can kick somebody in the head faster
00:48:47.020
than they can punch you in the face. But to get to that level of mastery takes so long that the average
00:48:52.100
person would never have benefit. So the actual system itself is pretty bad for self-defense
00:48:57.180
because the average punter can't use it. And, you know, not to pick on that, the same is relevant
00:49:02.380
for many other systems. You know, mixed martial arts, which is great, a great close-to-reality
00:49:08.380
example of the way fights manifest, is awesome. But the things that enable smaller people to beat
00:49:15.660
bigger people are all the things that have been made illegal. The only way you can stop a bigger,
00:49:20.720
stronger person is, you know, trying to poke them in the arse, trying to hit them in the groin,
00:49:25.420
breaking small joints like their fingers, trying to hit in the throat, trying to grab a weapon,
00:49:30.100
trying to run away. And all of those things are illegal and things you can't do in mixed martial
00:49:34.720
arts. So the more you train with the limitations, often the less effective you are in the real world,
00:49:41.600
which is a difficult conundrum to overcome. So I think that's a good point you just raised,
00:49:46.320
the difference between sport fighting and fighting for your life. When you're fighting
00:49:51.020
for your life, there are no rules. But unfortunately, people, because like most people are good people,
00:49:56.240
right? They grew up and thinking about, you know, you got to have a fair fight or they're thinking
00:50:00.620
about the legal consequences afterwards. Like they do, they just basically, they fight like they're
00:50:07.000
in a boxing match or an MMA, but when they should be, if it's for their life, like gouging eyeballs,
00:50:11.720
punching throats, et cetera. It's really challenging because, you know, as mentioned
00:50:17.460
before, there's only two reasons in life people will ever resort to violent behavior. And, you know,
00:50:23.880
I have this debate often with criminologist colleagues of mine who love to overcomplicate
00:50:27.580
the world we live in. But the reality is people either fight for ego or for survival.
00:50:33.300
And, you know, even if you look at, you know, serial killer behavior, most of those actions are based
00:50:39.360
on ego. You know, they're based on fulfilling a need that that person perceives is real.
00:50:45.440
Whereas in reality, you know, if it's a survival-based situation, which comparatively would be very,
00:50:51.340
very rare. You know, if you were aware, you were vigilant, you knew where, you know, things could go
00:50:56.420
wrong, you could avoid it. We were unlikely to get caught up in a bad situation. But conversely,
00:51:02.620
if we go into a situation that is a survival situation with the limitations that, you know,
00:51:08.380
people are good people, I couldn't hurt somebody, I don't want to hurt somebody, well, the chance of
00:51:14.440
you coming out okay are pretty slim because your attacker doesn't have those limitations. And it is
00:51:19.860
an awkward discussion. I'll just go back to, we teach a lot of female self-empowerment and female
00:51:25.620
self-defense. And I find women who come on us, women and girls who come on our self-defense programs
00:51:32.860
often are really in one of two categories. They're either really underconfident where they go,
00:51:39.420
look, what could I do against a bigger, stronger guy anyway? You know, so I don't even know why I'm
00:51:43.380
here because there's nothing I could do anyway. Or on the other end of the spectrum, we sometimes get
00:51:47.800
girls and ladies who have grown up with brothers, really cocky and go, oh, I'm not even worried about
00:51:52.920
this. I'll just kick him in the balls. Forgetting the fact that, you know, most men have learned how to
00:51:59.060
protect our groin since the age of three when we realize it really hurts when you get hit in the
00:52:02.480
nuts. So it's about finding that balance because neither of those is accurate as we discussed.
00:52:09.080
It's about finding the balance between both. But it's also about exposing people to, in a slower
00:52:15.260
measured way, to the very things they're most scared of. So people who are scared of violence
00:52:20.480
and believe it will never happen to them have no ability to respond if God forbid it does happen.
00:52:25.620
And people who slowly acclimatize themselves over time have a much better chance of being able to
00:52:31.860
manage it. And that's a process. And it's really important to find good coaches and good trainers
00:52:36.800
if you want to go through that. One of the worst things we find people can do is, you know, go and
00:52:43.540
do a self-defense training program, for example. Or, you know, we often have a lot of ladies who come
00:52:50.000
and train and go, oh, yeah, I do boxer size or I do tabo. I'm ready to defend myself. We go, well,
00:52:55.380
that's great that you're fit, that being fit and healthy and strong is excellent to manage our first
00:53:00.480
risk, which is health. And, you know, we'll make it easy for you to defend yourself. But your context
00:53:05.460
is all wrong. If we haven't thought about the way people might actually attack us, we've got no
00:53:10.600
ability to apply the skills we have. So it's a bit of a challenge. But the one thing I always urge
00:53:16.700
people is no instructor, no book, no manual can ever tell a person when or when not to fight.
00:53:23.920
It's really a personal decision. And the challenge we've got is referencing back to how quickly
00:53:29.720
violence can manifest. If you haven't thought about it ahead of time, you're unlikely to make
00:53:35.220
the best possible decision when something actually happens. You know, our cognitive function shuts down
00:53:39.840
and we respond with reflexive, instinctive response only. So if I want to make the right call,
00:53:44.740
I really do have to base it on, you know, thinking about this and programming a response
00:53:49.860
in through visualization or rehearsal ahead of time. I hope that makes sense.
00:53:55.180
No, that makes sense. I mean, like how, so like, how does that work? I guess like,
00:53:59.360
going back to this idea that 80% of the time we should spend avoiding the situation. So we can do
00:54:04.120
that with situational awareness. If you see something like doesn't look right, we get out of there
00:54:08.980
because even if we're wrong, you know, at least we're alive, we're safe. But how do you decide
00:54:14.760
how to respond with either run, hide, fight when like the event actually happens, right? You couldn't
00:54:22.360
avoid it. The event actually happens. So like, I guess what I'm trying to say, like, how do you like,
00:54:27.360
is there like proximity? So it's like, if the guy's this close or this far away, I'm going to run away.
00:54:32.080
But if he's within this perimeter of me, I'm going to attack because that's the only option
00:54:37.180
I have. Does that make sense what I'm trying to ask? Absolutely. And you're talking about what
00:54:42.460
we refer to as the pre-phase. So just before the situation happens, and I view this aspect as part
00:54:48.040
of that 80% we discussed before, you know, everything that happens pre the incident actually
00:54:53.020
kicking off is our pre-work. And that's where that 80% should focus on. So this is the challenge.
00:54:58.680
It's all about context. So we fear most what we don't understand. If I've never been exposed
00:55:03.780
to somebody closing range, and you're demonstrating even verbal aggression, chances are I'm either
00:55:10.680
going to respond with a flight, flight or freeze response, right? I might just absolutely freeze
00:55:15.980
and not know what to do. I might engage back very verbally aggressively, or I might just try
00:55:22.240
and run. And the challenge is around trying to map the right response to the scenarios we face.
00:55:27.700
And this is where realistic training experience, you know, done repetitively is by far the most
00:55:35.220
effective way to cover that gap you discussed. Because if I don't know at what point somebody
00:55:41.180
can actually step to strike me, how do I know when I should be backing away? You know, if I don't know
00:55:47.600
how quickly somebody can cover distance when they're across the room, you know, I might spend a lot of
00:55:52.780
time being paranoid and missing out on lots of opportunities based on inaccurate perceptions,
00:55:57.180
when actually there's no risk, no exposure of people, or even people who are threatening,
00:56:01.540
we're too far away. So part of the challenge with this one is I always urge people, even if you don't
00:56:08.000
want to be a serious martial artist, spend a few months at a self-defense school. It's a life skill.
00:56:13.820
That will teach you how to read distance. It will teach you when people can hurt you from where.
00:56:18.720
Okay. And then you've at least got context. So for the rest of your life, even if you never go back
00:56:23.340
and train again, you realize that, look, if I can keep a meter and a half of safe separation,
00:56:28.060
and I can see this person's hands, okay, and they're not exhibiting, you know, signs and symptoms
00:56:33.640
of adrenal dump, then chances are I'm okay. But if these things change, then I need to act on it.
00:56:41.060
And the biggest problem is we miss these cues because A, we've never been taught to look for
00:56:45.780
them. And it drives me crazy. I think this sort of training should be a life skill that should get
00:56:50.360
taught to every child. You know, there were programs that I was involved in in Israel where every school
00:56:55.800
kid, you know, received four two-hour training sessions just as part of their school curriculum
00:57:01.940
to understand how to respond. And we spend so much time trying to develop our kids' skills,
00:57:07.500
we're missing teaching them the life skills that could make them healthier, safer, more productive
00:57:12.960
adults. But, you know, on that piece, the big challenge is what do we do when it comes time to
00:57:20.420
make a decision? The reality is it's hard to make a decision under adrenal dump. So the more work I put
00:57:25.400
in ahead of time, the more likely I'm to make the right decision. And the right decision is different
00:57:31.020
for every single person. You know, if I'm the average everyday person, it's a comparatively
00:57:36.980
simple measure in theory. You know, I would like to make sure that I come out of every possible bad
00:57:41.900
situation with everything I went into it with. If I'm a first responder, sheepdog, law enforcement,
00:57:47.880
security, or military person, I have to run to trouble. So my context of, you know, how I come out
00:57:53.480
of it, how I deal with it is quite different, and it is a different discussion. But if we're looking at
00:57:57.760
the everyday person, you know, how do we measure success? And it blows my mind often talking to
00:58:03.440
young guys who get into fistfights. You know, and one of the guys will step up and he'll go,
00:58:08.180
oh, I won that fight. Man, did you see what happened? You know, I beat this guy down and all I got is a
00:58:13.480
black eye. You kind of look at them and often when I have these discussions with them, I say, well,
00:58:18.880
just tell me what were the aspects that led up to that situation? And they'll normally tell you a story
00:58:25.120
of, you know, he said something or I said something or he looked at me or I looked at him.
00:58:30.880
You know, he swore at me, I swore at him. And, you know, then it looked like he was going to throw
00:58:34.440
a punch or he did throw a punch. So I fought back. And, you know, there's this trail of incidents.
00:58:40.320
And when you trail it back down, it usually was, you know, there was an ego-based reason and he missed
00:58:44.620
the opportunity to avoid it, which means if he could have, he wouldn't even have had a black eye in the
00:58:51.220
first place. So actually that's a loss if you really think about it because he came out of the
00:58:55.260
situation worse off than if he had avoided it. Easy to say, particularly when ego comes into play
00:59:01.140
and social pressures are something that's tough on young men. You know, there is an expectation
00:59:07.020
in certain circles that, you know, you'll defend your honor and backing away from a fight is not
00:59:11.600
a good idea. But, you know, if you look at the consequences of getting it wrong, you know,
00:59:17.400
avoidance is by far the best strategy. Well, Gav, this has been a great conversation.
00:59:22.240
Is there someplace else where people can go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:59:25.540
Yes, thanks. So my book, Can I See Your Hands, is available on Amazon or through the publishers,
00:59:31.420
Universal Publishers. We also have an online training academy. If you just go to www.r2s.academy,
00:59:40.580
we've got various online training programs that are aligned to the book. The shortest one is 30
00:59:45.760
minutes, which you can do in five-minute blocks. You can do them on yourself. You can do them on
00:59:49.440
your cell phone. You can do them anywhere. And, you know, we do run face-to-face seminars and
00:59:55.360
programs all over the world. But from my perspective, I think we've got a lot of work to do. The way
01:00:01.640
threats manifest in a complex world now are so different to the way they used to be. And the old
01:00:07.680
model of, you know, sheepdogs keeping us safe is just not practicable the way it used to be.
01:00:13.760
You know, with cybercrime and online crime and, you know, alienated people who resort to violence
01:00:20.200
because they feel they have no other choice, that, you know, I really do feel very strongly that,
01:00:25.560
you know, our goal is to try and get the average person who may have viewed themselves as a sheep
01:00:30.400
before, in other words, security and personal safety is not my problem, to just get the basic
01:00:36.000
knowledge they need to go, in a worst-case scenario, I know what to do. So, you know, from my side,
01:00:40.740
Brett, thank you very much for the opportunity. To the people who are listening, all the people
01:00:44.840
who've read our books or do our programs, thank you very much for stepping up and being part of
01:00:49.460
the solution as opposed to being a passive stand-by victim waiting for something to happen.
01:00:55.880
Well, Gav, thanks for coming on. It's been a great conversation.
01:00:59.700
My guest today was Dr. Gav Schneider. He's the author of the book,
01:01:02.240
Can I See Your Hands? It's available on Amazon.com. And you can also go to r2s.academy,
01:01:06.940
where you can see Gav's courses that he have on personal risk management and safety. And he gave
01:01:11.480
you a free month membership if you use code AOM at checkout. Also check out our show notes at
01:01:15.020
aom.is slash caniceeyourhands, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into
01:01:19.560
this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips
01:01:36.020
and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy
01:01:39.660
the show, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us
01:01:42.660
a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please
01:01:46.220
consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who'd think of something out of it. As
01:01:49.520
always, thank you for your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to