L.O.G. 185 Its The Little Things

Alright, well, good morning, Greg. It's just me and you today. We're recording this on Election Day, so Shelley's busy, obviously, and you're standing by on QRF (Quick Reaction Force) out there in Gunnison. Although, if it's something that Shelley can't handle, then I don't know if anyone can.

Exactly. So, my QRF would just be to show up and pat her on the back and go, "Well done, good job!" And Adam already, we'll note if he got the Sheriff's position for Gunnison County. And for all the Gunnison County or PD Officers and Sheriff's deputies that are listening, vote you bastards!

So, we're both still getting over some of the crud from traveling over the entire month of October, but it's all good that it's happening now and we made it through the months while freebasing cold medicine, basically. But we're there. And Emergen-C, let's do a shout-out for them.

Yeah, seriously. If it wasn't for those packets, I don't know what we would have done.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, the general theme that we're going to talk about today actually came from our discussion on our Patreon side that we did the other week for those subscribers on there. You guys can check that out if you're listening, and the link is in the episode details. But it's where we talk about the little things, right? And what we mean by the little things, and how it's the little things that matter. These big events or big things that occur are often obvious and can be planned for. So, we mean it's all about the little things in a number of different ways. So maybe I'll throw you to start off, like, by the little things.

So, I'm going to be all over today. I'm going to be like a perfect Roman Candle. One of the things I want our listeners to understand, Brian, is the way we use information is different from anybody else. And we were the pioneers, we are the forerunners, the frontrunners of putting certain information together. What I mean by that is, certainly, I didn't invent entropy, okay? Like using the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Tropic principle, and human behavior—that's me.

When we start talking about stuff later in the episode about sequencing and change blindness and adaptation and channel capacity—I got "Channel Capacity," the actual words "Channel Capacity," and using those four things together. Nobody had done it before. I got it from computer science, alright? I was trying to name things that you and I saw people make mistakes with, and out with Shelley, and go, "There's got to be a term for that!" And there wasn't. So, I looked up, and the closest thing was "Channel Capacity," and then it started talking about Hicks and Zip and all these other things. And I put it together with a word that was common back then in computer science.

So, why did I give that preface? Because when you see things, you must see them in their totality, and you must have a number of lenses because your primitive self didn't. Your primitive self created efficiencies, and those efficiencies are still on board today based on your survival, and it makes you dumber. It resists an overflow of information so you have just enough to draw a reasonable conclusion right now to get the safety, right? That's the problem.

And you tied it to survival, and that's part of what I mean too when we say all humans are lazy, right? We create these shortcuts, and we miss little things because, exactly, because we're, in a sense, still wired in a way for a world that is not the world that is today.

Simplistic cues, slow cues, and repeated inferences. And our brain would say, "Hey, that thing is red. Red is a danger color. I smell something that is a dangerous smell. I see motion out of my peripheral vision." Those are all dangerous things. Look, a monkey's eyes are set up without a sclera so the panther on the floor of the jungle can't see the monkey looking for an exit. The chimp is looking for a limb to run around it.

So, those types of things are set up, Brian, and have been, and they're still on board. So, we forget, like how many times—I wish we had a dollar for every time we said the worst witness in the world is an eyeball witness, right? Why? Because we're overwhelmed by the amount of information that we're taking in now and the speed at which we need to process that. Now, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah, everybody's wonderful, and our brains can assimilate a tremendous amount of information now, much more than before. But guess what? That open indoor to the stadium, the stadium is vast—that's our brain—but the open door to the stadium is still this small. Okay? Because of the survival gating mechanism, the efficiency that our brain has. So that door, we ain't going to get it any bigger, Brian. So, what we have to do is we have to process the little things faster to come to more reasonable conclusions and more quickly.

And that's the caveat to it all, is to come to the reasonable conclusion. And we often come to unreasonable conclusions; we rush to them because we're, in a sense, still wired for a more primitive lifestyle. Things are more complicated now than they were several thousands or tens of thousands of years ago—20, I mean, we're talking a long time ago—that we're still wired the same way. And so, that also causes us to create error. So, back then, things were simple. So, like you said, that movement out of the side of my eye, the little thing, the branch shaking on the tree, I had to see that, and it happened. It wasn't my son coming over to say trick-or-treat.

Right, right, right. It was a predator.

That's right. That's the thing. So, I had to know that. I had to do that. But over time, because we don't have those predators, we start going, we start kind of, we're wired to attribute either human values or agency to objects that don't necessarily have it, right? Like the tree.

Exactly.

So then, we sit there and go, "Oh, well, it must be that." It creates the story, right? That's where the owl becomes the Bigfoot, that kind of thing. So, we have these sort of errors like fundamental attribution errors and confirmation bias that lead to that. Now, we talked about all that stuff before, but that's where I think that's a great starting point for what we mean by those little things because, yeah, it's right back to survival.

Let me throw one out there, okay? And we'll start there. Let's start with Tabula Rasa. We've got a clean slate today, everybody, just a white background. And what we're going to throw at it is a couple of ideas, and then you formulate the synapses that we're going to create in your brain. So, my first one, Brian, that I'll throw at you is parking.

When I walk through a parking lot, the first thing that I take a look at is how the vehicles are parked. Are they backed in, or what people sometimes call "combat parked"—which, by the way, just to clear that up, people have been backing into parking spaces before the military. So, the idea is we do steal absolutely everything we can to make it our own. But is the vehicle hastily parked? Is it illegally parked? Is it parked in a manner where you can see that the person didn't give a lot of forethought to being able to back out of that spot? Why? Because all of those are demonstrative to me of critical thinking skills, or the lack of, or demonstrations of intent.

Yeah, demonstrations of intent, or the opposite of that.

Lack of visionary gift of time and distance. So, when I see a person pull right up to a place and park in a place where it says "No [expletive] Parking"—pardon my language—anytime, but they pull up there and then they put their emergency flashers on, and you go, "What's the emergency?" And they go, "Well, my old lady just ran in for a minute." Yeah, that doesn't constitute an emergency, right? First of all, you should be slapped for using your flashers. Second, the reason that people aren't supposed to park there is bad things happen there, and that's where emergency vehicles need to pull up. So, when I see somebody dwell or linger in a place like that, Brian, I'm immediately on edge. Do you see what I'm trying to say?

So, that alone, the parking part alone, is something that if you paid more attention to today—like remember the old feral cat look around for feral cats? Once you find one, you'll spot others. So, we did that as a situation awareness trick to enhance situation awareness. I would tell you that this one, look out for parking, and then conduct sustained observation. You're going to find everything you need to find about the human condition. You're going to find bad guys, you're going to find idiots, you're going to find ne'er-do-wells and non-rule followers, and that's where the danger lies anyway. So, one thing in your day that you've changed, Brian, imagine how powerful that could be.

No, and that's why that's a perfect example of what we mean by the little things. Everyone's talking about, "Alright, here's every video breakdown you see, every event." Everyone talking about, "Okay, here's the person," it's like, "Dude, why don't you roll that tape back and do them walking in across the parking lot from where they park?" Because right away, before anything ever [expletive] happens, you can see. There are gas stations a lot, and we need to call 911.

Did you see that latest video, Brian? The latest video is the guy's getting gas, and all of a sudden, a vehicle backs up in front of him, and a van pulls up behind him, and like a clown car, these poor bandits get out, all dressed like ninjas, and surround the guy. And they're doing it, "It's like, stop! Do you know how much advanced work has to be done? Do you know how many molecules and atoms are in motion to create that event?" Shut up!

I laugh about that because those are perfect, because any idiot can break down a video, and you'll look right here while it's in progress, you're doing it while it's in progress. So, like, "No [expletive] [expletive], it's obvious at this point! Thank you very much." But yeah, it's rolling the tape back. And that's another thing. Now, the problem is, as we always talk about, is everyone's, "Well, give me this list of these indicators, or give me those." We just gave you a couple, and it's so context-dependent, right? And it is what's normal for this given situation, but those little things, that pocket lint, is more important than the big things because those big things are flipping obviously, Brian.

Yes, they're going to be too close to "bang." They're going to be the atmosphere just before "bang" occurs. So, look, we gave parking. Parking is a big bucket. It's an ice cube tray element, right? But it spills over another thing. So, let's throw one more out there on the Tabula Rasa. Our second paintball that's going to splatter on the white sheet is going to be driving.

Brian, what do we know about people that don't use their blinkers?

They're not rule followers. If they're going to do stupid things like slow down or speed up to change lanes without indicating, then that is risky behavior. So, anybody that's going to engage in risky behavior is going to continue to do that, and it's going to make it unsafe for the rest of us. So, there's one more thing. You're talking about the little things. If you change lanes without signaling, you just came up on my radar. Now, you're saying, "Well, people do that all the time." And so do bad people, and they should be shitty people, and people that get in an accident. So, what I do is I say, "Now I've got parking. Now I've got driving. Those are two things I do every day that, one degree—can you imagine one degree of improvement in those, or an increased visibility where I say these things matter—is going to make me safer and harder to kill."

And it's, your parking example is a perfect one about how identifying those things, it's almost like it's almost like fractal in nature. Meaning, I go through, I see the pickup truck backed into a parking spot. Okay, well, it's clean and it's newer. It's like, "Okay, well, I can continue that and go let's go deeper." Okay, it's got a lift kit, and it's got this on it. Now, is that a real off-road vehicle, or is that a "parking lot princess," they call it? Right? And what other things are on there that would add to this? Okay, can I now go in that place and find a person who likely belongs to that truck? What would I look for? And if you can't, Brian, if you can't, you could get the 100 people in that place down to 10.

Exactly. And that's the key, isn't that how we found bombs? The whole idea behind Combat Hunter in Iraq and finding IEDs was the same thing: "Listen, we're not going to find all of them, we're going to find a bunch of them." You know what, we're not going to win maker Obama in place, sir, but we're going to find a bunch of them, and that's going to make us safer and smarter, and we're going to learn from their TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), turn them against them.

And those types of things, you just said it. That truck. Now, I would counter with this: We see a vehicle running in the parking lot. Okay, but the vehicle isn't too close to the entry doors, and it's a cold day. Wow, those are people that leave their car running. And running for something, and they don't think their car is going to get ripped. One, they're in there ripping something, they want a getaway vehicle, or two, you're going to park close to their vehicle, and you might be there during the carjacking. Those are things you can avoid. So, if you can avoid them by adding a second 27-minute exposure at City Market, you're safer, right?

Well, yeah. It was one, I forget which shooting or in-progress situation, and it was like, "Well, how do you get these little indicators, what someone's going to do?" It's like, "Hey man, when you see a car door open, there's no reason for a car door to ever be open for an extended period of time unless you're working on it, going in and out of it." So, unless you get out of that vehicle and, "Oh crap, I forgot something at my house!" as I was pulling out of my driveway, and I gotta run back in and get it, and I left it, and everybody else is sitting there holding their lunch boxes ready to go, right? So, it's either I'm coming right back like right now, or I'm never coming back to that car, right? It's like, "Well, a car door..."

Yeah, like that. That's something that, a car door open. And now, add a level of complexity. Now you've got the car door open, the car's unoccupied. Now the car door is open and the car's running. Yeah, you get what I'm trying to say?

Oh, yeah. You have an escalation.

And if you don't, folks, if you're listening to Brian and I for the first time or the first couple of times, and you don't pick up what we're laying down right now, this is why you need to get to training. This is the kind of stuff you can't get from some shitty breakdown on YouTube. You have to go to training because your brain has to reprioritize, categorize how information goes.

And so, that was a good spiral as an example of the parking lot, then with the vehicles. And then now, we're going to be spinning around that top.

I got one more, though.

No, no, no. But what I want to kind of get into is that it was what we started with is, "Okay, this is where it came from, these are the little things." Why do we miss those little things? Because you brought it up at the beginning, so I just want to hit it now.

So, let me add one more thing before you go because I don't want everybody to think this episode is just going to be about driving and parking. Let's talk about trash. We're back in the parking lot. You get what I'm trying to say? And as we walk up, look, if you can't clean the floor on the elevator after a Saturday night at the hotel I'm staying in, you're not going to be checking the security monitors. If you haven't wiped the dust off of the ring at the hotel pool that you use to save a life with the shepherd's crook, you're probably not monitoring that pool closely.

If I'm walking in the City Market and I look in the trash and it hasn't been picked up because I can see the papers, old, the data on the information, all that other stuff, and the items are decaying, what chance do I have if I'm having a stroke in the parking lot that you're going to get me to a hospital on time? What I'm trying to say is, I want to emblaze in your point so brightly that people can't miss it. They go, "[expletive], I know exactly what they're talking about!" It's those little breadcrumbs that add up to the trail that leads to the Witch's House.

No. And then, don't pay attention, you're going to die. That's exactly it. It goes into when we go to an organization, you walk in, the bathroom is immaculate first place. You know what I mean? It's like, "Okay, that's a good sign of how they keep their house in order." And keeping your gifts in order is far more important than everything else that you do, or it's the foundation of what you do, the foundation.

Unless you take pictures of your relatives and only put them on the wall when your relatives are showing up, and you only clean the bathroom and refill the toilet paper and put a smelly stick in. Well, if you knew I was coming, we do that in our homes, right? We always take the extra time over having company over, "Let's make sure this..." But it's, you can still tell. You can tell when that's been done topically, or this is something that's consistent, right? Are they phoning it in, or is this a pattern of behavior? Because we're looking for the pattern.

No. And that's a great point. So, I love how we're just talking about parking lots and bathrooms and cars, and it's going to spiral down real quick.

But think about it, it's so simple. If you start with the least common denominator, you're always going to find evidence. You and I talked about this before on the road, and we talked about it probably in countless podcasts about the difference between baking and cooking. Anybody can cook. We've cooked for ourselves. Baking is an exact, specific art. All cooking is like you have to follow a recipe and you have to know what you're doing. I got it. But I'm telling you, you can't microwave bake something perfect. But you can microwave a bunch of things together, and they'll come out pretty edible. I've been drunk enough to try that. You know, different limited objective experiments. So, cooking, there's a wide swath of mistakes you can make and still have something be edible.

I'll give you an example. We were downrange once, and remember Mermite containers? They drop the Mermite containers in on us because it was so flipping cold. And inside of the military Mermites, that soup and hot coffee, that was the only two things that you could get a canteen cup full. I'm saying "canteen cup" to a Marine, he's never heard of that term, but there was a thing on your canteen. One time, there was a metal cup at the bottom that you had handles. Veterans Day coming up, [expletive]. And so, you got to get in line, and you got either soup or coffee. That's all you got. Well, the soup, they put sugar in the soup, and they put salt in the coffee. It was completely accidental. Do you get what I'm saying? But you know how the military does it, it was over the limits of tolerance. So, the people like me that got the soup, they were fine. The people that got the salted coffee, they couldn't drink it.

So, there's a big path that you can make a mistake and still survive in life. And that's what we're talking about. Not every running car or open door is going to lead to Godzilla that's trampling the city and eating everybody, but if everyone that did lead to a Godzilla...

Exactly. Back to that open door. Yes.

Right.

No, no, that's the point. I don't know what that's called. It's not always...

Well, no. It's not always going to necessarily lead you to someone that's about to do something or an in-progress situation, but if you don't stop to investigate those little things...

Yeah, it's cool. You're never going to see that. Well, because we missed it. But why do we miss these things? So, there are different things. You started to bring them up, "Well, let's start our Channel Capacity." So, big picture is kind of how we define why we miss these things, what's referred to as complacency or lack of situational awareness, is a couple things. So, I'll list them out like you start, Greg, but you've got things like adaptation and change blindness, and you've got channel capacity and sequencing. And these are processes in your brain that you really can't do anything about other than understanding that they exist, right? And trying to counteract them with some methodology, with some system or process. You can do that, but they're on board, they're there. So, I'll let you throw to one because you started with Channel Capacity. You give like a street definition.

So, Sean Clemens, and Sean's dear son, Christian, got his pilot's license very young. He's only 15 years old, and now he's doing the different levels of flying, with visual-aided and unvisualated, and different speeds and things. And one of the things that I'm sure that if he was here, he would tell you, is that there's a pre-frame flight checklist. And you've got to do the pre-frame flight checklist all the time. Say that five times fast.

And the reason is, Brian, because our brain cannot function on a bunch of levels at once. Our brain hates divided attention. So, the maximum number of inputs—and this is right from computer science, and you can trace it back to Hicks and Zip and the OODA Loop and all those other things—the maximum amount of things that we can, the balls that we can keep juggling in there at one time, is three. Now, science has said, "Well, in certain people, because of this and that and the other, it could be plus or minus one, or plus or minus two." You know what? The plus or minuses, take that away and think of just the three things, okay? Because you, in an emergency situation, only have certain channels available to you, and if those channels are full, you'll die.

So, in regular, ordinary circumstances, when nothing is bothering you, that number is generally seven, okay? And you get a seven, plus or minus one or plus or minus two. But we can't keep that up, and that's unsustainable over time. Those are the mild, like, I can have the TV on and be talking to Shelly while I'm looking at my crossword, but the problem is, when I attend to them, I won't do any of them very well, right? Do you get what I'm trying to say? Unless I stop for a minute, put down my book, and hit mute and go, "I'm sorry, baby, what was that?" You understand? You've only got 100% attention, and you can't...

So, if it's divided, you divide it, it's less attention everywhere else.

Precisely. Each thing is only getting a fraction of that. And it's just an efficiency. Your brain drops from a higher number of things that you can keep rolling to a lower number so your brain can focus on survival because all of your senses don't stop. They're still sending in information, but the ones that you focus on feel as though slow down.

So, that's the idea. Everyone talks about different physiological responses we have, this increase of performance, cognitive performance, even physical performance sometimes. And the way I would define it, it's not really an increase in performance, it's actually a decrease in [expletive]. Right? Your brain says, "Hey, we don't need to pay attention to any of this [expletive]. You need this thing right in front of you," because it's some sort of survival situation whether you trust that or not. And then that number of things, like your channel capacity, drops, right? That's where you get the "shoot, move, communicate," "tap, rack, bang," "911," "stop, drop, roll"—all of them threes for a reason because you can handle that. And the second something else gets thrown in there, it's got to go. If anyone's experienced that, you almost feel like, "Wow, things are moving in slow motion."

No, they're magic.

Things are altered. Because, exactly, it's not that you suddenly become better. It's just that your brain suddenly dumps everything it doesn't need and only focuses on what's right in front of it. And then, wow, look at that. But that's even what gets into the science behind what people call like the "Flow State" and all that stuff, is you can get into a position of Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, where you're so focused on something that you lose external arousal, and you can focus on that, and then time seems to slow down. It's really just your brain is only focusing on a few things at a time, which is really good for attention. But that's not sustainable long-term; you can only do that in short bursts.

And the reason is because you have chemical reserves that work in your brain, and they're used up like fuel in your gas can, or gas tank rather, or the electricity in your battery. And the idea is that they have to rejuvenate. So, you can't—you know what? When we did The Standard podcast—by the way, folks, that's out, check that out, I'll put the link, I knew you were going to say it—one of the things that we talked about there was hypersensitivity and being able to sustain it. You can't. You cannot, listen, you cannot go to the gym and run full speed at the gym for 72 hours, because your body has to recoup. One third of our life must be spent sleeping to re-tool the brain, to restart all of the mechanism. So, listen, if those things are important, why do we get eye fatigue? Because it's telling you, "You need to go take a break." You're not at 100% when you're looking at your environment. So, all of those indications are screaming to us: the channel capacity is important, and that's one of four things that we bounce.

And the other part we put together with Channel Capacity is called Sequencing. And Sequencing is just your brain has to make order out of chaos, so it likes things sequential. It likes to put things in order so that you can take them in one at a time, and you can make sense out of it. And then, we love predictability, right? That's all humans. We just want things to be predictable because that's safe, we know we can plan things. It's comforting to us. Anything unpredictable, anything with uncertainty, humans have this natural aversion to. So, immediately, what we try to do is create a sequence of events.

So, what'll start happening in the examples we would use, especially when you get these videos of someone in police custody who ends up having a gun on them, even though they went through a search, and everyone's like, "Oh, these guys suck, they didn't do their job." It's like, "Well, look, if I, Greg, if I search you and I don't find any sort of contraband on you, anything illegal or whatever, alright, good. I go to the next person, I search that person, I don't find anything. I go to the next person, I search them, I don't find anything." By that next person already, my brain's going, "Oh, okay, I get the game. We get a little hit of dopamine when we don't find anything sometimes. Everything's good. So, I'm unlikely to get this. So, since I haven't found anything the last few, it's unlikely I'm going to find anything on this next person."

So now, add that to checking the back seat for contraband. The person dropped the weapon back there. So, you do that commensurate to every single arrest, every single person that goes in the back seat and comes out, you check that. And you're checking the double lock on the handcuffs. Now you also have to hit the button for the sally port and put your gun in the lock box. And you made a bunch of traffic stops, and the first seven traffic stops you made, there wasn't any danger. So, what happens is you desensitize the part of your brain that is working on the survival reckoning. So, now your amygdalic reaction to your environment isn't as strong. And when you smell or hear or see those things, your reactions are [expletive] slower, just like an engine, just like a spark plug firing. When the rotor hits it, it's delayed, and now your engine is running inefficiently.

Folks, if you understand that, then you have to understand why coppers and firemen and first responders and teachers get dumber and miss those cues. Because what happens is the sequence is safe. Your brain anticipates the rest of the sequence to be safe because it's an efficiency. I don't have to burn extra chemicals, I don't have to burn extra calories. And almost all the time, it's right. And it's almost always right.

It's the mental Etch-A-Sketch, right? I'm building that picture, my brain has to build that picture, and it has to create that sequence. So, if I've done it before, it starts filling in those details before they arrive, right? It starts projecting what's likely to occur based on its knowns. And it falls back on what's the most efficient way to do it. And so, if I don't shake up that Etch-A-Sketch every once in a while, my brain will fill in the picture regardless of whether or not something...

Exactly.

And so, we kind of put those two together, that sort of Channel Capacity. They're opposite sides of the same coin, and they're definitely in the same realm. But those now, if we want to create a ball, now we have the circumference and the radius handled. But we want to go the opposite direction and create another circumference. So, we're creating the salted crust that's going to build out to a 360 ball. We have to have two more things to put things in context when we see objects in our environment start to coalesce, when they start to come together.

And one of those that we have to be worried of is adaptation, Brian. And what happens is the more we're exposed to things, even novel things, the less our brain gives them importance. And I'm trying to think about an example. Like, for example, with pornography. You know how people, they start with just a magazine article, then they're online, then they buy it, and now it's the drapes are closed, they can't get out of the house, and they look like Quagmire with the big arm. But it doesn't have to be that. It can be other things. It can be a sedentary lifestyle. You sit down and you wake up the next day and you're 40 pounds overweight and you can't get out of your chair. It doesn't happen immediately, but we think that those things are still in play, and our brain pays less and less attention to them. When we don't attend to those nuanced changes, we can be in trouble.

And that sensory adaptation is huge too. I mean, like you said, it's like, remember we've gone into a place, and they had like an alarm kept going off, and no one paid any attention to it. And I'm like, "Hey, is that the 'everything is okay' alarm?"

Exactly. I go, "It sounds like..." Shelly and I were outside, if you were calling, it was raining, and it was like, and it was going like, "Oh, well, yeah, that happens because something got tripped, and they haven't fixed it yet." So, now I'm exposed to the stimulus so much, my brain no longer attributes value to it. It's like going from being out in the country, out in the middle of nowhere, to all of a sudden you're living in a city, and you're hearing sirens and stuff.

And I still, Blues Brothers, right? When he goes back to his apartment, everybody picks him up from Joliet, and he goes, and the subway goes by, or the L Train in Chicago goes by, shakes the whole apartment, everything in there. And it's like, "Yeah, how often does that go by?" "So often you won't even notice."

Well, let me give you one. You remember when we were teaching in Columbus, Georgia, for that airline that will remain nameless? And you and I went into the airport terminal area, or the airport—what's the other outer area? My brain is just screwed—where before you even have your ticketing and all that other stuff, there's a food court and all those things where people show up, and they haven't even gone out to their concourse yet, where the train dumped everybody off the MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) at Atlanta Airport. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's just the initial, like, mezzanine level. Yeah, there's baggage claim there, but nobody there had to have a ticket. And some people just showed up. And we were advised that, "Listen, of all of the crimes that occurred in the airport, 90% of the crimes occur right here before everybody goes out there." And there's a ton of time.

So, you and I were conducting a limited objective experiment, and we saw the guy with the drum magazine on his M4 that had the sign saying, "Hey, Second Amendment, I'm free to carry my weapon anywhere I want!" And he was walking around and posing with people, having photos. And if you recall, I got in an argument with the guy, and I said, "I'm not against the Second Amendment or your right to carry a weapon, but what you're doing is you're causing adaptation to occur for all of the security that's around here because you're walking in random times during the day for your photo op with military-style fatigues on. Do you get what I'm saying? And you've got a long beard, and you've got this automatic weapon that people are saying, 'See what happens, Brian, is if we see that all the time,' our brain goes, 'Oh, it stops being afraid and shocked by this potential hazard.' A little of that can be good from time to time to spur your arousal of new events, but if you get it all the time constantly, like that alarm you're talking about, you forget it. So, that guy who was trying to make the Second Amendment a point was actually making the Atlanta Airport more dangerous and more susceptible to somebody walking in with an automatic weapon. It's making us all dumber.

All that stuff is just people wandering around with that. Well, then now no one pays attention anymore, you're just making it easier for someone who wants to do harm, is what you're doing.

But we have adapted to COVID masks now, right? Nobody pays attention when somebody wearing a mask comes into a bank, for example. And that adaptation can happen quickly over things like social media and stuff like that, right? You get so used to seeing certain things, it becomes normalized. There's so much that everyone shares and puts out there that, like, you're so far beyond what, like, I mean, I don't see the value in sharing every moment of my life with the world, but a lot of people seem to. And I don't think they're realizing a lot of, they're just mimicking what some marketing company did or some advertiser did, or what someone did to get them to make money. They're just mimicking that in their real life.

But once you expose that over and over again, it continues to happen. It's like those gender reveal parties that have killed people, started forest fires, like all this stuff. Because, like, "Oh, I saw that on the internet, that's now normal, that's a cool thing to do, so it must be okay." Adaptation. Case over.

Makes us dumber, idiot. It's completely normal to do this. People do it everywhere. Why would it be different for me? Oh gee, out here where everything is super dry and there's a forest right here, and you're going to be lighting off... Well, guess what happens? You just burn down tens of millions of dollars of property and damage to the community.

But that's the idea. And then we sort of couple that adaptation with change blindness, right? And here's one where people think they're similar. They're similar only because they're in the same part of the brain and how the brain makes order out of chaos, but they're completely different. So, adaptation, let me just hit it again, and I'll pass it to you for the change blindness. Adaptation, an example: Brian and I are in an elevator with the people that are doing the roof tar in our hotel, and it smells so bad in the elevator that by floor three, I got to look at the guy and go, "Hey, how do you get used to that smell?" And he turned and looked at me straight-faced and said, "What smell?" Yeah, adaptation. He had done it so long. The Arby's and all these restaurants, fast food franchising, selling the nuclear-hot burgers, why? Because people are smoking the kind bud, and they need something very powerful to break through for their senses and their palate. People haven't just decided, "Oh my gosh, I like habanero peppers now in my hamburger." Those are for a reason. Adaptation has taken over and dulled certain senses, so I've got to have other senses or more popping. So, change blindness is slightly different. What does it mean?

Right. So, that, and as simple as that, these slow, subtle changes over time, I'm less likely to notice, right? Because of that. Because everything we just talked about, how it's probably, we tie everything back to survival, so it doesn't matter if the chair that I normally sit in is a quarter inch off from where I left it. I won't notice that because it doesn't matter to me, to my brain, for the purpose of survival. So, when they happen slowly over time, that's the slow changes in someone's behavior where we think it comes out of nowhere. Then you go to their Facebook page, and you can go back 10 years and see how incremental changes over time got them to the point where everything was all happy and good and Wavy Gravy, we're all having fun, to now everything's hate, death, and fear, and everyone is horrible. Exactly. You can see those changes. And again, because we're tied everything into survival, and we're lazy, and it's not something that's going to just jump right out at us. That change blindness, or another version of inattention blindness, is kind of similar. It takes over, and we don't pay attention to those little changes in our environment.

And an important part that you just said on is the inattention—why we don't use that. We only use the four. Why do you use the four? Because there's a thousand. And what we did is we picked the four that are most common, that you can equate to any environment. And I'll give you one. We're in Iraq, and it seems like every week somebody's coming up with a new way to place a bomb. So, there are these guys that keep showing up with this 55-gallon drum that's burning 24 hours a day, and it's the same three or four guys that keep showing up. So, everybody's paying attention, but because it's on a FOB (Forward Operating Base) and you're not walking out there, so it's not dangerous. But it's on the MSR/ASR (Main Supply Route / Alternate Supply Route) that makes the turn coming out of the FOB. So, everybody watches and watches and watches. So, we started taking photos, thinking that the photos would reveal something. Well, the photos did reveal something: the 55-gallon drum burned down through the asphalt. Then when the 55-gallon drum was gone, they used the hole in the asphalt to put the bomb and replace some of the asphalt. So, the day that it was missing, everybody goes, "Well, let's not go down there." And they found a bomb, and everybody goes, "Holy [expletive]! You're a genius!" Now, slow, subtle changes over time means somebody is trying to fool your eye and your brain, and therefore, you can look out for that anomalous behavior, Brian, and say, "What am I getting set up for here? What might be coming if they're doing it a little bit at a time like this?"

No. And that again, because we're not primed for those things in our environment, it goes back to that "this is the little things." Those four things we just defined is basically a working definition of complacency. That's what people are...

Exactly, right.

You can't just say, "Don't be complacent." You have to go, "These are four things that lead to complacency, and this is how it affects you, and this is how it works." How do we counter that? And that's just, that's the big thing, is we're wired, in a sense, for that way. So, focus on these things that limit my performance. I have to be aware of, and here are the things I can do to increase my performance, right? To not fall into that trap. And that's the constant change of perspective, the constant moving around, the not following a set routine. Being, sort of, within yourself, predictably unpredictable. You have a loose framework of what you want to do, and then if you're constantly varying that, well, you're forcing yourself to see things a different way, to see them from a different perspective, at a different time and place. And literally, that's the shaking up the Etch-A-Sketch that I talk about. Those things are so simple to do, but we get accustomed to not doing them.

Equate them, folks listening at home, equate them to something you do every day, and you'll become more efficient. For example, if you haven't checked your tire pressure in a while, check it, right? All four tires, and make sure that it's consistent because that makes your vehicle more efficient. If you're using a lower grade of fuel, then you may need to use a cleaner in your fuel or clean out your spark plugs and rotor manually. You're saying, "I have no idea what I'm talking about, old man, because my car doesn't have those." What I'm telling you is, if that above your dashboard panel, that little warning light comes on, and you're more inclined to cover it with a piece of tape or a Band-Aid, you may be, you're looking for, you're riding for a fall, we call it as cowboys. You're sooner or later going to make a mistake, and you're not going to be able to retract that mistake even though all the warning signs were there.

And I'll give you a Brian-ism. So, Brian was talking to a crowd of RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), and he says, "Hey, I want you to pay attention to a certain thing that makes sense." And you went into a story trying to explain to them how the little changes over time created a huge mistake. And you remember that everybody had a very emotional reaction to it because it was still fresh in their mind, and they had lost a couple of people during that. And it was a killer that went on rampage, killed 22 people, Gabriel Wortman. But Brian, the way you set them up is, you set them up: "If you would see these things normally, would you pay more attention to them?" And the answer is yes, "I would definitely pay attention to a person that was doing this." And here Gabriel Wortman, what was his advantage? He did it over a protracted time. And so, because it was longer time, those balls dropped back down, they weren't as interesting. So, just like your vehicle is going to break down over time if you don't maintain it, so is your baseline. So, what you have to do is create a fidelity-filled baseline for every environment you're liable to go into, and then keep updating it. Because if you don't, it's going to follow the Entropic Principle and go to the lowest state of order, and you're going to miss what? The little things. The little things will fall through the cracks much more quickly than big things, like you were talking, "Hey, here comes a gun!" "Okay, hey, the guy fired an RPG!" Okay, those things your brain is going to get at, "Hello!" But it's those little things in your environment that subtly, you go the same way every day, you stop at the same place to eat, you take your lunch break at the same time. Those create patterns, and those patterns can kill you.

No, I mean, and that's a pretty good wrap on everything we just talked about. But we've talked about the little things indirectly in everything that we do because that's what we focus on: the pocket lint. And so, I want to give some of the definitions of how these things affect you in a negative manner. It's on board for your survival; it's on board for a good thing, right? It's kept the human race alive despite our greatest attempts for a really long time. And so, that's the point. And it goes back to, "Well, then what?" Like I said a couple minutes ago, "What is the groove of the record that I want to fall into?" Well, I want to write out what that groove is so that my brain falls back on that every time, but it's a good thing. You get what I mean? It's what is that behavioral change?

And that sounds dichotomous. It sounds dichotomous, "You're saying change up your route selection into work so you don't become a victim." But creating that change is a groove on the record, so both can exist in the same place. What Brian's saying is rehearse it so you do it consistently. And being unpredictable consistently sounds dichotomous, but it's not. It's a life truth. It's a plan. You have to say things, you have to do things, you have to expend some calories every single day. Like, if you don't go to the gym, you're not going to get GOLO. All those other things, don't want to get sued, so kiss my ass. But the idea is, what do they all say? "Diet and exercise" at the bottom. "And this program will work." Well, if I eat [expletive] cardboard three days a week, and diet and exercise, it's going to work. Those things have to be consistent. You can't do them hit and miss. You can't do a workout today and a workout next December and go, "Hell, I'm not losing any weight, Brian! What's going on?" The simple things around you, your car, your health, your family relationship. If you don't drop the wife or the husband a card now and again and tell them how much you love them, and drop a rose on the table and say, "Can't wait to see you tonight," you're going to be looking for hobo stab insurance and trying to find another lover. It's just the simple little baby things that are going to make your relationship better.

Yeah. And I don't know why you would need hobo stab insurance when you're out looking for another lover, Greg.

Talk about hobo stab insurance. Okay, there was a woman that was driving a Porsche, and the poor homeless guy says, "Could you move your car because your music's so loud, and I'm dying from the exhaust?" She shot him. You remember this a couple of years ago? And so, finally, she got, like, in Tennessee or something, she got handed her sentence, and now she's all over the news media going, "This is [expletive]! I can't believe that! Do you know my name was dragged through the mud?" Stop. Again, Brian, it's the little things. You can't see the forest for the trees because your brain is overwhelmed on [expletive]. There's a lot of people out there fighting every day to survive, and you shot one of them. So, it goes hand in hand with what we're talking about, right back to the little things. Brian, you can influence where you park in checking out the parking lot. You can influence how you drive. So, that's your blinker.

Yeah, checking out the exit beforehand. And that's the point, is that I can't control, I have very little control over who the President of the United States is, but I can control my life. I can control the decisions I make. It's stop worrying about these big things and focus on those little things because, guess what? You can influence them. You can make small changes, whether that's personally, like you said, in a relationship, to my security posture, to my organization, to my communication, my community, my house. My house is going to increase in value if I paint it once in a while. It's little things. A one percent change compounding over time is massive. So, I think that was sort of the point of all this, and focusing on all those things. I hope we got in there. I don't know, I've been up since 1:30, so both of us haven't slept in a couple of days. Into cold medicine, which is fine, stupid.

Yeah, just so you know, if I'm even more disjointed than before, now you know why. I freebase that Advil Cold & Sinus, that's the best way to do it.

Well, I don't know. You gave me two of those. I don't know where I'm at right now. That Canadian NyQuil, oh God, and I swear I had no idea what I was doing for like the next eight hours. That's a good feeling.

All right, well, thanks, thanks everyone. For, are we starting or ending this podcast? I don't remember. Actually, next topic. No, we've got a lot more on the Patreon side. We appreciate those of you who are Patreon listeners and subscribers. Please keep reaching out with your questions and your ideas for podcast episodes; this is where a lot of this stuff comes from. We're trying to slowly build that, which would be cool. But thanks everyone for listening. Please share it with your friends if you enjoyed it. Share it with your friends if you didn't enjoy it. Just get it out there, right? Always reach out to us at thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com.

And any final words, Greg? Four—one, Brian will put The Standard (Podcast) up there, that's a really good episode. Those guys are wonderful, they're great. Carry The Load (Podcast) had a really good one recently, Brian might put the link up for that. The 10th is the Marine Corps Birthday. Please reach out and thank the Marine Corps. We've got belated birthday cards, I know I've seen them in the store. So, go out and do something nice today.

Sounds good. Alright, well, thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.