Left of Greg 021 Mission Focus

Right. So where someone's actually looking is extremely important, far more important than people realize. And I think it's important to understand why that happens, just scientifically, a little bit about how that iron brain works and attention. So if you could maybe cover some functional field of view so everyone understands what that is when we're talking about it.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

The idea is that we call it attention because of the amount of information that the brain can attend to in any instance. So, if you take a look, a six-degree functional field of view for a normal human male and an 11-degree for a normal human female means that that's your processing center. Remember, vision means the entire back half of your skull is the brain that is tuned into your human vision to make sense out of the chunk information that's flying in from your eyes, right?

Well, what happens is, if you draw on a piece of paper—unless you're driving, don't do that—but if you draw on a piece of paper and just make a big circle, that circle is 360 degrees. And Brian's going to do that in the background while I'm speaking. I don't know what circles, but if you take a look at that circle, that's 360 degrees, okay? Start to finish, looking all the way around. A six-degree functional field of view would be a very small sliver from that much bigger circle. So Brian, if you can draw what would be, you know, we'll call for all intents and purposes, six degrees, and then could you color that in a little bit with that marker?

Now, if you understand that 6 plus 6 is 12, an 11-degree functional field of view that are normal human females would be almost double that small sliver that Brian drew there. Now, what does that mean? What that means is out of the 360 degrees, including your peripheral vision and your central vision, that 360-degree circle, you're only processing information in 6 degrees or 11 degrees, and that information is what your brain can see and think clearly. Everything else is "close enough."

And I think that's a good point you brought up right away when you started describing the entire back half of your brain. It's just important to understand that you don't really see with your eye, you see with your brain, right? So you can gather light, you gather information, you gather shine, shape, outline, contrast, all that stuff with your eye. It picks that up much like a camera, right? So we think of it as a video camera because that's how we see, but it's in fact more like a series of snapshots that get thrown back to that part of your brain.

Exactly. It has to re-integrate that information. So, if we take a look at the normal human eye, and we see the white portion being the sclera, and then you take a look at the pupil, and as the pupil is gathering the available light, whether it's a high bright environment like I'm in and Brian's in (and you can see evidence by the stuff on the board), or it's a low light or no light situation, what's happening is that you're having a muscle contraction or an expansion of that muscle, and easing of that muscle, that is allowing light to be projected back on a lens at the back of your brain.

But not all of that information is important to your brain. So while your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex are fighting for control of what's going on at this moment in time, what's happening is your brain is always in survival mode. So survival always takes precedent. So if I see somebody moving fast in my peripheral, I would orient towards that person because it may be a threat. So threat processing always takes the forefront.

The other thing that happens is when we repeat routine behaviors, and our brain does fall into routines, what happens is our brain goes, "Yeah, that's likely what it was yesterday, an hour ago, a minute ago," and therefore you can paint out, accidentally paint out, very important information that's extant in your current environment without even knowing it. The theory of "close enough" means that your brain will conserve calories by saying that what you're seeing, if it's not in a threatening situation, is most likely what I saw yesterday. And that's why these attacks in schools or in a Walmart or in a restaurant are so dangerous, because you don't equate that location in your brain with a survival situation. You associate the bedroom with making love or falling asleep. You associate the restaurant with cooking or eating. And so those specific file folders inside of our brain sort of regulate our behavior and actually get in the way of our self-defense processing.

Another good analogy I like to use, especially when people talk about, you know, in chaotic situations, high-stress situations, you get kind of visual and perceptual narrowing, and people call it, "Oh, you get tunnel vision." And an analogy Greg uses, "Well, that's actually all you ever see." That little bit of straw that you're looking through is technically all you can ever process at one time. Just like reading a book, you can't read what the word is at the end of the sentence that you're reading, you can only read what's directly in front of your face. And I know we always like to use the analogy too, of just, you know, your thumbnail held out at arm's length. You look at that thumbnail, that's roughly a six-degree functional field of view right there.

Precisely, it's about the size of a quarter held at arm's length.

Exactly. And so that's a good reference. And when you're talking about, "Hey, cognitively close enough," I always look at it as, "Hey, if you're ever looking at something," or sorry, walking this way down the street, and you ever have something that kind of catches your eye in a glance and then you have to look back because you're like, "What the heck was that?" And you thought you saw something that you didn't actually see because you picked up on something and your brain said, "Well, that's cognitively close enough to a dancing bear." And I turn.

It's just, Greg, let me give you three real quick examples of that that just happen all the time. The very first one is I want you to think of yourself as a small unit leader with a SWAT team or a police unit, some sort of armed first responder that's going into a very uncertain, ambiguous environment. As you're coming into that environment, what's happening is the guys that are less trained and neophytes at this are looking at the front sight post and trying to make sense of what's behind that, you know, what's in front of the MP5, while your small unit leader is kind of at the rear sight post, and he's looking at the other guys and looking where their muzzles are oriented and making sure we're going down the right hallway towards the right address, where your leader behind them is looking at the support team and the drone. So that's how your brain, the hierarchy of your brain, works.

So I'm going down to the Rogue Mentor West here. By the way, it's a big storm coming, so if the power gets out, you'll know it. I'll change into a neon glowstick. But I go down and I'm inside the house, going outside the house, so I hit the electronic door opener and there's this vacuum created by the door going up and this wind that's coming in for this storm. And all it was is a leaf, and that leaf came out under that door between my legs, which I didn't expect. And I jumped and hit my massive head on the garage door opener only because that was a survival reaction. It's autonomic. My brain said, "Close enough, something's coming at you. It's a rhinoceros," even though it was that little leaf, because it was a startle response. We have to be worried about that startle response as well.

So the idea, the third point, the idea of being able to master your functional field of view and open it, and you're not going to be able to do that in that tunnel vision scenario, because your brain is going to start constricting and saying, "These things don't matter right now. I know that I can breathe, I know that I can swallow," so that's going to be regulated to autonomic reflexes while my limbic system is going to that smell of danger. That's why auditory exclusion—I'm not going to hear the explosions after the first couple of gunshots, I'm not going to be able to count them. I'm going to smell decayed flesh and that's going to keep me away from the cage, or I'm going to smell the cordite and that's going to say "gun" only with the appropriate file folders, which means only with training. So when you wrote that up on functional field of view on the brain, all the rest of that information is going to not be available to an untrained person. Your brain will exclude that information and even upon recall, you're not going to remember that those things happened. That's why probably the worst witness in the world is an eyewitness.

Yeah, and that's been shown to be true of countless. We all know that. Sure, look at every one of these documentaries that are out now, especially at Netflix, about people wrongfully convicted, and this, and someone saw it. Look, you want to do the right thing, you want to say you saw the person, you saw this, you want to help out. And sometimes it's just your brain will plant that picture, and if it's cognitively close enough—and it doesn't even have to be that close sometimes.

Exactly right. When your analogy, Brian, was so spot on about the playing cards, if you think, if you've got quadrillions of bits of information that are bombarding your senses for everything that you do while you're awake, walking around, sleeping, sitting, reading a book in your environment (other than sleeping), the idea is that your brain couldn't process all of that. We'd be lethargic tree sloths, you know, letting the environment pass us by. So for your brain to operate in any newer incoming information situation, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to cut out some of the fat. So your brain takes these huge bits of information, chunks it into what they think you need to know, what the most likely thing that you're going to see next, and that's what your brain sees. So when you say it comes out of nowhere, when you say things hide in plain sight, it's exactly what we're speaking about. That's a function of the catecholamines, the electrochemical neurotransmitters, and how your brain processes chunked information.

Okay, so that's kind of a loose, you know, that's a quick down and dirty scientific explanation, I think, of how vision and perception. Right, right. So now let's, let's kind of go right into then, then what would be mission focus? So mission focus is a term that we like to use a lot of times, and everyone gets it. It's not, it's not just a bad guy or this, we can all, we can all have mission focus. So could you give us an explanation of what you mean by mission focus?

Yeah, absolutely. Great question, by the way. The idea of the "happy head" comes to mind. I've been training for many, many decades now, and I'm just looking at my reflection, I'm pretty good looking for as old as I am. Just had that birthday, Brian just got married, things are good. But the idea is that the "happy head" comes from way back, way back when I was training early in martial arts, way back when I was a copper still chasing thugs, way back when I was an 11 Bravo Infantryman trying to learn the ropes. And what happens is people do things where they exclude things that are right in front of them.

So a bank robber is going to walk into the bank and says, "Holy crap, I need to write my note." So they're going to take their own deposit slip and write on the back, "Hey, I've got a gun, give up the cheese." And you're going to know that'll never happen, dude. I've seen bank robbers leave the building the minute they get outside, like throwing the football down at the end zone, they take off their masks and throw their masks. "I'll never need that again."

What happens is the human brain gets set like a needle on a record in a specific groove. (Just lost 90% of the audience that doesn't understand a disc and a groove and a needle). But the idea is that you get into this pattern where your brain says, "Okay, I got this. Let me take it from here." In an example, everybody in the audience knows what a beer run is. A kid comes in, a kid wants to grab a six-pack or a case of beer and they want to run out. Everybody that you know, or somebody that you know, has done it, or everybody that you know has seen one or heard about one, right?

So, and that kid first walks into my favorite place in the world, 7-Eleven. (Southland Corporation, send the checks, 2446 age drivers). They first walk into that place, they don't have but a basic plan. They have the four corners, right? Then all of a sudden they take a look and they go, "Staring straight at that counter person, is that counter person watching me? Should I stay or should I go?" Now they take a look and all of a sudden it's like they see that cooler for the first time, "But I can't go right at the cooler." Even though I'm playing it cool, so I grab a flipping map at the front, okay? I look at the map, then I look at the AutoTrader, I worked my way down that aisle, look at the Fig Newtons. Now I'm at that case, so I open that case. And I know I looked a little young, but I ain't going to be paying for it anyway. So what I do is I start, you know, mentally measuring the amount of steps it's going to take me to get to the door of the place, and I look around to make sure there's not a linebacker that's going to see me clamoring, right?

So all of this in your mind, as you're that kid, put yourself in the shoes of that kid in that time and place. You're thinking you're Steve McQueen, you're saying, anybody else watching you is thinking that you're the robot, you know, from one of those Santa things where they got the guards, you know, the Island of Misfit Toys. They're watching you and going, "What's going on?" That mission focus is where your brain finds that channel and it's going, "I'm on, I have to stay in this narrow lane for me to accomplish my mission." So in order to break that, training gives you the ability to look up and out and down. And then at the same time, where an untrained or an inexperienced person, even a criminal, even if it's a bank robber doing this over and over, we get too "happy head."

I'll give you an example of that. On roads in Colorado, we see tourists, or "terrorists," as some of the locals tend to call them. And no pun intended, they don't like sometimes the influx of all these people in rental SUVs, because they come out and there's a thing called four-wheel drive. Now it's icy roads or feet of snow on the side. The speed limit says 55 to 70, and they think they can go that speed. They think, "Wow, I'm good at it." And guess what? At home, one time, they drove at those speeds and they didn't die. So what do you think happened? The receptors, the electrochemical neurotransmitter said, "I can do this." And then each subsequent time that they did it, they get more bold. That level of mission focus gets us into the trick bag all the time. We have to be able to focus on our intended target, but take into account all those peripherals that are around us. Only trained personnel can do that.

Yeah, so and there's the, and there to do it well, of course. Counter that you're never going to get more than this (referring to limited functional field of view), you're never going to get more than this, but I mean physically, physiologically, or biologically, you're never going to get more than that right there. There are limits on human behavior and human performance where that nexus is, you're exactly right. Put that cognitive performance being more where it allows you to slow down that time and actually take in more. So you're literally just looking around.

So, I like mission focus is another one, just when you're, yeah, you see it all the time, you're busy, you've got both arms full of groceries coming out of the grocery store, you're talking on your cell phone like this (demonstrates holding phone to ear), and you're looking for your vehicle, and to get out of there. You've got 37 things to do, and you're so focused. I've seen people walk right out in front of vehicles, got people backing out, trying to turn and just know they didn't literally did not see a giant delivery truck driving directly at them.

And how many times have we seen that on an elevator? You're walking on or walking off an elevator, or you're getting near an elevator, and the person coming on almost headbutts the person getting off. Why? Because they're so mission focused that they're not anticipating. That's advanced critical thinking. They're not anticipating what likely scenarios are going to come out. We actually have a video that illustrates that quite well. I don't know if you'll be able to bring that up.

Yeah, luckily, Greg, let me bring this up. Just an example, kind of I think perfect example as you'd like to relate to or be able to relate to a little bit, a little bit better because it's not something military or law enforcement related.

Yeah, while you're doing that, the other idea is that you can increase your functional field of view. As a matter of fact, our training program is the only program in the world that has been proven to improve the students' learning. That does occur, Part 1, and that we've increased the functional field of view. But to what degree? The degree is going to be very important in a shootout or in a horrific incident. It's not, and may be in, you know, driving your car really fast in a pursuit. But the idea that you can push the limits of human performance using cognition, cognition-based training, is amazing to me, Brian.

Okay, this is a great video. So talk us through this, Greg. Right, I forget his name, but a coach for one of coaches for the Rams football team. And so basically, obviously, their job on the sidelines is they're watching every second of every play. So they're so he's so mission focused on what's going on, he's not going to see a referee, a guy wearing, you know, (pauses video) real quick show that again, a giant black and white striped suit, or striped suit, running basically backwards directly at him. So what they've done is they have a guy whose sole job is to follow him around to make sure he doesn't walk on the field when he's not supposed to, make sure he doesn't get hit by anyone running off the field, make sure he doesn't get hit by the ref or anything. So his sole job. So that allows this guy to be, so he's so entirely mission focused that he's going to completely miss everything that's around him because he's so focused on what he has to do. And here he comes back again to make sure, "I got to pull you off because why?" (Video shows coach almost running into referee again.) Boom! What would have had the referee run right into him. Again, it's just a great example of exactly how we get so mission focused that we lose our ability to actually see or perceive things in our environment.

So mission focus and predatory looks are technically, scientifically, two sides of the same coin. That's why when Brian said at the beginning, "We're only going to talk about one thing, mission focus and predatory looks," it seemed dichotomous. It's not at all. What you just saw is an NFL team that knows that football is the game of inches, and they invested to make one person that subject matter expert on what's happening on the field. They wanted to make sure that they took off all the peripherals so he could focus fully, laser focus, on the mission at hand. That's important. If you want to do, all you need to do is watch 15 seconds of that video and listen to Brian to improve your own performance in certain jobs. If you have divided attention, you're going to do all things poorly because you only have a certain amount of bandwidth.

Right. And so, you know, just a couple other points on that before we get into it, we might as well jump into, since we're talking about predatory looks. So, got mission focus. Got it. So I'm so focused in on what's going on or what I'm focused on, on what I'm looking at, that I lose my ability to take in some of my surroundings because I'm so, I'm the tech surrender.

I surrender that. Yet, but an autonomic surrender. Yes, you're exactly right. I'm attending to my environment so closely, whatever it is. Whether that's a cute girl at the end of the bar, whether that's the football play, whether that's my kids running around at the park, whatever it is. You're so focused, you lose the lighting, my cigarette, changing my car stereo, text messaging. That's why people get into these horrific accidents. Brian, you're onto something there. Even the text message. When I look at words rather than looking down at my Big Gulp or trying to open my sandwich while driving, what happens is each one of those characters is like Monet to me, mayonnaise to my sandwich. And the idea is that I'm so focused on each one of them trying to figure out what they mean and measuring the context, and it only takes nanoseconds. But in the nanoseconds, how far is your car gone? And now all of a sudden that brief interlude of inattention puts you in the backseat of the car that's in front. It happens all the time.

Right. So let's, let's jump into then what would be, what we'll define predatory looks? Because I'm getting sounds that sounds like, "Okay, a predator, bad." This is what are, what exactly are predatory looks then?

Yeah, real quick, just for lexicon buffs that are out in the audience, these are my words, so you're going to go to a dictionary and try to find them, and you're going to go, "Hey, I haven't found it." You'll find a Medio, the US Department, yeah, that kind of stuff. You'll find them in court records and stuff. But these are terms that I made up to name something that people couldn't name.

So when it comes to predatory looks, I want you to think about this: almost always when I'm taking a look at something, my brain is processing it for the outcome. So for example, if I'm looking at a plate of food, or I'm going to open a sandwich, like the other day I was watching this game show (I rarely watch TV, but when I'm typing, it helps, you know, fill the house with sound). And so in World Manor, I got a big TV set, and there's some ridiculous game show, and just before the person answers, they lick their lips. Okay, that's an anticipation signal. That's just like taking your hands and either going slowly or going fast. Tell your kids, "Are we going to Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour?" And you'll see. Okay, those anticipation signals come from the brain's chemistry changing and anticipating a positive outcome. "Things are going to go good." The guy licking his lips, he wasn't nervous. Totally different in the context of an interview, do you get what I'm saying? Where you get the big gulp and a guy licking his lip—lack of episodic saliva means the person's going to be deceitful. But in this instant, where the person buzzed in and they licked their lips, it meant, "Oh, I know the answer." You could have predicted that. You could have stopped the camera, and certainly you did.

So the antithesis of that, the opposite side of that coin, is a predatory look. When I have sinister intent, when I have salacious intent that I'm going to force on somebody, when I come into a room and all of a sudden I lock eyes and I go, "There's that purse that I'm going to steal," or I'm carrying a gun, and I'm going to pull out my gun and all of a sudden I'm going to do this robbery, so I have to pump myself up. So the nostrils flare because I want to get oxygenated blood ready for the battle. My chest pumps up because I want to take in more oxygenated blood so I can fight to the death or flee or do any of the things (because freeze is an option, right?). People that don't train, and are overwhelmed or overcome by emotion or by the event, all of a sudden now the eyebrows come down because I might get hit, and I want to make sure that I don't bleed or sweat into my eye, and I'll be able to see. And my shoulders hunch up a little bit because they want to block my jugular and carotid from damage in that initial fight. So I'm anticipating fighting and running, and my quadriceps are ready and everything else.

And again, if you think of yourself, you're going, "Playing it cool, I'm like ice." Do you know what I'm trying to say? "I'm Ice Cube over here." And then everybody else watching is going, "Hey, what's with this guy?" So if you're watching, but if you're doing this, you're not going to see any of these pre-event indications. So the problem is that functional field of view when it's tied to a phone or your iPad, or your window screen (which becomes a television screen), and now all you can see is the front bumper of the car in front of you, you lose focus. So predatory looks are those looks which we will see just before an event, leading up atmospheric and biometric cues that the human body will always give off. Watch a gymnast before they do the vault. Watch a swimmer before they jump into the pool. You'll actually see their entire bodies reconfigure before that starting gun. And that's what you need to look out for before a person attacks.

Alright, that's a perfect definition. I also like to give the, anytime I'm in, you know, teaching a group of, you know, law enforcement, military, or, you know, a bunch of guys in the room, I'm like, "Hey, you ever seen someone who's about to, or about to get, about to throw a punch in a fight, or comes up to you and is about to, about to hit you?" Like, "Oh yeah, you know that look you had." "Yeah, I saw that look." "Well, did he hit you?" "Yeah." "Well, if you saw it coming, you know, that's, that's predatory looks, that anger cues that you're getting, those raising the shoulders, the balling of the fists." That balling of the fist will happen even if you don't intend to hit anyone. That'll happen even if the person's not in the room.

So you'll start pacing on the phone, you'll start balling up. So the great thing about it is it can be once removed. They can be environmental, you see it can be societal. The beauty of HBPRNA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis) is it's applicable in a whole bunch of genres that are related to it. So people, events, vehicles, animals give off these cues. If a dog comes up to you and raises the hackles, that's information that you need. That that dog is not only mission focused but exhibiting predatory cues, so you're likely to get chased, barked at, and bit.

Yeah, it means I can give myself time and distance and start heading for that fence, not me a kid like you. Me, I'll just surrender.

Yeah, all right, so I can run fast, so I'm just going to run. So I have a lot of scar tissue with dogs and bites. I'm alive because I can run. But think about that, isn't that what we're really talking about? If you absent yourself from that environment, you're going to be immediately safer. So when you predict these incidents and using this twofold, one-point standard can help us predict likelihood of danger or violence in a situation.

I saw a shooting last night, a lot of our viewers will send in stuff, Brian, you'll know we get hundreds of emails, and then some of them have videos. And it was a bunch of kids getting gunned down by a drive-by shooting. And the kids that were closest never knew what hit them. The kids around the curb were so overwhelmed by events that they didn't react until after the car left. And as you went, you know, with that application of, you know, started going away from it, the further into the store where people were dropping in front of other people, they had to say, "I don't know what this is." Some people kneeled, some people stayed at the counter, some people looked. What we're trying to do is we're trying to cut that down, we're trying to gain a tactical and technical advantage on the battlespace through cognition by saying, "I don't have to, you know, you know what, Brian, you know, we called one yesterday. I was talking and I said, 'Hey, you know, when the gunshots go, if people aren't trained, what's going to happen is they're going to overreact.'" And a car backfired, I think it was in Times Square, and almost crushed a bunch of people. So the idea is, training means train your brain for likely scenarios that are going to occur and calming yourself down by giving yourself time and distance so you'll make better advanced critical thinking, better decisions.

Okay, so let's jump into another video, and I know the folks listening, it's going to be a little bit more difficult because we're going over some of the videos, so please get it on YouTube if you're listening. I would tell you one fun thing is play any video. It's either, it's going to be like Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz, sometimes they come together. So should we do the surveillance team video? Let's do that. That's a perfect one. Greg showed this to me just before we came on, and what I want you to pay attention to while Brian is cueing up this video is that there's a survey crew watching a bank robbery in progress across the pond. What I would also further draw your attention to is that everybody on the surveillance crew is mission focused. They're completely paying attention to the robbery in progress, but none of the citizens that are on the street that are watching are paying any attention to it whatsoever.

Sorry, of course, when I go to bring it up is when I'm having some. So now the beauty of it is that it's called editing, so Viking Marren is jobless and he's homeless, so he's got plenty of time to focus on editing this one while he's looking. (Video plays) Exactly. So here we go, Brian, set us up here. The perspective is surveillance crews across the street filming it, but there's also a couple of ground units, and they're just waiting for the bank robbers to step out.

Yeah, so that's exactly it. There's already police surveillance watching this bank location in somewhere, and I believe it's London, watching this location. So a few things to look at right off the bat (referring to the video): we're standing outside of a bank. There's the ATM stand right off to the left of the main entrance to the bank, and there's a motorcycle sitting there two feet from the door of the bank. And you can just watch everyone, which right away, folks, if you ever see something like that, I think it's, go to another bank, go to a different bank and let someone know, please. Because that's immediately, that's a, that's an anomaly above the baseline there for sure.

So as they're watching it, they already keyed in on these guys. They know that they're in there, rob the bank. All these folks on the street, you can clearly see, are just normal folks, just normal folks walking by, not noticing anything and not having a clue that this was going on.

Now that's because they're not anticipating the danger either, Brian. You know, the ML, "Most Likely Course of Action," and "Most Dangerous Course of Action" (MD). Meaning that when you see an observation like this, like this young lady that's walking by (on screen), she takes a look, and this young man or lady that's closer to the building, they take a look, they see a motorcycle parked, and they're probably thinking, "Now it's for sale," or they're thinking, "Hey, if I open a bank account, I'm getting a free motorcycle." Same with this older couple here, they've never decided, "Hey, what's the most dangerous course of action here?" And we're not talking about being paranoid, we're talking about being logical. This is highly unusual, therefore I should make mention of it.

Alright, so now remember, we've got the police teams are in place. This is just the surveillance, the guy trying to record it. There's other units on the ground and in the area. So right now what we're about to see is the actual bank robber coming out of the bank.

Okay. Now, one of the things, if you freeze it right there, Brian, (referring to the video) I'm not the brightest bulb in a bag, clearly, but if somebody comes into your bank head to toe covered with a couple of extra bags, you go, "What?" I'm saying, full-face helmet down, Houston, you may have a problem. Or let's see the reaction of the ground team.

And to add on that, to that, if you walk up to an ATM, and to your right is the entrance to the bank, is exactly how the bank I use is set up too. They jump ATMs right out next to it, right next to the main entrance. And you look over and there's a guy walking out with a full-face helmet on, carrying two bags, about to get on the motorcycle. It's probably empty your pockets as you flee. (Video continues) Continues on about his business. Guy at the ATM. Another guy walking down the street doesn't know, clearly oblivious. Yep.

And now pause it there for a second. Because let's work from left to right, shall we, Brian? The accomplice is coming in. The survey, the survey crew, and the ground team have already given the go signal. So the black vehicle that you see that's down there, the Audi, comes flying in and literally hits the accomplice, pinning the motorcycle up. But take a look at the guy on the right. The guy on the right with the backpack has nothing to do with this. What's the only thought going through his mind? "I'm so pissed, dude, you just hit me with your car!" He's completely oblivious to all the peripherals that are going there, and that could cost him his life.

Listen, if this was in America, gats are coming out and there's going to be lead flying down there. And no offense to our coppers across the pond, but they have to go through a lot to be able to have weapons on a call like this. Now we've looked from left to right, let's take a look at what happens next.

So again, freeze there (referring to the video). So even though their primary move was to pin the vehicle, and they ended up hitting an uninvolved citizen and dropping the accomplice, we've now, just like all these Hollywood movies with all this high-tech stuff, and in a fist fight no matter how futuristic it is, we've just ended with this lone guy in the blue shirt on your right side of your screen that's actually wrestling with the guy that's escaping with the motorcycle, and the person that was knocked off the motorcycle on the left side of your screen.

And what do we see, Brian? We see a one-on-one. This is like a bad basketball movie at this point. So all plans have gone out the window because their anticipation didn't match the ground truth. And let's see a little bit more. Now that's in.

Okay, so here's the other people getting out. Now this is what we call in rugby, a scrum.

Yep, so there's a plan, it was quick, and right now coppers go, "Now you don't know what it's like." Yeah, I do. I've got 38 years of experience of what it's like, Brian. You've got a ton of experience what it's like. Here's the idea: everybody's going after the guy with the ball on the right of the screen and the left of the screen, and damn everything else. So if there was a siren, it's still going. If the car, they might not even have put it in park. As a matter of fact, we've seen people forget to take off their seatbelt and try to get out. And Brian, you have seen people with the locked door smack their head against the vehicle because they failed to do it. Why? Because you're being bombarded with all of these survival chemicals in that cocktail. It makes it hard for you to think, and mission focused makes it harder.

Now, if the helmets were off, we would see predatory looks on both sides, wouldn't we? Predatory looks on the coppers because they see the ball, they're going after the ball, and you know, meaning that they're going after the player most likely to be carrying the ball here, which is the guy right and left. Then we would also, if we could take off the full-face helmets, see those guys are fighting, so they're going to have that gnarled expression as well. We can slow time down at this situation and see that even though it's going to have a good outcome, what was the risk here, Brian? That would be my question as an administrator, either for the bank or for the law enforcement or an insurance agent.

Yeah, right. And this could have been carried out a little bit more safely, I think.

Okay, can you roll a little bit more? A little bit more, just like this. Login continues. You see the guys with the guns. You see, oh, there's no plan.

So right here (referring to the video), you've got in the center of your screen, the guy in the black with a semi-automatic weapon. You see the guy in the foreground with the blue that's behind the one vehicle. You see the guy with the white over there that's covered. What they're doing now is they're doing their full-court press, but go just a little bit further and watch the center of your screen first. Let's watch this guy. I'm not sure what to do. Keep going a little further. So what I'm going to do is do nothing.

So Brian, you'll remember an incident today that I related with you. We were in Iraq, and remote sensors were coming in from the dudes that were on the rooftop that were fighting with the Marines down on the ground. And the one guy kept loading and unloading, loading and unloading his RPD. Do you remember that? And we had a video that they wouldn't unclassify or declassify at the time, and what happened is the guy kept picking up a drum magazine, putting it into his RPD, coming up, and then he would look around him, and he would take it back out, and he would go through it. His brain got caught in that loop. He was so mission focused that he should be firing that he forgot to do it.

We had a copper back in southeastern Michigan that was involved in a situation that he should have been able to fire. He was legally able to, but I would have said he was obligated at that point because a guy offered a threat. And what the copper did is took his Remington 870 and ejected every one of the shells. Why? Before work, what you're supposed to do is eject all those shells, make sure there's not one in the chamber, then reload it. So instead of going back to the range ready on the right, ready on the left, what he did is ejected all rounds without ever firing a shot. Now, in his mind, after during the interview, he said, "Hey, I fired three rounds of 12-gauge."

After this, when you interviewed these guys, Brian, what do you think they would tell you?

Oh, yes, black shirt would say that he did a great thing there, you know. Yeah, he would say he's all over it. And this just kind of continues. Look, this vehicle's tired, shaking, it still wasn't, it was still here, all that stuff.

So everybody, by the way, right now, if you roll it just a little bit longer, Brian, you'll see that everybody's going to come up with handcuffs and you're going to end up at the jail with suspects that have two or three sets of handcuffs. And generally, one of the guys with a long gun, he's got one hand on the handcuff. Those are bad things. But Brian, people are going to think, "Hey, you're being critical of those coppers on the scene." No, the reason we're being critical is cops have more video available to look at. Gosh, in court.

So, so if you know, it's amazing that you got that, that film clip of that NFL coach because we have a lot of games that are videotaped, but very few on the sideline thing, right? I saw one a couple of days ago where Sean Clemens sent it to me, shout out to Sean Clemens, where a batter threw his bat accidentally when he missed a hit. So he goes through, follows through on the swing, the bat goes, and there's one of the players in the dugout that reaches up and grabs the bat. Everybody else had no idea that the bat was flying, wasn't paying attention. This guy was mission focused, grabbed the bat before it hit any of his counterparts.

So, so it all depends on your level of training. And again, the kinetic nature of the event. That event was a big, scary event, and they probably didn't have to take down a lot of bank robbers.

Yeah, and so therefore, you know, an unfolding environment means you're going to have situations like this. Well, it immediately for training, it goes back to functional field of view, mission focus, and predatory looks, and just limits on human cognitive performance. Look, all those guys can bench press a house, and we're, we're, thank God for their service, their country. And what it comes down to is again, just to reiterate, so we're not bashing people who think we're bashing law enforcement. This is just a human performance issue. This is what all humans have. If you don't have that training to do that, then these are the things that can go wrong. And that, you know, not a lot probably went wrong. Maybe that Audi was, I don't know, maybe they probably had to get some work done on it. They probably had to write some reports about their vehicles that they smashed up. But what could have gone wrong? How many, how many vehicles, people walking down the street, you know, how many of them were all, were just walking, could have gotten messed up in that, or taking a hostage, or who knows? You play the what-if game all day. So it just does the cost-benefit analysis. Does it, you know, is the risk worth the reward there? And, you know, it's another thing to talk about.

But let me throw one at you, Brian. You, you know, the Aurora theater shooter, and their being in Colorado, it's one of the ones, there's certain things that are ubiquitous things that people throw up all the time. But look at this, look at this. And one of the things is, there was an interview yesterday, as a matter of fact, with some of the people that were the victims of the Aurora shooting that had survived. They had been shot or they had been traumatized, but they survived, thank God. And they were saying, "Hey, listen, I'm watching a movie. It's a Spider-Man movie. I was talked into watching this movie. The next thing I know, I hear hissing, and all of a sudden I see smoke, and then the next thing, it's shooting." And immediately, what do you think? Well, you think it's going to be a publicity stunt? You think it's part of the movie, that the action's coming out, like that crappy Schwarzenegger movie with the little kid with the golden ticket, Last Action Hero? Is that what's happening?

One of the people in the audience, I'm sure many of them that day at the Aurora theater, was in Colorado, so there was a legal weapon carry person and had their own firearm with them. And the great thing was that one of the people who was talking to him, and the guy said this to the camera, just like your police chief friends, Brian, on TV that say there's no way to prevent these things from happening. This kid said, "I never had time to do anything, to draw my weapon, to fire back, to do anything else." No, he hadn't trained for it. So he didn't consider it. So when this was in progress, your brain never went to that file folder. If you don't have a file folder in your Rolodex for a situation like an active shooter, then when that Rolodex is spinning around, folks, it's going to come up on a blank card and you're going to go, "Duh!" Okay, and in that matter of seconds, the entire situation is going around. So I'm not calling a kid a coward, I'm saying the kid didn't train. He had no idea what he could have done with that weapon. A trained person, I mean, I wish that I could trade places with some of those poor folks that were victimized in that horrific situation, because I'm better trained to deal with that, Brian. You're better trained. So training is the key to improving human performance and being able to spot things like mission focus and predatory looks.

So we've given kind of a couple examples, I know one from an NFL team and one from law enforcement, but I want to pull one up now that's a Walmart example, and of how we can identify pre-event indicators, group likely people together. I mean, there's a lot we could talk about in this here, I know we're trying to mission focus and predatory looks, but that also goes down to this functional field of view and orientation. Right, the more I look at them. So let's just a second to make sure we have a definition for that, Brian.

Yep. So if I'm a human and I look over at something, I'm not orienting towards it. What I'm doing is adjusting my functional field of view to add that item that's external to my, to my functional field of view. Now, if my body turns and now I've got my shoulders and my core and everything that's looking at that, that's orientation. So it's a big difference, because we scan our environment all the time. You'd be amazed how many times you blink or scan your environment when you're not paying attention to it, it just blends in. But orientation means that I now have said, "There's something over there that I need more information on." And this video shows that, doesn't it, Brian?

It does. And that's why I could kind of just real quick to go back to that example I gave kind of at the beginning what you're just talking about, if anyone's ever had that experience where you look at something then look back and then you turn and to face it. That's your limbic system. That's your brain saying, "Hey, there's something going on over here that is more important to whatever you're thinking about right now."

So let's talk about sales. Have you ever been in a Nordstrom and you're walking down and the person that's got the pencil in their hair and they got the clipboard and they want you to look at their scent? Or you got the guy that wants to put the lotion on you? "Come over here, put the lotion!" No, he told me put the lotion in the basket, basket. That was what we were in the tunnel. But the idea is that if they can get you to orient towards them, the next phase is you saying, "No, oh, come on, it's free!" Now they're coming up and they're going to close in the proxemic distance that psychologically de-escalates you and breaks down that situation.

Yes, now they have a potential victim. Here in this circumstance, it's just a sales technique, but you're so right. If they feel or see or sense that orientation is coming, now they're going to orient toward you, and boom, now we have a connection. It's the same thing when you're pulling up off that freeway off-ramp and there's a guy out there with a sign asking for money, and you immediately start looking at everything else in your vehicle. And once you see him stand up and orient towards you, you have that feeling right there. You sit there, "This guy's going to come up and ask me for money. I don't want to do it." So you'll autonomically start looking around.

Digging through your time to adjust my floor mats. Yeah, what did I do with that John Denver tape? Right. Categorize my coins in my coin.

Exactly. Exactly right. That's, that, but that all ties into functional field of view, orientation, mission focus, predatory looks. So it's not so obvious as to back and say the same thing with you said with like, you know, the makeup or perfume salespeople as you walk through, you know, Bloomingdale's or any one of those places. You know, it's, it's the same concept.

So let's, let's bring up a video of actually something that happened in a Walmart, and I think we can kind of give that way, we give people a little bit better understanding of what we're talking about in a place that they're likely more familiar with. So just to kind of set the stage, obviously, we're looking through the perspective of a security camera, but for the purposes of this, you know, just put yourself standing right there in this spot in the store, right? Right here in the center aisle, you know, just looking at all this going on. So we have, you know, your whatever section this is that looks like it might be DVDs or, you know, electronic section over here. Alright, so I got to take in everything in my environment. I have two gentlemen on the little electric scooters, you know, that that they have for you there at Walmart for some folks that that are, you know, have disabilities for them to get around the stores here, right?

They're there for them. You know, given their age and athletic build, which you can pick up at the time, it would seem a little unlikely that these two gentlemen would be riding around, though. So it's just a new observation. It's hey, okay, wait, until that rises to my level of awareness. But I can't jam a square peg in a round hole. I don't know, maybe, maybe they're both disabled and their wheelchairs are at the front and they use these when they're here. Don't rush to an unreasonable conclusion.

And I'll give you an example of that. Let's say that the viewers at home can't tell that these are males because of their perspective. Let's say that they can't tell that they're smaller built and in pretty good shape from this distance. The number of times that you were at a mall where you saw two of the loaner carts being used in the same aisle at the same time by people talking to each other. So for me, where I live and where I've been, that's an anomaly. And I've never seen that. Now, somebody might be watching, "Oh, I see that all the time." Okay, but in my world, that's not. The other thing that draws my attention, Brian, is the store in this part is almost vacant. I need to know more. Is it early? Is it late? Is something going on? So those are a couple of very interesting conclusions that somebody could draw without getting too into the weeds. I always think of, "Your Honor, at the end of a sentence," right? "Yes, Your Honor, at this point I saw that both the rental carts were going the same direction. Yes, Your Honor, at this time I saw that the store was virtually empty." You know, so, so based on both of our observations, I think we got a pretty good baseline for what we're seeing.

And real quick, Greg, I don't know if you can check your, your sound there. Your, it sounds like you pulled the microphone out or something, or it's just using your computer audio. I don't know if you can test that.

Yeah, I got you now.

That's better. Awesome. Alright, whatever reason, the upgrade on my computer just occurred. Now, inside, take me off the loop, though. Of course, only when you, only when you what do you need it not to is what it's going to happen. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and start playing it, and we can kind of, the only thing we can really take in right now are the two gentlemen on the little electronic scooters that they have.

And we know, dude, there may be no sinister intent. They might not be doing anything. We're not trying to say that everybody around you is up to something. We're saying that certain cues will draw your attention, force you to attend to things in your environment more than other cues. So what I'd like to watch, Brian, is as we're coming up, if you can sort of indicate the top left of your field.

Yeah, so right here. That's going to be coming through there first is a female, and that's going to sort of trigger a whole bunch of action at once. And so once you're trained, you have the luxury of being able to chunk information more quickly, and therefore you'll be able to put things in context and measure the relevance much more quickly as well. So when she comes in, if you can just capture just for a second, so folks, they'll know what to look at. Yeah, so she should be coming in off the top left here. Yep. So I'll just kind of let this play, and she should be coming in here, kind of about any second, and with a group of people, one out in front and then several behind, and we'll get to it. And here she comes, I'll go ahead and point pause here in a second to point her out. Alright, so this is the kind of person we want to focus in on right here (pointing to the female on screen).

But up at the top left of that, people that are watching are going to be saying, "Why?" What we're going to say is, "Hold on a second, we're trying to orient you because you'll have a six-degree functional field of view, and then we'll rewind the tape mentally, cognitively, to show you why." Because everybody else is not mission focused. They're not mission focused and we don't see anything. We see our guys over here that become interesting because I want you to take a look at white. If you'll take a look at white versus black, and we're talking about the clothing there, look at the likely orientation of white now towards where this female is coming. So this is the inkling that there's a connection that's going here. Can you roll it a little bit further, Brian? Keep going a little bit farther. So she continues, and now I'm convinced that that orientation hasn't changed and black shirt's on the move. I'm convinced now that something was said there, something's going on there that they're aware that she's showing up. So right now, I've got sort of a proxemic linkage, Brian. It's a weak one, but it's a good one that's building. I've got some granularity building, but go a little bit further.

Okay, let's continue. (Video plays) Now pause it.

All right, start taking a look. What's going to happen is we're going to start seeing that the females are moving in in close proximity to each other. Watch your screen for a second. Good. Okay, as she's coming down the aisle, do you notice how the person in the white keeps orienting? That's very important to me because that suggests to me that something important is going on between those folks. So either they know each other, or the person is suspicious of her, or the person says, "Oh, here she comes." Now there's some connection that's established at this point only because of the orientation and functional field of view. Let's go a little further.

Okay, now all of a sudden we see the backing up. (Video plays) Now pause it right there for a second.

There's two females coming down that same row. So seconds ago, we had nobody in this section. Then we had the two guys on the carts in this section. Now, all of a sudden, everything in this store is happening in this row. So what we have now is orientation and mission focus on the two people furthest from the camera in the aisle at the right. We now have black shirt and white shirt orienting that way. At this point, the only person that's not paying attention is the female in the center. So we're all tracking that there's five people there, one in the center that's not paying attention. Let's roll it a little further, Brian.

(Video plays, showing a fight breaking out.)

And now we have a scrum. But take a look, everybody in that scrum, it's like a ball of yarn. Everybody was involved all at the same time. This wasn't a surprise. This was going on. Somebody anticipated this. If you would have seen the female earlier in the tape on the left, she actually broke off from the crew that was following this girl and paralleled them. So go back and watch this video on your own. Now we see white shirt, black shirt's involved, and the female's getting a beat-down. Let's see if there's any environmental cues that the atmosphere exchanged, Brian.

Now, a question here was, is black shirt and white shirt trying to break it up? Are they co-conspirators? What their role is? My answer to this is, I don't care. My answer is, I'm looking for intent, not motive, and that's up to the cops and the lawyers and everybody else to argue out. But what I am saying is that at this point we could tell by slowing down the tape that some foreign object was coming out of the trunk and it was likely a weapon. Why? Because everybody scattered. The female has the absolute right in the center of this photo to defend herself. As a matter of fact, take a look at the hair that's down on the ground. This is a violent assault from the very beginning. We saw the level of violence from this assault. But the question is, if we are going to talk about legal, rather than mission focus and predatory looks, Brian, the question is, what she does next, is that legal? And I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a person somewhere very close to this aisle at this time and place with your wife or kids or significant other. And your crime on this date is that you're just shopping. Let's roll it a little bit further, Brian.

(Gunshots sound in the video.)

Bang, bang, bang! Hard, hard to tell how many times she fired. We know from research it was five or six rounds that were fired. And the idea here is, if those persons were on her side and so willing to aid their "sister," how come that they attended themselves now when the gun came up, but they weren't at risk if they were her friends? If they were co-conspirators, likely she's not going to shoot them, right? As a matter of fact, what we see by her behavior is she goes after the people that she was fighting.

Now, first of all, from a legal standpoint, they don't have the right to do this. And from a human standpoint, you don't have the right to put my life in jeopardy just because you're a legal concealed carry holder, because those bullets go past the aisles that she's shooting, and that other person was running away. But for your audience that's listening, Brian, and certainly for the ones that are watching, all of those pre-event indications were screaming, "This is going to happen." Store security could have gone into action well before that. They could have already notified emergency personnel or locked down the store or, you know, started moving people out. Anybody on the other aisles could have covered their kid and said, "Hey, we're getting out of here." All of those things. And you're going, "That's a game of inches, the NFL, and we still watch them every Sunday." Yep. This is a game of seconds and nanoseconds. And by giving yourself the ability to cognitively anticipate danger, you're giving yourself the ability to survive a dangerous event.

And that's exactly what we're trying to prevent here, is what, you know, being a contributing factor to your own homicide, walking into an ambush. That's where this skill set comes into play. If she would have had a couple seconds, one second, to think about going down that aisle or notice the people following her, she could have changed that outcome, right?

She could have. Whatever she went straight to security, gone out of the store, said, "Please leave me alone," called for help, yelled on the intercom. Even if at that point she was legally concealed carry and felt that her life was in danger, if she had pulled out her weapon there without ever firing a shot, what would those people have done? They would have done exactly what they did right there: they would have taken off and ran, and no rounds would have been fired, no one would have gotten hurt.

All right, so that's the whole, equally...

Here's my thing, legally, you've got to remember this: if you're going to put your hand on a gun, you better be facing a felony. Yeah, if you're going to draw your gun, even if you're going to put it at the low ready, you better be facing a felony. Now here, like I said, she had the absolute right to defend herself against a multitude of people that were attacking. I'm not agreeing with what she did with her weapon, I'm saying it was wrong and she needs some training.

Alright, what happens is she escalated an already dangerous situation, and she could have easily been, you saw it, disarmed. Thankfully, nobody was killed in this incident, but I want to look at it, Brian, from the perspective of being there shopping and not being involved in this scrum and saying, "You don't have the right to put my life in danger or jeopardy."

You know, but also it's, it's my responsibility to kind of pay attention, isn't it?

Right. And that's what brings.

So exactly, to bring it back to functional field of view and orientation, to really bring it back to mission focus and predatory looks. I think the takeaway from that is, you know, now that we have, people have a general understanding of what mission focus is, we've all experienced it, we've all had it. What predatory looks are. Okay, we've all seen someone that just, "Man, did you see the look on that guy's face?" You know, if you know, it sent chills up my back. Okay, that's what we're talking about. You've seen predatory looks before. Well, I see those two things coupled together, that's danger, that's, that is always, always a dangerous thing in progress.

And I'll tell you this for our, our folks that are listening, because sometimes we appeal to security or military or schools or whoever might be watching the podcast. I want you to self-think, if you're a loss prevention or if you've ever worked security before, was there any time that you saw this video spontaneously that you looked at it and said, "Wow, they're shoplifting," "Oh, that's a flash mob," "Oh, they're all going to break into song"? This is just the preliminary. Now you knew right away it was a beat-down that was getting ready to happen, and all those cues started to coalesce. All we're saying is, if you slow time down and add training, you will be able to predict and anticipate those well before other humans and certainly before they occur.

Well, I think that's a, that's a good spot to end on, Greg. You know, just taking, taken away once again those mission focus and predatory looks. So it's just another, another tool in your toolkit right there to look out for that you can walk away from this podcast and go, "Okay, that's something I can look out for. That's an indicator for me right there where I know that's immediate danger." And now you're probably, some of you are listening going, "Oh my God, I've had that experience," or, "Oh, I saw that before," or, "I know exactly what you're talking about." Okay, so now the idea is, now it's, it's creating a bias for action. You need to act on that, or you need to prevent those things from occurring. So it might be something simple as you getting yourself and your family out of there and then telling someone, but get away from the immediate danger so you don't become a victim. I think you can learn from that.

So again, if anyone wants more information, always head to the website Arcadiacognarada.com. Again, we're on Twitter, Instagram, we got a Medium site where we post a lot of the lessons learned that are also on the website. So please follow The Human Behavior Podcast, follow us, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. Share with your friends if you liked it. Comments are always welcome, please. If you want to see anything specific or have questions on stuff, there are plenty of ways on there to get a hold of us. All of our links are in the link to this video or the podcast if you're just listening to it.

And Brian and I are going to break down a couple of other videos that folks sent in. Those are going to be available online shortly. And like Brian said, please, you've got questions, you've got things that you want to see us bring up, please contact us.

Alright, everyone. Thank you for listening. We'll have the next one out soon, and hope to hear from you guys. So be safe.