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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.
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Police departments, the same thing.
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Corporations, the same thing.
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You need what they have to sell.
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You need what they offer.
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It s a rare message that says you have everything you need already when it comes to your own safety.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Gavin DeBecker, author of a few books, including The Gift of Fear, which is simply amazing.
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If you like AOC, you re gonna love this episode, and you should listen to this one if you wanna learn about our intuition.
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how it developed, and how it keeps us alive, or can keep us alive if we listen to it, how to hone our sixth sense for danger, and how to discover and observe the warning signs of people who are abusers, conmen, and other predators, so we can avoid them and help our friends and loved ones do so as well.
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This episode sort of accidentally morphed into an AOC toolbox for safety, especially for AOC sisters, so pass this along to the women in your life and enjoy this fascinating episode with Gavin DeBecker.
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By the way, if you are new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the Art of Charm toolbox.
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That s where we discuss concepts similar in nature to this one, such as reading body language, nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking, mentorship, influence, persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at AOC.
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If you re in the United States, you can text the word charmed, C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Anywhere else in the world, just go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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All right, here s Gavin DeBecker.
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You ve designed a training system for the government to predict violence, and I was curious about why and how that works.
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I mean, obviously, people need to be able to predict violence, but is it body language?
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Is it nonverbal communication?
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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.
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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 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.
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The Mosaic system helps people to know
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what questions to ask about a situation, and it gives them a range of possible answers.
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I ll give you a fast example.
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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.
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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.
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It s either present or it s not present, but our mosaic system
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provides a range of optional answers, because there is a range in human behavior.
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So for example, you might have someone who owns a gun for defensive purposes in their house.
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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.
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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,
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describe this movie that you saw last night by saying it s either the best movie I ever saw or the worst movie I ever saw.
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That s not a sufficient range.
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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.
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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.
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And when you do that with
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a thousand cases, you begin to see patterns of human behavior.
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Spousal homicide cases, for example, are not that different one to the next.
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And public figure attack cases are not that different one to the next when you have enough of them to absorb information from.
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This makes a lot of sense.
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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.
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You gotta have the shades of nuance.
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Otherwise, if you re getting false negatives, that s terrible, but getting false positives just causes you to ignore actual positives, right?
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It s very true, and if you think about how we do any assessment of anything, you require a foundation of knowledge.
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For example, you could say to me, Gavin, there s a great restaurant, I know you ll love it,
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and recommend a restaurant to me.
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But you can t know I ll love it unless you answer a few basic questions.
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Do I like a live band in a restaurant or do I hate it?
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Happens to be hate.
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Do I like to sit near it or far away from it?
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Do I like quiet?
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Do I like options on the menu?
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Do I like fresh food or cooked food?
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There s so many things you would have to know.
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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.
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Predictions of violent behavior are not substantively different from predictions of any other kind of behavior.
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You need a base of knowledge about the ways that people behave and what factors are in their life.
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And I gave you the example of a gun.
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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.
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There are so many other factors that are more unique.
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You mentioned that the mosaic system brings in the evaluator s intuition.
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That almost presupposes that we re currently ignoring our own intuition.
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Is that accurate?
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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.
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It s true, and I think systems in general, you know, systems are not human.
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So systems of government are not human.
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They are a reflection of human choices made at some time in the past.
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They don t evolve organically, and they don t change organically.
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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.
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And what Mosaic has tried to do is create, in effect, artificial intuition, much like there s artificial intelligence, and to do so by weighing
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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.
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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.
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So for example, I could say to you that people who make threats to public figures rarely act on those threats.
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meaning the people who attack public figures are not the same people who threaten public figures.
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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.
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Really?
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That s interesting, and yeah, like you said, counterintuitive.
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I noticed in the book, there s a little factoid here that I thought was fascinating.
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Dogs are really great at reading us, and every dog owner knows this, but they don t have better intuition that reads other people.
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They re just really good at reading us.
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We re just really, really bad at reading ourselves.
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Yes, that s true.
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A dear friend of mine told me the story about firing her general contractor on a project.
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She was doing a renovation at her house and she did it because the dog didn t like the general contractor.
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Uh, 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.
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In that case, she can go direct to her own intuition and not have to lay it off onto
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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.
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That s for human behavior, I mean for human beings to work at.
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But we do tend to invest in other people and other beings, like dogs, a greater intuition.
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Now there is something the dog has that s enormously valuable, and that is the dog has less than we do.
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It is not bothered by the way it could be or should be or ought to be or used to be.
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The dog doesn t evaluate any of that.
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The dog just sees what is right in front of him.
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And if we could do that more, people would be a lot safer.
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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.
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They don t do that, they just react.
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That s true.
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You know, the whole business of thought is much different from the business of intuiting or perceiving.
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When you perceive something accurately, there s not a lot of thought involved.
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You walk outside, it s cold.
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You know it.
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You know it in your cells.
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When you think about it being cold,
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then begins the mental chatter.
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Then begins, well, it s not as cold as it was in London.
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Well, I should have brought another coat.
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Well, I wonder if it s gonna get colder or warmer.
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Well, I shouldn t be reacting to cold this way if I m gonna live in New York City.
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All the shoulds come into the thought process.
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And that s very far removed from the basic perception of cold.
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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.
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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.
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Well, it s true that it gets in the way, and it really depends, you know, 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.
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And what I m encouraging people to do is turn up their own perceptions and intuitions
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so that the other voices in our head, which are the cultural voices and PC, political correctness voices, which I despise and which are counterproductive to safety and to general free life.
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So if you turn up the voice on your own intuition and honor yourself first,
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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.
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Oh man, we would all be happier.
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Yeah, and safer, of course, as well.
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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.
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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.
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Interestingly, in that whole book, Gift of Fear, I think the word should appears only twice.
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And both times, it s in a sentence with somebody else saying it.
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I don t use the word at all in any prescriptive way, such as you should do this, or people should do that.
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The word should always invites the question, according to whom?
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Right.
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you should do something according to whom.
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And 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.
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It only matters how it is and how it is in terms of reality in this moment.
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I m now talking about safety.
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And reality is the highest ground you can get to.
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That s the place where you can see what s coming.
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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,
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you re basically not seeing what is.
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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.
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That s true.
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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 and she whipped around in a hurry and she saw a man wearing a ski mask and it was a hot day.
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And the first thought that she had was,
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I guess he s going skiing somewhere.
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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.
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And the point being that this is clearly a predator.
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There s no good reason to be wearing a ski mask when you approach somebody and shock them by being very close behind them in Los Angeles.
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But the first thought
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was a failed thought, didn t help her safety.
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Thankfully, she d already acted, and that s what intuition can do if we encourage it and let it happen.
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It ll just act.
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Does everyone have intuition?
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This might sound like a stupid question, but are we all actually born with a sense of intuition, and is everybody equally intuitive?
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Well, putting aside autism and various things that affect mental processing, everybody with a normal functioning mind and body system does have intuition,
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And what we have in varying degrees is our willingness to honor it and listen to it and learn about it.
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But otherwise, yes, we all have it and we all have it in great measure.
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It s our most extraordinary mental and physical process.
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And I say mental and physical because the stomach lining, as an example, has 100 million neurons, 100 million thought cells.
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That s more neurons than there are in a dog s brain.
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We have in just our stomach lining.
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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.
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And these two brains in the gut and in the skull communicate with each other through the body.
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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.
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So I think everybody has it.
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I gotta 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 was the 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 away, and my brain went through this process, which you re very familiar with here,
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It said, no, it s probably gonna be fine.
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I know he said he was gonna ask for directions, but he s a cabbie, he should know that.
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No, no, it s probably, there s gotta 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.
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So it is kind of like a cabbie not knowing where the White House is in D.C.
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No, no, no, no, but I mean, I ve never been kidnapped before, so that can t be what s happening.
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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.
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And I only realized a decade and a half later when reading the book, The Gift of Fear, that that was you.
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Well, Jordan, I m so glad to hear that story and that makes my day.
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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.
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Exactly.
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I m sitting in this cab.
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You know when you pick the plastic part off of a lock on an old car or the metal part?
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It falls below the flush threshold of where the window is, so you can t grab it.
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It s impossible.
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Both of his rear doors had that, and the passenger side door had that as well.
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And so I just thought, this is a really weird setup for a cab.
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Well, it s an old car.
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And I kept going through that, and then I thought to myself, am I making excuses that are gonna get me in trouble?
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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 and see, because wherever we go, then I can decide what to do.
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And I remembered, never go to the secondary location.
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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
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Couldn t drive a stick shift, especially not one from 1968 with a tricky clutch and shifter.
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Took the keys out through them and ran what seemed like 10 miles and probably was really two or three miles.
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And so I ended up essentially at the secondary location, but not chained in a basement.
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And definitely a lot safer having done that.
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I mean, there were a couple possible outcomes.
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The easiest one, which is
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A couple guys are gonna get in the car and run me around to ATMs until my card stops working.
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And the worst case scenario, which is a slow, painful death in the middle of nowhere outside Mexico City.
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Well, it s great.
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It s a great story.
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And certainly, though you might have ended up at that location, you did not end up under someone s malevolent control.
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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.
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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.
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And I never deconstruct these things later and say to people, you should have done this or that.
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It sounds like all the moves you made are right.
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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.
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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 comfort zone because taking drastic action like rolling out of a speeding car is not comfortable.
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so you kind of want to be damn sure.
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But the problem is, in waiting to be sure, you end up waiting 20 minutes longer than you were looking back on it.
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I knew what was going down miles ago when I was in that car.
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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.
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It was easier short term to go, oh come on, what are the odds that this is gonna happen?
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Especially given,
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and this occurred to me years and years later, you re only really basing your actions on your previous experience.
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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.
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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.
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Well, 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.
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I don t agree that we base our behavior only on that which we ve experienced before.
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We base our denial on that for sure.
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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.
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Right, that does make sense.
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I think it really was just, well, it s never happened to me before, so I can feel safer ignoring this because I don t have an experience that says anything contrary to it.
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However, there was a point at which my brain said, remember that guy in Oprah?
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Oh yeah, that s what s happening right now, knucklehead.
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Get with the program.
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And that s exactly what got me over that edge, but it took a while.
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I mean, I don t have an exact timeline, but it was probably a good 10 to 15 minutes where I just could no longer ignore it, thank goodness.
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Tell us about your childhood.
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I mean, this is something that you witnessed a lot of violence as a kid.
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Is that what got you into this particular field of study?
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Probably so.
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I mean, I obviously was in the field of study as a kid, and not just me.
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Millions of kids who ve had experiences with parents and others who ve been violent are learning to assess human behavior with a few more variations than kids who haven t had experiences with violence.
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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
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pre-incident indicators, the indicators that violence was coming.
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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 gonna be one of those days, or it s gonna be one of those nights.
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Kids become experts at predicting the behavior of the adults around them, and I was no different, and we had a particularly challenging time.
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My mother was a heroin addict, we were on welfare,
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We had a lot of bad folks around that you wouldn t normally choose to have around your kids.
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We, the kids, learned a lot about predicting human behavior and learned about the stakes of being wrong.
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And absolutely, my childhood contributed enormously to what I grew up to do.
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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?
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Or is that something that doesn t happen?
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Is it a matter of uncovering it rather than honing it?
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Really a matter of uncovering it rather than honing it, and that s a good way of putting it.
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There s a story of Michelangelo who is asked by somebody, how can you sculpt David?
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and he says you get a piece of marble and you remove everything that isn t David.
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So the same thing here.
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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.
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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.
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Police departments, the same thing.
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Corporations, the same thing.
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You need what they have to sell.
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You need what they offer.
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It s a rare message that says you have everything you need already when it comes to your own safety.
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No politician is going to be present with you in that underground parking lot or that corridor leading to your apartment.
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No policeman is going to be present with you.
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You ll be there and you have everything you need if you ll listen to it.
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Now, did we get
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intuition from evolution precisely so that we can figure this type of thing out, a self-preservation.
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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.
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Can you flesh that out a little bit?
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I thought that was pretty fascinating.
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Well, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
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One is that the word itself, intuition, the root of it is inter, and it means to guard and to protect.
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So think about that.
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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.
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And did it come from evolution?
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Certainly.
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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.
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It is a process of the mind and body, and it is there to serve us if we re interested,
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and it has various messengers that it sends out to get our attention.
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So, one messenger might be curiosity, and I d say, hey Jordan, I m curious, have you ever been in the Middle East?
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And you might say yes or no.
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Have you been, by the way?
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I have, yes.
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Okay, so that was curiosity.
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Something, curiosity, something inclined me to ask that question with the assumption that it would be yes.
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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,
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harming them in some way.
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But suspicion, the root of that word, suspicere, means simply to watch.
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It is curiosity with the added instruction to watch.
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That s all it means.
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So that s another intuitive signal.
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We ve talked now about curiosity and suspicion.
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Another one, and the one nobody can ignore, is fear.
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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.
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because it s such an overpowering feeling.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Is this the right route?
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Gee, it seems like we re getting farther from population areas.
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That s curiosity at first.
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Then comes suspicion, this guy s removed the lock operators on the doors.
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And then quite a bit down the road comes fear.
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All of them are resources, but the big one, the one that s a gift that every animal in nature,
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lives by, notice I said lives by and not dies by, is fear.
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Because fear is there, a signal in the presence of danger.
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There s nobody who wouldn t want it.
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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.
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And even though there s nobody who doesn t want it, people seek to talk themselves out of it.
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Let s start applying these concepts.
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I d love to learn how some of us can tell maybe some initial signs, maybe some of that initial curiosity or suspicion of controlling people, of violent people that we might come across, especially in relationship.
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A lot of female listeners of the show write in with,
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kind of crazy stories that are a lot scarier than the ones guys have.
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Guys have similar stories, too, but they tend to be the exception.
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A lot of female fans have at least one kind of scary or really scary story.
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I d love to talk about how we might be able to read people a little bit based on their behavior.
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Well, the first thing I want to share is that behavior is one half of the equation, and situation is the other half.
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In other words, where is this behavior happening, and do I have
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vulnerability here.
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I don t like political correctness at all.
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I don t like anything which seeks to control speech and discourage authenticity in speech, whatever one s feelings are.
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So I ve rebranded those two letters, PC, and I call them privacy and control.
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And if somebody has you in an environment that s private, your apartment, your car, and they have control over you, either by virtue of persuasion or by virtue of
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force or size or strength, which also persuades you to believe that you have to listen to what someone says.
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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.
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Example, you re driving with your kind, loving boyfriend.
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He has a situation that affords privacy and control.
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He s operating the vehicle.
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He s bigger than you are, but it s a non-issue.
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Because when you ask yourself the question, is this okay?
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The answer is yes, this is okay.
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You re driving with your driving instructor who you ve known and you ve been driving with a whole bunch.
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You feel okay about it.
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You re driving with a taxi driver who s giving you no reason to feel otherwise.
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You feel okay about it.
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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.
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And that s where this privacy and control equation comes in.
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Now talking about the behaviors.
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Certainly the number one behavior to concern female targets, and that s just about every woman, will be targeted at some time.
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Not every woman will be a victim, but every woman will be targeted at some time.
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The number one pre-incident indicator is that someone tries to control you.
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They try to control where you are, how you are, what you think, how you view the situation.
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And they try to persuade you that the situation is okay.
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So as to turn off fear,
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and turn off the other intuitive resources that you have.
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You mention, 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.
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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.
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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.
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I want to talk for a moment about two kinds of predators.
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These are the two broad categories of predators when it comes to human beings.
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The first is the persuasion predator, and the second is the power predator.
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The persuasion predator persuades a woman to participate, to be in this environment, to trust him,
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to go where he wants to go, to do what he wants to do, she is persuaded by him.
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Now, in fact, she s persuaded by herself.
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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.
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We go through that internal mental dialogue and we come through it either more comfortable or less comfortable.
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The second kind of predator, and far more rare,
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is the power predator.
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This is someone who just charges at you like a bear and does an actual physical attack.
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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.
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And so that s quite a rare kind of person.
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And the persuasion predator, on the other hand,
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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.
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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.
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Intuitively, you know you don t want to.
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And the moment you do, you start to talk yourself into it.
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For example, there s a woman that I interviewed recently and she said, whenever she hears herself say,
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Well, it s probably nothing.
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That is her indicator that it s probably something.
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How bad is it to remove yourself from an environment?
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It s not bad.
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You re not hurting anybody.
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You re not doing anything to anyone.
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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.
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And there isn t an animal in nature that would even second guess that for a moment.
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An animal in nature that says, get away from this lion, does not say afterwards, well, this is probably a nice lion.
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Just get away from the lion.
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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.
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Are there maybe non-verbal or even verbal initial signs of controlling or violent people?
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In the book, The Gift of Fury, you do mention charm, ironically, and also concepts like forced teaming.
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Well, charm is a very important one because I don t think of charm as a feature of an individual.
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I think of it always as a verb.
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And so when someone says to me, I met this guy and he was really charming, I usually say, you mean he was really charming you?
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Because no person is walking around charming everyone all the time.
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Charm is a strategy of human behavior, like niceness.
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Nobody s nice to everybody all the time.
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But when you choose to be nice, it can have a good and admirable reason.
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You want to be kind to somebody, you want to put them at ease, whatever it may be.
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Or it can have a very sinister reason, such as you want to set someone at ease so that you can victimize them.
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So charm and niceness.
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I m encouraging people to think of charm and niceness as choices people make, not as features of people.
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And once you do that, then you can ask the obvious follow-up question, which is, why is this person charming me?
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Why is this person seeking to charm me?
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If it s to put me at ease because they like me and they hope to continue this conversation or having a relationship and it has no sinister intent, great.
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If it s to put me at ease because they could see that I wasn t comfortable,
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and they have some sinister intent, of course, that s a different situation.
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So just asking the question, why is this person being charming or why is this person being nice, is a lot better than simply responding to the thought and say, oh, how nice, this guy is so charming.
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How wonderful, what a charming person I met today.
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As if charming means good, it doesn t mean good at all.
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It s almost like an immutable characteristic.
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Oh, I met a tall guy today, he s really tall.
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It s not an immutable characteristic, it s an action, a set of choices like you said.
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That s right, it s a behavior, it s a strategy of human behavior and so charm and niceness are not
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indicators of kindness, they are not indicators of non-dangerousness, and it s every woman s responsibility to register charm and niceness and ask why they are present.
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Not everybody who s charming or nice is a predator, though, so there have to be other factors that we can look for that might be a little more clear as well.
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Well, you mean other pre-incident indicators?
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Certainly there are many.
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The vast majority of people who are charming and nice, in fact, the vast majority of people who are anything are not
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intending to be predators and do not have any sinister intent for you.
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That s why we can all walk around every day and spend the whole day having gotten very few signals of concern and typically having gotten a lot of signals that set us at ease.
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That s why when we do get a signal that makes us uncomfortable, it s so very important to listen to it.
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What is forced teaming?
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That was one that was in there where I thought, oh, I m writing that down right now.
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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.
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But forced teaming, what is that and why is this something that s so important to note?
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Forced teaming is a strategy used by predators and other kinds of people in other situations
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that makes us both feel like we re in the same situation.
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For example, we both just missed the bus.
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So force teaming is to say, hey, we both just missed the bus.
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let s hail down a cab and use it together.
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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.
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And forced teaming is the effort to compel a person to feel like they re a member of a team because we both experienced something at the same time.
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For example, I m late and you re late, let s do something together.
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Or we re both going up to
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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 honest and force teaming the key factor is that you didn t choose to be honest somebody s trying to make me feel like i m a team with someone when i didn t choose to be.
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Great big thank you to Gavin DeBacker.
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This book is called The Gift of Fear.
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This will be linked up in the show notes as well.
4
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Really, really fascinating stuff.
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Man, this intuition, honing, using fear, there s so much we couldn t get into that s in the book.
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If you read it, you will not regret it.
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Fantastic read.
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really easy to digest and understand, and hell, it could save your life, as it may have done with me.
4
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So if you ve enjoyed this, don t forget to thank Gavin on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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Remember, you can tap your phone screen, and you should see the show notes for this episode pop right up on your phone, depending on what podcast player you re using.
4
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And I m also on Twitter.
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I post a lot of things there that never make it to the show, and it s a great way to engage with me.
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I m at theartofcharm on Twitter.
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Bootcamp are live program details.
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The programs are run every week here in LA.
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bootcamp.theartofcharm.com is where you find that.
4
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The boot camps are super rewarding.
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It s amazing to see how far these things take people and what we can see with our own eyes just during the week, in the weeks and months after the program.
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It is truly life-changing and it s such a rewarding part of this whole gig here working at AOC.
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Remember, we re sold out a few months in advance, so if you re thinking about it a little bit,
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You should get in touch ASAP and get some info from us so you can plan ahead or just dip your toes in the water.
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We ve also got the AOC Challenge.
4
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
4
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We ll teach you how to improve your networking and connection skills.
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It ll inspire those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I do videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It s designed to make you a better network and a better connector, as well as a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or you can text the word charmed here in the US to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of AOC was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor, and the show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Please go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.