January 27, 2016 • 30 mins
Cat’s out the bag: We’re not making it out alive. So how do we deal with the ultimate fear – that death is right around the corner? And when the survival chips are down, how can we increase our chances? Join Julie Douglas and colleagues from HowStuffWorks for the pilot episode of The Stuff of Life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the Stuff
of Life. I'm Julie Douglas, host of The Stuff of Life,
a podcast that teases a part of the tales we tell,
because when we crack open a story and look inside,
we see the seeds of what make our world so maddening,
(00:21):
so strange, and so achingly beautiful, not to mention ridiculous.
The Stuff of Life is a podcast about how we're
all just getting by, learning and surviving through the stories
we share. In this episode, we take on the power
of fear, and we talked to a swap team member
and a former firefighter about how we react when the
(00:44):
survival chips are down. Then we eavesdrop on the how
stuff Works collective and the types of emergencies they imagine
but rarely voice. Finally, a professor of sociology who's trying
to get to the bottom of what Americans are really
scared of. He schools us on what we're obsessing about
(01:05):
and why fear has this double power over us. It
has the power to to you know, of course, frighten us,
to make us coward, to change our behavior, but also
the power to make us ask all these questions about ourselves.
(01:27):
And question who we are. Most of us seldom actively
ponder the things that could go wrong instead are subconscious.
Is the jar of our fears. I mean, think about it.
We wouldn't be able to function if every single worry
came to the forefront of our conscious minds. We'd be
(01:47):
completely stunned. So we jar up the worst case scenarios.
We put them on a shelf and there they remain
until a nightmare unleashes them. Or we say, board a
plane and we take that jar the shelf to examine it.
And we've been doing this since we were children, absorbing
messages from fairy tales like beware of the wolf disguised
(02:09):
as a family member, or do not enter that charming
cottage that smells like gingerbread. These are survival kinds, the
very first fears to go up on the shelf. The
idea in this episode is to try to square up
the real and imagined fears that made it into adulthood,
how we think about them, and how we deal with them.
(02:31):
So first we turn to two experts who have their
boots on the ground preparing for the real deal picture
the Jason Movies or the Freddy Krueger and the girls
getting chased. She's got a hundred yards on the guy.
All she has to do is unlock her car with
(02:54):
the Keith and she can't do it. And you're in
the movie theater screaming at her unlocked, unlocked the door,
locked the door. We think that's just movie. It's actually
what happens to people. That's Brock Ryan, a former firefighter who,
along with Paul Merritt, a member of the Atlanta Police
Department swat team, formed a company called Life Safety Solutions.
(03:16):
They used their own blueprint for survival, all those high
wire moments they've encountered to teach others how to meet
their own life or death moments. That moment came to
me as a firefighter UM I was doing evacuation training
for the fire Department for high rise buildings. I was
(03:36):
trying to introduce them into how serious the matter can be,
and at that point there was a lot of people
not taking that serious. The planes said the building in
New York City and everything changed. Everything changed in the
sense that the veil had fallen. We had to now
think harder and smarter about the places we assumed were safe.
(03:58):
And while we all know that Sir vibing. An emergency
can sometimes come down to dumb luck, like say you're
close to an exit door. Sometimes the ability to persevere
comes down to self possessed split second decisions, something Paul
Merritt knows firsthand. If someone is not prepared for it
and they don't know what their options are, when they're
(04:19):
hit with that surprise emergency threat and they get big,
that big dump of adrenaline in their system, they're gonna
have a hard way thinking their way through the issue.
They're not going to take action. They're gonna search in
their and their brain for the proper response, and if
there's nothing there, that's when we see people take highly
logical actions. Paul said two things that I think we
can all relate to. That adrenaline rush that washes over us,
(04:42):
changing our body temperature, stiffening our muscles, dilating our pupils,
a feeling like the inside of our stomach is being
hollowed out flight or fight, as it's known. The other
thing we do is what we hide in plane sight,
just like you see young kids do when they first
try out a game of hide and seek. There they
(05:04):
are out in the open, hands pressed to their eyes.
It's a kind of magical thinking. If I can't see you,
you can't see me, and then the incantation please please
don't see me. If you look at the Columbine shooting,
they had students who were hiding under tables and plain
(05:25):
sight in the library that it was not a good
place to be. But because they were hit with this
unexpected stressor they couldn't logically think their way through it.
And in hindsight, we'll look at it like, what were
they thinking? How could they do something like this? That's
the issue. We can't are We can't logically solve a
problem when we're scared to death. One of the things
(05:47):
Brock and Paul talk about is a kind of mental
rolodex that your brain flips through during an emergency. They
point to the cliche of your life flashing before your eyes.
They say, it's not that your mind and is giving
you a last glimpse of your life. It's your brain
looking for an answer to the problem in front of you,
perhaps even looking inside of those jars of fears. Meanwhile,
(06:11):
your body is undergoing a massive chemical change that can
result in cognitive distortion and the loss of fine motor skills.
A lot of things both cognlively and perceptual distortions that
happened to people. Not everyone gets all of them, things
like tunnel vision, things like auditory exclusion, time, slowing down,
time speeding up, trouble with death perception, all these things.
(06:33):
Save someone's in the building and they might get tunnel
vision on the exit. Why they're totally focused on the
exit and their perfect vision is gonna basically go down
to nothing. We see that all the time with people
who were from from a law enforcement aspect. When you
talk someone's been rocked and they you say, what's the
description the guy. I can't tell you what he looked like.
(06:55):
I can't tell this, I can't that. But his gun
was huge. It was a massive gun. The gun was gigantic.
Why because all their focus is on is on that threat.
It's that gun. All of a a sudden, it might be
a little revolver, but the gun looked like a howitzer
because they were totally focused on it. Now, remember what
Brock said about Freddy Krueger. He's chasing the girl, getting
(07:15):
closer and closer, and she's fussing with the keys. She
can't unlock the car door. That turns out to be
a pretty good example of the loss of fine motor skills.
We think that's just movie, it's actually what happens to people.
She cannot unlock the door. She's too scared. She can't
control the key. It will not go on the whole. Okay,
(07:37):
so your heart's racing. You have only your gross motor
skills at your immediate command. What do you do well?
You breathe from the beginning. There's one thing that everybody
can do, and we just call it tactical breathing. You
call it psycle breathing. It's a four count breathing exercise
where I would breathe four and through my nose, hold
(07:59):
of four for sole the release of the mouth, hold
it for four. And when you do these breeding exercises,
it will help bring that hormone increased heart rate down
a little bit, which will improve improve your cogn ability.
It will reduce those perception storations, help you perform a
little bit higher level. They also train people to build
(08:21):
up a blueprint for themselves, learn their environments and their options.
It's about specifics, not generalities. They may even have blocks
of wood that they hit together to mimic the sharp
report of a firearm. So that if you ever do
encounter the real thing, the real sound, you won't be
quite as thrown by it. It's funny. We were doing
(08:42):
a training exercise in one building, and we train it.
We tell everyone, Hey, wherever I am, we hit these
blocks of wood together. I'm the bad guy. So when
they knew what their options john, we tell everyone there
is no right and wrong option. You do what's best
for you in relation to the threat, but bear in
mind I am the bad guy. So and this is
why it kind of tell the stories why it's so
important to have more than one option, more than one.
(09:03):
If I get this, if a happens, I'm always going
to do be Because I'm standing in the hallway and him.
These two pieces would together, and this guy comes out
of it and he's decide he's gonna practice evacuation and
he's leaving his cubicle and he starts coming right at me.
I was between where his desk was and where the
exit was, and I said, what are you doing? I'm
the bad guy. He goes, but that's my exit. And
(09:26):
that was a good teaching point because you saw his
shoulders kind of dropped and he realized, you know, no
it's an odd idea. So then we kind of thought
through what what will be a better option, because most
floor plans double back on themselves. He's like, why could
have gone this way or that? But I was, I
was only he'd made up his mind what he's gonna do.
But this type of training looks simple, but it's not easy.
There's a lot there's many many ways to do it wrong. Um.
(09:48):
For example, one, uh, there's a lawsuit going on right
now from a place out west. They decided at a
retirement community to a surprise active shooter drill. Not surprisingly,
people were traumatized, people were scared um and lawsuits arose
from it. We saw this also happened last year at
a school in Florida to where let's do a with
(10:08):
realistic weapons shooting planks, do a surprise active shooter drill.
We never ever, ever do surprise at active shooter drills.
It doesn't matter that people know what's going on. What
is important is they get the stimulus, they get to
practice their response and they succeed at it. If there's
anyone thread connecting Brock and Paul from their past to
their presence that they credit for keeping them out of
(10:29):
a jam. It's that four count breath or tactical breathing,
something Brock isolates in his memory of the Olympic Park
bombing in Atlanta. I was the first engine in for
the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. We were two blocks away
on a medical calm when the radio rang out, we
(10:52):
have a bomb in the park with several bodies down.
I turned the fire engine around, drove to the bottom
of the hill, turned into introve up into the park.
Um As we were pulling in, things were still settling
from the explosion. We were there in about forty seconds
after the explosion. From that, I remember specifically looking through
(11:19):
the chaos. I remember the lieutenant I was driving. I
remember the lieutenant looking at me. We got out, we
came around to the front of our truck and just
visually assessed what was out there. We looked at each
other and I told him, I said, Lieutenant, we've done
this before. It's just been one at a time. There's
a bunch of them. Let's go through one at a time.
(11:40):
And we actually did our tactical breathing. A lot of
things that happened with my career, but on a regular basis,
we ever get a swap call out, you know, you know,
on virtually all of them, the person you should be
talking to negotiators saying, yeah, they come in, I'm gonna
shoot Hi, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna kill everybody. Um,
you know, I'm married, I've got a family, I want
to go home. It's stressful at times, so but that
that's the common call. So as we're going to the call, um,
(12:05):
you know, people will be joking around, still trying to
keep things light. But as as we get close to
the call, as we as we get there and as
we start moving to the house, all the joking will
always stop. People stop, and and what starts At that
point everyone kind of gets in their own head. But
what do you hear? You hear that four count breathing
pretty much from everyone from all twenty guys we have.
(12:36):
Let's take another jar off the shelf of fears. Any
good Boogeyman story is just a stand in for the
terrible knowledge that life is fleeting. We will all die.
But the fictional version of the Boogeyman allows us to
die over and over again and resurrect ourselves each time.
After all, he's stuffed inside the pages of a story
(13:00):
far far away from us. But as we get older,
we begin to understand that he's escaped. He could be anywhere.
Once I was walking down a deserted street late at
night when a man appeared. How do you catch a
unique rabbit, he asked, assessing me as he took a
(13:21):
drag off of his cigarette. Unique up on it. Whenever
I step out into the dark alone, that punchline comes
swinging back, and I think of the split second between
prey and predator, the boogeyman and the dark. We'll look
(13:47):
into this primal fear the dark, but first we talked
to some unique rabbits from How Stuff Works to get
their thoughts on fear and survival. The rabbits in question
senior editor Alison louder Milk, writer and podcast host Joe McCormick,
An editor and podcast host Holly Fry. We need the
(14:08):
potato gun active and armed at all times. I wanted
to know what was lurking in the jars of the
fears of my coworkers. We need to pick who is
strongest in the office that could use you like a javelin,
So I asked them to share the scary stuff that
they had pushed way way back on the shelf. I
think exactly the reason it's uncomfortable is the reason it's interesting,
(14:30):
Like there's something like strangely uncomfortable about talking about this.
Let's hear from Joe, who has given this topic a
lot of thought, and by the way, he wants you
to know that you should do your very own research
on how to survive his worst case scenario. The following
is just what he has built up over the years.
I think what anybody would agree is the most terrifying
(14:52):
scenario going off a bridge or you know, over a
river bank in your car and then sinking slowly in
and then drowning in your car on a bad traffic day.
You know, like you were already upset, but if it
happened on a good traffic day, you'd just be calm
as a Hindu cow and just sink to your death happily.
What you have to do if you're in a sinking
(15:12):
car is immediately roll the windows down. The problem is
going to be as the car sinks, the pressure pushing
down on the on the doors from the outside of
the car. The water pressure is going to prevent you
from popping the doors open because the car is going
to sink faster than the interior of the cabin fills up,
so the pressure on the outside is greater than the
(15:33):
pressure on the inside. So you're gonna be trying to
open the doors and they're just too heavy. You can't
get them open. But if you can roll the windows down,
then you can just pop out through those. Joe is
not alone in this fear. Turns out that Holly has
kept the same sort of fear on her own shelf.
You have accidentally stumbled on one of the reasons why
I am a pain in the took us when it
(15:54):
comes to buying a car, because I'm the one person
on the lot that doesn't want power windows or power locks, right,
you gotta have will have manual windows for the one.
That's one of the reasons for me. My anxiety comes
from dwelling on a home invasion, and that's Allison's fear too.
But if you look inside the jar on her shelf,
her home invasion is perpetrated by the undead. If society
(16:18):
went haywire for whatever reason, Um, you know, yeah, sure,
I've imagined just living in the basement, like which room,
which part of the basement would be? Like the bedroom,
which part would be like the steady and like where
we do like homeschooling and you know, have our meals
totally planted out. I like her kids are still going
to be educated. Yeah, I mean I think about it
(16:40):
all the time. You know, my partner travels a lot
and I'm home with the kids, and I think about
I mean, our house is kind of unusual. Um, we
have a ton of glass, which is really not good
for a zombie attack because we will totally be you
know seen. That's an interesting point that you bring up zombies,
because I think I've noticed throughout the years that a
(17:01):
lot of people use kind of fake, funny zombie scenarios
to work out their actual anxieties about emergencies and societies
and breakdown of law and order in society. People are
it's just the general placeholder, the fictional, fantastical placeholder for
what happens if everything goes wrong. Oh yeah, absolutely totally. Um.
(17:30):
What's interesting to me about this conversation is that it's
all theory. Polly's actually had to deal with a moment
where things began to feel very real and very scary
very fast. Have you ever been in an interesting or
memorable emergency scenario and what did you do? Did you
did you panic or did you did you have your
(17:51):
wits about you? What happened? I had a very strange
one that seemed very scary and turned out to be
someone being a jerk, Which is that many many moons ago,
I used to manage a hair salon that was inside
of a um A department store, and we would have
outpost days where you would actually go and set up
like a table out in the store and sell product there.
(18:13):
And it was many moons ago, so it was not
the day of like being able to process square payments
on a smartphone like. It was all cash in hand,
and if people wanted to charge, we would have to
send them directly to the salon. And at one point
I was standing there doing this blah blah blah talking
to people about product and I feel something in my
back and a guy say, don't scream, just walk with me,
(18:38):
and I said all right, and I did, and we
got about twenty feet and then he started laughing and said,
I'm just messing with you. And after I wanted to
take my shoe off and shove it down his throat,
I gave him a very stern and unkind lecture with
a lot of swear where it's about being a poor citizen.
But I was shaking in my boots and darn near
(18:59):
urinating myself because I really didn't know what was going
to happen, and you can't see what's behind you, and
it was a person much larger than me, so it
was just But then I was like, you're so sick?
Who does that for fun? That is massed? There is
a strange feeling of being afraid that you would be
(19:23):
a coward? Do you ever have that, Like, like I
would hope that I would be that I would be
courageous and selfless in a in a dangerous situation, But
it's hard to know what you would do, you know,
So I think courageous is different than smart, though, right,
it can be. I mean it can be. Yeah. I
mean the whole thing, like you were talking about, is
(19:45):
that like you don't like you sort of go on autopilot,
And I guess what I fear is that what if
my going on autopilot reveals some side of me that
I wouldn't be proud of. I would hope that's not
what would happen, But I guess you can't really know
what happened when you go on autopilot. Yeah, I think
that's true. I mean I think we all want to
(20:05):
think of our best selves coming out, you know, being courageous,
and then I picture myself just running for that side
door and be like audios, we touches, come on with
me if you can't. But otherwise about I don't know.
I think about who I would reach for first, you know, say,
like my air like an airplane was going down, you know,
my kids were not sitting next to me, Like okay,
(20:27):
you know, go for my kids first, and then see
who else is in trouble or get them off the
plane and then come back in Like how would it?
How would that work out? But yeah, I would like
to think that I would do those kinds of things.
But who knows. I mean, really, who knows. It's a
strange kind of thing about how fear has this double
power over us. It has the power to you know,
of course frighten us, to make us coward, to change
(20:50):
our behavior, but also the power to make us ask
all these questions about ourselves and like question who we are,
and not only who we are, but how much of
who we are is determined by the glow contained within
those jars of fears? What happens when we take them
off the shelf and we unscrew the lids? Is it
like Pandora's Box? Do they bombard us? Or do they
(21:11):
float off into the ether, never to be worried over again?
And can we really ever know how much fear defines us? Now?
Granscribe to Night's presentation of Radio's outstanding Theater of Thrill.
(21:31):
Not much has changed between now and that bit of
audio from yesteryear. The subject the frightened City remains front
and center in the American psyche, and Dr Edward Day
of Chapman University can tell us why. But first let's
find out what's inside the jar on his shelf. I
(21:51):
am absolutely petrified of height. Put me on one of
those swinging foot bridges and I get vertigo immediately, and
there's no there's no rationale behind that. I'm at Day.
I'm chair of the Department of Sociology at Chapman University
and director of the Earl Babby Research Center, which is
the home for the Chapman Survey of American Fears. Chapman
(22:12):
University recently released the second wave of survey comparing results
from Wave one and two thousand and fourteen, Let's find
out what ranked as the number one fear on americans minds. Yeah,
the number one fear we had in this survey was
walking alone at night. It just gets at people's fear
(22:32):
of this idea of the country's going to hell in
a handbasket, and then then the crime is out of control,
and that you may not even be safe in your
own neighborhood, becoming the victim of identity theft, safety on
the internet, being the victim of a mass or random shooting,
public speaking. These are all ranked on the top five
fears of Americans, and it's easy to see why even
(22:53):
the public speaking one can be terrifying. Right, So, were
there any outliers that Dr Day didn't expect to see.
I was a little surprised at nine percent said they
were afraid of zombies. Um uh, one of you know,
just the pop culture seems to affect people's fear, whether
things are real or not. One of the things that
(23:14):
stood out to me was it more than half of
the people said they wouldn't stop to help somebody who's
card broken down. Um. You know, when I when I
was a kid, that was just something you did and
and now we're so suspicious of each other. It's something
that the people simply refused to do, and I just
you know, shows a sort of lack of trust and
faith in each other as people. Some call this media
(23:37):
driven angst mean world syndrome, something George Gebner and his
colleagues began studying in the nineteen sixties when they noticed
that people's attitudes about their community reflected the kinds of
media they consumed. For instance, the more police dramas and
news people watched, well, the greater they perceived the threat
of something violent happening to them. One of the things
(23:57):
we would hope would come out of this survey is
to address that sort of mean world approach or view
of the world and and and get off of it.
You know, whenever we talk about the fear of crime
or the fear of walking alone, we try to try
to emphasize the folks that crime rates have gone down
dramatically since you know, over the last twenty years, really
since ninety three, they've been dropping like a rock. Both
(24:20):
violent and property crime are down, and yet two thirds
of the country thinks crime is going up, you know,
I mean and it's odd because it's it's such a
simple thing to find out any anyone listening to the
podcast could could look this up on their phone before
I finished talking the sentence and see how far crime
has gone down. And at this point, it's not crime
(24:43):
so much that is affecting people's quality of life. It's
the fear of crime. And we hope by talking about
fear more openly, people can see, you know, which figures
are maybe rational and which ones aren't, and maybe we
can address that in a more logical, educated way. Chapman
University survey is dizzy and its ability to drill down
into fine detail, including who's most likely to be fearful.
(25:07):
A low education, you know, having only a high school
diploma or a g E ed or less was It
was a very consistent predictor of fears and worries and concerns,
especially on personal safety, on personal future, which is a
pretty reasonable fear or concern. In that group, they tend
to be more afraid of being stalked or having their
identity stolen, of criminal victimization. They reported higher levels of
(25:31):
the phobias you know of of fear of heights, fear
of clowns, uh, fear of blood. They had a higher
level of fear of the government and especially on things
like a gun control and Obamacare. UH. TV watching was
a very big factor, and especially on crime. What was
interesting is that it didn't matter whether you watched true
crime TV or fictional crime TV. You know, both have
(25:54):
a big effect on your on your fear of personal victimization.
People who watch a lot of Talk to you Be
also had higher fears, so the television influence was big.
Females are are more afraid of of personal safety and
criminal victimization and had higher levels reported higher levels of
fears of the phobia type things you know, the clowns
and blood and Republicans were more worried about government. Democrats
(26:18):
were more worried about personal safety and the environment and
man made disasters. Christians were more worried about the government
and man made disasters. And being retired was related to
personal safety and fears about one's future. The survey covers
a lot of ground, but if there's one thing that
Dr Day wants us to take away from it, it's this,
(26:40):
We would like people to get back to a more
rational look at their life. We would like people say, yes,
I've been afraid of crime, maybe because I'm watching TV,
not because I'm actually uh in in in serious danger
of a violent victimization. I mean like people to get
outside again, you know, I sit on your front porch
instead of locking yourself inside and barring the windows. Share
(27:03):
with your neighbors, you know, avoid this self fulfilling prophecy.
If everyone is afraid of the park at night, so
that leaves the park at night to the bad guys.
You know, go take it back. There's there's there's less
to be afraid of that you think. So have our
(27:33):
deepest darkest thoughts shifted from last year to this year?
And does the cultural echo chamber continue to feed our
collective anxiety. To find out about phase two of the survey,
head over to now dot how Stuff works dot com.
There you'll find the article American Horror Story What do
(27:53):
Americans fear most? For now, though, it's time to gather
up our concerns, anxiety and angst and put them back
on the shelf, even the jar that contains our biggest fear, death,
the knowledge of which makes living that much more beautiful
(28:17):
and strange. In the meantime, Joe has a question for you.
Here's one, what would you do if we lost power
like electricity and just didn't get it back? They keep
(28:37):
telling us it will be another day or two, and
maybe say it's been a week and you still don't
have power. Tell us what you do, or perhaps what
you have done. Email as your experience. Your plans are, hey,
write a fictional story about it and send it to
us at the Stuff of Life at how stuff works
(28:58):
dot com. The Stuff of Life is co produced by
Noel Brown and me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound
design is by Noel Brown. Thank you to Brock Ryan
and Paul Merritt of Life Safety Solutions for sharing what
you do. Thanks to Dr Edward Dave for covering some
of the finer points of the Chapman University Survey of
(29:21):
American Fears. And thanks to our How Stuff Works colleagues
Alison Loudermilk, Joe McCormick, and Holly Fry. Not to mention
Head of Production Jerry Rowland. I be pret Pretti
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the Stuff
of Life. I'm Julie Douglas, host of The Stuff of Life,
a podcast that teases a part of the tales we tell,
because when we crack open a story and look inside,
we see the seeds of what make our world so maddening,
(00:21):
so strange, and so achingly beautiful, not to mention ridiculous.
The Stuff of Life is a podcast about how we're
all just getting by, learning and surviving through the stories
we share. In this episode, we take on the power
of fear, and we talked to a swap team member
and a former firefighter about how we react when the
(00:44):
survival chips are down. Then we eavesdrop on the how
stuff Works collective and the types of emergencies they imagine
but rarely voice. Finally, a professor of sociology who's trying
to get to the bottom of what Americans are really
scared of. He schools us on what we're obsessing about
(01:05):
and why fear has this double power over us. It
has the power to to you know, of course, frighten us,
to make us coward, to change our behavior, but also
the power to make us ask all these questions about ourselves.
(01:27):
And question who we are. Most of us seldom actively
ponder the things that could go wrong instead are subconscious.
Is the jar of our fears. I mean, think about it.
We wouldn't be able to function if every single worry
came to the forefront of our conscious minds. We'd be
(01:47):
completely stunned. So we jar up the worst case scenarios.
We put them on a shelf and there they remain
until a nightmare unleashes them. Or we say, board a
plane and we take that jar the shelf to examine it.
And we've been doing this since we were children, absorbing
messages from fairy tales like beware of the wolf disguised
(02:09):
as a family member, or do not enter that charming
cottage that smells like gingerbread. These are survival kinds, the
very first fears to go up on the shelf. The
idea in this episode is to try to square up
the real and imagined fears that made it into adulthood,
how we think about them, and how we deal with them.
(02:31):
So first we turn to two experts who have their
boots on the ground preparing for the real deal picture
the Jason Movies or the Freddy Krueger and the girls
getting chased. She's got a hundred yards on the guy.
All she has to do is unlock her car with
(02:54):
the Keith and she can't do it. And you're in
the movie theater screaming at her unlocked, unlocked the door,
locked the door. We think that's just movie. It's actually
what happens to people. That's Brock Ryan, a former firefighter who,
along with Paul Merritt, a member of the Atlanta Police
Department swat team, formed a company called Life Safety Solutions.
(03:16):
They used their own blueprint for survival, all those high
wire moments they've encountered to teach others how to meet
their own life or death moments. That moment came to
me as a firefighter UM I was doing evacuation training
for the fire Department for high rise buildings. I was
(03:36):
trying to introduce them into how serious the matter can be,
and at that point there was a lot of people
not taking that serious. The planes said the building in
New York City and everything changed. Everything changed in the
sense that the veil had fallen. We had to now
think harder and smarter about the places we assumed were safe.
(03:58):
And while we all know that Sir vibing. An emergency
can sometimes come down to dumb luck, like say you're
close to an exit door. Sometimes the ability to persevere
comes down to self possessed split second decisions, something Paul
Merritt knows firsthand. If someone is not prepared for it
and they don't know what their options are, when they're
(04:19):
hit with that surprise emergency threat and they get big,
that big dump of adrenaline in their system, they're gonna
have a hard way thinking their way through the issue.
They're not going to take action. They're gonna search in
their and their brain for the proper response, and if
there's nothing there, that's when we see people take highly
logical actions. Paul said two things that I think we
can all relate to. That adrenaline rush that washes over us,
(04:42):
changing our body temperature, stiffening our muscles, dilating our pupils,
a feeling like the inside of our stomach is being
hollowed out flight or fight, as it's known. The other
thing we do is what we hide in plane sight,
just like you see young kids do when they first
try out a game of hide and seek. There they
(05:04):
are out in the open, hands pressed to their eyes.
It's a kind of magical thinking. If I can't see you,
you can't see me, and then the incantation please please
don't see me. If you look at the Columbine shooting,
they had students who were hiding under tables and plain
(05:25):
sight in the library that it was not a good
place to be. But because they were hit with this
unexpected stressor they couldn't logically think their way through it.
And in hindsight, we'll look at it like, what were
they thinking? How could they do something like this? That's
the issue. We can't are We can't logically solve a
problem when we're scared to death. One of the things
(05:47):
Brock and Paul talk about is a kind of mental
rolodex that your brain flips through during an emergency. They
point to the cliche of your life flashing before your eyes.
They say, it's not that your mind and is giving
you a last glimpse of your life. It's your brain
looking for an answer to the problem in front of you,
perhaps even looking inside of those jars of fears. Meanwhile,
(06:11):
your body is undergoing a massive chemical change that can
result in cognitive distortion and the loss of fine motor skills.
A lot of things both cognlively and perceptual distortions that
happened to people. Not everyone gets all of them, things
like tunnel vision, things like auditory exclusion, time, slowing down,
time speeding up, trouble with death perception, all these things.
(06:33):
Save someone's in the building and they might get tunnel
vision on the exit. Why they're totally focused on the
exit and their perfect vision is gonna basically go down
to nothing. We see that all the time with people
who were from from a law enforcement aspect. When you
talk someone's been rocked and they you say, what's the
description the guy. I can't tell you what he looked like.
(06:55):
I can't tell this, I can't that. But his gun
was huge. It was a massive gun. The gun was gigantic.
Why because all their focus is on is on that threat.
It's that gun. All of a a sudden, it might be
a little revolver, but the gun looked like a howitzer
because they were totally focused on it. Now, remember what
Brock said about Freddy Krueger. He's chasing the girl, getting
(07:15):
closer and closer, and she's fussing with the keys. She
can't unlock the car door. That turns out to be
a pretty good example of the loss of fine motor skills.
We think that's just movie, it's actually what happens to people.
She cannot unlock the door. She's too scared. She can't
control the key. It will not go on the whole. Okay,
(07:37):
so your heart's racing. You have only your gross motor
skills at your immediate command. What do you do well?
You breathe from the beginning. There's one thing that everybody
can do, and we just call it tactical breathing. You
call it psycle breathing. It's a four count breathing exercise
where I would breathe four and through my nose, hold
(07:59):
of four for sole the release of the mouth, hold
it for four. And when you do these breeding exercises,
it will help bring that hormone increased heart rate down
a little bit, which will improve improve your cogn ability.
It will reduce those perception storations, help you perform a
little bit higher level. They also train people to build
(08:21):
up a blueprint for themselves, learn their environments and their options.
It's about specifics, not generalities. They may even have blocks
of wood that they hit together to mimic the sharp
report of a firearm. So that if you ever do
encounter the real thing, the real sound, you won't be
quite as thrown by it. It's funny. We were doing
(08:42):
a training exercise in one building, and we train it.
We tell everyone, Hey, wherever I am, we hit these
blocks of wood together. I'm the bad guy. So when
they knew what their options john, we tell everyone there
is no right and wrong option. You do what's best
for you in relation to the threat, but bear in
mind I am the bad guy. So and this is
why it kind of tell the stories why it's so
important to have more than one option, more than one.
(09:03):
If I get this, if a happens, I'm always going
to do be Because I'm standing in the hallway and him.
These two pieces would together, and this guy comes out
of it and he's decide he's gonna practice evacuation and
he's leaving his cubicle and he starts coming right at me.
I was between where his desk was and where the
exit was, and I said, what are you doing? I'm
the bad guy. He goes, but that's my exit. And
(09:26):
that was a good teaching point because you saw his
shoulders kind of dropped and he realized, you know, no
it's an odd idea. So then we kind of thought
through what what will be a better option, because most
floor plans double back on themselves. He's like, why could
have gone this way or that? But I was, I
was only he'd made up his mind what he's gonna do.
But this type of training looks simple, but it's not easy.
There's a lot there's many many ways to do it wrong. Um.
(09:48):
For example, one, uh, there's a lawsuit going on right
now from a place out west. They decided at a
retirement community to a surprise active shooter drill. Not surprisingly,
people were traumatized, people were scared um and lawsuits arose
from it. We saw this also happened last year at
a school in Florida to where let's do a with
(10:08):
realistic weapons shooting planks, do a surprise active shooter drill.
We never ever, ever do surprise at active shooter drills.
It doesn't matter that people know what's going on. What
is important is they get the stimulus, they get to
practice their response and they succeed at it. If there's
anyone thread connecting Brock and Paul from their past to
their presence that they credit for keeping them out of
(10:29):
a jam. It's that four count breath or tactical breathing,
something Brock isolates in his memory of the Olympic Park
bombing in Atlanta. I was the first engine in for
the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. We were two blocks away
on a medical calm when the radio rang out, we
(10:52):
have a bomb in the park with several bodies down.
I turned the fire engine around, drove to the bottom
of the hill, turned into introve up into the park.
Um As we were pulling in, things were still settling
from the explosion. We were there in about forty seconds
after the explosion. From that, I remember specifically looking through
(11:19):
the chaos. I remember the lieutenant I was driving. I
remember the lieutenant looking at me. We got out, we
came around to the front of our truck and just
visually assessed what was out there. We looked at each
other and I told him, I said, Lieutenant, we've done
this before. It's just been one at a time. There's
a bunch of them. Let's go through one at a time.
(11:40):
And we actually did our tactical breathing. A lot of
things that happened with my career, but on a regular basis,
we ever get a swap call out, you know, you know,
on virtually all of them, the person you should be
talking to negotiators saying, yeah, they come in, I'm gonna
shoot Hi, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna kill everybody. Um,
you know, I'm married, I've got a family, I want
to go home. It's stressful at times, so but that
that's the common call. So as we're going to the call, um,
(12:05):
you know, people will be joking around, still trying to
keep things light. But as as we get close to
the call, as we as we get there and as
we start moving to the house, all the joking will
always stop. People stop, and and what starts At that
point everyone kind of gets in their own head. But
what do you hear? You hear that four count breathing
pretty much from everyone from all twenty guys we have.
(12:36):
Let's take another jar off the shelf of fears. Any
good Boogeyman story is just a stand in for the
terrible knowledge that life is fleeting. We will all die.
But the fictional version of the Boogeyman allows us to
die over and over again and resurrect ourselves each time.
After all, he's stuffed inside the pages of a story
(13:00):
far far away from us. But as we get older,
we begin to understand that he's escaped. He could be anywhere.
Once I was walking down a deserted street late at
night when a man appeared. How do you catch a
unique rabbit, he asked, assessing me as he took a
(13:21):
drag off of his cigarette. Unique up on it. Whenever
I step out into the dark alone, that punchline comes
swinging back, and I think of the split second between
prey and predator, the boogeyman and the dark. We'll look
(13:47):
into this primal fear the dark, but first we talked
to some unique rabbits from How Stuff Works to get
their thoughts on fear and survival. The rabbits in question
senior editor Alison louder Milk, writer and podcast host Joe McCormick,
An editor and podcast host Holly Fry. We need the
(14:08):
potato gun active and armed at all times. I wanted
to know what was lurking in the jars of the
fears of my coworkers. We need to pick who is
strongest in the office that could use you like a javelin,
So I asked them to share the scary stuff that
they had pushed way way back on the shelf. I
think exactly the reason it's uncomfortable is the reason it's interesting,
(14:30):
Like there's something like strangely uncomfortable about talking about this.
Let's hear from Joe, who has given this topic a
lot of thought, and by the way, he wants you
to know that you should do your very own research
on how to survive his worst case scenario. The following
is just what he has built up over the years.
I think what anybody would agree is the most terrifying
(14:52):
scenario going off a bridge or you know, over a
river bank in your car and then sinking slowly in
and then drowning in your car on a bad traffic day.
You know, like you were already upset, but if it
happened on a good traffic day, you'd just be calm
as a Hindu cow and just sink to your death happily.
What you have to do if you're in a sinking
(15:12):
car is immediately roll the windows down. The problem is
going to be as the car sinks, the pressure pushing
down on the on the doors from the outside of
the car. The water pressure is going to prevent you
from popping the doors open because the car is going
to sink faster than the interior of the cabin fills up,
so the pressure on the outside is greater than the
(15:33):
pressure on the inside. So you're gonna be trying to
open the doors and they're just too heavy. You can't
get them open. But if you can roll the windows down,
then you can just pop out through those. Joe is
not alone in this fear. Turns out that Holly has
kept the same sort of fear on her own shelf.
You have accidentally stumbled on one of the reasons why
I am a pain in the took us when it
(15:54):
comes to buying a car, because I'm the one person
on the lot that doesn't want power windows or power locks, right,
you gotta have will have manual windows for the one.
That's one of the reasons for me. My anxiety comes
from dwelling on a home invasion, and that's Allison's fear too.
But if you look inside the jar on her shelf,
her home invasion is perpetrated by the undead. If society
(16:18):
went haywire for whatever reason, Um, you know, yeah, sure,
I've imagined just living in the basement, like which room,
which part of the basement would be? Like the bedroom,
which part would be like the steady and like where
we do like homeschooling and you know, have our meals
totally planted out. I like her kids are still going
to be educated. Yeah, I mean I think about it
(16:40):
all the time. You know, my partner travels a lot
and I'm home with the kids, and I think about
I mean, our house is kind of unusual. Um, we
have a ton of glass, which is really not good
for a zombie attack because we will totally be you
know seen. That's an interesting point that you bring up zombies,
because I think I've noticed throughout the years that a
(17:01):
lot of people use kind of fake, funny zombie scenarios
to work out their actual anxieties about emergencies and societies
and breakdown of law and order in society. People are
it's just the general placeholder, the fictional, fantastical placeholder for
what happens if everything goes wrong. Oh yeah, absolutely totally. Um.
(17:30):
What's interesting to me about this conversation is that it's
all theory. Polly's actually had to deal with a moment
where things began to feel very real and very scary
very fast. Have you ever been in an interesting or
memorable emergency scenario and what did you do? Did you
did you panic or did you did you have your
(17:51):
wits about you? What happened? I had a very strange
one that seemed very scary and turned out to be
someone being a jerk, Which is that many many moons ago,
I used to manage a hair salon that was inside
of a um A department store, and we would have
outpost days where you would actually go and set up
like a table out in the store and sell product there.
(18:13):
And it was many moons ago, so it was not
the day of like being able to process square payments
on a smartphone like. It was all cash in hand,
and if people wanted to charge, we would have to
send them directly to the salon. And at one point
I was standing there doing this blah blah blah talking
to people about product and I feel something in my
back and a guy say, don't scream, just walk with me,
(18:38):
and I said all right, and I did, and we
got about twenty feet and then he started laughing and said,
I'm just messing with you. And after I wanted to
take my shoe off and shove it down his throat,
I gave him a very stern and unkind lecture with
a lot of swear where it's about being a poor citizen.
But I was shaking in my boots and darn near
(18:59):
urinating myself because I really didn't know what was going
to happen, and you can't see what's behind you, and
it was a person much larger than me, so it
was just But then I was like, you're so sick?
Who does that for fun? That is massed? There is
a strange feeling of being afraid that you would be
(19:23):
a coward? Do you ever have that, Like, like I
would hope that I would be that I would be
courageous and selfless in a in a dangerous situation, But
it's hard to know what you would do, you know,
So I think courageous is different than smart, though, right,
it can be. I mean it can be. Yeah. I
mean the whole thing, like you were talking about, is
(19:45):
that like you don't like you sort of go on autopilot,
And I guess what I fear is that what if
my going on autopilot reveals some side of me that
I wouldn't be proud of. I would hope that's not
what would happen, But I guess you can't really know
what happened when you go on autopilot. Yeah, I think
that's true. I mean I think we all want to
(20:05):
think of our best selves coming out, you know, being courageous,
and then I picture myself just running for that side
door and be like audios, we touches, come on with
me if you can't. But otherwise about I don't know.
I think about who I would reach for first, you know, say,
like my air like an airplane was going down, you know,
my kids were not sitting next to me, Like okay,
(20:27):
you know, go for my kids first, and then see
who else is in trouble or get them off the
plane and then come back in Like how would it?
How would that work out? But yeah, I would like
to think that I would do those kinds of things.
But who knows. I mean, really, who knows. It's a
strange kind of thing about how fear has this double
power over us. It has the power to you know,
of course frighten us, to make us coward, to change
(20:50):
our behavior, but also the power to make us ask
all these questions about ourselves and like question who we are,
and not only who we are, but how much of
who we are is determined by the glow contained within
those jars of fears? What happens when we take them
off the shelf and we unscrew the lids? Is it
like Pandora's Box? Do they bombard us? Or do they
(21:11):
float off into the ether, never to be worried over again?
And can we really ever know how much fear defines us? Now?
Granscribe to Night's presentation of Radio's outstanding Theater of Thrill.
(21:31):
Not much has changed between now and that bit of
audio from yesteryear. The subject the frightened City remains front
and center in the American psyche, and Dr Edward Day
of Chapman University can tell us why. But first let's
find out what's inside the jar on his shelf. I
(21:51):
am absolutely petrified of height. Put me on one of
those swinging foot bridges and I get vertigo immediately, and
there's no there's no rationale behind that. I'm at Day.
I'm chair of the Department of Sociology at Chapman University
and director of the Earl Babby Research Center, which is
the home for the Chapman Survey of American Fears. Chapman
(22:12):
University recently released the second wave of survey comparing results
from Wave one and two thousand and fourteen, Let's find
out what ranked as the number one fear on americans minds. Yeah,
the number one fear we had in this survey was
walking alone at night. It just gets at people's fear
(22:32):
of this idea of the country's going to hell in
a handbasket, and then then the crime is out of control,
and that you may not even be safe in your
own neighborhood, becoming the victim of identity theft, safety on
the internet, being the victim of a mass or random shooting,
public speaking. These are all ranked on the top five
fears of Americans, and it's easy to see why even
(22:53):
the public speaking one can be terrifying. Right, So, were
there any outliers that Dr Day didn't expect to see.
I was a little surprised at nine percent said they
were afraid of zombies. Um uh, one of you know,
just the pop culture seems to affect people's fear, whether
things are real or not. One of the things that
(23:14):
stood out to me was it more than half of
the people said they wouldn't stop to help somebody who's
card broken down. Um. You know, when I when I
was a kid, that was just something you did and
and now we're so suspicious of each other. It's something
that the people simply refused to do, and I just
you know, shows a sort of lack of trust and
faith in each other as people. Some call this media
(23:37):
driven angst mean world syndrome, something George Gebner and his
colleagues began studying in the nineteen sixties when they noticed
that people's attitudes about their community reflected the kinds of
media they consumed. For instance, the more police dramas and
news people watched, well, the greater they perceived the threat
of something violent happening to them. One of the things
(23:57):
we would hope would come out of this survey is
to address that sort of mean world approach or view
of the world and and and get off of it.
You know, whenever we talk about the fear of crime
or the fear of walking alone, we try to try
to emphasize the folks that crime rates have gone down
dramatically since you know, over the last twenty years, really
since ninety three, they've been dropping like a rock. Both
(24:20):
violent and property crime are down, and yet two thirds
of the country thinks crime is going up, you know,
I mean and it's odd because it's it's such a
simple thing to find out any anyone listening to the
podcast could could look this up on their phone before
I finished talking the sentence and see how far crime
has gone down. And at this point, it's not crime
(24:43):
so much that is affecting people's quality of life. It's
the fear of crime. And we hope by talking about
fear more openly, people can see, you know, which figures
are maybe rational and which ones aren't, and maybe we
can address that in a more logical, educated way. Chapman
University survey is dizzy and its ability to drill down
into fine detail, including who's most likely to be fearful.
(25:07):
A low education, you know, having only a high school
diploma or a g E ed or less was It
was a very consistent predictor of fears and worries and concerns,
especially on personal safety, on personal future, which is a
pretty reasonable fear or concern. In that group, they tend
to be more afraid of being stalked or having their
identity stolen, of criminal victimization. They reported higher levels of
(25:31):
the phobias you know of of fear of heights, fear
of clowns, uh, fear of blood. They had a higher
level of fear of the government and especially on things
like a gun control and Obamacare. UH. TV watching was
a very big factor, and especially on crime. What was
interesting is that it didn't matter whether you watched true
crime TV or fictional crime TV. You know, both have
(25:54):
a big effect on your on your fear of personal victimization.
People who watch a lot of Talk to you Be
also had higher fears, so the television influence was big.
Females are are more afraid of of personal safety and
criminal victimization and had higher levels reported higher levels of
fears of the phobia type things you know, the clowns
and blood and Republicans were more worried about government. Democrats
(26:18):
were more worried about personal safety and the environment and
man made disasters. Christians were more worried about the government
and man made disasters. And being retired was related to
personal safety and fears about one's future. The survey covers
a lot of ground, but if there's one thing that
Dr Day wants us to take away from it, it's this,
(26:40):
We would like people to get back to a more
rational look at their life. We would like people say, yes,
I've been afraid of crime, maybe because I'm watching TV,
not because I'm actually uh in in in serious danger
of a violent victimization. I mean like people to get
outside again, you know, I sit on your front porch
instead of locking yourself inside and barring the windows. Share
(27:03):
with your neighbors, you know, avoid this self fulfilling prophecy.
If everyone is afraid of the park at night, so
that leaves the park at night to the bad guys.
You know, go take it back. There's there's there's less
to be afraid of that you think. So have our
(27:33):
deepest darkest thoughts shifted from last year to this year?
And does the cultural echo chamber continue to feed our
collective anxiety. To find out about phase two of the survey,
head over to now dot how Stuff works dot com.
There you'll find the article American Horror Story What do
(27:53):
Americans fear most? For now, though, it's time to gather
up our concerns, anxiety and angst and put them back
on the shelf, even the jar that contains our biggest fear, death,
the knowledge of which makes living that much more beautiful
(28:17):
and strange. In the meantime, Joe has a question for you.
Here's one, what would you do if we lost power
like electricity and just didn't get it back? They keep
(28:37):
telling us it will be another day or two, and
maybe say it's been a week and you still don't
have power. Tell us what you do, or perhaps what
you have done. Email as your experience. Your plans are, hey,
write a fictional story about it and send it to
us at the Stuff of Life at how stuff works
(28:58):
dot com. The Stuff of Life is co produced by
Noel Brown and me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound
design is by Noel Brown. Thank you to Brock Ryan
and Paul Merritt of Life Safety Solutions for sharing what
you do. Thanks to Dr Edward Dave for covering some
of the finer points of the Chapman University Survey of
(29:21):
American Fears. And thanks to our How Stuff Works colleagues
Alison Loudermilk, Joe McCormick, and Holly Fry. Not to mention
Head of Production Jerry Rowland. I be pret Pretti
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