Making Sense with Sam Harris - #90 — Living With Violence

Episode Date: August 6, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Gavin de Becker about the primacy of human intuition in the prediction and prevention of violence. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Gavin DeBecker. Gavin is widely regarded as our nation's leading expert on the prediction and management of violence. He's the best-selling author of The Gift of Fear and several other books on violence prevention. His work has earned him three presidential appointments, and he's been on the President's Advisory Board at the U.S. Department of Justice. He's also worked with the governor of California.

He's worked with universities, corporations, celebrities too numerous to name. His first book, The Gift of Fear, was a number one New York Times bestseller and is now published in 19 languages. And Oprah Winfrey dedicated a full hour on her show to commemorating the 10th anniversary of that book. So Gavin has been extremely influential in how we think about violence, really at every level, from domestic violence to workplace violence to stalking incidents with celebrities, acts of terrorism, assassination. There's really no form of violence you can think of that Gavin hasn't weighed in on at some point. He's worked with security at schools. So it's really the full

footprint of violence in our society and how it deranges human life. Gavin has made a study of this, and his advice in this area is extremely good. So I've been a student of Gavin's for many years. He's handled security for me at my events, and he's just a great source of expertise on this topic. Gavin was very generous with his time here. I think he was talking to me from as far away as Fiji. But with the miracle of the internet, we got together. And now without further delay, I bring you Gavin DeBecker. I am here with Gavin DeBecker. Gavin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, too. Well, I have really been looking forward to this conversation. I'm a huge admirer of your work. I am a fan. I consider you a friend at this point. You are just exactly the person I want to talk to about this issue. So you have handled security for events that I've been at, both organized by me and for me for many years. And I will have introduced you properly before this conversation, but your company, Gavin DeBecker and Associates, handles security for like half of Hollywood and Silicon Valley at this point. And I see your presence everywhere. And many people who may not know that about you know you from your book, The Gift of Fear, which is, if I'm not mistaken, the best-selling book of all time on the topic of preventing violence.

And you've written a couple of follow-up books, a book about specifically protecting kids, titled Protecting the Gift. And even more recently, you have a book about how protective services of the sort you run prevent assassinations, and that's titled Just Two Seconds. all over the place with the State Department and the Department of Justice and corporations and universities, and you've really dealt with security and issues of violence at every level. So my first question, just by way of welcoming you onto the podcast, is how did you come to be in this role? Because you really are in a fairly unique position with respect to violence and its prevention. So like everybody, my work and my life's path began in childhood. I witnessed and experienced a lot of violence, and I did what children do, which is I learned to predict human behavior for my own safety

and for the safety of others. And it's not unique particularly. There are millions of kids who know that when dad comes home in a certain mood from work early with a certain attitude toward the other people in the family, and he sits down and he clicks open a bottle of beer and he looks at you a certain way, there are millions of kids who have learned to know that trouble is coming today. And we are in the business of predicting human behavior. So we predict the behavior of our siblings and our parents and our teachers and each other. And what I did is by accident or by intent or by fate or destiny, I systematized and really studied the ways in which

human beings make predictions. And there's no prediction that is more crisp than the prediction that someone makes about their own safety. You could say that of all the remarkable things the mind does, it brings its greatest resources when the host itself is in danger. And so the kinds of things I did at 10 years old in predicting violence and sort of madness in my own childhood are not terribly dissimilar to the kinds of things that I do today in terms of applying strategies that I think all of us, and really it's a key message of my work, as you know, is that all of us have these resources, these intuitive resources inside us. But how is it that you became the go-to guy on this issue? I don't think the history is so entirely unique because I think of, you know, a kid who saw his grandparent die of cancer and then becomes a cancer expert or somebody whose father died of a heart attack and they become, you know, a heart surgeon or somebody whose father died of a heart attack and they become a heart surgeon or somebody

who experienced or witnessed some kind of victimization or criminality and they grow up to become a police officer. My point is that your ghosts can become your teachers. And there are plenty of people who decided, hey, I'm going to be a psychologist because I think there's money in it. And there are other people who decided I'm going to be a psychologist because I sense and introspectively perceive the challenges that I have myself or that other human beings have. And if I, Gavin, were choosing a brain surgeon, I don't want the one who's there because he thinks he can make a good living as a brain surgeon. I want the one who's there because he's been absolutely fascinated with this topic his whole life. So for me, at 10 years old, I was home from school and I saw on television the assassination of President Kennedy. And my father was not in my

life at that time. And Kennedy was a kind of father figure to me, even a similar appearance. And it really knocked me on my ass that somebody young and in the prime of their life and involved in my life as a public figure, of course, could be assassinated even in the presence of what at the time was the highest level protective coverage in history. And so, you know, I asked myself the question at 10 years old as I looked around and saw people crying and saw people upset. And you could see how this event came into our homes and our school and our community. And it made me wonder forever about the best strategies for protection. I never followed an interest in the conspiratorial aspects of the Kennedy assassination, though I have opinions on it. That wasn't what fascinated me. What fascinated me was

the physical, on-the-scene aspects of how people could be protected. And eventually, as I got into that field more and more by being the best kind of student. That's not the student who goes to a college class necessarily. That's the student who never leaves the college class. I did it all my waking hours, everything I saw, everything I read, everyone I met, I extracted something that was relevant to my fascination. I call it now my work. And so as I developed strategies and ideas and began to write on the topic, I saw that the strategies that applied to the people we protect the most, presidents, vice presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, et cetera, they also applied in far larger numbers to regular people. For example, a public figure in America is attacked, you know, on average every five years, but a woman is murdered by a husband or boyfriend on average every five hours. So the same strategies can be applied, not in terms of physical protective coverage, but in terms of

identifying the pre-incident indicators associated with violence. And no crime in America is more preventable or predictable than spousal homicide, because all the pre-incident indicators are there. So that's a long answer to the question of how it is that I followed this path. I can give you some steps along the way that maybe make it seem like less of a magic trick if you want me to but I think it's like everybody's life I

think you you take the next step one after the other and and you I'm gonna use the word destiny for a moment because I do tend to believe just about everything is predetermined but I think you you know you're going to do what you're going to do with your set of circumstances and your biology and your meal that day and your amount of sleep and your age and your place of origin, birth. I think you're going to do what you're going to do. And I did my part. Well, let's just jump into a discussion of violence because there's so much to talk about

there. And I want to have this conversation not merely as an intellectual exploration of the topic. I think violence is incredibly interesting just as a topic. But I want this conversation to be useful to people in very practical ways. And so I want us to give people a deeper understanding of violence and how to avoid it. And when I mentioned that I would be talking to you in a previous podcast, I said that given the numbers of people who are listening, it doesn't seem far-fetched to say that this is the kind of conversation that could save a life or two, or at least prevent some

very significant suffering. But before we begin, I think we need to deal with what's essentially a statistical concern that I think many of our listeners will have in their heads, which is that violence is now rare enough in our society that there really is no reason to think much about it. To have a conversation of the sort we're about to have is essentially morbid or is a kind of fear-mongering. essentially morbid or is a kind of fear-mongering. Why do you think people at this moment in a society like our own, speaking now of the developed world, even the safest places within it, why do you think people should think about violence? So, you know, I actually have to laugh at the idea that people think an experience that has been going on throughout human history and is not only unabated and uninterrupted,

but that they think a political statistic, remember, statistics from the federal government are often highly politicized in terms of how they're developed. For example, there was a moment when rape statistics went down because they redefined rape. So rape involved, it used to involve any form of penetration, and then they defined it in a slightly different way in terms of penetration, and guess what happened? Rape decreased. But we are talking about a human behavior, rape, that has gone on throughout human history. And so the idea that politicians say, as many speeches have been given along these lines,

you know, we must stamp out rape in our culture, that's comedy, that's absolutely ridiculous. And we're talking about behaviors that while violence may tick down slightly, we'll say there's 26,000 homicides in America, and so a 10% reduction means that there's closer to 23,000 homicides in America. And that's not relevant to the individual who's facing a circumstance in which the pre-incident indicators of homicide are present. So for me, for example,

a white male, I might walk around all day, every day, and go years without experiencing something that makes me raise my eyebrow and say, hmm, this dark alley doesn't feel right. This circumstance, this person, this employee we're firing, this moment, for some reason, gives me reason to respond. And I get a fear response or an intuitive response about safety. So I might go years without that. But a woman, if you ask, for example, I did a thing a couple of years ago where we asked random men and filmed them and said, when is the last time that you experienced fear about

your own safety? And the men tended to answer, hmm, eight months ago or when I was in Iraq or when I was first on the police force or never. And then we asked the same number of women. And the women said today or last night while I was walking to my car after our company party or yesterday when that ex-boyfriend called me again after I asked him not to. My point being that it is a totally different experience for women than it is for men. It's a totally different experience for minorities than it is for white men, you know, ages 25 to 50. And so the idea that violence, which is an enduring element of human behavior, is affected because a statistic

goes down. I'll give you a quick example. In California, there are a thousand people shot every week. There are a thousand people shot every week. So most people are stunned by that statistic. I'm not. Why is it not a big deal in one sense? Because there aren't a thousand who die. They go to the hospital, they deal with their shooting injury, and it's almost like a car accident injury or slipping in the shower. But nonetheless, there's a thousand people who are shot in California every week. And so you now have a circumstance in which that statistic is worth avoiding, meaning I'm just as interested in avoiding being shot as I'm interested in avoiding being killed. And yet what's happened in America, and this is really key when people think about this topic, what you ought to look at is not the

rate of, let's take firearms deaths, it's the rate of aggravated assault. And here's the reason. What changed in the last 40 years profoundly? 9-1-1 service that calls ambulances and police officers to us more quickly, even if we can't say the address. Ambulance services that get us to nearer emergency rooms than ever existed before, because Americans are so unhealthy that one of the biggest growth businesses is hospitals. Emergency room strategies refined by the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq so that shooting trauma is dealt with. So the odds of dying from receiving a bullet are vastly lower than the odds of receiving a bullet. And so my view is I just want to avoid tissue damage. I'm not really interested in whether it's good or bad tissue damage.

I'm in the business of helping people prevent tissue damage. And in my case, with my clients, to prevent targeted tissue damage. So this is a long way of saying that statistics that say the crime rate is down do not change the relationship between me and that guy standing in front of me in the dark alley at two in the morning as I come out of a late party somewhere. One must always measure what's going on in their environment without regard to statistics. Here's a 20-second story. Years ago, there was a an actress you'll remember uh some audience members might not named theresa saldana who was uh stabbed by a mentally ill man who stalked her for a year

traveled from scotland to kill her uh tried to buy a gun but couldn't and so he used a knife instead and uh she called the police uh sheriff's department actually, about the fact that somebody was calling her mother and trying to get information about where she lived and then was calling her agent and trying to get information. And the police officer said on the phone, look, 99% of the time in these cases, nothing happens. Well, he was right. His statistics were right on.

Perfect. 99.9% of the time with media figures being stalked or pursued, it doesn't end in homicide. 45 minutes later, she walked out of her apartment and she was stabbed 18 times through the chest and spent the next two years, you know, dealing with that surgically. And so the statistic was not valuable to her. And statistics, you know, you're sitting on a plane and you look out the window and the left engine is on fire. You don't say to yourself, hey, you know, flying is safer than driving.

In your moment, in your circumstance, there's risk and there's danger. And that's where we live in our moment, in our circumstance, in our situation. And a quick thing is that on the actress I just talked about, Teresa Saldana, when I interviewed her assailant in prison years later and asked him, you know, would you kill her if she were, he still wanted to kill her, would you kill her if she were in this room right now? And he said, no, not unless I had a gun. Because he regretted and was disappointed that he'd had to use a knife. My point is that Saldana, anybody in the world could have said to her, hey, young actress who's barely known at all, forget about it. 99.9% of the time, nothing happens and their

statistics would be accurate, but their outcome would be grossly inaccurate. I do want to talk about these specific cases of public figures and the difference between men and women in their relationship to violence. Just generically speaking, there are different types of violence, and this is another source of confusion for people. So there are things like there's social violence, like two guys in a bar, you know, one says, what the fuck are you looking at? And then it escalates from there. And that's quite different from predatory violence, like rape as a prime example.

And these are both different from ideological violence of the sort that we see in acts of terrorism. of terrorism. And acts of terrorism are only superficially similar to mass shootings by mentally unstable people of the sort that we tend to see in schools or, you know, movie theaters and shopping malls. These are, they're obviously surface features that lead people to think that someone like Jared Loeffner is doing something analogous to what al-Qaeda is doing. But these are fundamentally different acts of violence. And this tends to confuse people. So is there anything you want to say about the general landscape of violence before we get into some of the more fine-grained considerations of the sort you bring up in your book? Yes. A great question.

Yes, a great question. And I'd like to express, because going with what you said about making this useful and providing some practical information that people can understand about the resources they already have, so my odds are better living here, or the statistics are down, or this is the least high-end violence we've had since 1957, is we are all automatically looking to exclude ourselves from the population of the stories we hear. So for example, if I hear that a guy was eaten by an alligator in Florida, I can write that off quick because I'm not swimming in the Everglades. And if I hear that a woman was raped, I can write that off because I'm not a woman. And on and on and on, we all do this. And one of the most substantial ways that we do it is by assigning categories to types of violence. And now I'm right on your question.

There's workplace violence. There's school violence. Is there a difference between them? Yes, there's a difference. The difference is the geography. That's the difference. The difference is the moniker that the news media gives to it. Another school shooting today in Omaha, Nebraska.

Another workplace violence event in Omaha, Nebraska. It's a faster way to tell the story, but those two are remarkably similar. The student almost is an employee in the environment. The workplace violence perpetrator is dealing with relationships and dealing with feeling alienated and things aren't fair and others don't treat him well. They're nearly identical, but the geography is different. Now let's go to the shopping center

shooter. Is the shopping center shooter different because he's in a shopping center versus in a workplace versus outside of school? See, my point is that the choice of venue for explosive acts of violence, and I'll speak specifically now about multiple victim shootings, which are nearly a weekly event in the United States, so much so that they are not even national news anymore. They are local news. So a multiple victim shooting, a guy who shoots four people at his workplace,

if they don't all die, and if there isn't any video, that won't be on the news nationally. And so a lot of it is driven by the video. And you know the video, I mean, the helicopter shot of the school with all the police and all the firemen around, you know, after a shooting like Newtown or any other school shooting. So speaking of school shootings, is a shooting like Newtown inherently different from a shooting by students like at Columbine? Not inherently. Yes, they have different motivations and they have different reasons. But a good way to look at this, and this is, I'm going to go a level deeper when I say this,

is that during the year that 9-11 happened and there were, in effect, 2,200 homicides at the World Trade Center. So that the homicide rate in New York City just went up by 2,200. And what changed? You know, nobody thought of it this way because they isolated that mass murder from all the individual husbands killing their wives and girlfriends and robbers, you know, inadvertently or intentionally shooting, you know, shooting victims of their robberies. But an interesting component that I believe in is that if 2,200 people are killed all at once in a big violent incident like 9-11, mass incidents of homicide will go down in the

United States for a while. And why would that be? Because in effect, not a lot of people have the stomach for the kind of violence that we see. For example, why doesn't 9-11 happen every year? Because it's a very rare thing for anybody to be willing to do it, willing to kill themselves. That's more common in Muslim cultures than it is in the United States to perish during the event, but it happens obviously. School shooters like Columbine intended not to survive. And my point is that this categorization business is a news media artifact. It is not really about human behavior, because if we take ourselves back a thousand years and we're living in the village and somebody gets killed, we ask a few questions. What happened to Steve?

I'm choosing a name that's a modern name in this thousand-year-old village. We say, what happened to Steve? And it might be that he got into a fight with Bill and he hit him with a rock. It might be that he was killed by a lion or a tiger. We want to know. We're interested. But ultimately, the loss of life as a condition of human beings living socially has never changed, and it's not going to change. What's going to improve slightly is that we will have better strategies for predicting who among our population needs help, in effect, is most likely to act out.

For example, the crime rate is down or the violent crime rate is down. That's true, statistically so. It doesn't change anything for the woman whose husband is holding a gun to her head. Nothing is different. But we have to also recognize that the strategies for doing tissue damage have profoundly improved in the same period. So we're talking about crime against us in our own society, and we're not talking about war, which is another way that people meet their end. And so the instruments of violent death, everything from the style of how handguns operate better and better to what will soon be weaponized component drones, weaponized consumer drones. Those have gotten so much better that we really have to factor that into the equation.

Now, you say, well, I'm not going to get killed by a drone because I'm not a public figure at risk of that kind of thing. And that's perfectly true. But is violence all around us anyway? And this isn't to scare people. It's just to say that in a very real sense, you know how the surging water in an ocean doesn't really move, but what's actually happening is energy moves through it. In that exact same sense, the energy of violence moves through this culture. Others as well, but I will say more in this culture than in any place on earth other than warring cultures. And so some of us experience

it as an unpleasant breeze that we can tolerate. We hear a story of a friend's daughter in college who was sexually assaulted, and others of us are absolutely destroyed by it, as if by a hurricane. But nobody in America is untouched by the reality. I mean, here's a good example. We turn on the news today and there's a school shooting. You think that doesn't affect us? That profoundly affects all of us. And so whether we were the recipient of tissue damage or not, we're actually experiencing more violence than any other culture in human history because we experience it through television. Yeah, well, I do want to talk about the role of the media here and how the internet may have changed things or amplified

things. Just to revisit the logic of my question for a moment, because I totally take your point that the categorization of violence can be misleading and seem to remove us from the epicenter of the problem just by the words we choose. But I think there are clearly different pre-incident indicators for different kinds of violence. different kinds of violence. So, for instance, as you said earlier, men don't tend to walk around worrying about getting raped, and for good reason, because men out, you know, unless they happen to be in prison, aren't often getting raped in our society. And so there's a reason why women uniquely inherit that burden. And I mean, there's other differences that are relevant that we could talk about. I mean, women tend to be outweighed by men. You know, virtually all of the men there around the men are taller, bigger. Their upper bodies are stronger. If you're a man to imagine what this would be like, you have to imagine that every time you get into an elevator, every man in that elevator is 60 pounds heavier than you and obviously stronger than you, right? And, you know, women don't tend to challenge other women in public places and ask them to go out on the sidewalk so that they can get into a fistfight, as dumb guys do. And when violence is directed at

women, it doesn't tend to be of the sort that is a fight among apish guys. It's an effort to physically control her, to move her to another location, to sexually assault her if it's stranger violence, very likely. So there are differences here. To add one more variable here that I mentioned briefly, there's a big difference between a mentally ill perpetrator of a workplace shooting or a school shooting or a mall shooting and a perfectly sane, ideologically driven terrorist. The pre-incident indicators will be different. They'll be, in the backstory of the terrorist, there may not be any of the things you hear in the backstory of the mentally unstable mass shooter, because he's not mentally unstable.

He's just ideologically driven. I was kind of pushing you in that direction, but that's actually, in my view, not in contradiction with anything you said about the other ways in which our categories mislead us. Well, I think all of that's right, and what you said about the woman in the elevator, and for a man to have the same experience, everybody would have to be taller and 60 pounds heavier and muscular, And also everybody would have to be familiar with the territory of violence and force in a way that we're not. They'd all have to be martial arts experts because women traditionally in Western culture have been told, this is not for you. You're not supposed to understand the code of human violence. And a big part of my work is to say, you do understand the code of human

violence, and you have all the resources that are necessary to protect yourself. And the protection might not come in the form of upper body strength and disabling your assailant. It might, by the way, but it might not come in that form. It might come in the form of intuiting earlier than a man might that you are at risk. And that's a skill and a resource that's been developed, what I would call the wild brain developed over millions of years that is slightly more tuned in women, but also used more often in women. But let's go to a different category, not just women. There are other kinds of people who are victimized more easily, and it'll be obvious why that is. Children. So children are the subject of all variety of physical assaults, more often than people like you and I are, speaking about people our age and socioeconomic environment and the kinds of lives we live. So, you know, something like 15

kids are killed every week by their parents in the United States. So I'm not speaking to children here where I could say to them, you know, you have nothing to worry about from your parents who love you and the odds are so overwhelmingly out of 60 million of you right now, the odds are so overwhelmingly low that you would ever have an experience with your parent trying to harm you. However, if you have A, B, C, D, E, F, G pre-incident indicators, then you have a reason to be concerned. Well, again, we're not speaking to children who are inherently, throughout human history, life's miseries have fallen disproportionately on children. And so the various categories of who we are and the demographic that we fit into is relevant, depending on where you put us. If you put us in Iraq, all of a sudden, you know, we're in great danger.

Or you put us in Afghanistan. So the geography has an influence. All of these things do. But I think what I want to say that's important here, and it just goes to your observation about the terrorist or the ideologically motivated violent actor, you know, the terrorist is very similar to the soldier. Both people, you know, we take young men who would never kill anybody. And if we thought they would kill anybody, we'd be scared of them. And we take young men and militaries throughout human history have developed strategies for getting young men to be willing to place themselves at risk

of being killed and to do this unspeakable and unforgivable thing, which is kill another person. And that requires inculcation and training that militaries, I'll choose our military for a moment, have gotten so good at that today we have a far higher participation rate in combat. This is a super interesting thing. Back in the Civil War, about 50% of the soldiers actually participated. Others would put their head down and wait for it to end. How do we know that? Because corpse after corpse after corpse is found with the ball still in their rifle. And sometimes two or three balls in the rifle.

You had to fire the musket and then load in and tap in the gunpowder and do all of that stuff. So what did they do? They were reloading and not firing. They were in complete trauma. They were shitting their pants. They were grasping the ground. And 50% participated, and those were the men who were more inclined to. Today, we have moved that statistic up through Vietnam and World War II. We moved it up, and now we have it at 90%. So 90% of American soldiers participate in combat, which is against our nature, you understand.

And that's why when people come back from the trauma of war and they suddenly are without this great family of men and women they served with, we see so much PTSD. And it's why suicide rate has killed the suicide in soldiers has killed more people than combat, as you may know, coming out of Iraq. I don't want to that's a tangent we'll avoid for right now. But the broader point is that. the good news, we're still on the bad news right now, it's important that people realize that violence is not only part of America, but part of our species. And ultimately, as the most powerful people in history, Americans, we've climbed to the top of the world food chain, you could say. But now facing not a single enemy or predator who poses us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left, which is ourselves. And nobody should doubt this. And I give you two good examples. In the last two years, more Americans died from gunshot wounds than were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

Now let's go to Japan. It's got a population of about half ours, in other words, it's a big country, the number of young men shot to death in a year in Japan is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single busy weekend. So all the stats in the world will not change the fact that America is a particularly violent culture. And by the time your podcast is aired, thousands more Americans will have suffered a shooting injury, for example,

and thousands will have faced a criminal, and hundreds will have been raped by strangers, and thousands will have been raped by boyfriends and spouses. And so that's what you have to believe in order to bring your resources to the table. Because if you actually believe what a politician says, oh, the crime rate is down, didn't we do a good job? Didn't the FBI and this administration do a good job for you in stamping out violence?

If you believe that, then you tune down the radio channel that has to be the highest, which is your own intuition. the radio channel that has to be the highest, which is your own intuition. Let's talk about intuition because we have just said that people are fairly confused about violence and tend to be bad at dealing with some of the information that's out there about it. But this point you make again and again, you've made it here, and it's the very title of your book, The Gift of Fear, there's one thing that we are actually very good at. Evolution has made us experts at detecting danger and detecting shady people, feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people who are liable to do us harm.

Talk about intuition here and what it means to trust it and why so many people are unaware of the validity of trusting it, the reasons given for not trusting it. Talk about the primacy of intuition for a moment. Well, here we get to, I think, the biggest gift we can give to listeners. And this goes for female listeners and male listeners. This goes for decisions you make in your work and decisions you make for your safety. Ultimately, the biggest decision we all make is who to include in our life and who to exclude from our life. That's choosing friends, spouse, neighbors, co-workers, et cetera. We make those choices. Those choices aren't made for us. And so my advice always is to make very slow and careful decisions about whom you include in your life and very fast

decisions about whom you exclude. So if you have that nanny that you're uncomfortable about, she goes quickly. There's no reason to keep her around. I mean, I've had people through my career say, you know, should we put in a nanny cam because we're worried that this nanny is doing something dangerous with our kids. And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is going to thank you in 20 years. Mom, thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired. And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I want to focus on for a moment. Because America particularly, or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us. And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going

to protect you because they're not going to be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation. And government's not going to protect you. It can't. It tries to pretend it can, but it can't. And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment. And I think, as you said, Sam, it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on with some contempt. It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable, and husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition, and they don't take it seriously. But what I can tell you about intuition, I learned from

the origins of the word itself. The root of the word, inter, means to guard and to protect. Super interesting that that's what it means. We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions, but what it's built for, what it's in this system for, is to guard us and to protect us. And what it does is, and I'm really going to quote you for a second here, because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this. True. We didn't get the biggest claws.

We didn't get the sharpest teeth or the biggest muscles. What we got is the biggest brains. And the idea that we use the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog. So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on. That's why you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you, this danger. And that's a very meaningful thing. Gut feeling is the perfect word for it. And it's visceral. It's in the tissue. And it isn't just a feeling. No, it's called the enteric nervous system. Well, you've given it, you're smarter than I am. You gave it a better name. The idea is that this is a process.

This process we ridicule, intuition, is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical. In the natural order of things, it's more logical than the most fantastic computer calculation. And it's our most complicated cognitive process. And it's also, in some ways, it's the simplest, which I'll explain. But what it does, intuition, is it connects us to the natural world and to our nature so that when we are free from judgment and we've got only perception,

we say that thing, you know, in recounting what happened to us, somehow I knew. So if people will do these two things, one is to pay attention to intuition. It's, in my opinion, it's always right in two important ways. One is it's always based on something. And two, it always has your best interest at heart. And so give you a fast example. You're in an airport and you get that feeling, I shouldn't get on this plane. And millions of people have had this feeling. This plane's gonna crash, something, they get anxiety about it,

and I shouldn't get on this plane. So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling's coming from. And if it is coming from a news story you saw, you know, two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru, that is not based on your environment or your circumstance. It's based on your memory or your anxiety, and that's not actual fear. If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport

and make his way slowly down the jetwalk, now you've got something that's in your environment. And the question to ask always, this is how, you tell the difference between true fear, like I'm afraid of getting on this plane, and unwarranted fear, worry, anxiety, etc. This is how. True fear will always be based on something in your presence, and will always be based on something you perceive. The signal comes from your perception, from your senses. Unwarranted fear will always be based upon memory. And so it's something you remember, something you recall, something you're worrying about or something you're thinking about. But something based on your actual environment is a gift, hence the title of that book.

There's not an animal in nature that would say, oh, I don't want that gift. Don't tell me when I should be worried about my safety. It's so much trouble. You know, there's no antelope that suddenly is filled with fear and says to itself, it's probably nothing. But human beings every day are engaged in the constant prosecution of their own feelings. And, you know, the most vivid example I'm aware of is a woman alone in a building late at night. She's working late in the office and she goes to the elevator. The elevator door opens and there's

a guy inside who causes her fear. She's afraid of him. And so what does she do? Most women get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes her fear, something no animal in nature would do. And why does she do it? Because she says, I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby. I don't want to be like that, or I don't want to offend him, or I don't want to make him angry. She talks herself out of what I call prosecutes, her own jury's conclusion. And she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator. And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate. And human beings do it every day, participating in their own

victimization. The elevator example brings up some other issues here that are hugely important. And this is the other side of the balance that causes people to not value intuition or to prosecute their feelings, as you say. And it's that these moments of negative intuition can be in contradiction to a variety of social norms that well-intentioned people want to adopt. And so you just named one. You don't want to be racist, right? So if you're a white woman and the elevator doors open and the man on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable is black, well, you may just get on that elevator perversely to prove to yourself and to him that you're not racist, right? You override your intuition.

And in fact, I know someone who was in a circumstance like this, and it didn't end well. And we can make it even more provocative than that. There are certain circumstances where the race of the person is obviously relevant information. It is in and of itself a pre-incident indicator or a statistically relevant fact, regardless of any other messages that are coming. There are places where it's more surprising or less surprising to see a person of a certain race. And people feel very bad. We've all been trained to ignore those facts, which again, we can, in many cases, just instantly and intuitively surmise. So what are good people to do with that? Well, I mean, the best gift any of us can give to not only ourselves, but our society is that we take care of the person

whom nature has made us responsible for primarily, and that's ourselves. And so what I like to do, and in my own life, believe me, I'm no different from anybody else. I make mistakes all the time where afterwards I say, damn it, I knew better. I shouldn't have talked to that person. I shouldn't have said that thing. I shouldn't have gone to that place. And I didn't want to. And I overrode it for some reason. You know, a typical example would be you're invited to dinner at somebody's house and you just don't want to go. But you go. I think these aren't violence issues, but I think they're always mistakes. And there was in the Friends television series years ago, Phoebe, the character played by Lisa Kudrow, taught me something really important once. Somebody invites her to dinner and she says

to them on the phone, oh, it's Tuesday night? Oh, I can't because I don't want to. That's pretty fucking strong. If we would all live that way and say, I'm going to listen to myself, I'm going to listen to the voice that's a little bit more important than the voice of political correct this moment based on my behavior. The significant issue is listening to intuition and have the dialogue with yourself later about why you did or didn't do that. I'll give you a great example of this. If you, a dog, for example, is an animal that listens to its senses very well and its perceptions.

And when I was writing Gift of Fear, a good friend of mine said, oh, I know a lot about that. My dog is super intuitive. I said, really, tell me. And she said, well, he hated the contractor that I hired. And boy, he was right. That contractor ripped me off. And so I said to her, listen, the dog is not an expert on contractors or people. The dog was reacting to you when the contractor came over, right? You were the one who knew all about contractors and this guy. The dog didn't know that his car was too expensive for the level of bidding that he was doing or that his proposal was a little bit sleazy. The dog knew you, and the dog doesn't have better intuition. Here's what the dog has.

It is not bothered by the way it used to be, the way it could be, the way it should be, the way it ought to be. The dog doesn't ask any of that question. The dog looks and says the way it is, reality in this moment. And for that reason, animals don't even go into this mental exercise of, I don't want to be this kind of person. I don't want to be the kind of person who's suspicious, for example. I want to interject a quick thing here about words, is that the root of the word suspicion was also a big teacher for me. That root, suspicere, only means to watch. It doesn't mean to hurt somebody.

Like, should I feel bad because I'm suspicious of my neighbor when my kids are, you know, playing over at their house and I'm wondering about whether he's an alcoholic or whether he's violent or whether he's, you know, a child molester? So I say, oh, I don't want to be suspicious of everybody like that. Well, suspicion only means to watch. It is curiosity with the only means to watch. It is curiosity with the added imperative to watch. And so if you're suspicious of that guy you're getting into the elevator with, you watch and you change your demeanor. But listen, changing your environment

by getting into a steel box with somebody, that's a pretty radical decision when nature has just told you, you ought not. I mean, you're going to argue with that because you don't want to be that kind of person. Well, which kind of person do you want to be? The kind that's victimized? So I hit this kind of strong, Sam, I know, because in this part of our discussion is the gold, in this part of our discussion, is the gold, which is don't worry about why. Worry only about is. Is this feeling in this moment something that I am, as a general lifestyle choice, am going to push down and ignore? Or is this feeling in this moment something that I am going to listen to as a general lifestyle choice? I think we should add one more principle here, which you do talk about throughout your work. It really is the foundation of almost everything you recommend.

And it's something that people who prepare for violence, who train to defend themselves and others, whether they're martial artists or they get into firearms training. You meet a lot of these people, you can see that they not only don't spend time focusing on this principle, but their training tends to, in many cases, teach them to ignore it. And the principle is just avoidance. The primary goal here, the first move to keep yourself and those you love safe, is to not be where violence can happen to you. Insofar as your training to protect yourself leads you to be the kind of person who's more likely to put him or herself in the path of violence, then that's obviously counterproductive. This principle of

avoidance, when you marry that to what you just said about intuition and the validity of intuition, that's so much of the story of what it takes to not be a victim of violence and why you cannot afford to be politically correct at all about this. Be politically correct after the fact, as you said, right? Feel guilty after the fact. But if you're not going to be motivated by a split-second sense that the person who's just come into your presence doesn't mean well or represents a physical risk to you, if you are going to forsake that signal based on some, you know, larger social concerns that have been drummed into you, you will be the sort of person who never acts to avoid proximity to violence at the first

opportunity. Well, I love the way you said it, and I agree with all of it. And I think here I can sell this idea a little bit by offering a value add that has nothing to do with violence, because as you said at the beginning, most people assume that it's so rare in our culture or in their lives that they don't, you know, you would think it's morbid to think about it, they don't, you know, you would think it's morbid to think about it, or they would, not you. And so, you know, the sell is that the same resource I'm talking about, intuition, is how you get rich. It's how you choose a great spouse. It's how you fulfill your purpose here on earth. It's what Steve Jobs had and listened to. It's what Jeff Bezos listens to. If you had all these guys in a room, and by these guys, I mean people who've changed our lives and

who've contributed a great deal, they would all tell you that their decisions were not made on the basis of spreadsheets and logic and slideshows and calculators and all of that, their ultimate decision to do something that nobody had ever done before. So logic would tell you don't do it, right? If Jeff Bezos came to me and said, I want you to invest in my company, I'm going to sell books on the internet, you know, he'd have to say to me, the odds are 99%, you're going to lose all this money. And the only reason to do it is if you feel intuitively to do it. If Steve Jobs were to go somewhere, you know, there's a story of Steve Jobs saying to a friend of his whom he invited to be in the beginning of Apple, that guy was going instead

to work for Coca-Cola company, which he did. And Steve said to him, do you want to change the world or do you want to put sugar in water? And that guy made his choice. But Jobs did something with his life quite different. So if you listen to your intuition, you're in the great company of people who make a lot of their decisions respecting their intuition. And basically, this means learn how you communicate with yourself. For some people, it's a gut feeling or a hesitation or what have you. And for other people, it's the highest order messenger that intuition ever sends, which is fear.

Let me real quick talk about the messengers of intuition. There's curiosity. Curiosity simply says, I got another question here. So you learn a little more. There's hesitation. There's suspicion, which is a pretty important one. There's dark humor, right? You say to me, hey, I'll see you next week unless somebody's killed me by then. Well, I'm going to sit down and keep talking to that person. Because that's not a funny joke. There's no pure humor in that, but it's a way of expressing a concern. So I want

to know where'd that come from? Oh, well, you know, we got this employee and he's a former Vietnam vet who carries guns a lot. And he's been talking about shooting his mouth off about how much he hates everybody. Ah, so let's talk about that because it'll either be resolved that it's not likely to produce violence or that it is. And then of all the messengers of intuition, I talked about curiosity, suspicion, hesitation, the one that must never be ignored is fear. I mean, fear is, it may be whispered or it may be

screaming in your ear, but fear basically says, shut up, listen to me, and I will get you out of here. And if you listen, but if you don't listen, then you remain in an environment. And this goes to your question about simply not being there. You remain in an environment that is you've already been told contains the ingredients of violence. And I want to talk about because you said, you know, social conditioning and political correctness and what have you. what is the opposite of intuition? The opposite of intuition is denial.

Because if intuition is knowing something, but not knowing why you know it, then denial is choosing not to know something and having all the details, right? My boyfriend has hit me before. He just lost his job. His drinking has increased. He's just bought a third handgun. He beat up his last girlfriend. I know all that, and I'm going to act like I don't.

So I ask our listeners today the question, which of those two features of human behavior denial or intuition is likely to be more relevant and and constructive for your safety and also for that other thing i'm selling which is all the quality in your life because the quality of your life is completely determined by one thing and that is let me make it clear after you have food after you have shelter after you have food, after you have shelter, after you have your immediate physical needs met, the quality of your life is determined by the choices you make in terms of relationships, employees, employers, family members, spouse,

all these choices that we make. That's including the choice, by the way, of who to get into the elevator with, because that's a relationship. Obviously, when violence occurs, there's very often a story to be told about the signs that were ignored. But more often than not, you're seeing these signs in other people and often taking steps to avoid further contact with them. And then, you know, nothing bad happens. But the signs can be fairly subtle, and I think if you're not someone who has your head in this kind of thinking, it can seem kind of paranoid to be viewing the world this way. I don't know if this is the greatest example, but this is something that just occurred to me. I remember I had a problem with the cable at our house and

scheduled an appointment for the cable guy to come over and fix things. And I don't have a standard relationship with the cable guy. This is the kind of thing that happens like once every five years or so. Somebody shows up and it was one of these moments where he comes through the front door and I immediately had an intuition that there's something off about this guy. And here were the following moments that became salient to me. He comes to the door and he looks at me, but then immediately looks around. He's kind of surveying the house, right? So he's looking around at an inappropriately early moment,

looking at objects. I mean, basically just trying to see, in my interpretation, what else is in the house or who else is in the house. So it's just this very subtle failure of ordinary social behavior, looking past the person you're meeting in his house at an earlier moment than you otherwise would. And then when he introduces himself, he says, hey, hi, I'm John. But in the act of telling me he's John, he shows me his name tag as though to prove that he's telling the truth, right? So this struck me as, this is a kind of cascade of impressions that's coming. It was later that I unpacked them in terms of why they struck me as wrong, but, you know, struck me as odd in retrospect that he would ask me to verify that he is actually John by showing me his badge.

And then the final kicker was that, you know, I showed him the television that was having a problem and then, you know, went off elsewhere in the house. I wasn't going to ride shotgun with him every moment while he's fixing the television. But then he comes back. When I next see him, he comments on having seen my wife and me in a picture that was in a room that he had no business being in. So it was like he had wandered into a room that was just not on his path over the course of dealing with the problem he was there for. And then, you know, all sirens were blaring.

I mean, I basically thought that I had an ex-con in my house who was casing the place. But people encounter that kind of thing all the time, and I assume don't notice any of it. It's true. And so many things were said there that I wouldn't comment on. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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