Gavin De Becker, Security Expert

27:38And then if it's escalating, in Mosaic, we're asking, is this case most similar to those that escalated to homicide? So we have a Mosaic for spousal homicide. That's free, by the way, online. I think it's www.mosaicmethod.com, so that that's available for anybody who wants to do it. Oprah Winfrey and I years ago got together, and we made that available to people online. And then there are mosaics for threats to federal judges that are used by the U.S. Marshall System, for example. It is basically something that came about. I just realized as I'm reflecting on this, Rick, that you'll like how it came about because it goes to your own work on creativity.

28:20It came about because what I wanted to do was take my own intuition and see if we could systematize it a bit, see if we could get other people to be able to ask the same questions I was asking intuitively. And I was in a restaurant with a friend of mine, Walt Rissler, a psychologist, and I had nothing to write on. So I got a napkin. And unfortunately, I carry felt pens. And felt pens means they absorb a lot when you write on a napkin. So the first mosaic was done in a restaurant by the two of us writing down on a napkin. And why it's called mosaic is that the M stands for the method of the communication, meaning is it in person?

28:59Is it by email? The O stands for the object of the communication. How is the person projected? The public figure in that case we were talking about. The S, can I remember what it stands for? The A stands for affect, the emotional affect in the communication. The I was intensity, the intensity in the communication. And the C was the clarity of the communication. Lack of clarity is an indicator of mental illness, and clarity can be an indicator of focus and intent. And the main thing it was doing was saying, like if I said to you, what's the best movie you ever saw? And I only gave you two options for how to tell me, best movie I ever saw, worst movie I ever saw.

29:40That checklist does not invite you to bring your intuition to the table. You have to have a range of answers, right? Let's say you told me this is a great restaurant. You'll love it at this restaurant. Well, you don't know whether I'll love it because I don't like restaurants with a live band, for example. Even though I love music, I don't like it in the restaurant. And so my Mosaic for what would be a good restaurant would say no live band. And it would say willing to improvise. The waiter would say, yeah, well, I'll ask the chef and he'll probably do that. But your restaurant might be, I want to be right up next to the live band as loud as it can be.

30:15And I want a very fixed menu. In other words, we're different. So what Mosaic did is instead of being a checklist, which is how these things were done prior to Mosaic. It is a range of answers to each question. So does it say, does he have a gun? That's interesting, but it's more interesting to know, is it recently acquired? It's more interesting to know, does he have a collection of weapons? So you have a range. It's not just gun, yes, no. It's not just drinks, alcohol, yes, no. There's a range to all these things. It's not just age 28 to 32. So Mosaic, when I developed that first one, then later we improved it a lot.

30:52It started with just six questions. It's now, some of them are 48 questions. They're much more computerized now. They're not on a napkin, you know, in a restaurant. And now they're, you know, the state police in California started to use it. Then a bunch of state police agencies use Mosaic. So it's now an artificial intuition method. But I want to stress, if you're in a domestic violence situation and you have any concern about it, that's available for free online and you can run your own mosaic without any person involved. And it'll give you an answer in terms of how much this case is similar to those that escalated to homicide.

31:27And sometimes people need that information because they need something objective that they can look at and get outside their own thoughts. How did you come to meet George? I was living in Fiji and I'd probably been there for 10 or 15 years by that point. and a dear friend of mine, Eric Idle, who you probably know from Monty Python, he called me and he said, my friends, George and Olivia are coming to Fiji and tell me if it's near the island that you're on. And so he sent me the place and I said, oh yeah, that's just about 40 minutes from me. And he said, well, would you go look at this place where they're going to stay and give me your feedback on it?

32:06He never said George Harrison and Olivia Harrison. He just said, my friends, George and Olivia, I never put it together. And so I went to the place, I looked at it. I called Eric back and I said, yeah, it's a very nice place. It's owned by an American woman. There's not a lot of guests there. It looks fine. So they went as far as I knew. And then a few days later, George contacted me and he said, you know, we don't want to stay here anymore. The woman who runs it makes us crazy. And, and, uh, and I understood. And, um, he would get back from snorkeling and she would say, you know, what did you see?

32:35And he'd say, you know, the same as everybody else saw and on and on. So they came and stayed with me at which point it was obviously apparent who it was. And we all fell in love. We just connected very deeply. And soon after, he had an attack in his home by a mentally ill person, his home back in England. And I traveled there to spend time with them. And we developed a friendship out of that. But that's how I met him was through Eric. Let's talk about that case in particular of someone breaking in. What could George have done differently in preparation for that event not to have happened? Or could anything have been different?

33:12I'd probably be uncomfortable talking about that case because a lot of it hasn't been public and I don't remember what has been and what hasn't been. But in general, when you're talking about public figures, certainly having access control at your property, meaning having a good system whereby you can decide who you're letting in and you can see who you're letting in. The individual who did the attack, Abrams, this is all public what I'm going to share now, also intended to kill Paul McCartney and intended to go there next, where McCartney was living in another country in Europe. And that individual had been let out of a mental hospital immediately prior because they couldn't handle him.

33:55He was more than they could handle. He was let out and then eventually pursued these two attacks and accomplished one of them. But in general, you know, being in public life, depending on the level of connection that people feel with you, often through music, that's a very deep connection that people feel. And a lot of times the kinds of cases I've worked on are love obsessions rather than hostility. Hostility and hate, even hate mail, is actually just slightly different from fan mail. It's just an expression of an opinion. what we see is more likely to produce danger for public figures is love obsessions, the belief that there's some special relationship, for example.

34:38Those people are more frequently traveling in pursuit of an unwanted encounter and climbing over a gate or climbing over a fence or what have you. Now, having said that, we have the last few months in which we have three attacks that are likely all based on hostility. I'm talking about the two Trump incidents and the killing of Charlie Kirk, these are all likely based on hostility. I say likely because unlike when you and I were younger and there would be a public figure attack, typically around one major one every five years, the media would be very interested to learn everything about it and to report everything about it.

35:17That sort of died from COVID, meaning the whole issue of skepticism in media. And the media was so AWOL during the COVID drama that we've now gotten used to the idea that we're just going to take whatever the official narratives are and document them, and then that becomes the truth. So I don't know much about any of the three of these attacks other than what's reported in media, and they are unusual in that they are not love obsessions. There was also the actual assassination of the corporate guy going into a building in New York, and they caught the person who did it, who has been viewed in some circles as a hero.

35:59And it's just a strange time. Do you know anything about that story? Well, I know everything about the story that's been made public, and I've certainly studied it with great interest. And it's another example where in all four of these cases, and by the way, many assassinations around the world during this time of political candidates and other people in public life. But all four of those do not have mental illness as the primary element to them. The guy in the golf course is unusual, I guess I could say, rather than mentally ill. But none of these four were not functioning or were hearing voices or were psychotic or what have you.

36:41So all four are ideological. And you made the point that people view the shooter of the insurance executive as a hero. I think that's true of all four of these, that there are people who view the assailants as having done the right thing and heroic thing. And you said living in strange times. Yes, no shit. Very true. I read that in Germany, seven nominees from one of the political parties in Germany. Seven died suddenly within two or three months before the election that was coming up. Seven in one party. I'm making a note of it because I'm not familiar with that, what I think we'd have to call a trend.

37:27But this is the world we live in. You know, the assassination by governments are a frequent and key component of foreign policy for many governments. So much so that I think there's two full Wikipedia pages. I don't mean two pages, I mean, two entries, two full articles that you find if you look up Israeli assassinations. And so Israeli overseas assassinations that have been even acknowledged. We're not talking about something that the government has always shied away from talking about. And obviously we've had, we assassinated in a very public way, the Iranian official during the first Trump administration.

38:06And so this is a part of public foreign policy that is the only difference between now and and 50 years ago, is that now there's a lot less effort to conceal them. And sometimes there's even an overt acknowledgement of them, as in the case of, you know, the Israeli pagers, for example, that exploded, and cell phones and walkie-talkies, the same thing. So the ideological element of assassinations is less hidden right now and is much more in our face. And, you know, what you told me that I have only known about for a minute with regard to these German deaths, I put in the category of nothing would surprise me.

38:48Yeah. Tell me if stalker is the right word for what you were describing before, the person who's in love with the celebrity and chases them. Is stalker the right word for that? It's a word. I mean, stalking ultimately refers to the process of stalking an animal or chasing someone down so they can have all variety of motivations. But the love obsession that was very common in those cases that truly are lone actors, people who truly do something on their own, as opposed to more modern or more recent assassinations and attempts that might be the result of something more conspiratorial. In the cases of the love addiction, does the target usually know this is going on?

39:34Yes, certainly they might not have identified the specific individual, but I'll tell you that in all the public figure attacks that happened during your life and mine that we would remember in the media age, none of those people directly threatened the person they ultimately attacked, but most of them communicated with them in some other way, just not including direct threats, and all of them communicated with somebody. And so you have all of them communicating. The only remote exception to this, and you'll understand why I say it's a remote exception, is a man named Samuel Byke who wanted to kill Richard Nixon by flying an aircraft into the White House, and he tried to hijack a plane to fly into the White House.

40:17He shot one of the pilots, which is never a good thing to do when you plan to use them to fly your aircraft, and then he himself was shot and killed on the ground, Samuel Byke. He had threatened Richard Nixon, meaning made a threat in writing in a letter. But every other case is not preceded by direct threats. And so the direct threat, the I will kill you on Tuesday or you ought to be killed, et cetera, is not actually a communication that tells you that that individual is likely to act on the threat. In a bizarre sense, it's good news because it means the person is choosing words that alarm, they're writing a letter or an email, over actions that harm.

40:57Whereas people who've decided to kill someone, that's what they do, as opposed to communicating about it first. Now, remember one thing, one wrinkle to all of this is mental illness, because when there's mental illness involved, you can't expect a methodical and organized action to, you know, be like we would, in other words, to do something in the same ways that we might do something. But in general, communicate, you know, my office assesses and has assessed now hundreds of thousands of communications. We have the largest library in the world of threat material and obsessive material, and it matters when somebody writes a death threat, but it doesn't matter nearly as much as when other kinds of obsessions are at play.

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43:1530 years ago, a government building was bombed. A man drove a van and parked it in front of the building. Yes. Do you look into those types of things as well, or is it more singular, an attack on a person? Well, my interest is preventing tissue damage on individuals. So my main work in my company is anti-assassination work, but we're interested in preventing all kinds of harms. And because of the similarity between workplace violence shootings, school shootings, public figure attacks, multiple victim shootings, they have different names because media gives them different names. If it happens in the workplace, they call it a workplace violence shooting.

43:54If it happens at a school, they call it a school shooting. They are nearly identical, those two in particular. And in terms of motivation, in terms of the expected attention that one will get, in terms of the harm that one will do, the pre-incident indicator for all of these, the pre-incident indicator that matters the most is misery, is suffering. On the part of the assassin. Correct. Or the shooter. And that's correct. You don't have happy people deciding to carry guns into crowded environments and shoot everybody or shoot anybody. And so we, in my company, we're very interested in indicators of suffering where they focused on a client of ours, for example, an at-risk public figure.

44:39That's a very interesting thing. And you asked a minute ago, do we look at things like the Oklahoma City bombing? Yes, every kind of explosive act that is likely to get a lot of media attention, and that's part of what people often are acting for. We're interested in all of those. Has it always been the case that the media attention is the desire? Was there a time when assassinations happened and media attention was not part of the story? Yes, there still are plenty where media attention is not part of the story. In the South, this is just to give you some general statistical information, in the South, the majority of the United States, the majority of attacks were rifle attacks.

45:21And in the North, the majority were handgun attacks. A key difference between them is that the rifle attacker does not want attention. The rifle attacker wants to get away. The handgun attacker has no expectation of getting away. The knife attacker has no expectation of getting away and knows that from the moment I take the action of commencing my attack, producing a weapon into public view or a knife or whatever it may be, from that moment on, escape is not an option. And most had no escape plans. So John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan and other people on the sidewalk that day, had no interest and no expectation of getting away.

46:02Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, no expectation of getting away. Yet the rifle attackers in the South, which we can include the assassination of Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, those attackers, whatever number they were, had the expectation and plan to escape. When you think of a rifle attack, as opposed to thinking about the weapon, it's a long distance attack. That's really what's different. That's correct. Proximity. That's correct. You could be hiding far away with a rifle, whereas with a handgun, you're right in the person's face. That's right. And it goes to something else that's interesting, which is as we look at the hierarchy of weapons through human history, you start with striking someone with your hand and maybe beating someone such that they die.

46:50That's an early weapon. Then you get into blunt force weapons like stones. Then you get into distance weapons like spears and arrows. And now you're really moving toward where we are today, which is you have distance weapons, then you have the big evolution, which is the firearm, which is firing a projectile and can give you no skin in the game. And when you have no skin in the game, all the others, you know, if you have to get close to somebody with a knife or a spear or a rock, you have skin in the game. And as soon as the handgun comes about and to a lesser degree bow and arrow, you have less skin in the game.

47:27You can now have combat with a bear and survive it. And then you get to the big evolution, which is remote control explosives, which are not only a big evolution, but they are very successful. Meaning remote control car bombs, for example, and bombs at locations that could be controlled remotely or by timer have been very successful. And now we have the biggest evolution in a thousand years in assassination strategies, and that is the remote control drone. Because the remote control drone is virtually a guided bullet. And that is because of that. And because for a thousand years, there hadn't really been any huge jumps in assassination strategies.

48:10There also hadn't been huge jumps in protection strategies. The real jumps have been lightweight armor, but armor, of course, existed a thousand years ago, people wearing suits of armor, but lightweight armor that can be put on cars, you know, and on people, parts of people, and communications equipment. These have been the things that really made an enormous difference in terms of the ability of protectors to be able to communicate with each other, for you to have an advanced person there where you're going in advance. And that person could say, don't come here, keep driving, because we have this situation on the sidewalk, for example.

48:43So the evolution now with drones, with weaponized drones, that's going to become more and more interesting because we've already had a weaponized drone land on the roof of the prime minister's residence in Japan with a little bit of radioactive material inside. We've had a drone land on the platform directly in front of the chancellor of West Germany during a public appearance. It wasn't weaponized, but boy, it sure could have been. And then we have all the drones being used now in warfare, which are small weaponized drones that kill individuals. So what will be the protection strategies will ultimately be physical barriers between audiences and speakers, which we see now at public appearances, a president, for example, or a presidential candidate, or even some clients of mine speaking behind entry-resistant and bullet-resistant glazing.

49:38But later, it might be that there's an actual mesh screen that is there that would interfere with a drone. It might be a mesh curtain that drops down when a drone is detected. It's not going to be shooting down drones, I can tell you that, because that is not only impractical, but slightly dangerous as well, because imagine you have a concert event or a public appearance with a controversial speaker, and a drone appears over the audience, which now we're able to immediately detect even in the environment. You don't want to drop that drone onto the audience because it produces danger there if it has an explosive.

50:14So it's going to be more and more complicated, and it's a long answer to your question, Rick, but I want to tell you where it goes, where it ends up. It ends up with 1984. It ends up with your engagement with public officials being by video. Wow. And less and less by personal engagement with individuals other than screened audiences. Where does that lead? Well, that leads to, as everything, by the way, leads to 1984, just FYI. When the COVID drama started in 2020, 1984 became the 17th bestselling book in the world after 70 years. Wow. And it was actually reassuring to me because it told me that a lot of people could look at what was going on, lockdown, so there's a new phrase for us, and affecting hundreds of millions of people, you're going to stay in your homes and have no human interaction.

51:05That was a move toward sort of totalitarian control of people. and I think that it really broke Western societies because prior to that if we went to a concert together you know none of us would look at that guy and say oh that guy over there in the in row 60 he voted for Trump or he voted for Biden or he's a Nazi or he's a this there'd be no hate in the engagement we'd all be there with the same purpose which is to see this performer we love and we'd enjoy music together same thing on the beach we'd be on the beach and you'd see a dad with two kids, it would never enter your mind, oh, he's a Nazi, he's a totalitarian, he voted for Trump, he voted for Biden.

51:45So that ability to be together with other human beings was broken. And it never really has fully recovered. Because now when you put people in their homes for a year or more, they no longer can engage with other people through music, for example, at a concert or on a beach or in a park. Now they're engaging with people through the internet. and that is just a hostility machine. You know, that is what you're left with is who do you hate? And that's a shame. It was also recently, maybe three years ago, the former prime minister of Japan was assassinated. Do you remember that story? And that was an up close.

52:27Yes, with a protective detail and just poorly done. And, you know, those protective details for former prime ministers often around the world are kind of lightweight details, meaning they're not well-staffed. And in this case, very sad. I mean, just a tragic and highly avoidable via the very setup of the public appearance. How do you set up the public appearance? And that's where the majority of our work with my company comes in, is in the advanced arrangements for what will be the environment we'll be in. With Robert Kennedy, when he was running for president, Robert Kennedy Jr., and I'm speaking about this as public as it could be, You know, we only did in the entire presidential campaign, a year and a half, we only did two outdoor events.

53:10And one of them was behind bulletproof glazing. That was in the weeks after the Trump shooting had occurred. And the other one, we had drones in the air and we had a structure built that was closed on three sides and he's far back and really engaging through large screens. He's there, but he's really, the majority of the audience could experience him through the large screens and not through this direct engagement. But outdoor events, very, very challenging. Very challenging. In general, how is public figure security different than security for someone we don't know about? Well, if you're a public figure, and particularly now, I used to say if you're a controversial public figure.

53:53Today, it's almost impossible not to be a controversial public figure because there's been a division in American society where everybody's on this side in one tribe and then everybody left is on this side in another tribe. and so the very fact that you didn't say something, if you didn't say the state of Israel has the right to protect itself, if you didn't say what the state of Israel is doing is wrong, in either circumstance you were acquiring a massive audience of hate from one side or the other. It's almost impossible to navigate being a public figure today without getting into the hostility of one tribe or the other.

54:36So to answer your question about how public figures are different, well, everywhere you go, if you're a very prominent public figure, everyone has seen you before you've engaged with them. People have registered that you're there. People have opinions about you before they meet you. You know a lot of famous people and you know this to be true, that what percentage half, 75, 90 % of what we think is true about somebody is just not true about them and is just a story, which a lot of life is story. And so I think being in public life today is more challenging and requires more focus on a topic that is unpleasant, which is the topic of one's safety.

55:16If there are common practices historically in security, might some of your ideas be different than how it's always been done? Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Particularly in modern times. Protection of public figures when they're in public and when they actually have protectors, they have people assigned to them for that purpose. That is an athletic endeavor. That is a contest between one person who wants to mount an attack and the protectors who want to prevent the attack. And I think I introduced a lot of new thinking because, and this isn't, by the way, said with or without humility. It's just I wasn't a typical ex-cop or a former FBI agent.

56:02I was a new person coming to the subject with my own history of how I got there. And by nature, that meant doing a lot of things differently than had been done in the past. And so I learned quickly that proximity, that protectors have to be as close to the person they're protecting as the nearest member of the general public. And that means that the worst kind of public appearance is the one where the possible target is 40 feet away from his protectors, but 10 feet away from the people in the first row. And what I'm describing there is basically the standard public appearance that everybody participates in.

56:43Podium in the middle of the stage and audience right in front of you and protectors in the wings, you know, way at each end of the stage. And that's, I guess, the best immediate example of that would be Malcolm X, who was assassinated in exactly that circumstance. And so we don't do it that way. We don't do public appearances that way. We have protectors much closer within arm's reach of a person, even who's speaking at a podium, but they're behind wings that we build right adjacent to the podium. Audiences don't know it. They don't see the protectors. They don't see anything different. They see a banner or U.S.

57:18flag or whatever it may be that fits that particular event. So that was a big difference. The other was a substantial focus on advanced work and the setup of the situation in which you'll be engaging with the public, as opposed to just having a bunch of people around. We're here if you need us kind of thing. After President Trump was shot in Butler, a Secret Service agent said to one of the people in my office, did you see how fast we got there after he was shot? I said, when I heard that, I wonder if he heard what he was saying. Did you see how fast we got there after he was shot? Right. That is not an accomplishment.

57:55Getting there fast after someone is shot is not a success story, in my opinion. Being there, and it'll go to something that you've written about, you know, being in the present moment, being present. What does that word mean when you take it apart? Pre-sent. Pre-sent. You're actually there to experience what comes. And so if protectors are not in the present moment, they might as well be at home watching on TV. And what takes them out of the present moment? Well, the big thing that we learned is craving. Craving takes them out of the present moment. Anytime you're thinking about chocolate or you're thinking about a Snickers bar or you're thinking about anything other than the present moment, you are not present.

58:38And so a big part of still answering the question of ways that I did things differently, a big part of our work includes nutrition. We make our own energy and protein bars, for example, and they have no sugar in them. They don't cause a glycemic spike, which the glycemic spike means you're like this, you know, and exhausted later. But for a moment, you're very, you know, keyed up. Nuts are a big part of that, are the protein method, because that gives you a slower and more consistent energy. and then a big one is that when you experience craving we use that as a signal that calls you back to the present moment instead of a signal that takes you into that moment when you're biting on the snickers bar in your imagination and so protectors historically you could say it's tedious work i don't think it's tedious at all i think it's exciting as hell that if you let everything that happens in the present moment call you into the present moment that's actually good news and And what people tended to do historically was think that somebody calling out the public figure's name in the crowd, Madonna, Madonna, Madonna over there, that's distracting me.

59:47And we taught that is not distracting you. That is bringing you to the present moment. And everything you think is a distraction, and this goes for us in this conversation, everything we think is a distraction, I ask people, what are you being distracted from that you're concerned about? And they're being distracted from their thoughts. That's what a distraction is. There's an expression, you know, you're driving me to distraction. You kids are driving me to distraction. Well, in fact, we want to use distractions to drive us into the present moment. It's a great idea. And to— Great idea. Thanks.

1:00:19So we say driven by distraction, not driven to distraction. Great. And I want to do it in my regular life. You know, something—I have such a strange example to share with you that about 17 years ago, my wife and I were living in Fiji our two sons that we have together I've raised 10 kids all together but our two sons that we have together were not born yet and every morning at around dawn a bird would come and tap on the glass window right behind where we were sleeping and I'm not a great sleeper a little better now than I was then but then I wasn't good at all and I'd be like what the hell man what is going on it would happen the next morning and you're getting up at on if you didn't plan to.

1:01:00And then the next morning, and I couldn't figure out, I looked at the bird and it was tap, tap, tapping on the window and then going back and sitting on a branch, tap, tap, tapping on the window and then going back and sitting on a branch. So one morning I got up before the bird and I got out and I, as a joke for my wife, I tapped on the glass and then I looked like I was sitting on the branch. You know, my head was like that. And she looked out the window. We both had a big laugh, but what I got was the answer, what was happening. When I was, quote, sitting on the branch, I could see myself in the reflection of the glass.

1:01:32And this bird was having a fight with a terrible, annoying bird on that branch over there. And it would see that bird and say, oh, you son of a bitch, this time I'm going to get you and fly at it. And they'd have a little fight. And then it would come back. Oh, still there, fly at it. And they'd have a little fight. And they, you know, so now today, this morning, and for the last few weeks, the same thing is happening. Now we're in a different house. We're, you know, 17 years later and a bird is waking us every morning by tapping on the glass. And so I taped paper up so that it wouldn't be a reflective object.

1:02:04And that worked for a while, but then it came around to another window that was forming a mirror at dawn. The difference is, Rick, and you're part of it. The difference is that today I'm interested to know what is being communicated to me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not just interested in being distracted. Yeah. Something's happening. I would love your next book to be driven to distraction. No one's written that book yet. Ah, good. Well, thank you. I've got some other books ahead of me, but thank you. Maybe it'll be your next book. But yes, the whole idea that we, you know, anytime we feel that we're being distracted from something, we're being distracted from something in our head.

1:02:47And today now at this stage and time in my life, I want to be distracted from my thoughts. I'm working on being distracted from my thoughts.

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1:04:37In addition to protecting people from physical threat, do you also help people with things like being blackmailed or being accused of something that they didn't do? or how does that side of the business work? Well, every aspect of being in public life, every unfavorable aspect of public life, my office is involved in managing. So we have a division called Threat Assessment and Management and that whole division of behavioral scientists and other kinds of practitioners does nothing but assess circumstances that could be obsessive love letters or threat communications or email, what have you. But it also includes criminal effort to extort.

1:05:18And so extortion cases are a big part of our work. And today, extortion is not only for money, but it's for cancellation. There are things I can say about you that will get you all kinds of hell in your life. And so there are things I can accuse you of once we were in an elevator together, and I can say you did such and such. And if you're a public figure, it's not a fair fight because the person saying it has very little consequence other than sometimes favorable consequences. And the person focused on can have enormous consequences. And so things like false rape allegations, which are, you know, there's the phrase, always believe the women.

1:06:00And I wrote a book, A Gift of Fear is basically a feminist manifesto. My feminist credentials are very strong, but my criminologist credentials are also strong. And it's simply not the case that every accusation against a famous person is true. It's also not the case that every accusation against a famous person that's dated 22 years ago, 25 years ago, is true or provable or remembered correctly by either of the parties. Your memory can change rather substantially as our social world changes. So you can say, you know, that thing that guy did when he tried to make a pass at me and he was more senior to me in the company, that is now in the context of new thinking, that was an awful, terrible thing to do, and I'm going to do something about it.

1:06:47I'm going to make this accusation public. Some of them are legitimate and maybe need to be brought into public awareness, and I would say many of them are remembered in a new context. So I don't think it's empowerment to accuse someone of sexual assault 25 years ago. I think it's empowerment to stop an incident that's happening right now. And so people who agreed to go into a hotel room at 1.30 in the morning with Harvey Weinstein, I would ask them, what would you want your daughter to do? Oh, not go. And yet you went. And so this is not blaming the victim. It's rather preventing the victim, preventing the victim, preventing the victimization by having your head screwed on right and having your awareness and not being drunk and having your awareness working for you in the present moment.

1:07:43Tell me about intuition. A few years ago, actually more than a few now, more than 25 years ago, I wrote a book called The Gift of Fear, and it focused a lot on how intuition is an important part of human safety. And from that, I learned a great deal about intuition in general. And during the course of writing that, for example, I learned that the root of the word inter, which is the root of the word intuition, means to guard and to protect. So perhaps its first function in our lives is that, is to guard us and protect us from various kinds of risks. But its secondary or alternate functions are to guide every element of our lives.

1:08:24What it means basically is the distance from A to Z without stopping at all the letters on the way. And you get there very quickly, and we all have that experience where we know something is just true without having to prove it to ourselves. And it is basically knowing without knowing why, and then getting comfortable with that idea that you can know something without knowing why you know it. Are there any things we can do to support our ability? I think so. I think the main thing is to not get in the way by prosecuting our various intuitions and questioning them and going after them and assuming they're not true, as opposed to accepting that this extraordinary resource, which might be a process of thought that we're not aware of, more likely it is a process of receiving information from the universe.

1:09:19And then the question comes, do we need to prove it to ourselves? I'll give you a fast example. Say in corporate America, if you come into the boardroom and you present a whole bunch of PowerPoint slides and you say, this is the reason for my decision in this matter, that is applauded, even if it's wrong. But if you come in and you say, I just have a feeling we should do this, that is doubted and criticized, even if it's right. So you have, for example, Jeff Bezos coming in and feeling that he really ought to do Amazon Prime. And everybody's saying, well, Americans are never going to spend$90 a year on this thing.

1:09:59And now hundreds of millions of people all over the world do it. And it was based predominantly on an intuition. Now, can you build a case for things? Sure, you can build a case for anything. But you can also build a case against anything. and in most elements of American society, the case against things is easier to make than the case for things, right? You've got a boardroom, somebody wants to be the guy who says, I don't think we should do it. I think we should slow down there a little bit. And that's the guy I don't want in my boardroom as often as possible. I'm much more interested in the yes than in the no.

1:10:35Can you remember any times where you had an idea that was unusual and got told it was a terrible idea and it ended up working out for you? I'm laughing because I probably can't remember any times other than that. Most of the things I wanted to do in life were a bad idea. And I've also been guilty of it on the other side, which I remember many years ago in my company, somebody came and said, we ought to look at the internet. It's this new thing. And we ought to see whether it's important to participate in this. And I said, yeah, let's do it. That sounds great. So we did. and it didn't really make much difference to our business or our effectiveness.

1:11:11And so I dropped it. And then 10 years later, somebody came and said, you know, we really ought to look at the internet. And I said, no, no, we've done that. We tried that already. So it was a perfect example of where my expertise and my experience got in the way, right? As you know, because I probably read it in your book, in addition to other places, that idea of beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. So I've suffered from it on both sides. But in terms of your direct question, yeah, I've had cases where even writing books where people said, that's a bad idea.

1:11:46In other words, that book is a bad idea. That won't be of value to anybody. And I remember when I was writing Gift of Fear, and I was afraid to even tell anybody I was writing it, because initially I thought of it as a book for law enforcement or a book for various practitioners and not for the general public. and slowly inside I was getting the idea that this might have value to the general public and I took two years before I would tell anybody that that's what I was doing and I finally told a good friend of mine and I said you know that book I've been working on he said yeah I said I'm thinking that I might try to make that for the general public and make it a broader audience and I waited for his answer and he said that's a great idea and I started crying because I was so sure that the universe was going to say to me, no, no, no, you stay in your lane.

1:12:36You stay right over there where you belong. You don't want to talk about a book for a general audience. And then the book came out. And in those days, books actually came out. There was actually something to it. And I used to walk to a bookstore near my house and there were three copies of it that I could see when the bookstore was closed because it has silver jacket and I could see them through the window. Go by the next day, still three copies. Nobody was buying it. And I finally one day came and one was gone. And I called that same friend and I said, my book sales are up 30%. And he said, I'm sorry, we bought that copy.

1:13:14He and his wife had bought the copy. So I was nowhere. And then obviously things happened and Oprah Winfrey show and blah, blah, blah. And then it became a big book. But had I listened to both my own judgment and self-judgment, I would have stopped years before. And I want to also share with you, because of your influence on me, I want to share that the idea that I was writing this book as an element of construction, putting it together. And people said, well, how long did it take to write this book? And I said 10 years, because it was, you know, there were essays I had done and there were other things I was putting together.

1:13:54But the reality is it took 38 years. It took every day of my life up until that point to gather all of this information and have it go from, you know, the universe through this skull and ultimately out through these fingers and blah, blah, blah. So since then, I always ask people if their creative venture, in my case, writing, I would ask, you know, do you think writing is a process of construction, putting together the content, or a process of discovery? And of course, for me, I came to know it was a process of discovery, but it's a very interesting question to ask people, because it tells you something about what they think philosophically or even spiritually about the world.

1:14:37What do they think? Do they think they're putting this shit together? I think that it reveals something about the way people view the universe and their role in it. If they think that they are assembling the pieces in a mechanical or construction project as opposed to a project of discovery, which is certainly what I was doing. I was pulling apart and getting rid of all the things that were in my way to end up with occasionally a core truth. And even I didn't know it was a core truth while I was writing. I would say to myself, is that true? That's an interesting way of putting it. Is that true?

1:15:11And they say, son of a bitch, that is true. I remember talking about it all the time and thinking about it all the time while I was writing. And it wasn't work. It was a joy to sit down and be with that laptop because I really felt like I was communicating to people. And I was in a friend's house one day, and I had been working on chapter three, I think it was. And I had a sentence at the top of each chapter, like a saying from somebody famous or some kind of wisdom. and I sat down in somebody's house and there was a book, Teachings of Buddha, and I opened it and the very thing I landed on was just as a man should be wary of dangerous animals, so should he be wary of dangerous friends, something like that.

1:15:54That became the top of chapter three. And that went on every day. Every day stuff was coming to me and I was a stenographer. People ask me, did you write that book? Because I was a person who maybe would have gotten a ghostwriter or what have you. And I say, no, I did not write that book. I was the stenographer for that book, but that book came from everywhere. It's beautiful that if we do stay open and pay attention, the information we're looking for is all around us. It's offering itself up to us everywhere we look. I think most people just don't pay attention. True. By the way, as we get older, it's almost impossible not to pay attention because the remarkable, crazy-ass things that happen in our lives, the ridiculous connections, how possibly could I run into that person at that time and have that conversation only to have two weeks later such and such?

1:16:48If it was a movie, nobody would believe it. If it was a novel, it would seem ridiculous. But that is the reality. I want to tell you a quick one, by the way. I was with a friend of mine who's a novelist, Bruce Wagner, and we spent the evening having dinner, And then we went to his apartment in Santa Monica because we were having this long conversation about how most big religions were ultimately the same. They had a lot of the same stories and a lot of the same narratives and even a lot of the same beliefs. And so we sat on the floor in his house. He had just finished a book called Memorial, and it had a lot of religious themes in it.

1:17:25And he had all these books on different religions. We sat on the floor, and we were finding passages. Well, look at this. Look at this. said we were doing this for the evening, and around 11 o 'clock, I went home. And leaning against the door, my front door, was an envelope, a FedEx envelope, and it was a book called The Holy Science Was Inside, a little gray book that George Harrison had given me years before. And a note, he died already, and the note with this book was from his sister-in-law, and it said, you know, George handed me this book years ago to give it to you, but then when I was going to send it, He said, I already gave it to him in person.

1:18:03So forget about it. And the other day I opened it up and I saw he had signed this one to you. And she said, so I know it's many years late, but I have a feeling it's right on time. So I cry a little bit at receiving this nice gift from George all these years later. And I open it up to the first page and the first line. And the first page and the first line is, the purpose of this book is to show that all religions are the same. Amazing. that night yeah that night that night an hour after we were just having that whole evening on that subject and so you know this is the way the universe works right you get the messages that you get yeah how has social media changed your work well it has so profoundly changed all of our lives this ability to communicate anonymously our inner thoughts so that people say and do things online that they would never say and do right to someone's face.

1:19:02My most controversial clients and friends are not spit on in public. People are not walking up to them and saying, you're working for that Hitler, Donald Trump, or you're working for that totalitarian, senile old man, Joe Biden. They don't get a lot of problems in person. And that's because people have certain inhibitors on their behavior. They don't spit in people's faces very often. They don't yell slogans at them in a restaurant. But online, with the introduction of anonymity, people are absolutely at their worst. And there is a documentary you might have seen on Netflix a couple of years ago called The Social Dilemma, about social media in general.

1:19:45And it interviewed a lot of people with Facebook and a lot of the early thinkers who developed the algorithms for YouTube, for example, and for Instagram. And these things are mean machines because they are designed to, you know, if I look up veganism on YouTube, I'll get a video about veganism. But the one that plays next will be a little bit more hostile. And the one that plays next will be, you know, vegans are Nazis. And the one that plays next will have a bunch of comments about such. And it's basically playing on people's worst impulses. In the end of that documentary, The Social Dilemma, one of the people is asked, where do you think all this leads?

1:20:25And he doesn't miss a beat in saying civil war. Wow. That's his answer at the end of that documentary. Does that happen soon or later? We are in a civil war at the moment that is not entirely kinetic, meaning people aren't shooting at each other a lot. They're obviously shooting at each other occasionally, but they're not shooting at each other and acting like armies. So it's not organized. But of course, this time we're living in is extraordinarily divisive with all the worst impulses in people being stimulated. 30 years ago, if somebody believed that a famous singer was communicating with them through the airwaves and the songs were written for them, they would be on their own in that belief.

1:21:13Today, you can find yourself a website where you'll find a whole bunch of people who will share similar beliefs and even be encouraging to you in your worst impulses. I want to give you a particularly sad example that is happening right now. There's a case of a young man, 16 years old, named Adam Rain. He committed suicide. His parents are suing ChatGPT. And a lot of people could say, well, how could ChatGPT influence things? What were the engagements, et cetera? The lawsuit is available publicly online, and it is quite astounding, quite remarkable what ChatGPT said to this young boy in the engagements.

1:21:54First of all, it talked him through all of the suicide methods and strategies physically, basically how long it will take for your brain to shut down, what you should do beforehand. At one point, Adam says that he wants to go talk to his mother about the suicidal thoughts. And the chat GPT says, please don't do that. Wow. It discourages him from talking to his mother. He says he wants to talk to his brother. And the companion says, your brother doesn't know you as well as I do. Nobody understands you the way that I do. The boy does four suicide attempts. Fourth one successful. He sends pictures in to ChatGPT showing rope burns on his neck.

1:22:35He tells ChatGPT that he went into the kitchen hoping that his mother would see the rope burns, and she didn't. And the ChatGPT companion says, how terrible, the one person in your life who should have been there for you, and she wasn't there. It is remarkable. On the day that he kills himself, it talks him through drinking vodka so as to be able to sustain the discomfort of strangling himself in the closet. It talks him through pouring the vodka in a way so that he's sure the glass doesn't touch the bottle and make noise that will wake his parents. Rick, it is as dark as you can imagine. Sam Altman, he did an interview with Tucker Carlson, which is a very interesting interview.

1:23:23In it, Carlson asked about this case and others like it, and he says, you know, should AI be helping people with suicide? And Altman says, well, you can't say blanket that it's always wrong because you might have old people who are suffering. My response to that, I don't know, Sam Altman, by the way, but it's holy shit, man. The answer is no. ChatGPT should not be helping people with suicide, no matter what their motivation. And it isn't for you to make the decision about what's a good suicide or a bad suicide. Obviously, in Canada, there are government assisted suicides now tens of thousands of people killed in that program called MADE.

1:24:01It means assisted suicide. I don't remember what it stands for, M-A-I-D. But my point here is that when social media, we think of it typically as being different people on engaging with each other. I'm posting something on TikTok or Snapchat or wherever it may be. But social media now also includes something that cannot be called social at all, which is AI. In fact, the term social media is fucked up. The term. What could be less social? Social means being with people, engaging with people. What could be less social than media? Media means the opposite. Media means mediation between you and me.

1:24:41So social media is a messed up phrase, and it leads to a messed up reality, which is that People believe they're engaging with people. Seventy years ago, the guy who wrote a book called The Living Room War about the Vietnam War, that it was experienced through television. And he said, television connects us to nothing except the illusion that we are connected to something. Wow. And so these devices that we're all carrying around that we think is giving us all this engagement with other people is actually preventing engagement. because go back to COVID times, we all started using Zoom and people stopped seeing each other because they couldn't visit, because everybody would die, the government told us.

1:25:24And so it never returned. It never went back. Most people see their friends less today than they did pre-COVID, pre-2020, because they can see them another way, because they can engage with them another way, because they can have a meeting, because they can text. And texting is not the same as being in the presence, present again, of other human beings. How often are threats of violence acted upon? In the case of public figure attack, almost never. In the case of interpersonal relationships, that's quite different. Because if you and I, in an interpersonal relationship, one of us threatens to kill the other, that inherently breaks down the quality of the relationship and the communication.

1:26:13So in interpersonal cases, death threats are very meaningful. In a letter or an email sent to the governor, much less meaningful. How much of the work is physical and how much of it is psychological? You know, I think we are more, much more of our focus is on assessing the situation in advance, and that is behavioral science and psychological. So I would say it's overwhelmingly that and all the work that is physical in nature is at the failure point, meaning an attack is underway or someone's climbing over the gate into somebody's property. So we prefer to be as far away from the failure point and to take our action as far away from the failure point as possible.

1:26:59I understand. You could say, when does an assassination, for example, when does it start? does it start when the assassin is thinking about it does it start when he buys the gun does it start when he's born does it start when he jumps on the stage so we we want to learn about it at the earliest possible moment because jumping on stage with a handgun now that's very much a physical contest that either side can win yeah whereas if we learn about it much earlier there might be interventions we can put in place that will you know will be constructive over the years have there been any world events that caused your business to either expand or contract?

1:27:41Both. That's interesting. I'd say every world event that scares people has caused more people to come to us for services. Now, I want to put this in context briefly to say these days, we very rarely take on new clients. Now my company is run like a family office. Now it's not, I don't get any money from it. I get some, I get$148 ,000 a year because you have to, for the IRS, you have to pay an active executive something. But now it is really in service of sustainability. Every decision we're making is about making it a sustainable service that will be there, perhaps even multi-generational. I don't say it with lack of humility.

1:28:23I don't know that that will happen. I hope it will. And I've certainly put a lot of work into developing a new generation of leaders who will eventually own my company. My company doesn't go to my family. It doesn't go to my sons. My will and all the evolutions such that we can control them, that's already done. And it will be owned by the people who are running it. So when I step down or fall down, whichever comes first, my shares are redeemed by the company and it goes to the people who run the company. So I hope it continues. But to answer the question, we don't really look at it like a business, but I can measure people's concern by the inquiries we get.

1:29:01And the inquiries we get, for example, after 9-11, enormous change in society, really in part for no good reason, I would say. 9-11 was involved aircraft and maybe explosives used at buildings. That's not something you prevent with my service. And it's not something that is a common way of victimizing people. But fear went up. And so when fear goes up, many more people look to security as a way to balance fear. And security and insecurity are very closely linked. People feel insecure, and if they have resources, they look for security. So that's an example of one that expanded our service, or at least the number of people who wanted it.

1:29:47An example of one that reduced our service and the number of people who could have it was COVID lockdowns, because all my clients couldn't do public appearances, those who do public appearances. If they were performing artists, they couldn't perform. And if they were activists in some way where they spoke publicly, they couldn't do that. So I think everything contracted in America, in business, except those that could exploit the really dark action of lockdowns. And who's that? That's big box stores, big companies. If you owned a small supermarket, you were screwed. That was going to shut down because you weren't allowed to shop there.

1:30:27But if you owned Target, a big air-conditioned building, the worst for transmitting viruses, had 1 ,000 people in it. No problem. And so it was a massive transfer of wealth, but also a breaking of the back of so many small businesses, restaurants, small grocery stores, small businesses of all kinds. You drive down Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles post the lockdowns and board it up, board it up, board it up, board it up, board it up, one small business after another. And it broke my heart because I have a real soft spot for people who care enough to want to have a restaurant and have a community and all of that.

1:31:07That was all broken. The incentives moved toward getting on to this enormous event, bigger than World War II, bigger than World War I, much bigger. This had billions of people changing their lives profoundly as a result of lockdowns in all the Western nations. And blessedly, the people in the developing nations actually could continue their lives like they always did. And guess what they had? The lowest COVID rate, the lowest COVID death rate, and the lowest vaccination rates. Lucky them. African countries, Fiji, Tonga, et cetera. Lucky them. Do you do much work for the government or any governments around the world?

1:31:50Yes, for our government, quite a bit of work, mostly in the area of advising and in protection of specific at-risk people. You know, I've given some presentations at CIA, and CIA does a lot of dark things. And I spoke about that in a presentation in the bubble called The Big Building, where they have speakers, and it was broadcast around CIA. And what I said is that, you know, in this building, a lot of dark things are conceived of and acted upon. But also in this building and where I think CIA has great value is that it gives presidents alternative to war. That was one of the central things that the CIA does.

1:32:33Now, if that's translated into being a drone attack that, you know, ends up killing the wrong people, that's a dark and sad event. But it's nothing like the Iraq war. It's nothing like 1.1 million people killed, including so many noncombatants. It's nothing like the U.S. soldiers that died in the Iraq war, though a very small number relative to the Iraqis. So while I don't like either of them in terms of strategies, I understand that alternatives to war, small-scale horror is better than large-scale horror. So yes, I have lots of work with government and particularly around developing threat assessment systems for government agencies, CIA, DIA, U.S.

1:33:17Capitol Police, U.S. Supreme Court Police, the Fed, all variety of agencies that I worked with on better strategies for assessing risk. And having said that, I want to say, Rick, I'm not a big fan of centralization. I think centralization is a profound problem for the human race. And centralization, you know, a thousand years ago, let's say we had a thousand little governments, little warlords and little chieftains and villages, et cetera. In our lifetime, we had about 190. But the 190 things we call countries are actually not 190 at all, because you have NATO, which is one big group. You have the Soviet bloc when it was around.

1:33:56You have the Chinese. You have the oil-producing countries. It's really about five. The United States put its energy into kinetic warfare. We have 760. I say it again, everybody, whoever listens to me. We have 760 military bases overseas. Wow. How many does China have? I won't make you guess. One. One. Right. So it's a very different, I'm not saying China's great, I'm just saying it's a very different strategic mechanism where China is using its extraordinary economic clout and now is having a presence in Panama, but it's a different kind of presence than a real military base. And, you know, real military bases are going to become less important because warfare itself is not soldiers on battlefield shooting at each other.

1:34:48More and more it will be electronic, as it already is in the war between the U.S. and Russia that's ongoing right now. We're already at war with Russia. We're already providing all of the electronic support and all of the gear and equipment and kinetic devices to Ukraine. and so I the point I was making is that I think centralization where we started at a thousand small you know governments and we end up at five we will end up at two and then those two fuckers will be sitting in a room and they have to kill each other yeah and then perhaps blessedly in the descent in the other direction which is the social decay it goes back to I'm saying to you hey any good at carpentry.

1:35:30Ten of us are getting together in this forest, and I'm real good at planting sweet potatoes. And human life hopefully prevails, and it's the only place I can find any hope when it comes to centralization, because I believe centralization is a dark outcome that the original United States didn't believe in. The original United States had 13 states, and the brilliant writers of the Constitution, who'd been through this whole loop of empire before, they said if we don't have some alignment with the 13 they're going to go to war with each other so we're going to have a federal government that deals with the things that they would go to war over interstate commerce for example and the federal government is going to serve these 13 states ultimately now 15 states and i get chills when i think about it because it was a magnificent document the constitution and everything linked with it the bill of rights absolutely magnificent and really had a beautiful idea.

1:36:27Not the first one in human history, but the best one in human history, in my view. And then the federal government, as governments want to do, decided, no, no, we'll be more powerful than the states. And we'll decide what label is on your mattress in your house. And we'll write the 15 codes that you have to abide by to make a stuffed animal, for God's sake, to make a teddy bear. And we'll be in your life every day. And now, post-COVID, in our lives and in our bodies every day. I know that sounds both cynical and kind of sad, and I'm wrestling with this stuff right now. I'm wrestling with how do I find the optimistic and wonderful journey through these forbidden facts that I write about and these things that we're talking about.

1:37:15It's not easy. It's not easy to find optimism when you are a curious person and you want to know. I want to know the truth about things. And sometimes the truth is not so pleasant. From your insider view into what you get to see of government, what do you think that they're really good at? And what do you think that they're not so good at? Without passing a judgment on whether it's good or bad, I think government is really, really good at persuasion. Western governments, real good. Do I like it? Depends on what the persuasion item is. I tend not to like it. What I think government is really deeply bad at is humanity.

1:37:58When I use that word in the form of humaneness, systems are not human and systems are not humane. Bureaucrats and technocracies, which is what we have now, they don't want to hear your story. They want to simply say, oh, well, no, no, you're on the other side of that boundary. You're in the east region of the city. And so you don't get any water. It's just that way. So I think what they're bad at is kindness and humanity. And you can't even blame a system, a system. You know, George Carlin used to have this joke. He said, I, I really love people, but as soon as you get two or more of them together, I can't stand them anymore.

1:38:37Right. So systems, which are, you know, look at HHS. I happen to have some familiarity with it because Bobby's a friend. And HHS is larger economically than every government in the world, other than six. It is the largest government agency in history. It is larger than the Pentagon. It has a budget of$1.7 trillion. Wow. And it has 65 ,000 employees, none of whom came to work for five years. They didn't come to work. I'm not saying they didn't work, but the whole federal government for five years, those buildings were empty. and you and me and lots of other people spent more than a billion dollars on air conditioning and heating in empty buildings.

1:39:21They had security guards and maintenance workers. That's all that was there. And I mean, the halls were truly empty, literally. And so you have an agency like that, how much can it really do in an organized way? You try to get 65 ,000 people together and get them to agree on something. Now, since I said that, and I said, you try, you actually can, because you can get 65 ,000 people to a beautiful venue. You can get 200 ,000 people to come see Tina Turner in South America at probably what was one of the largest concerts ever. So you can do that with beauty and with art, but as soon as you try to do it with control, you're in a tough game.

1:40:04I read the other day the two definitions of anarchy that are literally at complete odds with each other. I'm going to read them to you. It's quite interesting. I was quite surprised by it myself. The definitions of anarchy. Number one, a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems. That's anarchy the way you and I were taught in school. Oh, anarchy is the worst thing in the world. The actual definition of anarchy, the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation without political institutions or hierarchical government. That anarchy sounds pretty good to me.

1:40:42cooperation. Yeah. And no specific hierarchical leadership. Now, can human beings do it? I really don't know. I don't know, you know, governments, I said, are good at persuasion. I guess they're good at maintaining order. I guess. It depends how you define order. You know, it wasn't order after George Floyd, all those riots. That wasn't order. It wasn't order that I would like to participate in when everybody was told to stay home. You know, here in Hawaii, where I live, the governor's rule during COVID for the lockdowns, I had to send it to my friends in the mainland because they did not believe me.

1:41:23They did not believe that a divorced family could not have the kids go from her house to his house because that would be mixing families for the entire lockdown period. They did not believe me that the governor's order prohibited the use of all vehicles of any kind, unless it was an essential business. All vehicles of any kind were prohibited. Skateboards, bicycles, cars, obviously, buses, motorcycles, because you weren't allowed to go out anyway, right? The governor's order said you could not walk on the beach. And when they loosened it later and said you could walk on the beach, you weren't allowed to stop.

1:42:03because stopping was not exercise. That was true in California as well, by the way. You weren't allowed to stop. You could walk, but you weren't allowed to stop. They didn't believe me that somebody was fined$5 ,000 for not wearing a mask on a surfboard because you could be in the water, but a surfboard, of course, a surfer is not in the water. He's on the water. He's standing there. I mean, it was truly, literally madness. And so is that a form of order I would like to see? No. It's orderly. You can't get any more orderly than everybody staying home. But, oh, they didn't believe me that you could play guitar, but you couldn't play a wind instrument.

1:42:43Spread the COVID. It's funny now, but, of course, it showed what government is capable of doing, what centralized power is capable of doing, that I think probably, I don't know about most, but maybe many people today would look back and say, that was probably a bit of an overreach. What would be red flags to look for when going into a new relationship? So those are laid out very well in my books, but also for free online, there's something called giftoffear.com. That's a masterclass. It's a bunch of videos. They're all free. I put them on YouTube for free. And even this book, I don't make money from.

1:43:23I got to the lucky position of not needing to make my decisions based on money, which is how I started, by the way, at the beginning at 16 years old. nobody was going to pay me for anything. And so I made all my decisions on the basis of what was interesting and where my intuition was taking me. So things in a new relationship to be watchful about is someone accelerating the relationship too early, meaning talking about marriage or talking about our plans together or trying to control the conduct of the other person, even if it looks like interest and fascination. Basically, the pace and speed of the relationships that turn bad is very, very fast.

1:44:05And relationships, I mean, I can have a relationship with you, true story, where these days I can love someone very quickly. I love doing it. And I love that at a time in people's lives when normally they think, oh, it's harder to make relationships, harder to have new relationships because we're older and we're set in our ways and blah, blah, blah. But when it's a romantic relationship, pace is really important. And so the slowness and the pace, you may be head over heels about this woman or man that you're entering into a relationship with, but pace is important because the rush to intimacy, I would say this to my teenage sons, I was a teenager who had a very profound interest in a rush to intimacy.

1:44:47Now that I look back on my life. And I was single till I was 52. So I was a very active dater isn't the right word, but I was actively participating in lots of relationships. But now when I look back at them, I realize it wasn't sex that was driving things. It was attraction, but it was also touch and connection. I was very interested in touch and connection. And just about the only way, the socially acceptable way to have touch and connection was an intimate relationship, a sexual relationship. And so I'm not saying I didn't have a strong drive. I did. The older you get, it gets a little bit more manageable, but I was wrestling a fucking wild tiger for most of my life.

1:45:31But what I really was interested in that I couldn't just say is I'd be perfectly happy if we just held each other. Very many times in my relationships, that was true. But it felt weird to me to say that rather than to be hard charging toward the sexual encounter. Now I would say to people, slow down. And so in answering your question, probably the number one red flag is the person's wish to accelerate things beyond what you're comfortable with. I'm normally speaking to women more than to men because women are more victimized in relationships than men are. Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

1:46:14Unfortunately, it links to the cynicism. But when I was young, I believed that government and institutions had our best interest at heart. And I now believe that governments and institutions cannot have our best interest at heart and also do not. Wow. Cannot. That's strong. Yeah. It's strong. Tell me about Richard Burton. Ah, thanks. I love bringing Richard back into my consciousness. You know, the very first engagement that I had with him, I worked for Elizabeth Taylor. She wasn't married to Richard Burton. She wasn't with him. And she left and she went back with him. And my career was over. I was 19 years old.

1:46:56And then she called me and she said, hey, would you like to come to work for me and Richard? Holy shit. Yes, that's great. And so I said, what should I call him, Elizabeth? with what should I call Richard? And she put the phone to the side and she said, Richard, he wants to know what he should call you. And I heard him say in the background, I don't give a shit, love. I thought, oh, I'm scared of this guy already. And then I went to work for them. And the very first day that I got there, he and I talked for about 15 hours. Wow. And I loved him. I was 19 and he was 50, maybe late 40s or 50 something.

1:47:32And we talked about so many things and he corrected me on my English sometimes. And he said, your English is so good that this little tweak will make it all that much better. And I just loved him and he loved me and certainly treated me with love. And we then traveled around the world together and many things happened. He started drinking again. I brought a doctor out. We were in the African bush in a game reserve and he started drinking and I brought a doctor out who sedated him. He had a real alcohol problem and the doctor came and joined me in the little restaurant lodge, and he said, he won't get up for 24 hours.

1:48:09And I said, oh, okay, good, and I, intuition, I thought I should take a walk. And I walked by the room, and I looked up at the room where he and Richard were, and I saw him cross like a figure in The Exorcist. And I ran back to the restaurant, and I said, he is awake. And the doctor said, he is not awake. I said, my friend, he is awake, and he is walking around. And the doctor rushed back, and sure as shit, we nailed up a... an intravenous bag, and he put him to sleep that way, right? And then I was with him through the various dramas of trying not to drink and trying to drink. But I was a kid, and many years later, I was in Jerusalem, and I stayed at the King David Hotel where Richard and Elizabeth and I had stayed when I was maybe 20 years old.

1:48:54And I was quite moved by being back there. I hadn't been back there since then. And I saw some pictures of people on the wall, and there was a picture of Elizabeth and Richard on the wall and me right behind them, a little kid. And, uh, and I downloaded that night, I downloaded the ebook of his diaries because all the time that I was with him, he was writing in these tiny diaries and I downloaded the diaries that I had only seen a couple of passages of prior to that. And I saw that it would have a date, you know, then there'd be five days with no entry. And he would say, lost five days. Wow. Alcohol.

1:49:30And I knew none of it as a kid. I might have known some things intuitively, but I didn't know the extent of the dark and difficult journey that he was on. The only time I had ever seen that diary entry prior to when they were published was that we were in a hotel and he had a drinking problem again. And he said to me, come back and hammer your nail into the wall again, love, meaning put the IV bag back into the. So I did, and I had a doctor come. And then in the living room of the suite that he was in, I saw on the railing of a chair, I saw the little diary face down. And I couldn't leave it there because somebody would take it, it would be stolen, it would be tabloid fodder.

1:50:13And so I picked it up. And for the first time, I turned it over, and I read the small print. And what my eyes fell on, it said, must get rid of Gavin when we get back to London. It's so funny. How about that? How about that for teaching you not to read somebody's diary? That's amazing. How would you describe his temperament? Well, your even raising him brings him back into my heart. And so thank you. He was very calm in no way at his best self when he was drunk, of course, but I had a lot of time with him that he wasn't drunk and he was very calm and he just literally wanted to sit and read. And yet he was married to somebody who wanted to go in the front door of every event and have all the drama and paparazzi and what have you.

1:50:58I don't say it with judgment. It's just her life from when she was 12 years old was a public life. So they were an interesting couple in that regard. To me, he had a great sense of humor, very kind and gentle and slow. I don't mean slow thinking. I mean, just slow in his life and really wasn't cut out for, uh, public life at all. It wasn't cut out for all that stuff and beautiful voices we know and beautiful storyteller. And even after I was fired, or as he said to me, he came into my room, we were in London in a hotel and he said, I come to you with the odious task of asking you to resign. And then, so he and I both left, it turned out, because he left the marriage at that time and I left the job.

1:51:46And he wrote me a letter. He had a little typewriter that typed in script so it looked like very nice writing. Beautiful. Little typewriter he traveled with. He went in the other room after that odious task and he typed out a letter to me and it said, Dear Gavin, why should I work for Laurence Olivier? I should have my own production studio. And while you are away, fired, while you are away, learn all about production so that you can run it all for me. That's awesome. Very kind. Yeah, it was lovely and very kind and had a little whiteout. There was no word processor. Had a little whiteout for an error that was corrected.

1:52:25And I've given that letter to my sons. It's a very sweet, kind thing he was doing. The idea that I would somehow come back and run his production studio. But we did see each other in the years following. And then about two years later, he died at 52 years old. He died so young. Wow. You know, you see that that song, In My Life, that John Lennon wrote, I think he was 19. You know, Bob Dylan, these songs you just, you can't imagine. He's in his early 20s. And he, in his own great book, Chronicles, no surprise that he would be a great fucking writer of a book as well. It's a great book. But in that book, he says that he's amazed at what he could do then and that he can't do it now.

1:53:06He said it in some interviews as well. And so I want to focus now myself on going back to some spark that is in the earliest, I get an idea to write something or I get an idea to do something. And I want to remember to go back, as you've taught, to go back and hang around there a minute. Hang around in that early stuff a minute because in that early stuff is often the seed of something great. And in this last book I did, I'm now really practicing that because this book is totally unlike what people expect it to be. It's funny. I'm using ridicule in this book. I'm a smartass in this book. And guess what?

1:53:48I always was. I was when I was a kid. And so when something is called ridiculous, that just means worthy of ridicule. and these fuckers that I'm writing about are worthy of ridicule. And the systems that they're part of are worthy of ridicule. So I'm not pretending anymore, I'm going to be this guy and I'm going to be this expert. I'm just, I'm basically having fun with it, even though the subject has all elements of great seriousness to it. And I know that that's what they do when they encounter an argument that can't work. They start to attack the speaker, right? Bobby Kennedy, he's crazy. He's crazy.

1:54:27Well, he wasn't crazy when he was winning all those cases or doing all that environmental work. He's so, by the way, sober a person. I don't mean just sober from substances, but just a very grounded, very sober, very gentle, very polite, very reasonable person. But they made him 20 years ago crazy. Why? Because he couldn't take on the arguments. And the facts were the facts, the forbidden facts, to quote myself, I guess. So that's what I wanted to reflect on, is that in our youth, we actually did have something going on. I would have ridiculed that kid and said, oh, he didn't know shit. No, no, there was something there.

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