L.O.G. 200 Home is where the head is

Okay, good morning, Greg. On this wonderful Tuesday morning that we're recording this, which this will actually be our 200th The Human Behavior Podcast episode.

Yeah, I don't know if you realize that, but I have no idea. I just realized it now.

It actually was that wonderful. Yeah, yeah, we got to do some kind of celebration. Okay, yeah, that's it. We've had ourselves on the back, actually. Okay, we should be celebrating our listeners. So, thank you, folks. The only reason why we continue to do this show is because we have people listening. So, both of you should be applauded.

Yeah. And we've had 200 episodes and 200 total downloads of all episodes. No, oh, okay. I'm kidding.

Exactly. Putting that knife in, I accounted for 160 of those. Yeah, I was like, we have 100,000 downloads, at least. But anyway, today, on that anniversary, I guess we're sort of—I wanted to discuss with you something that has nothing to do with that anniversary, nothing to do with it. Be here, note for our segues, right? Number 200 or anything. I thought about that. I was like, "Oh, should we do something special?" But we had already had this plan, so I was like, "Ah, whatever."

Anyway, here we are. We're talking about, I guess, home is where the heart is, Greg. What I mean by that is we're going to talk about the psychological and sociological factors in what we call our home and what it means to us. Obviously, if you listen to the show, there's going to be a point to this, and we're going to get somewhere with it, but I want to start sometimes so—

Exactly.

But I want to start with that, that sort of description, because it's extremely powerful. What I mean by it is what we call our home, our actual house, apartment, car, tent on the street, whatever you're living in and tuning into this right now, your home is obviously extremely valuable and important to you, far more than sometimes we even realize, meaning it becomes our safe space. Right? It becomes our place. It's only for us. We get to pick and choose who we allow into our home.

I think sometimes we forget about that when some incidents occur at someone's house, just how emotionally charged those are instantly, every single time. I always make a joke, even when I know I'm getting a package delivered and a clearly marked Amazon delivery truck with the same driver I've seen come every time, even when that's pulling up to my house and I see, I'm like, "Hey, what's going on? Who is this coming in?" It's like, I know it is. I'm not hyper-vigilant, but I still have a little bit of that anxiety in the background, right?

That extends to anything. When we talk about how people show ownership of different things, one example is, if you're walking out of a restaurant or a bar and there's someone out there and they've got their foot up on your car, you're going to be [expletive] immediately, right? Because they're usurping ownership. Think about that too. Even when someone's at your house and you don't know them very well, and they put their foot up on your front step, it doesn't matter what it is, even if they don't realize it, you take pride in it, and you take ownership of it, and it feels like they're stepping on you. That's yours. You own that. That's part of who you are.

It's no different; that extends to our even vehicle sometimes, why people get so [expletive] about getting cut off on the freeway or someone jumps in and, "That's my lane!" It's like, it's not your lane, it's everyone's lane.

It's so true.

But I just want to talk a little bit about that, Greg, and kind of set it up to get into where we're going here, but it's something we take for granted. People go, "Yeah, obviously that's your home." It's like, no, no, this has roots back to when we were living in caves.

Exactly. True. Absolutely. So tied to survival. Brian, we normally talk about things under the guise of baselines, and then we talk about psychological or physiological or sociological. But we also warn people that it could be financial, it could be fiduciary. There are relationships all over, and you've got to take a step back sometime and see that relationship. So, how important do you think this topic is that law has a thing called the castle doctrine? The principle says that an individual has the right to use reasonable force, up to deadly force, to protect themselves against an intruder inside their home.

Just to think about even the title of it, Greg, that this law was written long after anyone's been living in castles. The home is your castle. It could have easily been called The Cave. Think about all the laws that you've read. You were always interested in law well before—

Yes, for the wrong reason, looking over your shoulder sometimes unwillingly.

Think about how many capers that we looked at where the curtilage of the property was at question, whether you're on the porch, whether you make an observation from the porch, where's the protected area? Right?

Yeah. You had a right. You know, are you where specifically are you on the sidewalk? Exactly.

Or someone's home, or are you on their actual front lawn?

You know, in that city.

Technical controls that, you know, they're exactly very specific.

Yeah. But why would we spend so much time on litigation and legal process and having people develop, if it wasn't something that matters to every one of us? I'll throw this at you: you and I both know that a home is more than a house, but a home depends on your psychology, your emotion. So, you could say that that box along the railroad tracks is your home, and that's where all my [expletive] is, and legally that's where I go every day.

Right. You've seen cases where that's actually stood up in court where, even though you were—the person was homeless, or you're transient, exactly, yeah, that became, for legal purposes, their home, which means you couldn't search it or someone intruded into their home. So, it's extremely powerful.

Yeah, no, no. And we're saying here that you have the right to defend your property within that box. Okay? When somebody else interferes with it, obviously that's not a deadly force situation, but there's interference means, look, I have to have some place that's—this is what we miss sometimes when we talk about the homeless situation. Many times, homeless is mental health. Right? Many, many times, homeless is something like an addictive personality. Yeah. And I know I don't want to get arrested by the woke police, whatever you talk about, but if the person's on fentanyl or this or that, and somebody threw them over or something, somebody did something, and now all of a sudden you're without a home. That's right.

We're talking about, yeah, well, the stakes are higher now, aren't they?

And Brian, I would venture that if you have a dog, the stakes are even psychologically and emotionally much higher. And now what if you have a kid or what if you have a significant other? Right? So, see, we don't sometimes think about that, and we think nothing of giving somebody the brush-off or the shove-off, you know what I'm saying? That's in that situation, and then when that person barks back or bites, now we're surprised by it for some reason. I think there's a direct correlation.

There is. That's why, with most of the stuff we discuss, we tie a lot of it back to some sort of primal survival system, a way of looking at it. Why? Because that's relatively unchanged, meaning your health and safety, where you live and how you survive is extremely important to you. It's encoded and embedded in your DNA and runs in the background without you even realizing it. So that extends directly to where you live and what you call yours, in your home.

So, this is kind of what we're getting to, some of the examples of it here now, but I have to take a step back and think about that for a second when I'm going to someone's home, meaning that it's—because maybe you have a role where that's something you do often. You're a first responder, you're in law enforcement or something like that. You take it for granted because why? You go to people's homes all the time. If half the time, they call you to come there, exactly, so that's the idea. We can sort of brush past that, like you said, and not take into account, like, "Wait a minute, I'm going into someone's cave right now. I don't know what's in that cave and I don't know what their psychological state is."

How many times have we seen different sheriffs' deputies in different places all over the United States go to evict someone because they can't pay for where they're living, and they get shot or killed, or the person ends up getting shot or killed because there's some sort of fight, it ensues with a weapon or without, yeah, it doesn't matter. It's because it's such a highly charged situation. You know, meanwhile, the sheriff's deputies are probably rolling their eyes, "Oh, great, I got to go evict someone." They probably don't want to. Who wants to kick someone out on the street? Two, they're like, "Hey, I've got seven other things I was directed to do today," you know what I'm saying? And I don't want to have to do this. Three, "Hey, this is private property anyway. Why are we enforcing the laws?" I mean, there's a lot that's in there. So, we tend to not put a lot of value or we don't recognize the potential for extremely bad things to happen in those.

I mean, that's going to anyone's house when anything's happening. Even I've been in situations with my wife before where we're visiting people, and they're kind of starting to get into an argument, "Like, I'm out, man! I don't want to be there. I don't know what else they have going on in their life." Yeah, we're in their cave right now, and if something goes south, and they might turn that anger towards me, whatever the situation, everything might be fine one minute and then escalates because something else is going on, and simply due to the geographic location, simply being in their home, one, they're more comfortable to do things that they wouldn't do in public. They're more comfortable to say and act in certain ways that they wouldn't outside of that home. And three, I'm in there, I'm in there. So, if it gets confrontational, it gets very confrontational, and it goes very quickly.

Yeah, very quickly. So, let's go white belt. Let me street it up. Let me talk about geographic, something you've witnessed me do, so, and you've done it yourself, but I mean, but very early on, very early on, when you were still learning some of the ropes that—Brian is a subject matter expert in his own right, but Brian and I spent a lot of time developing each other, and before that Brian had T3s and different mentorships and stuff. So, I'll take you back to when you would go with me and watch me during lunch manipulate somebody at lunch by very slowly changing the geographics of the table, right? What I would do is I would first put the salt and pepper shaker over. Then I would open my menu and make a big point of putting that on that person's side. And then I would move the table and take a drink of water and then put your glass out a little bit farther than it was, spread your silverware out.

Like, we call that a little territorial encroachment there.

Yeah. When I would take a little bit of the territory, at first the person, and remember we were doing this in a limited objective experiment, so at first the people would go, "Oh, it's just big guy." Exactly. They're not even noticing it at first. And then they kind of are, but they're like, "Oh, it's, yeah, I'm going with it," and they're not getting mad. And then all of a sudden, there's always that point where the person goes, "Hey, what the [expletive] is going on?" Yeah, they want their space back. And the biggest change with Don Yeager, you saw that, Don Yeager lost his mind. And the idea was, okay, then we had to back it up. And listen, you can't just say, you can't invoke the words if it's a limited objective experiment unless you started that. So, we were in the car going, "Okay, now we're going to go in this restaurant, we're going to do this. This person is unaware that they're the cats," right? Because if you don't do that, Brian, then what you're doing is you're just randomly covering your ass, especially when people are yelling at you, right? Yeah.

So, the encroachment was to demonstrate that even in a temporary, transient space, you have an expectation of personal privacy and what happens when somebody intrudes into that space, even for a small period of time. People always think, Brian, that they've got more rights with their vehicle than they do. And so, a person stops a vehicle and, "Hey, just about, I'm not stepping out of the car." "I need you to put it in park." "I'm not going to put it in park." "I need you to roll down your window." "No." Because the motor vehicle code has exceptions because a motor vehicle is inherently transient. And guess what? It's on the roads by the will and whim of the state, not you. You don't have a right. Your driver's license is not a right that's conveyed, right? But we would get into that another episode. But the idea, though, is that people wrongly sometimes think that they have a possessory interest that's greater than they do, or they have rules and laws that govern things that they don't. But when we come to a house or your property or your vicinity, the area that you occupy, there's a lot of case law that protects you on that. And it's historically significant that you remember when you're going to that call or when you're going to step in.

Even a teacher with a locker. How many episodes did we have to do on that, that teachers have the absolute right to go into the kid's locker, right? And they were saying, "Well, that seems like a protected area." "No, you're the school. You, administration, yeah, the students are part-time, their safety is your right and responsibility. They can't have, like you, exactly." Yeah. So, I would tell you that anytime, no matter if you're a civilian or if you're given a legal responsibility to a space like a teacher, HR, a janitor, something like that, you should separate normal stress, reasonable stress, let's call it, to high stress. And anytime that you're kicking anybody out of anything, anytime that you're grabbing something and throwing it away. I remember one relationship that I was with where the person did the, "Up, over the railing, everything out." Do you get what I'm trying to say? Remember Stripes at the very beginning of Stripes? They have that same type of situation.

Feel that once.

And I'll tell you a couple of white belt films that you can look at. They're comedies, but the idea is that you'll get into the emotion, it's right there. One is a Mel Brooks—I'm a fan of Mel Brooks, everything—but Life Stinks. Mel Brooks takes to the street, and he gets a completely different perspective of what it's like being on the street. The other is Be Kind Rewind. It's kind of about gentrification, but it's the same basic principle of somebody trying to boot you out of something that you think is yours, right? And then they come down and they draw a line in the sand and go, "Oh, by the way, you've got six weeks to either do all of these things that you can't afford or get out." That time, Brian, that the clock ticking in the back of your head is horrible. It's a terrible feeling.

It is. And for a lot of people, it can become their only thing that they have in life, is that small space, right? Large space, doesn't matter what it is, is that they can call their own and go to. So, this is kind of leading us to what I know everyone's not like, "Okay, what the hell are you getting at?" There's an element of emotion in these events that we don't always take into consideration or we overlook or take for granted, right? Especially if you have the power to do something like that, where you have to execute a search warrant or an arrest warrant, or you have to deliver—you're writing a code enforcement for the city, whatever it is, and you have the right to post something on someone's door or go in and speak to them or come onto their property to whatever, announce something, deliver something, it doesn't matter what it is. Because you do that over time, and things just go according to plan most of the time, we forget about that emotional and psychological element in there that causes these situations to spiral wildly out of control.

So, we have to take the temperature of this. And then there are also true examples of just some seemingly benign situation that spirals wildly out of control. And everyone understands that, especially with, like, a domestic violence situation, or, you know, those can be highly charged, but do we actually plan and put a plan or implement something in this? No, no.

And what you said, I would tell everybody, Brian, to take a step back to what Brian just said and write down, "Taking the temperature of the room." How many times do we tell people during training, "Take the temperature of the person you're talking to. Take the temperature of the vehicle on a traffic stop. Take the temperature of the crowd." And what do we mean by that, Brian? What we mean is, are things okay? We're talking about psychological triage, aren't we? The sociological impact of the people that are watching and filming you. What does it feel like? Because your body and your brain are attuned to the survival instincts, and you know that things aren't always what they seem. So, you need to give that gift of time and distance and feel.

Yeah, we also call it reading the tea leaves, right?

We want you to look at the emotion. And then what else do you have to understand? You have to understand the hidden underpinnings, Brian. You have to understand, for example, I would say there's a critical time for a cop from the time they get the dispatch that there's a domestic violence incident, and in Colorado, those are code three. You run hot. You run lights and sirens to a domestic violence. Okay? That's the law, that's how you do that. And that's very different in some places how you do that. So, now you're on the way to that, and let's say it takes you three minutes to respond, Brian. How much [expletive] can go wrong in a kitchen in three minutes in a highly agitated, very dangerous emotional situation like a family fight? Do you get what I mean? So, now what you knew to be certain, what you suspected because your psychology is going to be messing with you, and then all of a sudden you're there, now it's very different.

And so that's very, like in combat, you expect to be shot at. You expect somebody to have a minefield. You expect there to be a—there's a fence or an obstacle that you might have to cross, right? And so, you can take those into account, but you don't know these. An armed robbery call. Is it an inside job? Is the person armed with a gun? Is it a knife? Is it just a note? Those calls and domestic violence, to me, that's the balance right there. That's the ones where you don't know [expletive], and you've got to learn very quickly what's going to go on because of the most, seriously, the most dangerous.

No. And any of those situations, even if you—even among family or friends or something. I heard some folks that we had known, "Hey, did you hear so-and-so, they're getting divorced?" I'm like, "Wait, what? They just got married six months ago." Yeah. "And she's already moved out back with her family." "Like, wait, what?" Like, that's something abrupt. It's so outside the norm. I mean, it's so quick and so fast that it's very volatile. So, it's like, "Okay, well, we need to make sure so-and-so is contacted and make sure, let's, can we find out about this because they have a child and what's going on?" Because it's such a—it's not typically how those things go. Sure, divorces happen, people split up, there's all kinds of different reasons. It's not about that, it's about the manner in which it happened.

You're exactly right. So, to add to, to add the complexity to that, listen, folks, Brian is on something here. Add to the complexity that you as a family member, as a community, a social worker, as a cop, you're going to respond to the scene to find out, "Hey, do you need anything? I know you guys are splitting up or whatever else." Brian, do you have any friends or anybody that you know that lives close by, like across the street or next to another family member? Okay, that's huge in Chicago. It's huge in Detroit. So, now think about walking up on this porch and what you don't understand is the estranged husband or wife is right next door and they're with the uncle that sides with them. And across the street is the mom and dad that bought you the house, and now, "Look what you did to my daughter." Do you understand how that can spin sideways really, really quickly, and you never see it coming? That's what we're talking about here. We're talking about having a plan for those. Do you have a plan for driving on ice? I do. Okay. So why wouldn't you have a plan for responding to—

Okay, so you brought up some key elements. Those are the things that we look for, right? It's okay, what—what can I, before I go to intervene in that—intervene whether that's my duty as a, because of my job or I'm a family member or I'm a friend or my neighbor—before I go to intervene, what elements of this story do I know? Meaning what other things are there? I mean, simply just going, "Oh, did you hear so-and-so got divorced?" "Oh, that's horrible, I didn't know anything was going on." "No, five months after they got married and she's already moved out, and this—" It's like, "Whoa, wait." It's a comparison to what typically happens versus this. So, if I know what typically happens and what's gone right, what can I see that's different?

In a lot of these cases, especially when you talk about highly charged domestic violent situations where now, especially with law enforcement agencies having—they're trying to use psychologists to come in and do stuff, and it's well-intentioned but could potentially go horribly wrong. I actually think the probably the officer on the beat has a better advantage using that situation, maybe with a little bit of extra training or a little bit of understanding, if you get what I'm saying, versus bringing in this person, because that person is only thinking it from one lane and one lens, and that's it. So, they could—that could cause them to miss something. Do you get what I'm saying?

You're right on track again. But I would say this, to add to what you're saying, I would reinforce your fires by saying, in almost every circumstance where you encounter, for example, a shoplifter, or you encounter a sneak thief, or somebody just at a street robbery, or somebody's messing with your vehicle, you come on. Okay. Okay. Almost every circumstance is a flight. But we started off this episode talking about the house, the home is somehow different. Now, all of a sudden, "Hey, I'm flat-footed. Hey, this is my house." Yeah. You walked into my house. And so, now even that short duration that you're in that place, Brian, you again feel as though you have a possessory interest, and now all of a sudden somebody tells you this kind of stuff in your own home, "Go sit over there, shut your mouth, step back for a minute." Okay? You're naturally going to have a heightened level of emotion, but it's more than emotion. I'm searching here, folks, for a word because it's a different kind of emotion. Like a German language and Inuit Eskimos have all these different words for this stuff. In English, we don't have the right word for the rage that boils in your gut when you're in your own home and somebody tells you to shut up and say—

Well, that's the thing. What you start doing is, you start taking away my options. Right? Even if I didn't have any, because the situation, like this, if I feel like I have some options, then I do, meaning, the difference of being actually cornered and not being able to do things is different than feeling that way, but not to your brain. If you're feeling that way, it doesn't matter, and fantasy or reality are the same, right? You're looking at, like, "What do you mean? Like, he could do this, he could do that. He's got all these options." But internally, I'm going, "This is it. This is it right here. If you're backing me into a corner, I have two options. I either go hands up and all right, what, you're now in charge, Greg, and I'll do what you say,"

Yes.

"Or we're fighting," you know what I'm saying? And whatever. So—

And what are most if we're talking in a range of, like, a domestic, a domestic violence caper, a family fight, as they used to say in the old days? What are we talking about? We're talking about a realm of control. We're talking about, "I lost control of the finances. You called me on it. I had a couple of beers after work." Now that's what we're fighting about. And don't raise your voice in front of the kid. Now I feel—I feel that loss of control tangibly. I feel it. I can reach out and hold it.

And we know in cop work, and it's very same across the board for anybody that's in anything related—court, cops, corrections, emergency rooms—the two most dangerous times for any of those type of capers, whether it's a warrant service or an eviction, foreclosure, domestic violence, is always the approach to the scene and the arrest. Why the approach to the scene? Because defense, three-to-one odds. Urban, five-to-one odds. "I know you're coming. I know somebody called 9-1-1. I know that when I blew that front window out, exactly, and I can hear the sirens are coming, so I now know that this has already gone past the inevitability point of no return," right?

And the other thing is when you actually lay hands on somebody, that's a very different thing. There are some people out there that have been arrested before. For those of you that haven't been arrested, there's a phase. "Okay, turn around. Don't look at me. Okay, bend slightly at the waist. Okay, put your hands back, palms up. Separate them a little further. Now separate your feet. Now don't—" And you're going through this, going, "What the [expletive] is going on?" And now that first bracelet goes on, and there's a moment where you do the, "Should I stay or should I go?" And all humans do that. So, if we know that that's coming, we can prepare for that. And I'm not talking about just arrest tactics, Brian. I'm talking about, how can we psychologically de-escalate a situation that was probably un-escalatable when we got there? That's what we're talking about. Those inevitable fights where, look, if you can't control your husband, wife, or significant other, and you can't control your finances, and you're going to lose your house and you're going to lose all this [expletive], and now I'm there and guess what the first thing I tell you to do? "Calm down." Yeah. Okay. And then I tell you to shut up, right? Because you're vocalizing too loud for everybody else. Think of that. You're talking about a cauldron, you're talking about a powder keg.

It is. Because if I'm that person in that state, both physical and psychological and financial state, whatever it is, I will look for something I can control, and man, that's why, like you always say, violence is a language, and I can control that message. I can control that message very easily, and I can do it when I want to do it, and it's always there. It's primed to me as a human being when I start to feel overwhelmed, I'm going to lash out. Right? If I don't have any other options, I'm going to choose my survival over anything else. Over yours.

Exactly. Right.

So, it's always on the table, no matter who the person is. It could be Mother Teresa, right?

Yes. Still on the table.

You know that the Pope punched a guy after, you know, he threw—

We use that in class because I was so amazed that the coach reached across and slapped that guy so hard. And the woman was holding onto his hand, and he pushed her. Yeah, it was a melee. So, that's why it's called the melee, right? And those things are on the table. So, it comes into, you're walking into that. Is the first thing, "Do I need to walk into this, right? Can, is there a better place and time I can have this conversation or affect this arrest warrant or whatever?"

So, on a domestic, on a domestic, your timeline, you're spot on. On a domestic, your timeline is very restricted because you have to respond, like I said, even in Colorado state statute, you must respond emergent to the scene. So, they're throwing you into this and saying, "Fix this." Okay? This is one of those situations where even if you had the counselor from community services and everything else, it's not going to end up well because, dude, some of them allow you to talk your way through it. Yes, some of them will talk, but again, most of these domestic violence incidents aren't the first time. Okay? They're near the last time, if you know what I mean. And so, it may be your first call to this house with this pair of people that you're talking to or three, or whatever the dynamic is, but it's likely not their first time being responded to by the police.

Yeah. And what does that mean? That means that you're ill-prepared for the situation. So, the TTPs, and you know my thoughts about TTPs, but the TTPs are, "Separate the parties." I get it, don't make them look at each other. Yeah, we're trying to get the rage to abate, try to put them in different rooms. Well, that's really hard because if you don't have that extra officer, now the two officers can't see each other. And guess what, Brian? Every house is replete with weapon systems. And if the person is a hunter, they've got a gun. And if the person's threatened, they might go for the gun. I mean, think about those—

Stuff everywhere. Yeah.

And houses are—how many videos did we watch in the last year, let's say, from right now, just the last 12 months, where the incident unfolded with a closed door or in the hallway facing a closed door and it was a shooting? It was a house. So, the idea is that it's not key terrain, it's not the greatest place to have this discussion. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to go in and go, "Okay, give me two minutes and I'll change the trajectory of your life," and set up the kitchen table where no knives and stuff are within reach because there are snipers out there right now that are going, "Oh, yeah, yeah." Could you imagine that? And then sitting down at the table and saying, "Okay, we're going to search everybody and now what we're going to do is talk." That's what's needed.

What's needed? A calming of minds.

And some things, simply of getting someone outside of their house is enough to, to at least, reduce, reduce it to a simmer rather than a boiling over. Do you get what I mean? Like, those, those things, and it's part of what we're getting into at the beginning. Now, I know, and I'm not saying this is, again, this is something you can always do or whatever, but I just from a psychological, sociological, survival perspective of human behavior and human performance, you having a conversation outside of someone's house is very different than having it inside their house, even if you're on their property, on their front lawn. Right? I mean, it's, but I—that, because now that person has options, they can go back inside, right? They can do whatever.

Now, I understand the situation, I'm just taking it from a human behavior, human performance perspective on what's the, the possibilities, the likelihood of events occurring.

Yeah, exactly. You're not giving a TTP. And the other thing is we also have to remember that that approach from exiting your police vehicle to walking up to the front door is a very fatal funnel for coppers because the person inside the house goes, "Well, this is inevitable. I'm going to jail. I know I have two strikes already, or a warrant for my arrest," and so they just start shooting, and cops don't anticipate that. And they go, "Well, I can't, I can't anticipate because I go on 19 domestic violence calls on a three-day period." But look, you can. If you're going to give me statistics, listen to statistics. It's a high emotional state situation.

I sent you a report which got me thinking about these things, and the report was that there were 1,000 suicides in a five-year period just from—that were given foreclosure notices, right? And 75 of those people blew their brains out before the cops or the bank ever showed up, right? Before they were—just before anyone enforced it even. So, what does that go to? So, now imagine that person's getting out of their car, they're opening up the envelope, and they're going into Burger King for lunch. They're blindsided by it. They knew they were a little behind, they didn't understand the foreclosure was coming. Now there's a real date on it, Brian. And you're standing next to that person, and that person reading that letter bumps into you and you go, "Hey, step off, [expletive]." Pardon the language, folks. I'm playing a role, Brian. What might happen then? See, if we can anticipate what might happen in public, in a public place with a person whose cup is full, now put that person in their own home or in their apartment, in their car.

There's complexity. And then this gets into now the conversation, right? Is, in those moments, in real time, what is, what does predictive analysis look like? Because we're talking about all this stuff, and you can 100% absolutely do that. There are countless examples. The one I just sent was—was here. I didn't say, I'm sorry, I actually didn't send you, but I told you about it. It was a unique, interesting one, and these are the type of things that we look at. I'll put the link in the episode details.

But this was outside of Los Angeles, somewhere in California, and I forget the reason why they're pursuing this vehicle. Yeah. And this guy's in a pickup truck, and he literally takes his rifle and comes out of the window and is shooting at the police behind these people, right? Just blasting away. And then he'd drive, and then he'd shoot again and drive. And it's like, okay, this obviously is a huge threat to those officers. You know, this guy's trying to kill them. He's, it's, this is attempted murder, right? He knows what he's doing, intent has been demonstrated. So, as he's driving, but then he comes up to a busy intersection, and he doesn't blow through, he doesn't whip around in the car. He slows down, creeps up to the intersection, and then as a, you know, kind of helicopter—I'm moving from that perspective—there are all these kids crossing the street like they just got out of school. So, not like six, like, you know, like 30 on each side, you know what I mean? As they stream across, right? And so, and he's such a fast—and he waited, and then he creeped through the intersection. And then it looked, there was like a little break in the kids, and he still didn't go. He waited for like the stragglers at the end, right, to continue to cross the street. And then he didn't gas it, he didn't slam on the accelerator, he just slowly drove away.

And it, it—what, the reason why I'm talking about that is that it showed so much intent and shows you exactly what they're thinking, that individual. Yes, they're committing multiple felonies as they're doing this. Yes. But just despite whatever they actually are getting pursued for, whatever the initial arrest, there's, there's more. This guy's going to need to go to jail for the rest of his life for what he's doing. But the idea is, you look at what his intent is in that moment. He's not a threat to those people and to the public safety at large. Now, don't jump on me for saying that, you'll see what I'm getting at. But he's very clearly a threat to the police officers. So, it shows what's going on inside their head and what they're likely going to do next. I can plan for that. One, if he's already shot at me, I can assume he's going to do it again. If he has to run or bail, he's going to likely either run until he can't run anymore, and then what? Well, he's already demonstrated the fact that he shot at police officers once. Is he likely to do it again? Absolutely. He's likely to do it again, especially if he feels cornered. But is he a threat to that immediate public area? Okay, well, no, he hasn't actually shown that. Right? He's demonstrated his, his, you know, it certainly had the opportunity for a hostage, certainly had the opportunity to pull in, to grab one of those, certainly anything. He had all those opportunities. So, that that should inform you how you can situation—how so, how am I supposed to do that in real time, Greg? Right? Because we can break that down. I don't expect to answer that on a one-hour podcast, right?

Our 200th episode, you bastards.

Yeah.

But this is it. This is, this is what we do, the 200. Here are the golden pieces. This is where we throw all this stuff in the fire. Yeah, you quit listening, so—

No, no, no. But you're onto something.

You see what I'm getting in is what should I—how can I, what can I glean for that in the moment to make a better decision about how I approach it? Right? Two things, go back to white belt again. Always go to white belt. Why? Because the best I ever known black belt is going back to white belt. Okay? And I'll tell you this, two films again, because you know how much I value films and music. Pulp Fiction, Christopher Walken. "I had this watch, oh yeah, in my ass." Okay, exactly.

Like your Bill Clinton impression, it sounds exactly like my Gilbert Godfrey.

So, the idea, Brian, is that that watch meant so much to him that he hid it in his ass, his prison wallet. Okay? Stop for a minute, think about that. Now, let's go to Steve Martin in The Jerk. Steve Martin is cleaning up at the gas station, and the guy looked in the phone book randomly and picked out the name Nabin Johnson and is going to shoot Steve Martin. And the guy's missing and hitting the oil cans. So, Steve Martin is looking around him and going, "It's the oil cans! Everybody saved the oil cans!" And he's moving the oil can. One, have a clear picture of what's happening and understand that there's going to be distortions. For example, the longer a pursuit goes, the more reckless it becomes. Yeah. The sooner you stop that. Okay. Now, if those are facts that you have, then you can make theorems based on your facts that will work in many situations, then apply it to the situation you're in. So, Pythagoras didn't solve for X on everything. Pythagoras showed you the method to solve, and that's why we're very old and very Greek.

And somebody will say, "Well, that's a TTP now." A TTP is only the how. It has nothing to do with the when, it has nothing to do with the why. So, this is one of the situations where I need to, like, for example, I don't have to understand all the hardships you're facing to understand domestic violence, but I do have to understand that you may be willing to kill me to stay in your house five more minutes. And just knowing what's at stake.

Realistic. Yes.

Understanding what's at stake and knowing that those things are in play, not only in play, but in the balance. So, for example, if you tried to make the custodial arrest at the scene where the person was with those children around the vehicle, I can imagine that tense moment for the kids. Yeah. Okay. That could have gone sideways very quickly. Yeah. And everybody would have blamed somebody for that event. Thank God calm heads prevailed on both the suspect and the police to say, "Okay, listen, you're the cops, I run from the cops. You're the cops, you need to catch me." Yeah. We're going to take this away to some other area where it occurred. Most people don't have the wherewithal to do that, they don't have the smarts, the scruples to do that.

And look, if you're a criminal, I'll give you an example, the bank robbery where the guys dressed like automatons and went around and shot up the whole place and a bunch of—everybody said, "Oh, we learned so much about tactics." No, what we learned, we learned about human performance and human behavior, and we learned that there are some people out there that are willing to die from what they believed in or do. And whatever that debt is, you don't really truly understand right now. So, what you have to do is, for example, you quit smoking and you lose weight because you want to live a couple of more days of life. You reconnect with your family because you're an ass to your daughter and you want to see your grandkids. Do you see what I'm trying to say? Yeah. If we take time to do that in our private lives, why wouldn't we want to take time to do that in somebody else's private life? So, we have to sort of see where that person might be on a scale and understand what might be at stake for that person.

So, now that homeless person that I come out and I spray with the hose because they're screwing my business up, okay, there's more to it. And that means that, look, it's like a fly fishing knot, Brian. The worst way to do a fly fishing knot is pull anything. What you want to do is make the knot bigger, and what that means is make it bigger spatially so you can see all of the lines leading into the knot. So, why wouldn't you enlist the aid of others in the community? But what we do is we force officers into these situations, right? Literally at the point of a gun or at the barrel of anger or when rage and violence have already occurred, and then we expect them to be able to solve for X. That's, that's not what the course was about, Brian, but you see what I'm trying to say. There's a longer process, and we're not talking about that process, and that has to occur well before you ever get in a police car, well before you ever pin the badge. And that has to take place now in training and education well before a call for service codes.

Well, no, and you actually, you actually brought up a good point about almost making it like a personal investment. Like, so you, you talk about what someone might do in their own life, yeah. And then you're talking about now dealing with another human being, you know, you're almost personalizing it, like, "Wait a minute, I might want to take the time to find out what else is going on here." Yeah. It may extend my life. I mean, literally taking a personal investment like you did with your own life, own family, well, in this individual. I mean, you don't know what you're going to get, and that might be that missing key piece that you go, "Wait a minute, that's a powerful indicator. This one is different than the other ones I've been on because now I know that this person has no other options. There is nothing else." So, the other one where it's the first time you've ever showed up at the house and someone's called because they're drunk and they're having a disagreement is different than this guy has a past history of this, there's maybe a warrant out, or he's just been paroled. Like, those are very, very different situations. So, as much of that information is, is, is more important, taking the time to figure that out than it is to go rushing into somewhere.

And I know, no, it's more than a balance, it's imperative. Right? Yeah. Because you just said something, a parolee. If you're a parolee and I come into the house, first thing you see is my badge and you go, "Here's my ride back to prison." So, I've got to break that. Yeah. I've got to say, "Hey, listen, whatever's going to come out of this, I'll tell you what, I'm not like all those other cops, I want to hear your story." You got to give it a time.

Well, you know, it goes back to even what you just said about the example I brought about the pursuit where the guy went slow and stopped for the kids crossing the street. You know, if, like you just said, if they had said, "All right, hey, now's our chance, this is a stop right here, let's get them now." Like, he's, he's going to start shooting at you because he's been shooting at you, and then who's going to get hit now? I mean, that, that's the whole thing. It's like, it's a, it's, it's seemingly difficult, or it seems like that's overwhelming to do in the situation, but it's actually not if you didn't understand how to slow down time and how to pursue things.

Brian, do we have hostage negotiators? Of course. Do we have passion? Okay. So, why wouldn't we look at a situation for a domestic as having a domestic negotiator? And the reason is very, very much at the beginning. Yeah. But I mean, the cop is going, "Look, I got better things to do." You don't. Because the call you're on is the most important call of your life, because if you do it wrong, people may die. And you're going, "Yeah, but it's just a simple, you know, loud party." No. Everything you do and the things you don't do matter. And you're exactly right. You have to take a look at that and say, "Okay, this, I need to take a knee. I need to get my head straight. I'm going to go into this situation. Now, my partner is younger, so I'm going to call a more experienced veteran, or I'm going to tell these folks, 'Look, I'm going to talk to you. I'm going to take as much time as it takes to make sure we sort this out, but I'll tell you, I can't do everything. There are certain things the community is going to have to do.'" And I know you've heard that before, but listen to me, let's try to get—what you're doing is talking. And when we're talking, we're not shooting and we're not punching and we're not fighting, you know?

And the idea is that that takes time. But we're not, look, when you go into combat, combat is much of a seesaw as anything, and the seesaw is up on one side, and that civilian deaths and collateral damage and a lot of deaths on the force that's going in. Then it kind of evens off and then it turns into an insurgency and it goes the other way, yeah, where there's a lot less damage, but the, you know, there's more collateral damage within a unit and insider threat. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So, why, if we can apply that to combat and history rights, writers go back in for everything I can read about MacArthur and de Gaulle and Churchill and all the decisions they made—frank, where's that book on response to domestic violence? That that's, like, Joe Reed, one of the greatest assets, is Joe Reed because Joe Reed wants her to blow his own brains out. So, if I want to talk to somebody about suicidal ideation, you know, I call, I call a subject matter expert, but we don't do that in this instance, do we?

And we're not just talking and railing about domestic violence, we're talking about critical decisions under stress. That's what it is. You just said that you make much better decisions under stress if you're further away and you have more time. And I would add if you have different opinions of subject matter experts that you can rely upon. And so, that means tacit and experiential knowledge, right? So, if I don't have that at the scene, I have to have it somewhere. And so, I can either be at the scene and try to work time into it, or I can go, "Holy [expletive], this is a great thing we need to cover at the academy. This is a great place where—" And, you know, those are the types of training and training films. And because, look, what we do with the, even the shoot/don't shoot scenarios that have to do with domestics, everybody pulls out a weapon and then we have the decision to drop it, and they do or they don't. Yeah, that's not how they go every time. Come on.

Well, it's, that's not even exercising any type of critical thinking. No, none whatsoever. I mean, it's trigger pull or not. How fast are you responding to what's happening? And that's, that's unfortunate that people still see it that way and continue to make that stuff better. What you're, yeah, what you're talking about when you went back to critical decisions under stress, and I think again, I, you know, you, you brought up the combat examples are great, but I, of course, it's easy to point to that and say, "Hey, that's an extremely vital, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment." It's like, "Well, so the [expletive] is everyday life." And when you're, when you're understood—like, but we don't, we, we don't even see it as that. Like, you know, what, what does it mean to be under stress? Well, you brought up a bunch of situations, like you're in a stressful, even if you, like, but you could have a great night's sleep, everything's going well in your marriage and life and everything's happened. You just got promoted and everything's good, and you're like, you know, "Man, I just set a PR on my one mile run time and my deadlift." And it doesn't matter. Like, and you're, you're walking into a stressful situation. So, yes, you're at some optimal level of performance, but that doesn't mean you can't easily get overwhelmed, not just because of what's happening and you're distracted, and now I'm dealing with you, Greg, and something that's going over here, and I miss the fact that this is super highly charged right now. I think it's at that calm situation because everyone just got quiet, but really it's everyone just got quiet because they're all about to do something where we don't even realize, Greg, what you mean by decision-making under stress because someone's going to go, "Yeah, I'm not stressed. I'm doing fine. I'm not the guy sitting there thinking about blowing my brains out every night." Like, exactly this. So, but, but that's because we set them up for part-task training or scenario-based training some people do without taking into account everyday life.

That's why I always say, "Street it up, go white belt." So, about three hours ago, I was overcome by emotion, overwhelmed by events, and I lost my mind. And so, I had apologized to Shelley before she left the house because it was changing the trajectory of our day. So, what happened? So, the dog gets up decidedly early and decides, "Hey, it's a full moon, and I've got to go outside because the yard is full of animal friends to play and frolic with." So, it's 3:45, so I said, "Well, it's close enough to our four o'clock normal morning start, zero four." Right? So, I said, "Okay, well, Shelley's going to take the dog out. I'll go down and get a work on it." I got a long work on it. I felt great. I come up, there's no pressure whatsoever. I have a yogurt, I have some of my Metamucil, right? I come in, and Shelley's got her glasses on and looking at her computer, and I go, "Here we go." Okay. Because I know there's something new. Yeah. Okay. And she goes, "Hey, it's nothing. We've got to go to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife site, we've got to update our stamp and our this and that," you know, "because it's the annual thing for going out and doing our antler hikes and fishing and all the fun stuff we do in Colorado." I go, "Okay, well, this is the dilemma that I'm faced with, Brian. You know I hate computers. You know I understand nothing. I always mess up the computers." So, Shelley's got her website content so she can access it at work, but I can't. She's got my password and my CV, my Colorado Wildlife ID number on there with her phone. So, all she did is, because we're a couple of minutes, yeah, but now I'm on my computer, and I can't get in with my own password. Yeah, Brian, how long have you known me? So, you know, I, that was it. And I lost my mind. And I'm pre-table tipping, "I don't want coffee! This is [expletive]!" Okay. And then all of a sudden, I look at myself and I go, "What did I just let happen?" Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So, that can either, and now all of a sudden there's a knock at the door, and it's a cop going, "Mr. Williams, we have the traffic—" That's what I'm trying to say. We have to stop thinking of everything as a critical incident or nothing's a critical incident. Right? Right. So, the idea is, everything has the potential to be a life or death situation. And some of it might be just your pump stopping while you're going out, you know? So, you better have a P-FAC, a personal first aid kit, ready to go somewhere or AED. Some might be your car not starting this morning. How close do we cut stuff, Brian? We cut it real close. "Well, hey, that milk will last until tomorrow." Now, all of a sudden, we have it for whatever. And that's what we do, right? So, so we go to the lowest common denominator a lot of times. And if we do that in our own life, how do we think now that we're a cop, that we're going to change? We can't. It doesn't matter how much training you have, you are who you are when you're in that uniform. Right?

And especially in that profession, who you're typically dealing with on a daily basis, it's not generally the most upstanding members of society. Don't say "doctor" a lot. Right? You don't say—

It is. What you're talking about too is just every one of those situations is like the potential energy is always there, and we forget that sometimes. It's not always the kinetic energy, it's not always going to transfer over to that, but it can very easily.

You know, I'm very similar in some of the stuff, like you are with it's like, "Why would you—" Someone like my wife would be like, "Why the hell would you get upset over something like this?" I'm like, "Because this is a simple thing that should not be complex. It should be very simple to use." And so, when it's not, then it, it basically negates—

I took it personally, though.

Well, it's just, it's like, it negates the whole point of having the website and having a computer. "Why are we using this [expletive] if you can't do something so incredibly simple?" I'm okay with big, complex, hard problems because, man, there's not always a right solution and you've got to figure it out, and you're—but simple. I, I get, I'm the same way where I have to take that step back and go, and my, because my wife is just like, because she said, "You know, a normal human being is like, 'How is the, why is this—explain to me why this is upsetting to you?'" I'm like, "I don't do, like, when simple things go wrong, I, I lose my mind. I can't because it's like, exactly, why did you—" Like, I, I replaced the outdoor lights here with ones that come on automatically when it gets to a certain ambient light level outside and then shut off during the day because the girls have problems turning lights on and off. And then so, when, when one was off, like, I, I literally started, "Why is the front light, why is it off?" And my wife is like, "Jesus! I'm sorry, I accidentally turned it off when I turned off the inside light." And I'm like, that loses my mind at that. I go, I, I—

She goes, "You just came in with all this stuff going on, and we had 30 million things, and you handled this and organized this and took Harper over here and solved this and then got back on your call, all while you're doing that." And I'm like, "Yeah, I was like, 'Well, that's easy. Those are hard problems. This is simple.'"

Brian, you lost your mind with the electrician because when you got your house, oh, he didn't—switches were down instead of up. Yeah.

On that one. And the panel wasn't marked correctly, and I almost had an aneurysm. And like my wife was like, "This is not something—" I was like, "No, this is a good thing that you can go, 'Humans are wired.'" Yeah. Yeah. It's a very simple thing that should be done.

Today, Brian, when I looked at that and I'm on my computer and Shelley's on hers and we're sitting a foot apart, I go in to put my Colorado driver's license, so there's a button and it says, "What type of ID are you using?" And I press driver's license. It's a scroll, right? So then I go and I put my Colorado thing and it says "State," and I go through and it has every one of the states except Colorado. I go, "Can I show it to Shelley?" And Shelley goes, "Well, just scroll back up and take a look at the top." But when I go, it's that driver's license. Guess what the next choice was? "Colorado driver's license." Now, who would plan that? What kind of demented [expletive] would build a computer program that Greg specifically doesn't understand? But that's what we do. We take it personally, and we'll write back that all of a sudden you're in my house and I'm going to ask you to leave. Why am I asking you to leave? Because it's my goddamn house and I don't want you here. Yeah. Whatever injustice that I see before me, even though you look at it and say, "Do you understand how minor this is?" I would rather break it or shoot it than let you make fun of it one more second. And that's, we have to understand we're all frightened little children at our core. Right? So, it's not hard to—you said it best when you said, "Paint yourself in the corner." And guess what I'm going to do, Brian? There are two things humans do: they act up, and we can deal with that, or they act out. They act out. Yeah. Now all of a sudden we got dead people laying all over our kids, right? Okay. That's the kind of thing we're talking about here. And Brian, it's not binary. And that's a thing. No. Pythagoras understood that. Cops need to understand that, that soldiers and firefighters and everybody else, it's very seldom binary.

No. And we, it's, it's not, it's not binary. You, you have options. They might not always be the best options, but having that's an option nonetheless. Three options is better than having one, right? In some of these highly charged situations or even how you look at different problems. I mean, we've done that on, on even business type of calls where it's like, "Well, I don't know if I see a fit or where it's—" And then it's like, "Well, hang on, why don't we take a look at this?" And then they're like, "Holy crap, I never even thought about it that way. Yeah. You guys could fit in there sooner than we thought because of the—" And it's just about creating those options where, you know, if I'm laser focused in the way, because only because that person was extremely intelligent human being and had their own company, but they were looking at it through their perspective. They were in their house and went, "Well, that doesn't make sense here." Until we said, "What about these three things?" They went, "Oh, crap, I never thought of that." And so, so sometimes creating those options, creating time, creating distance, you can, you can do that in a number of different ways. If I'm going in armed with the ability to know that, yes, there's a range of possibilities and things could escalate and it's going to be fluid, but I got to be light on my feet. You know, I always look at it, if a situation can escalate that easily, it can likely de-escalate just as easily. Meaning, if it's one of those, you're saying, "It's so fluid and so it could go anywhere," well, that means it can go to a better place too. So, sometimes I have to try to lay out those options for other people to choose from, right? And sometimes making you feel that you have something versus actually getting, you know, it's like maybe going to jail, but if you feel that you have some say in it, then, then I can get you on board. And that's kind of goes back to one of the stuff that we talk about when we get into, you know, cognitive manipulation and what that means. There's a negative term, but it's just co-opting people to give them choices and give them options because I'd rather have you on board with it than have us rowing in different directions and trying to see who wins.

You're exactly right. And I would say look for stress fractures in everyday things. Yeah. So, when you take a look, we default to a family annihilator, and then we say, "Well, that person was cooked from birth, you know, and they should have saved them a ride to the delivery room and, you know, killed them in the river." Now what you need to look at is any human given too much stress will reach their limit of human performance and will break. So, now all of a sudden, I feel, let's say I'm a man or identify as a man and I feel emasculated because my wife left me, she's now with another person. I'm now in a shared custody situation. And all of a sudden, we're in that parking lot, and it's a nicer car and they're dressed nicer. Yeah. My daughter's happy for the first time. And Brian, guess what? It turns into a homicide-suicide. Okay. We find it hard as humans to look at that and say, "That could be a spiral." That's where we need to train. We seldom have to train for the mundane. We have to keep our head on a swivel, but nobody ever tells us what types of things to look for. Right? So, the idea is that in a combat zone, what are we constantly fighting? Complacency, right? Remember where you are. You're fighting your own natural cognitive tendencies. Exactly. So, why wouldn't we use that understanding to prepare ourselves for the hidden unknowns in these very, very dangerous, potentially dangerous situations? Brian, we're talking to firefighters and paramedics. You don't know who's going to bring the match into the house where the accelerant and the propellant are already laying out there, right? And now somebody says, "Hey, some—those are fighting words for me." Are they? Bristle at something. So, you really, really have to understand the underpinnings of de-escalation. De-escalation can't just be a thing that you pull out and go, "Now we're going to de-escalate." It's got to be from pulling up. You pull up with lights and sirens, that's a different level of force for domestic. You're shining flashlights and banging on the door and, "Police! Don't move!" and heightened voices. That changes likely outcomes, just like it could have changed that guy sitting at the intersection with those students walking in front of him and somebody saying or doing the wrong thing or going and trying to block him in, Brian. So, you have to plan that now. So, when it comes up, knowing what we know now, we have to plan it now and rehearse it now in a safe space. This is what I love about VR and AI. VR and AI is a safe place. I can try my hypotheses. Yeah. It's an avatar that died and I can reconstitute it. So, if you want to ask, what's my opinion on those? I think the greatest thing in the world to create that petri dish where I can try different combinations before I go out on the road.

Yeah. And you, but that's, you know, failing during training is what you're supposed to be doing most of the time until you get better at it. I mean, what's Homeland about?

Yeah. I mean, if you, if you decide that you want to go to the Milo website and you want to go and take a look at the Milo Cognitive Division, you want to take a look deep for deeper and look at Hoberman. That's the whole idea behind that movement is that there are chances and choices. And guess what? Everything that you try—wouldn't it be great to be able to try those? Do you ever see the, the, the, what's that place called, Brian? The where you pull off the freeway, we went to one time because we needed a boot or something like that.

Fishing village, whatever, Bass Pro Shops or something.

Yeah, that's it. Okay. We walked in, and there must have been 1,000 fishing lures, and they were all just a different color. Do you remember? And it went from like that, that, that green to hyacinth, this to that. And I was floored. And I was thinking, "Holy [expletive], they're taking everything into consideration." Well, if you're going to take into consideration that the water temperature and the color and the spin or vibration and the structure, if all of those things matter in fishing, why wouldn't they matter on this call? Why wouldn't they matter on this traffic stop? Why wouldn't they matter when you're going to meet your ex at a restaurant? And I say they do. And I say that extra amount of time that you put in thinking and planning for those contingencies and literally rehearsing it, Brian. How many of your friends, you say, "Hey, I have a business meeting. Could, could you guys come to coffee with me and I'm going to rehearse my shtick with you?" And you know your friends that some of them would be very supportive, and some would call you an [expletive] and make fun of you the whole time, but at least it's a rehearsal.

No, that is funny because I do that with Mikaela, that when she's got a presentation or something big that she has to do, and she'll be like, "Okay, can I go over this with you?" I was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Well, we'll just, you know, look at it simply, like, 'Dude, me, because I, you know, brief it back to me with bullet points because I have no idea about any of this stuff.'" She's like, "Okay." And so, she'll go through it, and sometimes now she doesn't even—she won't even go over it with me because she's, she's got it. She did the thing that she needed to do now, so she doesn't even actually have to rehearse because she's got, "Oh, I did that same thing we did last time, it worked out real well." And I was like, "Yeah, because you're dumbing it down. Bullet points, these are leadership. You don't need no big picture, they just want to know what, what the important thing is. So, less is more, and do it this way. You can answer all the questions because you can go into detail about this stuff, but what are exactly the ways you want—" She's like, "Oh, yeah, okay." It's like, "Wow, you're really good at this." I'm like, "Babe, once again, do you know what I do for a living?"

Exactly. But look at what we brought up on this call, you and I. When it comes to basic human interactions, we're stymied. We do not understand that low level of complexity thing. Right? Okay. And we get frustrated by it. But if you and I are in a tense negotiation where people are armed and there are already dead bodies on the ground, we're fine. Yeah. And somebody's going, "Hey, they just popped smoke, and the helo's inbound." And we're going, "Okay, switch them to channel three," you know what I'm saying? So, and we even have to ask for help in those situations. So, it's right for me after this call to call Shelley and say, "Hey, I was an ass this morning. I'm sorry about it." I've waited three and a half hours to do it, but that's how things get fixed.

Right. Right. Some things are inevitably going to not get fixed, and you've got to understand, you're not going to be the savior on that day. No. Coming in, you're not going to be the hero in all those situations. So, plan for it now. Expectation management, you know, of yourself and the situation, like, what are you really trying to accomplish here? And let's not go too far. Right? There's—

Exactly.

What's that meme? It's like, "Hey, there's a, you know, there's a, there's a lot of people who had some really big goals, and a lot of those people are dead bodies on Mount Everest right now." I just want to kind of reiterate because I think it's kind of good that we're sort of bringing in for a landing here, but just a couple of minutes ago, you said, "You know, look for stress fractures in everyday things." There are always stress fractures showing before the building collapses. Before, always. There's always, always something there. And actually, most of them in all of these situations are noticeable. It's either someone didn't take the time or didn't know how. So, I like how you simply put, "You know, look for the stress fractures in everyday things." What's, what's, what's weak here in this foundation, right? Yes. Of this situation that I'm going into, that may get worse as the, as I go forward or as more weight gets—

And stop thinking about it as a cop or a soldier, start thinking about it as a parent or a student. Those stress fractures, that's where it's going to happen. You know what? I haven't gone on Babbel today and done my Spanish. I, I did it the last three days, so I'm going to plan out some time this afternoon because consistency and persistence is how I'm going to learn that. And then you look at that and you go, "Well, then I've got this and that." Well, something's got to give. Those are the stress fractures I'm talking about. Because what happens is when you look the other way over time and you put a Band-Aid over that warning light on your engine, Brian, they're not going to get better. And the little things are what's going to add up and creep up and make the mistake and turn it into a crime scene.

Yeah. And that's why, we're all about sort of the thinking points. What are the habits of thought? What are the habits of action? What are these, these, you know, sort of cognitive skills I can use versus learning how to do something every single time? And that's hopefully came across in this episode. So, I do appreciate everyone tuning in. We've got more on our Patreon side, 100%. So, please answer 300—

200th episode, you're going to be applauded, man. This is all your idea. Everything.

Yeah. Grew out of your brain. Like the Samson Heritage Sports, just to do it and just to take photos and just to put it on social media. I really think, let's do it for donations and give that money to a local project or homeless shelter, yeah, domestic violence, the Ronald McDonald House. That's always a good one to donate to. Let's do that, Brian. I, I would do it, but, yeah. But you see, I look like a television.

Well, it just won't be, it won't be, it won't be a long enough episode to do it if we're, if they're braiding your hair. That's all.

So, yeah. No, we do appreciate everyone listening, tuning in, like we say, please, if you enjoy parts of the episode or any of the episode, share it with your friends. Get it around, that kind of helps us out quite a bit. We do have our Patreon side, which we've got even more coming up, and they get some behind-the-scenes scoop and discounts on stuff that we have coming up. So, it's only a couple of bucks a month, and we do our extra stuff and the things that we want to discuss in detail, sort of behind a paywall a little bit to kind of keep the riffraff out and keep it from getting into the wrong hands. At least, at least there's, there's some, some barrier to entry on that one. So, there's a lot on there that you can go back and check out. So, we thank everyone for tuning in. Check out the episode details for any of the links of this stuff and don't forget that training changes behavior.