The Human Behavior Podcast
Do you ever wonder why people act the way that they do? Join human behavior experts Brian Marren and Greg Williams as they discuss all things human behavior related. Their goal is to increase your Advanced Critical Thinking ability through a better understanding of HBPR&A (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis.) What is HBPR&A? It's a scientific (and fun) way to understand and articulate human behavior cues so that you can predict likely outcomes and it works regardless of your race, religion, political ideology or culture!
The Human Behavior Podcast
Talk Behavior to Me: Kendall Ryndak-Samuel
This week we are joined by a very special guest, Board Certified Behavior Analyst Kendall Rindak-Samuel. Kendall joined us to talk about the fascinating world of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), showing how it can transform fields like education, sports, and corporate systems. Join us as we debunk common myths and gain an enriched understanding of human behavior, all while Kendall shares her dual expertise in behavioral sports psychology and dissemination.
During the episode Kendall discusses the value of ongoing research beyond initial education, highlighting how honing observational skills in daily life can strengthen both personal and professional relationships. She also touches on the pitfalls of self-diagnosis on social media and underscores the need for ethical standards in changing behaviors that genuinely impact individuals’ lives.
Effective communication is crucial in behavior analysis, and Kendall excels at translating complex terms into accessible language. She recently wrote a book called “Talk Behavior to Me: The Routledge Dictionary of the Top 150 Behavior Analytic Terms and Translations” so that the average person can better understand the different terms used in behavioral analysis. Tune in for practical insights and strategies to enhance your observational skills and deepen your understanding of human behavior, guided by Kendall's expert perspective.
Thank you so much for tuning in, we hope you enjoy the episode and please check out our Patreon channel where we have a lot more content, as well as subscriber only episodes of the show. If you enjoy the podcast, I would kindly ask that you leave us a review and more importantly, please share it with a friend. Thank you for your time and don’t forget that Training Changes Behavior!
Check out Kendall's book: https://a.co/d/c4Z3s1s
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. This week we are joined by a very special guest, board-certified behavior analyst, Kendall Rindak-Samuel. Kendall joined us to talk about the fascinating world of applied behavior analysis, showing how it can transform fields like education, sports and corporate system. Join us as we debunk common myths and gain an enriched understanding of human behavior, all while Kendall shares her dual expertise in behavioral sports, psychology and dissemination. During the episode, Kendall discussed the value of ongoing research beyond initial education, highlighting how honing observational skills in daily life can strengthen both personal and professional relationships. She also touches on the pitfalls of self-diagnosis on social media and underscores the need for ethical standards in changing behaviors that genuinely impact individuals' lives.
Speaker 1:Effective communication is crucial in behavior analysis and Kendall excels at translating complex terms into accessible language. She recently wrote a book called Talk Behavior to Me the Routledge Dictionary of the Top 150 Behavior Analytic Terms and Translations. She wrote that so that the average person can better understand the different terms used in behavioral analysis. Tune in for practical insights and strategies to enhance your observational skills and deepen your understanding of human behavior, guided by Kendall's expert perspective. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode and please check out our Patreon channel, where we have a lot more content as well as subscriber-only episodes of the show.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed the podcast, I'd kindly ask that you leave us a review and, more importantly, please share it with a friend. Thank you for your time and don't forget that training changes behavior. All right, Hello everyone, and thank you for tuning in. Today, Greg, we have a very special guest who I would like you to introduce yourself. We have Kendall Rindak, Samuel, who is a BCBA, a behavior analyst, and Kendall. Thank you so much one for coming on the show. Tell everyone a little bit about you so we can jump to the fun part of the conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me guys. I am a board-certified behavior analyst. I am different than a psychologist. I feel like a lot of people. When they ask me what do you do? I go I'm a behavior analyst. And they go like a social worker. And I go nope. And they go like a counselor. What do you do? I'm like nope, not that either. So I am a professional who I study the environment and I try to analyze and understand what is causing different behaviors to happen and then, if it's significant enough, we put in strategies to change those. So it could be something as small as teaching somebody how to make a sandwich, or it could be as grand as changing an entire system at a company on how you can decrease turnover and putting in incentive systems and all that.
Speaker 2:But what I specifically do? I work in two areas. I work in behavioral sports psychology, so I'm a private softball instructor. So I'm a private softball instructor, so I use behavior analysis to teach all of my students how to pitch, how to field properly. I'm using behavioral performance in order to help them grow their skills, which is a little bit different than just typical coaching, because typical coaching you just might look at someone and be like all right, this looks like this is going wrong. Let's try this, whereas I kind of track progress over time and I track the strategies that I'm using and then I also work in dissemination. So I teach people how to talk about behavior analysis, very basically, and I teach people about what it is, because not many people know about it. So, long and short, I do a lot.
Speaker 1:No, that's perfect and this is why I was also interested to have you on. And, for anyone listening, greg and I a while back were on the Behavior Bitches podcast, which was a fun one, and they're BCBAs. They do a whole lot of stuff and they're just fun to talk to. And we've also been on the like, the texas association of school psychologists. They have their own uh podcast as well. We we went on there with them and you know the reason and you I love how you hit it up right here with your your sort of your softball example is that it's kind of like one. We get the same question. When I tell people I you know, work in human behavior or do something like that, they're like oh, are you reading me?
Speaker 1:right now Can you tell me that I'm like, first of all I'm like ma'am, leave me alone, I'm trying to have a drink. That's my usual response. But there's a lot of misconceptions. And what I also like about folks like you and then the behavior bitches as well is you know, you're a practitioner, right, and so Greg and I are practitioners, right. We're not just studying and writing and reading about this stuff at a university level or an academic setting, which is great, you need to have that stuff. But you know, we're all about the application of it, and so you brought up two sort of completely different areas, which is interesting to me.
Speaker 1:One a lot of stuff, a lot of the BCBAs, a lot of this work. A lot has to do with kids and people think about autism or different issues. My mom was an occupational therapist she actually just recently retired, so she worked with a lot of real young kids, like zero to three, on some of those basic things like how to feed yourself, how to pick up these different things. And so you're looking, it's it's very behavioral based, and then you put in different intervention strategies. But what really fascinated me too is because you have a background in softball and you're a coach, is you're looking at it from not just a coaching perspective and maybe softball experience, but like what you know about behavior and I'll you know, I'll ask you. But in my you know, since I've been doing this for a long time, it's sort of like once you get in and understand some of the underlying principles of behavior and how humans are, it's like it opens up this world that touches everything.
Speaker 2:So I kind of yeah.
Speaker 1:So I kind of want to get like your perspective on that, because we even have listeners, uh, from all different backgrounds. Like we have a lot of like law enforcement, first responders, some military folks listen, uh, but we also have like fraud investigators. We have just interested parents, we have people who just want to keep themselves safe, because we we deal a lot with like sort of what people call threat recognition. That's not what we really do, but it is in a sense so it goes everywhere, and so sometimes that can become nebulous to people. They're like well, what do you mean? It touches everything. So I want to get your perspective on that, or your experience in dealing with something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean, that's what made me fall in love with this science is that I saw this opportunity for a lot of people call it a technology um, because it really is this like huge, like grouping of strategies and how to um, how to analyze what's going on and strategies for that, and then strategies to change behavior, if you need to, and to teach skills and to you know, work on like increasing motivation, which is how we live. And I just found that was so fascinating. Because I I really hadn't seen anything like that before in my life, even like learning about general psychology in high school. It was cool. But then when you got to like operant and classical conditioning, I was like, wait a second, this is actually how people learn how to do things. This is how people get motivated to get out of bed, to go to their job, to have kids, like everything. So if you can understand the basics of that, that's like a superpower. So, and and working in the field that that that's what you do for a job, it's so cool. So, um, I really wanted to go into this because I was like well, I, there's, there's no way, there's a job for this. In high school and in college I was like I'm so good at this, breaking down all the operants and learning about how Pavlov made his dogs salivate and all of that, but there can't be an actual job for that. Well, there is, there is, and I was so excited because, again, I felt like I was going to learn about a superpower that I could teach everybody else about.
Speaker 2:Then, when I got into it, I learned that it's actually kind of a narrow practice right now. There are all these different things that we can do with the science, where even on our board's website, the board of behavior analysts, and then there is another organization it's called the Association for Behavior Analysis International. So all of these organizations, they have all of these subspecialties of areas that they say behavior analysts can practice in. And when I found that I was like, oh my God, I can choose any of these. Just like in medicine you could be a gynecologist, a cardiologist, an oncologist, you could do anything. I could do the same thing. But in behavior analysis this is dope.
Speaker 2:But then when I got into it I was like whoa, people are only working in a couple areas. I want to change that. I want to grow that, because there's research, tons of research that's been out there that has said this science should be used by everybody. If people understand how to use this, you could change your life. You could change your family's life, you could change the gigantic groups like an organization, a country, for the better.
Speaker 2:And that's why I do what I do, because I want to see a great impact in the world. And that's why I found you guys, too, talking about behavior analysis, behavior science in general and how else it's being practiced, because really these two areas that are being practiced in one very, very heavily is in autism and like that's where a lot of people think of behavior analysis. Working is in like schools, therapy centers, and then you got the other side of it, kind of small Um, but it's called organization, organizational behavior management, which is like business behavior analysis, so working in the corporate, setting um and helping people. You know you've heard of a pit before performance improvement plan stuff like that, incentive programs, so that's happening a little bit. But I want to grow this field and see it thrive and help the world.
Speaker 1:Well, Greg, did you want to add anything before I leave?
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course I do. I'm excited about your book coming out in October. Brian will talk about that later. I'm sure One of the things I'd like that you did that set you apart from other people. Look, there's a lot of.
Speaker 3:I get anxious because a lot of people write about stuff they don't know about and they read a book or they studied in school and then turn it into their life's work without doing any research after that initial tranche of information they found. So one of the things that's troubling is in Europe right now they've got a lot of these seminars where people say, oh, absolutely everything about human behavior starts and ends with kinesiology and body language and this is the end-all, be-all and it's not. It has nothing to do with it or very little to do with the big process. What you talk about is you talk about research. One of your quotes was that's another layer of being really successful. Behavior analysis is having extreme empathy and being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes, because if you can't do that, it's going to be really difficult to see the whole picture and why maybe something's happening. So I pride myself on being in the business longer than a lot of people and I still, to this day, walk through a parking lot, pick a car at random, take a look inside the car and then go in the business to try to find the person that owns that car. And that hones my skills all the time, because absolutely everything you do from a trash poll to where you park your car, to what your car looks like, all that stuff that's on the floorboards of your car or the dashboard that helps me target you. And again, my goal is slightly different than yours and again my goal is slightly different than yours.
Speaker 3:But what I do is I read the full spectrum of human behavior and then I compare it against the baseline that that person is operating in or that they operate in at home, and then people will say so what Well? That helps me figure out exactly what you need, what you need to hear from me, what you need to do in your home, why you're thinking that you're failing. So all those things that I can do with that information are amazing to me. And then when I open somebody's eyes, like in a lesson, brian and I'll teach a course, or, you know, in the book, or when we, you know, do a webinar or something, people go.
Speaker 3:Oh my God, that's amazing we can do that and it's like, yeah, it's called pattern recognition, you know, and so the analysis part is what you're doing and what we do, but the idea is that we have to disabuse people, and I think you wrote a lot about this as well, because I've read it. There's a lexicon that's out there that's non-helpful. It's like a doctor telling you all of these different things that you truly don't understand and saying, well, there's my analysis. Well, if you can't use that information? So I street everything up, and Brian and I are very good at taking things to a level that anybody can understand and use them immediately Turn around in your own life and be a better lover or husband or wife or, you know, coach.
Speaker 3:So I just want to give you the kudos for that and tell you that we're all on the same coin. It's just we may be on opposite sides of it, but I think all roads lead to Rome on this. I hope you feel that way as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I, I a hundred percent agree, and especially with what you said. How, yeah, if a doctor gives you their analysis like I love to use these examples like a doctor wouldn't tell you. So I looked at you and you got rhinosinusitis, you would be like I'm dying. This is the worst thing ever. I should probably go get a lawyer and write my will. It's a sinus infection. That's what they describe to you. You have a sinus infection. Here's a prescription Call me if it doesn't get better. Or cephalagia, that's a headache.
Speaker 2:You don't hear doctors saying that and if you do, if you're listening to this and your doctor has said that to you, please, please, maybe, go find somebody else. But that's what's happening in behavior analysis is that we have this wonderful science, all of these strategies that people are secretly obsessed with. People talk about this stuff all the time in books, on social media. It's everywhere, and that's one of my hashtags I use when I make my TikToks and Instagrams. It's ABA or hashtag. Aba is everywhere because it is, but people just don't know it because the people who are practicing it don't talk about it appropriately. We say things like the motivating operations here, just really fighting against what the actual behavior is doing and where it's coming from. Already, as a lay person, I'm like I gotta go.
Speaker 2:I can't you could have just said somebody's motivation is a little bit in a in a different direction here. Uh, they have a different craving that maybe we we might need to look at, um and and change so that we can help them achieve their goals, whatever. That sounds so much better, but we're I. I've been guilty of it myself. But that's why I wrote the book is because we need to help people speak about this appropriately and easily, so that we can help everybody that we need to and so that we can grow the science as well. It sounds better, it's a lot friendlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and, and you know, especially on social media, there's a lot of people sort of self-diagnosing with different, different things and it gets pretty bad. So there's, there's a ton of misconceptions out there and part of it is just people's, you know, feeling like, oh, I want to be special or I'm different, you know. And so feeling like, oh, I want to be special or I'm different, you know. And so, oh, I have ADHD or I'm on the spectrum autism spectrum, or I'm this, and it's like all right, like, uh, if that's where you're starting with, and I think we're, we're not at the best place, and so what?
Speaker 1:And the reason is, what I would like to kind of get from you is sort of like, I guess sort of a two-part question is what are some of the big misconceptions that you see out there, especially with your training and your experience and your being a practitioner? And then also there's this thing where people talk about what's normal or typical and it's like, well, that's not typical or that's not normal. And when you study behavior at least for me and I know Greg's similar, greg Simler the things that we find normal or typical is a lot more than what most people do. It's like, look, people are odd. Sometimes People are weird. They do weird things. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. We can't attribute value to that. So I want to get your perspective on that from your background is, whatever you see, those big misconceptions and what are the things that you see out there that are just kind of wrong? And then what is normal, what is typical?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so both really good questions. The first one I see huge kind of misconceptions again, just basically around ABA. A lot of people just misunderstand what the science is. Again, when I tell somebody I'm a behavior analyst, they immediately go to your social worker, your counselor or your psychologist. So right away they go to mental health, which there are behavior analysts who work in the clinical setting that work in mental health Absolutely, but that's one specialty of it. So there's misconception around what an actual behavior analyst is, what they're able to do. Again, like I said, a lot of people, if you have been around BCBAs before, they immediately, if they know what a BCBA is, they think they you work in autism or you work with kids who don't follow the rules, or you work in a school, um. Then there is another group of people that they know what behavior analysts uh, behavior analysis is Um, and they may have had a bad experience with it. And then they just labeled the entire science as it's not good. Don't use it. There are better strategies and therapies out there, especially like in the realm of autism. There are much better things to do with your child to help them than ABA.
Speaker 2:I do not doubt that people have had bad experiences with behavior analysts. People have bad experiences with their doctors. People have terrible experiences with their plumbers, their hairdressers. Not everybody is good at what they do, so there are going to be people that are kind of botched professionals. Um, and that's super unfortunate and it's unfortunate that that's in a uh, really, um, it's a very intimate setting that you're working in, especially when you work in therapy. Um, you have to be really careful about what you do and a lot of people make not great mistakes. They make mistakes and it it leads to bad outcomes. So, um, aba has had this bad rap also, that it's um, it's, it's not good. I've on TikTok, people have ripped me saying like you're abusive, you abuse children and all these things, and that is the furthest thing from what behavior analysts are doing.
Speaker 2:Working in autism because I did work in autism for a while we will change behavior that's significant to that person. We're not just going to change a behavior just because and that's in our ethics code too so if there is a BCBA that's out there that's just changing behavior just because it's convenient for them or for somebody else, that's not good and they should be reported. But if there is an issue happening where somebody is injuring themselves or they're putting themselves or other people in very dangerous situations. Or maybe it's not a dangerous behavior, maybe it's just you want to see an increase in performance from your employees or, like my pictures that I see, I want to help them make a significant change with their skills so that they can throw the ball harder. That's a significant behavior and I am going to change that. So behavior analysts don't just change anything just because it has to be significant to that person and make a very significant impact in their life or that group's life. So those are the main inconsistencies that I see with people who just aren't familiar with the science or who had a bad experience with the science.
Speaker 2:And then for your second question about what's typical, there isn't a whole lot that's typical. It's all relative to the person and again, we're not going to change some behavior because it just doesn't look typical. I've had plenty of families come to me in the past for either autism families saying my child is hand flapping. We have to get rid of that. My first question is well, is it hurting them? Is it hurting somebody else? Is it getting in the way of somebody else's learning? Is it getting in the way of their learning? Is it distracting to an entire class? Is it so distracting to this person they're not able to get their things done? If you can't answer any of those questions, I'm probably not going to change it because it's not significant and it doesn't matter if that looks atypical, okay, we all have.
Speaker 2:If that's like a stimulatory behavior, like we call it in ABA, sometimes stimming, um, people stim all the time that this shirt, that could be a sim, I'm stimming right now I'm, I love, I love running my fingers across my, um, my, my fingers across my hands. Also, my dog might bark yeah, yeah, the car just went off. Um, so, yeah, it might not look typical, but that's okay. Uh, that people do. Everybody has atypical kinds of behaviors. Um, and then in pitching what I've seen people will say, oh, okay, uh, this her windup. It looks weird. Compared to everybody else, it doesn't really look typical. We got to get rid of it. Again, if she's getting enough power, she's throwing strikes, she's able to be an effective pitcher. I don't care that that looks atypical, I'm not going to change it. So sometimes it's preference from your clients and that can be hard to deal with at times. But, um, typical is relative to the person. It's not, it's typical, it's again.
Speaker 2:It just depends on what that person is doing it's, it's, it's not, you know, uh uh, this, this large grouping of only these behaviors, are typical. Only these behaviors are normal. Only these behaviors are normal.
Speaker 1:No, it's relative to the person, and the way I look at it too is like, because that's a great explanation, because we look at it as you're kind of bringing this up in a sense implicitly is, well, what's the outcome or what's the impact or what's the effect of what they're doing? Because that's what it should be. It's because you know, humans are terrible in general at measurement and assessment. Right, we don't measure things. Well, you know, if I need to cut a piece of wood for something I'm building, it's very easy. I take out my tape measure. All right, we use, you know, inches, and this is, you know, and I can make my cut cut.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to things like psychology or behavior, I would say just behavior in general, it's not like physics, right, physics is math, right, here's what it is, this is what we know. You can measure it, and unless you get really really, really small or really way far out in the universe, then it gets a little complex, but otherwise it's hard, it's difficult maybe, but these are the laws. You understand it implicitly, implicitly, like you don't need to know you or be taught. The um, you know the, the, the measurement for for what gravity is right, you, because you know what that is. You're not. If you jump off your roof, it's going to hurt when you fall Right, but when it comes to behavior like, there's a lot of complexity in it.
Speaker 1:And so we don't always uh, we, you know, we don't always measure it correctly. And something you brought up, even when you first, um, were introducing yourself, is like you talked about the environment and everything else, so it's it's always like you're comparing something to something else. Every observation you make is a comparison to something, and I think what a lot of people don't know is like okay, they can see something, but what am I comparing it to? Why am I measuring this? What am I? You know, every observation I make is, is, in a sense, is is a. Every perception is a measurement of something. Whether it's hot or cold in the room, is subjective to you right, what the, what the temperature, what the thermostat says, that's, that's an objective measurement, because that's what it is.
Speaker 1:But the effect could be something completely different and it seems to me difficult for people to, even who know certain things, like you brought up the great example of the pitcher doing it different or wind up. Well, I see that with really good trainers people for teaching shooting or something they're like well, that's a little different than we taught, but you know what the really good trainer will be like. Hey, if that works for them and it's safe and it's effective, then that's how they do it. It's the outcome. But, um, you know, we, we don't do that with everything. It kind of takes a lot of tacit knowledge and experience. So, like, what are?
Speaker 1:Are there? Are there common ones that you see like that? Or or where, where someone or what's the best way? What I always try to get someone's perspective on, who's outside of our field or doesn't do what we do, is, in general, how do you teach people or how do you explain that to people, on how to measure correctly or what is your comparison or why is this observation significant? You get what I'm saying. It's like we focus on the vanilla, we focus on what's the comparative background, is the most important part right to us.
Speaker 2:So I kind of just want to see, like what you've seen in that or what your, what your take is on that I'm getting chills with you asking me about that, because this is like getting into the nitty gritty of what behavior analysts do. This is so exciting. So, again, this is what behavior analysts do. This is so exciting, um. So again, this is what behavior analysts are so good at is turning something that seems very subjective like somebody running uh or um, uh, people not showing up to work on time and turning it into an objective measurement. So to um, a typical person outside of person, outside of working in the behavior analysis field, if they wanted to start measuring something, they'd probably be like, okay, if I'm, if I'm looking at you know these employees coming in late, I might. I might just say, okay, they, they showed up. They showed up a couple minutes past 8 am. They're supposed to be here at 8 am, okay, well, if that's not written down somewhere that 8 am is the exact start time, then that'sa problem, because then it really isn't very objective. Everybody doesn't really know the rule. So what BCBAs would do is we would come in and say, okay, let's make this even more clear. You can show up anytime between 8am and 8.10 and be on time still any time past 8.10. It's late For something that is a little bit more complex.
Speaker 2:Like I always like to go back to sports, um so uh. Gymnastics is a huge sport where a lot of people they do have objective measurements for how they um, how they have their grading systems, um, or point systems for um, uh, for who takes first and second and all that Uh. But some people argue that it's subjective at times because it's also so difficult to judge those skills cause they happen so fast, um, so um. For a lay person they might think, okay, well, um, you know they, it looks like they're, they're getting, you know, seven feet off the floor, maybe I don't know, so they might just eyeball it, whereas behavior, behavior analysts are a lot more rigid, um with that. But that's how we get objective measurements, that's how we teach people.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is how you're exactly going to measure this thing. We have to have a very definitive description of what you are measuring. Um, say, in gymnastics, someone's layout has to be um, you know, at least eight feet off before. Whatever it is, um, we would put that in our what we call our um, uh, uh, our operational definition. Um.
Speaker 2:So we have to start with a very objective definition of what we are measuring. So everybody measures it the same over time, not just when we are first tracking our data and seeing what's going on. That is the definition that stays from the start of tracking it all the way through. Okay, now we have started to change it. If it was significant, we need to make sure this individual maintains this behavior and then, until we're done so, we are the experts at taking something that looks very subjective and making it very, very objective, which a lot of people. It's very hard to do that because you have to break it down to its most minute form, but again, we're trained to do that and that kind of separates us, apart from some other professionals who might target behavior at times.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so talk about the travails of predictive analysis. So what happened for our listeners? Brian brought up a great question and, kendall, you did a great job answering it. What both of them were talking about?
Speaker 3:In our realm, what we deal with is called an external perspective. What happens is most people are so interested in giving an internal perspective this is what this means, this is what I see and they're compared against themselves as a baseline and that doesn't mean anything. The idea is like, for example, if I was going to do a cold read on Kendall, I look in the back to Sam. I am, the certificate that's above it, the organization, how she's dressed, that she's wearing white, all risky behavior there, but she's very clean with her lines and organized, and the corkboard that's next to her. All of those things are great. So I'm breaking that down. Well, the problem is now I'm a CNN analyst, because I don't know if you bought that room. I don't know if your significant other built that room. I don't know if those things are valuable to you or you built it for a podcast background, because you want to portray a behavior. So what we do is we have to look at 360, everything, the Hoberman, we have to move it around and then we have to measure it against something. So we have to measure the behavior that we see against known behavior and then we got to measure it against the baseline and then from that information we have to say, well, there's likelihood, this is likely what's going to happen if we don't impact that behavior. This is likely what's going to happen if we do a little bit of impactful this, you know, into that behavior. So we're in the same world.
Speaker 3:The difference is with BCBA. When you guys have board certified people that create a diagnosis, okay, the other people around are the ones that don't understand. It's generally not the person you're dealing with. Like, if we're dealing with a supervisory level, they'll look at us and go, yeah, but I don't understand why you can't just point to the school shooter. It's like wait a minute. That's not the way any of this works. This is you know we're not in Oz here, or Wingardium Leviosa. You know we don't have the Harry Potter's magic wand With you and I love the sports analogy as well.
Speaker 3:What you do is you have to look at a situation, you have to look at the person in that situation. You have to understand that sometimes, when we go to the doctor. We lie to the doctor. You have to have to say that sometimes we put on, you know, egotistical behaviors which you know we use to trump some other void in our life, and we have to go through all of that other stuff and go. It's getting better or it's getting worse, or there's an attack likely or it's never going to happen.
Speaker 3:So I think that you're doing the same basic thing and I think that sometimes the misunderstanding doesn't come necessarily from the client, sometimes it comes from society, because society doesn't understand that. And that goes back to your point, brian. People are horrible at what they think is wrong with them and if you're getting opinion-based testimony, so if I ask you what are your symptoms, and you give me an honest portrayal of the symptoms, I can do more with that than if I say, okay, what do you think is wrong with you? Because with me I'm always on WebMD and I have a brain cloud, so I'm not sure what that means. But no, it's. It's actually a UTI, greg, you're going to get better.
Speaker 3:But you see what I'm trying to say. So when I look at how you're approaching it, I love it because it's very clinical and very basic and people would be able to understand and get behind it, Whereas I see that this mysticism, we have to shine lights on those folks and we have to say that's not how any of this works and get to the root cause. Do you find that once that epiphany occurs, once that people see what it is that you do, do you find that it's easier to get your desired end state?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, because then you have buy-in, and that's why it's so important to explain everything basically to whatever stakeholders you're working with clients, people who might not be directly your clients, but who might work with that client or live with that client. So you're trying to get this picture of their life or the office setup or their practice environment, to see how they're training. And then, when you go to do your analysis, or when you're just explaining what you're going to do and how the progression of behavior analysis works, if you're not able to do that and speak to that person in their language, that connection is going to be broken right away and no rapport is going to be built. And they're probably going to say, all right, connection is going to be broken right away and no rapport is going to be built. And they're probably going to say, all right, I'm going to try to go find somebody else who's going to help me, but yeah, if you can do that, if you can speak to someone in their language, you're going to make them feel really comfortable.
Speaker 2:You're going to be able to make a really big impact in their life and then they're going to feel a lot better about what is about to happen and they're probably going to go talk to their friends and family about you know what? I'm working with this person? I'm working with this behavior analyst who's helping me get up earlier in the morning. It's phenomenal. It's the same science that they use with kids who are having issues in school. It's the same science that they use to teach Olympic athletes how to run faster. It's insane. And it's getting me up earlier in the morning. That's great. So that's again the level of impact that communication can have on people.
Speaker 3:It's great, I totally agree with that. And Brian, just one quick comment here. Look, you can go to any, any, any uh uh right aid or or. I'm in a small town so we don't have a pharmacy. Actually, I have to go to a witch doctor who comes out and get a chicken foot and tells you what you got.
Speaker 1:Your doctor also is like the vet and takes care of the horses.
Speaker 3:And the barber. You give it a pin. But you can go to any pharmacy and you can go in and say I have a headache and a person will lead you to a counter that has aspirin and Advil and Tylenol and all of these other things. And what I see sometimes is people go to a doctor and they go well, they've got me on this med and you know one of the side effects or and you grab the person. I'm a touchy-feely. I grab the person I go.
Speaker 3:Have you ever read all of the stuff that's in a normal bottle of order-the-counter aspirins and what it can do to you? Well, we don't See the things that are familiar to us. We don't dig deep, we don't look under the veneer, we don't want to investigate those because we just take them for granted. And our human behavior. Look, if you would have had a counselor and Brian, this is for you, for the love of God If you would have had a counselor, like Kendall when you were growing up, you wouldn't have had all of these behaviors that we got to unpack now and speak with a megaphone please come off the roof and all that other stuff. But we don't have that. We don't have those life coaches Now. We have coaches at different parts of our life, and we have parents and we have significant others. And you know what, if I'm going to conduct predictive analysis, the more of those people you have, the better unpacked you'll be and the better you'll do in life, but the less that you have the ability to bounce that off. Look, I'm feeling that this is normal, clinically normal, but it might not be. I feel that this soothing behavior that I'm doing is okay. Look, measurement assessment leads to a better conclusion, and that's what we do. We just do that over a.
Speaker 3:We're looking for different things. You know you're looking for the pitch. I'm looking for a bomb emplacer. You know you're looking for how can this person improve themselves? I'm saying, on a highway full of cars, this is the one you want to interdict because that's the most dangerous vehicle that's coming up. So, but it's no different really, because what we're doing is we're comparison and comparing and measuring and saying, hey, that banana is too ripe, that one's not ripe enough. We're either having banana bread or we got to leave it out in the sun. I love that. So. So you simplify things, which means I'm a big fan, because most people are overblown and you can't even get through the diagnosis without having to have a you know PDF on your side or a dictionary, to reference some of the material.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:Can you kind of like explain or give sort of an example, if you've got some, like how do you one of the things you talk about and Greg was talking about when we go with internal versus external baselines and how we read a situation or a person or behaviors right, and one of the things that's hard to do and I kind of Greg and I kind of argue about this a little bit. Maybe it's just the way we talk about it, but it's when you say, like taking another person's perspective, like it's psychologically that's very, very difficult to do. Like Kendall, I have no idea what, like we've only been talking for half an hour. We had one like 15 minute phone call before this and I Googled you right. So I don't. But I don't know your life experiences, I don't know what you see, I don't know how you think, and so it's difficult. Like how am I supposed to take your perspective on this? How am I supposed to get in the head or in the mind of someone else? Like I've got like a little.
Speaker 1:He's now like 13 months. You know, boy, it's easier that because it's like this kid's me, like I see, like this kid literally is me but biologically is. You know, I helped create him. But but like even his behaviors and even how he acts and points and stuff, like I can get it because I live with them, I see him every day and I do it. But when it comes outside of that right it can get, it can get difficult and you know.
Speaker 1:So what are your? How do you do that? How do you shift perspective? How do you take someone else's perspective? Or do you even have to Cause that's my thing is, what I tell people is like, look, it's really hard to psychologically take another person's perspective, but but you don't have to, you don't have to know what they're thinking. So you have to have some comparison. So like, how do you describe that? Or what do you tell people to do? Or when they ask you, hey, I'm sure you have people come up, hey, I've got my kid doing this, or someone's I'm watching this. I'm sure you get all these wild questions that most of them are completely irrelevant and don't matter in the big picture. So like, how do you, how do I filter through that? If I'm just listening to this, going like, yeah, maybe it's about my kids or my neighbor's kid or someone I saw? Like, how do I use what are your lenses that you use?
Speaker 2:So, um, we use a few different um measurement strategies in like that assessment portion of when we are looking at behavior, because we can't put changes in place before we learn about what's going on. So when we're in that assessment phase of behavior analysis, we will take objective data which first, like we talked about, we have to have a really, really good definition of what we're supposed to be targeting. So, for instance, say it's. So, for instance, say, say it's, we'll go to a child example, say a child in school and they just aren't doing their homework and they they haven't turned anything in all year and it's like two months in. So what we will do is we will interview the teacher, we'll interview the child, if they're able to, if they're able to talk for themselves, we'll interview the family. So we get all this background information of what could possibly be happening and what other people, other people's perspectives are of the behavior that's going on. And then we will take objective data on what we are seeing Um, so uh for a behavior analyst that would be working in this area, they they might go into the home or they might go into the school and take data on what is happening right before that child is supposed to be engaging in doing their homework, um, what is happening when they're doing their homework? Or if they're not doing their homework, what are they doing? And then, if they did do their homework or didn't do it, what happened right after that? So then we try to find these patterns of what is going on in these situations and then once we can put all these pieces together and sometimes it happens pretty quickly because some behaviors are very, very consistent, others it might take a little bit longer to understand because it might be happening across all different environments, it only might be specific to one environment or one person, they might only not be doing their homework for one teacher Once you can get all that information, then we can move forward.
Speaker 2:So we do what you guys kind of call it pattern analysis, which it might be different than this, but we do try to find those consistencies of this is what is happening. This appears like this is why it's happening. Now we can put this change in place. So we rely heavily on that objective observation of. I'm not going to try to get in your head. If you want to tell me what's going on in your head, I'm going to write that down, because that is probably impacting also what you're doing. But I'm not really worrying about what's going on in here or in here again, unless you tell me. I'm worried about what's going on out here because we can kind of change that to help that person meet their goals. Stay on track, whatever it is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Brian, I think a great thing there a great parallel discussion.
Speaker 3:Look, you're speaking the right stuff, kendall. You're going to hopefully resonate very well with our audience and I think they're going to listen in, follow up and buy your book, because it's really good stuff and it's very simple stuff. I was sexually abused as a kid so if I was going to conduct an interview with, for example, a pedophile, the easiest thing for me to do is bring my confirmation bias, bring all my hate and vitriol and all the things from my internal perspective on it and lay it out while I'm doing the interview. Well, it might give me some sense of relief, but I'm not going to get anywhere with figuring out what's inside the pedophile's head. So the difference between Brian is Brian is classically trained and then has a lot of street exposure. I had all street exposure and no classical training. So when we talk about putting ourselves in the shoes of somebody else, I do it because what I have to do is force myself to do the external perspective, and then I go over and ask people. So the great thing is, I'm like the stumbling detective and I go over and I go. Excuse me, what does this mean? What do you mean by this? Why are you wearing this ring on this hand rather than on this hand, and through that I gain a lot of information. I'll give you a very, very brief one that speaks directly to this.
Speaker 3:So IEDs improvised explosive devices were very different in Iraq than they were in Afghanistan, but the same bomb makers taught those criminals. So then there was tendencies to follow a pattern, so we could actually figure out where a bomb came from, who that guy taught, what the pigtail splice was like, and that was very important to predict what was going to happen. So I'm in this meeting and they got all these geniuses from the Department of Defense and Department of Justice and ATF and everything in Afghanistan and they're all in this room, in this bomb protected room, and they were talking about this new thing where they were putting bombs and culverts on roads, these IEDs that would blow up and kill the people. And I had been on the road. I was out there talking to the people and the reason they do that is because they don't have to dig a hole, because people are lazy. So if I find a culvert under a road and just put a bomb in it, it's much simpler.
Speaker 3:So there's always an analysis, but there's also the answer that the person, why? Why do you cut off the ends of the bread? Why do you do this? Why do you do it? So I'm using culture as context and love the interview process and you both are very clinically trained. So you, you stack the cards and everything.
Speaker 3:But both of us and all three of us on this call understand there's also an intervention strategy where you've got to go more quickly. This is going to harm somebody, so we have to intervene. So if you take all of those, what you have is now you have this big body of work that says pattern analysis works because people repeat behaviors. We have this whole body of work that says physically, physiologically, chemically, scientifically, cognitively, that people repeat behaviors because of these reasons. And that's forced society and humans to say, okay, then give me a checklist and checklist blow, they're absolutely horrible, you can't give one. So so, folks, if you're listening to my voice and you're hearing this call, listen to what they're saying. Measurement and assessment and comparison and baselines are how you come up with an analysis and a diagnosis, not saying, well, there are 3.1 on this scale and 2.7 on that one. I hope you agree with me on that one because it sounds like we're all in violent agreement.
Speaker 3:Okay, perfect. Yes, that wasn't really a question, I was just happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's fine Great.
Speaker 1:Greg got some validation on the call.
Speaker 3:For the first time in 62 years, somebody is on the right tune of music.
Speaker 1:So thank God, I'm never going to give you validation music, so thank god I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm never going to give you validation, so but but no that that all goes back to kind of like you know. It goes back to you know what is this person doing specifically and then what is the effect it has on them, on others, on the environment, like, and that's where you can come in, because, like you even said and I I see this too with organizations where it's it's like oh, we gotta, we gotta, get better at communication. It's like okay, well, how did you arrive that at that solution? Already you haven't clearly defined what the problem is and you're already jumping into a solution. Do you see stuff like that?
Speaker 2:Oh my God all the time. And that like Do you see stuff like that? I'm guessing, oh my God all the time. And that is such a perfect example of again, most people have really good intentions Anybody who's saying that they want to help make whatever situation it is better and relieve whatever issues are happening. So their intentions are good. But to a non-behavior analyst, they say we have to get better communication, whereas a behavior analyst would say I have observed that there have been four people not on our meetings and these three people haven't responded to any of the emails that we've been sending out. So let's look at how we can increase attendance at meetings and increase people's responses over email. Boom, great. That's where behavior analysts come in and we can really help because we can make people's lives easier so that it's not just this, this dark cloud, very, you know, gray space. We have to increase communication. That's impossible.
Speaker 2:I, I, I don't it's a really, really difficult task, um, but what you said, I loved what you said how, um, both of you guys have said something about, like, you have to find out someone's why, why you're doing this, why you cut the bread like this, why you have to get a hot dog every time you go to this baseball park Um, that's what we do. That's like one of the parts of things that behavior analysts do. Um, we do that analysis. It's to a lay person. I would describe that as like a motivational analysis. What's motivating you to do this? So that's where we find the patterns. We find out.
Speaker 2:In our jargon we call them functions of behavior. So we see that there are four major functions or four main whys of why people do things. It's either for attention, escape or avoidance, access to tangibles, things, and then automatic meaning. It just feels good, um. But sometimes you don't have to actually go that route, because sometimes you're not trying to find out why. Why are you doing this? Why aren't you doing this? Maybe you're just trying to increase somebody's skills, um, like in performance training, for sports, for work, like you're onboarding somebody. That's just skill training. Um, but that's another thing that we're experts in, because we know how to take a really, really complex behavior, um, like Simone Biles doing I don't even know the names of all of the different flips and like her routines and everything like that Crazy, but a analyst would able to be would be able to.
Speaker 2:Who is an expert in behavior analysis and gymnastics would be able to break down those movements and teach that to someone who is trying to learn that. Now I'm not saying that everybody's going to be able to be Simone Biles later on in life. That would be incredible. But, um, we know how to break down those skills and make it more realistic for somebody to attain those goals that they have and be able to do those flips and all those movements for them. So just more yeah.
Speaker 1:And so we do a lot of the same stuff. When you talk about how do you turn the subjective into the objective, and that's why we use a lot of the tools that we use in the lexicon that we have, and because it does that, it's saying well, this is a category it fits into here. And now I have a way to sort of measure it, and it comes down to those different sort of operational definitions that you talked about, and we have even our own that we use. And so did that play into cause? I kind of want to. You've got the book coming out called uh, uh, talk behavior to me, and it's the Routledge dictionary of the top 150 behavior analytical terms and translations. So was that kind of fit into? What you're trying to do here is is define some of this stuff for people better, or what was the? What was the reason for the book?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I just I saw that there is a huge lack of people talking about behavior analysis. Basically, and because I love the science so much, I was seeing and I don't have actual data on it but I see how pigeonholed and how narrow our practice is, with only like one to two populations, and I see that some of that is because we can't talk to people about what we do. If you put a BCBA at a bar and have someone approach them and say what do you do, the conversation that on on the behavior analyst side would be so long and they it would. It would probably get more complex and confusing the longer that it would go on and that the the person who approached them would probably be like, okay, I got to go to the bathroom and they probably leave. The person who approached them would probably be like, okay, I got to go to the bathroom and they probably leave Um, cause it's, it's just, it's too much Um. So I wanted to simplify things for everybody, to teach practitioners and students how to talk to non-behavioral analysts about what we do, so we can increase our impact, grow the field Um, but then, on a smaller scale, increase how effective our treatments are by making it easier for the people who are implementing our strategies and all of our plans. Making it easier for them to understand and then do it right teachers, parents, youth coaches, professional coaches anybody who's not a behavior analyst. They're usually the ones who are taking these plans and running them. If they don't understand what we're writing, why are we even working? What are we doing? We're not going to help anybody if we can't talk to people in their language. So I saw that there was a huge lack of resources out there for our practitioners and our students to achieve this, and so I said you know what I'm doing this.
Speaker 2:I went to a great talk out in Boston in 2021. And the researcher, dr Kimberly Marshall. She's out of University of Oregon. She's an expert in dissemination of behavior analysis, and this is what she talked about at the end of her speech. She said from this research, this should prove to everybody that we need to increase resources, do more exercises with our students in school to teach them about this ethical code that we have, where it says we have to talk in an understandable manner to all of our clients and stakeholders. This is going to help support them. We can't just tell people. You have to talk basically to people and make sure they understand it, because this really isn't taught to anybody directly. So right after I left there I said I called my mom. Right away I go. I think I'm going to write a book.
Speaker 3:And yeah right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and but it's not just for our practitioners to talk basically to people, anybody who is interested in behavior analysis or who wants to understand if you're getting services from a behavior analyst, whether your company is or your child is, or maybe you're working with a behavioral sports performance coach like myself and you have these plans that they give you and it might have some jargon in there, or you just want to understand what they're doing with you better, even though they might be talking very basically to you and you understand everything. This is going to help you understand it on a way more basic level and make you feel more comfortable about what you're getting into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great and those things are important. Right, having the different operational terms, the different ways to describe something, because they can be different for you than they are for me, but we're talking about the same thing. So what allows you to do is obviously use that, or use those and use the terms, use a process to conceptualize it in whatever area of your life or whatever, whatever reason, or, or you know whatever you're using it for, and so do you. Do you have any like um, do you have any things that you tell people, like on how to look or looking for things or stuff to look out for? And I don't mean like the checklist, like hey, when you see these things, it means you know that, cause it's never it's never a squared plus B squared equals C squared.
Speaker 1:That's not how behavior is Right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's chaos, it's, it's very complex. So, meaning, meaning, like like Greg and I'll give uh, uh, folks like examples. Uh, give folks examples when they're talking about looking for the seams and gaps of an area, looking for negative space. Where do criminals, terrorists and surgeons, where do they get in from? How do they do this? And so we play observational games where we go.
Speaker 1:I want you, when you're out, driving around, walking around, look for any feral cats in your neighborhood. And because cats, they don't just go strutting down the middle of the street, right, where do they hide? They hide underneath cars, they go in between buildings, right? They're careful on their movement. Well, guess who else acts that way, right? A lot of criminals act that way too. So it's like the idea is, if I just tell you, go, look for the guy you know trying to break into a place, you're never going to see that. But if you go out today and start looking for feral cats, you're going to realize like damn, there's a lot of cats, you know what I mean, just wandering around. So the idea is you get, you get a reward, you actually get some practice in it and you get, you know, you get a little bit of validation and you get better at it. But I was just curious as like do you have anything that you do or that you tell people as like a general practice of, of, of things to do?
Speaker 2:Yes, um. So I'm so happy I put this in my book, because when I was writing it I was like, oh, I could just make this like a translational dictionary and we'll end it there. But at the end of my book I was like I want to give people some general tips that they can use, because I know they're going to be non-behavioral analysts who are reading this. So let's help people learn how to use the science very easily. So I have a couple of them that I'll read off. There are I think I have about maybe 12 that are at the end of the book.
Speaker 2:But the first one is you have to be the best listener and observer in the room, because a lot of the times what happens is behavior analysts, especially new behavior analysts, will go in and they'll have, you know, all their data collection system stuff. They got their clipboard and their iPad and all these things, and then you have behavior technicians coming up and talking to you. You got people messaging you. You're trying to multitask when you're trying to assess a behavior, because you're constantly assessing. It's like we're street researchers. We are constantly researching, taking data, putting in strategies, changing all these things. But if you can't be in the moment and put your pen or your iPad down, you're going to miss a lot of really important things, because behavior, when we look at it, the things that we look at are what happens directly before behavior occurs, like within the first five seconds before behavior occurs, and then what happens within five seconds of that behavior ending. So you have to A know what you're looking at. B have your eyes wide open and completely focused on this one thing, because you have to catch these things so quickly. And there are other analyses that we do that you're just constantly writing or typing down what is happening and if you can't observe, you're not going to have a great assessment, which is going to lead to a faulty treatment. You're not going to have a great assessment, which is going to lead to a faulty treatment, which is going to lead to the person not meeting their goals or progressing. So you have to be able to observe and listen very, very well. So going along with that, observe before you make moves.
Speaker 2:One of the other biggest issues that happens in behavior analysis is people right away. Even though we're taught to assess before we put changes in so many balls they walked 10 people this weekend my brain immediately is like, oh my God, I'm not helping them. This isn't good. Or if it's a new student, I'm like I hope I can help them. You know, maybe I'm thinking that we need to do more snapping drills, we need to do more leg drive.
Speaker 2:Before you go there, you have to know what's happening. So you have to observe and get all the information before you can even worry about how you're going to change it, because you can't change something that you don't know anything about, so you have to learn about it first. And that when you're just plainly observing, you can't do that and try to think about all these changes and your worries and anxieties about. I don't know if I can do this. You can't really do those at the same time when you're completely in the moment, and in behavior analysis we call that an incompatible behavior when you can't do two things at the same time.
Speaker 2:And then the last thing, which I feel like is the most important out of anything we do in behavior analysis, is you have to be consistent with whatever strategies you're using, and it doesn't just mean you're consistent for a day or an hour. You have to be consistent over a long period of time with however it is written in that plan that you were supposed to be acting. When this person does email you back on time, if it says in the plan, you're supposed to send them back. Thank you so much for getting back to me. Or you're supposed to I don't know say, you have some employee reward board, you're supposed to put a star up there. Great, you have to do that. You have to keep doing it, because nobody ever mastered anything by doing it once in a while or just one time. So consistency is huge and it's something we preach all the time um to our clients and stakeholders, our students that we work with. You have to do the same thing all the time until we say it's okay to change it.
Speaker 3:I'll be a quick translator for Kendall to our normal audience for first responders. What Kendall said is you have lights on your vehicle and a siren and you're rushing to an unknown trouble where you've got limited information coming in from an RP on the scene and a dispatcher and you, as the copper, have already decided how you're going to handle the scene and the situation and calm things down. And that's why cops die, because we're rushing into the situation with scant information. Another sales pitch for your book.
Speaker 3:I surround myself with translators because sometimes I speak in parables that I don't understand. It's just information comes out in that manner, and earlier when we were talking, I said the white shirt represented risky behavior, kendall, and what I meant by that is I have to wear dark shirts. Why? Because I'm a mess maker. When I'm drinking, I'm always wearing it and I'm up in front of people all the time. So your risky behavior is that you know that you can hold it together, so I have to have people around. That says what Greg is trying to tell you is this. So the reason I'm excited about your book coming out and I was so thankful to be able to talk to you is common sense. Street-level interventions, for me, work the best and when people understand that they're contributing, like listening to somebody, and they're sitting there going. Don't you want to write any of this down? Not yet. I'm enthralled, go on.
Speaker 2:I love that.
Speaker 3:And you know, and this is how we're going to learn about other people, this is how we're going to fix things. Self-help books. Listen, if you knew how to help yourself, you wouldn't be buying a book. So my thing is that I like this approach. I'm very enthralled by it, and I just think that when you said, don't sell yourself short on the translational aspect of the book, because even the lay person is going to get something out of it. They're going to read it and they're going to be able to compare it to their own life and go, wow, that's me. And that's helpful too, seeing that, you know you got to show up every day engaged, and the only way to be engaged is to understand what your role is. So this book is going to speak volumes to you understanding what that person means, why that person shunned you, why you're turning people off. You know all of those are part of the subtext of what you're talking about, and I love it.
Speaker 1:That's all I got to say you know, and what happens with you know? This is why I love talking to someone sort of from a different realm, that's in a similar you know, doing something similar, but kind of a different domain. Maybe you know you brought up some things that everyone goes well, yeah, yeah, that's common sense, I get that. It's like no, but you didn't do it Right. You said all right, you know, because you put it as what Be the best listener. You right, because you put it as what Be the best listener in the room. Just shut your mouth and open your ears.
Speaker 1:Because we always say one of our principles is that humans are constantly on transmit. People teach you how they want to be treated. We're constantly just transmitting everything about us. So I have to one tune into the right frequency and then not jam a square peg into a round hole, right? So I have to not let that, let that take over. And you know, even with you you're talking about listening and people like OK, yeah, no, I listen to him. It's like no, like this is even even military, has terms called SILS, stop, look, listen, smell and like so I get inserted with my team via helicopter in the middle of the night somewhere. We jump off.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, depending on the mission, you literally sit there for an hour and you just stop, you look, you listen, you smell, you hear, see what's going on in the area, see if your presence just attracted anywhere. I mean, for an hour you just don't say a damn thing and you just sit there and then you decide to start moving towards wherever you're going. I mean, that's the idea, because you're just getting that baseline, you're getting that sample, you're acclimating yourself to the situation. So you're using that external baseline, not an internal one, of what you think is going to happen and it seems so obvious but people really don't do it. And then what happens is like Greg, did you know the thing earlier in the call, when he's like, okay, this is what you're showing me, kind of like you're highly organized, you've got all your stuff neat in your room, you've got a cool little neon sign in the background with you know everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've got all this stuff and it's, it's, it's well put together, it's clean, it says. But here's the thing. I don't even know if that's during COVID, for a lot of like, and it happened mostly in DC all the talking heads on different news shows, because they're mostly doing stuff remotely. There were companies that would come in. You could hire them and they would put in like a bookshelf. Make a decorative zoom background.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that, but I don't doubt it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it was big, big money too, and it was all certain. I didn't know that. But if you saw where my this is, my little loft office above our garage, like this is Brian's head, I've got like the guitars over here, I've got some stuff stacked up over here that I need to get to, I've got my books back there, the couch that I sit, like it really is, but. But you only get this perspective right. You're only seeing what I'm I'm showing you. So those, those simple things is where I see things go wrong.
Speaker 1:So I like what you're doing with the book and then kind of expanding this, this sort of reach, because you know, especially with BCBAs, it's, it's so much focused on kids and intervention strategies, and then that takes on a life of its own with social media and every little thing gets picked apart. That's why Greg, even brought up like kinesics and body language, you know at the beginning where it's like. You can't start there. You have to know where you're starting from and and I I just love getting your, your perspective or background from this. So you know, I don't um, I want to, I want to allow you to like any, any you, anything else you you kind of want to add or or takeaways for people.
Speaker 1:Um, people, from what you've seen especially stuff with kids and sort of your you know perspective on, you know everyone's really scared of social media and these different apps and the way things are changing. You know, I always say people have been the same for a really, really long time. It's not the app, it's not the phone, it's the person, you know. It's not the gun, it's not the drugs, it's the person. If we shift our focus to that and people are worried, well, what do I do with my kid? What do I do about this? And my opinion of this is sort of okay. What are you doing yourself? Because I see adults are much worse at this than children are, and if you're doing that around your kid all, they're going to do is mimic your behavior.
Speaker 1:So if you're constantly on the phone, when you're hanging out with them and checking your Instagram, well then that's what they think is normal or typical. So it's actually not them that you have to worry about, it's you. So I'm just curious, from your perspective, what you see or what you tell parents, or what you've seen before, and kind of where you think the social media impact what it really is, not just versus what it's always talked about.
Speaker 2:So like social media impact on like what people are saying about behavior analysis or like how social media how it's, how it's really affecting our behavior, especially at a younger age. Oh, I think this could be an entire podcast in itself.
Speaker 1:It could be.
Speaker 2:But what I see is it totally draws people out of the moment and again, I don't have data on this. I don't have data on this, but from my observations, I'm seeing decreases in how people are connecting with anybody and anything around them. A lot more risky and dangerous behavior, Like people are texting constantly or on social media at the red light and you might take your foot off the brake for a second and don't realize that you're rolling and then you get into a fender bender, Um. So all these things that maybe weren't happening as much before social media occurred, um are starting to pop up now. Because of it, we're also constantly comparing ourselves to other people.
Speaker 2:I'm super guilty of that because I'm an influencer. I am on social media all the time, and it's not the best environment for us to really thrive, Because when you're constantly comparing, you're getting pulled out of the moment that you're in right now. You're maybe not interacting with the people around you or your pets as much. You're not attending to what you should be the stove that's on, maybe all the work that's in front of you. We're being less productive. We're living less in the moment and, to me, when I'm on social media more, even though I love it and it's so fun. I almost feel like sick, like something's wrong.
Speaker 3:Like and.
Speaker 2:I'm like man. Why do I feel like so off? It's because I've been living in this world, in this box, for you know, two hours or whatever it is. I really try not to be on social media for that long, but it happens. So all of these risky things and these things that we talk about like, oh, we don't like being ignored. We don't like when people are not vigilant when they drive. We're doing that because we're on social media.
Speaker 2:Social media is wonderful for so many things. It allows us to connect to a lot of people, but I think that there has to be a lot more education for the young population on how to engage with it appropriately and what to expect. Maybe some restrictions on who can be on there, like what age and duration restrictions. Maybe there also needs to be after when you become an adult, you can have full access to this. Here are some tips on how you can engage with your social media audience and your platform and whatever in a healthy manner, because here are the effects that can come from it, which there are resources out there, but just constantly putting them out there for people, because if we're not prompted, we're not going to do it, if we're not, if it's already not a habit.
Speaker 1:So yeah, well, greg, I'll let you kind of get any final comments or any other questions for Kendall while we have her on here.
Speaker 3:I had so much more we could talk about. I think this would be a fun conversation to revisit once the book comes out. We've all had a chance to look around. I think we should have you back on the show. I think that there's all. The book comes out in October. No, I'm sorry, go ahead yeah.
Speaker 1:You can preorder it now. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm not preordering unless it includes like an autographed edition with the Sam. I am moniker on it.
Speaker 2:You got it.
Speaker 3:But no, but this was a fun, spirited discussion about simple stuff that everybody can wrap their head around. It demystifies some of it. It puts it back in the realm of you writing your own narrative, and that's what people really want. That's why people are really out there looking for an answer, and this is an answer. It's not the answer. We don't offer the answer. We offer an answer, and I think that's important. So I just want to tell you thanks. You lived up to all the expectations that I had. Can't wait to see the book.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you guys for having me on. I was so excited to talk with you because I know you guys are in a different domain of human behavior and I love learning about what other people are doing, because that's why I got into this is to grow the science and have the biggest impact possible. You guys are awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, we appreciate you coming on here sharing your perspective. Obviously, for listeners and everything, we'll have the links to you and your social media and the book to pre-order in the episode details and all that, and you can always look her up at the Behavior Influencer on Instagram. And then TikTok. I'm not on TikTok just because it's not, I don't you know. I think the Chinese government has enough information about me already.
Speaker 1:Because they steal so much by surveillance and my you know, different things have been hacked that have my information in it. So they have enough on me. But you know we appreciate you coming on here. So they have enough on me. But but you know we appreciate you coming on here, you know.
Speaker 1:I think you know if you're interested to maybe maybe something again, we could organize something, just kind of getting into the social media stuff, because it's it's huge and we've got sort of different perspectives between the three of us in general. And then I kind of want to get like how, how to address it. We get questions on it all the time and you know, I thing where I do like all right, brian, if you're going to grow this stuff on Arcadia, on the social media, you got to be more consistent. It's like okay, so I start being more consistent. And then I realized like Jesus, I'm spending so much time on here, it's not good for me and I don't like it. So then people are like how do you? You just post and then you won't even open the app for like another week. I was like no, they're like you have to engage with people.
Speaker 1:If you want to go, it's like ah man, I don't really want to do that, but uh, but it's, it's, it's, it's tough, but that's just part of that, Just like a generational thing and how we use it. No-transcript.
