Daniel sent us this one after something that happened to him today. He was moving a few boxes back from a new apartment on a Friday afternoon, and some guy starts screaming at him about not preparing for the Sabbath. A religious extremist, clearly — aggrieved that Daniel's way of life is different from his. And Daniel's instinct was the same one most of us have: don't give the person attention. Ignore it, keep moving. But he said that doesn't always work. So the question is straightforward — what do you actually do in these moments? Herman, you were there for part of this.
I came around the corner and this man is maybe six feet from Daniel, full volume about how Shabbat is approaching and where is the respect, where is the fear of heaven. And Daniel's holding a box of kitchen stuff, just walking. And the guy follows for half a block. I still feel it in my shoulders thinking about it.
That's the thing that sticks with you, isn't it — not the words, the following. The fact that disengaging didn't end it.
And that could have been anywhere. A subway platform in New York, a parking lot in London, a sidewalk in Tel Aviv. The trigger was Sabbath observance, but the dynamic was universal — a stranger who decided you owe them something and will not be ignored.
Here's why this matters right now. Jerusalem's secular population dropped nine percent between twenty twenty and twenty twenty-four. That's according to reporting from nine-seven-two magazine. Fewer secular residents means more of these friction points, because the people who stay are increasingly navigating neighborhoods where religious enforcement has become ambient. Forty-seven Sabbath-observance ordinances enacted in Jerusalem since twenty twenty. That gives street-level enforcers a sense of backing.
Here's what Daniel's really asking, and I think this is the right question — what's the actual protocol? Not "stay safe" platitudes. Not "just walk away" when walking away didn't work. What's the decision tree when a stranger is yelling at you and you have three seconds to figure out whether this is dangerous or just unpleasant?
Most people have the wrong instincts for that. Myself included, probably. So let's step back from that specific Friday afternoon and ask — what's actually happening in these moments?
What's happening is that most of us walk around with two default settings, and neither one is calibrated for the situation that actually exists. Setting one is freeze and ignore — hope it dissolves. Setting two is confront — meet force with force, assert dominance, don't let them push you around. And both fail in different, predictable ways.
The freeze-and-ignore one feels like the smart move. It feels like de-escalation. You're not engaging, you're not feeding it.
Sometimes it is the smart move. But the Violence Prevention Institute has done real work on this — they tracked hundreds of street confrontations and found that ignoring the aggressor escalates about forty percent of encounters. Not de-escalates.
Forty percent is a lot higher than I would have guessed.
Because we think of ignoring as neutral. It's not. To someone who's performing aggression — who needs an audience — being ignored is a provocation. It says their performance failed. And the response is often to escalate until they get the reaction they're looking for.
The thing that feels like the safest, most passive option is actually poking the bear.
And then the other instinct — confronting, squaring up — that has its own failure mode. If someone is genuinely dysregulated, in a mental health crisis or intoxicated, confrontation can be perceived as a life-threatening challenge. You're not in a rational negotiation. You're in their threat-response system.
Somewhere between those two instincts is where Daniel was standing with a box of kitchen stuff, getting followed.
So the real question isn't "should I ignore or should I fight." It's "what category of situation am I in, and what does this specific category require.
Which means this episode is about street safety, yes, but it's also about something bigger. It's about how you coexist in a dense city with people whose internal states you can't control. Jerusalem makes it vivid because the friction points are so specific — Sabbath enforcement, modesty patrols, religious territoriality. But the underlying problem is the same in any urban environment. You're going to encounter people who escalate on you for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
I should say — this isn't a political episode. We're not here to litigate Jerusalem's demographic shifts as a policy question. We're here because Daniel got yelled at on a Friday afternoon, and the question he asked is the one everyone should be able to answer: what do I actually do?
The answer isn't a slogan. It's a decision tree. A way of reading the situation in the first three seconds that tells you which protocol to run.
Which is what we need to build. Because "stay safe" is not a protocol. "Be aware of your surroundings" is not a protocol. Those are the safety equivalent of telling someone who's drowning to "stay afloat.
Let's build that decision tree. Because Daniel's situation — holding a box, getting followed, someone screaming about Sabbath — that's not a random event. It belongs to a category. And if you can identify the category in the first few seconds, you know which protocol to run.
This comes out of the threat assessment literature — I'm drawing on work from the Violence Prevention Institute and some of the operational psychology research. Category one is performative aggression. They want an audience, not a fight. The yelling is the point. Category two is instrumental aggression — they want something from you. Money, compliance, your phone, your attention as a hostage. And category three is dysregulated aggression — mental health crisis, intoxication, psychosis. There's no rational goal at all.
Daniel's Sabbath guy — which category?
Performative, almost textbook. He's not trying to take Daniel's boxes. He's not in a psychotic break. He's performing moral outrage because it reinforces his identity and his social standing — even if the only audience is Daniel himself and maybe a few people on the street. The performance is the product.
That's why ignoring him backfired. Because ignoring a performer doesn't make them stop performing — it tells them the performance bombed. And the response to a bombed performance is to go bigger.
That forty percent escalation number from the Violence Prevention Institute — that's exactly the mechanism. When you ignore a performative aggressor, you're not being neutral. You're actively rejecting their social bid. And they escalate to force acknowledgment. Daniel's guy followed for half a block. That's the escalation.
What's the right move? Because "acknowledge without engaging" sounds good in theory, but what does it actually sound like coming out of your mouth when someone is six feet away screaming about the fear of heaven?
The technique is sometimes called verbal Aikido — you acknowledge the emotion, not the content. So you don't argue about Sabbath observance. You don't defend your way of life. You say something like "I hear that you're upset" or "I understand this matters to you" — and you keep walking. You've given them acknowledgment, which is what the performance needs. But you haven't engaged the substance, which is where the fight lives.
That's enough?
Often it is. Not always — nothing works always. But what you've done is you've taken away the escalation incentive. They got the acknowledgment. The performance landed. Continuing to escalate after that has diminishing returns, and most people — even very agitated people — feel that.
Here's where Jerusalem gets tricky. Because that guy yelling about Sabbath — he's not just a lone performer. He's backed by a social structure that tells him he's right. Forty-seven Sabbath ordinances since twenty twenty. A demographic trajectory where his side is winning. That changes the calculus.
It does, and this is where the nine-seven-two magazine reporting is so useful. They document how Haredi political pressure has created a sense of impunity for street-level enforcers. When the city keeps passing ordinances that align with your worldview, it's easy to feel like you're deputized. Like you're not just some guy yelling — you're enforcing a norm that the authorities endorse.
Which means the performative aggression has teeth. It's still a performance, but the performer knows the city's power structure is behind him.
That's why the verbal Aikido move is actually more important in Jerusalem, not less. Because arguing the substance — "I have the right to move boxes on Friday" — that's not a street argument. That's a political argument. You're not going to resolve it on a sidewalk. So the acknowledgment move bypasses the entire political dimension and just addresses the psychological need.
"I hear that you're upset." You're not conceding anything. You're not agreeing that Sabbath observance is his business. You're just naming the emotion and moving on.
Now contrast with category three — dysregulated aggression. This is the person on the train platform who's yelling but not at anyone in particular. No coherent demand. No performance for an audience. Their internal world is fractured and you're just a shape in it.
Here ignoring is actually the right call.
And more than ignoring — active non-engagement. No eye contact. Eye contact can be perceived as a threat by someone in psychosis. You want peripheral vision monitoring — you're tracking where they are without looking directly at them — and you're creating distance. No verbal acknowledgment, because any verbal input can become part of their delusional narrative.
The same behavior — not responding, not engaging — is the wrong move for one category and the right move for another. Which means the whole skill is in the diagnosis. How do you tell the difference in three seconds?
Three quick filters. One — is there an audience? Is the person performing for someone, even if that someone is just you? Performative aggression has a stage. Dysregulated aggression doesn't care who's watching. Two — is there a coherent demand? "Stop working on Shabbat" is a demand. Incoherent screaming about government satellites is not. Three — what's the eye contact doing? Performative aggressors want eye contact — they're trying to engage you. Dysregulated people often have a thousand-yard stare or they're tracking things you can't see.
Daniel's guy — audience, coherent demand, wanted eye contact. Acknowledge and keep walking.
The drunk guy on the Tel Aviv platform — no audience awareness, no coherent demand, eyes unfocused. Don't engage, increase distance, monitor peripherally.
What about the middle category — instrumental aggression? Someone who wants your wallet or wants you to move off a bench or wants something concrete?
Instrumental is different because there's a negotiation possible, at least in theory. They want something. That means you have something they need — which gives you options. Compliance might be the safest move if it's property. If it's space — someone demanding you move — you can assess whether giving them what they want de-escalates or whether it signals weakness they'll exploit. This is the hardest category to give a single rule for, because it depends on what they want and what the stakes are.
That's where the environmental scan comes in — knowing your exits, knowing who's around. But we should get into that.
We've got the taxonomy. But here's where it gets interesting — the cumulative effect of living in a place where this happens regularly changes how you move through the city. Nine-seven-two magazine found that thirty-four percent of secular Jerusalemites report avoiding certain neighborhoods entirely. Not because they've been attacked — because of the ambient possibility of confrontation.
That's the number that stuck with me. Thirty-four percent. That's not individual safety decisions anymore. That's urban geography reshaping itself around fear. Neighborhoods become no-go zones not by law but by accumulated experience. You just stop walking through Mea Shearim on a Friday. You take the long way around.
The long way around becomes the new normal. You don't even think about it after a while. But the city's smaller for you than it is for the people who don't have to make that calculation.
Which brings me to something I think we get wrong about preparedness. People train for the dramatic worst case — active shooter drills, what to do if someone grabs you. And those are real threats. But the thing you'll actually encounter fifty times before you ever face the worst case is this. The low-grade confrontation. The stranger who won't stop yelling.
The preparedness paradox. You're ready for the thing that happens once in a thousand lifetimes, and completely unready for the thing that happens twice a month.
The skill for the twice-a-month thing isn't tactical. It's emotional regulation stamina. Can you stay calm in the fiftieth encounter when you're tired and it's hot and you're carrying groceries? That's the actual test. Not your adrenaline response on day one — your composure on day fifty.
Because by day fifty, your threat-assessment system is either well-calibrated or it's fried. If every encounter feels like a crisis, you burn out. You become one of the thirty-four percent who just stops going places.
So let's talk about keeping the system calibrated. There's a framework from military aviation — the OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Colonel John Boyd developed it for dogfighting, but it maps perfectly to street confrontations because it's about cycling through decisions faster than the situation degrades.
Walk me through it on a sidewalk.
Observe is the three-second diagnosis we talked about — what category is this? Performative, instrumental, dysregulated? Orient is the environmental scan — where's my exit? Who's watching? What's behind me? Decide is picking the protocol — acknowledge and walk, don't engage and create distance, or negotiate. And Act is executing with commitment. No hesitation, no second-guessing mid-stride.
The Act part is underrated. I've seen people pick the right move and then half-do it because they're still doubting themselves. The half-measure is what gets you in trouble.
Because the aggressor reads hesitation as weakness or as an invitation to keep pushing. If you're going to acknowledge and walk, you acknowledge and walk. The acknowledgment is genuine but brief, and the walking doesn't pause.
The Orient step — the environmental scan — that's something you should be doing before anything happens. Not paranoia, just the same situational awareness urban cyclists use. You don't wait for the car to swerve before you check your exit.
Three things you should already know when you're walking anywhere. One — where's the nearest open business I can enter? A shop, a cafe, a lobby. Two — is there someone nearby who looks like a potential ally? Not a hero, just another person who'd notice if something went wrong. Three — what's my line of retreat if I need to reverse direction?
That last one matters especially in Jerusalem, where some streets are narrow and dead-end into courtyards. You don't want to discover you've walked into a cul-de-sac while someone's following you.
This connects to something specific about Jerusalem that actually generalizes anywhere. Cultural competence is a safety tool. Knowing a few Hebrew phrases of deference — "slicha," "ani mevin" — can de-escalate religious confrontations because they signal you're not a clueless tourist. You understand the social code. You're choosing not to fight.
"Ani mevin" — I understand. You're not saying "I agree." You're saying "I speak the language of this place and I'm not going to argue with you in it.
That maps to any cultural context. If you're in a neighborhood where a specific group holds social power, knowing the local deference signals — even just the tone, the body language — gives you an off-ramp that an outsider doesn't have.
There's a case study from Nahlaot that illustrates where this goes when it becomes systemic. Nine-seven-two magazine documented twenty-three incidents of Haredi modesty patrols in that neighborhood in twenty twenty-five alone. These aren't random encounters. They're organized, they're recurring, and they target specific people — mostly secular women.
What the residents did is instructive. They built a WhatsApp group to share real-time locations of aggressive enforcers. If someone's working a particular street corner, everyone knows within minutes. That's not just information sharing — it's a community-level safety network.
Which is the thing individual preparedness can't replace. You can have perfect OODA loop execution and still get worn down if you're facing this alone every time. The WhatsApp group says "you're not alone, and here's where the threat is right now.
It works across contexts. The same taxonomy applies on a New York subway platform. The triggers are different — someone's yelling about how you looked at them, or about their ex, or about nothing coherent — but the categories are identical. Performative, instrumental, dysregulated. The verbal Aikido technique works cross-culturally because it addresses the psychological need beneath the specific grievance.
The need to be seen. The need to matter in that moment. You give them that in the smallest possible dose and you keep moving.
The community safety piece maps too. New York has its own versions — the group chats, the neighborhood watch apps, the informal networks of people who look out for each other on the same commute. It's the same principle. Individual skill is necessary. Collective awareness makes it sustainable.
Let's put this into something you can actually use. Three questions to run the moment someone starts yelling. One — do they want an audience or a result? Two — is there a clear exit? Three — what's the minimum acknowledgment that lets me disengage?
That third question is where most people get stuck. They think acknowledgment means agreement. It doesn't. It means you're giving them the social off-ramp without conceding anything. "I can see you're really upset about this" — that's not "you're right." It's not "I'll stop." It's just naming the emotion and continuing to walk.
The walk is non-negotiable. The acknowledgment happens in motion. You don't stop, you don't turn to face them fully, you don't plant your feet. The body language says "this interaction is already ending.
That's the skill to practice. Acknowledge the emotion, not the content. It works because you're addressing what they actually need in that moment — which is rarely the thing they're yelling about. They need to feel seen. Give them that in the smallest possible dose.
Then there's the long game. If you live somewhere where these encounters are frequent — Jerusalem, New York, London — individual technique isn't enough. You need a community safety network. The Nahlaot WhatsApp group is the model. Real-time information about where aggressive enforcers are operating. Shared knowledge of safe spaces.
Because the person who just moved to the neighborhood doesn't know which streets go dead-end or which shopkeeper will let you wait inside. The group knows. Individual preparedness is necessary. It's not sufficient.
Here's the mindset shift that makes all of this sustainable. These encounters are not about you. They're about the aggressor's internal state. You're just the nearest surface it happened to land on. Internalizing that is the difference between a ruined afternoon and a minor inconvenience.
That took me a long time to learn. I used to carry these encounters for hours. Replaying what I should have said. And the truth is there's nothing to say. The guy yelling about Sabbath wasn't responding to Daniel. He was responding to a whole narrative in his head about what secular Jews represent. Daniel just happened to be holding a box.
If you're the nearest surface, you don't take it personally. You run the protocol, you keep walking, and you let it belong to them.
The question that sits with me after all this is — what happens to a city when the secular population keeps shrinking? Jerusalem is on track to become Haredi-majority by twenty thirty. That's not speculation, that's the demographic projection from the nine-seven-two data.
That changes what these confrontations are. Right now they're street harassment — unpleasant, alienating, but still in the category of individual encounters. When the group doing the enforcing becomes the political majority, it shifts into something else. Cultural enforcement with the full backing of municipal power.
The guy yelling about Sabbath isn't just a random extremist anymore. He's an early adopter of the new normal.
That's what I keep thinking about. Not just Jerusalem — this pattern is showing up in cities worldwide. Demographic shifts create friction. The friction shows up on sidewalks and train platforms before it shows up in election results. The street is where the future arrives first.
Which means the skills we've been talking about — the three-second diagnosis, the verbal Aikido, the community safety networks — those aren't niche Jerusalem knowledge. They're becoming urban survival skills everywhere.
Most people don't have them. Most people are still running freeze-or-fight instincts that were calibrated for a different kind of city.
Here's what we'd say to someone listening. Next time you're walking and someone starts yelling at you — on the street, on the platform, wherever — try the acknowledgment technique. Not the content, the emotion. "I can see you're upset.Notice what happens.
Then tell us about it. Email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. We want to know what worked, what didn't, what you learned. This is the kind of thing where the collective knowledge actually matters.
If this episode was useful to you, share it with someone who walks alone at night. Or someone who just moved to a new city and is still learning which streets feel safe. That's the person who needs this.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen fifties, Icelandic researchers discovered that certain early Islamic maps of the Mediterranean had been drawn on parchment with acoustic properties so specific that, when tapped, they produced distinct tones corresponding to the latitude lines they depicted — essentially functioning as navigational instruments that could be played.
The map was also a musical instrument.
That can't be right.
Hilbert's never wrong. He's just...
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. We're back next week.
