The Jordan Harbinger Show - 329: Gavin de Becker | The Gift of Fear Part One

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

Gavin de Becker (@gdbaprotects) is the author of The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence and the security pioneer who designed the MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems used at the top levels of government. This is part one of a two-part episode. Make sure to catch part two here! What We Discuss with Gavin de Becker: Violence is a reality -- if you're not prepared for its possibility, you'll be caught off guard by its eventuality. Learn how to hone your sixth sense for danger. Discover how to spot the red flags that signify someone as a likely abuser, con artist, or predator. How can technology paired with human intuition protect us from people who mean us harm? How literal is the term gut feeling? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/329 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! The James Altucher Show brings you into the lives of peak-performers: billionaires, best-selling authors, rappers, astronauts, athletes, comedians, actors, and world champions! Check it out here! (Or wherever you prefer listening to podcasts in your ear-holes!) Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave. We want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes. for skills like negotiation, body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, then you'll be right at home here with us. Today on the show, another one from the vault.

My friend Gavin DeBecker is back on the show. Gavin has been the head of security for folks like Oprah and Jeff Bezos. He's one of the most respected people in the security industry globally. Gavin is also the author of The Gift of Fear, which is simply amazing, an extremely popular book for the past few decades. on the subject of fear, why fear exists, and how we can use it as a tool instead of, well, just being afraid of it or avoiding it. We'll rediscover our intuition and how it developed and evolved and how it can help keep us

alive if we actually listen to it. We'll learn how to hone our sixth sense for danger, something I didn't think was possible, and we'll discover and observe the warning signs of abusers, conmen, and other predators so we can avoid them and help our friends and loved ones do so as well. This show accidentally morphed into sort of a toolbox for safety here on the Jordan Harbinger show, especially for our show family's sisters out there. So make sure you share this with everyone you love and help keep them safe. This is a fascinating episode and could potentially save your life or the life of someone you love.

If you want to know how I managed to book all these great folks, my network is massive. I keep in touch with hundreds, probably thousands of people, using systems and tiny habits so it doesn't take hours every week. check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now that we're all dug in for COVID-19, now is the best time to be doing these drills because they don't require going out and seeing people. They can all be done from your phone in a few minutes a day, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter.

So come join us and you'll be in great company. Now here's Gavin DeBecker. You've designed a training system for the government to predict violence. And I was curious about why and how that works. I mean, obviously, people need to be able to predict violence. But is it body language? Is it nonverbal communication? This is something that seems like you're one of the pioneers in this field.

So it's one of the reasons we're excited to talk to you here. Well, I designed a system called Mosaic, which is a computer-based threat assessment system that is basically a method for how you approach making threat assessments, just like like a word program doesn't write your book for you, but it does facilitate you to write the book, or computer-aided engineering does not design a jet, but it facilitates the design of the jet. The mosaic system helps people to know

what questions to ask about a situation, and it gives them a range of possible answers. I'll give you a fast example. There's a mosaic system for assessing which spousal abusers will escalate to homicide, and there's one for assessing which school threateners will actually carry out threats. So if you ask a question like,

Does the person have a gun? Old strategies had people saying yes, no, kind of a yes, no checklist. It's either present or it's not present. But our mosaic system provides a range of optional answers because there is a range in human behavior. So for example, you might have someone who owns a gun for defensive purposes in their house. That's a lot different from somebody who just bought a gun yesterday. And that's a lot different from somebody who has 30 guns. And so what Mosaic does is give you this range. And when dealing with human behavior, including just you and I doing assessments of people we know, it's not practical to say, describe this movie that you saw last night by saying it's either the best movie I ever saw or the worst I ever saw. That's not a sufficient range. And so old threat

assessment systems that just were a checklist of whether certain features were present or not present are not really what mosaic is. And that's artificial intuition. It's a method that brings the evaluator's intuition to the table and organizes it in a way that can be replicated over and over again. And when you do that with a thousand cases, you begin to see patterns of human behavior. Spasal homicide cases, for example, are not that different one to the next. And public figure attack cases are not that different one to the next when you have enough of them to absorb information from. This makes a lot of sense. Well, first of all, you end up with no system, or you have the old system, which is binary, which then results in so many false positives that it becomes,

useless at some point. You got to have the shades of nuance. Otherwise, if you're getting false negatives, that's terrible, but getting false positives just causes you to ignore actual positives, right? It's very true. And if you think about how we do any assessment of anything, you require a foundation of knowledge. For example, you could say to me, Gavin, there's a great restaurant. I know you'll love it and recommend a restaurant to me. But you can't know I'll love it unless you answer a few basic questions. Do I like a live band in a restaurant, or do I hate it? It happens to be hate. Do I like to sit near it or far away from it. Do I like quiet? Do I like options on the menu? Do I like fresh food or cooked food? There's so many things you would have to know. But if you learned all of those

things, you interviewed me in effect about restaurants. Now you could make a recommendation to me that would be valid because you would have jumped through those various hoops. And predictions of violent behavior are not substantively different from predictions of any other kind of behavior. You need a base of knowledge about the ways that people behave and what factors are in their life. I gave you the example of a gun, just owning a gun when you recognize that hundreds of millions of people do, that's not enough to put you over or under with regard to a safety evaluation. There are so many other factors that are more unique. You mentioned that the mosaic system brings in the evaluator's intuition. That almost presupposes that we're currently ignoring our

own intuition. Is that accurate? I mean, reading the book, The Gift of Fear, it seems like we've programmed or deprogrammed ourselves when it comes to listening to our intuition entirely, and that's what leads us into a lot of trouble. It's true, and I think systems in general, you know, systems are not human. So systems of government are not human. They are a reflection of human choices made at some time in the past. They don't evolve organically, and they don't change organically. And so if you think of a bureaucracy, setting up standards for how human behavior will be assessed, it's missing a key feature, which is human intuition. And what Mosaic has tried to do is create an effect artificial intuition, much like there's artificial intelligence, and to do so by weighing thousands of cases

where we know the outcome, meaning we know whether it escalated to violence or it didn't, and then making that information available to the person doing the assessment. And indeed, we want that person's intuition to be part of the assessment. And we also want to inform that person's intuition by teaching a few things. So for example, I could say to you that people who make threats to public figures rarely act on those threats, meaning the people who attack public figures are not the same people who threaten public figures. Just knowing that, which could feel counterintuitive, would change your assessment because you would now say if the guy says, I'm going to kill you on Tuesday, written to the governor of some state, that that actually reduces

the likelihood of that person acting out in a threatening manner. Really? That's interesting. And, like you said, counterintuitive. I noticed in the book, there's a little factoid here that I thought was fascinating. Dogs are really great at reading us, and every dog owner knows this, but they don't have better intuition

that reads other people. They're just really good at reading us. We're just really, really bad at reading ourselves. Yes, that's true. A dear friend of mine told me the story about firing her general contractor on a project.

She was doing a renovation at her house, and she did it because the dog didn't like the general contractor. And I clarified for her that the dog is reacting to her reactions to the general contractor, and she doesn't need the middleman or the middle dog in that case. She can go direct to her own intuition and not have to lay it off onto an animal,

which is not particularly well informed about whether a contractor should charge you 15% or 20% on top of his costs, or whether it should be time and material, or how the contract should be written. That's for human beings to work out. But we do tend to invest in other people and other beings like dogs a greater intuition. Now, there is something the dog has that's enormously

valuable, and that is the dog has less than we do. It is not bothered by the way it could be or should be or ought to be or used to be. The dog doesn't evaluate any of that. The dog just sees what is right in front of him. And if we could do that more, people would be a lot safer. Right. So essentially, they have less cognitive bias and things like that that they're subject to because they're not thinking it would be really impolite for me to bark at this guy for seemingly no reason, or it could be mistaken as a racist for barking at this type of person or something like that. They don't do that. They just react. That's true. The whole business of thought is much different from the business of intuiting or perceiving. When you perceive something accurately, there's not a lot of thought involved. You walk outside, it's cold. You know it. You know it in yourselves. When you think about it being cold, then begins the mental chatter, then begins, well, it's not as cold as it was in life. London, well, I should have brought another coat. Well, I wonder if it's going to get colder or warmer. Well, I shouldn't be reacting to cold this way if I'm going to live in New York City. All the shoulds

come into the thought process. And that's very far removed from the basic perception of cold. And what I'm trying to encourage people to do is get back to their basic perceptions and intuitions and less in the process of horizontal thinking. Right. So it's almost like the thought process gets in the way of the intuition process, or maybe just screams a lot louder than the intuition can. Well, it's true that it gets in the way, and it really depends. You can think of it as the volume adjustment on a radio

in which do you turn up more or less, the radio or yourself. And what I'm encouraging people to do is turn up their own perceptions and intuitions so that the other voices in our head, which are the cultural voices and PC political correctness voices, which I despise,

which are counterproductive to safety into general free life. So if you turn up the voice on your own intuition and honor yourself first, before you honor the predator who's trying to trick you into something, before you honor the advertiser who's trying to sell you something,

before you honor the politician who's trying to get a vote, you honor your own direct, immediate, intuitive process first. Oh man, we would all be happier. Yeah, and safer, of course, as well. You say in the book that the intuition process works, it just doesn't work as well as the denial

process, which I assume the denial process is some combination of what you just mentioned, PC, rational thought, manners, social programming, and things like that. Yes, and the big element of denial is that you can try to make it the way you wish it could be or the way you think it should be. Interestingly, in that whole book, gift of fear, I think the word should appears only twice, and both times it's in a sentence with somebody else saying it. I don't use the word at all in any prescriptive way, such as you should do this or people should do that. The word should always invites the question according to whom. Right. I try to remove that word from my thinking and encourage other people to remove it from

theirs because it doesn't really matter how a thing should be. It only matters how it is and how it is in terms of reality in this moment. I'm now talking about safety. And reality is the highest ground you can get to. That's the place where you can see what's coming. If you modify reality by changing it to, well, it shouldn't be this way. I don't like it to be this way. I want it to be another way. You're basically not seeing what is. Right. So we then end up ignoring danger because we're programming slash building ourselves to see what we want to see instead of what is. That's true. I interviewed a woman who was coming out of her apartment and as she turned to lock the door, put the key in to lock the door, she felt some hand on her shoulder. She whipped around in a

hurry and she saw a man wearing a ski mask and it was a hot day. And the, The first thought that she had was, I guess he's going skiing somewhere. Oh, man. Fortunately, the thought didn't matter because she had already pushed herself backwards and pushed this man over the second-story railing of her apartment building down into the courtyard below. And the point being that this is clearly a predator. There's no good reason to be wearing a ski mask when you approach somebody and shock them

by being very close behind them. But the first thought was a failed thought. Didn't help her safety. Thankfully, she'd already acted. And that's what intuition can do if we encourage it and let it happen. It'll just act. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Gavin De Becker. We'll be right back.

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It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Gavin DeBecker. Does everyone have intuition? This might sound like a stupid question, but are we all actually born with a sense of intuition? and is everybody equally intuitive? Well, putting aside, you know, autism and various things that affect mental processing, everybody with a normal functioning mind and body system does have intuition, and what we have in varying degrees is our willingness to honor it and listen to it and learn about it.

But otherwise, yes, we all have it and we all have it in great measure. It's our most extraordinary mental and physical process. And I say mental and physical because the stomach lining, as an example, has a hundred million neurons, a hundred million thought cells. That's more neurons than there are in a dog's brain. We have in just our stomach lining. And so when you hear the word our gut,

you know, I had a gut feeling, it's a very accurate description of what's going on. And these two brains in the gut and in the skull communicate with each other through the body. And so the whole mind-body system delivers intuition to you, which is knowing without knowing why, knowing without having to stop at all the letters from A to Z on the way, just getting from A to Z automatically. So I think everybody has it.

I got to tell you, one of the reasons that I was really keen on having you come on the show is, and my listeners have heard this story in pieces at various points in time. 16 years ago, when I was 20, I got into a taxi cab in Mexico City. This is a year 2000. I was 20 years old. And it turned out to be a fake taxi. And the guy was driving me further and further away from my destination, further and further way and my brain went through this process, which you're very familiar with here. It said,

no, it's probably going to be fine. I know he said he was going to ask for directions, but he's a cabby. He should know that. No, no, no, no. There's got to be some other rational explanation for why we're driving further away from a really popular destination, the presidential palace in the middle of town. So it is kind of like a cabby not knowing where the White House is in D.C. No, no, no, no. But I mean, I've never been kidnapped before, so that can't be what's happening. And then I remembered some guy on Oprah in 1994 or something like that when I was a kid sitting there with my mom who said, never go to the secondary location. And I only realized a decade and a half later when reading the book, The Gift of Fear, that that was you.

Well, Jordan, I'm so glad to hear that story. And that makes my day. That means a lot to me, particularly as I'm about to hear, I hope, how well you prevailed, because I know we're here having the conversation. So you did well. Exactly. I'm sitting in this cab, you know, when you pick the plastic part off of a lock on an old car or the metal part, it falls below the flush threshold of where the window is, so you can't grab it. It's impossible.

Both of his rear doors had that, and so I just thought, this is a really weird setup for a cab. Well, it's an old car, and I kept going through that, and then I thought to myself, am I making excuses that are going to get me in trouble? And then I realized, well, I have no time to think about this, because my resolution at that point was, well, I'll just wait see because wherever we go, then I can decide what to do. And I remembered never go to the secondary location. So what ended up happening was we stopped outside of what probably was the secondary location and I put my arm between him and the door and I slid behind the driver's seat and he reached over toward the glove box and I grabbed him and threw him back to his seat because I figured he had a knife or a gun in there or something. And that's when he made a fast one for the

door not knowing that my arm was right there. And I ended up having to choke him, smother him, and throw him out of his own car, crawl through the front seat, push him out of the car, couldn't drive a stick shift, especially not one from 1968 with a tricky clutch and shifter, took the keys out through them, and ran what seemed like 10 miles and probably was really two or three miles. And so I ended up essentially at the secondary location, but not chained in a basement. And definitely a lot safer having done that. I mean, there were a couple possible outcomes. The easiest one, which is a couple guys are going to get in the car and run me around to ATMs until my card stops working. And the worst case scenario, which is a slow, painful death,

in the middle of nowhere outside Mexico City. Well, it's a great story, and certainly, though you might have ended up at that location, you did not end up under someone's malevolent control. You clearly established by your behavior that you just described to me the most important message that a target can ever express to a predator

is, I am not your victim. And so by not being an easy target and by getting out of the car and by distancing yourself and all the things that you did, congratulations, because I know you've prevailed and I never deconstruct these things later and say to people, you should have done this or that. It sounds like all the moves you made are right. And the only takeaway that you have is that in the future, you'll short circuit the time that's used up for the internal conversation.

Right. Now it's a much quicker conversation. And I've definitely had similar conversations with myself where I find myself going, well, it's probably fine because and then I go, wait a minute, I'm just making an excuse to keep myself short term inside my life. my comfort zone because taking drastic action like rolling out of a speeding car is not comfortable. So you kind of want to be damn sure. But the problem is in waiting to be sure, you end up waiting 20 minutes longer. Looking back on it, I knew what was going down miles ago when I was in that car. I just waited and waited and waited because it was easier short term to bury my head in the sand and not listen to my intuition, which said, red alert, this is really, really bad. It was easier short term to go, oh, come on, what are the odds that this is going to happen? Especially given, and this occurred to me years and years later, you're only really basing your actions on your

previous experience. So if you've never been kidnapped, chopped up, and murdered, you think, well, the odds are pretty slim. It's never happened to me before, and I've been on this planet for 20 years. You don't have a frame of reference. And when you talk to guys, military personnel and things like that that have been snatched up, they have a completely different response to this, because they've already had that close call. And it's a similar response to what I would have now, which is much quicker, I would like to think, than it was 16 years ago. It's all true, and you had the benefit as well of some message in your head from that Oprah show, for example, gave you a different way of looking at the situation. I don't agree that we base our behavior only on that which we've experienced before.

We base our denial on that for sure. But we, human beings, unlike virtually every other animal in nature, we have the resource of being able to learn from other people's mistakes. Right, that does make sense. I think it really was just, well, it's never happened in me before, so I can feel safer ignoring this because I don't have an experience that says anything contrary to it. However, there was a point at which my brain said, remember that guy in Oprah? Oh yeah, that's what's happening right now, knucklehead. Get with the program.

And that's exactly what got me over that edge, but it took a while. I mean, I don't have an exact timeline, but it was probably good 10 to 15 minutes where I just could no longer ignore it, thank goodness. Tell us about your childhood. I mean, this is something that you witnessed a lot of violence as a kid. Is that what got you into this particular field of study? Probably so. I mean, I obviously was in the field of study as a kid, and not just me, millions of kids

who've had experiences with parents and others who have been violent are learning to assess human behavior with a few more variations than kids who haven't had experiences with violence. And I was doing at 10 years old, much the same as what I do today, in terms of putting together the features and the characteristics that I considered to be pre-incident indicators, the indicators that violence was coming. And I say not just me, because you can imagine millions of kids

whose fathers, for example, are violent when they drink, who see coming home from work and popping that beer can and can predict it's going to be one of those days or it's going to be one of those nights. Kids become experts at predicting the behavior of the adults around them. And I was no different, and we had a particularly challenging, time. My mother was a heroin addict. We were on welfare. We had a lot of bad folks around that you wouldn't normally choose to have around your kids. We, the kids, learned a lot about

predicting human behavior and learned about the stakes of being wrong. And absolutely my childhood contributed enormously to what I grew up to do. How can we then, without having our own horrific childhood or anything like that, of course, how can the average Jane and the average Joe sharpen our intuition? Or is that something that doesn't happen? Is it a matter of uncovering it, rather than honing it. Really a matter of uncovering it rather than honing, and that's a good way of putting it. There's a story of Michelangelo

who is asked by somebody, how can you sculpt David? And he says you get a piece of marble and you remove everything that isn't David. So the same thing here. You have the intuition, the resources there, and it's a matter of learning and being open to learn

that it has value and works and is effective. In a culture that is trying to sell you, services and ideas. Governments are trying to sell you the idea that only they can keep you safe. Police department's the same thing. Corporations the same thing. You need what they have to sell. You need what they offer. It's a rare message that says you have everything you need already when it comes to your own safety. No politician is going to be present with you in that underground parking lot or that corridor leading to your apartment. No policeman is going to be present with you. You'll be there and you have everything you need if you'll listen to it.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Gavin DeBecker. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

If you're listening to us in The Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Gavin DeBecker. Now, did we get intuition from evolution precisely so that we can figure this type of thing out, a self-preservation? I mean, you write in the gift of fear that we do a lot of modeling or we have the ability to model other human beings for reasons of safety and the ability to predict their behavior. Can you flesh that out a little bit? I thought that was pretty fascinating. Well, a couple of thoughts come to mind. One is that the word itself, intuition, the root of it is

in tear, and it means to guard and to protect. So think about that. Here's a word we've all used all our lives, and you come to learn that the word actually means to guard and to protect, and that's what it can do for us if we listen to it. And did it come from evolution? Certainly, it's a far higher thought process than the thought process of logic, for example, which gets a lot more favorable attention in Western society. It is a process of the mind and body, and it is there to serve us if we're interested, and it has various messengers that it sends out to get our attention. So one messenger might be curiosity, and I'd say, hey, Jordan, I'm curious. Have you ever been in the Middle East? And you might say yes or no. Have you been, by the way? I have, yes.

Okay. So that was curiosity. Something, curiosity, something incline me to ask that question with the assumption that it would be yes. Then there's suspicion, and suspicion has a very bad rap, meaning it's bad if I'm suspicious of somebody. People think it's harming them in some way. But suspicion, the root of that word, suspicier, means simply to watch. It is curiosity with the added instruction to watch. That's all it means. So that's another intuitive signal. We've talked now about curiosity and suspicion. Another one, and the one nobody can ignore, is fear. That's the one that really gets your attention and it calls you very loudly because it's highly uncomfortable to almost intolerable to experience fear and not respond to it because it's such

an overpowering feeling. I'm not talking about anxiety or worry, but real fear that you're in the presence of danger. That's a very strong signal that you get from intuition. So all these ways in which it communicates with you, those are ways that we want to learn so you can react far earlier than fear. you can react when it's just curiosity, like you in the taxi cab in Mexico City, is like, hey, is this the way to go? Is this the right route? Gee, it seems like we're getting farther from population areas. That's curiosity at first. Then comes suspicion. This guy's removed the lock operators on the doors. And then quite a bit down the road comes fear. All of them are resources, but the big one, the one that's a gift that every animal in nature lives by, notice I said lives by

and not dies by is fear. Because fear is there, a signal in the presence of danger. There's nobody who wouldn't want it. If you have a reason to feel fear, please send me the signal. Don't leave me to be the only guy who doesn't know what's going on. And even though there's nobody who doesn't want it, people seek to talk themselves out of it. Let's start applying these concepts. I'd love to learn how some of some of some of some initial signs, maybe some of that initial curiosity or suspicion of controlling people, of violent people that we might come across, especially in relation. A lot of female listeners of the show write in with kind of crazy stories that are a lot scarier than the ones guys have. Guys have similar stories, too, but they tend to be the exception.

A lot of female fans have at least one kind of scary or really scary story. I'd love to talk about how we might be able to read people a little bit based on their behavior. Well, the first thing I want to share is that behavior is one half of the equation and situation is the other half. In other words, where is this behavior happening? and do I have vulnerability here? I don't like political correctness at all. I don't like anything which seeks to control speech and discourage authenticity and speech,

whatever one's feelings are. So I've rebranded those two letters, PC, and I call them privacy and control. And if somebody has you an environment that's private, your apartment, your car, and they have control over you, either by virtue of persuasion or by virtue of force or size or strength,

which also persuades you, to believe that you have to listen to what someone says. If you're in a situation where there's PC, privacy and control, that by itself is a reason to simply check and confirm that it's all right. Example, you're driving with your kind, loving boyfriend. He has a situation that affords privacy and control. He's operating the vehicle. He's bigger than you are.

But it's a non-issue. Because when you ask yourself the question, is this okay? The answer is yes, this is okay. You're driving with your driving instructor who you've known and you've been driving with a whole bunch. you feel okay about it. You're driving with a taxi driver who's giving you no reason to feel otherwise. You feel okay about it. But if you ask yourself before you ask about the behaviors that indicate violence may be likely, you ask first about the situation you're in, and that's where this privacy and control equation comes in. Now talking about the behaviors, certainly the number one behavior to concern female targets. And that's just about every woman will be targeted at some time. Not every woman will be a victim, but every woman will be targeted at some time. The number one pre-incident indicator is that someone tries to control you. They try to control where you are, how you are, what you think, how you view the situation. And they try to persuade you that the situation is okay. So as to turn off fear and turn off the other intuitive resources that you have.

You mentioned as well in the book, a lot of people become controlling because they need to predict human behavior, often because they grew up in a place where that was impossible and inconsistent. So a lot of the people that seek to control are doing so because they had crazy unpredictable childhoods, which, as we all know, it's a cliche that parental issues end up imprinting on us, and those people can be abused in turn become the abuser. Yes, all of that is true. And certainly when you don't believe that good things will come to you on their own, then the effort to control outcome becomes far more important.

I want to talk for a moment about two kinds of predators. These are the two broad categories of predators when it comes to you. human beings. The first is the persuasion predator and the second is the power predator. The persuasion predator persuades a woman to participate, to be in this environment, to trust him, to go where he wants to go, to do what he wants to do. She is persuaded by him. Now, in fact, she's persuaded by herself. He just changes the events that are in front of her, the things he says, the things he does, but we tend to persuade ourselves. We go through that internal mental dialogue and we come through it either more comfortable or less comfortable.

The second kind of predator, and far more rare, is the power predator. This is someone who just charges at you like a bear and does an actual physical attack. The reason I say he's far more rare is that the power predator needs an environment in which you won't be able to call for help, and there aren't other people around. And so that's quite a rare kind of person. And the persuasion predator, on the other hand, gets a target to go to a location or remain, in a location or stay in someone's environment when she otherwise wouldn't want to. So the number one pre-incident indicator of a violent situation is that someone is seeking to persuade you of

something or control you and you don't want to. Intuitively, you know you don't want to. In the moment you do, you start to talk yourself into it. For example, there's a woman that I interviewed recently and she said, whenever she hears herself say, well, it's probably nothing. That is her indicator that it's probably something. How bad is it to remove yourself from an environment? It's not bad. You're not hurting anybody. You're not doing anything to anyone. You're just retreating from the environment that you're in or getting away from a person that you don't want to be with at that moment. And there isn't an animal in nature that would even second guess that for a moment. An animal in nature that says, get away from this lion does not say afterwards, well, this is probably a nice lion.

Just get away from the lion. These are the primary pre-incident indicators of which by far the most important one is the feeling that someone's trying to make you do something you don't want to do or be present where you don't want to be or engage when you don't want to engage. What is forced teaming? That was one that was in there where I thought, oh, I'm writing that down right now. And in fact, it is one of the few that I wrote down from that enormous pre-incident indicator list, which I would love to flesh out a little bit. But forced teeming, what is that and why is this something that's so important to note? Force teaming is a strategy used by predators and other kinds of people in other situations that makes us both feel like we're in the same situation. For example, we both just missed the bus. So force teaming is to say,

hey, we both just missed the bus. Let's hail down a cab and use it together. Now, in a bus situation, you actually have both experienced something together. So there actually is a bit of shared experience, but that doesn't make you a team. And force teaming is the effort to compel a person to feel like they're a member of a team because we both experience something at the same time. For example, I'm late and you're late. Let's do something. Let's do something. something together, or we're both going up to the fourth floor. Let's do it together as a team. Let's be forced into a situation where you feel that we share this experience commonly. Now, there are real teams, and the key factor of real teams is that everybody chose to be on it.

And forced teaming, the key factor is that you didn't choose to be on it. Someone who's trying to make me feel like I'm a team with someone when I didn't choose to be. Big thank you to Gavin. The book title is The Gift of Fear. Links to everything he does will be on our website in the show notes. By the way, if you buy books, please use our website links if you buy books. It does help support the show. Also, in the show notes, there are worksheets for each and every episode so you can review what you've learned here today from Gavin. We also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny hacks. so it doesn't feel like a lot of work, it doesn't take up a lot of time. That's at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The problem with kicking the can down the road is that we are not able to make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking.

The number one mistake I see people make is, well, aside from people who think they know this already, people don't dig the well before they get thirsty. You have to build your network before you need it, even if it means starting from scratch. Don't procrastinate and stagnate. Just get this going. The drills take a few minutes a day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. It's pretty much been crucial for everything that I've done being successful so far here. You can find it all for free at jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Speaking of building relationships,

you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and This show is created in association with Podcast One. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger and Jason DePhilippo, engineered by Jace Sanderson, show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own. And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm sure as heck not a doctor or a therapist.

So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends. when you find something useful or interesting. And this is a great episode to help keep friends and family safe. Hopefully you find that of value. And hopefully you find something interesting in every episode. So please do share the show with those you love.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. A lot of people ask me which podcasts I listen to. And one of the shows that I find myself listening to regularly is the James Altucher Show. I've actually got James here right now. Thanks, Jordan.

So happy to be here. once again on your show? Well, tell me about David Sinclair. This is anti-aging, which is kind of a field riddled with a little bit of BS a lot of the time, a lot of BS, all the time, maybe. A lot of BS. I've had quite a few anti-aging researchers over the past six years on the podcast. And David Sinclair, a Harvard researcher, author of Lifespan, founder of a whole bunch of companies, is definitely the best source of information. He told me so much about basically his routine. And, and he, and what the latest research is on viewing aging as a disease as opposed to an inevitability. And he recommends so many different things and he pointed me to so much research.

It's one of the favorite episodes I've done and I've done lots with health experts and a lot of peak performance experts. And David Sinclair, that episode on aging was really fun to do. That's episode 492 on the James Altiture Show. Thanks, James. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard. right, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show,

you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions

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and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same Same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.