Why do we protest?

clueless and walking through them. Oh yeah, Well, I think we've all done that to a certain extent, Like when I when my wife and I went to Thailand several years back, there was some protesting going on at the time, and we just we were on the edges off and we we knew it was going going on, but that

was about the extent of it. Yeah, And it's kind of it's it's difficult to when you're on vacation because you're not in protest you mind frame, So you might say, oh, I support that, but you know, you probably have things to do, You've got you know, the love to see, so on and so forth, and I make light of it, but seriously, it's it's something that it So that has been happening a lot lately, is definitely on our minds, and we're recording this mid November, and as of mid November,

we've seen a lot of protests unfolding over the summer in this fall. So yeah, like just the other day they cleared out the Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, that's right, So that's sort of up in the air as to what the fate will be of Occupy Wall Street. Now. Protests as a whole have have been around for ages, like pretty much as as long as as human society has been advanced enough to have laws and customs and policies and cultural norms. Um, We've we've had reasons at

times to rebel against those norms. It's human instinct, right, I mean you feel like some something has been uh, there's some sort of un injustice going on in the world that you need to write, right, and and we'll talk about this a little bit more too, but it's a little bit more complex. I mean obviously socio economic issues come into play as well. Yeah. I tend to think of it like a like a river. I think that's the analogy made in How Protests Work, which article

which you can find on how stuff Works dot com. Uh, thinking of it in terms of of a river. And in the same way that yes, you can change the course of a river, and nature can change the course of a river, but it's gonna take something. It's gonna take a certain amount of will, or a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of power, because otherwise, rivers tend to just keep going the way they're going unless

unless something comes along to change it. And that's the way it tends to go with with something, well, whether it is a law or a or a social norm or some sort of an idea that has become popular or or or has become the norm and a culture, that the river will continue to go down the course it's been going unless people rise up and change it, unless they step forward and and like, you know what, we're not gonna have the river run this way anymore.

We're going to alter its course in a less destructive route or in a more wholesome route, etcetera. Yeah, it's interesting you you use that analogy, because just yesterday on NPR one of the Occupy Wall Street protesters was making the analogy that they are like water, um that you know, they're a morpheus in the sense that they just can

continue to sort of change course at will. So, yes, they've been whisked away from Zuccati Park in New York City, but that doesn't mean that the protest has stopped the genies out of the bottle. And so they're just going to continue to to I suppose, run downstream in whatever

manner they're like water. Um. So, in this podcast, we're going to we're going to talk about protests more along the lines how we approach it, like why do we protest, and and also some of the misconceptions about protesting and protesters and protesters. Uh, we're just gonna sort of jam here about about what the protest is and how it works.

And then at the end, we're also going to run through some some quick ideas, some quick suggestions that we've run across that may help any of you out there who who are planning to be a part of a protest in the future, or just I mean, even if you're not planning to be a part of one, Uh, you may find yourself in the middle of one just

by virtue of traveling around or going about your daily life. Yeah, and how you can better gauge a crowd and uh be safe in the crowd really, Yeah, I mean whether it's an occupy protest or a borderline revolution and in another country or something as simple. You remember the great coffee machine protests here at work of Oh yeah, I'm not going to talk about the brand name of the coffee that was taken away, but I will say this.

Everyone complained about that brand name coffee ceaselessly until it was taken away and another subpar brand was brought in, and I think everything just ground to a halt because we live and breathe off of coffee here. Yeah. Well, I remember I was one of the early protesters in that particular movement. But no, but I was protesting before anybody else, I think, really noticed the change. And so then I was like, all right, I give up the new this is the new order with coffee. I spring

my own coffee. And then everybody got up in arms and she changed everything. So yeah, yeah, and the Twitter feeds were just going nuts. They were. Luckily it didn't turn violent, um, and we were only tear gast ones. Yeah, it's just not too bad. Um. I mean, you know, in a workplace, right. Yeah, But let's talk about one of the original protesters, or at least in American history that we think of Henry David Threau. Oh, yes, Henry David Threau um in nineteenth century American philosopher, and his

big thing was civil disobedience. He was against slavery, which was legal at the time. He was against the US war with Mexico, and so he was like, you know what, you know, things the way they are. If this was a meal at a restaurant, I would refuse to pay for it, So I'm going to refuse to pay for it my taxes, taxes. He decided to just not gonna pay his taxes, and and he was not injuring into this situation thinking I'm going to stop paying my taxes.

Good luck funding that war without Henry David's dough behind it. Now that that wasn't really his his approach, but he was making a statement that that as individuals, we can choose not to support the things that we disagree with, right, We don't have to accept the status quo. Right. Yeah. So of course they came and arrested him eventually, because that's what happens when you don't pay your taxes, you

get put in the pokey. Yes, at least, but this is really the birth of this idea of civil disobedience UM is a way to combat perceived ills in the world around you. Rosa Parks is another great example of civil disobedience. UM. Of course she she is famous for helping to uh begin the civil rights movement right with the Alabama bus boycott. Yeah, this was ve and at the time, Alabama state law required UM, black individuals to set at the back of the bus and relinquish their

seat to white individuals if the vehicle was full. So Rosa Parks decided, you know, I'm not going to comply with this. I'm going to set where I want to set and uh and this and again this is not a situation. She was like, I'm going to change the world with one movement, No, with with with one decision to you know, to to disagree. But it ended up kickstarting. This was like the snowball down the hill. Right. Eventually you have a three d eighty one day boycott of

the Montgomery bus system. In the following year, the US Supreme Court banded segregation on public transportation. Right. And this wasn't as improvised as as it sounds. Because she was a member of the Double A C p UM. There was UM Joanne Robinson. She was a black woman and a professor in all black Alabama State College, and she thought it was time to to test the law. And so Rosa Parks had completed a workshop on civil disobedience before she was arrested, and she knew very well what

she was doing and what they were trying to accomplish. Yeah, as as much as much as we may want to sometimes interpret that story is it's a lady on the bus and she finally just had too much and sat down. Um, it wasn't quite that, but still, Uh, well, that's what I love about that because I think that it shows that there was this network going on, a lot of fun being put into this, a lot of work being

put into this. And there's a great article called How the Civil Rights Movement Work by John Fuller that goes into this more detail if you're interested. Um, but this is the time obviously that's pre Facebook, Twitter, email, So it's really amazing that people were able to really get all of these details down and execute very well planned situations. And I mean we're talking about the situations that were

years in the planning. Yeah. And of course, the other big name in protests, non violent protest is Mahatma Gandhi who in the eighteen and nineties, early eighteen Nini, who worked as a legal advisor to an Indian law from in South Africa. So he's he's you know, he starts off not like the Mohamma Gandhi we come to identify with and the iconic Gandhi that we we know. But

while there he encountered rachel intolerance. He in sain he was reading the works of Thorow tolstoy Um, even the writings of Jesus uh and uh well, the writings of Jesus, the tales of us, you know, and he ends up he ends up campaigning for the rights of Indians in South Africa and then returns back home to India itself and rallies of support against British colonial rule and the cast system. So he ends up coming up with a strategy called Satya Graja, which is Sanskrit for truth and firmness.

And this in itself to is based in in even older ideas that the date back to the Vedic panishards of non violence against any living thing. Uh that that his whole ideas, it was, you know, we're going to protest and we're just going to we're gonna keep it as non violent as possible, and uh, it kind of it kind of bleeds over into some of the stuff we talked about in Martyrs, the idea that if you if you sit there and take it, eventually it shames

the person dishing it out. And that's exactly what it did, and very similar to um, you know some of the things that happens. Civil rights movement people were absolutely aghast at how the government um or certain officials initially reacted and that put the pressure on those governments to make

huge sweeping changes. Yeah, there was a nineteen nineteen the British troops open fire and demonstrators and then there's this enormous massacre, uh and estimated three hundred seventy nine killed, over a thousand injured, and Gandhi ends up calling for non compliance. Indian public officials resigned from the British government, parents withdrew their children from British schools, and virtually anything

bearing the Royal seal was boycotted. So in India's struggle for independence ends up paying off like through this this measure and things things that could not have been one necessarily with violence or or violence have been used, you would have seen an entirely different unfolding of events and unfolding of the modern India. Yeah, the Satia Graja, I think was obviously key to this, right because it just said, you have to roomain passive, even if you're being kicked,

even if you're being beaten. We must refuse to act. And of course this is this is the the the upper hand that Gandhi and the protesters had eventually using this tactic. But of course, sometimes protests do turn violent, and I mean you can pretty much search for the phrase protest turns violent on Google News any day and you'll find a pretty recent example. I mean, it happens. You get people in a in an area, everyone's kind of riled up, their tensions mounting. There's generally some sort

of security police or military force keeping an eye on things. Uh, it's kind of a powder keg And I mean that's one of the things that Gandhi realized in his whole thing, was don't don't give them cause to set the powder keg off. And if they start setting the powder keg off, don't throw more powder on the fire. Right, And it doesn't it's not even just a protest, It could be a bunch of individuals congregating. Um. And I'm thinking about

Laura Logan. She was the chief foreign news correspondent for CBS. Uh. You know during the Egyptian Revolution in Tahier Square, she was brutally desaulted, assaulted, sexual assaulted. And again, this is a crowd that was initially coming together to celebrate and turned very violent. Um. So we'll talk a little bit more about that and how how and if you can actually read a crowd and try to avoid that. So what do we protest, Why do we do it? What's

at the heart of it? Well, you can't really talk about about protests about talking about group think a little bit and the whole the idea of like the wisdom of the crowds or well, there's sort of two sides to the coin. On one hand, there's the idea of the wisdom of the crowd. You get you get a you go out in the street, you ask what the opinion is, and then the street is going to be right. Well,

this is that idea of emergence. Right, And we've discussed this a little in the past, that if left to its own devices and within certain constraints, the crowd will do a better job at figuring things out than a single person. A really cool example of this this came up in an article I was writing for for How Stuff Works about the game Pandemic. This is a game where people collaborate to try and stop an outbreak on

a game board that looks like a map. And I was reading some interviews with the Dinner and he and this is the guy who created the guy who sat down and wrote out this game, planned it out. And he pointed out that when he if he plays the game by himself, like controlling all say four players, And again, this is a game where part of it is people have to get along and collaborate and potentially fight with each other about what are the best moves to initiate.

There's no leader per se, not an officially prescribed leader, so they have to kind of figure it out and decide what their group tactic is going to be, or or they're or if they're just going to fight about things.

But even even with this situation in place, he pointed out that when he was playing a game controlling all four players, he generally did not do as good as four individual players because you're gonna have Each of these individuals is gonna bring like new uh us new data, and if if they can work those out, they're going to actually do better than the guy who created the game.

Well see, and that's that's one of the things that uh I guess you could say one of the errors that people make when they talk about protests sometimes and then video they say that the crowd is irrational or full of irrational people. And what you're saying is is that there's you know, pointing to this sort of crowd intelligence that is happening, and that people aren't actually nuts, they're not being crazy. A lot of people who are

involved in this crowd are actually pretty pragmatic people. Right. Well, I think everyone has a rightful fear of mobs, I mean, and I think that's what plays into this. So so there's the idea that we know that a mob is a fearful thing when a when a crowd of people are out of control and and there's porks with pitchforks or fire or you know or whatever Frankenstein, right and Frankenstein in the movie and uh but but no, like a riot situation is not a good environment, and it

is one that is rightfully feared by by many. So it's easy to extrapolate that and say, I mean it ties back into the basic evolution. You know, are you going to make a type one air or type two air? Right? And so you look at a large group of people and you're like, I don't like to look at this. This is gonna they're out of control. Just look at the beard on that one guy, you know, like these

dirty bumps. Speaking of this is this is another common claim that people make that the crowd is poor, right right, yeah, the it's going to be the masses teaming out there to tear down the golden palaces of the of the rulers,

right yeah. And this is from an article from Psychology Today that's actually talking about the reasons why we protests, and it says people join mass protests to achieve personal goals that they are otherwise unable to realize, for example, getting jobs, affordable housing, or getting rid of their debts. But what counts in terms of people's motivations to protest is not so much their absolute poverty level, but their

relative poverty that is compared to their peers. Sociologists have called this a relative deprivation and it is important predictor of social unrest. So the point is there is that you might have someone who's protesting at say occupied Wall Street, who's doing fine. Actually they can put some you know, fine being meaning they can eat, they have clothes, they

have a place to live. So the point of it, though, is that the person that occupy Wall Street is saying, Okay, yes, I know that I'm doing better than this other person, this this other country. But the fact of the matter is I live here in this city with these people, and I should have the same access to opportunities and resources that this person next to me does, that my politician does, um, that the blue collar worker does, the

white collar worker does. And it's it's really important that while we tend to think of the US is a rich country, the fact of the matter is that the income gap between the rich and poor is much greater than anywhere else in the Western world. Um. So statistical data bears out that the more unequal society is, the more stressed and unhappy people are, and the more chance

again we have of social unrest. Now, two other ideas that are I think are pretty closely related that are brought up in the Psychology Today article one crowd members are all alike, and that the crowd has no face. Now the crowd members are all alike. This one is is one that I think tends to it. It tends to get be wound up in media coverage, like, for instance,

in in noticing various media outlets covering Occupy Wall Street. Granted, you only have so many photos to choose from, I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure a p getty all these places rolling out a lot of photos, but you tend to see people gravitating towards particular images, and like, there's just one of this dude that kind of looks like Andy and Parks and wreck Um with kind of like one of these beards I think, I know, yeah, yeah he and he has like one of these beards, except his

his mustaches shave, so it's kind of looks like giant wolverine ciders and he's like kind of yelling, and so you see that picture enough and you're kind of like, that's the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's kind of burly dudes with the crazy sideburns, yelling that haven't maybe they

haven't had a bath recently. Well, this is another thing that that comes up to This came up in the London riots as well, like how could so many people from so many different backgrounds, since you know, of all stripes of life, how could they all be together doing this? This is impossible, you know because not right next to Andy from parts of reck, you also have a guy in a business suit. Um. So it's funny because we've talked about this before. We like pattern recognition and we

like to keep it simple and easy. But the fact of the matter is is that all these people are coming together for a common cause. Um, it's not weird that there are people from all different walks of life getting together and protesting right now. But the idea that the crowd has no face, that's another thing that came up. You know, this is frequently cited, well, the like the occupied movement has no leader, you know, so they can't just shut down this leader or arrest this leader because

the movement is greater. That's true to sort of varying degrees with with movements, because even in something like Occupy Wall Street, during these occupied movements, you're going to have people that are more connected. You're gonna have I mean, just on a basic level, think of your own friend group. Um, there are people that are better organizers than others. I mean just like within you know, my own marriage, my

wife is much better organizer than me. So well, just even in the personality tests that we all took here and how stuff works, and some of us were put in a group and made play with legos, which was perfectly fine. Us and another group were made to play with legos unbeknownst to us, and then a third group had to clean all the floors. That was really weird. They like doing that. That's what their personality test said. Um, but you saw one group I'm gonna says, we were

all grouped in like UM dispositions. So in my group where the creative crazies, and so we made some sort of toy that made no sense and was inoperable. The other group made this was amazing to watch. The other group made this completely streamlined, UM, some sort of vehicle like with little people, and it was of course it was in running condition. So yes, you do have people who are you know, automatically going to start organizing and helping UM in a protest group situation. And then this

is another one that I found. It the idea that protests correlate to weather, and this one turns out to be true, or at least there's some there's some strong evidence to support the idea. Yeah, there's a Columbia University study and they used data from nineteen fifties two thousand four, and the researchers concluded that the likelihood of new conflicts arising in affected countries, mostly mostly located in the tropics

double during alminio years is compared with wetter, cooler years. Right, so the hot, dry weather was driving people nuts, raising their hackles. The the the theory goes right, and uh, this they say, we believe this finding represents the first major evidence that global climate is a major factor in organized violence around the world. This was said by Solomon his Young, the leader, the lead author of the study, who conducted all the research at Columba University. And then

another thing too, the Psychology Today article. I can't remember if it actually went into this, but you know, the recent upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa really can be traced to the region's youth, because we're talking about millions of young people facing widespread unemployment and seeing an earth of opportunities ahead of them. So you know, again we're seeing a lot of these sort of themes

coming up, opportunities lack of them. You know, you look at Occupy Wall Street and you know, some people have sort of made light of that because there's some there's some yoga going on, there's some hacky sack playing. Um. Again, some of the people that are in that group, Um, you might point to and say, but you've got it, You've got it. Fine, Well I think we should we should see more yoga practice. Actually we should. It's a

really good idea on both sides. Yeah. Um, but again, there is this this sense that that there is injustice going on that needs to be right it. All right, Well, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss crowd psychology a little more and get into what you can do to protect yourself when you encounter a protests with This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel.

At Intel, we believe curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions. All right, we're back crowd psychology the group think in action. UM. We mentioned a little earlier the idea that four people playing a game are going to do better than one person playing a game. That if you that the street is wiser than the individual, and that and that if you were to pull a number of individuals in a group about a particular topic, UM,

on average, they would get it right. This is the classic like, I guess how many jelly beans are are in that bottle? Right? But if you want to kill this jelly being phenomenon, the one thing that will do it really well, aside from I guess like putting a hall of cylinder in the middle of the jelly beans or something, would be uh to aggregate the information when the When the information is aggregated amongst the people being pulled, drastic fall off and crowd wisdoms. So is that when

people become informed of others decisions? Yeah, or I think, um, it's it's like, for instance, when you can if you all everybody and you ask him a question such as, um, do you think the President of the United States as

a US citizen? And then but but then if you expose them to poll data shows that a large number of people are in question about it or or say global warming is another one where if you're exposed people to enough polls and enough data that represents the idea that hey, lots of people think this is uh, this is bunk, then people's uh wisdom on the data on

the matter will be affected. Well see. And I think that's really important when you're talking about crowd psychology, right, because yes, there there's a self organizing aspect to it, um. But when you are sharing data and you know you do hear everybody else's opinions, I mean, that's when you can start to go a bit awry and logic. So, yes,

they're they're the crowd. The most part is rational, but we've seen it turned irrationally, especially if it if it is being controlled and people are being told what to what to think. I mean, one thing to keep in mind with protests. As much as we we like to discuss the really good examples of protests, UM, one of the most successful protests in the twentieth century was, in some respects the Nazi Party. I remember the rise of

the Nazi Party in Germany. H A lot of that began as protests, and then the protests were successful enough that they ended up becoming the government. So yeah, that's interesting to think of it that way and how that that error in logic rose to to really just yeah, and for every great example of civil rights protests out there, you can find another equally disturbing um say, klan klu

klux klan group thing going on as well. So that's just something to keep in mind about the free market of ideas and the use of protests to try and turn the tide of public sentiment. This is interesting too. This is from psychologist Clifford Stock at the University of Liverpool in England. He has a theory of crowd behavior

called the elaborated social identity model. This holds that individuals and crowd do keep thinking for themselves, um on top but their individual identities, though they also develop a makeshift social identity which includes everyone else in the group. When the group faces oppositions such as police indiscriminately bashing it's the members of the group with batons. The social identity congeals members of the group began to work together to

fight with it sees as common oppressors. So that's that maybe some sort of insight, uh, particularly into the Nazi example that you're talking about that if someone, if the group feels on some level that there in danger, then all of a sudden, your your individualism will seed to group think. Yeah, which explains a lot of why a protest can be successful and also why it can potentially collapse into violence. Okay, let's say it all goes to poo. What do we do? Well? Um, it depends exactly how

it goes to poo. Actually, UM, I'll tell you one thing to keep in mind. We reference this earlier when we brought up the idea of our bosses tear gassing us tear gas. I just wrote an article about this for Housta Works, How tear gas Works, which should be on the site by the time this episode airs. And uh, there are a number of things to do if you get tear gas. First of all, tear gas is it's commonly used as actually cs gas, and it is generally not lethal. It is less lethal if you want to

get technical, though. It is also technically a chemical weapon, and it's used just around the world no matter what country you're talking about, because it is an effective riot control agent. And the reason is because if you were hit with tear gas, you pretty much are only concerned with the horrendous burning in your eyes, in your mouth,

possibly in your lungs, and on your skin. It really tends to simplify a situation what starts off as you know, I believe that people of my generation don't have a proper say and government blah blah blah. It ends up devolving into, oh, my goodness, I need to get some water on my face now. And so people tend to scatter, and certainly, if you were tear gas, scattering is a good idea provided you can see where you're going and there's not a danger in running, because you want to

get away from the source of the tear gas. And then you're gonna want to if you have if you have contacts in you're gonna want to get those out, preferably with hands that have not been and so clean hands beings like you know, if you can find somebody who can jab them out of your eyes for you, or or preferably medical relief. A lot of protests, you're gonna have some people on hand to provide medical support afterwards for individuals who have who have been pure gas.

So ideally, like you would have safety goggles on, you would have some sort of surgical gloves on, you might look odd. But you also see individuals attending protest with gas mass with be they you know, commercially available gas mask or improvised gas masks. I'm not saying do that, but some people. If you don't have it, you know, try a scarf. That's not as effective. But obviously there are things that you can do to prepare if you if you think that you will be in the middle

of a protest. Yeah, the big thing with tear gas is you want to get away from it. You want to get it off of you, and then you'll probably be okay. Prolonged exposure that's where things get dangerous. And this is kind of a observation, but it probably bears mentioning that if you don't want to get hit with tear gas, if you don't want uh the police to uh maybe aggravate you a bit, do not be in the front lines. Try to be on the periphery of

the crowd. Um. Of course, that would make a really crappy protest if everybody did that, but if this is what you're trying to avoid, then it makes sense that you would back off a little bit. Yeah. Oh and then the other thing too, if you get it on your clothing, you're gonna take that. Take those clothing items off as soon as possible. You're gonna want to shower.

And if you have it on your your shirt, you might want to consider cutting the shirt off if it has to be removed over your head, because otherwise you're going to be dragging a tear gas coat shirt across your face. So just another small thing to worry about there. But then also it's worth knowing that some individuals are are going to be hyper sensitive to tear gas, and that's certainly a situation to be aware of. But then

also some people have a surprising immunity to to your gas. Right, so there's no way to know unless you have been gassed, really, but you know, well, I mean you can know if you have a heightened the immunity. You mean, you may have like a compromised immune system. If you were a child, if you weren't an elderly individual, then that's a pretty good sign that to your gas is going to have

a rougher effect on you. Yeah, let's talk about policing too, because obviously the police are there, they're not trying to be the bad guys. Sometimes things happen and they inadvertently end up being the bad guys. They didn't set out to be the bad guys. That's a very difficult position for someone to be in, stressful, it's potentially dangerous for them and for you. So, you know, how do you behave if if you are confronted by a police officer, Well,

a lot of it. I mean it lines up basically what Gandhi was saying, right, I mean, if if some if some dude is is clubbing people in front of you, or I mean not even clubbing, if they're just say, right, you know, resting everybody inside. If you were passive, if you are visibly not a threat, then you're you're going to be better off. You're less likely to to probably be beat with a a baton or um, to be put in a position of aggression by a police officer.

That of course, we have seen examples before where that's not necessarily true. But if this is something that you're doing again, you've got to keep that in mind. Um, And what do you do if a police officer or someone else in the crowd becomes very aggressive with you? I mean, there are actually a couple of things that you can think about doing. It takes foresight and it takes all a lot of concentration, but you can help

to diffuse a situation. Well, um, one of the this comes from the book How to Want to Fight that we're looking at and then certainly we're not we're certainly not advocating getting in a fight with anybody. You're not advocating this this book, per se. We're just there's some information in it that was helpful. Yeah, And one of one of these was that if you were in a situation where where someone is acting aggressively towards you, and in a protest environment, this could be even one of

your fellow protesters, that things get out of hand. Um, they say, if you were to say something confusing or perplexing that that is, that is out of character with the situation, that can help if only providing like one brief moment to slip away or to or to distill the aggression of the other. End. Right, So if someone were about it seemed like someone was about to attack you, then you could calmly say to them something like do

you know what time it is? Which sounds ridiculous, but really what's happening is that it's creating this this mental sort of flicker in their brains, and it's cognitive dissonance, right, because they're like what, who cares what? Because they would expect someone to say, like occupy this or back off pig, right. I mean that's the kind of that's kind of the kind of stuff that that someone in an aggressive mindset

in that situation might expect them to say. And if you don't play along with that, with that transcript, right, with a social role that you're playing right right, then

that that can potentially help diffuse the situation. Yeah. And another effective thing to do is to calmly, again, calmly say something along the lines of, you know, there are a lot of surveillance cameras around here, or there are a lot of people with video surveillance UM or you know, cell phone video, so that you can get that person to back out of their heads a little bit and and sort of see the big picture of the situation and maybe even think, okay, this is you know, someone's

about to record, um, some sort of transgression on my part. Yeah. And if you manage to make it away from a protest that has fallen apart into some sort of violent situation, take it an indirect route home, don't don't go the direct route necessarily. Yeah, I read that, and I wondered about that. Um, is this I wondered if this was a sort of extension of police going after people. Um, although I'm assuming that if you're on your way home,

you're probably out of nabbing distance, I think that. Yeah, I think this one just basically it's kind of like you're being herded into arrest kind of a situation. It's about, you know, arrest avoidance. And that's the other thing. If someone is trying to arrest you at a protest, you

should probably just comply and be arrested. Really, I mean, I mean, certainly we're not to advocate that anyone try to avoid arrest lawful arrest, but I mean, if it's a situation between being chased down or hit with the rupper bullet versus giving yourself up to the authorities that are cracking down in the protests, you know, and if

you're about to get caught to this is sort of interesting. Again, it's from from the book, but they were basically saying that it sounds querintuitive, but if you're about to get struck, you should try to relax your muscles. Yeah. The reason is because your reaction time is going to be a lot slower if you lock up all your muscles in anticipation of a blow. So if you're going to try to avoid it, then that's what you'd want to do.

I mean, it's very kind of kung fu, right, because you know it looks like a batter on the mound, right. If the batter is stressed out, they're not going to have as they may be as powerful as all get out, but they're not gonna have as much control over this swing. Yeah. And and this is this is kind of funny. From the book, they said when a drillin hits your system, you become tougher and more resilient. But the downside is

that you become a one task, knuckle dragging troglodyte. So the more stressed you are, the more your body shuts down. And we're talking from fine motor skills like finger dexterity and I hand coordination to the loss of depth perception and then of course irrational thinking. So there's just some ideas about how you might respond to a protest environment. Yeah, and and this again, this is sort of timely. This piece of information to um in the final hours of

protest um. But you know, when the permits are about to expire, this is usually when the police make most of their arrests because now they can kind of charge in and do that. So so go early and leave while they're wanting you to stay right exactly like basically, like with any party, leave on a high note. So let's leave on a high note on this one then, UM.

And though certainly we invite any ideas and opinions related to this topic, because because this is more than than than a lot of them, there's some aspects of it that are that are open to interpretation in terms of like what, for instance, what the best response is. I mean these right, Yeah, I would love to hear from people who have perhaps been in many protests before, what

have your experiences been like? And then what has it been like when people like try to keep it cool and try to you know, try to engage in non violence and uh and and passive responses to all of this be honesty to hear a new tails. I'd love to leave off with a quote from Martin Luther King

about his take on the psychology of the disenfranchised. There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it, who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. That's a pretty stage. Words from Martin Luther King. Well, hey, I'm gonna reach into the listener mail folder if the robot

will hand it to me. Thank you, robot. So this one here is from Hannah Hannah wrightesin and says, Dear Robert and Julie, I recently listened to your podcast on sports and was intrigued by a passing bit event from Nation. When you were talking about the brain simulating throwing a baseball when watching baseball being baseball being thrown, Robert mentioned the brain doing the same while reading. As the family's resident bookworm, it has been pointed out to me that

while reading, I make a lot of facial expressions. My parents and sister tease me for this, but I have found that these expressions are not of my reaction to the book, but reflect the emotions of the characters. For example, of a character's browse for a mine will be as well. I always attributed this to general quirkiness, but it was fascinating to hear that, hear what might be going on in my head. I love the podcast You guys make

College Apps season a lot less stressful, Oh college application, Susan. Yeah, as opposed to like something on your phone? Yeah yeah, um yeah, that's that's interesting. I mean her her mirror neurons were definitely at work there. And I was just thinking too about the Imaginary Friends podcast that we did and which we talked about the authors sometimes engaging with the characters are creating as imaginary friends, in fact thinking of them as imaginary friend and so a lot of

that plays into it, the empathy part um. I have one quick email from a listener named Savar, and Savar said, I just heard your last podcast and heard Julie say that adrenaline fledgs your body. I'm a biology student. I just recently found out that the amount of adrenaline needed to trigger the fight or flight response is actually minuscule. Adrenaline has roughly the same concentration in your body as

an aspirin tablet dissolved an Olympic sized swimming pool. Okay, so that was kind of that's pretty fascinating, right, like that that that amount could make you feel as that you were having adrenaline rush, like you as if you

were being flooded with adrenaline that you're not, so thank you, savar. Alright, Well, if you guys have any tidbits to share with us, uh, you know, especially about protests, your own experiences with them, your own thoughts about them, uh, and about I mean just the the idea of protests is this social thing. I mean, that's what fascinates me the most, um and certainly just what engaged me the most, and writing that

article about protests. Share them with We are on Facebook and Twitter, We're blow the Mind on both of those and you can always share your thoughts by sending us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.