Gavin De Becker, Security Expert

Gavin de Becker is a security specialist and author whose work focuses on predicting and preventing violence. He founded Gavin de Becker & Associates in 1978, a firm that advises and protects some of the world’s most high-profile figures and organizations, and has developed widely used threat assessment tools such as MOSAIC for governmental agencies including the U. S. Marshals Service and Central Intelligence Agency. De Becker has served as an advisor to three U. S. presidents and earned accolades for his impact on public safety protocols. His bestselling book, The Gift of Fear, has helped shape public understanding of violence prevention and continues to be a reference in the field. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  As I reflect on a long career, the cases that I look back at that are most interesting are cases where I came to know the so-called perpetrator. Years ago, I was hired by a big movie studio to be an expert witness in a case of a guy who claimed that he wrote a particularly successful movie. And he had, in fact, written something, and he had, in fact, sent it to the studio. I would say it wasn't identical to what ultimately happened, but he didn't get any traction with the studio because he said, "I have to be the star of this movie." And they said, "Well, he's crazy, right?" Well, it wasn't crazy when Sylvester Stallone did the exact same thing. Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky, and he said, "I'm not going to sell it to you unless I'm the star."

• 1:08Speaker 01

  And of course, that was nuts. The guy had never, you know, been in a movie and had no apparent reason to believe that he would be successful. It wasn't crazy when, you know, Eddie Murphy said, "I want to be the guy in, you know, Coming to America." And there was a time when Eddie Murphy was some 19-year-old who thought he should end up on TV and who thought he was talented enough to do so. So it isn't inherently, you know, that case I ended up not testifying in because I could not make the case that the guy's aspiration and ambition made him crazy. I was not willing to make that case. The other interesting case I want to share is that I had a case with a very prominent...

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Client who came to meet with me and told me that he had had a phone relationship with a woman and it happened when he was touring around the country and as you know, you get offstage and you're all jazzed up and full of adrenaline, but where are you? You're now in a Holiday Inn near the venue, or in the case of my client, slightly better hotels, but you're alone and it's 2:00 in the morning and you miss your wife and you miss your family and you miss other people and you've just had this highly energizing engagement with thousands of people. And so these, in this case, men were particularly susceptible

• 2:32Speaker 01

  to a woman who contacted them and she was brilliant and she had a relationship with my client and when it sort of broke off and he didn't want to have a personal engagement, he was married and he felt he'd done something wrong to his wife. And so I was asked to learn about this 19-year-old, very beautiful woman, who I was given the name and I could see her in, she was a model who did ads that we could see in magazines. And what I learned is that it was not, in fact, a 19-year-old beautiful woman. It was a 56-year-old overweight woman who lived near a campus and thus she had a lot of contact with young people and

• 3:15Speaker 01

  she pretended to be the 19-year-old model with the name that I won't mention right now. And as I learned more about her in our investigation, she was having relationships with some of the most prominent Americans of that time. Wow. About 20 years ago. Deep, intense, personal relationships on the phone. She had been a suicide prevention hotline operator. So she was very good at engaging with people. She was brilliant. And in that case, I advised my client, he was concerned that she'd recorded calls, he'd said things about his contemporaries and political figures, et cetera. And I advised my client that I did not believe. That she was going to do anything damaging to him. Because I believe that it was for her as well, a real relationship. Yeah.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  But quite, I mean, when I showed my client the photograph of her, he was quite stunned that this is who he had been in a relationship with. And not just her. Another prominent person who was not a client of mine, got her tickets to attend a show. Two tickets, so she would be there with her girlfriend. And he looked and he saw that it wasn't her in the audience. Well, it actually was her in the audience. Wow. He'd paid her airfare. He'd paid for hotels for her to be in. And when they would arrange to meet, she would always get angry in their phone conversations. And then one person actually did meet with her in a hotel room. She said, let's have all the lights off. Because that's the way we did it after your shows. We would turn all the lights off. We would have a wine together.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And so she took all the light bulbs out of the hotel suite. And he went into the hotel suite and actually had an engagement with her. Two people had that happen, by the way. And by the way, a lot of people you know, and a lot of people I know, hearing this story, would recognize it immediately because they are among the people who had relationships with her over the phone. That's wild. Sounds like a movie. Uh, yeah. It would have made a fine movie. And I came to respect her a lot. And years later, I contacted her for help on a similar case. Yeah. I wanted her input on a similar case. And I also wanted to know that it wasn't her. And it wasn't her again. I don't know where she is today. It's been a long time since I had any contact with her. But that was a very particularly interesting case

• 5:29Speaker 01

  that looked like it might come to extortion, but, but didn't and wasn't going to. Tell me about hacking and computer privacy. Well, that can be a short answer for me because I actually don't get involved in it. You know, I view my work as the prevention of tissue damage. And mine is highly physical. And I'm grateful that it is. Because the other stuff, I'm not an expert on it. We have experts. And we certainly have had, you know, very dramatic cases of, of hacking happen to clients. But I engage other people for that work. And what I can say. Briefly is that if a government wants to get into your phone, there is absolutely no precaution of any kind to prevent it.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  The technologies used now, particularly a system called Pegasus 3, that's used by many governments around the world, sold by the Israelis, absolutely, there is no preventing it. It doesn't require that you click on some text you got. It is a no-click exploit. There is no preventing someone from getting into your phone. And when they do, and this isn't for, by the way, regular folks don't have the likelihood of being targeted by a government. But people who do have the likelihood of being targeted by a government, forget about it. You have absolutely no strategy for preventing it. And these exploits are usable without your participation, like clicking on a link or something like that. They give the power to those governments that they can operate.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Everything that you can operate on your phone, they can do from 8,000 miles away.

• 7:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Turn on the camera, turn on the audio, download the stuff while you're sleeping, even by the way, if your phone is off.

• 7:09Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So that, yeah, governments have had resources. You can imagine that the CIA or the larger agency, the NSA, has quite extraordinary capabilities.

• 7:19Rick Rubin?

  Now, is that only governments that use it? Or might big corporate spies use it to look at their competitors' information? Or drug companies looking at their competitors' information?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Sure, of course. Good choice, by the way, that you chose drug companies, because big pharma companies are the most criminally corrupt companies in America. They have had the most multi-billion dollar fines for crimes, again and again and again. In my new book called Forbidden Facts, I have a whole chapter just detailing what Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and company after company, Roche, what they have gotten caught for doing. And that's not to mention what they haven't gotten caught for doing. So the answer to your question is no, it's not just governments. Because while Israel treats very carefully who they sell that particular program to, Pegasus 3, there are many, many exploits being

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Developed all the time for getting into phones and they are used by powerful individuals and certainly by corporations and the investigators hired by corporations. There's a company, for example, of former Israeli intel people specifically from the division that did the best and highest level work of getting into phones and monitoring phones remotely. And that's a private company that's hired by pharma quite often to go after the worst people in the world. And the worst people in the world, who are they to pharma? They are people who question pharmaceutical products. You know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Russell Brand. There was a $2 million effort by Moderna against Russell Brand because he's a very big podcaster.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And he was talking about facts that were coming out regarding COVID vaccines, for example, mRNA vaccines that are a failed product, worse than failed product, they're a dangerous product. And so they went after him like crazy and they went after him with all variety of of online tricks and methods and things that destroy your reputation. Ultimately culminating in, you know, a whole bunch of rape accusations from 20 something years ago that were made massively public in the UK. Every magazine, every newspaper and the Sunday Times and Dispatches, which is a documentary TV news program, who all put forth these four women that had come forward to make accusations from a long time ago. Guess what?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  In the documentary that was seen so profoundly by everybody in the UK and it had the blurred out, the women were blurred out as they were speaking. Guess what? All actors, not the women, but they blurred them out to make it seem that they were the women. That's a tricky game, dramatic music. And not one of those four women went to the police. Wow. But then the police put out a statement saying, if you have any information on Russell Brand, please let us know. And then some women did come forward, not those women. And so it was a massive ad campaign, all starting with governments.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  And by the way, right after the show came out, a woman named Dame Dynich, who's in the UK Parliament, wrote to YouTube and to Rumble and said, "You have to demonetize this terrible person, Russell Brand." Her husband is the head of the UK Cyber Warfare Unit. Wow. And so YouTube did, by the way. Rumble said, "No, we're not going to demonetize somebody because of off-screen accusations that have nothing to do with the content that we're putting out there." So I shared that with you, Rick, because you asked, "Do private people use these methods?" And the answer is yes. Private corporations. Pfizer put out a product that is the most successful consumer product in world history, more than Coca-Cola.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  The consumable product being mRNA vaccines. Billions and billions of doses funded by government, so it was free to the consumer and mandated by governments all over the world and, you know, made your life hell if you didn't take it. So what a business to be in. What a grand business to be in. If you're interested in selling stuff, you can't be sued for it because the government prevents all liability from a law in 1986. Can't be sued for, no matter how terrible your negligence, no matter how grievous the injuries. Pharma products, you know, you can't sue for a vaccine. Tell me more about the new book. It's called Forbidden Facts, and it is about the ways in which government suppresses information, not just government, powerful, you know,

• 11:42Speaker 01

  power centers all over the world, suppresses information and identifies certain facts as being forbidden. For example, Agent Orange. In the case of Agent Orange, Agent Orange was a chemical weapon that contained dioxin, which is one of the most toxic things that can ever affect human beings. It causes birth defects in your offspring, and it was known to cause birth defects in babies or offspring of animals, which are not that different biologically from people. So what do we do? For 10 years, we sprayed that all over Vietnam, on jungles and on people. And then people came home, veterans, and they went to the government and said, hey, I'm injured, or many died, and the government, how did they debunk it? They debunked it by going to the Institute of Medicine,

• 12:26Speaker 01

  and the Institute of Medicine came out with a report. A bunch of experts got together and they said, oh, no, no, Agent Orange is not a problem. Then there were more investigations afterwards, and Admiral Zumwalt testified before Congress, very famous, prominent military and public figure. He was the person who ordered Agent Orange to be used in Vietnam, and his own son died from it. And so he testified before Congress that the Institute of Medicine report was a scam and a sham. And then so did the Veterans Administration did studies that called it into question. The two people who were most prominent in that Institute of Medicine report, did they get fired?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Did they get in trouble? Did they get demoted? No, they got promoted to childhood vaccines, which is also debunked by the Institute of Medicine. Wow. Now, the interesting thing I want to tell you is that the Institute of Medicine is the government's debunker. Right? We all know that the connection between childhood vaccines and brain damage or autism has been debunked. We could, you know, find a thousand people on the street who would tell you it's been debunked. But you won't find one person who could tell you who debunked it or how it was debunked. And that's what this book is about, is it tells you how and who. And who was it, by the way, that debunked the connection, the link between any childhood vaccine and any child having brain damage or autism? It was the Institute of Medicine. And what is the Institute of Medicine?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Ask everybody you know, and they'll all tell you it's an important government agency that is part of the National Academies of Sciences. Guess what? Neither is a government agency. It's a totally private organization, the Institute of Medicine. The guy who runs it gets 1.1 million dollars a year, not hardly a government salary. And they are in the business of being funded by government when debunking is wanted, and by corporations, and by pharma corporations. And what did they debunk? They debunked any link between vaccines and any brain damage in any child. They debunked that Agent Orange could hurt anybody. They debunked that Gulf War Syndrome was even real, which is very real.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  They debunked the idea that burn pits might cause injury and death to our soldiers. And every one of those things has subsequently been proven to be true. Baby powder, Johnson & Johnson's baby powder, causes cancer. It has asbestos in it. How do I know that? Because 50 years ago, Johnson & Johnson sent a delegation of scientists to Washington DC, to the FDA, to say, "Listen, our baby powder has a little bit of asbestos in it. We thought you should know that." And what did the FDA do? They said, "Well, we gotta study right away how much asbestos is okay in baby powder." Now, I'm a father of 10. I'll tell you how much asbestos is okay in baby powder if you ask me.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  It's zero. But the FDA studied how much would be an allowable amount. How long did they study it for? Forty-five years. When did they finally conclude that the Johnson & Johnson baby powder should not have asbestos in it? 2024. Wow. And so, that's after Johnson & Johnson paying out billions of dollars in lawsuits so courts could figure it out, and victims could figure it out, but the FDA couldn't figure it out. So this book is about a whole slew of those kinds of forbidden facts. And by the way, it's a very short book, and it's funny, believe it or not. Because one of the reasons it's funny is that when the Institute of Medicine

• 16:05Speaker 01

  did the debunking of any vaccine linking to any child's brain damage or autism...

• 16:13Speaker 01

  They did it behind closed doors and their meetings were transcribed and some good-hearted person leaked them. Wow. And so I have in this book their actual discussions, what are they actually talking about? And it's funny, I tell you, Rick, it would be a one-act Broadway play that audiences would hold their bellies laughing if you could hear, and you'll see it in the book, it's funny, if you could hear what these chucklehead experts are actually saying to each other when it comes to this most important thing that they were paid by the United States to do. What are they talking about? They're not talking about the science, they're talking about how to say it. On day one, at the very first moment, I just picked up the book, this is the very first

• 16:56Speaker 01

  thing said to them by one of the people who worked on Agent Orange and also worked on the CDC. She says, "The point of no return, the line we will not cross, is public policy that says pull the vaccines." The point of no return, the line we will not cross, is change the vaccine schedule. We wouldn't say compensate the injured, we wouldn't say pull the vaccine, we wouldn't say stop the program. The CDC wants us to declare, well, these things are pretty safe on a population basis. We are not ever going to come down that autism is a true side effect. That's day one. Then they meet for two years and they come out with their study. Big surprise, that's what it says.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  It says that no vaccine can be demonstrated to cause autism in any child, despite tens of thousands of people telling the story about getting the vaccine and bringing their kid home and the baby shrieking and having seizures and ending up in the emergency room and then within days being gone. Wow. So, I don't even make a case in the book about what's true, I just make a case about what's untrue. And what's untrue is that the Institute of Medicine gathered and convened and really discussed anything other than syntax, not science, syntax. And it's awful and dark and also some of it, as I say, is very funny. You kind of go back and forth reading this book, I can tell you, having written it, you

• 18:20Speaker 01

  go back and forth between slapping your forehead and laughing and being really pissed off. Yeah. Because when the government doesn't want something to be true, not just our government, by the way, every power center in world history, when they don't want something to be true, it's just not true anymore.

• 18:36Rick Rubin?

  How did you come to write this book? This seems off-brand for you.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  You know, it is and it isn't because in The Gift of Fear, I talked about what large institutions and corporations do, what gun manufacturers had done. And so I talk about how people are harmed by large corporations in that book. And in this book, that's exactly what I'm doing again. You know, I want to always encourage people to make their own decisions. And can you imagine something more important to make a decision on, free of pressure and deceit, than something you inject into your body? I mean, these companies were for decades, including mercury, in the ingredients of childhood vaccines.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And then mercury was taken out of many, but not all. And ultimately, it now, after all these years, now Bobby Kennedy in the position he's in has actually removed it from childhood vaccines. But the similarity between this and Gift of Fear, both books are about personal responsibility. Right? No parent in the world would let a stranger walk up to their infant on the street and inject something into the baby's arm or ass and not know what's inside that injection. And yet, millions of parents in the United States walk into a Rite Aid or a Long's where they're advertising and promoting, hey, did your baby get the vaccine yet? And letting some 23-year-old pharmacist assistant,

• 20:08Speaker 01

  who has no idea what questions he ought to ask first about your baby, has your baby had seizures in the past from vaccines? And this is happening millions of times every year. And it's quite insane. And if you want to have almost a laugh with me, I'll read you something, a short thing from this book.

• 20:26Rick Rubin?

  Please.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Okay, thanks. It's about vaccines. And basically, what were vaccines when they started? They were, and by the way, I'm not anti-vaccine. I talk about vaccines that I really believe in in the book as well. But what were they when they started? What does the word mean, vaccines? It comes from the word vodka, which means cow. The earliest vaccines were pus from sores on cows that had cowpox, and then rubbed into wounds on people as a way to vaccinate, they assumed, against smallpox. And then they would take pus from the hoof of horses when they would get an infection, and they would use that. And so they were basically the old timey vaccine makers were experimenting. And these are some of the ingredients in the old timey vaccines.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Dried rabbit spinal cords, duck embryos, chicken blood, human bile, because God knows you wouldn't want to throw that away. You'd want to inject that into a baby. Ground up rat spleens, boiled pigskin. So all of that, which sounds like a scene out of Macbeth, you know, eye of newt, toe of frog, lizard's leg, tongue of dog. All of that was in the old time vaccines. Now I'm going to read you what's in today's vaccines after all our science. First one, gelatin from boiled pigskin. So that's obviously endured over all these years. Chicken embryo protein, blood from the hearts of cow fetuses, human fetus DNA fragments, albumin from human blood plasma,

• 21:53Speaker 01

  oil extracted from the liver of sharks, protein from the ovaries of army worms, which is a small insect, and monkey kidney DNA. That's all in current vaccines. That's the biological stuff that's in them. But also in them is formaldehyde, and you don't need to hear from me that that's probably not a good idea, and potassium chloride. Now, why potassium chloride is so interesting is that is the last, there are three injections given when you execute someone. The last one, the one that kills them, is potassium chloride. And obviously a much larger dose than we give to our infants. Phenol, which is listed by the EPA as a hazardous material. Borax, which is used in pesticides and not allowed in food, but it's okay to inject into my baby.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Aluminum salts and mercury, ethyl mercury. So maybe it's all good. Maybe it's all great stuff to inject into a baby. I don't, I'm not saying, but I am saying that parents ought to learn about it a little bit. And in that book, I have hundreds of citations, 450, that will take you QR codes. So you can read that book with your iPhone in your hand and you'll be taken right to the CDC website, right to the FDA website. The stuff that you, when you read it, your first impulse will be, that can't be true. This DeBecker guy is making it up. And that's why the QR code is right next to the stuff that you'd think can't be true. So I think it's the same book in that it's asking you to listen to your intuition.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  And it's asking you above all to have personal responsibility. Because governments don't keep us from crime. Police departments don't keep us from crime. They move crime from this neighborhood to this neighborhood with enforcement here. It moves over there. Crime is a part of, and violence is a part of human interaction throughout human history. But what we can do as individuals, there's a Wordsworth poem. He says, "In ourselves our safety must be sought, by our own right hand it must be wrought." It's not somebody else who's going to protect you. It's not me or my books. I'm not going to be there. It's going to be your own willingness to take responsibility. And so in this book, what I'm asking parents to do when it comes to all pharma products, it's much more than just about vaccines.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Vaccines are just a, a very notable example because it's topical right now. But I'm asking people to take responsibility on all things that you put into your body. I do that in my own life and I'm quite careful about something that somebody is aiming a hypodermic at me. I, I want to say, hold on a second. I'd like to know what it is, if you don't mind. And we've lost that in America. We've given that over to the government.

• 24:31Rick Rubin?

  What is Mosaic?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  So Mosaic is a, is a method of, I guess I would call it artificial intuition. It is a method used for, in our case, assessing situations that might escalate to violence. So I'll give you an easy example would be a husband who might kill his wife. And this is, I say it's an easy example because this happens every few hours in America. A husband or boyfriend kills a woman. When I first did Mosaic, it was about risk to public figures. Congressmen, senators, I developed one with the Capitol Police and one with the US Supreme Court Police, a mosaic system. And it's basically a system that asks you a lot of questions about the communication or the situation that you're assessing.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  In the case of domestic violence, it would ask questions like, did he experience violence as a boy? Does he have substance abuse? Is alcohol involved? Has he made reference to violent acts? Is the woman afraid? That's one of the most important things we're measuring in that mosaic, her intuition. So spousal homicide and intimate violence is the single most predictable crime in America, and predictable means preventable. We don't have just a few to study. We have tens of thousands to study, and they have similarities. And so when you look at a case of spousal violence, you will find that her coworkers knew about it, her friends knew about it, knew about the violence that had already gone on.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  And 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'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. Then there are mosaics for threats to federal judges that are used by the US Marshal System, for example. It is basically something that came about, I just realize as I'm reflecting on this, Rick, that you'll like how it came about, because it goes to your own work on creativity.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  It 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 Rizler, 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? Is it by email? The O stands for the object of the communication. How is the person projected?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  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. That checklist does not invite you to bring your intuition to the table. You have to, you have to have a range of answers, right? Let's say you told me this is a great restaurant.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  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 a 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. And 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.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  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. It 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,

• 29:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:52Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And sometimes people need that information because they need something objective that they can look at and get outside their own thoughts.

• 30:01Rick Rubin?

  How did you come to meet George?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  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 gonna stay and give me your feedback on it?" He 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.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  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 I understood. And he would get back from snorkeling and she would say, "You know, what did you see?" And 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.

• 31:25Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 31:37Speaker 01

  I'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. And 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.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  He 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.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Those people are more frequently traveling in pursuit of an unwanted encounter and, you know, 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.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  That 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, 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.

• 34:12Rick Rubin?

  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. And it's just a strange time. Do you know anything about that story?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Well, I know everything about the story that's been made public, and I've certainly, you know, 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, you know, 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. So all four are ideological, and you made the point that, you know, people view the

• 35:13Speaker 01

  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, and heroic thing. And you said, living in strange times. Yes, no shit, very true.

• 35:32Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  I'm making a note of it because I'm not familiar with that, what I think we'd have to call a trend. But 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.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And so this is a part of public foreign policy that is, the only difference between now 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.

• 37:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me, 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?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It's a word. I mean stalking ultimately refers to the process of, you know, 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.

• 37:52Rick Rubin?

  In the cases of the love addiction, does the target usually know this is going on?

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yes, 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 Bike who wanted to kill Richard Nixon by flying an aircraft into the White House. And he tried to hijack a plane to

• 38:41Speaker 01

  fly into the White House. He 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 Bike. 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," etc., 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. Whereas

• 39:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:11Rick Rubin?

  Thirty years ago, a government building was bombed. A man drove a van and parked it in front of the building.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:19Rick Rubin?

  Do you look into those types of things as well? Or is it more singular, an attack on a person?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  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 a workplace, they call it a workplace violence shooting. If 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

• 41:06Speaker 01

  indicator that matters the most is misery, is suffering.

• 41:12Rick Rubin?

  On the part of the assassin.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  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. That'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.

• 41:52Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Yes, there still are plenty that 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. And in the North, the majority were handgun attacks. A key difference between them is that the rifle attacker does not want attention. Right? 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.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  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. Mark 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.

• 43:17Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 43:24Rick Rubin?

  Proximity.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 43:26Rick Rubin?

  You could be hiding far away with a rifle, whereas with a handgun, you're right in the person's face.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  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. That'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, you know, 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.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  And soon as the handgun comes about, and to a lesser degree, bow and arrow, you have less skin in the game. You can now, you know, 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 that 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

• 45:01Speaker 01

  there hadn't really been any huge jumps in assassination strategies, there 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. So the evolution now with drones, with weaponized drones, that's going to become

• 45:45Speaker 01

  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,

• 46:30Speaker 01

  speaking behind, you know, entry-resistant and bullet-resistant glazing. But 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. So it's going to be more and more complicated, and it's a long answer to your question, Rick,

• 47:15Speaker 01

  but I want to tell you where it goes. Yeah. 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, you know, 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, you know, affecting hundreds of millions of people,

• 47:58Speaker 01

  you're going to stay in your homes and have no human interaction. That 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 sixty, 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, and it would never enter your mind, oh, he's a Nazi, he's a totalitarian, he voted for Trump, he voted

• 48:40Speaker 01

  for Biden. So 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.

• 49:11Rick Rubin?

  It was also recently, maybe three years ago, the former Prime Minister of Japan was assassinated. Do you remember that story?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:20Rick Rubin?

  And that was in-

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, of course.

• 49:22Rick Rubin?

  Up close.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yes. 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 all been 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.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And 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, through the large screens, and not through this direct engagement. But outdoor events, very, very challenging. Very challenging.

• 50:35Rick Rubin?

  In general, how is public figure security different than security for someone we don't know about?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you're a public figure, and particularly now, I used to say if you're a controversial public figure. Today, 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

• 51:27Speaker 01

  without getting into the hostility of one tribe or the other. So 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.

• 52:12Rick Rubin?

  If there are common practices historically in security, might some of your ideas be different than how it's always been done?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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. I was a new person coming to the subject with my own history of how I got there.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And by nature, that meant doing a lot of things differently than had been done in the past. And so, you know, 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. Podium 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.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  And that's, I guess, the best immediate example of that would be Malcolm X, who, you know, 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 arms' 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 US flag or whatever it may be that fits that particular event. So that was a big difference. You know, 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.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  "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. Getting 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? Present, present. You're actually there to experience what comes. And so if protectors are not in the present moment,

• 55:15Speaker 01

  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. And 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, exhausted later, but for a moment, you're very, you know, keyed up. Nuts are a big part of that, are the protein method,

• 55:59Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  And, and 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. Great idea. Thanks. And I, so 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

• 57:24Speaker 01

  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 altogether, 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 dawn if you didn't plan to. And 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.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  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. And 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 gonna get you." And fly at it, and they'd have a little fight, and then it would come back, "Oh, it's 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.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 59:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's something.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  I'm not just interested in not being distracted.

• 59:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, something's happening.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:24Rick Rubin?

  I would love your next book to be Driven to Distraction. No one's written that book yet.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 01

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

• 59:57Rick Rubin?

  In 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?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  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. And so extortion cases are a big part of our work. And today, extortion is not only for money, but it's for cancellation. You know, 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.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  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. And I wrote a book, Gift of Fear, is basically a feminist manifesto. My feminist credentials are very strong, but my criminologist's 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

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  twenty-two years ago, twenty-five 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. I'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.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  So I don't think it's empowerment to accuse someone of sexual assault twenty-five 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 one-thirty 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, you know, working for you in the present moment. Tell me about intuition.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  A few years ago, actually more than a few now, more than twenty-five 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 in tear, 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.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  What 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.

• 1:04:08Rick Rubin?

  Are there any things we can do to support our ability?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  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, it might be a process of thought that we're not aware of. More likely, it is a process of receiving information from the universe. And 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

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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. And 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.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:54Rick Rubin?

  Can 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?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  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. And 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,

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  that idea of beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities and 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. In 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.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  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 gonna say to me, no, no, no, you stay in your lane. You stay right over there where you belong. You don't wanna talk about a, you know, 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.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Cause 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 thirty percent. And he said, he said, I'm sorry, we bought that copy. He and his wife had bought the copy. So I was, you know, nowhere. And then obviously, you know, 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, you know, I wanna also share with you because of your influence on me.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I wanna share that the idea that, you know, 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, ten years because it was, you know, there were essays I had done. And there were other things I was putting together. But the reality is it took thirty eight 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, 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?

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Putting together the content or a process of discovery?

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  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. What 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?

• 1:10:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  And then 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. That became the top of chapter three.

• 1:11:15Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  And that went on every day. Every day, stuff was coming to me, and I was a stenographer.

• 1:11:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  People asked me, you know, 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.

• 1:11:35Rick Rubin?

  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.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  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? If it was a movie, nobody would believe it. Yeah. If it was a novel, it would seem ridiculous. But that is the, you know, 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.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  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. And 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. And 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,

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  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. So 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 opened 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.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  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. My 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.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  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. And 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

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  of comments about such and 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?" And he doesn't miss a beat in saying, "Civil War." Wow. That's his answer at the end of that documentary. You know, does that happen soon or later? You know, 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...

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Is extraordinarily divisive with all the worst impulses in people being stimulated. Thirty 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. Today, 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, sixteen years old, named Adam Rain. He committed suicide. His parents are suing ChatGPT.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  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. First of all, it talked him through all of the suicide methods and strategies physically, 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 ChatGPT 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.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  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. He 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 the strangling himself in the closet.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  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. In 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. Chat GPT should not be helping people with suicide, no matter what their motivation.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  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 MAID, it 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.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  What could be less social than media? Media means the opposite. Media means mediation between you and me. So, 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.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  We all started using Zoom and people stopped seeing each other because they couldn't visit because everybody would die. The government told us and 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.

• 1:21:08Rick Rubin?

  How often are threats of violence acted upon?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  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. So in interpersonal cases, death threats are very meaningful. In a letter or an email sent to the governor, much less meaningful.

• 1:21:42Rick Rubin?

  How much of the work is physical and how much of it is psychological?

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  You know, I think we are more, much more of our focus is on assessing the situation in advance. And that is, you know, 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.

• 1:22:18Rick Rubin?

  I understand.

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  You know, 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.

• 1:22:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Whereas if we learn about it much earlier, there might be interventions we can put in place that will, you know, will be constructive.

• 1:22:51Rick Rubin?

  Over the years, have there been any world events that caused your business to either expand or contract?

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Both, 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. I don't know that that will happen.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  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. And the inquiries we get, for example, after 9/11, enormous change in society, really

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  in part for no good reason, I would say. 9/11 was a, you know, 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, you know, many more people look to security as a way to balance fear. And security and insecurity are very closely linked, right? 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. An example of one that reduced our service and the number of people who could have it

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  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. But if you owned a Target, big air-conditioned building, the worst for transmitting viruses, had a thousand people in it, no problem.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  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, you know, soft spot for people who care enough to want to have a restaurant and have a community and all of that. That was all broken. You know, the incentives moved toward getting on to this enormous event, bigger than World War II, bigger than World War I, much bigger.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  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. Yeah. African countries, Fiji, Tonga, et cetera. Lucky them.

• 1:27:05Rick Rubin?

  Do you do much work for the government or any governments around the world?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Yes, 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.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Now, 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 non-combatants. It's nothing like, you know, the US 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've lots of work with government and particularly around developing threat assessment systems for government agencies, CIA, DIA, US Capitol Police, US Supreme Court

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  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, you have the Chinese, you have the oil-producing countries, it's really about five.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  The United States put its energy into kinetic warfare. We have 760, I say it again, Dad, everybody, whoever listens to me. We have 760 military bases overseas. Wow. How many does China have? I won't make you guess. One.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  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, you know, using its extraordinary economic clout. And now is having a presence in Panama. But it's a different kind of presence than a, 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. More and more, it will be electronic, as it already is. And in the war between the US 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,

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  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, you any good at carpentry? Ten 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.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  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, not the first one in in human history, but the best one in human history, in my view.

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  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, you know, the optimistic and wonderful journey through these forbidden facts that I write about and these things that we're talking about? It's not easy.

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:48Rick Rubin?

  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?

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  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 what the persuasion item is. I tend not to like it. What I think government is really deeply bad at is humanity. When I use that word in the form of human-ness, 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.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  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. Right? So systems which are, you know, look at HHS. I happen to have some familiarity with it because Bobby's a friend. 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 dollars. Wow.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  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. They 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.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  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. Uh, you know, you're in a, you're in a tough game. I read the other day that 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.

• 1:35:51Speaker 01

  The organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation without political institutions or hierarchical government. That anarchy sounds pretty good to me. Cooperation. 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,

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  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. They 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,

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  you weren't allowed to stop. Because 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 couldn't. You could play guitar, but you couldn't play a wind instrument. Spread the COVID.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:21Rick Rubin?

  What would be red flags to look for when going into a new relationship?

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  So those are, you know, laid out very well in my books. But also for free online, there's something called Gift of Fear dot com. Uh, 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. I 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, you know, 16 years old. Nobody was going to pay me for anything. And so I made all my decisions, uh, you know, on the basis of what was, 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,

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  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. And 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, you know, 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.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  But pace is important because the the rush to intimacy. I would say this to my, you know, teenage sons. I was a teenager who had a very profound interest in a rush to intimacy. You know, now that I look back on my life, and I was single till I was 52. So I was a very active, data 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.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  And so I'm not saying I didn't have a, you know, 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. But 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, you know, 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

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  because women are more victimized in relationships than men are.

• 1:41:28Rick Rubin?

  Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, it links to cynicism. But when I was young, I believed that government and institutions had our best interests at heart. And I now believe that governments and institutions cannot have our best interests at heart and also do not.

• 1:41:50Rick Rubin?

  Wow, cannot. That's strong.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  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 nineteen years old. And 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, 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. Oh, I thought, oh, I'm scared of this guy already.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  And then I, you know, went to work for them and the very first day that I got there, he and I talked for about fifteen hours. Wow. And I loved him. I was nineteen and he was fifty, maybe late forties or fifty something. And 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. 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.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  And the doctor came and joined me in the little restaurant lodge and he said, he won't get up for twenty-four hours. And I said, oh, okay, you know, 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, uh, an intravenous bag and he, 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.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  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. And 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. 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. Yes. Because all the time that I was with him, he was writing in these tiny diaries. And I downloaded the diaries that I had, you know, 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.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  And I knew none of it as a kid. I might have known some things intuitively, but I didn't know the, 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 an out, 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, 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

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  be, you know, tabloid fodder. And 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 for, how about that for teaching you not to read somebody's diary? That's amazing. That's amazing. How would you describe his temperament? Well, you're 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. Yeah. And yet he was married to somebody who wanted to go in the front door of every event and have

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  all the drama and paparazzi and what have you. I don't say it with judgment, it's just her life from when she was 12 years old was a public life. Yeah. So they were an interesting couple in that regard. To me, he was, 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. Wasn't cut out for all that stuff. And beautiful voice as 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."

• 1:46:57Speaker 01

  And, uh, and then, so he and I both left, it turned out, because he left the marriage at that time and I left the job. And he, he wrote me a, a letter. He had a little typewriter that typed in script, so it looked like, 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

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  was no word processor. Had a little whiteout for an error that was corrected and 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, uh, 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, his songs you just, you can't imagine. He's in his early twenties. 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, in that book, he says that he's amazed at what he could do then and that he can't do it now. Yeah.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  He said it in some interviews as well. And so, I wanna 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 wanna 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, you know, the, 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 smart ass in this book, and guess what? I always was. Yeah. I was when I was a kid.

• 1:49:10Speaker 01

  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. Yeah. And the systems that they're part of are worthy of ridicule. So, I'm not pretending anymore, I'm gonna be this guy, and you know, I'm gonna 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, you know, that's what they do, when they encounter an argument that can't work, they start to attack the speaker. Yeah. Right? Bobby Kennedy, he's crazy. He's crazy. Well, 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.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  I don't mean just sober from substances, but he's just a very grounded, very sober, very gentle, very polite, very reasonable person. But they made him, twenty 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 ridicule that kid and said, "Oh, he didn't know shit." No, no, there was something there.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

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