Hello concealed coalition family, Austin Davis, your national director of training, and I'm so glad about this month's webinar topic. It's about travel. I've been teaching this for about 30 years and I've traveled as a individual all over for pleasure. I've traveled for business, I've traveled as a police officer. It left me with a lot of stories for my students and myself. I've traveled in the best hotels. You know the ones that got them big thick robes and big thick towels. I mean, before you check it out, you can barely get your suitcase closed. I've been at hotels so bad and so sketchy, they stole my towels. I've flown first class where it's all the free liquor you can drink and I don't drink, so I'm passing off to my neighbor and I've flown things as slowly as commuter flight. Never forget one time I'm on commuter and lady walks on the airport before taking off and she says, excuse me, how much do you weigh?
I said, excuse me. She goes, I Sid, how much do you weigh? So I asked her, why do you want to know? And she said, we need to know how much fuel to put on the airplane. Dig in my pocket, pull out my credit card, fill the damn thing up, looking at the one next to me. 95 pounds. Oh yes, Ms. Ozempic, I'm sure I've been to some very safe places. I had dangerous moments. I've been to some very dangerous places, had some very safe moments. And the whole point about travel in this thing is I want you to understand that we talk about travel. You're probably going to be safer if you leave the continental United States than you are here, but I'm going to ask you three questions to kind of set this on up. Number one, do you think that you could spot a traveler anywhere you're in the world and do you think travelers face unique security challenges?
And if you think about it in your town, if I came and traveled to where you live, you would probably be able to tell me where some places I should go. Shouldn't go, could go in the daylight, maybe not in the nighttime, but your local knowledge though would keep a traveler a lot safer to get access to it. And that's kind of my whole point with this brief talk today is to help you get through this travel season as safe as possible. I'm going to break this down into four sections. One is know before you go because problems we leave at home don't travel well, and there's a whole lot of things we can do before we leave that can make the trip a whole lot safer. I'm going to talk about the actual travel itself. Planes, trains, automobiles, cabs. I'm going to talk about hotel safety because as I might say more than once in this topic, what is a hotel security professional?
It is a room that you have a bunch of keys to, you have room you have a key to and a whole bunch of other people have a lot of keys to as well. And then I'm going to talk to you about some situational awareness that really ties in very closely with what we teach in Conceal Coalition University. Also in the book I wrote on situational awareness, but the three big ones that really relate to travelers. So let's kick this party off and let's get started. First off, before you go, a couple things you might want to think about. Number one, research where you're going to go. Now you could just be traveling to someplace the United States or in my case, I tend to travel overseas once or twice a year, so I need to do some research. A couple of months ago I just went over to Egypt and I spent some time there, had a great time, had no problems, but I had a lot of people telling me, oh my gosh, I can't believe you're going to Egypt.
It's a place where you can't carry a gun. Well, first off, if you think if you can't travel because you can't carry a gun there, you might want to rethink your security profile and I'm not so sure that you need a gun to be safe in other places. As you always said, for me a gunfight is the least most important part of a gunfight. There's a whole lot of other stuff other than having a gun to be safe. So before you go do your research, a couple of things you might want to do is get online and find out the current crime trends. Find out the cities you're going to and what the current situation is and if you can get on some sort of form or blog and find some local knowledge early on, things might go a whole lot better for you. The second thing is before we leave our home home, problems don't travel well.
So what we want to do is first off, go back and watch concealed coalition university about home safety. Remember in our home if we want to keep it safe while we're there or while we're overseas traveling or around the country traveling, make sure you always have three layers. First layer is psychological protection, whether you're home or whether you're away. We don't have the criminals to go, wow, there's a lot of houses in this neighborhood on this block, in this community. I'm going to take that one. And for specific reason, remember when we think about home security as a psychological protection, all crimes star, the thought in the colonel's head going, I want that especially if they think I want that house because people are going to be gone for a while. So if you're going to leave your house unattended, your apartment, your home, your boat, your travel trailer, your rv, whatever you live in, you might want to leave your responsible person behind as a police officer.
If you do that, make a note, a letter for them that says they have a right to be here and then go ahead and attach a copy of some Id like your driver's license. So if there is some sort of report that hey, the Davis family's gone and someone's living in that house and moving around, if the police show up, you can show the document that hey, I have a right to be there. And if they're not staying there and they have to show up because you had an alarm call or in my case we had a water leak once, whatever big water main blew out and we had to from overseas call back and have the person watching our house deal with the contractors and getting it dug up and turning off the water and turning it on and purging the valves. Fortunately for us, we had to handle all that with someone who we really left good documentation on and they had a way to go ahead and pay the contractor so you'd have to transfer the money over.
So before you leave three layouts, first off, psychological, second, good fiscal security, good door and window locks, and before you leave, make sure everything's locked. Also, the third thing is actual protection. Make sure that mail doesn't stack up If you're my mother, newspapers don't stack up. I'm not sure who exactly over the age of 75 has newspapers anymore, but you want to make sure the mail comes on in Amazon packages don't pile up and make sure you secure anything that's left in the house, totally anything that you don't feel comfortable leaving the house. Maybe you can leave with a trusted friend who's got a gun safe if it's jewelry, firearms or whatnot, and then make sure you have good insurance coverage and that you've recorded those things you're leaving behind so that if a firearm or some big expensive thing leaves, you have documentation on it so you secured your home.
Now we start thinking about how we're going to pack. First off, save yourself a lot of trouble when it comes time to get your suitcase out, whatever you're going to pack on, I want you to take your dominant hand for me. That's my right hand. I want you to reach around. I want you to dig in every nook and cranny of every pocket, every crevice. Make sure there is not a firearm in there, ammunition in there or gun magazine in there. Some countries you travel to, you may have problems. I believe it's Turks in the Caico. We have a couple of American citizens right now who are jammed up because they had a bullet. I am very familiar with two individuals in my lifetime who got jammed up in Mexico because one had a 45 caliber bullet in their suitcase and a completely different instance, someone had nine millimeter round single rounds, not a fire, not anything else, but what happens is in Mexico they consider that importation of military armament and it doesn't matter if that military caliber is one round or it's a Conex box full of them, it's treated as the same.
So before you leave, make sure there's nothing in there that's going to cause a problem. Next thing when you get ready to pack and you got everything in there, what my wife and I do is I take half of her stuff and put it in my bag, half of her stuff in her bag. That way if we lose a suitcase and my suitcase gets lost in transit, I can go ahead and have half my clothes there so I don't have to use her bag without this little tip, which means I'd be going to dinner on a cruise ship and a beat it ball gown and sensible flats when you're ready to load up your bag, also think about some things that you're going to take and some things you shouldn't take. Some things I don't really want people to take on trips or anything that you're going to be overly concerned about losing.
My theory is I don't want to take anything on a road trip, whether it's in America or overseas that I really can't afford to lose. So family heirloom jewelry, that kind of stuff, you probably don't want to take it with you. So start thinking about the things that irreplaceable that cause more stress and benefit. My wife has a throw down travel ring. I wear a little rubber wedding ring, but she would not wear the same wedding ring she wears in Houston, Texas that she's going to wear in Egypt or all the other countries we go to overseas. So think about that when you start loading your bag in though, think about some other things. I had a corporate client who got jammed up and of all places Denmark, we live in the swampy area of Houston, Texas, and they had taken a couple of big Costco packs of Sudafed with them and they got hemmed up when they tried to bring them into Denmark because Denmark thought they were importing narcotics.
I've had some other people who have the daily pill pack where Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, just pop it and take those who got hemmed up when they travel, especially overseas because it is not in the bottle with the prescription with their name on it. So what I'd recommend is when you're packing your medications to make sure you secure those in the bottle with the doctor with the prescription, the state I live in Texas alone, that is a crime to be carrying prescription without it being in that labeled container. So something to kind of think about as you're packing your stuff on out. A couple other things you might want to think about as you pack is breaking it down into thirds. I think of level one, level two and level three packing level one are the things I'm going to keep on my body that I put my little travel billfold, I stuff it down the front of my pass.
I have my daily cash and just whatever I need to deal with from day to day right there, but all my other level one stuff goes in deep protection, so I would never put my credit cards or my passport in level three, which is the big bag. So that's the stuff that stays on you. Level two is going to be your purse, your backpack, your fanny pack, whatever, which is always going to stay with you, but it's not the stuff that you're carrying in you and it's not the stuff you would leave behind or check on the bag. And the third bag of course is what we're going to check on the plane or carry on the plane that's got most of our stuff. That level two thing. Let's go back to that though. Your prescription medication probably need to be a that level two thing.
Your electronics probably need to be a that level two thing. It's easy to leave the big bag behind, but this one always stays with you when you're packing. There's a few other little things you might want to take with you. A couple things I always want to put in my suitcase is hotel locks. I had this one for probably 15, 20 years. It clips in there, door slips behind it doesn't matter if you have a key or not, it's not opening up. We recently went to, these are super grip locks. You can get them for about four bucks off Amazon. It's sort of a Velcro band and what this does is it loops over the lock loops around the door handle and then velcro's back in and the inside throw for the deadbolt can't be turned, takes up no room, takes up no weight, and it's not prohibitively expensive.
A couple other things I like to take is an RIDF wallet. I'm not sure how difficult that's going to be in the area you're traveling, but nobody's going to be able to scan over this with all your credit cards in it and deep insecurity, so pretty handy. A couple of defensive tools that I always take with me is one serious bad flashlight. This one is a cloud defensive. It's got a theorem ring. If you've got the book on the light, you know what it is and how to deal with it, but I have found in my travels that anytime I'm out after dark with my wife and some dudes roll up on us, boop, quick blight of light right in our eyes tends to shut things down. Kind of saved me one night on a walk in pa. It was in Italy somewhere. This escapes me exactly with talent, but at night, just a blast of light in the dude's face and it shut things down.
Also of sudden walking down the street, little blip of light here, little blip of light there. It tends to keep the locals who are sort of bad intend kind of away from me. Then two other tools I carry is I have to carry a zebra pen. These are dirt cheap and they make wonderful tactical pens and for many, many, many years I've traveled with this one. This is aade and if you'll notice real closely right there, it's got little hearts on it and it's pink. What I like about this pen is it allows me to cap my thumb on top and it gives me a striking tool that I can put this in my flashlight on any x-ray and get into museums or secured hotel spaces or passport offices and no one even thinks twice about a pink pen. Even lower is these. And the reason I like zebras is they're stainless steel.
You can still cap it off of your thumb and you can still work it. One thing you might want to consider carrying a pepper spray if you do decide to carry a pepper spray, a couple things. One is these cannot go on the plane, they have to go in your check baggage. Number two, be very careful about the country you're traveling. It could be a problem. This is where you really want to research it before you take on off. I never fly home with these. If it goes with me one way, I leave it with a guide or a guest or just anybody that really treated me well in the trip because it's not really worth the hassle trying to bring this back and the risk of having it in there. I also put this in a Ziploc bag so if it does leak, it'll help kind of contain what's coming out of this.
So once you've packed, you broke things on down into level one, level two, level three, level one, the stuff you have on your body, which is stuff you cannot afford to lose in deep concealment. Hopefully level two is a belly bag or whatnot. And the last thing I always want to make sure I pack for me is I like to pack a small first aid kit for little booboos. I also like to pack a kit in there with a lot of over the counter medication. I like leaving the original package so if we have tummy troubles or diarrhea or whatever rehydration salts, I can go ahead and treat that by having to find the local pharmacy and figure everything out. And most importantly, I carry basic trauma kit. I carry two tourniquets, I carry wound packing material and I carry gloves and I carry trauma shears with me so that if I do have a problem of getting hit by a vehicle on the street or have a car crash or come on something, I can do all the necessary things that as they stop the bleed instructor and as an alert first responder medical that I need to have handy.
These tools don't weigh much. They're not expensive and they don't even cause a second thought if you just put 'em all in one big Ziploc bag with all your meds and it works out really well. Okay, we pack smart, we're not taking anything we shouldn't take. We're taking everything we should take. We make sure we put a big piece of paper with our name and our contact information so that somehow the tag gets knocked off there and the airports open up or the train station, they can see your contact information on the inside. You've checked with your hand to make sure nothing's in there. You've broken it down. 1, 2, 3, and you're ready to go. Okay, let's talk about some things here. First off, airplanes. I think the statistics are if you flew every day for 26,000 years, that's about the odds of you being in a plane crash.
Now me, when I get on an airplane these days and I see the Boeing thing on the side, I keep wondering if I should bring a multi-tool with me and maybe some spare bolts and nuts to hold things in. A few things about airplane flight, it's probably the safest travel you're going to have, but some things we might want to think about. Number one is where your seatbelt as much as you can. We recently had I believe a fatality and many people hurt when they hit a big air pocket and when happens the plane goes down, object, motion and stand motion object rest and stand rest and the people in the side of the plane go bouncing off the ceiling. So as much as you can keep your seatbelt on as often as possible, may want to also start listening to the safety briefing before planes takes off when you're listening to them, you can ignore some things like in case of a water landing, your seat cush can be used as a flotation device.
I'm like, okay, we're at 30,000 feet, we crashed in the ocean, I've got my under the seat going, kick, paddle, float, kick, paddle, float. I'm not sure that's exactly going to be helpful, but what I do want to know is where are my emergency exits in front of me and behind me I count how many seats are there, how many seats are back, and I think about if I did have to leave, who I'm going to grab, who I'm going to work out, who I'm going to get over if the lights go out, I know how many seats I can count to get on out. I think that that's probably pretty prudent if you don't have somebody traveling with you and you have to go to the bathroom, make sure that you zip and lock all the stuff you leave behind. So while you're gone that passeng next you doesn't cause a problem.
And you might want to think about brushing up on your deescalation skills because if you watch as much YouTube as I do, we see a lot of passengers kind of getting into each other business. So remember for sure deescalation don't escalate the situation, you should be okay in the airplane. Next thing we're going to talk about though is trains. My favorite way to travel in Europe is a train. It is like being treated like an adult. Nobody frisked me so hard they find stuff I've been looking for like they do at home, they just let you get on. The problem though is when you have your type two and type three luggage and you have to leave it and a lot of these, it's in a big shelf kind of back by the door and that could be a bit of a problem. We talked earlier about packing a retractable cable lock.
This would be a really great place to just go ahead and run that cable through a handle. We're not trying to defeat bolt cutters or professional thieves, just the opportunities and that could really do a whole lot to keeping your stuff safe. Taxis, I've had two scary taxi situations, one in South America and one in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, both of which could have turned really ugly. So things to think about with taxis is first off before you get in, make sure it's a legit taxi check to make sure it's got a license plate on it. If you can look in the front and see if the picture of the driver is the same picture of that person there, make sure they have some sort of meter on there before you get in, make sure that we agree on where we're going and roughly what it's going to cost.
One of the things you want to do in your free workup before you leave for some place is print out a paper map. So when you're in that town, you're leaving from the airport, from the airport to some other place, you have a rough idea of the most logical place for them to go. And that way if they are driving off to meet with some friends of theirs in a remote location, either rob you or hurt you. You can tell when things start getting off pace to save me in my near robbery and gosh knows what else in my taxi situation at Fort Lauderdale. And once you're in the cab, make sure you don't share it with strangers and be very careful if the driver starts wanting to take you at a different place than you originally agreed upon. And finally, automobiles. If you're going to take a local trip and you're taking your own car, first off, my heart goes out to you.
That is my absolute favorite way. Road trips. Some things to think about though if you're going on a road trip. Number one, make sure your vehicle maintenance is up to speed. Make sure your spare tire is filled up and remember Quarters Inc is empty tank, so we never want to get so low on gas, we have to go put ourselves in our family and our stuff in a bad spot, in a really sketchy fuel situation. Next thing is try to keep as much of the possessions out of view as you travel, especially if you're going to leave your vehicle unattended while you go in for a meal or the bathroom or entertainment or whatnot. And if at all possible, as soon as you get to a place of safety, whether it's friends, family or hotel room, take everything you can out of the vehicle and put it in the hotel.
Check with locals. Also, there are some places where it's not safe to keep anything in your car. The most classic example in my mind comes right now with San Francisco. I've heard some incredible horse stories, a vehicle's getting popped just sitting out in the street and for ridiculous things like just change in the cup. So be very aware of local knowledge now, hotel safety in our research before we leave, I hope you not only found a hotel for you to stay at, whether that's a hotel or Airbnb, a bed and breakfast or whatnot. Have a backup plan because if you show up and all of a sudden that some guy's cleaning a rusty AK out there and chewing on cot, that may not be the place you want to be. If you go to check in and the receptionist is behind a bulletproof glass, a little piece of opening for you to put your money in, that may not be the place.
And if you don't already have another place figured out where you know that you can cancel this reservation and go the next, it could be a problem. When it comes time to picking the room, if you get a choice, I would prefer you to be probably somewhere between three and four or two and maybe top of six. The reason is if you're at the ground floor, it's easy for anybody on the grounds to kind of come on in and breach your perimeter. If you're up much higher than like five or six, it may be difficult for certain fire departments to come up and get you in case of a fire. If you can pick a room that's not directly across from the elevator, I think there's some huge advantage to that. One of the big concerns I have is somebody bum rushing in the hotel room.
I've had many of my corporate travel clients and seminars telling me about how that happened. Somebody's just walking down the hall, you think they're normally, you open the door and all of a sudden they push you in and once they get in, they lock the door. Now they're in a secure place to do the bad things they want to do. If you suspect someone is going to bum rush you don't get your key out, don't push it. I think you'd stand a much better chance of surviving a conflict in a hallway, yelling, help, help, help. Then you in your room where even the yelling of help, help, help may not help you When it comes time to go in, you need to decide if you're going to prop and peep or lock and look prop and peek or lock and look, if I'm in a motel six on a ground floor and there's some sketchy people there, I want to open the thing.
I want to get in close it, then I want to check the room. If I think there could be potentially someone in that room and we'll talk in a minute how those things might concern me, I want to prop the door open with my bag, go in and check that way. If there is a problem, I have an open exit on the way out. Once I get in my hotel room, I want to check the door and I want to check the door jam and I want to see how secure it is. I want to also check the windows and sliding glass doors and any connecting door that goes between rooms. Remember this is our temporary place of sanctuary and if we were talking about this insecurity for your home, that would be level two security, good door and window locks. Since we're in a hotel, we have to take other preparations and again, that's why I carry one of these for the inner joining room and one of these for the front.
And if we had some more time, there's some ways you can secure the windows and sliding glass doors, which can keep the bad guys out. Simple internet search will help you figure that out. What you're in there, start to also figure out how you're going to secure the stuff that you leave behind. If you're traveling domestically anywhere in the United States, you might want to take a lockable box with you with a retractable cable lock so that you can go ahead and tie it to a fixed point. So while that doesn't mean they're not going to break the piping on the toilet or the sink or the table leg that you got this round, at least you can show documented evidence that somebody used force to get it out and they're still going to have to beat on the box to get it open eventually. So if you're traveling with a firearm, think about that, especially if you're going to leave it behind with other people because I don't want the maids there.
I don't want to kid you're involved with. So if you travel with a firearm, firearm, take the lockable box with you and find a way to secure it. Absolutely your valuables decide what you will and will not travel with what you will and will not secure in a hotel room and what needs to be put in the hotel safe or security deposit box. I'm not that convinced that a hotel safe in a room is all that burglar proof. It may be more with some than others, but if you watch YouTube, you're going to see that those are pretty easily breached, but that may be the lesser of two evils in your decision. And when you leave the room, you may want to do what I do. I leave the TV and the lights on and I leave the do not disturb sign out there. Sometimes I'll bend the edge of it and put it right in the crack of the door.
So if I come back down the hallway from a distance and it's sitting flat, not in the crack, I know that may be a potential sign, there could be a problem. Open the door, I come in, the lights are off, the TV's off. That could be another sign. Things are there. There's some apps that are called photo traps. You can take a picture of things when you open the door, you'll know insulate something got moved. That might be if something you might want to look into. And one final thing about the hotel is what is an elevator security specialist? That's a room you get on a stranger that only has one opening between floors and if you do have a problem, hit all the buttons you can. Don't hit the stop because that freezes things in place. Also, if you have some little voice, your Olympic system screaming, we got a problem.
Don't be afraid to do the universal racer. Snap your fingers, slap your forehead and get off. So if somebody sketches getting on and you got a bad vibe for this thing and you don't be locked up in a small metal room with no exits between floors, turn around, walk right on off. Even if it's not your floor, if you think that person comes on and they give you some bad vibes and you don't get bum rushed on your floor, you may want to push another floor after you go and then press on so they don't know which floor you're on. A few years ago, many years ago now, about 16 years ago, a local news station had me go out and I conned my wind to giving the clerk to give me the hotel key to get in rooms. So we don't want to give, if you think someone's sketchy there, don't let 'em know which room you're in because that is one more piece of social engineering they can use to get the key from the front desk.
And that pretty much is about hotels. The thing that I do want to leave on this section though is there's a difference between answering a hotel door and opening a hotel door. I was in Corpus Christi, Texas several years ago on business and it was in a one story kind of motel thing, kind of near the beach, kind of a cool little place. And all of a sudden I hear a knock at the door, look out the window and there's a very scantily clad, very attractive young lady going, Hey, hey, I'm really into old guys and I think we need to party. I thought, Hmm, that's interesting. And so I thought, and I got on to look the other way on the other side of the window that looked that way and I saw a dude pressed up against the wall and I said, well just wait right there because this old dude's calling Corpus Christi Police call the police.
Many years ago I was in a hotel room in Chicago. I'm trying to get my notes ready for my seminar and I get a call from the hotel on my phone in the room, which you haven't gotten a call from your hotel room on the nightstand. It's really weird. It's a landline. It's like being at my mother's house, picked it up and they said, Hey, this is the front desk and we need to change out the chairs in the dinette in your hotel room. Are you going to be there for a few minutes? I'm like, yeah. And I thought that doesn't make any sense after I hung out. So I called the front desk and he said, no, we would never do that. And they said, look, we have a Chicago police officer who's working security, he's not available right now. We're going to send a security guard up.
His name is whatever his name was. All of a sudden, a few minutes later here knocked on the door to the people and there's a dude in a security informant said, what is your name? He said, my name is whatever his name was. I said, great, come on in. He asked me what the story was, I explained it. I said, look, if you don't mind, I'm still preparing for my speech. So I've got my notes and all over and I'm getting ready to do my shtick, and all of a sudden he looks at my business card and my brochure that was in my open briefcase in the table. And he said, you're a security consultant. I'm like, yeah. He goes, you're also a police officer. And he goes, I always want to be a police officer. Damn, that psychological test. Okay. Eventually the Chicago police officer showed up at the door, took the report, and apparently what had happened to somebody who had bad intention picked up the phone in the hallway, called my room, knew I was in there, thought this was a pretext.
We don't know what the pretext was for, but note to self it wasn't good. So if someone shows up to your door, you don't have to open the door. If you open the door, make sure it's from a place of security and information before you go. That's hotel safety. Let's talk about travel situational awareness. If you've been to the Concealed Coalition University Situational Awareness course, you're way ahead. If you read my book on situation, it's your way ahead. But there's really three very specific things that I think will help you as you travel anywhere in the world. And the reason why this is so important is because if you're a local, you have a certain built-in ability to know what the baseline of any situation is. But as we travel to different places, we may not know those. Even in the United States, I call it kind of the Disneyland effect.
I don't live in New York City, I live in Houston, Texas. I've never been a cop in New York City, but I've been one in Houston, Texas. So when I show up there, I'm walking around Times Square thinking, this is Disneyland, it's all great, but I don't know because I'm not a cop there and I don't read the news there and I don't know what's going on. So last rain washed away the chalk outline of the guy who got murdered right there. And I think I'm in a relatively safe space where the locals know, no, that could be a bit of a problem or that could be a problem at night, but maybe not in the day. So I'm going to give you three awareness tips no matter where you go on the planet, they'll work equally as well. I've used these in China, I've used these in Egypt, I've used these in Switzerland, I've used these every place you can possibly imagine.
And it's basically called reading the baseline. And just think of the acronym BAD bad. First thing you want to do is you want to figure out what the baseline is. If you ever travel with me, the first thing I'm going to do after we check in is I'm going to come back down to the hotel, I'm going to go outside the hotel or go to the nearest point of where the local lifestyle is and I'm just going to chill for a few minutes. I'm just going to sit there and just figure out what's the baseline here, what's the energy level? Is it positive or negative? Do I see a lot of unaccompanied women who are moving through with comfort and security and not threatened? I look at the baseline of human behaviors. Are these people comfortable, uncomfortable? Are they showing dominant or submissive traits? Are they in situations where they're paying attention to their surroundings or not paying attention to surroundings and reading a baseline and then looking for anomalies.
So if people are all kind of doing their thing, but there's one or two dudes watching everybody else, maybe they're a store owner, maybe they're one of those little shop owners who's looking for a tourist to say, come on in, or maybe that's your cue that there's a bad guy there. Or you might kind of think there is an absence of a situation where you should expect people to be there. You go in a store and no one's in there and you start thinking, why isn't there a clerk here? Why aren't there people in here that's below the baseline? So it's baseline anomalies and then decisions. So what do you see? How does that affect you? And what are you going to do about the information? You've got the second technique for travelers and situational awareness, something that's called a hasty search. And basically what the hasty search is, you want to break things down into two things.
Is the atmospheric here positive or negative? Real simple. So you come into a space and you've got that limbic system firing off your hypothalamus, your amygdala is going, Hey man, this doesn't feel right. What is it? Is it neat and orderly? Is it filthy? Is there an order to it? Are there rules and people following them? Are people exhibiting behaviors of comfortable people or do you come in here and say, man, this has got great vibes, great atmospherics, I feel comfortable here and I don't. Once you establish that baseline, then you can start looking down and then looking for the universal communications standards again, are people exhibiting comfortable or uncomfortable behavior? Are they exhibiting dominant behavior? Hey, why are you here? Get out of my space. Or they showing submissive behaviors, which is they are not feeling comfortable in this space and that your hasty search on this and said that this is a negative atmospheric for probably correct and are people paying attention to or not?
And this attention thing with me locally, if I'm in my Houston area and I'm getting out of my car to get gas or running in the store to grab something, I'm looking around all over as far as my area of responsibility and I'm looking to see if anybody's paying attention to me. Now in Houston, Texas, people should be going back and forth. Nobody should be paying attention to me unless they're a crook or a cop like me looking around because we're all looking for those people not paying attention. When I'm overseas and I'm a six foot tall, 180 pound, 61-year-old dude in Egypt, when I'm walking down the street, everyone should be looking at me. That's kind of a baseline. But if I'm walking into a restaurant and nobody looks up and sees me, that's below the baseline. First thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a B, a, D.
Read the baseline, look for the anomalies and make a decision about how you're going to treat it. Next thing's a hasty search. Whenever you go into any kind of situation, decide real quick, are they positive or negative? Atmospherics. If something's make you feel it's negative, try to identify it. If it's positive, figure out why it's positive and then make sure those baselines don't change and turn into negative atmospherics. Because just because you walked into a situation or a setting or whatnot doesn't mean it can't change. So you have to be aware of that. So then once you read that, and the third thing is understand how human beings communicate. Human beings only communicate two ways, force a reason. That's it. Force a reason. So as you travel on about, if somebody gets in your face and starts yapping and you can talk and back 'em down, that's cool, but understand when time for talking doesn't work and we're going to have to use force.
Now the problem with travel safety and using forces, if you are traveling in the continental United States, firearms, legal protection, they will get you out of trouble. That's who you call and that's who you can use to find out on their app about what use of force is. Whether pepper spray is legal in that state, whether your fire's legal in that state, whether the hollowpoint bullets in your magazine are going to cause problems, whether you're plus 10 round magazine is going to cause problems, solve all those problems before you leave. But if you use force there, you have a legal defense for self-defense. When we're overseas or out of the territory of the United States, things change quite differently. So when you start thinking about using force in those situations, we long and hard, I've talked a lot of my students over the years who say when they get on scene, they buy a local small pairing knife.
They take it and put it in a piece of cardboard, wrap it in duct tape as sort of a sheath, put it in the appendix position, and if something happens, they're going to start stabbing away. You start stabbing a local with a fruit knife, the attack may not be the last of your problem. So think long and hard about it. That's one of the reasons why I really like a very high powered flashlight. As we discussed also the incredible utility. If you're a place where the power goes off or if you have some sort of earthquake or fire and the power shuts down, you can guide you and your family out of there safely. Can't speak highly enough about that. Tactical pen is in your hand, is socially invisible and it's not a lethal tool. It's just a way to go ahead and transfer the force from this fist down to this point to try to get enough pain to back 'em off to make 'em rethink some like decisions about picking on you and of course pepper spray and if it's legal, this might be a tool that you might want to consider if it's not having possession of this, being a traveler could cause some serious problems.
So it's something you might want to think about. In closing on travel safety, let's think about this for a second. If you leave the continental United States, you're probably going to be safer than the major city you live in. If you live in a major city in the United States, most places you go. The problem though as being a traveler is we are high profile and a lot of the places we go, especially places that don't have the same general lifestyle standards of wealth we have as American, walking down the street with your Rolex watch could be a problem walking down the street with expensive drill, it could be a problem. Walking down the street with your electronics could be a problem. Heck, just your expensive running shoes could be a problem. So you want to try to deselect yourself as much as possible. Try to fit in with the flow.
Don't stand out, don't show any obvious wealth. And remember when it comes time to travel trouble, there's personal problems which you get in the conversation and you get drunk and you have a problem with the local or for some reason and that's a thing. And we need to make sure we don't have that deescalate at all possible. If not, use the least amount of force you need to do. If can no longer a reason we have to use force. Could be you could get in political trouble. It's really easy for a lot of Americans to want to go overseas and tell about how good America is or how bad the country we're in there is. My advice is don't say anything about your country or their country that's not just really effusive and positive. I just love the greenness here. I've never seen green is like aim to Costa Rica.
Oh my gosh, Panama people have the most open hearts, but don't get in political discussions, especially today's age. And I wouldn't post anything on the internet that causes problems on social media while you're there. Could get in legal trouble. Remember, just because it's legal back where you were doesn't mean it's legal there. And just because you're there doesn't mean you can't get jacked up and hemmed up. And that means you're not have protection of legal defense for self-defense. You're going to have to find a local lawyer, have to spend time there and get it sorted out. And then of course, self-inflicted problems. The best way to keep self-inflicted problems from happening when you travel are the same ways you keep them happening in your own home. These are called farms rules from John Farham, one of my first big time instructors back in the early nineties, and that's called The Farm Rules.
Don't go to stupid places with stupid people at stupid times for stupid reasons. If you remember that, you're probably going to be okay. One final closing thought to round this off is why do you post that you're leaving for vacation and why do you post that you're on vacation on social media that just tells the world that your home is unsecured? And I don't think that's a really good idea. Save that. When you come back and you get back in your place of comfort, then post that on up. We covered a lot of material in this I hope. If you're traveling this summer, whether it's local or not, you are building memories. I hope you take so many pictures with your phone that you have memories for a lifetime. And remember, the best part about traveling is when things go wrong that are pain there.
They usually turn into amusing stories later on. And I hope you gather many memories of your family at the same time, understand that traveling has unique security risks and I want you to keep your profile as low as possible so you don't become picked. And if something does happen, I want you to avoid. I want you toter and I want you to evade. And as always weekend, come and do this in a class. If you think you'd like to see this as a full on concealed coalition university episode, let me know. This really is just a short version of my 90 minute class hour and 45 minute class I do for corporate America. If you need me to come out to your company to do a full-blown business travel corporate class. I do one that I talk about how to treat our proprietary data and the problems that are unique, two business travelers. And I expand that over 30 years of seeing this develop with real case studies. Love to do that. And as always, never forget, be a guardian, always and a warrior when needed.
YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g8wmWJg4Fc
Credit: Austin Davis, Concealed Coalition