L.O.G. 131 Whos in your orbit

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. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media; the links are also in the episode details. Hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

Well, good morning, Greg. Let's get started here today. We both have a lot going on right now, and I'm about to hit a road trip actually tomorrow (from the day we're recording this, not the day this gets released). But I'm going to be traveling to—very, very close to—actually how we're starting our podcast, with a story out of Chicago.

The story is about a couple of undercover officers, ATF officers, and a Chicago police officer doing a drug deal with this guy. Basically, he ended up shooting them. Not fatally; they were injured, thankfully they weren't killed during this interaction.

So, I don't have all the details and everything, but the reason why we're talking about it is he was subsequently arrested, and I remember the first I heard of it was when his booking photo popped up, and I was like, "Oh damn, this guy clearly looks like he's in trouble!" He had that look like, "I got in a little over my head." I read the backstory, and his response was, "I had no idea there were police officers. I thought they were—I thought I was getting ripped. I thought it was another drug dealer that was going to try and steal from me." Whatever the situation was, I was like, "That seems like a logical way of thinking for this guy."

But it brought up a point, and this has nothing to do specifically with law enforcement or anything, but just humans in general. The way you've described it before, you've kind of described it as we all have sort of our own orbit of people that we're around, and that kind of influences us, and we influence them. Then when someone else comes in, they're kind of unknowingly coming into sort of our orbit, I guess, of all these people that are there. So, I'd love for you to kind of just explain that, what you mean by it, and then we can kind of go from there.

So, Brian, it's a great way to phrase a question too. What I'll do is I'll start at a street level: you go every Thursday morning into town to a local McDonald's. You get a black coffee and a crawler (a donut). You sit there for 15 minutes before you go to work, but you only do it on Thursday because they get the senior citizen discount or whatever. You know the counterperson, Madge, you know her by sight, or by her name tag. She doesn't know your name, but you're civil and cordial. And when you sit down, the young guy that comes by, that is wiping off the tables, you always say, "Hi," to him, "Hey, how's it going?" because he's got a basketball team shirt on, and you always ask about that.

Then you go out and you perpetrate a quadruple homicide. The news comes because they want to know where you just came from. They talk to them, and they go, "Oh my God, he was the nicest guy! He sat right over there every Thursday." They have no idea what goes on in your orbit, and they're part of the killer's or the serial killer's orbit. But those geospatial relationships never coexist in the same plane at the same time.

So, it's another way of looking at the gift of time and distance. If you're laying on your back and you've got a piece of straw in your mouth and you're gazing up at the sky, remember that each one of those solar systems is comprised of planets, and each one of those planets has planetoids or moons that go around it, and each one of those has gravity and they influence things around them. So, just because you're on a different planet doesn't mean you're not influenced by the tides on my planet.

But we don't look at it that way because 25 or 50 years ago, there was a Good Sam Club, and when a Winnebago went by and they saw you broken down, they'd pull over at the side of the road and help. 25 years ago, if you had a paramedic or a CPR bumper sticker on your car and you didn't stop, you could violate the Good Samaritan Law or be protected by it, depending on which side of the coin you're on for not stopping and rendering aid.

The question is, in this situation, the specific situation you brought up in Chicago, the guy's orbit that they want to arrest included daily threats with guns from other persons in his orbit. He had been robbed and perhaps been shot, or at least shot at and threatened with bodily harm. So now these cops—my question would be, and nobody ever wants a cop shot, but my question would be, Brian, did they anticipate the geospatial orbit of their prey, the guy that they were going to arrest, and say it might include that plainclothes people came up to him and pulled guns? And was he ever robbed by somebody that purported to be a police?

So, go back to the factual basis: has anybody ever executed a raid on a house just to do an armed home invasion, stating they were police? I would say it's happened thousands of times. Do you see what I'm saying? Now we get this kid whose job is being a street urchin and a drug dealer, perhaps, and all of a sudden these guys come up and they go, "Hey, give up the cheese!" with a gun in his face. Well, we know human behavior, and we know how fast information is transmitted by the amygdala to the other cortices of the brain. Do you see what I'm saying?

So, are we going to fault this inner-city kid for being smarter, faster, stronger? We talk about that on the podcast every week, don't we? So it applies to bad guys too. So I hope you see, I just want to hit the outer edge of the solar system on this one and say that you sometimes have to consider the influence that is pulling on you, the gravitational pull, the entropic pull of the situation, because if you don't, Brian, one day you're going to pull over, and you're going to go to render aid, and you're going to get right in the trick bag because you didn't anticipate that orbit or that sphere of influence that's already in progress.

No, and that's a good way, that sphere of influence. We influence others in our orbit, so to speak, and they influence us. I like the analogy of the gravitational and entropic effect, I guess, you have on each other.

I think one of the issues too is that I'm coming from my solar system, so to speak, and if I drop into yours, I'm only using my solar system as a comparative baseline to yours. But it's not scientific, is it? No, because in fact, yours might be a planet made of gas, whereas we're not. We're carbon-based. What I'm trying to say is you say it all the time when we're given a brief, when we're out on the road, you say it all the time: "Baseline plus anomaly equals decision." And then you go down and you say, "These are the emergent ones. These are the ones that can wait a little while."

Your analysis just then was unscientific, meaning you were portraying an unscientific analysis if you look at the world through your glasses only and you go, "Oh, this person's in distress." Do you get what I'm trying to say? And I'll give you a perfect example. Our parents had traveled all the way from Detroit Metro via car, all the way to Gunnison Metro (where Uber is "Goober," with the little umlauts above the U). Along the way, let's say that they decided to pull off the road and check their map on the hood of their car in a big lot store parking lot, because we all know that they're by major intersections, thoroughfares. Who else pulls off the road at those big parking lots? That's where every drug dealer is: Walmart parking lot. Oh my God!

Check the tape, and you'll see every serial killer in historical perspective since Dillinger and the Lady in Red stopped in at one of those places before they did something. What I'm trying to say is you're sitting there planning your rest of the day based on the patterns that you have etched in your dreamcatcher of a life. And now all of a sudden, you see or feel something. It can be something where you saw somebody that looked confused and you want to go, "Hey, can I help you?" We've done that before. Where you see somebody, they're out of their element just momentarily, and what it is, is they're waiting for this guy that's showing up and the cops are in the car next door, and the guy's going, "Hey, some big guy with the brown church coat is coming up." Do you see what I'm trying to say? We don't know what we're part of.

So my question to you is that, with the advent of instant communications, do we need to be that guy anymore? Do we need to be that human, that boy or girl or man or woman, that gets involved with it? Or is there an imperative now, a social imperative, let's call it that, that says we can "phone it in"? Remember when "phoning it in" was an insult? That guy's an opportunity to see if he's just sitting there.

I get what you mean. In this case, you mean being a good witness versus being an active participant in something. That's a perfect way of putting it, and that's a huge distinction. Because you hit on a few things here. One, you said some of the ways that we think and act and respond to these different situations may be outdated due to the speed of communication, meaning, is it necessary? I think it's a factual statement. Is it necessary now to have that type of mindset or idea of, "Hey, I'm going to go in and do something about this," because we have instant communication now? And we have the ability to enlist the aid of others, or get help from somewhere, or call the professional. Like you said, everything from a broken-down vehicle to "I'm witnessing some type of crime." Each one of those things now, even just 10 years ago, the difference in how quickly someone can be—the information can get to the right person at the right time, and then they can respond with that—is, I mean, that's increased exponentially. So I would say even the difference between today and 10 years ago is huge.

So, that's a lot to unpack with that, especially with your analogy now, because I'm thinking of all the other different ways we could describe that in terms of human interaction and how it works, just understanding physics and literally how humans interact. But what this is, let's stick with good witness versus active participant. Let's start there. Meaning, what does that mean? Because we all want to be the Good Samaritan that helps out, or helps a person in distress, or can be the hero in the movie, or do whatever. That's good because we're human beings, and at a very primal level, we do want the survival of not just ourselves, but of the species. Therefore, when we see people in need, we generally—you can see, you get the guy who gets arrested because he was like a four-time felon, but he was pulling a guy out of a burning car. There's a sociological drive there to help that individual. So even if that person is a criminal, whatever, they're willing to do that. I bring that up because it's a very primal instinct humans have to want to do because it's a survival instinct.

Exactly.

But if we're talking about, where do we draw the line here with, "I'm going to stand here and be a good witness versus I'm going to be an active participant"? Without diving into a specific case or drawing and delineating different levels of, "This is where you can sit there and continue to watch. This is where you call someone. This is where you get involved," it's very—I mean, that's a, there's a lot of complexity in there.

But listen, science is not absolute. Somebody right now is going to jump on that. There's absolute zero there. There are things that we're absolutely certain of. We understand the difference and can calculate it to the nanometer when we're talking about Celsius to Fahrenheit, or when we're talking specific gravity or amounts of pressure. But it wasn't that long ago that we thought the Earth was flat. Do you get what I'm trying to say? It wasn't that long ago that we thought that the solar system spun around us. So that's why I'm saying that science isn't absolute; science learns and adapts and changes. So we have to learn and adapt and change with it.

What I'll do is I'll use your example of Chicago, and it's a perfect one, Brian. Let's say that you're a concealed carry holder, and you're about to walk into your apartment, condo, or local gas station, and you see a couple of guys in hoodies. You hear what I'm trying to say? And they're jumping over a thing and running at another guy in the parking lot and go, "Don't move! Don't move!" And they've got their guns out and everything else. You go, "Holy [expletive], I've seen a robbery before, and this looks a lot like a robbery or it might be a homicide." So you pull out your weapon, and now guess what? You're no longer that witness, are you? Now you're an active participant.

And because time is fleeting, and because distance changes your proximity view of the situation, you're not sure if these guys are two coppers or if they're going to kill this guy. And you want to do the right thing, but you're doing the mental "Should I stay or should I go?" Now what I want to do is go one ring out from that. So we've got a ring: it's a guy they're arresting. We've got the next ring: it's the two guys that are arresting that guy. We've got the third ring, which is the Good Samaritan. The unknown fourth ring is four guys with raid vests and a van. One of them is going to hit you over the head with a sledgehammer, Good Samaritan, because they think you're there to kill the cop. They think you're a guardian angel for the dope dealer.

What I'm saying is complex situations, ambiguous environments, require that extra couple of seconds sometimes of processing, and sometimes doing yourself a favor by giving yourself that gift of time and distance. And if somebody's beating somebody to death with a claw hammer, feel free to step in. Do you get what I'm trying to say? But we're not talking about that anymore, are we? We're talking about a situation where communication again is instantaneous. You can record, and what's my favorite saying? If you can record it, you can stop it. You can intervene and stop it.

I don't know, Brian. I think that we're in an age now where there's such a fine line between, and the other thing is, how qualified are you? So if you call paramedics, paramedics are certainly more qualified than I am at American medicine. And if I call the cops, I'm certainly hoping that I'm in a jurisdiction where it's not "Green Acres is the place to be," and you've got the deputy that comes up and says, "I don't know." I mean, I'm hoping. But we also know that with 18,000 police departments in the United States, we might be in one of those jurisdictions. I sent you that one just a day ago, of the guy that was killing people like it was free. He killed those two people at the gas station, went over and shot the person as he was leaving the gas station, went to the next gas station, and it happened to be an off-duty cop that was armed. He stopped the situation, but guess what, Brian? He was shot too. He shot and killed that person, but he was shot too.

And this is the thing you brought up: the concealed carry and people who want to intervene. Again, I'm not bashing anyone for doing that, but it's understanding everything you just said, that we don't take into account those spirals that could potentially come from that. Like you said, the Good Samaritan wants to do something and, "Oh hey, now I've got this tool on my back belt here, and I've been going to the range, and these guys have been showing me this really cool stuff and how to do it, but I want to go do it now." Which is part of it.

But I think knowing what happens after that is, you're now a contributing factor to everything that comes from that situation. Meaning, you stepping in, you intervening, you are now assuming responsibilities that you may not have thought about when you were seeing this situation. I think that's really important because when these different situations occur, you're only thinking in those nanoseconds.

Right. Well, yeah, you're thinking binary, absolutely. It's the classic, "Is it a threat or not a threat?" like, "[expletive], I don't know!" There's a range of options, tick, tick, tick. That's what I'm saying.

No, you're right. No one ever does that. But the idea is, not knowing, you're only thinking in that moment, so you're thinking in nanoseconds in those moments, in those split seconds, because that's what you think it really is when it's not. It's a series of spirals. Like we said before, the line between A and B is a series of circles or spirals; it's not a straight line. When you interact with that, when I push into that orbit, when I push into your gravitational pull, it affects me, and I affect it. Therefore, I am now part of that situation and partly responsible. You can come up with all these different scenarios of, "Well, you see this..." and it's like, "Yeah, but people always come up with a scenario that's so blatantly obvious that it's great." No, like you said, you've seen a person pounding someone over the head with a hammer. Clearly. But what we're talking about is, those situations rarely occur. It's always something ambiguous.

Rarely.

And so if I go walking into that and I place myself in there, I am now a contributing factor to everything, and therefore partly responsible for everything that happens after that. We don't take that into consideration at the time. We don't because we can't, because your survival chemistry, your electrochemical neurotransmitters are set up to defend you. They're not set up to defend the third person in the group that's with you in the limo. So it's counterintuitive to be a security guard or a presidential entourage security because you're committed to protecting another.

Now, if you're standing in line with your wife and your kids, of course that group tribal safety, security mentality is going to take over. But I mean, when you're in the moment with other folks, the first biggest lie that we were sold, Brian—second to Maslow's, or first to Maslow's, I guess it would be—is proxemics. I absolutely believe in proxemic indicators, yes, absolutely do, but they change so drastically with the situation that if you don't orient them and specifically assign them to the situation, which is ever changing, that you're in, then you're wrong.

So we look online and what do we find? We find, "This is the interpersonal zone." Yeah, yeah. But you're standing within someone. It's like, "Okay, okay." So here, let me give you one why that's a lie. We're in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we still got haircuts because we're servicemen, or ex-servicemen, or former servicemen that are working on contracts, and we have to have a certain appearance. Take Delta Force and SEALs out of it. What I'm saying is that there were times that we had our hair cut, and we had our hair cut by a person that was indigenous to the area that we were in, that was the war zone, that stood behind us where we couldn't see them with a sharp pair of scissors and a razor, and we sat there and relaxed, talking to our friends while we were at the barber. Show me where that is in proxemics, Brian. And the mother-baby with the oxytocin, and then the girlfriend where she's sitting in the middle seat of the pickup truck. It doesn't take into account those situations.

Why am I bringing that up? Because when your orbit is going around, it's this same orbit pattern recognition and analysis means that you repeat patterns, or it wouldn't be a science. Let's say that mine's the size of a beach ball, and yours is four feet in diameter, mine's only two feet in diameter. What I don't know is because parts of that orbit that I exude are invisible, Brian. They're invisible to the naked eye. I can influence you. I had a situation, and I can't be very specific about it because I live here, but I had a situation where very recently we were in an office waiting for something, and the person that came in either worked at a marijuana dispensary or was in fact a marijuana dispensary, if you know what I'm trying to say. And the overpowering smell of hemp and the kind green bud was such that it was like, "Oh my God, I'm getting a contact high just from the odor."

So, did you thank him? No, but I should have. Now I'm reconciling that matter. But the idea is that you're exuding the P.U. and you didn't think about it because you're so close to it, you don't know it. Okay. So think of that term. For example, have you ever seen somebody? They give off that vibe. When I go into that mode, when I'm going to take action, I switch from normal Greg, the big, huggy, teddy-bear-happy Greg, to mission focus: "Oh, crap, it's about to come." You've seen it. Other people have seen it. I don't notice it. And then all of a sudden, what happens, Brian, is that starts spreading through the crowd and people that know that I see it. Yeah, boom! Okay, so that's influence.

That's it. That's the perfect thing. It fixes you, it changes your orbit.

Well, that's a perfect example of how those relationships happen, because then I see you click into that, and what do I immediately do? Now I'm in it because I'm like, "[expletive], Greg's on something!" And something I can't communicate because you know me, I'm a pointer. Not Bob Pointer (Bob, we love you by the way), but I'm a pointer, a point setter. I'm sitting and pointing, but that's a perfect analogy, isn't it? I mean, so imagine yourself in the same situation in Chicago, because that's sort of a central focus point of what we're talking about today. Here, this guy's getting out of his car.

And I'll tell you, from doing thousands of hours of surveillance and testifying in courts against people, that the person will say, "I've never seen that man before in my life." And I'll say, "Your Honor, I ate breakfast with this guy, right there!" And I'll show hours of footage of me being with the guy. People don't look around. They're not situationally aware. That's why we'll never be out of a job.

So this guy is more situationally aware than others, this guy that shot these coppers. Why? Because it's part of the survival accounts of his life. It's part of the [expletive] fabric of how he operates in his version of what we used to call "the hood." So if you and I were sitting in a car and we were driving to training and we saw him getting out of the car, we would have immediately assigned him to our baseline and said, "This is anomalous behavior above the baseline." Do you get what I'm trying to say? Then all of a sudden, if we saw those guys moving up on him out of our periphery, we would have stopped and oriented and said, "This is about to be a hit. Turn the volume down. Take a look at it."

Now you're that guy with a concealed carry, you're somebody else. My thing is, Brian, sometimes covering concealment, taking out your phone and saying, "Hey, I'm not sure this is anything,"—how many times have we called 911? We start that exact way: "I'm not sure if this is anything, but I see this guy with a gun, and he's moving in on this guy in a parking lot at the Empty Arms Apartments or whatever." The idea is that that's, I guess, the core of my thing to you today: that's my question. Is it now different with instantaneous communication? Is it now better to be an informed witness from cover than it is to intervene in almost every situation?

And I think that's the core, kind of central question. Is it because of that? It has changed. We brought up a whole bunch of examples of how quickly we get to that survival mode, whether it's that individual in that neighborhood where that's their whole life actually, or us in those situations, or in any of these things. Your very primitive level of thinking and acting, and unless you've trained in specific things to react, you're still reacting. But unless you have some sort of training that allows that, you're not going to know necessarily what to do, how to process it. Because you even said ambiguous environments require time to understand, which is true. But it's just an ability to sense-make and problem-solve. It's a level of human performance that eludes most humans, I think without training. But even with training, you're only going to do what you specifically trained to do.

And I think people forget too, is why we're bringing this stuff up. You talk about the concealed carry holder: "I see something happening, and I want to go respond." In all of these situations, every single one, whether it's the story I talked about at the beginning with the police officers and doing a dope deal or whatever, or it's the concealed carry, or whatever, you see something going on. What people forget, even people who do that stuff for a living, is what works. You're at the absolute limit of human performance, cognitive performance. [expletive] what your workout time is for whatever workout, and how many yards you can drag a dummy for and then sprint. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actual cognitive performance. You are at the very, very, very, very limit. So people who have trained really well for specific situations will fall back on those neural pathways that they've created through training and have a response for that given context and situation. It will hit. But now you're still just stuck in the groove on the record. You're not still not thinking through the situation; you're simply relying on what you have. So that taking that pause, that breath, that increasing that sense-making, going, "What other spirals could likely come from this situation? What else?" And that doesn't take that long when you're trained for it.

Go back one inch, just before we made those comments. Now you're that person, and you're literally at the penultimate point of your human performance. So you're being tasked in so many different ways. All your chemicals, all the electric synapses, everything that's firing, your muscles are straining, your body is preparing for impact in case you got to fight. Now your biases step in. Now cognitive dissonance steps in. Now all of a sudden your human emotions of empathy step in, Brian. Those take time; they're not instantaneous either. Even a parasympathetic/sympathetic reflex has a time element associated with it. Yes.

So my thing is that if you're going to say, "I'm going to physiologically take time anyway in this situation," why not enhance that by saying, "I'm going to give myself the gift of time and distance from cover to make a better informed decision"? And I'm saying that to first responder coppers, moms, human resources. You brought up something that was so important a minute ago about why training. I'll tell you right now, if you want to assess training, go around the world and take a look at training. It's one of two things that are going to be more pervasive than anything: one, Stevie Wonder could solve the scenario that you've got; it's so simple and it's so ridiculous. Or it's such a convoluted Rube Goldberg mess.

"Okay, Brian, I want you to put your Glock in your mouth, and I'm going to swing across to that other thing, and then cut the rope and drop down in between, and they'll have rice sacks over their head." Okay, why do we do that? We want to show somebody the limit of their stuff and say, "Oh, so there! That's our answer with that one: that's the rice bag over the head and swinging from a thing." Or we want to make it repeatable so we know what the results are going to be, and we've already worked it out for safety and timing and directions and left and lateral limits. Well, our brain doesn't work on left and right lateral limits or limit of advance; our brain works on novelty and nuance. Yes. And those influences that come up, sometimes one is more tantalizing than the other.

I'll give you a perfect example of that: if you're a human male, the Coolidge effect steps in, and you see the female by the side of the road, you want to pull up and see if she's okay. That's a thing, Brian, that's been hardwired, and nature and nurture both screw us on it. So we have to be careful when we go into a situation. We think that we're beginning at A and going to Z. Sometimes the situation is at P. There are already things that have occurred that we don't know about, that we can't unring. We're going to step into the trick bag unknowingly. That's all I'm saying.

Well, your alphabet one is perfect because that's a perfect example. We go from A to Z on the alphabet because that's how we're taught to memorize it. There is no reason for any of those letters to be in that order. That's true. That's absolutely true. Sorry. Not by frequency. That's a perfect example because the alphabet is A, B, C, D. We learn how to memorize it, but it's completely arbitrary. There's no purpose behind it; it's just someone came up with that way to do it. Once you realize that, I think they came up with that order because it fit the song maybe, because there's literally no reason for it to be in any sort of order like that. I mean, we're just so conditioned to it because that's how we learned it. But you can go A, R, T, Z, but that's chaos to us, and we don't like that. We like order. And we have to make order out of chaos, and that's what we're talking about in these situations: just taking that alphabet and creating what words am I seeing?

If I'm seeing 26 indicators or novel things in my environment and I'm juggling those, I have to put order to them. So I'm going to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but that's not how it works. I have to be able to go from A to L, then back to C, then all the way to Z, and then know how that fits in the field. And you go back to intervening or seeing something, and what training will get you and what it won't get you—it will not give you every answer. The idea should be, the training should be universal enough to give fundamentals of a procedure, or a thought process, or some mechanical response to allow you. If I have a conditioned response, then during that conditioned response, because I can do it basically autonomically, without thinking about it, I can then—that frees me up to think about the situation. Meaning, if I—you gave the Secret Service kind of protection example—if I have that autonomic response, if I hear something and then I turn and face, or I get in front of my protectees, or on my weapon, because that's conditioned, that whole time I'm doing that, I'm free to think. Now, if I don't have that training, I have to think about what to do in the moment, which is going to blow because you're never going to come up with a good decision right then and there. But that's the idea: if I haven't built that stuff in.

So I can do the same thing with a way of thinking or processing my environment. And to go back to that gas station example is a perfect one. When I'm filling up with gas, what are we doing? Walking that W, looking around the whole entire time. Once again, I have to constantly remind people, and shout out to Dr. Carlos if you're listening, because he's always posting stuff on his Instagram with gas station stuff, and he always tags us because it's like, "Hey, listen to these guys! They're always telling you the most dangerous place in the world is a flipping gas station!" And everyone's posting all these videos, this crazy crap that happens at gas stations, yet no one takes the time to literally walk a W on the ground and look around the whole entire time.

Well, because I automatically do that. Like, I do it without thinking about it. So I'm filling up with gas, talking to my wife who's in the car, and she's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "Oh yeah, I didn't even know I was still walking around, moving the entire time I was talking." Well, that's the point because that allows me to actually, now I free up my attention for anything novel that's in my environment. Absolutely.

So, listen, go back a minute, and folks, if you're listening, let's "street" this up for you: automatic versus autonomic. Both are internal cues, triggers that your physiology, and sociological, and psychological brain respond to. I'll give an example of it: autonomic—blinking, swallowing, breathing, inhale, exhale. Those are functions that are taken care of by parts of your brain where it requires zero conscious thought. Now, automatic is very close to that. But automatic is all of a sudden, you rest your hand on the stove accidentally, not knowing that it was hot. It's one of those forever stoves that looks like it's fine. You withdraw when you got too hot, or something's really cold, and you withdraw to it. And I'm not just talking about temperature, but temperature is a good way of thinking of those things. Those are the type. And I'll give you another automatic one: we flinch when we hear something.

So I would challenge everybody that's listening or watching this morning. I would challenge you to go to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. You had Ronald Reagan surrounded by the most highly trained personal protection specialists in the world, and a guy with a .22 starts capping rounds. Everybody for that first few seconds, Brian, was looking at the sound and flinching and responding to Brady getting shot, and then trying to, "Oh [expletive], the door is closed! Do we get Reagan in? What do we do?" It was absolute pandemonium. And everybody will say, "No, this is a perfect example of how to get them." Horse crap! Look at that. We all do that. So you're expecting to operate at peak performance in a situation that defies human logic. It defies the types of things that we see in our environment.

If you were talking about 10,000 years ago, and I'm being chased by everything in my environment, or for those people that have to deal with Third Marine (Division) in Hawaii, there's a perfect example: banana spiders, those [expletive] wild pigs, and all that stuff. They have to deal with the environment: centipedes that bite and leave a welt. But listen, Brian, survival is overrated because we've abandoned it. Because we can say, "I'll have a Number Three in a clown's mouth." Do you see what I'm saying? So life is too simple.

So if you think that just because you have trained for this environment, because you went to a concealed carry for how many other hours, and you think, or you went to a guy and he did a couple of scenarios, do you think you're going to be able to figure it out? What happens is you don't know where you're getting dropped into this. And it could be Mission Impossible. And if you're overwhelmed, all you're adding to is the weight of those cops. Now they got to consider you. The weight of the emergency services, or you're going to kill the wrong person, and we've seen that happen in Arvada. So then, what are we supposed to do?

Because that's a question. Is a concealed carry, or whatever the situation is—everyone, because you're going to want—I don't care. I don't want it to sound like we're just bashing that and saying it's not necessary. It's very, very necessary for all of that, but it only provides you with a very, very narrow bandwidth of options or things to do or to consider. There's a finite number of things that could potentially happen to you, but those things are based so much on the context that you're in that you cannot ever prepare for every possible scenario. But you don't need to. I have a set of certain things that I'm going to do in certain situations. But then rather than trying to come up with all these different crazy things to think about, it's just get really, really good at these few things and then conceptualize that into other domains. "Okay, how would that same process work in this situation? How would that same process...?"

The architecture is sound.

Exactly.

Exactly. So let's throw this at you, and folks, there are times that we're moving fast and loose. All you've got to do is tune into the news to look up some of these stories on your own and do an independent study. Do your homework.

So there was a caper just a little while ago. Husband and wife celebrating either their wedding or their wedding anniversary or their engagement or whatever, sitting at one end of a bar. A guy keeping to himself is sitting at the other. At some point that guy pulls out a gun, shoots both of them, has never met them before, doesn't know them from Adam. Then shoots himself at the bar. And the article started out saying, "There is no way in the world that you could have predicted it." The guy had gone inside a bar. Then the next fact that came out is, "The guy's a prior convicted felon." Then the next thing is, "The guy's out on bond or parole or something else." But all those things are great, but you don't know that sitting in there. But wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm getting somewhere.

The next thing is that this guy's acting hanky, and everybody's going, "Hey, I'm wondering if this guy is overserved or what's wrong with him, or he's having a problem." And then these other people are having a ball. Look, you have to consider that when you go into a bar, which is a public place, that there might be a predator operating in there. Maybe it's a pedophile or a sexual predator, or maybe it's a robbery that's happening. And if you're not paying attention to your 2-, 5-, and 10-meter (situational awareness checks) around you, you could be a victim.

Second thing is, if you're going into a public place that allows other people to have a weapon, and nobody patted this guy down and said, "Hey, what's with the gun, son?" and took it away. The other thing is, if you're in a bar and this guy's drinking and he's introspective and he's talking to himself and he's sweating, all these things that they listed that the guy did before he pulled out his gun. The other thing is, when a person pulls out a gun in a bar, he's not going to say, "And bang! They're off! Let's go for a foot chase!" and, "I'll buy you the next round of drinks." So all of those things are things that we can start putting together, Brian. And if we train our brain to say when this guy starts coming up with that gun and he's standing up, now the clock starts. Brian, let's see, gravity works: drop down behind the bar, start running, screaming. Anytime you think that you're in a situation, you need to tell somebody. And if you're in a public place, you need to say, "I'm scared! I think that's going to hurt me. I'm going to do that."

That's kind of, again, that's kind of like given after the fact. It's easy to see all those things, but when you're in that moment and you're walking in, it's, this is the issue with all of these cases: people typically train or prepare for certain events or things in their life. Ours is always—we talk about that situation. But here's the thing, you always tell people, "Oh, you're going out to dinner, you're going out to a restaurant or a bar with your family, practice the Heimlich maneuver," because you're more likely to come across someone who's choking. But in these situations, you can't, you don't know. All of that's hard to see if I'm just sitting here walking in a place. I might not even have ever seen the guy coming in there. So I don't want it to sound like, "Oh, this is so obvious," because it's often not.

No, and we're not saying that. It's the subtle cues that differentiate a situation from lethality to normality. It's always subtle cues, but the cues add up. And Brian, you have to pay attention that if you're going to, a police officer gets out of their vehicle to go in and have lunch. They leave their flashlight, their PR-24 (baton), their sap gloves (weighted gloves), whatever cops carry now, in the car. Then they go in, and they sit down, and they're surrounded by people that are carrying knives and forks, and guess what they do? They tune out. Now, how many times have you seen coppers get killed in that exact situation? You failed to anticipate the danger in the situation and that you're influencing somebody else's orbit now, unknowingly.

And I don't care what the person's motive was, but intent is a thing that you can establish by watching people. If the person is taking on a predatory look, if the look... there's going to be a situation that happens when you walk out of a bar one night, headed to your car, and you get hit by a meteor, and you're dead. Those are things you can't anticipate. But you can certainly anticipate those things in your immediate surroundings that could signal danger. And all I'm saying is that when I sit there and I knowingly say, "I'm going to stay here anyway," even though I see certain cues...

Well, that's one of the major issues. When someone, after these events, thinks, "Well, I knew something was up!" It's like, "Well, that, and this is why, if I'm just listening to this podcast going, 'Great, what am I supposed to do?'" Because that's the thing, and it's why I always tell people, "Trust your gut. Trust your instincts in those situations." Because you don't know what that person has in their orbit. That's why I go back to, the gas station examples are always perfect, because you don't know what the person who pulls up next to you and is filling up gas—they might be a wanted felon on the run right there at that time. And you're sitting there going like, "Oh, hey, did you need the brush to clean your windshield here?" I mean, so that's what it is, but it's then not being hyper-vigilant about it, but...

But you can't be an ostrich, and you can't be hyper-vigilant. But what I'm saying is, sense-making and sampling your environment constantly: "What's changed in the last couple of minutes when I'm at Applebee's?" Do you get what I'm trying to say? "Has there been an atmospheric shift?" Certainly, this guy around his orbit had an atmospheric shift occur because people talked about it; they just didn't know how to name it in the moment. And my thing is that if you linger... Look, if you're going to shoot me, you're going to shoot me in the ass because I'm going to be getting out of there. And if I start sensing my 'hanky buttons' going off, like you said, Brian, that your instincts are telling you that something has changed in the environment, sometimes you got to vote with your feet. People stay too long, and then they become a victim of a situation that rapidly exceeds their level of human performance.

And I'm not saying to be hyper-vigilant, and I'm not saying to let the bad guys win and not going to get the Blooming Onion tonight. I'm just saying make sure that you're alert and aware of nuanced changes in and around your environment. The big ones we'll all see, Brian. The big ones we'll all see. I'm talking about the little ones.

People miss the big ones too.

Oh, you're right. But I mean, the average human being, if they're alert and aware of their surroundings, without training, will see some of those things occur.

And I want to go back to being a good witness versus an active participant, and then the speed of communication on this, because I think that's a big factor now today that we didn't have 10, 20 years ago. Meaning the actual speed of communication and being able to, I don't know, I'm a big fan of letting experts do what they're supposed to do, or letting people who are hired to take care of such situations let them do it versus getting involved. Because I always go back to that same situation. Here's my issue with some of the stuff you just said. It's not an issue; it's just, I just said, "You're responsible for everything that happens if you get involved." And then you just said, "Well, you have to see this, and maybe you have to say something to that individual." So it's like, "Wait a minute! If I'm sitting here listening to this going, 'Wait a minute, you're telling me don't get involved if I don't have to, but then if I'm at a restaurant, I need to say something, get involved'?" It can be confusing, and I just want to clear that up with people.

But Greg, it goes back to the orbit, the whole purpose of the conversation. You're sitting at that restaurant with your family, and someone is sitting alone and eating alone in a restaurant. Well, that in and of itself means nothing. But when coupled with other things, because what's normal behavior at a restaurant? Typically, people go and eat with other people, or they sit at the bar and have a drink and eat if they're by themselves. So one, it in and of itself means absolutely nothing. But when coupled with, now that food's been sitting in front of that person and they haven't touched it. Now the physiological signs of stress or anger or mission focus, now that starts to add in. So it's those types of things that I think allow those nuance situations, or for you to be able to identify those subtle nuances in the environment. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So it's taking each one of those things and balancing it against the context of what you're in.

It is, though. But there are three basic choices. The basic choice is to be a good witness, which is always a great choice because you can do that from cover and concealment and call an expert. That's always the advantageous situation. Brian, if somebody's trying to carjack you and take your car, it's a property crime. Let it go. So that's the same line of thinking of being a witness.

The second thing is, you're going to get actively involved. You're going to get sucked into the orbit of that situation because you think that you've got to take an action. If you choose it, you're reaping the whirlwind because you take everything, the vacuum that's created around that orbit too, and all the things that go with it.

But there's a third choice, Brian. The third choice is to not pay attention and be a body count, to be a victim, to just sit there and keep yelling and laughing and have somebody walk up to the nightclub and shoot you in the head. So clearly, the third choice is the least advantageous one that I would say, "No, don't do that." And I'm telling you, the first two choices are two sides of the same coin, and that's why it gets sticky. That's why we're talking about it today. That's why experts are writing books about it, and that's why these self-proclaimed prophets of security make all this money.

When you go and you're dancing around a campfire in the rain learning Krav Maga with a bunch of other people, that's not because you want to learn Krav Maga. That's because you're [expletive] scared of living in your apartment and going out to your car, and you're fearful of getting robbed. Folks, don't stop doing that if it's making you happy. Go ahead and do that. But having a plan before you go in that includes the Heimlich, but also includes your 2-, 5-, and 10-meter (situational awareness checks) looking around you, and also includes getting out of there when the barometric pressure changes. Those, Brian, that's good advice. That's good advice anywhere. You have to be responsible for your personal safety, and your orbit extends further than you know. And sometimes when somebody walks by, that could be just the person that the police are looking for.

I'll give you one quick story. We meet our friend Roger at the local Walmart the other day. Shelly and I are going in; we just got to grab something. Roger's worked there since Christ was a carpenter. So while we're talking to him, he looks in and sees something, I don't know, reaches into a shelf and pulls out an empty six-pack of Bic lighters. And he goes, "My third one today. Somebody's shoplifting those lighters because weed is free now." And all they were doing is hiding and discarding the garbage and sneaking out with the lighters. And you're thinking to me, "Okay, it's six lighters, what is that, a couple of bucks?" You're thinking, "Hey, it's shoplifting, what's the big deal?" Roger's thinking, "Hey, it's more [expletive] I got to clean up and write up an extra SKU."

I'm telling you, if that's going on in the store, what else is going on in the store? Cautionary tale, Brian, cautionary tale, because it might be the buck nine (small amount of money) next time. It might be the whatever next time. You just got to have, and we both know that there are certain places in our environment that they don't give a [expletive] about your security; they give a damn about your bottom dollar, making a profit. So you're responsible for your own personal safety. When you go somewhere and there is a current and an atmosphere that's going on that you don't know about, and if you don't tune into it, sometimes you could be a victim.

Well, that's the other part about getting involved is you're walking into a situation, and you don't know what else has occurred or happened or what's going on. I mean, that ties it right back to your story, or the example of your concealed carry holder, and you see two people chasing another guy. And now, you're only seeing it from your perspective, and you get sucked into that orbit, and then now you're part of that situation and everything that comes from it. Yes. So, and there's ways to get involved without getting involved. Like you talk about calling someone or taking a, literally, just looking around the situation.

And it reminded me of when you were telling that story of something we had. It was out here, it was in front of my buddy's business, and I was waiting around for something. I looked out the window, and all I saw was a guy, and he was opening the trunk of his car, and before he did, he kind of looked left, looked right, over his shoulders. And I'm like, "Whoa!" So I immediately pulled my phone out. I was like, "Yo, I'm going to take some photos of this." Because I've only seen that when, like, RPGs and AKs are coming out of that trunk. That's the only time there's just bad [expletive] going to happen. And so it immediately got me. I was like, "Well, who looks around before they open their trunk? Someone who doesn't want to be seen."

Well, me then looking, or taking some photos, looking at the guy, even, like, of course, now I'm adding to it. I'm starting to, he's like, shaved head, sunglasses on, kind of like almost like he's got that mission-focused look on his face. And he's looking around. Well, then he looked left, left, right, and he pulls out, and then he pulls out, it was clearly a box from like a bakery with like a cake in it. And it was going into the Boys & Girls Club down the street. "Because you're about to kill them!" I'm like ready to go running at this dude with like a metal rod I found. But it was so close that I instantly went, "Oh crap!" "Here we are, the fix is in," whatever. But as he's pulling it out, what did I do, though? I looked around, looked right. Okay, well, there's no, this isn't—he's not pulling up to a bank, or whatever. He's not pulling a long gun out of there, or there's a festival going on, he's going to shoot the place up. There was no nothing else he could have done within that context. And as soon as that box came out, I noticed like, "Oh, that's from like a bakery type thing." And then he walked in, and there were balloons and everything like that. Let's just say that's so much more about understanding situational awareness.

And that's... people need to tune into that. And I'll give you an example. So back in the early days, back in the remote days, we were doing some training, myself, a guy named Ron Goss, a couple of other hard-hitting coppers. And we were all in the same vehicle. It was like an unmarked police vehicle that was used for, like, traffic, dropping off traffic cones or something. There were no markings whatsoever. Didn't have any specialized license plates. It just was a big, vacuous vehicle that we all could climb into. And we were south of Detroit doing this training which involved our weapons. And so we all had to take the rounds out of our weapons. In the old days, there was no Simunition (training ammunition); there weren't any of those things. So you had to take your rounds and put it in a duffel bag. You had to have a duffel bag with your empty mags, and then you had an empty mag with your weapon and do the clearing.

So we were coming back from this, and because standards were different back then, folks, and I'm old, everybody was reloading their Model 39s and stuff in the vehicle while it was moving, while we're headed through Detroit to go back up to Warren, Michigan. And we pull up in an intersection. Everybody's chatting about the training. And these are cops that have been around, they've seen it all, everything else. And Ron Goss and I both on the right side of the car, and we glance and we see a guy up against the building. Now, folks, I'm having my arms extended like I'm being patted down by a copper standing up with my arms on the building and my feet spread and leaning back at like a 33-degree angle, and the guy has his hand—the second man has his hand between the shoulder blades of the guy holding him up against the building and is holding a claw hammer. Now we talked about a claw hammer attack earlier, Brian. Both Ron and I look to the right at the same time and we see this. And because we're in a vehicle, and this is on the curb, it's 15 feet from us. Both of us come to the realization at the same time, and we're in a high crime area, that, "Holy crap, this guy is doing a robbery right here, right in front of us!" And everything else.

Now, knowing to be the expert in gift of time and distance, I go, "Hold on, what's up?" And everybody now orients. You've got like six armed guys that just came from shooting training in a car, 15 feet from this guy. And what it was is we all noticed that, about the same time, that the guy's got these 8-d (eight penny) nails in his mouth, and it's a 5/8-inch piece of plywood, and there are two carpenters. There was a robbery at the store and the windows got blown out, and they're just replacing the window just like you would before a storm that's coming in, something else.

Listen, Brian, not everything is dangerous. That's why I always use the analogy about the Heimlich maneuver. If you walk around every day going, "I want to go out to eat, but we might be robbed and raped at the Texas Roadhouse," you're not going to have any fun with life. What you have to do is you have to start assessing from the plan. What are we going to eat? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to go? Where are we going to park? We're going to do all those other things. And once you're inside a venue like that, if you see a sketchy situation, say something on your way out. Dial 911 and be heading for the exit. We know not to hide in the bathroom; that's not going to work. Look at all the historical examples of that. And lately, you've had this spate of people that have been found with weapons caches near public events, near races, or near concerts, or near all those other things. Brian, one of those is going to light off, and it's not going to be fun. So you're responsible for saying, "Why are those people in the booth not looking at the show?" "Who's unloading those wooden crates and all that stuff?"

And Brian, if you don't want to do that, then don't go. Stay home, order in, and enjoy life. But I would much rather be that witness than the person that's going to get first person involved, I really would.

I think it's kind of a good place to sort of wrap the conversation and understanding about how we all have our own orbit of people around us that we interact with. And so when you pull up to that gas station pump and the guy or girl who pulls up on the other side of it, you have to wonder, "Who else are they affiliated with?" And is that interaction going to happen right here? Is that guy hooking up with some girl who's married, and her husband just found out about it, and that's him following him in here, and there's going to be a confrontation? I mean, that spills over into you, and you're just trying to get gas.

I think that's an important part, and I continue to reiterate gas stations because I swear they're the most dangerous places on the face of the Earth statistically.

Slow time down. Life is about slowing down, smelling the coffee, enjoying the roses, all that other hyperbole. But at the end of the day, Brian, it's going to keep you safer. It's going to make you smarter and harder to kill.

Well, thanks, everyone for tuning in. Don't forget, you can always check out more on our Patreon site and follow us on Instagram. If you enjoyed the podcast, share it with your friends. All that stuff, we appreciate it. If you can scroll down and give us a review, that'd be awesome. And always reach out to us: thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. We can always answer some questions and kind of go from there. I think that'll be an interesting perspective to take. I know we got into a little bit of the analogies; they were plenty in this episode, but they're good ways, I think, to look at it and understand a situation.

And my thing is too, Greg, if someone is telling you, "Oh, this is the answer in that situation," we need to go look for another dojo, bro. You need to say there is no rigid answer. If someone says, "Hey, this is a potential solution in a situation like that," I like that wording a little bit better because there is no—none of these situations are ever binary; they're never a yes or no. You influence the situation that you're in. So how do you want to influence that situation? How do you want to influence the orbit you're in and the one you're going into? Because that's going to determine the outcome much better than some very simple answer to a complex situation.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. All right, well, thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget: training changes behavior.