The Art of Manliness - May 13, 2020


#610： Who Lives in Survival Situations, Who Dies, and Why


Episode Stats

Length

46 minutes

Words per Minute

181.58707

Word Count

8,357

Sentence Count

518

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

In disasters or accidents, why do some people survive and others perish? In exploring this question, my guest has uncovered psychological and philosophical insights into not only dealing with life-threatening crises, but strategically navigating any situation that involves risk and decision-making. His name is Lawrence Gonzalez, a pilot, a journalist, and the author of several books, including the focus of today s conversation, Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. Today, we discuss how the story of his father being shot out of the sky during World War II set Lawrence on a journey to explore the mysterious underpinnings of survival.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.180 In disasters or accidents, why do some people survive and others perish?
00:00:15.480 In exploring this question, my guest has uncovered psychological and philosophical insights into
00:00:19.700 not only dealing with life-threatening crises, but strategically navigating any situation
00:00:23.780 that involves risk and decision-making.
00:00:25.720 His name is Lawrence Gonzalez.
00:00:26.780 He's a pilot, a journalist, and the author of several books, including the focus of today's
00:00:30.740 conversation, Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.
00:00:34.360 Today on the show, we discuss how the story of his father being shot out of the sky during
00:00:37.720 World War II set Lawrence on a journey to explore the mysterious underpinnings of survival.
00:00:42.220 Lawrence then explains what happens to us mentally and emotionally in a disaster situation that
00:00:46.040 causes us to make poor decisions, how our mental models can get us in trouble, and why rule
00:00:50.340 breakers are more likely to survive than rule followers.
00:00:53.460 Lawrence then walks us through complexity theory, and how trying to make things safer can
00:00:57.320 counterintuitively make them more dangerous.
00:00:59.220 We then talk about why the frequency with which you yell at your kids correlates to your
00:01:02.540 chances of surviving a life-threatening emergency, before ending our conversation with a discussion
00:01:06.420 of the paradoxes would-be survivors must grapple with, including being both realistic and hopeful
00:01:11.220 at the same time.
00:01:12.320 After the show is over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash deepsurvival.
00:01:16.040 Lawrence joins you now via clearcast.io.
00:01:18.540 Lawrence Gonzalez, welcome to the show.
00:01:33.320 Thank you.
00:01:33.940 So you wrote a book, we're coming up on almost 20 years ago, Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who
00:01:39.420 Dies, and Why.
00:01:41.060 This is a book about the psychology of survival, where you go and you look at accidents that
00:01:45.280 happen in the wilderness, mountain disasters, people getting lost, people drowning in rivers.
00:01:51.240 But this is also a very personal book, because throughout it, we have a story of your own
00:01:56.180 story, but also the story of your father.
00:01:58.180 The story of your father sort of began this search of why people survive in dire situations.
00:02:05.020 Can you tell us about that story and how it sort of kick-started this journey of yours?
00:02:10.140 Absolutely.
00:02:10.620 My father was a combat pilot in World War II.
00:02:14.460 He was a B-17 pilot.
00:02:16.680 He flew out of England and over Germany.
00:02:20.600 And on January 23, 1945, he was doing a bombing raid on Dusseldorf, where there's a big railroad
00:02:28.200 marshalling yard.
00:02:30.040 And before he got to the target, he had his left wing shot off by anti-aircraft fire.
00:02:35.120 Now, this was one of those gigantic raids near the end of the war, where they would put
00:02:41.900 up sometimes upwards of 1,000 planes.
00:02:45.000 This particular mission was 700 planes, approximately.
00:02:48.780 And my dad was the very first plane, and he was the pilot.
00:02:53.320 And so he was ahead of everybody else.
00:02:55.220 Everybody saw this happen.
00:02:57.060 And his left wing was shot off, which meant his right wing was still flying.
00:03:01.660 So it rolled upside down and started spinning, and it spun so fast that the G-forces pulled
00:03:07.900 the airplane apart.
00:03:09.180 And my father was in a little fragment of the cockpit that had torn off, and he fell 27,000
00:03:15.780 feet.
00:03:16.760 He never got out.
00:03:17.960 He never got his parachute, which was under his seat.
00:03:21.420 The G-forces were too great.
00:03:23.140 And so essentially, with the aerodynamics of a bathtub, he fell 27,000 feet and survived.
00:03:31.740 And in fact, he was very badly injured, but the Germans took him to a prison camp.
00:03:36.840 It was a prison camp hospital, and there was a French surgeon who put him back together
00:03:41.140 a bit, as best he could.
00:03:43.200 And my father actually made it home.
00:03:45.140 He was liberated by Patton, and he came home.
00:03:48.200 This was 45.
00:03:49.160 I was born a couple of years later, and I grew up with these stories, which to me sounded
00:03:54.640 incredible.
00:03:55.680 But I grew up also with the sense that, hey, I might not have been here.
00:04:00.320 You know, if my father, everybody else in his crew was killed except him.
00:04:04.180 And if my father had somehow not survived that fall, I wouldn't be here.
00:04:07.960 And that was a very existential kind of thought for a little kid to have.
00:04:13.240 And it was also a very big deal in my growing up, because every January 23rd, my mother would
00:04:19.620 have a special meal and make a cake and celebrate my father's survival.
00:04:24.180 So we were all very aware of this.
00:04:26.420 And it began my quest to find out who lives, who dies, and why, and ultimately led me to
00:04:32.260 write the book Deep Survival.
00:04:34.460 And what's interesting, your father never flew after that, but then you went on yourself to
00:04:38.200 become a stunt pilot.
00:04:40.160 Yeah, I did indeed.
00:04:42.080 So I grew up with the idea that flying an airplane was the coolest thing in the world,
00:04:46.800 and that even cooler would be to fly upside down with smoke.
00:04:51.460 And just as soon as I could arrange it, I got my pilot's license.
00:04:55.180 I've been a pilot most of my life.
00:04:57.260 And for about eight years in the early 90s, throughout the mid-90s, I flew aerobatics.
00:05:04.600 And I flew mostly for fun.
00:05:06.620 I did fly competition a little bit.
00:05:08.380 But I flew a very high-powered aircraft called the Pitt Special, which I probably had no
00:05:13.720 business doing.
00:05:14.620 But there it was.
00:05:15.800 It was the most fun I'd ever had.
00:05:17.540 I think it's interesting.
00:05:18.460 You know, I mean, I think most people, they heard their dad almost died in a plane.
00:05:22.260 They would avoid planes.
00:05:23.360 But you were like, no, I'm going to go.
00:05:25.400 I'm going to do some of the most dangerous things you do.
00:05:27.400 I'm actually going to turn upside down and do flips in a plane.
00:05:29.540 Well, you know, it's funny.
00:05:32.440 I took my father.
00:05:34.300 So when I was flying competition, they have these aerial routines that you have to do.
00:05:38.660 It's like compulsory set of figures that you do in the sky.
00:05:42.540 So it might be, you know, a spin and a roll and a Cuban 8 and an Immelman and whatever other
00:05:50.280 things they prescribe for you.
00:05:52.240 And I was getting ready for a contest.
00:05:53.760 And my father was 70.
00:05:56.200 And I said, you want to go?
00:05:57.620 You want to see what I do?
00:05:58.520 And he said, sure.
00:05:59.340 And we went up and I took him through my sportsman routine in the aerobatics competition.
00:06:06.120 And he didn't say much, you know, we were on headphones together and got back on the
00:06:11.440 ground.
00:06:12.000 And he said, you're a really good pilot, which is like the ultimate, you know, that I've
00:06:17.820 been waiting for all my life.
00:06:20.020 Well, in your book, Deep Survival, you focus primarily on disasters that happen when people
00:06:26.220 are doing recreational activities in the outdoors.
00:06:29.040 Why did you key in on that particular topic?
00:06:32.500 So I had been working for National Geographic doing what we would call adventure journalism.
00:06:38.340 National Geographic had a magazine for some years called National Geographic Adventure.
00:06:44.000 And I would go out.
00:06:45.460 We had a joke.
00:06:46.240 My editor, John Rasmus, and I had a joke.
00:06:49.080 It was that he would try to get me killed and I'd try to come back with a story.
00:06:53.140 So we'd go, you know, on adventures.
00:06:55.060 Like I would go learn rock climbing or I'd go to Glacier National Park and get myself lost.
00:07:00.520 And after a few years of doing this, I came to him one day and said, you know, we glamorize
00:07:07.380 this stuff and we publish these beautiful photographs and people want to go out there
00:07:12.100 and do what we've done.
00:07:13.140 And I think we owe it to them to say, hey, you can get killed out there.
00:07:16.580 And here are some things that maybe you should think about before you go.
00:07:19.420 And he said, like, no, no, no.
00:07:21.480 The advertisers would never go for that.
00:07:23.380 They'd hate that.
00:07:24.340 And I kept after him actually for a couple of years before he finally said, okay, go ahead
00:07:29.660 and do it.
00:07:30.540 And I did a piece in the magazine called The Rules of Adventure.
00:07:35.600 And it was this stuff about the psychology of like how people make, essentially the meaning
00:07:43.120 of it was why smart people do stupid things.
00:07:46.660 And that got me started down the road of doing deep survival in earnest.
00:07:53.320 And this really all began back in the early 70s when I was investigating airline
00:07:59.540 crashes.
00:08:01.120 And I would always go to the NTSB and say, you know, this guy who crashed his plane,
00:08:07.620 the pilot, he's a really smart guy.
00:08:10.340 He's got 30,000 hours.
00:08:12.140 He's ex-military.
00:08:13.060 He's got a master's in engineering.
00:08:14.880 How come he did this stupid thing and flew his plane into the ground?
00:08:17.700 And they would always say, well, we don't know.
00:08:19.740 He's dead.
00:08:20.700 And we can't interview him.
00:08:22.140 We'd like to know that too.
00:08:23.280 And I always thought that's the most interesting question.
00:08:26.360 It's like, why did the smart guy do this stupid thing?
00:08:30.140 And so when I wrote Deep Survival, I did write about all these wilderness accidents and recreational
00:08:35.520 accidents.
00:08:36.100 But I tried also to connect them to other things in our lives that involve risk and decision
00:08:41.600 making, such as running a hedge fund, being a cancer doctor, you know, any kind of ordinary
00:08:48.400 activity that involves incomplete information or confusing information where you have to make
00:08:54.400 a decision.
00:08:55.780 Well, yeah.
00:08:55.940 And the thing about the outdoors, it's you're in a complex environment where you have very
00:09:00.960 little control.
00:09:01.760 I mean, I have actually no control over most of the stuff, the weather, the terrain, and
00:09:06.420 that's like most of life.
00:09:07.820 You're living in a complex environment, a business.
00:09:09.820 There's so many decisions you have to make, and you don't have a lot of control over those
00:09:12.460 factors.
00:09:13.680 Right.
00:09:14.820 So yeah, in the first part of your book, you talk about, okay, why do people get in these
00:09:19.140 pickles in the first place?
00:09:20.200 Why do people get into accidents in the wilderness?
00:09:23.400 And you focus in the first part of the book talking about the role of emotions play that
00:09:27.920 people, sort of, I don't know, cause people to make bad decisions.
00:09:31.760 So what happens to our emotions whenever we face a survival or disaster scenario?
00:09:38.100 So everyone is familiar with this scenario.
00:09:42.000 I'm at home.
00:09:43.360 My wife is at home.
00:09:45.060 We both know we're here.
00:09:47.040 We both know that nobody else is here because we're sheltering in place because of the coronavirus.
00:09:52.360 Moreover, we know that there most likely aren't any bears in our house right now.
00:09:58.480 So I come up the stairs and I come around the corner and all of a sudden my wife is right
00:10:02.560 in front of me coming the other way and I grab my chest and I go, oh my gosh, you scared me.
00:10:07.840 And we laugh.
00:10:09.460 And then the whole thing settles down.
00:10:11.040 But during that moment of getting startled, some interesting things take place because
00:10:15.300 none of my cognitive knowledge that I just told you about makes any difference at all.
00:10:20.200 The emotional response of being startled is full-blown almost instantly.
00:10:26.240 And it means my heart is racing, my steroid levels go up, my bloodstream, my muscles tense,
00:10:31.520 my breathing quickens.
00:10:33.020 Everything for a fight or flight response is amped up, even though there's absolutely no
00:10:38.580 logical reason for it.
00:10:40.900 So what does this tell us?
00:10:42.840 This tells us, first of all, emotion and reason work like a seesaw for the most part.
00:10:47.460 And when emotion is very high, reason goes out the window and it just doesn't function
00:10:53.640 at all.
00:10:54.420 In these situations like this, we don't tend to make up new behaviors.
00:10:59.640 We tend to do what we've done before and we don't tend to get much choice in how we
00:11:05.220 react.
00:11:05.640 So no matter how many years my wife and I have been married, no matter how many times this
00:11:10.140 has happened in our little house, I can't prevent it from happening.
00:11:13.380 And we have this joke because she'll be coming around the corner and she'll hear me on the
00:11:17.520 stairs and she'll say, bear, bear.
00:11:21.240 Like she knows she's going to startle me and is trying to prevent it.
00:11:24.720 So that's essentially in many of the scenarios I describe in the book, Deep Survival, I'm
00:11:30.980 describing people who are overcome by emotion when if they took the time to sit down and think
00:11:36.040 about what they were doing, they wouldn't do it.
00:11:37.660 Well, and you also talk about this concept of there's primary emotions and there's secondary
00:11:42.400 emotions and people who survive tend to, they've trained up those secondary emotions.
00:11:47.540 Yeah.
00:11:48.360 So when we're born, we have a set of built-in emotions.
00:11:52.640 Little babies have, you know, they can cry if you hold a baby up, you know, under his arms
00:11:58.980 in front of you, he'll kick his legs rhythmically.
00:12:01.520 And there are a bunch of reactions he'll have.
00:12:04.080 In fact, babies have a real powerful startle reaction.
00:12:07.800 If you make a loud noise, the baby will startle and cry.
00:12:10.920 And most animals of our kind, I believe, are born with an innate fear of snakes and shapes
00:12:17.500 like snakes.
00:12:18.880 But beyond these primary emotions, as they call them, you will develop all kinds of secondary
00:12:24.520 emotions.
00:12:25.280 So, and they follow a pretty well-known path.
00:12:29.560 You will learn to like the things that are good for you.
00:12:32.360 And you will learn to dislike the things that are bad for you.
00:12:35.920 And that means you will label those things with either a good emotion or a bad emotion.
00:12:41.260 And it just depends on who you are, what things you're going to be attracted to.
00:12:44.780 But food obviously is a big one.
00:12:48.540 Some of that is primary.
00:12:50.480 We're born with the response to sweet things that we have, which is we like them.
00:12:56.320 We don't have to train that.
00:12:57.820 But like when my son Jonas was, I don't know, two, maybe two or three, when the garbage truck
00:13:04.180 would come in the alley, he would get all excited and scream, garbage truck, garbage truck.
00:13:09.640 And he would be like quivering with excitement because to him, this was a great, you know,
00:13:15.760 display of something that he enjoyed.
00:13:18.760 And gradually over time, he got used to the garbage truck and it faded into, you know, the
00:13:23.860 background.
00:13:24.240 And so this is kind of the course that emotions take.
00:13:28.760 And I mean, those sort of those emotions that we associate with events, you call those
00:13:32.840 emotional bookmarks, right?
00:13:34.040 So like if something happens, you either bookmark it as good or bookmark it as bad.
00:13:39.380 And then you might even bookmark it with certain actions that you do as a result of experiencing
00:13:44.100 that event that triggered that emotion.
00:13:45.880 Yeah, so one of the stories I tell in the book is about a group of snowmobilers, and they
00:13:52.840 are actually going out in search of a snowmobiler who didn't come back.
00:13:56.860 And they're told at the beginning of the day, the avalanche danger is very high.
00:14:01.900 There will be no high marking today.
00:14:03.780 And high marking is where you run your snowmobile up the side of the mountain, see how high you
00:14:08.140 can go.
00:14:08.620 And then before you have to turn around and come back down.
00:14:10.800 And the guy who makes the highest mark is the winner.
00:14:15.220 And this is a real fun thing to do with a snowmobile.
00:14:19.460 And so they're puttering along out there in the woods trying to find this guy.
00:14:23.960 And they stop for some reason.
00:14:26.780 And one of the guys suddenly is overcome by emotion and races up the hill.
00:14:33.280 And he knows not to do it.
00:14:35.240 He's been told not to do it.
00:14:36.440 He's agreed not to do it.
00:14:38.280 He understands the danger.
00:14:39.440 But at that moment, with the smell of the woods and the sound of the engines and the
00:14:44.220 throttle in his hand, he just couldn't resist.
00:14:47.280 And he races up the hill.
00:14:48.900 Of course, the reason the story is in the book is because it ends badly.
00:14:52.580 He triggers an avalanche and somebody dies.
00:14:55.320 And then everybody stands around and says, well, you know, why did he do it?
00:14:58.800 And the answer is he did it because of the nature of the emotional response.
00:15:02.460 And that's an emotional bookmark.
00:15:03.720 Or something in that scene or a combination of those things in the scene had been embedded in his emotional system time and again until it became automatic.
00:15:14.100 And just the smell of the pine, you know, could have been enough to make him do this without thinking.
00:15:19.860 And so, you know, it's an extremely powerful system.
00:15:24.820 It's meant for our survival and obviously has worked because here we are.
00:15:29.620 Yeah.
00:15:29.680 So that was an example.
00:15:30.460 He probably, he'd done that lots of times before, had a positive emotional experience with it.
00:15:36.200 And then he had it again.
00:15:37.220 He did it thinking it would be like the other times where it'd be a fun experience and it didn't turn out the way.
00:15:42.060 Well, and the key to it is you don't think.
00:15:44.500 So his body had told him this is good.
00:15:47.440 And every time he'd done it before, it had been good.
00:15:50.060 It had been reliably good.
00:15:51.880 All his time on a snowmobile, he'd had the same experience.
00:15:55.760 And you hear this all the time from people who get dead, as the saying goes.
00:16:01.620 And their friends would say, but we always did it this way.
00:16:04.320 We've done it before.
00:16:05.160 We've never had a problem before.
00:16:06.440 And I say in the book, you know, you read in the newspaper about the accident and it says he was a very experienced snowmobiler.
00:16:14.280 And very experienced may simply mean he's done the wrong thing more times than you have.
00:16:19.980 And it finally caught up with him.
00:16:22.140 Right.
00:16:22.320 Well, and the other example you gave of someone who had some emotional bookmarks, you know, embedded in him, but it ended up poorly for him was, I guess he was like a former army ranger, special forces guy.
00:16:32.860 And he went whitewater rafting, fell out of the boat, and he actually was pretty calm and relaxed.
00:16:38.920 He's like, oh, yeah, this is, you know, I don't have to worry about this.
00:16:42.100 I've come out good when I've been put in situations like that.
00:16:45.320 And he wasn't thinking and he made a bad choice.
00:16:48.000 He ended up drowning.
00:16:48.860 He got pinned in to a log.
00:16:52.120 Yeah.
00:16:52.220 And so he was an army ranger and in army ranger training, if you need to be rescued, you're out of the program.
00:16:58.940 You do not get rescued.
00:17:01.420 You're trained that rescue is not a good thing.
00:17:03.900 You're the guy who rescues other people.
00:17:06.040 So when he fell out of the raft, the guide jumped in the water to rescue him.
00:17:10.980 And I think it was Colonel Gabba was his name.
00:17:14.460 Pushed the rescuer away and laughed at him like, you know, I'm an army ranger.
00:17:18.300 You don't need to rescue me.
00:17:19.260 And moreover, he had a bad emotional bookmark associated with being rescued and a good emotional bookmark for taking care of himself.
00:17:28.660 He just didn't understand the nature of the hazard he was in.
00:17:32.660 And that's often the case with people who get in trouble.
00:17:36.400 They don't realize how big the hazard is.
00:17:38.920 And so it's, you know, it's always good to think about your environment and what you don't know about it.
00:17:44.260 When your environment changes, you can't just keep acting the way you've acted all your life.
00:17:48.640 All right.
00:17:49.380 So the big takeaway there, oftentimes when people make decisions that kill them in the wilderness, they're not typically thinking.
00:17:55.800 Their emotions are making the decisions for them.
00:17:57.980 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:17:59.960 And now back to the show.
00:18:04.480 What I love about your book is you go in deep in this idea of mental models.
00:18:07.800 And we've written about this on the website and had guests talk about mental models with, you know, John Boyd and his OODA loop and whatnot.
00:18:15.180 But what role do mental models play in accidents happening in the wild?
00:18:19.440 So just to, for those of your listeners who aren't sure about this, mental models are something we create all our lives to make ourselves efficient.
00:18:29.820 And if you have little children around, you can watch them doing it.
00:18:32.740 You get a one, one-and-a-half-year-old who's able to say a word or two and walk, and this child encounters a dog, and somebody will say doggy, and the child will immediately learn what a dog is.
00:18:46.280 And it doesn't matter from there on if it's a Great Dane or a Chihuahua.
00:18:50.600 This child is never going to mistake a goat for a dog.
00:18:54.000 They will have a sort of template for what a dog is, and I call this a mental model.
00:19:00.000 And it will free them of the necessity for examining every dog they encounter to see if it's not actually a buffalo or a cat.
00:19:08.200 They know it's a dog.
00:19:09.640 And we do this with everything in our environment.
00:19:12.020 Anything that we see multiple, you know, if you look at a book,
00:19:15.420 at different books, at different angles, they all give different visual impressions, and yet we know exactly what they are.
00:19:23.420 So we tend to find these big groupings of things.
00:19:26.360 And then once we have them, we figure out things to do with them that I call behavioral scripts.
00:19:31.340 So, for example, you can teach a child to tie his shoe.
00:19:36.240 Teaching someone to tie his shoe is very difficult to do,
00:19:39.180 but it produces this kind of miracle in which something that takes all of his attention and conscious, deliberate thought
00:19:46.220 turns into something that takes none of his attention and is absolutely automatic.
00:19:50.760 So we tend to do this with everything in our lives.
00:19:54.180 If we do something enough, it becomes automatic.
00:19:57.080 We instantly recognize the thing and what we're supposed to do with the thing,
00:20:01.480 and we also label it with emotional valence of some kind, that it's good or that it's bad.
00:20:07.480 Most people will very quickly and early on, if it's not a primary emotion already, learn to, you know, brush an insect off.
00:20:16.020 So if an insect lands on your face, you're going to immediately respond to it.
00:20:21.080 But everything in our life will become that way.
00:20:23.520 It's like learning how to swing a golf club.
00:20:27.060 It becomes fully automatic.
00:20:28.820 But the problem with mental models whenever you're out in the wild is,
00:20:33.640 and you face a situation where things get dangerous,
00:20:36.420 like you might not ever experience that situation that you're finding yourself in,
00:20:40.800 and as a result, you still behave based on prior assumptions or a prior mental model,
00:20:47.120 and that ends up getting you killed.
00:20:49.300 Right.
00:20:49.880 So we tend, as I think I said this earlier, we tend not to invent new behaviors under stress.
00:20:56.080 If we're in a stressful situation, a high emotional situation, we tend to do what we've done before,
00:21:02.320 and that can lead us into a dangerous place or take our lives.
00:21:08.900 There's one case in the book in which a guy gets lost, and he, people don't tend to backtrack.
00:21:16.480 He's under a lot of stress.
00:21:17.560 He's exhausted.
00:21:18.720 The hike has taken longer.
00:21:20.200 He's been through a storm.
00:21:21.260 A bunch of things happen, and he's stopped making good decisions.
00:21:25.860 And so he starts running around in a kind of panic to try to find out where he is,
00:21:31.700 which is a very typical, you know, you run from danger, and it's kind of an automatic thing.
00:21:38.280 Eventually, he gets himself under control and survives.
00:21:40.760 But many times, young kids, not very young, but like teenage kids, will start running,
00:21:47.020 and they'll just run themselves to death.
00:21:49.100 So this automatic response can be quite dangerous.
00:21:52.800 And you also talk about how, you know, our mental models are so embedded in us.
00:21:57.220 You talk about the research that shows whenever people do face a disaster situation,
00:22:02.180 like a fire in a building or like in a plane crash,
00:22:05.480 people, you think the normal response would just be panic,
00:22:09.480 but like a lot of people just sit there and act like everything's normal.
00:22:12.720 Because like the mental model still hasn't updated that,
00:22:15.880 oh, wait, something bad is happening right now.
00:22:18.140 So there are a couple of things I would say about that.
00:22:20.560 The first is there's a case, and I don't know if it's in the book Deep Survival or not,
00:22:25.640 but it's in a dorm room.
00:22:28.620 A girl has been in the habit of coming out of her dorm room,
00:22:32.720 going to the left to get to class every day, you know, going to the left in the hallway on,
00:22:39.200 I believe it was the second floor, and there's a fire.
00:22:42.640 And the exit is to the right that's closest to her room,
00:22:45.820 and she goes out her door and runs to the left and dies,
00:22:48.340 because that's what she had done all along.
00:22:51.200 In the case of freezing that you mentioned,
00:22:54.220 yes, it's very common in airline crashes to find people strapped in their seats,
00:22:58.680 otherwise uninjured, but dead from smoke inhalation because they just didn't do anything.
00:23:04.740 This is a very common mammalian reaction to freeze.
00:23:08.940 And if you look at the video, I believe it was 1996 when the Atlanta Olympics were bombed,
00:23:15.460 there's a video of a crowd seen there.
00:23:18.220 And when the bomb goes off, everybody drops to one knee.
00:23:21.000 And then after a moment or so, they run away.
00:23:25.080 But that first freezing response is very, very typical of mammals,
00:23:30.720 and it's kind of an orienting response.
00:23:33.840 However, under extreme trauma, you can get a very deep freezing response
00:23:38.900 that can actually do damage and in some cases can even kill you.
00:23:43.440 This is a response inherited from our reptilian ancestors
00:23:46.740 whose primary defensive mechanism is freezing.
00:23:51.000 And they can lower their metabolism so that they can stay underwater for a long time.
00:23:55.700 If you're a mammal, you're hot-blooded,
00:23:57.640 and you need a lot of oxygen for the big brain if you're a person.
00:24:01.140 And so if you do this freeze response and lower your own metabolism,
00:24:04.380 you can hurt yourself.
00:24:05.680 But it's a very real thing.
00:24:08.280 I think another example, you just mentioned the Atlanta bombing that happened in the 90s.
00:24:12.180 That jogged my memory, something I remember reading from your book,
00:24:15.200 of a mental model getting people killed was with the world trade attack.
00:24:19.120 And so the example you gave was, first, we all know about the bombing that happened in the 90s.
00:24:25.260 And the thing that people did to help them survive was go up.
00:24:29.060 Because down was where the bombing happened.
00:24:32.240 And so when the World Trade Center attack happened in 2001,
00:24:36.340 when they felt the building shake and they say there's an explosion,
00:24:40.280 like people's mental models, well, last time this happened,
00:24:43.060 you had to go up to get rescued.
00:24:45.380 But that actually ended up getting people killed.
00:24:47.820 Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:24:49.520 There had been, at the time of the first bombing,
00:24:52.840 I forget how they got there,
00:24:54.180 but they had somebody who was able to unlock the door to the roof.
00:24:57.200 And they got on the roof of the building and were rescued from there.
00:25:00.840 And so the people who had that memory
00:25:03.380 had formed an indelible mental model
00:25:06.980 and behavioral script that matched that.
00:25:10.600 And they went up.
00:25:11.960 By the time they realized they couldn't get out on the roof,
00:25:15.120 which wouldn't have done them any good anyway,
00:25:17.020 they started to go down and they could no longer get down.
00:25:20.320 As you say, they perished.
00:25:21.840 And this, again, is a very common response.
00:25:24.800 And we have to be aware of, in stressful situations or dangerous situations,
00:25:30.800 we have to be aware of that response
00:25:33.940 and take the time to think and plan and act.
00:25:38.880 And in the book, Deep Survival,
00:25:40.240 I have at the end of the book an appendix
00:25:42.660 with 12 sort of traits of good survivors
00:25:45.700 that include these pieces of advice of how to manage that.
00:25:51.280 Well, and yeah, with mental models,
00:25:52.820 one thing that stood out to me is that
00:25:55.020 the people that typically survive are rule breakers.
00:25:58.020 Like they break the rules.
00:25:58.860 They don't follow those scripts
00:26:00.580 that they thought they're supposed to do.
00:26:02.440 And that actually ends up saving them.
00:26:04.220 Yeah, exactly.
00:26:05.920 And it turns out that in medicine, for example,
00:26:09.000 doctors find that in cases like cancer,
00:26:13.460 people who follow the rules tend not to do as well.
00:26:18.320 So if you say to somebody, you know,
00:26:19.620 you've got six months to live,
00:26:20.820 they die in six months because that's what you told them.
00:26:23.880 Whereas the rule breaker, the rebel,
00:26:26.900 will probably say, well, to heck with you.
00:26:29.240 You know, I'm going to live again.
00:26:30.460 It's a typical, we hear this all the time.
00:26:32.740 It's like they come back from war
00:26:34.460 and the doctor says, you'll never walk again.
00:26:36.940 And the guy says, oh yeah, well, watch this.
00:26:39.120 And he learns to walk again.
00:26:40.680 And so in the book, there is a case
00:26:44.540 where a fellow breaks his leg at 19,000 feet
00:26:48.160 on a mountain in Peru.
00:26:51.380 And he says to himself, wow, I'm dead.
00:26:54.680 I just broke my leg at 19,000 feet.
00:26:56.760 There's no way to get off this mountain.
00:26:59.400 However, I can see that I can make my way
00:27:02.500 over to that spot over there.
00:27:03.800 I think I'll make my way over there to that spot.
00:27:06.240 And each time he does one thing, he thinks, wow, I'm dead,
00:27:10.160 but I'll just do one more thing.
00:27:11.720 And he keeps going and eventually actually
00:27:13.700 gets himself off the mountain.
00:27:14.920 And this is a rule breaking kind of scenario.
00:27:19.300 All right.
00:27:19.440 So our emotions make our decisions for us,
00:27:22.180 which ends up killing us.
00:27:23.500 We oftentimes are using out-of-date mental models
00:27:27.240 to make decisions and behavioral scripts
00:27:28.940 that can get us in trouble.
00:27:30.920 But besides human psychology causing accidents,
00:27:33.640 you also get into complexity theory.
00:27:36.240 Which I thought was really fascinating.
00:27:38.400 I think we've heard ideas of like,
00:27:39.980 I think people have heard about complexity theory,
00:27:42.420 but can you kind of walk us through
00:27:43.860 what role complexity theory plays
00:27:46.380 and why accidents happen?
00:27:49.040 So complexity theory applies to certain kinds of systems
00:27:52.920 where there's no central authority.
00:27:55.180 So if you take an example like the stock market,
00:27:57.800 the stock market is really pretty simple.
00:27:59.740 You can buy something or you can sell something.
00:28:01.840 I mean, there's lots of complex schemes in there,
00:28:04.800 but those are the basic rules.
00:28:07.640 And yet out of those basic,
00:28:09.460 and you have a bunch of agents,
00:28:10.900 each of which is making his own decision
00:28:14.620 about what to buy or what to sell.
00:28:16.680 And out of that simple interaction,
00:28:18.880 you get this very complex,
00:28:20.900 mathematically beautiful result,
00:28:23.500 which is the price of stocks.
00:28:25.420 And the price of stocks moves each day
00:28:28.180 by a certain amount.
00:28:29.120 And there's a bunch of small movements
00:28:31.300 that are typical.
00:28:32.580 But every once in a while,
00:28:33.580 you get a really big movement,
00:28:34.900 either up or down,
00:28:36.220 like we saw recently in the crash.
00:28:38.860 People are attributing this crash
00:28:40.720 to the coronavirus.
00:28:41.980 But in fact, that's not really correct to say.
00:28:45.360 The crash is typical of a complex system.
00:28:49.560 And so in the book,
00:28:51.440 in Deep Survival,
00:28:52.480 I say that if you look at mountaineering accidents,
00:28:56.040 and I use Mount Hood as an example,
00:28:58.740 you will see that all kinds of people
00:29:01.320 go out there to climb these mountains all the time.
00:29:03.600 They're very crowded with people.
00:29:05.820 And every day that there are
00:29:07.800 a bunch of people out there,
00:29:08.860 you have people making
00:29:09.760 these individual decisions
00:29:11.160 and you're having little accidents
00:29:13.120 of all sizes.
00:29:14.780 People slip and fall.
00:29:16.040 They use an ice axe to self-arrest,
00:29:19.480 you know, or somebody may break a leg
00:29:20.940 or somebody may try glissading and fail.
00:29:23.620 But all these little accidents
00:29:25.380 are happening all the time
00:29:26.360 in the background of this system.
00:29:28.320 And then every once in a while,
00:29:29.820 they all get together
00:29:30.640 and you get a really big accident.
00:29:32.520 Or some days you get no accidents at all.
00:29:34.780 So it behaves kind of like a complex system.
00:29:37.760 And it is certain
00:29:39.860 that you will get these accidents.
00:29:42.380 There's no way to take the accidents
00:29:43.960 out of the system.
00:29:45.260 And the same is true with the stock market.
00:29:47.300 There's no way to take the crashes
00:29:48.720 out of the system or the bubbles.
00:29:51.520 Well, yeah, with that Mount Hood example,
00:29:52.640 I think is a good one
00:29:53.860 to explore complexity theory.
00:29:55.820 Because yeah, the mountain itself
00:29:57.400 is a complex thing.
00:29:59.380 The terrain is always changing.
00:30:00.860 The weather is changing.
00:30:02.020 And then you have all these people
00:30:03.720 who are interacting with that terrain
00:30:05.240 who are modifying it and changing it.
00:30:07.340 But the other way that complexity theory
00:30:09.540 can cause accidents
00:30:11.160 or is a part of the reason
00:30:12.880 why accidents happens is
00:30:13.900 when we oftentimes,
00:30:15.900 when we try to make things safer,
00:30:17.980 we only add more complexity
00:30:19.960 to the system,
00:30:20.680 which increases the chances
00:30:23.100 that a big accident can occur.
00:30:24.840 And this happens with mountaineering
00:30:26.000 with how people try to be safe
00:30:29.120 by roping themselves
00:30:29.920 to everyone that's
00:30:31.080 on their little mountain group.
00:30:33.180 Yeah.
00:30:33.460 So the accident that I described
00:30:35.460 in Deep Survival,
00:30:37.500 there were several groups
00:30:39.280 on the mountain above,
00:30:42.220 you know, one above the other,
00:30:44.000 which is not a good idea anyway.
00:30:46.680 And they had roped themselves together.
00:30:48.680 However, they hadn't attached
00:30:50.640 the rope to the mountain.
00:30:52.780 And so when you rope yourself
00:30:54.400 together with someone else,
00:30:56.080 the mountaineers who know
00:30:57.520 what they're doing
00:30:58.280 refer to it as a suicide pact,
00:31:00.020 because if one of you falls,
00:31:02.140 the other will fall
00:31:02.900 or all of you will fall.
00:31:04.740 And they don't appreciate
00:31:05.740 the forces involved
00:31:07.200 when somebody falls.
00:31:09.040 And so they think
00:31:09.800 they can self-arrest
00:31:11.080 with an axe,
00:31:12.440 which they carry,
00:31:13.760 but they can't.
00:31:15.280 And that's exactly
00:31:16.000 what happened at Mount Hood.
00:31:18.700 The guy at the very top fell.
00:31:21.380 And the rule
00:31:22.140 in roping yourself together
00:31:23.400 is the top man must not fall
00:31:25.220 because if the top man falls,
00:31:27.140 he's going to pull everybody
00:31:28.040 off the mountain.
00:31:28.620 And that's exactly what happened.
00:31:29.820 So this tumbling effect
00:31:32.040 of people coming down with ropes
00:31:34.000 caught the next group
00:31:35.340 and they went tumbling
00:31:36.640 and that caught the next group
00:31:38.020 and they went tumbling
00:31:38.820 and everybody wound up
00:31:39.920 in a crevasse
00:31:41.180 and three people died.
00:31:43.020 And so they had created
00:31:44.100 this very complex,
00:31:45.500 high energy system
00:31:46.560 without ever realizing
00:31:47.880 what they were doing.
00:31:49.380 And of course,
00:31:50.020 it gave way.
00:31:50.940 Then it got even more complex
00:31:52.900 because now all of a sudden
00:31:53.980 there's an accident,
00:31:55.220 a fatal accident,
00:31:56.460 and rescuers start pouring in
00:31:58.280 from every direction.
00:31:59.140 Now you've made the mountain
00:32:00.100 more complex
00:32:00.920 and raised the likelihood
00:32:03.200 that there'll be more accidents.
00:32:05.260 And indeed,
00:32:05.740 a helicopter came up
00:32:06.900 to try to work the incident
00:32:08.720 and the helicopter crashed.
00:32:10.840 So it's one of these systems
00:32:13.040 that just gets worse and worse
00:32:14.300 as you tweak it.
00:32:15.940 And complex systems
00:32:17.180 tend to be this way.
00:32:18.740 They have a number
00:32:20.180 of striking characteristics,
00:32:22.640 one of which is
00:32:23.280 small inputs
00:32:24.620 can lead to very big outputs.
00:32:27.780 So this is called
00:32:28.580 the butterfly effect.
00:32:30.280 The flapping
00:32:30.720 of a butterfly
00:32:31.820 in Brazil
00:32:33.220 can cause
00:32:34.380 a hurricane
00:32:35.000 in Texas.
00:32:36.840 And that's a
00:32:37.640 sort of famous
00:32:38.620 catchphrase
00:32:40.220 having to do
00:32:41.080 with complex systems.
00:32:42.820 And the big takeaway
00:32:43.740 I took from
00:32:44.240 your section
00:32:45.360 on complex systems
00:32:46.380 is that
00:32:46.800 if you're going to
00:32:48.380 engage in an outdoor activity,
00:32:50.280 there's always going to be risk.
00:32:51.300 Like, you can't eliminate the risk.
00:32:52.640 It's just
00:32:52.920 that risk is part of the system
00:32:54.480 and you cannot eliminate.
00:32:55.440 And even if you try to eliminate,
00:32:56.820 you might just make things worse.
00:32:58.320 Yeah.
00:32:59.620 Exactly.
00:33:00.340 And so
00:33:01.100 in trying to make it safer
00:33:03.080 by roping themselves together,
00:33:04.260 they made it worse.
00:33:05.160 If they had gone individually,
00:33:06.680 only one guy would have fallen.
00:33:08.300 And machines are like that too.
00:33:10.260 We take things
00:33:11.080 like nuclear power plants
00:33:12.440 and we put a safety valve on
00:33:13.880 that's going to shut it off
00:33:15.040 if something goes wrong.
00:33:16.620 And it turns out
00:33:17.340 it shuts off
00:33:18.860 the one section
00:33:20.440 that's cooling the thing
00:33:21.740 and the whole thing melts down.
00:33:23.500 And it's typical,
00:33:24.640 there's a guy named Perrault,
00:33:26.060 Charles Perrault,
00:33:27.120 who wrote a book
00:33:28.600 in the 1980s
00:33:29.540 called Normal Accidents.
00:33:31.700 And it was about
00:33:32.320 this very phenomenon
00:33:33.400 of how
00:33:34.580 when you deal
00:33:35.380 with these complex
00:33:36.300 machine systems
00:33:37.600 that are tightly coupled,
00:33:39.160 you get all kinds
00:33:39.820 of weird interactions
00:33:41.460 that were not intended
00:33:42.780 so that, for example,
00:33:44.780 the lavatory
00:33:46.140 on an airliner
00:33:47.320 can cause the plane
00:33:48.720 to crash,
00:33:49.360 you know,
00:33:50.100 because it leaks
00:33:50.880 and the ice forms
00:33:52.040 on the outside
00:33:52.720 of the airplane
00:33:53.560 because it's so cold
00:33:55.020 and the ice breaks off
00:33:56.100 and flies into the engine
00:33:57.460 and there you've got
00:33:58.960 an accident
00:33:59.460 that who would expect
00:34:00.560 a toilet
00:34:01.040 to bring down an airplane.
00:34:02.820 And so,
00:34:03.340 understanding complex systems
00:34:04.700 and understanding
00:34:06.340 how they
00:34:07.000 don't work
00:34:08.640 the way you expect
00:34:09.660 normal things to work
00:34:11.200 that is
00:34:12.240 in a linear fashion
00:34:13.320 can save you
00:34:14.480 a lot of grief.
00:34:16.100 So,
00:34:16.320 the accidents happen
00:34:17.240 and our typical,
00:34:18.200 the typical response
00:34:18.960 that we talked about earlier
00:34:19.960 is people panic
00:34:21.460 and they start
00:34:22.080 making dumb decisions
00:34:23.240 but survivors tend
00:34:24.420 not to do that.
00:34:25.880 I mean,
00:34:26.080 or they do
00:34:26.840 but then they're able
00:34:27.440 to get control
00:34:28.100 over it really fast.
00:34:29.240 What have you,
00:34:29.780 in your research,
00:34:30.360 what did you find that,
00:34:31.320 what's the difference
00:34:31.960 between people
00:34:32.520 who don't panic
00:34:33.340 and let their emotions
00:34:34.580 get the best of them?
00:34:35.560 So,
00:34:36.620 as I've said
00:34:37.400 a couple of times already,
00:34:38.440 you don't tend to invent
00:34:39.520 new behaviors
00:34:40.460 in stressful situations
00:34:42.160 and so,
00:34:43.420 how you behave
00:34:44.400 in your life
00:34:45.500 before the event,
00:34:47.320 whatever it is
00:34:48.100 that's going to
00:34:49.120 demand that you survive it
00:34:50.540 will be how you behave
00:34:52.080 in the face of an emergency
00:34:53.740 for the most part.
00:34:55.000 There will be exceptions
00:34:56.160 to this
00:34:56.720 but if you're
00:34:57.720 the kind of person
00:34:58.580 who
00:34:59.260 is used to
00:35:01.040 being calm
00:35:01.960 in the face
00:35:03.000 of adversity,
00:35:03.660 you will bring
00:35:05.460 that same ability
00:35:06.500 to be calm
00:35:07.280 to whatever
00:35:08.260 emergency faces you.
00:35:10.180 If you're the kind
00:35:11.080 of person
00:35:11.520 who's constantly
00:35:12.460 going off,
00:35:14.280 you know,
00:35:14.800 half-cocked,
00:35:15.880 this does not bode well
00:35:17.480 for how you'll behave
00:35:18.540 when things really
00:35:19.460 go wrong
00:35:20.100 and so,
00:35:22.020 so it's really
00:35:22.580 a lifelong quest
00:35:24.140 for equilibrium
00:35:25.760 that brings you
00:35:27.520 to survive better
00:35:29.260 when you're called
00:35:30.560 on to do so
00:35:31.500 and
00:35:32.800 this can be
00:35:34.020 anything from,
00:35:35.280 you know,
00:35:35.960 are you always
00:35:36.540 yelling at your children,
00:35:38.040 you know,
00:35:38.400 when you could be
00:35:39.260 calmly talking to them,
00:35:41.060 you know,
00:35:41.260 are you always
00:35:42.020 irritated by things
00:35:43.340 that happen in life
00:35:44.320 when you could be
00:35:45.720 simply facing them
00:35:47.120 and saying this is life.
00:35:48.280 One of the
00:35:48.800 things that psychologists
00:35:50.220 talk about
00:35:51.020 is the locus
00:35:52.080 of control
00:35:52.940 and there are two
00:35:54.620 forms that that takes.
00:35:55.880 One is external
00:35:56.860 and that person
00:35:58.440 believes that things
00:35:59.320 are happening to him,
00:36:00.680 that the world
00:36:01.680 is falling down
00:36:02.620 on him,
00:36:03.100 that things are
00:36:03.700 other people's faults.
00:36:05.680 If he trips
00:36:06.540 over the sidewalk,
00:36:07.620 he'll sue somebody
00:36:08.800 instead of saying,
00:36:10.300 wow,
00:36:10.460 I should be more careful
00:36:11.400 and the person
00:36:12.460 with the internal
00:36:13.240 locus of control
00:36:14.120 believes that he's
00:36:15.160 in charge
00:36:15.800 and can make
00:36:16.740 things happen
00:36:17.480 and if bad
00:36:18.560 things happen,
00:36:19.700 he asks,
00:36:20.380 well,
00:36:20.980 how can I make
00:36:21.680 that into an
00:36:22.300 opportunity?
00:36:23.480 There's some
00:36:24.340 lesson to be learned
00:36:25.560 here or some
00:36:26.280 opportunity to take
00:36:27.300 from this.
00:36:28.460 I know lots of
00:36:29.240 people who are
00:36:29.920 in the world
00:36:30.860 of investment
00:36:31.500 and when the
00:36:32.820 stock market
00:36:33.400 crashed in
00:36:34.480 the face
00:36:35.080 of the
00:36:35.520 coronavirus
00:36:36.160 epidemic,
00:36:38.020 they said,
00:36:38.820 oh,
00:36:39.220 bargain basement,
00:36:40.240 time to buy
00:36:40.740 some stocks.
00:36:42.000 These people
00:36:42.560 have what they
00:36:43.260 call an internal
00:36:44.040 locus of control.
00:36:45.180 They view the
00:36:45.820 world as something
00:36:46.420 they can manipulate
00:36:47.280 and be successful
00:36:48.160 at and they make
00:36:49.300 much better
00:36:49.740 survivors.
00:36:51.100 Another thing
00:36:51.420 you talk about
00:36:52.080 with survivors,
00:36:53.220 particularly survivors
00:36:53.860 who are having
00:36:54.700 to survive
00:36:55.660 for a long time,
00:36:56.580 say you're lost
00:36:57.220 in the woods
00:36:57.700 for a long time
00:36:58.420 or the worst
00:36:59.200 ones you talked
00:36:59.680 about,
00:36:59.880 people lost
00:37:00.400 at sea
00:37:00.900 for weeks.
00:37:03.000 That's hard
00:37:03.660 because on one
00:37:05.980 hand,
00:37:06.140 you want to hope
00:37:06.680 that you're going
00:37:07.080 to live
00:37:07.660 and you'll survive,
00:37:09.020 but on the other
00:37:09.380 hand,
00:37:10.100 you can't focus
00:37:10.880 on that too much
00:37:11.640 because it might
00:37:13.140 drive you crazy
00:37:14.100 and might cause
00:37:14.860 you to make
00:37:15.220 bad decisions.
00:37:16.160 How do people
00:37:17.000 who end up
00:37:17.360 surviving,
00:37:17.780 how do they
00:37:18.140 balance that?
00:37:19.340 That hope,
00:37:19.940 I'm going to live
00:37:21.200 and get past this,
00:37:22.040 but also maybe
00:37:23.700 think I might not
00:37:24.480 get through this
00:37:25.340 and this might be
00:37:25.960 my new situation
00:37:26.700 forever.
00:37:28.420 Steve Callahan
00:37:29.480 is a guy,
00:37:31.580 a sailor,
00:37:32.540 who I write
00:37:33.020 about in Deep
00:37:33.580 Survival,
00:37:34.340 and he was lost
00:37:35.660 at sea,
00:37:36.620 I think it was
00:37:37.140 72 days.
00:37:38.200 It was a long
00:37:38.660 time.
00:37:39.800 And Callahan
00:37:40.200 is an exact
00:37:41.180 example of what
00:37:42.320 you're talking
00:37:42.820 about.
00:37:43.540 He was pretty
00:37:44.320 sure he was
00:37:45.040 going to die,
00:37:46.460 but like the
00:37:47.120 mountaineer in
00:37:47.760 Peru who broke
00:37:48.600 his leg,
00:37:49.300 he said,
00:37:49.660 you know,
00:37:50.760 I probably am
00:37:51.940 going to die,
00:37:52.440 but I think I
00:37:53.060 will just take
00:37:53.740 this one step
00:37:54.560 and try to
00:37:55.200 catch that fish
00:37:56.080 and see if I
00:37:57.260 can't feed
00:37:57.940 myself something.
00:37:59.400 And sure
00:37:59.720 enough,
00:38:00.040 he succeeded
00:38:00.540 in catching
00:38:01.060 a fish.
00:38:02.120 In addition,
00:38:02.860 he did things
00:38:03.560 like he had
00:38:05.060 a life raft.
00:38:06.940 He used the
00:38:07.600 fly cover for
00:38:08.780 the life raft
00:38:09.380 to catch water
00:38:10.180 so he was able
00:38:11.460 not to dehydrate
00:38:12.500 completely.
00:38:13.680 And he just
00:38:14.300 did these little
00:38:14.960 things.
00:38:15.380 And I think
00:38:15.760 the broad
00:38:16.800 answer to
00:38:17.440 your question
00:38:18.020 and looking
00:38:19.120 at something
00:38:19.580 like coronavirus
00:38:20.360 right now
00:38:21.240 is we have
00:38:23.080 to take
00:38:23.460 things a
00:38:23.960 day at a
00:38:24.360 time,
00:38:25.040 in some
00:38:25.340 cases an
00:38:26.000 hour at a
00:38:26.600 time,
00:38:27.400 in some
00:38:27.720 cases minutes
00:38:28.840 at a time,
00:38:29.460 but we have
00:38:30.480 to not try
00:38:31.960 to concentrate
00:38:32.760 too much on
00:38:34.160 the grand
00:38:34.680 future of
00:38:35.720 things,
00:38:36.080 which will
00:38:36.920 tend to
00:38:37.340 frustrate us.
00:38:38.320 I use
00:38:39.060 examples of
00:38:40.180 people who
00:38:40.760 were prisoners
00:38:41.360 in Nazi
00:38:42.540 death camps,
00:38:43.400 Auschwitz and
00:38:44.000 other places,
00:38:44.840 who tried
00:38:46.180 to not only
00:38:48.020 get through
00:38:48.780 every day as
00:38:50.200 best they
00:38:50.640 could,
00:38:51.240 but tried
00:38:52.060 also to
00:38:52.660 see,
00:38:53.820 hear,
00:38:54.280 and do
00:38:54.600 things that
00:38:55.360 would uplift
00:38:56.000 them somewhat.
00:38:57.560 And so
00:38:57.860 there's a
00:38:58.300 scene in
00:38:58.860 Viktor Frankl's
00:38:59.660 book,
00:38:59.960 Man's Search
00:39:00.440 for Meaning,
00:39:01.740 Viktor Frankl
00:39:02.380 was in
00:39:02.720 Auschwitz,
00:39:03.380 in which he
00:39:03.960 and a group
00:39:04.340 of people
00:39:05.000 come out
00:39:05.500 of their
00:39:05.840 huts to
00:39:06.980 watch the
00:39:07.460 sunset,
00:39:08.280 because it's
00:39:09.180 really beautiful.
00:39:10.720 And this
00:39:11.300 promotes survival,
00:39:12.960 if you can
00:39:13.500 find things
00:39:14.500 in your
00:39:15.500 environment to
00:39:16.440 see that are
00:39:17.640 beautiful.
00:39:18.580 And I see
00:39:19.500 in this
00:39:20.320 quarantine,
00:39:21.100 business we
00:39:22.860 have with
00:39:23.560 the coronavirus,
00:39:25.260 people are
00:39:25.780 kind of going
00:39:26.300 stir-crazy and
00:39:28.180 doing dangerous
00:39:29.300 things because
00:39:30.500 they're just fed
00:39:31.200 up with it.
00:39:32.280 And it's like,
00:39:33.240 okay, already,
00:39:33.980 I've had enough
00:39:34.540 of this.
00:39:35.400 But you have
00:39:35.860 to be,
00:39:36.860 you know,
00:39:37.560 you have to
00:39:38.260 look just a
00:39:39.180 little bit ahead,
00:39:40.900 not months or
00:39:42.380 years ahead,
00:39:43.040 in order to
00:39:44.160 survive properly.
00:39:45.640 And I have,
00:39:46.060 again,
00:39:46.320 in the back
00:39:46.820 of Deep
00:39:47.200 Survival,
00:39:47.680 there's an
00:39:47.960 appendix that
00:39:48.580 lists 12
00:39:49.460 traits of
00:39:50.500 survivors,
00:39:51.260 and one of
00:39:51.860 them is see
00:39:52.640 the beauty.
00:39:53.820 That is,
00:39:54.800 find something
00:39:55.440 beautiful today
00:39:56.440 that will uplift
00:39:57.640 you,
00:39:58.220 and it'll make
00:39:58.980 your day easier.
00:40:01.020 And one of them,
00:40:01.780 too,
00:40:01.900 you hit on this
00:40:02.620 in your answer
00:40:03.300 just now,
00:40:04.340 set out tasks
00:40:05.380 for yourself,
00:40:06.180 like little
00:40:06.600 small things,
00:40:07.280 then celebrate
00:40:07.920 those small
00:40:08.460 successes.
00:40:09.100 And you talk
00:40:09.380 about people
00:40:10.120 who survived,
00:40:11.200 they would say,
00:40:11.860 hey, I'm going
00:40:12.220 to build a
00:40:12.780 fire today,
00:40:13.260 that's my
00:40:13.540 task for
00:40:14.040 today.
00:40:14.660 And once
00:40:15.000 they built
00:40:15.340 that fire,
00:40:15.940 they would
00:40:16.120 be like,
00:40:16.440 all right,
00:40:16.800 I got a
00:40:17.160 fire.
00:40:17.500 They were
00:40:17.680 like Tom
00:40:18.400 Hanks,
00:40:18.960 right,
00:40:19.500 in Castaways,
00:40:20.660 I've got
00:40:21.340 fire.
00:40:22.300 And they do
00:40:23.220 that day in
00:40:23.800 and day out.
00:40:24.820 Yeah,
00:40:25.380 right.
00:40:26.380 And this is
00:40:27.080 a perfect
00:40:27.400 opportunity.
00:40:28.200 I know I'm
00:40:28.960 doing this
00:40:29.400 with a number
00:40:29.820 of things,
00:40:30.580 because my
00:40:31.320 wife and I
00:40:31.880 are, you
00:40:32.500 know,
00:40:32.580 we're staying
00:40:33.020 home.
00:40:33.440 We are very
00:40:34.180 lucky that we
00:40:35.460 have kids who
00:40:36.020 can go shopping
00:40:36.680 for us,
00:40:37.360 but we're
00:40:38.020 basically staying
00:40:38.800 home so as
00:40:39.760 not to get
00:40:40.160 exposed because
00:40:41.620 we're both
00:40:41.960 vulnerable for
00:40:43.360 different reasons.
00:40:44.320 And it's like,
00:40:44.960 hey, I always
00:40:45.680 wanted to learn
00:40:46.240 German.
00:40:46.960 Well, I've got
00:40:47.860 a lot of time
00:40:48.460 right now.
00:40:50.120 And so,
00:40:50.900 you know,
00:40:52.300 there's got to
00:40:52.700 be something
00:40:53.160 that you wanted
00:40:53.800 to do.
00:40:54.380 You've always
00:40:54.760 said, hey,
00:40:55.320 I'd like to
00:40:55.780 learn to play
00:40:56.220 chess.
00:40:57.260 Well, here it
00:40:58.140 is.
00:40:58.440 And you've got
00:40:59.100 all these
00:40:59.800 wonderful computer
00:41:01.100 internet resources
00:41:03.100 to work with.
00:41:05.040 So this is,
00:41:05.900 again, a
00:41:06.740 survivor takes
00:41:07.960 adversity and
00:41:09.100 sees
00:41:09.440 opportunity.
00:41:11.200 And this is a
00:41:11.740 perfect example
00:41:12.620 of that.
00:41:13.560 No, in
00:41:13.980 surviving,
00:41:15.220 there's a lot
00:41:15.940 of paradox
00:41:16.520 involved.
00:41:17.500 And throughout
00:41:17.720 the book,
00:41:18.120 you quote
00:41:19.200 stoicism,
00:41:20.500 the Tao
00:41:20.780 Ching,
00:41:21.180 where they
00:41:21.680 deal with
00:41:22.060 paradoxes.
00:41:22.800 Or you talk
00:41:23.260 about the
00:41:23.540 Stockdale
00:41:23.900 paradox,
00:41:24.480 like James
00:41:24.840 Stockdale,
00:41:25.860 who was a
00:41:26.420 prisoner of war
00:41:26.920 during Vietnam,
00:41:27.920 he studied
00:41:28.440 stoicism,
00:41:29.680 and he credited
00:41:30.780 stoicism to
00:41:32.000 getting him
00:41:32.600 through that
00:41:33.280 experience.
00:41:34.240 And it's
00:41:35.380 sort of that
00:41:35.620 thing, he had
00:41:36.080 to hope that
00:41:37.020 he would get
00:41:38.000 released, but
00:41:38.940 also at the
00:41:39.800 same time
00:41:40.340 accept that
00:41:41.080 it might not
00:41:41.680 happen.
00:41:42.940 Yeah, and
00:41:43.300 again, going
00:41:43.840 back to the
00:41:44.800 Nazi death
00:41:45.960 camps, a lot
00:41:47.280 of these guys
00:41:47.780 who were in
00:41:48.520 there talk
00:41:49.100 about how
00:41:49.660 the optimists
00:41:50.920 were in
00:41:52.260 greater danger
00:41:53.080 because they'd
00:41:54.260 be saying,
00:41:54.880 like, oh,
00:41:55.360 you know, we're
00:41:55.760 going to be
00:41:55.980 out by Easter.
00:41:56.840 I know that
00:41:58.220 we're going to
00:41:58.440 be through by
00:41:59.300 Easter.
00:41:59.700 Easter comes
00:42:00.320 and goes and
00:42:00.980 you're not
00:42:01.280 out and it's
00:42:01.840 like depressing
00:42:03.080 and you kind
00:42:03.760 of give up.
00:42:04.440 And the
00:42:05.500 other people
00:42:06.160 are not
00:42:07.760 trying to
00:42:08.480 see that.
00:42:09.380 They're not
00:42:09.880 trying to see
00:42:10.360 that end.
00:42:11.480 They're trying
00:42:11.960 to see today.
00:42:13.200 How do I
00:42:13.760 make today
00:42:14.460 good and
00:42:15.640 how do I
00:42:15.980 get through
00:42:16.300 today?
00:42:16.660 And as you
00:42:16.980 say, little
00:42:18.140 tasks, complete
00:42:20.380 them, celebrate
00:42:21.880 your success, and
00:42:23.720 enjoy the task.
00:42:25.040 And this is
00:42:25.620 something that
00:42:26.940 will get you
00:42:27.360 through.
00:42:28.340 And you also
00:42:28.860 talk, I mean,
00:42:29.180 there is a
00:42:30.060 spiritual element
00:42:30.820 to survival.
00:42:31.440 A lot of
00:42:32.180 these people
00:42:32.640 that you
00:42:33.880 described, they
00:42:34.820 all had a
00:42:35.440 moment when
00:42:35.960 they knew,
00:42:37.040 like at a
00:42:37.740 spiritual level,
00:42:38.780 like in the
00:42:39.200 bones, like, I'm
00:42:40.380 going to survive
00:42:40.920 this.
00:42:41.420 Like they knew
00:42:42.020 it.
00:42:42.280 Exactly.
00:42:43.260 Even while
00:42:43.860 admitting that
00:42:44.680 the chances
00:42:45.200 are bad, many,
00:42:47.900 many, many of
00:42:48.420 these people
00:42:48.920 report the same
00:42:49.880 thing that, you
00:42:50.900 know, at that
00:42:51.340 moment, I
00:42:51.940 thought I'm
00:42:52.600 going to live.
00:42:54.180 And I think
00:42:55.540 it's very
00:42:56.180 important.
00:42:57.040 It's, you
00:42:57.740 know, part of
00:42:58.400 our emotional
00:42:59.840 system, when
00:43:01.420 which is kind
00:43:01.860 of like our
00:43:02.320 immune system,
00:43:03.180 you know, it
00:43:03.500 tells us what's
00:43:04.140 good and bad.
00:43:05.160 Part of it is
00:43:05.860 feeling joy.
00:43:07.580 And the
00:43:08.740 reason joy
00:43:09.460 exists is
00:43:10.560 because it
00:43:11.600 helps us to
00:43:12.220 move forward
00:43:12.820 and go on
00:43:13.480 and do things
00:43:14.120 that need to
00:43:14.540 be done.
00:43:15.480 And if we
00:43:16.580 can find a
00:43:17.820 little bit of
00:43:18.300 joy in that
00:43:19.860 thought, then
00:43:21.440 we will tend to
00:43:22.520 do the next
00:43:23.060 right thing.
00:43:24.200 And that's
00:43:24.840 really what
00:43:25.220 surviving is.
00:43:26.000 It's doing the
00:43:26.540 next right thing.
00:43:27.320 It's not
00:43:27.720 collapsing and
00:43:28.840 giving up.
00:43:29.880 And whatever
00:43:30.200 the next right
00:43:30.780 thing is,
00:43:31.420 tends to be
00:43:32.560 the thing
00:43:32.980 that you
00:43:33.280 do, such
00:43:34.780 as, you
00:43:35.280 know, I'm
00:43:36.360 going to make
00:43:36.820 it over to
00:43:37.220 that boulder
00:43:37.700 over there.
00:43:38.340 I know that
00:43:38.740 I might die,
00:43:39.760 but I'm
00:43:40.080 going to get
00:43:40.360 to that
00:43:40.680 boulder.
00:43:41.480 And now I
00:43:42.060 got to that
00:43:42.500 boulder and
00:43:42.980 I feel like
00:43:43.620 certain that
00:43:44.500 I'm going to
00:43:44.880 live.
00:43:45.480 And that
00:43:45.860 motivates me to
00:43:46.620 get to the
00:43:46.980 next boulder.
00:43:48.060 And that's
00:43:48.260 pretty much
00:43:48.580 life.
00:43:49.060 It's just
00:43:49.300 doing the
00:43:49.620 next right
00:43:50.040 thing.
00:43:50.380 It's life.
00:43:51.160 It's life.
00:43:51.940 Yeah.
00:43:52.200 Yeah.
00:43:53.280 Well, Lawrence,
00:43:54.020 this has been a
00:43:54.440 great conversation.
00:43:55.160 Where can people
00:43:55.560 go to learn more
00:43:56.200 about the book
00:43:56.980 and your work?
00:44:01.420 If you Google
00:44:02.260 Deep Survival,
00:44:03.180 it's very, very
00:44:03.940 easy to find.
00:44:04.980 I'm easy to find.
00:44:06.580 And so they can
00:44:07.080 order the book
00:44:07.560 online.
00:44:08.300 If they order it
00:44:09.420 through my website,
00:44:10.180 it goes to any
00:44:11.520 number of places
00:44:12.580 your choice,
00:44:13.920 Barnes & Noble,
00:44:14.800 independent
00:44:15.180 bookstores,
00:44:16.560 Powell's, a bunch
00:44:18.060 of different places
00:44:18.680 you can choose
00:44:19.320 from.
00:44:20.080 And it's
00:44:20.640 available online
00:44:21.640 in other places
00:44:22.460 too.
00:44:22.780 But if they want
00:44:23.260 to see the
00:44:24.460 range of books
00:44:26.140 that I've written,
00:44:26.960 they're all on
00:44:27.640 that website.
00:44:28.300 And one that may
00:44:29.280 be important to
00:44:29.980 people coming
00:44:30.700 in very soon
00:44:32.420 is, it's called
00:44:33.300 Surviving Survival.
00:44:34.260 It's a sequel
00:44:34.840 to Deep Survival.
00:44:36.360 And it's like,
00:44:36.900 okay, I survived
00:44:37.760 the thing,
00:44:38.320 now what happens?
00:44:39.740 And I think a lot
00:44:40.760 of us are going
00:44:41.220 to be facing
00:44:41.840 that when this
00:44:42.620 coronavirus pandemic
00:44:44.660 is over.
00:44:45.880 And we see
00:44:46.640 that our old
00:44:47.220 lives aren't
00:44:47.960 waiting for us
00:44:48.720 there, and we
00:44:49.700 will have to
00:44:50.200 reinvent ourselves.
00:44:51.960 Fantastic.
00:44:52.300 Well, Lawrence
00:44:52.660 Gonzalez, thanks for
00:44:53.460 your time.
00:44:53.760 It's been a pleasure.
00:44:54.860 My pleasure too.
00:44:56.340 My guest today
00:44:56.860 was Lawrence
00:44:57.260 Gonzalez.
00:44:57.740 He's the author
00:44:58.320 of the book
00:44:58.860 Deep Survival,
00:45:00.040 Who Lives,
00:45:00.520 Who Dies,
00:45:01.200 and Why.
00:45:01.740 It's available
00:45:02.060 on Amazon.com
00:45:02.980 and bookstores
00:45:03.440 everywhere.
00:45:04.060 You can find
00:45:04.400 out more
00:45:04.680 information about
00:45:05.180 his work at
00:45:05.680 his website,
00:45:06.360 deepsurvival.com.
00:45:07.800 Also, check out
00:45:08.420 our show notes
00:45:08.860 at aom.is
00:45:10.020 slash deepsurvival,
00:45:11.180 where you can
00:45:11.380 find links to
00:45:11.840 resources where
00:45:12.540 you can delve
00:45:12.780 deeper into this
00:45:13.480 topic.
00:45:13.780 Well, that wraps
00:45:21.840 up another edition
00:45:22.600 of the AOM
00:45:23.040 podcast.
00:45:23.700 Check out
00:45:23.960 our website
00:45:24.300 at
00:45:24.460 artofmanliness.com
00:45:25.400 where you can
00:45:25.600 find our
00:45:25.880 podcast archives
00:45:26.920 as well as
00:45:27.220 thousands of
00:45:27.620 articles we've
00:45:28.180 written over the
00:45:28.540 years about
00:45:28.820 pretty much
00:45:29.360 anything you
00:45:29.780 can think of.
00:45:30.480 And if you'd
00:45:30.760 like to enjoy
00:45:31.100 ad-free episodes
00:45:31.940 of the AOM
00:45:32.220 podcast, you
00:45:32.820 can do so on
00:45:33.440 Stitcher Premium.
00:45:34.240 Head over to
00:45:34.620 stitcherpremium.com,
00:45:35.720 sign up, use code
00:45:36.620 manliness at
00:45:37.300 checkout for a
00:45:37.960 free month trial.
00:45:38.760 Once you're
00:45:39.040 signed up, download
00:45:39.760 the Stitcher app
00:45:40.360 on Android or
00:45:41.000 iOS, and you
00:45:41.720 start enjoying ad-free
00:45:42.680 episodes of the
00:45:43.240 AOM podcast.
00:45:44.140 And if you
00:45:44.340 haven't done so
00:45:44.740 already, I'd
00:45:45.080 appreciate if you
00:45:45.700 take one minute
00:45:46.340 to give us a
00:45:46.740 review on Apple
00:45:47.240 podcast or
00:45:47.900 Stitcher.
00:45:48.280 It helps out a
00:45:48.780 lot.
00:45:49.020 And if you've
00:45:49.300 done that already,
00:45:49.980 thank you.
00:45:50.660 Please consider
00:45:51.220 sharing the show
00:45:51.800 with a friend or
00:45:52.380 family member who
00:45:53.180 you think would
00:45:53.700 get something out
00:45:54.200 of it.
00:45:54.520 As always, thank
00:45:55.300 you for the
00:45:55.560 continued support.
00:45:56.380 Until next time,
00:45:56.960 this is Brett
00:45:57.200 McKay, reminding
00:45:58.060 you not only to
00:45:58.460 listen to AOM
00:45:58.900 podcast, but put
00:46:00.000 what you've heard
00:46:00.640 into action.