Left Of Greg 023 How To READ People

That's great. Anybody that's been a guest before, anybody that's watching us or listening to us while they're driving or running, always knows that Brian asks a huge question, rarely with an immediate soundbite answer. The other thing they don't know about us, Brian, is that usually just before the podcast, I'll get a text message, "Hey, we need to talk about this," and then the next minute we're on Zoom. So, none of the script that's presented, which I'm sure is a report, is immediately obvious upon somebody tuning in.

So, I was thinking about it while you were saying it, and there are a couple of parallels. One, I remember going to every brief since probably 1975, and every single brief said, "John Boyd, Boyd's OODA loop, John Boyd, Boyd's OODA loop." By 1980, I had started asking if they had ever met John Boyd, because I saw John Boyd brief two times, and the briefs were not even remotely close to each other, because he was still living all up in the OODA loop. He was still developing his understanding of what it was that he tripped over in the dark.

And real quick on that, the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is an observation and decision-making process. Colonel John Boyd came up with it, sort of stumbled on it, like you just said, in the dark. There's a way to take very, very complex scientific principles and how humans make decisions into a very easy way to articulate it. He was a fighter pilot, so his whole thing was, "How do I outsmart?" So, how do I get that gift of time and distance? If I can observe the enemy, orient in the direction, make the best tactical decision right at that moment, then I'm going to win that engagement. So that's kind of a rundown on the OODA loop. And again, we expect our readers and listeners and watch-observers, I guess, to do their homework. I certainly do expect that.

My point being is that I'm talking to some specialists in the D and E ring of the Pentagon, and talking to the most brilliant scientists on the face of the planet, and everybody's throwing out the John Boyd, but when it came right down to a critical understanding, Boyd didn't have it. The idea is that if we take a look at the O and the D in the center, that's where all the decisions are made. Now, it has to be coupled with something. So, you touched on it: when we start talking about the electrochemical neurotransmitters of the body, let's talk about something as simple as the pheromones. Certain smell indicators warn us prior to actually shaking hands with the person, and those may influence our decision or our reaction or our ultimate understanding of the situation. So, what I'm trying to tell you is, as smart as Boyd was, what he was trying to do is create an architecture for an understanding. That's what I'm trying to do because no two situations are identical, so don't rush to an unreasonable conclusion.

Now, if we take a look at the next thing, we have a hierarchy of needs, and everybody says, "Oh, we have to look at Maslow's hierarchy." Okay, I love Maslow, love the name, and everybody throws Maslow out there. There's another thing that they don't understand: Maslow's base with it was a college classroom. I remember the very first time that they wanted to add a confound early in the Combat Hunter, which was originally named Urban Hunter, and a Marine Corps Warfighting Lab was working with Pacific Science and Engineering and other super scientists. And what they wanted, Brian, is they wanted to add a stress in the decision-making process. The stress was one of the students would have his hand in cold, one of the students would have his hand in warm water. This is important to me, as we're talking about skill-building, critical thinking decisions for Marines that were going to go to the most dangerous kinetic environment ever. Here we were talking about the tried and true. So, abandon looking at these architectures as being "this or that," "check in the box," because it doesn't work that way. It has to be fluid, it has to be in the moment, but there are certain things that we should be looking for.

Okay, and on that, I know that I think the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is not something that's really even taught as much anymore. I think that's kind of gone away, not gone away with, but sort of not really relevant as much, and for a number of examples you brought up.

Relevant concept? No. But to add to what you're saying, that's not really that we have to look beyond that. And to touch on the OODA loop a little bit, same thing. I mean, Boyd was talking about things that most people, like you just said, anyone who uses the term, are like, "Do you really understand?" He was talking about physics, he was talking about mathematics, he was talking about evolutionary biology when he developed this. What I'm talking about, we have to talk about the second law of thermodynamics, we have to talk about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, we have to talk about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to understand what you and I do, to understand what you, Shelley, and I are taking to the masses, what we do every day. They would have to understand all of that. But what we've done is reduced it to the fact that it's much simpler.

There was a book out—I'm still getting those jalapeño peppers for lunch—there was a book out called Left of Bang. What a novel concept, written by those two young reserve lieutenants that followed me around and said, "Hey, what if we steal everything he says and just write it down?" But in that book, when you take a look at it, what they tried to do is go backwards; they tried to degrade what it took me my entire career to take a look at and wash away from. So, do we use a little bit of Maslow's now? But we use the pyramid concept. Fred, it's a little bit of Boyd, but we only use the O and the D in the center. And does that say that those guys are charlatans? Some of them. But no, what we're trying to say is that there's a rapid—for example, if I see that you've got a bumper sticker on your car that says, "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." Okay, the first thing that comes into my mind if I'm going to do a traffic stop on that is this guy might be armed, but it might not be his car. So, what you've done is you've created a vacuum by saying, "This might be true, but are there any other artifacts and evidence to support that conclusion?" Right? Unreasonable conclusion. We can't keep it.

Okay, so right there is a great example. So, what we're looking at, like a bumper sticker on a car, which would seem innocuous to some, which we almost don't pay attention to because everyone puts bumper stickers on their car, or a lot of people do. Folks like you and I go, "Well, wait a minute, that's someone who's sending a message." If you take the time to write something on the wall, whether that's graffiti or a note, or you take the time to put a sticker on your vehicle, whatever that is, is important to you. So, whether that's all the little doodles of the mom and the dad and two little kids to show you how many people are in their family, or they're proud of that. Whatever that message is, we're talking about, we have to attribute value to that.

Precisely. So, just to go back to "observe, orient, decide, act," if I have to attribute value to things that I would otherwise not really pay attention to, this is where we get into the "pocket litter." I would say, "Alright, one, in my environment, we look for pocket litter. What are little things, little indicators in my environment that are going to tell me about that person or that situation?" So, like you just said, a bumper sticker, perfect example. Whether that says, "Trump 2020" or "Bernie 2020" or "Coexist," you can take it from that someone's sending a message. So, now I can say, "Alright, likely, I can draw some type of conclusions about this person." But we always have to do the "most likely, most dangerous course of action." But I also say, just what you brought up, "Hey, maybe they borrowed that car. Maybe that's their mom's car. Maybe that's it." So, I can't go off of one indicator to draw a conclusion. I have to gather a number of cues together. So, I have to gather more artifacts and evidence.

So, let's follow that line of reasoning, Brian, because you're spot on. So, let's just say that for whatever reason I'm going to talk to a driver of a car. It could be something that I'm hosting a car wash for my local church, not that I'm a cop on a traffic stop. Put yourself in the shoes that you're a fly on the wall, observing this contact. As I'm approaching the car, I notice, comparative all the time, I've got one car over here that's not smoking at all, but this car is smoking. I smell that this car smells like a car. This car over here, man, I'm smelling it's burning oil viciously. I go up and I see this one doesn't have a bumper sticker, this one's got a bumper sticker and the two are something to support, let's say, the NRA and "My high school kid is on the honor roll." So then I get a little bit closer and I look into the rear deck. In the rear deck of the NRA car, I see a baseball cap that says the "cold, dead hands gun thing." I also see a copy of Sports Afield and some shooting magazine, Guns & Ammo. In the other car, I don't see those. What I'm starting to do is I'm starting to create a case of likelihood.

Now, as I get a little closer to the car, I notice on the "gun guy's" car, that he's got some impulse control issues, because I see a lot of empty cigarette packs in the back. I see an ashtray that's full. I see some fast-food wrappers. Now I get a little bit closer to it and I notice that there are things wrong with the car, that there's a Band-Aid and duct tape and something else holding it together. What I'm trying to do is not to bash anybody for an affiliation to an organization or the lack of an affiliation. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to put stuff in a box, and it's like taking a jigsaw puzzle, and it's not all pieces from the same puzzle. We want to look for two cats and a ball of yarn, but what we've got here is we've got some Eiffel Tower, and we've got some people fishing on a pond in Helsinki. So, what you've got to do is you've got to shake that box and take a look and say, "What are we really looking at? Are we dealing with the guy that's got low levels of sophistication or high levels of organization?"

I want you to think now, let's reverse it. We're standing there and the two cars are coming to our carwash. On the right side, we've got the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo. It's got a carpet dashboard. The guy's unkempt in his appearance, shaky beard, he's got a cigar with a big ash on it. On the left side, we've got a guy that's 30 years old, he's got a polo, it's tucked in, his gig line is straight, his car is waxed, and the windshield is clean, and the rubber on the wipers—I'm telling you, you've got to look at that level of detail instantly when you're making the decision. Now, if those two just passed me for three-quarters of a second and I was going to determine which one was a likely serial killer, I'm going to choose the polo guy, because he's got his stuff together, he's highly organized, he's got a way to handle the stress of his life, in a situation where the other guy with the candy wrappers and the carpet on the dash doesn't.

I'm talking about instantly making realistic conclusions based on incoming or stationary evidence that I have to weigh compared to the baseline. So, not everything matters, but the minutiae, sometimes measured against other artifacts and evidence, will tell me a story. And I've got to be able to follow that story and draw reasonable conclusions from what that story gives me.

Now we've just talked about a car, Brian. Let's talk about a dog next. The same thing as a "Beware of Dog" sign. Then we see the dog in the yard, we see that the dog has got chain marks because it stretches against the chain. I don't have to go near the fence to know that that dog is going to likely jump at me because I can see the wear marks on that dog's neck. I see that it's chewed and dug in the yard, so the dog doesn't have a lot of discipline, so I'm not going to be surprised if it breaks loose and tries to bite me. If the dog is a Ridgeback or turns into one, with the hair on the back of the neck standing up, now I know the erector pili muscles (piloerection) of the dog are alerting on me and it probably wants to take a bite out of me. So then I'm not going to be surprised if the dog attacks me. These people yesterday in Colorado got attacked, and two mountain lions got euthanized. If you go into the woods where mountain lions live, and it's the time the mountain lions are out, and you see a mountain lion and you stick around, you're going to get bit.

So, the same thing with that dog in the car, it's comparing those things, and then against the baseline: "Hey, it's cold outside, why is the guy not wearing a jacket? Hey, it's cold and the guy's driving, why does he have the windows rolled down?" There might be a DUI. Those might be artifacts and evidence that tend to show me something unusual against the baseline.

Okay, so a couple great things to pull out. One, you said, "Tell a story." So, everyone tells a story; every person, every vehicle, every situation you're in has a story to tell there. And we actually like that. Our brain likes explanatory storylines to make sense of the environment. I have to come up with likely conclusions in my environment; I have to come up with patterns, because otherwise my brain—

It's purely survival skills.

Yeah, "Am I going to be able to survive the situation? Am I going to live?" And there are a lot of examples we can get into, but you started right there with "baseline." I would always say that that step, we'll call it Step One of observing behavior, is establishing a baseline: what's normal for that given place, in time of day, where you're at, who you're with. There are environmental factors in there, there are internal and external factors through that person. But what's normal for that event that you're at? What's normal for a gas station at 8:00 at night when you're filling up with gas? Alright, so we start there. I think that's a good place to start. And I think we can just build on our own experiences. Maybe that gas station at 8:00 at night on a Monday is different in one neighborhood than it is in a different neighborhood in that city.

So, you've just identified something that's key for our listeners: if you don't have the file folder for "Atlanta, Georgia, 8:00 o'clock, Shell gas station near the airport," which is full of rental cars being returned, nobody uses it but those people on a rental. So, all of a sudden, you see an old beat-up car that's pulled up next to you and the guy is giving you a predatory look. Maybe that's very important. Maybe he's the security guard. Well, how do you balance that? Listen, if you don't have those file folders, one, you've got to get the training and learn them, because there are basics of how to read that, and that's what we're trying to do here for free if you can't get to the class. The other thing is, you've got to go out and get them. You have to go to different places in different environments, because if you don't, you're going to be at a deficit situation, because you won't know what an anomaly looks like. An anomaly in your baseline, and if they start adding up quickly, means you have to leave. That means that place is getting robbed. That means that you're going to get taken. That means that somebody wants to jack your car. Not everybody is out to get you, but just like the things we talked about with that car and that dog, in those situations, if I get enough evidence in the pile that is an MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action), I have to act, and I have to act first and act faster or I might be a victim.

Okay, so yeah, it's a good point about establishing baseline and building on our file folders, our past experiences, what's normal for this given place and time. And then, just like you said, "Well, what's the anomaly in the baseline? What's here that shouldn't be here, and what isn't here that should be here?" And I like the "telling a story" part; it's great.

So, I'll give you an example. Just walking with my dog with a seven-year-old, and she goes, she's—we're walking past a few cars just in our neighborhood. And then in the little area that we live, the pizza delivery car goes by. It's very well branded, it's clearly marked, the entire vehicle. It's got the little thing on top. So, I started a little perfect, perfect time for training right then and there. So, she says—remember, she's seven—it's like, "Man, I see that thing all the time. A lot of people around here, most people around here must eat a lot of pizza." And I said, "Yeah, that's probably a good assumption." I go, "You know, hey, what's the other thing though? Do you see it here? Does that person, do you think maybe, do they live here?" She says, "Well, I guess they could." I go, "But have you ever seen that vehicle parked in a parking spot or only out in front of people's houses?" She's like, "Well, only out in front of people's houses." And, "You know what? It's only around dinnertime or at night that I see it." And then she stopped dead in her tracks and went, "Wait a minute!" And I was waiting for her to pick up on this. "They don't drive those cars; those cars are parked over at the pizza shop that we drive past, and they leave them in the parking lot." So, she came up, as a seven-year-old, with an explanatory storyline to determine, "Does this person likely live here, or are they just likely delivering a pizza?"

So, what she created is a profile, just like a computer has a profile for a user. What she started doing is filling in these file folders. For example, you could quiz her now and say, "What time are pizza places open? Does the pizza place have a 24-hour delivery? If so, does the pizza delivery guy ever have anybody else in the car with him?" Because all of those would help me understand anomalies. If now I'm getting followed by a pizza car and there are two people in the front seat, that doesn't fit. So, anytime something doesn't fit, I have to account for it because that becomes an anomaly, and all anomalies must be investigated.

An example: people go, "Man, you're the crab magnet. How are you getting all these felonies all the time?" It's paying attention to little things. So, I'm going north on Hoover, approaching the PD back in the day. I'm going to take a left on 12-and-a-half Mile and head west. So, this vehicle is coming, and it's racing the yellow light, and I see it. Now, I'm tired, I worked nights, I just want to go to the barn. And it actually runs a yellow so late on the yellow that you're in the intersection during the red. And I don't care if it's illegal or not, it's stupid because the other people, all they see is green and go, and they hit the gas, and now you've got this world-class T-bone accident. So, I'm looking on the side of this "sled," and it's a frequently stolen vehicle, which helps add it to my baseline. It says "Sterling Heights Public Schools," which is further north yet, and it's heading southbound. They're not speeding, but they're all in the middle lane. So, I look and there are four people in it, none of the four people that are in that car are over 17-18 years old.

Okay, so what you would have me believe in this explanatory storyline is on a Saturday morning, Sterling Heights High School had such an emergency that they gave their administrative vehicle to four kids that were going to be driving southbound towards the Detroit border. Now, the idea here is that it's not plausible, that doesn't hold water, it's highly unlikely. So, what I have to do is I have to conduct a limited objective experiment. I happen to be in a fully marked police car. What do you think the likely reaction would be from the Sterling Heights people at the school if I did a U-turn and I hit the siren and the lights? Obviously, they would want to stop and say, "Didn't you hear about our school emergency? We're hosting whatever." The idea is, what would they do if it was a fresh "rip," if it was a stolen car? Well, they probably would get around and they would likely accelerate.

So, those are the types of conclusions you have to draw, and it doesn't matter what your lifestyle is, it doesn't matter if you're at a 7-Eleven or you're working at the library. Everything has a baseline. For example, if I see a human—and you know me, Brian, we always talk about people, events, and vehicles—that's me, I don't just do humans, right? And the humans in that baseline in that surrounding. So, would you say that Brian Marren acts differently in front of his dad and mom than he does if he was just with his brother? What about if he was with his brother and a couple of cousins, or he was with his brother and people that he met for the first time? Or what if you were alone? Or what if you and Makayla were alone at dinner and somebody came up and said, "Hey, aren't you that 'hosebag' from that podcast?" However you react in those situations, the baseline is different. So, just like there are 52 cards in a deck, don't think that every time I come up on the Brian Marren card there's only one card. There are different places in your brain that information is stored, and you have to be able to recall that specific information based on the arousal. So, if it's a smell or if it's a sound—like for example, the sound of a shotgun racking is very different than the sound of a trunk closing—those things are what add the color to the play-by-play of my human behavior profile. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and then it goes right into, when you're establishing that baseline, anytime you make an observation, the context and what you view it in is everything. The context changes the relevance of what it is that you see. So, just like you said, given each of these observations, depending on where they're at, is what it means. So, you just take that same exact situation of the four young individuals driving that vehicle from that school. Now, if that accident occurred as they were going into the school lot, that would completely change the relevance of it. Maybe they were trying to get in a hurry to get that vehicle back because they had to go do whatever. It can totally change our observation immediately.

And it also changes my probable cause. So, I don't have a legal standing to create a contact in one, but I do in the other. So, relevance gives the context a greater deal of fidelity, more granularity with which to create comparisons. So, we're not just comparing red to orange. What we're doing is we're saying there are many different—there's a palette of differences in between us. So, instead of sitting there and going, "Not enough information," I remember one time teaching Marines on the East Coast, and we got in a room with a bunch of unbelievers because they'd never been through the training. They're trying to poke holes in it, and they had the XXX file up, which was the role-player file called "Such." So, it was the last file that you could pull from, and there was nothing after "X." And they were looking at a license plate from the role-player file, and they were saying, "This is not enough information to draw a reasonable conclusion." I was like, "Yeah, hair-brained, that's because it's for us to make cardboard license plates that look like the area we're going into, and nothing more. We made money."

But back in those days, remember Brian, we had to create the clothing of the Iraqi police, and we had to modify the UN vehicles. We had to do that all with money out of our own pockets and with poster paint and stuff. So, these jamokes were saying, "Hey listen, if I compare those, no, you can't compare apples and lawn chairs and come out with a reasonable conclusion." What you've got to do is say, "What's this lawn chair doing in Antarctica?" It doesn't fit. So, the idea is don't try to take too much information. Assimilate as much information as possible, but don't try to fit a round peg into a square hole. Don't try to create an unrealistic standard by which to measure your observation.

Right. And I think that's where a lot of people, that's where we go wrong sometimes. So, we teach human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. Pattern recognition, sure, people can go out and say, "Oh yeah, I saw this, this, and this," and it's great. It's the analysis part where we often jump to conclusions. So, a lot of times, we'll come up with some type of ridiculous hypothesis trying to jam that square peg into the round hole when we're looking at something, or we'll say, "Oh, I saw this, this, and this, so that must mean this." Well, you don't know that. You know, perfect example, you said you see all those bumper stickers all over a vehicle like, "This guy is," come up with whatever opinion you want. And then that person gets out and, "Oh, hey, it's my mom's car that I had to borrow because mine's in the shop."

Exactly. Jumping to an unreasonable conclusion based on not enough information. So, there's an important, I think, reason to at least understand why we do that. Why humans go for those unreasonable conclusions. Why is it, "Oh, it must be a Bigfoot!" "It's got to be a flying saucer!" "They had to be aliens!" Why do we always go for the absurd? The simple reason is this: your brain must—and we're right back to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem—your brain must make order out of chaos. So, when you see something, your brain has to assimilate it and put it in a file. It's got a well-organized system for decimal, and this has to go here. So, when you see something that doesn't fit, you get this look, the chin opened, the gait, the arms and legs akimbo. And that's the misunderstanding most of the time. It looks like this because people are trying to assimilate enough information to draw a conclusion. If you can't, and that rolodex is spinning, it keeps coming up with a blank card. What you will do is you'll choose an unreasonable conclusion when you come up with a blank card. It's all the time, it's the roll of the dice, it's whatever the heck comes up.

And whatever that thing is, like, we're at the ranch one night, and all of a sudden we had this green asteroid or meteorite come down, and a little bit later a red one came down. It was absolutely amazing. And the next thing we did, we talked to US Forest Service and I go, "Yeah, US Geological Survey tracked it. It was amazing. The part..." And that's because of this in the atmosphere, and there was a high sulfur content, and a ferrous oxide or whatever else. We drove down to one of the fellow ranchers, who shall remain nameless, he's wonderful. He goes, "I'm damn sure UFOs were doing them crop circles out here, and they stole a cow!" I said, "They stole a cow?" "I know them cattle mutilations!" So, a cow is walking down the road when we were driving back to the ranch, and I go, "That's the one that the UFOs stole! He must have got away!"

The idea is, if you allow anything to go, if you don't try to create an architecture for your observations and perceptions, you'll believe just about anything. You'll believe the news headlines, or you'll believe what you saw in passing was in fact a Bigfoot when it was a loose cow. You can't jump to unreasonable conclusions. You've got to format the way that you think, and the way that you think is this: almost nobody is trying to kill you. Almost no vehicle is stolen. Almost nobody is carrying a gun. But all of a sudden, in this room or in this Walmart that I walked to, or trying to get the Double Gulp Slurpee at 7-Eleven, I noticed that this person is "waist-aware," meaning that they're paying more attention to their waist area than anybody else in the store. I also noticed he's not the counter person. Okay. I also noticed that he's not in line, and everybody else is trying to get to the line quickly and pay for their "Third Zig-Zag" and get the hell out to the car. This guy's lingering. And all of a sudden, that person (guy, girl, doesn't matter; I just happened to use "he/him" but I'll accept anything when I'm doing the descriptions, right?). So, I'm now watching the guy over by the Funyuns, and he's looking at the roadmap, and all of a sudden, I see the predatory looks, and I see the mission focus. He's not paying attention to us at all, he's paying attention to the counter or the cold medicine or the cooler. And now I start drawing the reasonable conclusion that either he's going to try to buy the cold medicine because he wants to make the meth, or he wants to steal a six-pack, or perhaps he's going to rob the joint.

Now, that doesn't mean it is. The person might have just had his eyes dilated at the optometrist and he's waiting for a Uber. So, if I continue my observation from a safe location and I watch just a little bit longer, I'm going to get information that's going to feed one of those buckets. Now, guess what? I've got more puzzle pieces that show that cat with a ball of yarn than I do the Eiffel Tower. And that's what this is about: making reasonable conclusions based on artifacts and evidence that exist, not coming up with a hair-brained theory. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And also, not jumping to a conclusion and saying, "Okay, everybody down!" I don't have enough information, so I have to be alert but not hyper-alert.

Right, and that's also coming up with that explanatory storyline. So, if you think that you do make that observation, like, "Okay, this guy is going to rob the place." Okay, let's assume that for the purposes of hypothesis testing, let's assume that to be true. Well, what will I see next? Where else is he likely then going to go? And if he's not going to rob the place, what should I see next? What else? And then it's got to meet one of those two criteria. It's got to head in either one of those directions.

You're exactly right. So, now I change the lenses and I use any of the domains. So, I say heuristically, I see a bulge to the rear right. Most people are right-handed, and the bulge is about where I would put a gun. Okay, that's not enough information, right? But I also notice a vehicle in the parking lot that's backed in a few spots over, and it's running. And that guy keeps checking his watch and looking over his shoulder to the front door of the store that you happen to be in. I also noticed that this guy has oriented himself a number of times toward that vehicle. Now it's starting to seem that this might be a more likely storyline than the other.

Now, that doesn't mean anything. Maybe, one of the greatest capers in the world is this guy going into diabetic shock, and he says, "Hey, I got to go in and grab some orange juice," and comes out. And a cop sees him and thinks he fled the store after a robbery, and during the traffic stop he rolls a guy up and is a little rough with him. That turns into case law because, guess what? He, instead of filling those spots with artifacts and evidence, filled those spots with conjecture that said, "It must be a robbery." Once he did that, once he said, "It must be this," then all the evidence started filling and fitting that unreasonable conclusion.

Yeah, we make the facts. Yeah, it's confirmation bias, right? We make our hypothesis, we make our analysis, what we think is likely, fit the artifacts and evidence, versus looking at the artifacts and evidence and letting them lead you to where they can.

Criticize which is science. So, science says that we're going to take a look at what the evidence shows us, we're going to study it, and we're going to test our hypothesis. And guess what? It's going to hold water, or it's not going to hold water. So, the whole idea is for a neophyte, for somebody brand new with this, if you see enough information that you think crime is afoot, call 9-1-1. They're the experts. Let them come and figure it out. It's like if you see smoke and you see fire, and it's coming from a house and not a barbecue, call 9-1-1 and let the fire department show up and figure it out.

But if you start people-watching on a level of a human behavior profile, what you want to do is take a lot of notes and take a lot of photos. And then you want to compare those photos to the reality of the situation and get used to going up afterwards and going, "I'm a student of human behavior and I noticed that you're doing this, and I just wonder why." And then the person will say one of two things: one, "Get out of my face or I'll pound you," which we get about 70 percent of the time, because people are surprised by you being pretty good at this.

Psychological de-escalation.

Exactly, you learn how to do that. The second part, where they go, "Wow, that's interesting. This is my son and we're about to go in this place and we're waiting for my mom who has diarrhea and can't come out of the 7-Eleven bathroom." Right? So, there are reasonable conclusions, but there's also the conclusion that you have been anticipated. So, what you always want to do—you remember the Zanpakutōma with Brad Pitt (referring to World War Z by Max Brooks)—what they said is, "Hey listen, we always got this one guy that no matter what, comes up with the alternative hypothesis." That's a great mind game to play. You're out there and you're trying to take a look at an explanatory storyline. Go, "What if it's none of this? What if it's just that this guy is waiting for the bathroom?" Guess what? The person outside is waiting for him going, "We're going to be late for work," and there's somebody in that bathroom that does have violent diarrhea, and now he's upset. That's just as likely as your gosh-darn abduction or robbery scenario. So, without the artifacts and evidence to support a conclusion, without your hypothesis test, you have to drive on, and what we tell people is, "Take Eckhart notes and move out," because not everything is a bomb, and not everybody is trying to kill you. So, therefore, you have to be reasonable.

And I think the reasonableness standard is one that I would apply to any baseline: is it reasonable to assume that in this baseline, at this time, in this place, that this is likely? Now, if you're in an area that has a high crime rate, and that high crime rate happens during nighttime hours, and normally happens at 7-Elevens, then maybe you have something. Maybe that's a more important factor, weighs more than another factor.

And that would also go into building that baseline for that specific location.

Exactly. So, Brian, I want to make sure we touch on this because you hit on it earlier, but I think it's important enough: by deciding not to go to that place and going to another place, by deciding not to risk being a victim in an incident, that's your choice. Your safety is largely your responsibility. And we talked about homework. If you go out and you're in an area that is a high crime area, and you've got your windows rolled down and your music blaring, and you're not paying attention, you should expect to get jacked. And when you do get jacked, guess what? If you're not a trained MMA fighter and a martial arts expert and a shooter, maybe you want to give up that car and just walk off. Those are the rehearsals, cognitive mental rehearsals for an incident that are overly important.

So, let's kind of just scale it back then to just everyday observations. You call them performing "limited objective experiments," but it's because it's a scientific term for messing with people, but really just observing the area.

You want to rock a pond, Brian, right? Yeah, we throw a lot of rocks in a lot of ponds. Sometimes they're pretty big rocks too. But if you're sitting there, I like to give the example, you're just sitting there, you're out to dinner with your lady. You just take a look around that restaurant, figure out, "Hey, is that—you've done it before—oh, there! Hey, they're on their first date, you can tell," or, "Hey, that's like the third date," or, "Hey, they've been recently engaged," or, "They've been married a long time." We all make these assumptions, and most of the time you're likely correct. So, build on that instead of just sitting there coming up with that. Go, "Well, why about the situation is that that's telling me this? Go deeper, why are you most likely correct?" Because human beings have to live in pods, they have to live in these little groups. And socioeconomically, or physically, or mentally, or psychologically, sociologically, we have to do certain things. So, we have to indicate, we have to eat, we have to do these things. So, therefore, all people that live in pods, no matter where they live, have to do certain things to survive. They eat in a certain manner, restaurants are designed in a certain way. For example, they don't have a vacuous Home Depot that's empty and has safari animals in it, and at the door they hand you a club and you have to go in and hunt them, right? If anybody out there, that's a hard "no," you can't come up with that.

So, therefore, what happens is just like driving, there are certain behaviors that are... But, for example, could you tell the difference between an aggressive driver and not? Well, yes. So, if you have an aggressive driver and that person is creating friction and havoc in his environment, then you're going to likely have a better chance at road rage than if everybody else is driving very carefully. So, those complicating factors have to be considered as well. So, you said it a while ago, "Hey, it's like looking through a straw." Well, this is what it is. You're looking at the person on the bench, but I have to consider how long that bench has been there.

In the light around the bench.

Yes, and I also have to take a look at the duck pond, and where are the ducks this morning? Then I have to take a look at the sidewalk, and where does that sidewalk go? Then I have to take a look at the weather and what the person is wearing for the weather and the cars that are in the parking lot. Don't ever forget that a human behavior profiler has to take macro to micro. They have to take a look at all of the different factors around and know what Dow Jones is today. They have to do the morning Intel and security brief before they walk out because that gives them more items of comparison. And the more items of comparison that you weigh, the more that you compare, the better, likely, the better your conclusions are going to be.

Right. And that's why a lot of the, you see people try to break some of this stuff down about, "Hey, when you get into biometrics and kinesics, paralanguage, body language, all that stuff," and it's all still based on a baseline, and you can't go off of one observation that you make. "Oh, I saw that on there, if they're rubbing their nose, it means this." "Well, it means they're lying." It's like, "Well, or he has a sinus infection, or he's a cokehead, or there's a million other reasons." Or his nose just itched at that time because the pollen count is high right now. So, you have to—the next step I would say is, after establishing baseline, prior to looking for those anomalies—looking for things that are there that shouldn't be here, or things that aren't there that should be there—is exactly that next step. It's like, "Okay, I can't just go off of one cue unless it's so blatantly obvious." Like, "Yeah, that guy pulling a gun out," I don't need to figure anything else out, that's easy, you're already right there. But I have to go, "Alright, if that's the case, what else are we looking at?" And that's what we, in order to touch back on what you talked about, creating that explanatory storyline. "Okay, well, if I'm observing unusual behavior, and I think this person's being odd, well, let's continue that observation and come up with likely conclusions. Why are they doing this? Well, and if they are doing it for that reason, what is it? What should I expect to see next? What is the next likely event that we're going to observe?"

And I'll give you one, Brian, because you brought up the deceit clues, and everybody's excited by paralanguage and what we can see, right? But remember, it's one of six; it's certainly not standalone. So, there was a guy that was on a commercial, and a dude sitting next to me, just before I traveled back from where I just was, says, "Hey, that's that Joel Osteen, I think I'm saying his name right. He's shifty." And I said, "He's shifty?" because I haven't heard the word "shifty" in a while. I go, "How is this guy shifty?" Because then I try to remember, one of the ways to get people to love you is to mimic that person because they like hearing themselves talk. So, I was giving this guy right back what I was taking, and I wasn't doing it like "identical cousin" to the extreme, I wasn't scaring the hell out of the guy. I was going, "Hey, tell me what you see as shifty." And the guy goes, "You see that blink rate? I remember reading something about blink rate."

So, let's go back to Clinton, Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton's blink rate was faster when he was lying, much faster when it was known and measured against the baseline of lying than it was when he wasn't. Okay, well, that's a tangible factor that, as people measured him in all these different public settings, they measured him against what they knew to be lies and the truth. And now that's one factor out of myriad factors that they can compare. So, if you've ever watched Joel Osteen, Joel Osteen blinks a lot when he talks. He's very demonstrative when he talks. So, how do you measure that baseline when he blinks all the time? That's not him being shifty; that's you applying a standard that was scientifically vetted here to everybody. You did a panacea. "Hey, you just licked your lips, Brian! You're worked up! Or the fact that you're probably s***-faced this early in the afternoon on Friday. This is probably the fact that you're being shifty." No, you can't apply a standard across the board.

And it doesn't mean that it has to be harder, it has to mean what other clues are you getting? Like, for example, language. Language can tell you just about anything. And you see people that are going, "Oh, well, he raised his voice there, and his voice was too high-pitched there." None of that means anything. All of that is crap. It's like that other "O" and the "A" of Boyd's OODA loop, it's a placeholder, it's a bookmark. What you've got to do is you've got to assess the entire area, the entire dog, the entire person sitting on a park bench within the situation. And when other confounds come in, when other rocks hit the pond, you have to measure that, and how does that fit into your explanatory storyline? "Had this person done this, I would have been more suspicious, but had the person done that, I'm not suspicious." And guess what? Your biases play a huge part. So, I always take a look at a semi-truck draped in white Egyptian cotton, and I get a palette of colors and I get a brush and I paint what the world is telling me, rather than come up with these confines and these trays full of ideas. Because once you start filling those ice cream—ice cube trays, you're more likely to go on a bias and make an incorrect assumption or decision than you are when you paint what you see, smell, feel, and taste as it compares to the baseline that you created.

Yeah, and I think that's a good point to just kind of articulate the difficulty sometimes in articulating how to teach someone how to read human behavior, because one, not only is there so much that goes into it, you get people that focus on things like that, "Well, I'm going to watch his blink rate. I'm going to—" That's if you're in an interview and you're law enforcement or you're some type of interrogator, okay, there are different tools you can use. When you're walking down the street, you just have to come up with, "Alright, was something unusual I'm observing? Does it fit the baseline for that I'm in? And if it doesn't, what is it about that I create that explanatory storyline? Alright, this guy's going to come up and try and mug me and my family." Okay, if he's going to do that, what is he going to do next? "Alright, if he's not, he's just coming up and asking for money because he's poor and sees that you've got some." It's very likely going to be that, but that behavior is going to be different than if I'm going to take some type of violent action. So, as long as I know how to measure those, I measure my observation against the baseline and against my "knowns," what I've learned, my file folders I've developed over time, my own experiences, then I can come up with more likely conclusions and not be wrong about an observation.

Well, and you also have to add in culture as content. You talked earlier about comparing the "knowns" and the "unknowns," and you said that relevance and context work together. That's absolutely certain. So, you're going into an unknown environment, or an environment that's unknown to you because you haven't socialized as much. And I'll give you an example: I was working with a cop, and we were in an area and we had to stop because there was a use-of-force and they needed some assistance in the Spanish language. So, we go up there and this guy's a mess. And I asked one of their supervisors, "Did this guy put up a good fight?" And it's like, "Well, it de-escalated nicely." "Well, tell me about it a little bit because I worked IE (Intelligence Exploitation) for a while and I said I want to understand what happened in this instance." And they said they knew the guy was guilty because the guy kept looking at his shoes, and he wouldn't make eye contact. And even when they asked the question, one, they had a language problem, they weren't communicating. The guy spoke an indigenous language, he was speaking Cora instead of Spanish. It's close, but guess what? There were some significant differences. The second thing, the guy was what they referred to at that time as a campesino, he was a farmer. He was not a well-educated guy from a big city. And therefore, he had been taught in his village, "You don't make eye contact with the authority figure. You don't make eye contact with the cops." So, these cops were more and more aggressive as the situation went on and thought, "This guy has to be lying! Look at this behavior that he's trying to shy away from us and look the other way when we're asking the hard questions." Once you commit the greatest sin of putting that round peg in that square hole, you can almost never unring that bell. And what you've done is you've tainted a whole bunch of evidence, and guess what? Other observers, for example, the easiest thing to do is, "I think I see something." I look at you and I go, "Hey Brian, I think this guy's going to rob us." And you say, "That's Homeless Pete, he always comes up and asks for money at this time." Why not get other people involved in your essential observation? This failed, and it failed on a grand scale because, guess what? They were convinced this was the guy, and they stopped looking at other potential storylines.

Yeah, we see that all the time. But that's just a confirmation bias. And it's almost that person isn't doing it knowing that they're not knowingly malicious here, that would be a better word. But that, they're not doing that on purpose, they honestly believe—they 100% believe that, but it's still happening. And guess what? That leads to bad situations. It leads to bad court cases, it leads to a whole bunch of bad lawsuits, and bad feelings, and hate, and fear, and distrust. You've got to make sure that you say what you see. The guy with the eye calls the ball. And the other thing is, it's always got to be a scientific fact. You can't say, "Yeah, my hinky button was going off because I saw this guy and I kind of thought this or that." Look, I articulate stuff like, "Hey listen, I saw the parked car and the tires were bald. I know this because I have my tires changed regularly, and they tell you to take a quarter and if it goes past the guy's head on a quarter, then the tires are whatever." What I'm doing is I'm comparing scientifically, rather than just throwing conjecture.

Good way to articulate it. It's no different in a situation where you maybe have met someone or seen someone, and you know that you made a conclusion about someone, "Hey, that guy is kind of a jerk," or, "That person's kind of an ass," or whatever. But maybe not without knowing, in the context of anything that's going on, that person could have just got a horrific phone call in the middle of some super stressful event. And that person might be the nicest person in the world, but that one second, that one time you ran into him, in a terrible situation for them, they come across a certain way. So, it's just always that most likely, most dangerous course of action: is this what I'm seeing? Alright, well, I should see this again in the future if I want that—if that conclusion I'm coming to is correct, then I will continue to see that. And if I don't, I come up with a different hypothesis. It's just a scientific approach of looking at it from macro to micro and then back out again.

And I like a point of just coming up with explanatory storylines. And take photos. You want to learn how to read human behavior, take photos of people that don't know you're taking photos of them, or they don't know you're watching them.

Not everyone, not the same place, in the same type of situation. No, you're exactly right. On their bedroom window or are you still paying for that, by the way? The tether for that stalking? Still not allowed within several hundred meters of a few people. But no, your ear is precisely correct. Though, at the same time, my therapist says, "Go to a place and I would repeat the behavior over and over and over." Yeah, measured. Like you mentioned a gas station. I would go to places people frequent: a theater, a gas station, a library, a park. And then what you do is you say, "Okay, my confines are going to be this area of the park, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to observe this park between one and two every day during my lunch hour, and I'm going to take tons of photos." And I'm going to compare, "These people likely know each other, how do I know that? When they greet each other, eyebrows go up, 'Hey, how are you doing?'" Okay, so what I've done now is I've created a file folder, not just for that person, but for meeting people. And then I compared that at church every Sunday morning for a couple of weeks. And then I compare that at the beach when an authority figure comes up and says, "Hey, let me look in your cooler." What I'm now doing is I'm creating those files, I'm hand-writing, hand-jamming those files into my brain. And that means that I'm going to be a better profiler.

For example, in class—and we don't have the luxury of doing that—but the old sniper on Highway One, you see a sniper because he's got an ID in place or whatever. They try to make this guy because he's hiding in the shadows and he's parallel to the approach of the road. Okay, so could he be hiding in the shadows because it's hot? Yeah, but I don't know because when the shadow moves, he moves, and we're on that hot asphalt too. You get what I'm trying to say? So, when you're scared or when you don't have the mental acumen for some of the observations you're making, you're much more likely—I'll tell you two things—one, you're much more likely to make a wrong conclusion and follow that wrong conclusion. And the second is, you're much more likely to escalate force. Your level of force is going to go up when you're scared or you think you're being put on, than it is when you're prepared for a situation. So, human behavior profiling is not just "Left of Bang" thinking, it's also a psychological method of de-escalating situations before they ever occur, where you're actually mind-gaming a potential situation and coming up with reasonable alternatives rather than immediately going to less-than-lethal or lethal force.

Well, in the big picture, that's what most of this is about, is, "Hey, I have a desired outcome that I want to get to. How do I approach the situation and manage it and make it get to that desired outcome?" And that's just through burning a ton of calories without having to fight for it, without having to run for it. I think that everybody would love that. Why, if you couldn't talk to your wife or spouse or child in a way that would make it much more efficient and burn less calories, and at the end of the day everybody would be happier?

I mean, you know, that's one thing, Brian, if we were going to wrap today because it's such a vast topic. If you thought that your co-worker or your spouse or your significant other was cheating on you, the first thing to do is take a giant step backwards. Look at what you know: "Every single day we leave at this time. Every single day I go to the gym, he or she goes to McDonald's for the coffee with their friends and then goes on to work. Every single week on Wednesday or Thursday, because it changes week to week, we have to fill up the gas tanks." And then, "Every Friday we come home and it's that 'ambushed at 1800' mentality." "Now I have to rush back to work for two or three hours because there's a project due." Those create this biorhythm for normal, just like a heartbeat. It's like breathing, just like anything else.

Now, all of a sudden, you start noticing that I'm spending much more on my fuel budget, that Friday has leaked into Saturday, and both nights now my significant other has got these calls that come in. And as a matter of fact, those calls are not transparent anymore. Now it's, "I didn't even hear the call," or it was a call while they were out on the balcony and they came in and said, "Oh, I just got called back to work." Subterfuge. There's something hidden that's going on. Anytime that you have that rock going out and instead of hitting a lily pad, the frog jumps in, the bird flies before they get the warning, something is wrong. Now, it might be something simple: this person is planning your surprise birthday party. There might be something simple: this person is not doing well at work and this is their way of coping after work because they just don't have the bounce. I'm going to come to that unreasonable conclusion, but in the anomaly, that's where you're going to find the answer. You're not going to find it in the rest of the world, you're going to find it in that anomaly. So, if you do nothing more than search for anomalous behavior, you're always going to be on the right track as a profiler.

And that's a good point to end on and to reiterate: it's those artifacts and evidence. Anytime you're making an observation, just like the example you gave, right there is, you take that step back, write down artifacts and evidence, or take a mental snapshot, list it out in your head, all the observations that I'm making. Because still, I don't necessarily know why these changes are taking place, but I have noticed, "Oh, wow, I have noticed a significant amount of change in behavior." And that's important. Any change out of the baseline of someone's behavior, there has to be a reason for that. Human beings, we're lazy, we set patterns, we do the same thing over and over again. If I'm going to change my behavior, it takes some calories to do that, so there has to be some reason why. So, when I'm making that observation right there, at that time, I might not know the reason, but if I can articulate the change in behavior, I can come up with likely conclusions.

We talked about flashlight and laser, Brian, and you always say it best when we're teaching. You say, "You've got to turn that flashlight and laser on yourself." If I noticed that brushing my teeth started becoming an arduous process and the back of my teeth were hurting, and I noticed that when I was going to the bathroom, I had this—I lost some hair the last time I took off a hat or whatever. Those are very personal. See a doctor. No, but whatever those things are, "I can't eat certain fruits or vegetables." You go to the doctor, you go to a dentist, you go to a specialist and go, "How can I account for these changes? I'm losing weight and I don't know why, because I certainly am not working out enough." So, if you would do that with the laser pointed in, why don't you do that with the flashlight pointed out? And that's the answer. The answer is, ask the right questions and you'll be given information. Compare that information, look for the anomalies, and then measure artifacts and evidence to support a reasonable conclusion. If you can do that, you'll be right more than you're wrong.

Well, that's, I think, a good point to end on right there. So, if anyone wants any more information, obviously, website ArcadiaCogNarada.com. Follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA. We're also on Instagram. The podcasts will be on iTunes; just look for The Human Behavior Podcast, also on Spotify, Stitcher, all the places you can listen to a podcast. Go ahead and download the audio so you can listen to us on your way into work and maybe learn something new. Head to the YouTube channel, The Human Behavior Podcast, and check out the videos. We've got clips, some of them have other videos in it and some writing on it, so you can really pick up the concepts a little bit. And again, continue with any of the questions. I know people are kind of hitting me up privately, or text message, or wherever, and saying, "Hey, what about this?" or asking questions. If anyone's got that, please get in contact with us on any of those places. Comment right here on the YouTube video if you want some information or say you want a specific topic covered, and we will be more than happy to break it down through the lessons of HBPRNA.

So, this was kind of a 30,000-foot view, and got a little bit lower, on how to read human behavior, everything that's involved in it. It's not a simple tell, "Hey, a hand doing this," or a body or a kinesics cue doing that, or a biometric cue. You have to take into the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, feel of everything in your environment to make an accurate observation and come up with a likely conclusion. So, I think much more to discuss on this topic. Absolutely, we will continue to deep dive it and we'll break down some of the individual concepts that we talked about in separate videos and separate podcasts. So, stay tuned for more. That's all I got everyone. Be safe. Thanks everybody and thanks Brian.