L.O.G. 116 From Theory to Practical Application

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast! I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after.

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All right, guys, so we'll go ahead and get started here. Had some technical difficulties there at the beginning. Not sure what happened; my computer decided to say, "Go f yourself, Brian." But for those just listening, don't forget you can also check us out when we come up live every once in a while on Facebook. You can follow me on there, or watch the video version on YouTube and get the full effect from all of us.

Today we have on the show Stephen, one of our listeners who reached in with some questions. So Stephen, thank you so much for coming on today.

Yep, a pleasure to be here, man.

All right, appreciate it, man. So Stephen is a law enforcement background. Won't get too much into him, but I do want to bring up some of the questions he posed.

We kind of started with — he shot us an email after listening to the OODA Loop episode we did about John Boyd and the OODA Loop. He had some really good questions about, "Hey, am I getting this? I seem a little bit more confused after listening to your show than before," which we definitely want to clear up. And then he also wrote in, "Hey, I've seen a lack of sometimes during training, people not making the right decisions or failing to fully understand." And then he brought up something called Occam's Razor, which is a throwback to — which I'll define and we'll get into.

But the idea was, we were like, "All right, well, rather than just going back and forth on emails, we'll just get Stephen on the show to talk to us and ask us these questions." Because if you have questions, then I'm assuming other listeners out there do as well, or people in similar backgrounds. So thanks for coming on, man. We'll go ahead and jump into this right now.

Stephen brought up again, questions about the OODA Loop, which is Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA). John Boyd, with his genius mind, came up with mental models and decision-making, learning to adapt and update your decision-making based on new and incoming information. The faster you do that, you can be ahead of your opponent, your adversary. If you want more on that, just go listen to the episode we did on it.

But the other one you brought up was called Occam's Razor. So real quick, a definition on Occam's Razor: this goes back to William of Ockham hundreds of years ago. He was a Franciscan friar and kind of had this — it had been around, but he basically was one who stated, "Look, among competing hypotheses" — so you're trying to figure out this situation, what's likely going to occur, or make a prediction, right? "Amongst competing hypotheses, the one you should select would be the one with the fewest assumptions." So the less you have to assume in that, the better assumption overall; the better one to use because it's simpler and there are fewer ways that it could go wrong. There are fewer other ways it can get interfered.

What it means is basically, you're coming down saying, "All right, hey, I've got this big elaborate explanation for some event, or I've got this very simple explanation for the event." Generally accepted, use the simple one, because that's more likely to be true. It's more likely to be proven versus having some big elaborate explanation for things. So that came into what he called Occam's Razor, or what became called Occam's Razor. The whole idea is just keeping things simple, especially when it comes to explanation.

With the questions you brought up and things like the OODA Loop and William of Ockham, you're getting into a number of areas: things like mental models, things like heuristics — which is a big one we talk about. You're getting into stuff like selective priors, how we decide. So you're talking about intuition, but what you're also really talking about here, Stephen, is the big picture of information theory, decision theory, then learning theory. So there's a whole body of science behind all that stuff and how it works, and you have a lot of brilliant minds coming up with ways that this is a mental model or this is how your brain works, and this is how you can arrive at a good conclusion later.

Because, like you even stated in your email, "Hey, you're never going to have all the information. You're just trying to make the best decision based on what you know at that given time you're making the decision." And this goes even more modern day. I'm already thinking of guys like Klein, Greg, recognition-primed decision making, a whole bunch of other people. Marty Seligman?

Seligman, yeah. Seligman's a big one.

So all this stuff, we've got these great scientists who kind of codified this stuff and written it up and put it in a book and said, "Well, this is what it is." But that's great to read, yes, but so what? What the hell am I supposed to do with it? How do I use that? So Greg, maybe instead of kind of giving the academic version of this stuff, what are the street definitions for some of the stuff we're talking about?

Yeah, so for everybody at home, unless you're driving, pull over somewhere, grab your yellow pad, and let's street it up. Let's give the three street definitions, Steve, if that's okay for you. And then, so what the hell does this mean in the context of training?

And Brian, I want to make sure that we caution also that it's not just in the context of training law enforcement, or corrections, or courts. We're talking about everybody from human resources to mom and dad at home, to whatever other skill set they might possess.

So, simply, the Boyd OODA Loop is how to think critically to anticipate threats. And the reason is to neutralize them before they grow, to kill them in the crib before they get really big and really unmanageable. What you want to do is you want to be able to anticipate them and mitigate them.

Occam's is hilarious because Occam's I've been teaching my entire life until Marren goes, "Oh, that's Occam's Razor," and then I have to start now adding that. I thought I was the one that came up with that. And the idea is, Occam's Razor is literally the most basic heuristic. It's the second law of thermodynamics, and what that is, is conservation of energy. The essence of confirmation bias is that one, your theory is probably right when you come up with it, so don't add a bunch of stuff to it. Just try to break it down in terms of what do I know right now that I can operate on? And the reason it's called Occam's Razor — and I love the history but it means nothing to me — is that it's literally a razor. So what I want to do is I want to excise those things, I want to cut away those things that are probably useless to me in the moment because I got [ __ ] to do, and this is happening right now on this spot. And if I can make a good decision now, that'll probably trump a great decision tomorrow morning.

And then finally, when we come around to talk about it, is that the Gordian Knot? And here's another one that I that I love learning about because, you know, I thought again, I came up with this concept on my own. What makes me laugh about the Gordian Knot is the very simple thing is, you know, how do I use a creative solution to cut through what looks like an insurmountable problem? But the reality of it is that if you really want to know something, you got to dig deeper. Go back to the Greeks; they dug real deep. Gordius of Tyre, or whatever the town was, was a dude that, like in an Andy Griffith episode, he was riding into Mayberry on a wagon. Yeah, the guys made a bet and they said, "The next dude in the town on a wagon is mayor for life." You know, "He's going to be our ruler." And so they came up with this wagon as sort of a display in the front of the town with some knots on it. And Alexander the Great, uh, who is "the Great," doesn't have a lot of time for horse [  ], and he was like, "Yeah, okay." So either, according to science, he pulled out the linchpin, making the knot fall to the ground to recut it. So what does that mean? That means [  ] or get off the pot.

But the problem with all three of these is that somebody has taught us, Brian Marren and Steve, somebody has taught us that this means we can accelerate the process and not focus on our skill set, our knowledge, our in-processing, out-processing, up and down processing. Brian, it's all based on your skill and your experience. So if we think that we're going to be able to look at a situation quickly—like, I got to ride around with Joey Chitwood, I got to meet the Pettys and the Unsers back in the day, I won't tell you in what context, but certainly it was in pursuit driving, trying to increase the excellence level of drivers. I remember sitting next to Jackie Stewart, and we were going down the street in Detroit. Jackie Stewart was tripling the speed limit by then, and he says, "What you got to do is you got to pay attention to what's down two, three lights out ahead of us and anticipate what's about to go on." Well, that's amazing for for Jackie [ __ ] Stewart, okay? But I'm sitting there going, "Oh my gosh, the light's turning yellow, I better apply the brakes at this." You can't be a critical thinker without some training and some experience and some limitations. And once you surmount those, once you bypass those, what you're going to get is a roll of the dice or you're going to get a really good answer. The question, how's that, Brian?

Yeah, that's pretty good. So you brought up, I mean, well you brought up skill and experience are the big thing. And so I think this kind of leads into what you were getting at a little bit, Stephen, and the idea is, you know, I only have so many options based on my training level or life experience level, education, everything goes into who we are, right? All of those life experiences. And we often, what I've found, is we actually often time have more than sometimes we realize, right?

So one of the things that Greg does really well, better than anyone I've ever seen, is able to one, recall experiences or bits of information and then infer conclusions or infer what the solution would be based on small amounts of these data points, so to speak. Like, "I only got these few little information points, damn, how do I get to a conclusion?" What Greg always does is follows that, keep it simple. "Well, you've got these three things, those are what you can prove. And based on what I know here, here, and here, and here, and here, back when I was a kid, I saw this, now I can say this." And it's a very logical conclusion. So what he does really well is he intuits that information, right? Uses that intuition, so to speak, and infer based on very, very little amounts of evidence.

But the idea is, it comes from that training and experience. And training and experience are a lot of things. So not just like, "Hey, I went through this training course and yeah, it opened my eyes and I learned this," or, "I learned a new way to load my weapon system," or whatever it is, right? There's all kinds of different ones. There's also like, you'll see, Greg always tells people like, "Hey, when you're going through an airport, go buy Cigar Aficionado magazine." If you've never done that before, go read about this because it's something so outside of what you typically do. And that's the learning process. That's where you get in, "Go, I have to." That's where that's called getting comfortable being uncomfortable, right? Going and doing something that you've never done before in the past, because you now have three or ten or a hundred more file folders, right? You've got these little different mental models that you can use and draw from that you otherwise wouldn't have.

And I just want to kind of get that out. Does that make sense, Greg, at the beginning here, to go into it's not just about, "Hey, I went through an academy and then I went through these three courses after that academy." It's, no, man, what did you do as a kid? "Oh, you did HVAC repair in high school." Well, now you know about this. "Oh, you did wood shop and woodworking." You know how to build things and manipulate your environment using tools. Okay, well, that's not unlike what you're going to go do here. So it's really all of your life's experiences. And that's what even these philosophers and mathematicians were talking about. They were going, "Look, you," and that was the whole thing about the Gordian Knot and Alexander the Great. It was this big giant knot and said, "Whoever could untie this knot would be the greatest ruler, it would rule all of Asia," right? And everyone's trying to do it, they couldn't do it. And the story, the myth goes of Alexander the Great coming up and he's like, "What are you doing? Boom, I'll just cut it in half! It released the knot, didn't it? We accomplished the objective and I did it in one swipe of my sword. You sat here for days trying to undo it." And that happens all the time. That's why that story continues to this day, right?

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It seems like the biggest thing that I see is like, you and Greg are talking about, is there is some amount of experience and training that everybody has coming into law enforcement, into whatever situation they're in. But they don't trust that instinct necessarily. And it's always hard to be like, you know, "Hey, man or woman, trust your instinct." If you don't like what somebody is doing, don't just sit there and, you know, take it. I saw one of your guys' podcast is titled, "The Behavior You're Willing to Walk By Is What You're Willing to Accept," or something like that. And it's like, you know, you have the authority and you have the training, and it's like, you can you can do this, but they always get all hung up on that decision cycle. They're like, "Well, you know, it was in policy and it's like, yes, and law and all this stuff, and am I doing the right thing? I'm new." And the list goes on and on and on.

Are you ready to be deposed, Steve? Can I ask you a couple of questions? So you've been through a police academy, is that a correct statement?

Yeah.

Okay. And during the police academy, how much time was dedicated to talking about John Boyd, OODA Loop?

A couple hours at the range, maybe.

Okay, at the range, at the gun range. Okay. And did you find yourself being enlightened by the information that you received on the OODA Loop?

No.

Okay. Now how about Occam's Razor and Gordian Knot, how much time at the academy?

None.

And that was in small group session where you were there with a sociologist or a psychologist or physiologist? Okay. So, you know what, the problem in our nation is that I went through an 18-week police academy, got two advanced police degrees, and taught criminal law and sociology at universities, and I still didn't understand the law and I'm still a student of all of these principles, right? But the thing that you went to the academy with, how old were you when you went?

Okay, you had 21 years of life experience. Now, a lot of people are going to say, "Yes, but that doesn't mean anything. He wasn't in Iraq and he didn't go to East Timor and he didn't climb a flip in Mount Shasta." All of that accounts for [  ] because you did 21 years in your body, in your world, and that accounts for something. There's a degree, there's a Steve degree that you earned. And so that means when you sense or feel or smell [  ] in a situation, it's probably crappy. When you think you're getting scammed or hustled, it's probably real that you are getting scammed or hustled. So what happens is the way we learn to be a cop is all wrong because I can't remember how many times that in the academy they said, "Throw away all those foolish things that you learned in your life and get that blank sheet of paper because we're going to teach you." And then the first minute that you're in a scout car, what did they tell you, Steve? "Throw away all that [ __ ] you learned in the academy because now your training starts." Now, would that be fair? Am I speaking reality?

That's 100% true.

So I pose a challenge to Marren, and I like doing this, and we didn't talk about this beforehand, and Steve, you were on, we, you know that we had a malfunction with the system, so we had to start over, so there was no way for us to talk about what we're about to talk about. So here's the challenge, Steve, I want you to tell me a couple of things that come up normally in work that either scared the [ __ ] out of you or surprised you, or that you didn't expect a situation where you tried to solve through training. And what Brian and I do will do is we'll take OODA Loop, Occam's Razor, or Gordian Knot and apply that to a new training solution that'll work better. What do you think, Marren? Is that worth it?

Let's do it.

There's the challenge.

Okay, get my other pen out here too. So no notes, no notes, nothing else, we'll just go off the top.

So Steve, a situation maybe that you were involved with on the street or in corrections or during the academy that that wasn't fully explicated, or that you saw happen, or a common mistake that you see young coppers making, help us out. Um—

Oh, by the way, tag, you're it! That's what you get for coming on the show. Welcome.

Putting me on the spot. Um, well, one something that happened right before — right before I got to my assignment that I'm at now, um, which is in corrections, there was a a a big fight between a bunch of gang members on, you know, one of the max security floors, right? There's like eight people involved, there's shanks, people were getting stabbed, you know? And um, one lone, you know, deputy ran balls to the wall into the middle of this chaotic situation where, again, there's there's homemade — there's homemade knives that they had crafted, they're stabbing each other. And he is trying to break up the situation. And then after that, you know, the the big discussion was, "Slow down and wait." And so we tried doing all this this different um, training to help people get become, you know, emotionally detached from from the scenario training that we were doing and and things of that nature.

That's a great one, Marren. You want to go first or last?

No, go ahead, buddy.

Okay, so I, first of all, ah, never stop to separate the emotion from the training. We remember things better when they're vivid, when they're stories, and when they're happening right in front of us. And when a person cries and another person jumps out of their chair and says, "Hallelujah!" So the more vivid the narrative, the more important it becomes to the brain and the more creative juices — actually electrochemical nervous transmitters — that are going around what you were talking about by detaching yourself from the situation. That's another thing I'm completely against.

To get the time and distance means that we have to slow down the incident. And I would guarantee you, if you look back on it, if you break it down because you need to do an autopsy of the incident—I'm not saying anybody was wrong, you probably did the right thing—but I'm saying, look at it, let's, I'll use Occam's Razor. Look at it from Occam's. Occam says that there was an atmospheric shift that happened that everybody missed that was them ramping up, getting ready, escalating from words to fisticuffs, creating a shiv. Do you get what I'm trying to say? That all happened so far left of the bang that if anybody would have been paying attention, it would have seen it.

Then you've got the one deputy. The one deputy fell for what's called an availability heuristic because Occam's is the most simple heuristic in the world. And what that means is that we give too much importance to the event that's right in front of us. And immediately it's the only thing in the world, and we're the only person that can solve it, and we got to get in there right away. And once we commit to that, now our fragile ego system says we can't come off the gas, we can't back out even if it gets over my head. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so I'm actually, I'm going to take this too from with looping in a comment you made right off the bat, Stephen, because you talked about, "Hey, you know, when you said people don't trust their instincts and everything." This is a big thing when I talk about everything has come down to this is policy and procedure and this is when this occurs, you will do these three things and you will fall within these guidelines and it will be this department policy. One, obviously, you are starting at bang, the event's already occurred. But beyond that is, we focus so much on policy and procedure when we should be focusing on knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities, right?

So we do this line by line, "You will do step one here, step two here, step three here." But as you know, that's not how the events unfold. So what we want to do is focus on those those knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, abilities. Focus on those on, what are — how do we want this person to act, not what do we want them to do? What's the overall strategy here? What's the end goal here? And you develop those individuals, that allows them to make the right decision at the right time and not go running into the middle of that because — because I knew Greg was going to bring it up too — it's like, you know, those events don't happen out of nowhere. A massive, massive fight like that where everyone's got weapons and this is going on, that's a planned event, man. Someone knew it was going to happen. But half the people in that, I bet most of the prisoners in there knew it was going to happen, right? And so that was why, excuse me, that was why probably like — like people who weren't involved in those two gangs probably didn't get stabbed. They probably stayed the hell out of there, they knew what was up.

I mean, and I'm I'm just opining here, I don't know the case and specifics of that. I'm just saying these are likely how these things occur. But just like you said, because of that policy and procedural focus on training, that's why that deputy ran in there. Because that was counter—that's counter-intuitive to any natural human reaction. Your limbic system there, it's completely unnatural to look at two warring factions stabbing each other and beating each other, and then you as an individual going, "I'm going to break this up." That is an unnatural response. So what that means is that response is a trained response, meaning they were trained incorrectly. And this isn't bashing on whoever trained them or what the policies and procedures are. They've evolved over time to this, and I think they've evolved or devolved, more like, but they've evolved incorrectly in some ways where we do want some things have to be procedural and precise and written down and codified and you have to sign off knowing that, yes, absolutely, that's 100%. But how we operationalize that information and how we use it and how we train to that, that's often done incorrectly. So that's a training scar, right? Someone someone got a training scar and they went, they were taught to do go run into there, which is the absolute wrong thing to do. And everyone was going, "Oh, I would never do that." [ __ ] man, you're going to do it. You're going to do exactly that same thing if that's how you trained. And it's not their fault, right? It's just it's it's an incorrect process. And so that's that's okay, we can you can fix an incorrect process very easily. So all of these problems are extremely, extremely solvable, right? So that's what we look at and I always blow these down to everyone always wants to bash on the individual. They want to bash on, "Oh, this person did that, they're an idiot," or, "This person doesn't know what they're doing." Look, it's about training and it's about leadership. That's it. That's it. That's, those are the two most important functions. Go ahead, Greg.

Yeah, three things. And Stephen, the first thing is, be thinking about your next question because it's about to come to you. The laser is going to come back to you because we're going to do part two. But while you're doing that, Steve, I want you to consider two things, and I'm going to talk a little bit about gangs.

One, Marren is exactly correct, and because I don't know when he's going to hang this podcast in real time, folks, if you're listening along, tomorrow in our universe is Saint Patrick's Day. And to say that somebody's going to get stabbed at the Marren household in Chicago, it's a given. That's learned behavior over many years. But I would guarantee if you were sitting across the street going, "They're at it again," you would be able to pick out the atmospheric and the geographics and all the different indicators. And somebody go, "What do you mean a geographic?" This person gets up, starts posturing, that's a biometric. They move across, that's the atmospheric. And then they stand by the favorite chair in the house and put their hands on it, there's the geographic anchor point, and you know what's coming next. So you on the ground knew that in that jail or in that prison setting.

So let me tell you about gangs and Steve. The reason that I loved working with the Marine Corps, Marine Corps was always hungrier than everybody else because they didn't have the budgets of the big players. When I was dealing with the Army, when I was dealing with JTF North, when I was dealing with the Navy, you know, I would go into places and say, "Here's a list of things that we need." When I went into the Marine Corps, they go, "One, no, you get what I'm saying? Anything you find in that connex you can keep." But the idea is, you have to think of this, Steve: you're the smallest gang in corrections right now, the law enforcement officers that you have. You might have the technological ability, you might have a second and third order things that you can bring into, you know, bring a foreign object out of your trunks when you're fighting and use a less than lethal force alternative. You might be able to hit a panic button and call all the law enforcement officers that are in the state of California. When it comes right down to it, if you took the number of gang members in prisons and out on the street, they vastly outnumber you.

So do you want to think, "Okay, and this is back to the Gordian Knot now, do you want to think harder or smarter? Do you want to work harder or smarter?" So the idea is, you have to enlist the prisoners themselves to say, "This type of behavior is going to get this type of reward. So first of all, we don't want that. Second of all, if you're not playing with all these other guys, we don't want you to be a snitch because we don't want you to get a stitch." But by the same token, do you get what I'm trying to say, backing out the situation and laying down means that you don't have to get made or sprayed and that's one more, you know, one less person we have to worry about. There's a strategy. So those rehearsals that you do during your practical application training, you could put Gordian and you could put Occam's right into those training out in the parking lot. You get what I'm saying? For a third of the staff on their half day or whatever, if you're working, you know, whatever [ __ ] thing, that's the key.

The key is to say, "Okay," and you're going to get the old vet that's going to go, "Seen it all, been there, don't need this [ __ ]." You're going to get the young kid that's going to be asking, "But what if? What if?" And you got to tell them to shut up too. And what you got to do is you got to have a direction and distance for your training. "What we're going to do is we're going to talk about the buddy system, the body armor, where to lock down, which of the key players we're going to take down first." And that's, you know, having a pace plan. And then also saying, you know, "I have to understand mimicry, adoration, direction and entourage to figure out who the key player is." "And this guy's got the knife, but he's only stabbing one guy, so do we focus on him or focus on somebody?" You've got a tabletop then, and then you've got to go out and rehearse it, and you got to rehearse it until it becomes muscle memory, and then, you know, you got to rehearse it till it comes to cognitive memory. Brian, is that a good way of bouncing that around?

Yeah, and you guys already have the tacit knowledge. You know, when you have especially like when it comes to law enforcement, corrections, all that stuff, like you see more in a day than most average people on the street will see their entire lifetime, right? You know, and you know, it's it's it's funny like, you know, you you have those experiences even just out in public. You know, I get, I'll go to a place and me and my wife will be together and then she knows all sudden when I get quiet and I'm eyeing someone, she's like, "What's going on? Do we need to leave?" I'm like, "No, we're fine here. That dude, yeah, it's a bad dude over there, man. He's he's the real deal." And then you're at a nice place or in some beach community or something, no one even knows what's going on. I was like, "Yeah, man, there's there's a deal going on in that parking lot, we're going to stay the hell away from there. I don't know if it's if it's someone's getting busted or what's happening." She's like, "This ha-" I was like, "Yes, it all happens right in front of us. Just no one sees it."

Well, you get that experience in there in general, you get to see it and especially that behavior. And it's the same and you know the bad guys are on bad guy time, doper time, you know, inshallah time, whatever you want to call it, right? They got nothing but time on their hands, but you can pick apart those different incidents and go, "Based on what we saw in the past, this is the type of incident," meaning a gang hit on another member is very different than a big brawl in the middle of an open area. Those are two different types of attacks, right? Meaning the dynamics of the behavior beforehand, how they actually implement it, what has occurred like, you you can see those changes. And so you can talk to those like Greg's talking about, is you're going over whatever that tool you're going to use, whatever that policy or procedure is, whatever that method you're going to do. And then you have to sit there and go, "And here's what I saw in my experience and this is what it looked like. And now if I would have known at this point to implement this policy procedure rather than waiting until it escalated here, we might have been able to mitigate that." So now I get into the application of whatever that tool or policy or procedure is with that story, that personal story which makes it real, right? Because we all have had the training or these air quotes on that where, you know, you watch some horrific video of some horrible incident and it just like rips your heart out and then they end it, you're like, "Yeah, so don't do that. You're dead." And then you're like, "Jesus, man, like you just scared the [ __ ] out of me." So now now I'm just scared and now like I didn't learn anything from that. Um, I didn't get any takeaways. And now I'm actually fearful rather than breaking it down like, "Look, this is the awful things that occurred, but here's all the events leading up to it where we could have stepped in." You see what I'm saying?

No, I I 100% see what you're saying. And then on the other side of the spectrum for a great, well, spotlight's been on you.

Yeah, we're going to say, on the other side of the spectrum, you know, we have the the that kid that, you know, again, I say kid, I'm a kid, but, you know, the guy that doesn't trust their their instinct or their intuition, you know, um, we had a younger trainee, I think he was like 19 years old or something like that. He's doing his booking training and, you know, he's pat searching this guy, um, during the whole the whole pat search, the guy's looking back, you know, uh, gauging that distance. Um, handcuffs come off, the fists go, you know, balled up, shoulders get tight. He turns around to do the mouth check. He puts his hands up like this. The trainee put looks down at the ground. And then next thing you know, he's getting punched in the face. And so, you know, like you're talking about all those little indicators leading up to an incident, you know, this is that right of bang thing. We went back and looked at the camera, the the camera footage and we were able to see all of those, you know, pre-threat indicators that he wasn't that he wasn't picking up on, or he was and he just again, wasn't trusting that instinct. It it becomes that that so focused on again, it goes right? So focused on that procedure. Look, man, like when you got 30 of those, you got to do a day or a morning or an hour, right? You start going through that rather than stopping and taking the time to evaluate each one on their own. And that's being so focused on that that you're just not taking in the entire situation. That has to be step one before I go to employ these whatever I'm going to do. It's simple as stop, look, listen, and smell, right? All right, what's going on here? Can I determine something about this individual prior to me getting in this dangerous situation and be, you know, because we dude, we got to, "Hey, man, only only 24 hours a day, we got a lot of [ __ ] to do. We got to get all this stuff done." But and that's why those things occur. You know, these stories never come from like, "Hey, you know, there I was, I had a great night's sleep. I woke up, got a good workout in, had a great meal, had a cup of coffee, birds are chirping, you know, the sun's out and I'm observing." No story ever starts like that. Why? Because you're never at some optimal level. You're it's always when you're not paying attention, you're not attending to the necessary things in your environment you need to attend to. And Greg, I know you're you're trying to—

No, no, you're you're spot on and I'm having an emotional, yeah, because I'm thinking about what you just said and I'd like to talk about Chris Wooters and Mark Anderson for a second. What I'll do, I'll couch my answer in Occam's Razor, because that's what we said we would do.

So Stephen, biologically, physiologically, we know that there's reward circuitry in the brain. Okay, again, electrochemical neurotransmitters that function and run everything that we do. So if you repeat the same behavior over and over and over to the same cue, okay, your reward circuitry or your fear circuitry is going to take over and it's going to create a groove like a groove in your brain, like a wrinkle, like a groove on a record, if anybody's old enough to remember what that is. And that's called the neural pathway. And a neural pathway is easy to build and it's almost impossible to erase. So that's why you can have a biological tactical response to training that's going to be really good. So we look strategic, organizational, and tactical. I'm talking in your responsibility to make sure that the training in the tactical realm is realistic enough that it'll form that that that pathway.

Now, the reason I want to talk about Chris Wooters is Chris Wooters' job as a detective, playing clothes, was to go to the jail and interview the drug arrest that just came in so he could talk briefly to him and decide whether this person was willing to flip. If they were, they're going to get a team go out and hit the house, do all that other stuff. Everybody listening, look it up, watch NCIS one episode, you'll know what I'm talking about, right? So Wooters goes up to the jail after a person has been arrested on the street and searched, transported, searched by the transport team, sally port team searched him, sent him up to the jail, jail team searched him, and now he's handcuffed behind his back. And I won't tell you the kid's name, he's no longer with us. I used Wooters' name, but there's a probably a legal standard there somewhere. And the kid's wearing no shoes, the kid's wearing no underwear, no t-shirt, no gloves, nothing, just handcuffs behind his back and a cut-off pair of red workout pants, you know, with the drawstring, the old style. Wooters goes up, goes, "Hey, I'm Detective Chris Wooters." The kid reaches down between his butt cheeks, pulls out a gun, and with his handcuffs behind his back, blows Chris's head off.

Okay, one. Mark Anderson. Mark Anderson pulls over a car. The car had a paper plate. What he didn't know is the family was taking those paper plates and they were copying them and they put a realistic logo on it and they put some fake numbers on them, and they were stealing the sleds in Detroit, putting on a paper plate, driving them up north, they were flipping the car, changing the VIN, and then selling them at a chop shop for a great profit. Kid who was sitting there, Mark Anderson goes up to the car and says, "Hey, driver's license, registration." He was a traffic officer, he did this a thousand times a week. And the kid said, "I don't have any of it." He goes, "Well, when you find it, bring it back to me." He goes back, starts writing it up, calling for a wrecker. Kid steps out of the sled, walks back, and while he's looking down at his paperwork, shoots him. The bullet comes out the back of his head. He was off the road for I don't know how many years, came back, had to work on the inside and then finally started going through rehabilitation. And we were doing funds and softball and all this other stuff to try to make money for them. So [ __ ] what?

Okay, both of those cops did the behavior the same time, the same day, over and over. And now that neurological pathway that was formed was corrupted because they expected that the next and the next and the next incident would be about the same. So their brain didn't assign "danger, warning Will Robinson" to it. So that copper you were talking about, first time, and the people that you're talking about now that aren't trusting their instinct, I'm telling you it's a function of, and Brian, to steal your thunder, it's a function of leadership and training. You've got to have strong leaders that lead from the front and the back and the side and say, "Oh, whoa, give the time and distance. What are you guys doing? Let's suit up, let's take the time." Because it's our it's our urge as heroes to want to rush into that burning building, but you know what, just like the house from hell, we're not doing anybody in that building any favors by dying on the way in and becoming the next victim. And that's hard to talk about because because I get hate mail from other coppers that don't understand why I talk about the stuff that I talk about. They say, "Hey, that's secret [ __ ], you're not supposed to put that out on the air." What are failures? We learn from scar tissue, we learn from our failures. And going forward, Steve, if we don't, we're going to lose more coppers, we're going to lose more people in corrections, in courts, because we're going to underestimate the potential of the bad guy and the gravity of the situation. Both of those examples are Occam's Razor, rather than Gordian Knot. But Brian, I guess if we had time, I could apply the Gordian to it as well.

Yeah, and we, I mean, those are those are examples that unfortunately, I mean, there we see those still every day. And, you know, again, it goes back to kind of what I brought. People say, "Oh, that person did this wrong or this right." It's like, "Look, man, that that was a that was a, what is it? 99 out of 100 times it's a training failure." Like very rarely is it that person was just didn't belong there, shouldn't have had that job, shouldn't have been there, was a terrible person. Like, it's very rarely that in all of these cases. I don't care if it's if it's medical malpractice, Greg, I mean, it's the same, you know, you know, you've got that's a, it's it's it's no different that, "Look, I've been doing the surgery my for the last 20 years. I'm an expert in my field. I know what I'm doing. You know, I got this." And then, you know, someone comes up with, "Okay, this is happening. Well, it's probably just this," you know, and then they make the wrong decision and someone dies. I mean, that happens all the time in our country and it's not necessarily it's a failure and doing that same thing, that same mental model, that same process of going, "Stop, let me get some time and distance," you know, what what what's the most likely, what's the most dangerous course of action? And then, you know, using exactly what you're talking about, it's that that, "Hey, sometimes it's just the simplest thing," and that's often what's overlooked.

I mean, I'm sure even the example you brought up, even then, you know, why did that why did that officer go running in the middle of that fight thinking at any time that they were going to be able to to stop that situation? And it's often goes back to, "Well, I was taught that during this situation, I do that. And I thought this was the same thing, so therefore I applied that." And and and it's it's just so it's a we're not teaching critical thinking skills.

So Stephen, before you go, and Brian, this reminds me of so many videos that our listeners and viewers send us where you see the person that thinks that just because the bad guy's escalating the situation, we have to we have to close in. The person's now going in the car and they're going to drive away or they're jumping in the car and they're reaching for a gun in their handbag, so we got to close that distance. Listen, gift of time and distance is different, Steve. And I'll tell you, I just thought of a great Gordian Knot perspective because Marren used it in his example, he just didn't, you know, cite Gordius. The idea of a fresh perspective, a fresh pair of eyes on something, okay? Being innovative is important. But the question remains, and this is what I would do in a small group with your coworkers: Did Alexander rush to the decision based on frustration, or was he exhibiting the fact that he was a critical thinker and he was innovative? There's a great question I would sit down with the people in a small group, and ten minutes in, they're going to look at you and go, "What the hell does this have to do with corrections?" But it's the ultimate because humans don't just use trial and error, but they use their insight, their knowledge, their skills, attitudes, aptitudes, abilities to understand certain things in their environment. And those principles, both inductive and deductive, and that's what I was trying to allude to earlier with bottom-up and top-down processing and creative thinking, that's what creates problem-solving.

And John Boyd didn't write the OODA Loop for the business world, okay? He wrote it for a fighter pilot. So can you put it over there and duct tape it over? Yeah, but what you got to do is you got to back off and look at the science. Look, I don't know [ __ ] about a prison, but I do know the entropic principle states where a ball is going to stop if I roll it down a hill. I can figure out the physics, and with friction and all the other forces, I can say it's probably going to stop here. So this is probably where I've got to be to catch it and throw it back, to stop the base runner. You get what I'm trying to say? So why isn't it that you can't break down the inside of the interview room, the inside of the booking room, these places, and create small training events that would be called part test training that have increasing external stimuli? We pat this person down, and this person has some contraband, but then we change it to a shiv, and then we change it to a gun. How would we react to those? Why do we have to then walking down the hallway, the guy jumps his cuffs, and now all of a sudden we're, you know, the cuffs are in front and the person's trying to choke another guard? Okay, so we have that. We have to talk to the guy down. We got to beat the guy down. We got to spray the guy down. And the folks at home, believe me, I'm just coming up with likely scenarios. I'm not saying this is the way the world works. But Steve, do you see how we got to break that down, and we can't just — law enforcement is no way one size fits all. And am I getting a believer out of you on that?

Yes, no, I mean that's that's definitely the way it is. And uh to go back to a couple examples, um, we have tried to do some training, you know, where I myself, I'll dress up in in orange like an inmate and I'll do my best to act like an inmate and think like an inmate. And it is interesting to see some of the reactions that we get, you know, and some of the um, some of those training failures if you will. Like uh, you know, I'll be sitting at a control point and I'll be refusing to go back. And and one of two things that is going to happen either based on the officer's, you know, command presence and their their their ability to speak to me and give me clear commands and stuff like that, I'll either go back to my cell or somebody's going to get into a fight. And, you know, unfortunately for them, most of the time it ends up in a fight because they they rely too heavily on the authority. Like, you know, they're like, "Oh, you know, I'm a cop, so you got to do what I say." [ __ ] right? Instead of like being that, you know, respectful, "Hey, man, we just got to get you back in your cell, other people are waiting to get out," like, you know, whatever the situation is. Um, one kid even walked up to me and he was like, he started off the the encounter with, "Let's go!" And my response to him was, "Well, you know, where I come from, 'Let's go' means let's fight, so yeah, I'm going to fight. Or what?" And he just kept repeating, "Let's go, let's go, let's go," you know, I'm closing distance on him and he's not reacting. So, you know, we get into a little scuffle. But, you know, it's it's it's, uh—

Those are known as diseases of adaptation. Okay, so what happens is some people think, "Well, they're badge heavy," and "the bad person goes to to become a police officer because they want to exert their force." Of course that happens, that happened at 7-Eleven. I was at a library where that happened. The problem is it's such a small, insignificant number of those people. The real problem is nobody showed us a different way. So what happened is we went from the academy, we went on the street, we didn't go back to the academy, did we?

No.

And so we went out on the street or we went into the jail. Like folks that are listening, it's obvious that in many sheriff's departments to be a road deputy, you have to do months or years in corrections and you know, enhance your training before you go out. And some people never go out, some people become prisoner transports or love it in corrections. And good for all of them. My point being here that when you're taking a look at the situation for training, how much time in a police academy is talking yourself out of the situation? It's virtually none. I would guarantee if that's more than eight hours, whoever's zone is is fudging that number because I see the type of training.

And then when the disease adaptation occurs, you're on the road and you've got a call list of 14 calls. And all of a sudden you go to the first one and it's a bicker and everything and there's no physical violence so I don't have to take one of them to jail. So I say, "Hey, look, if I come back here, you're both going to jail." And then I I move on, right? And so what happens is I get used to these little talismans, these little totems, and and all of a sudden they're in my thing. And so I come up to a guy in the street and I go, "Hey, you want to go to jail?" And the guy goes, "Certainly not." "Well, then you better shut your mouth because I don't have time." I'm going to go, "Those things work!" And every time they work, our reward circuitry goes [makes sound]. Then we run up to the felon that's a two-strike loser. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Not that all you people that are watching and listening to the show won't redeem yourselves, but recidivism is, you know, all over the map. But the idea is now you're on that traffic stop, right? And you go, "Hey, you better pay attention because I swear to God, I'll yank out," or whatever. And you got the guy that goes, "Hey, come get some," or you got the guy that's already got the gun in his hand and he goes, "Well, if you don't give a [ __ ] about me, I don't give a damn about you." You see what I'm saying? So that's got to be part of that training. And I applaud you for dressing up like that. Marren's not, but that's because he ran away wearing it.

Yeah, you know what, you brought up a good point, you know, that that, you know, Greg always reminds us is that role playing isn't just for the bedroom, right? I mean, you having having everyone like you just did do that same thing and like, "Hey, you're going to act up like the prisoner now, you're going to wear this, we're going to put you in a cell." I mean, if you're not—

Don't sound like my house, though. Go on.

If you don't, yeah, they couldn't. No, no, Greg, this isn't sexual, this is training. All right? Um, so so the the but the idea is is seeing it through their eyes has you have to literally do that, right? You have to go do that and be that person and be that role player because not only does it just help prepare the other, you know, individual training, right? But but you get that chance to go, "Oh, damn, I could really get to do whatever the hell I want here. I don't have any rules. Uh, I can do, I got all the time in the world. I'll f with this dude or this girl all day long." Because and once they see that and once they get to play that role, when they see it happening, they go, "All right, this person is just there, that this is what they're doing. And they're giving me a hard time because," and I can't let it affect my, uh, my performance, right? Because if I what happens if I start getting fed up and I start getting agitated, man, now I start amping up and I'm ramping it up and I'm ramping up and it doesn't take much more than that until I get to the point where, you know what, now we're now we're going hands-on or now we're using force. And now this situation's escalating and and sometimes that does need to occur, but a lot of times it can be mitigated, you know? And that that's the whole point is is being able to identify that sometimes playing that role is a huge key in doing that and build on those skills.

So I'm I'm now thinking in my my mind, you're dressed in the in the suit and you have a confidant, another trainer that knows what you're going to do. And they they have the roles on a couple of cards just to keep them straight because free play and training is is not going to help you here, right? You got to crawl, walk, run. You got to start white belt and work up to black belt. So your confederate, your contemporary, has a PVC pole that's four feet long and you put some red tape around the end of it, okay? And what you do is you say, "Okay, anybody can call a tactical freeze." It's a Greg-ism. And tactical freeze means freeze right where you are in the training. And the person who calls the tactical freeze, your buddy walks over and hands them that long white pole that nobody can get injured with, that's why it's PVC with the red on it. And while everybody's frozen, that person can walk around and use the pole to illustrate, "Look, this person's hands, they made into fists, and look at the way this person is leaning forward, and now they've got this expression. These things are anger cues. So I'm thinking something's about to happen." And then the next guy goes, "Hey, pass that baton." And he grabs it and he goes, "Look at how these two people are almost ganging up." Okay, you can do that in training. And then you go back and you go, "Excellent. Those were knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, abilities that we had worked in. Look, here's the card where we said Joe is going to get angry or till he starts to fight, and you were able to stop it before it occurred." That should be the key to training. What can I do? How can I use my decision at the appropriate time in this continuum of events that are rapidly unfolding in any situation, and how can I mitigate it? Means softening the blow, means stopping it before it occurs, I mean, giving somebody an off-duty roll call that didn't have one before. Because I'll tell you right now, bad guys got what's called bad guy luck. And if they're going to yank their gun out of a out of a pocket without a holster and fire that one crusty round, it's going to hit you where your vest ain't. You see? And and and so you can't rely on God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah alone. And none of them asked you to. All of them gave you stuff like Occam's Razor and OODA and Gordian Knot to talk about. And I'll tell you this, and Brian, I would challenge you on this one too. I think the best stories like Occam's Razor are those the ones that we might not remember the name of the thing or who, you know, Gilead of Ockham was or whoever, because I don't know all that [ __ ]. But I'll tell you what, it causes me to sit down and do some deep thinking and have some great conversations in the rental sled with Marren on the way to our next venue. And Stephen, you were the catalyst behind that with that email you sent. So I would say send that same email to your co-workers and say, "Hey, time to time to play dress up in the parking lot again. See you at three, you know, bring a water bottle and some PVC."

Yeah, that that's uh that that's a good way to approach it too. And even with what you brought up in these conversations, even like we're having right now, Stephen, that that those conversations can happen at work while you're doing this. "All right, what is this apply, or this is today's the today's topic over the course of the day at the morning brief is going to be this." And work that into every conversation that you can or come up with for three by lunch and another three examples by this or where I want you to look for this specific behavior. "Look for someone, let's talk about posturing." Okay, because you're in prison, that's a jail. That's that's a perfect place. What does that mean? What does that look like? And what did all these body language experts say, "Well, I read that this said this." Okay, well, go find me three examples by lunch. And then you can, "Oh yeah, I saw so-and-so, remember him down here? Yeah, I saw that too." "Okay, what was he upset about?" So now you're seeing it just in general and you're getting a baseline for each individual in there because you likely already have, you know, the people that are going to give you a hard time. You know the ones that are just there doing their time, man, they don't want any trouble. You know the guys that are trying to join gangs, the ones that are already like, you have all of this incredible, incredible information. So then you just got to discuss what's going on inside of there because it's a closed system. Yes, in a jail, like there's it's a complete it's such a great way in terms of observation. It's almost like it's a very scientific way of doing it because there's no external influence. It's all happening right in there in real time. And then you can see deviations from the baseline and people's behavior. You go, "Hey, wait, that guy's always like, you know, out of his rack right away and talking [ __ ] in the morning. And you know what, today he was it something happened, something changed that behavior." Because I mean, you see it, there has. So then it's like, "Okay, well, let's go talk to him. Can I contact him? Can we have a discussion? Can we figure out? Can I ask the other people that I work with, 'Hey, was there something else that came?'" I mean, see how now you're building this explanatory storyline for what would seemingly be a benign behavior to then go, "Oh, man, he wrote a suicide letter and he did this and he told this other guy, 'I'm done, I'm out of here, I'm checking out today.'" But his sentence isn't up for a while. What does that mean? So now we're already built we've already built that case and we're going, "Hey, let's intervene, let's find out what's going on." And that can be used for whatever example is happening.

And throw away the horseshit. There are so many ridiculous courses out there that aren't founded in science that are teaching people for a certificate, stuff like, "Hey, uh, the person didn't maintain eye contact with me." Okay, uh, you have no way of knowing why that person didn't maintain eye contact, no way. And and it will never be probable cause. But let me give you one that will be immediately probable cause: a person looking at your holster and your gun. Yeah, okay, they're either fascinated by it and say, "Wow, this guy's an authority figure," or they're going, "Damn, I wonder if I could yank that off and shoot him in the head and then shoot myself." Those are the types of things based on the other artifacts and evidence in the scenario that you can utilize. I'll give you another one with looking. You talk to the person, you go, "Hey, do me a favor, step over here." And the person looks over there and they look over there. You get what I'm trying to say? Then they're doing the felony warm-up stretch. You remember those? You know what I'm trying to say? Well, you know, it's off to the races, so time to really quick get into your Adidas or your Keds because you're going to be running. So all of those other things that people tell you about, man, that the the hair in the back of my head or my instincts told me this or that or my gut was telling me this, those are all either explicable through science or they're not. Either those are things I can measure against a baseline and call them an anomaly or they're not. So if you're not dealing with the type of training, yeah, our training is expensive, but guess what, you're going to be at the top of your damn game. I mean, uh, let me ask you a stupid question, Steve. Did you imagine that when you wrote us that you were going to be on a show and we were going to answer the questions for you?

Yeah.

Okay, did we charge you a penny to do it?

No, not yet. I'm waiting for a follow-up email, I guess.

Well, stipend while we talk? No, but the idea is that this is professionals building their skills by talking about stuff and we're going to share it with folks for free. Holy crap, what a novel concept! That's what I'm talking about here is you brought some really hard questions and I hope in some small way we were able to break them down into usable chunks, man.

Yeah, don't think of the big name, you know, think of what what does it mean? What's the gist of that thing?

Yes, I mean, that was the whole purpose behind emailing you because, you know, um, we we do often host trainings. You know, training is expensive, so we usually do it in-house. You know, the department's always willing to spend money on other things, but, um, how to, like, my whole thing is, how do we, like, like, uh, Brian was saying, how do we articulate this? How do we break it down so that, you know, the average user can actually apply this information?

Yep, yep. No, and that that's, you know, a perfect example of all the stuff that that we talk about and get into. And everyone goes into, "Well, you got to learn about reading body language and all the stuff." And it's like, you you don't have to be an expert at it. You have to be an expert at understanding your kind of yourself, so to speak, right? How do I understand human behavior and and how it works?

But, you know, he gave, I I want to go back as a perfect example. Greg said, it's like, you know, everyone gets into all he's looking over here and your functional field of view is this and, yeah, we say your functional field of view is extremely important. But like, if he keeps looking at your gun, like that's the worst thing you have to worry about. You don't have to worry about whether they're looking up and to the right and whether they're doing this. It's like, no, that means they're thinking about your gun or a gun or gun is on their mind right now. You know what I mean? It's like that that's the point. It's when it's or the classic when you bring two guys take off running and bring them back together and they won't look at each other at all. There's one, here's one, you're just like, "Okay, why won't you look at that's that's normal human behavior, man." Like, I'm doing this, I'm trying to disassociate myself with that person because I know it's bad. And every human knows when we look at each other and give the eyebrow flash, it's a recognition symbol signal, right? And they're going to know we're linked. So it's like, it's so obvious, but you can articulate because it's so odd of the normal to say, "Hey, do you know this guy over here?" "What guy? Who? What are you talking about?" Like, "Dude." All right. So so it's it's they're they're they're generally more obvious. And and like Greg said is like all all that experience stuff you guys have, you can play these games, their mental games during your work day to go, "I'm going to look for three these three things today." "Oh," and it's you're playing Where's Waldo, it's just that everyone's got guns or knives or or weapons of some sort, right? And and but that's what you're playing. And then when you keep doing that over time, you eventually won't even have to think about doing it. Like those those indicators pop out without you being consciously aware. You're just you scan and go, "Oh, what's that? Oh, we time to go talk to this guy right now before this escalates." And you're already seeing it. And then that's just that repetition of training that constantly.

And to call out more scam artists, Steve, because you brought it up and we want to tell everybody that you live in Pacific Palisades, 234 Kingman Way, you know, so they can come and talk to you. But there are so many people out there that they need to take a step back and see what situational awareness means. Situational awareness doesn't mean how to better pay attention. Okay, uh, raising your level of attention. It's what you attend to and how you compare it against the baseline in whatever environment you are found. So therefore, you're building artifacts and evidence to support reasonable conclusions. Just paying more attention means you're going to walk around with a slap-happy look on your face. You get what I'm saying? And you're going to be hyper-alert, you might not get punched by somebody walking by, but I want to punch you. Situation awareness means that you're more in tune with the things that are happening around you because you're creating explanatory storylines. "This guy's standing by the car. The car is occupied. That's good. He's probably doing a window drop, talking to him. This guy's standing by the car and then looking left and right and then kneeling down. He's probably using that for cover. Now I have to orient and focus on that." You get what I'm trying to say? That to me is building the situation, the sights, the smells, the feel, the touch, the taste. Not this crap that you've increased your situational awareness. Yeah, we're the only program that proves that they do it and we will pass whatever test that you bring us. The other stuff is that they go, "Just pay more attention." That's horse crap and it's going to get you killed. You can't pay more attention. Yeah, pay more attention. You can't, yeah, do you see what I'm trying to say? More attention.

Exactly.

I can increase that just by waking you up an hour early today. You see what I'm trying to say?

Yeah, exactly. Don't fall for the crap, man. Don't fall into the trap. Well, well, Stephen, um, do you, I kind of, you know, what we're going to throw to you and see if you have any other kind of specific questions or general things that you've seen or want to discuss quick before, you know, we don't want to take too much more of your time and and stuff. And I know we had some technical difficulties at the beginning which I don't know what the hell just happened, but I'm freaking out about it, so I'm trying to pretend.

We also want to give you time to get out of that realtor's house that you're barricaded in.

Yeah, looking at your roof, I can see there's no furniture there, Marren, the window's open. You get what I'm trying to say? He's got gloves on his hands and squatting.

Yeah, exactly. Squatters' rights, man. Uh, no, nothing in particular, nothing in particular. Um, like I said, the whole the whole goal of that email was just figure out how to make this stuff more more digestible because when you guys were talking about OODA Loop, I was like, I was lost in the sauce for a little bit there. And and that's why I kind of responded.

Like, look, the the only the reason why we went down the rabbit hole on that was to explain to everyone like because we see a lot of people just throwing out terms or using stuff. And it's not to say like, "Oh, you don't really know, we're so much smarter than you." It's like, "Look, man, like, hang on, don't start preaching about something that you don't fully understand for one." And two, like this this these are all, and and it's important to understand even most of the policies and procedures that are in place, they they came from somewhere, right? And and there's usually with a lot of them, there's sometimes some really good information as to why we do that. But if we don't ever learn what that is, then those things lose their relevance and then we stop doing it and then guess what, we have to relearn that mistake somehow. So the OODA Loop is just a great example of like, you had a guy who was a super, super genius, who didn't even fully understand what he was talking about. He literally invented energy maneuverability theory, which revolutionized how we design aircraft in our in the world. Like, we're talking such uber level smart that I don't know how I'd have a conversation with him, but right? But the reason, but but it's such a simple way to to look at something and understand an information loop and that it constantly updates. And it's not just some standalone thing or a cool thing to say about acquiring a target and shooting at it. No, this is a mental model that you can use for every single thing that you do and understand how to update information.

Using Occam's Razor to stick with the most reasonable, the most likely thing, right? Get away with these these wild, long explanatory storylines that involve all of these different connection points. It's like that's why all these, it's like the conspiracy theory stuff, you're just like, "Do you understand what you're saying right now? This story has gotten so out of far ridiculous." Like, it's generally the simple answer is going to be the most right, you know, 99 out of 100 times, or whatever the percentage is. It's very rarely something extraordinary, which which is good, I like that because that means I can solve it, right? I'm just dude, I'm a Marine, so I need stuff simple sometimes, it helps. And like so so that means I stick and that goes back to what just something you brought up, trust your gut and your instinct on something. When something doesn't feel right, it's because something isn't right. Now, maybe it's an error in how you're processing or it's actual something that you're seeing, but you have to investigate that. That's the time to take that step back and go, "Hang on, something's up here. I'm not really sure what it is yet. I don't want to jump to a conclusion, but I'm realizing that something's going up, something is wrong here or something is off." Just having that record, just recognition, recognizing that and being able to take some action, you're already ahead of, you're so far ahead of the power curve just doing that. We even without knowing what the answer is, you have to first recognize that there's a problem. And if you can recognize that there's a problem, even if you don't have the right answer, you've already had a better starting point than you were if you just glossed over it.

And Stephen, my final comments for today, and I hope you come back as a guest, you're a great guest, and keep watching and keep writing, because that way our other fan can have some time off. You get what I'm trying to say? We only have two. But I would tell you this, I would tell you this, don't spend all your time trying to impress your audience with your knowledge. And that's the reason Brian talked me into the OODA Loop. I didn't want to do the OODA Loop because I figured if people wanted to do it, they wanted to study it. And what we did it is to poke in the eye the people that were using too much [ __ ] in their training. And I'll tell you this right now, if you're doing training, let's say you're doing pursuit stuff, you don't need to understand the internal combustion engine to understand how pursuits happen and the dynamics of pursuit. But you do need to know some science like brake fade, coefficient of friction, you know, stopping distance. There's some math. So winnow it down, and this is back to to Gordian and Occam's, winnow it down to the central knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities—we always add those—that you have to know. What are the core competencies here and work on those? Because I tell you, nothing inflames me more than we're sitting in a class and a person goes, "All right, if you understand the basic hyperbole that comes with this," and I'm already lost and I just get angry. Marren's a lot smarter than me, I just go to anger as soon as I don't understand something, I want to break something. And I usually have to walk out of those lectures. But if somebody tells me, "Hey, I'm going to streak this up, I'll show you what it means and we're going to do a practical exercise at the end," I usually stick around.

All right, man. Well, uh, thanks again for coming on, Stephen. We really appreciate it. We like it when, uh, listeners kind of reach out with questions like that because it lets us know when it's a good gauge for where we're at, what people want to know more about. And so we always tell people, man, if you've got, you know, ideas or a topic you want us to cover or something you want us to go over, just reach out at leftofgreg@gmail.com because, you know, I mean, you reached out to us at, you know, and sent us an email, I think, through the website, and I was like, "Oh, this is awesome." And I immediately got with Greg and we were like, "Dude, this guy, we gotta have, let's just have him on." I was like, "Let's just see if he'll come on," because you you just brought up great points. And that's you brought up the "so what?" And the "so what?" is the most important thing. Like that's what I tell anyone, you know, one anytime I'm going through a course, I always try to be a really, really good student and I'm going to be the best student I can and I'm always going to ask, "So what? What's in it for me?" And if that instructor can't tell you the "so what?", then maybe there's a problem there. Maybe they don't know the material enough or they're not doing it correctly or they're not explaining a way that that makes sense to you. And that's what it is, it's about getting that "so what?" "Here's what's important. Here's what's in it for you. Here's what you're going to use. Here's how you're going to get out of it." And then that's the best way to approach it.

Yeah, and thanks for everything that you do too. And listen, give us some feedback. Tell us if this helps you communicate training principles with your coworkers. And by all means, get them and the damn prisoners, you get what I'm trying to say, to start signing up for their website. I'll maybe just the lessons learned, you know what I'm saying? I don't know. No, but seriously, thanks for what you do and thanks for keeping the streets safe and the prisoners safe too. Thanks for due process, thanks for the Constitution.

Thank you guys. You guys make it a little bit easier, I guess, trying to learn along the way. I'm just trying to try to be the best I can, I guess. But um, no, I'm sure I'm, uh, it's twofold because, you know, I I don't want to be the guy who's doing the whole "well, OODA thing" if I don't really understand the purpose behind it, so um, yeah, thank you guys a bunch. I can't I can't thank you enough, actually.

Thanks. Sounds like the homeowner's coming home.

Yeah, I think uh, yeah.

Streaming in the background. That's great. All right, we'll be safe, but link back up with us so we know how it went. Okay. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks everyone for listening. Please remember, follow us, share it if you like it, like the show, subscribe, all that stuff. Share it with your friends. And don't forget we always end it. Don't forget that training changes behavior.