L.O.G. 209 But can we use it in training

All right, well, good morning, Greg, on this Friday morning when we're recording this episode. And what we're going to be talking about today is something we've touched on in different episodes, either directly in a small discussion or implicitly talking about training. But it comes from a question from one of our listeners who reached out, and it has to do, well, it has to do a lot with what's called stress inoculation training. And it has to do with how your brain learns, and threat sensory neurons and what those trigger, and how to do that kind of correctly. And we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly with a lot of the stuff in terms of training and scenario-based stuff that people come up with.

So I kind of want to have this discussion today, and we're going to talk about a couple things: what elements are needed, what you don't need, and then kind of the broader picture of what happens when we take science from one area and try to apply it to another area. And I guess we'll kind of keep the discussion around that, and I know we'll bounce around a bit. But I figured I'd start with a little bit of background about what's called stress inoculation training, right? Because that's basically, you know, it's the psychological concept, it's a form of cognitive behavioral therapy. And so the idea is to build resilience with someone so they can cope effectively with different stressors. So that's the basic thing, and it came from a therapeutic setting.

So, that could be something as simple as, "I'm terrified of elevators, and I won't go on an elevator." And I'm getting some type of psychotherapy for it. And maybe that starts with, you know, Greg, you're my therapist. That would be terrifying, by the way, if you were my therapist.

I'd not fashion myself as a therapist, or enabler, or a therapist the rapist.

Yeah, it's right there in the word. That's horrific. You know, that's horrific. So the idea would be, "Okay, maybe we have to discuss elevators and what triggers that in me, right?" Exactly. No, show me a photo of an elevator, and then you can take me to an elevator, and then you can get me on it, and then off of it. And then I go once, and then I learn. Yeah.

So, it's a very simple explanation for the reason behind it. But the idea is to deal with stressful situations; I have to learn about this. Now it kind of got called this stress inoculation. But inoculation, in that sense, is just sort of an analogy, almost like a vaccination, right? I give you a small dose of something, your body learns, "Oh crap, I've got to fight this off." So that way, the next time I'm exposed to it, especially at a much larger dose or a larger setting, my body goes, "Nope, I've dealt with this before. I got this. I'm not going to let it get me sick. I'm going to attack this before it becomes a problem."

Now, that's a big leap there in a few ways, right, to call that inoculation. But the issue is, the science behind it feels right. It sounds right, because the science behind what's called stress inoculation training, or cognitive behavioral therapy, is good. And that may work, and there may be a lot to point to. But now, to take that and then do a leap into, you know, military, law enforcement type training, or you're training for some type of chaotic event, things get a little murky, right? It gets a little bit different.

It's a little more than murky. I think that you're running up against some obstacles, right? I mean, it's fair to say that there are some strong objections and obstacles for that.

Thank you. You are. And so I'll start with just a little bit of background, too, about back when I was working out at the Infantry Immersive Trainer (IIT). And that was the idea behind that on Pendleton, and what General Mattis wanted, and was built back in 2007 or '08, or whatever it was. But his whole thing was, "I want a Marine's first firefight to be no worse than his last training evolution." Which, okay, that's a great theory. That's a great intent. Love that sort of mission statement. Okay, now, how do you do that?

They brought out all the big-brain scientists, brought all kinds of different folks, did some different testing, cortisol testing, put you through scenario-based training as realistic as possible. In some ways, we learned, "Okay, the idea was to learn what elements do you need? What don't you need? How should this be conducted?" Because how you conduct it is just as important as the elements you have within that training, because you have to modify it to different training levels, what the actual intent is, what your mission is, what the training objectives are. All that stuff has to be taken into account.

And what you find out is, because that place was another one of those in the DoD, especially with their endless bucket of money, "We'll build all kinds of stuff and make it look exactly like where you're going and have people speak the language there, and then have scent generators in there." Remember, the dinosaur dung was my favorite, "Oh my gosh" generator. And we're going to have all this stuff in here. And what would often happen is people would become overwhelmed by events. And then some people were setting up training where, you know, it ends up everyone on their team dies. And you're like, "What is going on here?" And it completely overwhelms the system.

And so you have what I would call negative training. You're actually not learning anything, or you're learning, in that case, to do the wrong thing. And some of this stuff is taken and put into training elements, and becomes, "I just want to stress you out to see how you do." Okay, well, if that's not an objective, there's no training objective behind that. And if there's no measurement and assessment, then you're just, it's just activity, right? It's not training; it's activity.

One minor thing: sometimes we say, "Yeah, even though it's well-intentioned..." A lot of it isn't. What I mean by that is, you think you have the best of intentions, but you never did the research to find out that you're creating a negative feedback loop.

Yes, it's dangerous.

Yeah, it's not just that we're opposed to this, that's... we're saying that it's dangerous, that it has the potential for a negative outcome to still...

The reinforce... Yeah, you're reinforcing the wrong response, and you're reinforcing this idea that you are going to get overwhelmed, and this is what you need to do. And then I even see stuff, and we talked about this, too, with some of the different like virtual reality and video-based training stuff that we've done, and we consult with, and we write different programs for. You know, another one I've seen is where we try to mimic real events, or come up with, "I'm going to make you do all this physical activity, and then we're going to do a live fire drill, or a simulation drill, a video-based simulation, whatever it is. And I'm going to get your heart rate up and get you sweating and moving to simulate some sort of realistic scenario."

And again, that's one of those where, like, I understand what you're talking about, but that's like you're just doing fear-based preparation, like you're going to prepare to be scared, and this is what's going to happen, and you have to learn how to deal with it. And I think that's kind of the wrong way to look at it, because, one, there's—and we've talked about this before—there's a difference between an increase in oxygen demand for my body because I'm just working out is one thing, right? That's going to increase my heart rate and blood pressure, all the stuff, and limit my performance a little bit. That's completely different than a response of an increase in heart rate due to a sympathetic nervous system response, right? A fight-or-flight response, releasing epinephrine and cortisol and all that stuff. Those are two completely different pathways. And you can't just... otherwise, you know, we would just... I don't know, cardio would be, "I'm going to go smoke meth," because that's going to jack my heart rate up and have all these responses, and now that's what I'm just doing running on the treadmill, right? I mean, it's the same thing. So there's a lot in here that I kind of just brought up, Greg, and I want to throw it to you. But, you know...

Yeah, no, I want everything you said made sense. But I'll just lay out some of the elements.

I'm discussing here because, and to just inform everyone, right now, this is where it's coming from, right? This is where these terms come from. This is where we've seen things go wrong before in the past. And sometimes it's well-intentioned, but something well-intentioned could be catastrophic and do something wrong. And precisely if there's no point or purpose behind it, then why are you doing it? Exactly. And...

Right.

So that's kind of what we lay out, but again, and I want to try to answer, like, "Well, what elements do need to be there? What does this really mean? How do I make sense of it? How do I use some of the good science to inform my own training that I'm doing?"

Yeah, so let's start with a very simple thing. First of all, folks, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has been around for a good long time, and it works. As a matter of fact, it works very well in stuff like dealing with a person that has a drug or an alcohol or a fetish where they can't get out of the abuse cycle. It works very well. Okay, and it's got a rich history. So there's like 17 or 18, you'll have to check me on this, different functions of cognitive behavioral therapy, where stress inoculation is like the seventh. So it's one of them, it's one of the many things. So, yeah, people say, "Well, heuristics." I hear "heuristics" used all the time, and I hear it used wrong. And there's so many types of heuristics, there's a lot of it. So understand that when you go in there and just use cognitive behavioral therapy, you're talking of a field of study, right?

So then let's talk about stress inoculation. The goal of stress inoculation is to help you build resistance to sources of stress or anxiety. It's in the title, and you said it perfectly, because it mimics how we would go after a disease, right? How do you go after a virus? And so it teaches your mind to react to possible stressors in a healthier way with better outcomes than it's doing right now. So that's directly to the point that you were talking about about influencing training the wrong way.

And I'll give you two very brief examples before I go to Dean's comment and how important Dean's question is, right? So, Brian, number one, you made the scent generator comment. I will posit this for everybody listening: a scent generator without olfactory training is absolutely useless and counterproductive. What do I mean by that? Okay, if I just have to keep stumbling through the thing, and then come out and you go, "Hey, did you notice anything?" And I go, "It smelled like shit in there." Hey, exactly. Now go back through and we're going to do it a couple. "That's what combat smells like." No.

So if you were going to do something, and you said something simple like, "Hey, do me a favor, go get one cotton ball. And Brian, before you come into the room, do me a favor, put some nail polish remover on it." And then as we're talking, you walk in, and you walk up and down the aisles, and then you stand by the door, and I go, "Hey, anybody know what that is?" And somebody goes, "Yeah, nail polish remover." And I go, "Why is that important?" And then we start talking about acetone and how that smell should be in a nail salon, but Brian, now we're finding it overpoweringly in a parking garage. And guess what? Maybe that's what bombs are made of. Do you understand how we're tying something to it, and cognitively we're doing the Rubik's Cube? Let's put one of these in there until the explanatory storyline fits. That's not what they were doing; they were shoving smells in there without any training that went on to it.

I'll go to the next one: when we were in someplace in Colorado conducting training just before this big Utah... it was having the Olympics. And so we had all the security teams that had come in, and we were doing training for them sometime ago. So they had their training lane set up, and they go, "Hey, what do you think we should add?" And so—and this is called a dick move in science—so we had the units that had to come in, and each one of them were timed, and they were measured for the response and how they did. So the unit came in, and you know how shoot lanes sometimes have these portable doors that you can boot, the door ram the door? So we set three up on the lane where you would park before you went out to do the shooting, and each one of them had an address on it. So you got a dispatch call off the range. You had to have your weapons, which everything's loaded, get into one of the sky cars that was available and ready for you that had already been trained and tested and safe. And you had to drive the three-quarters of a mile on this dirt road to get to the range. And then you pulled up, and you call out at the scene, right? And then you walk up, and none of the doors are the right address. That's flipping cognitive. Now what do you do?

So everybody's ready to boot the door, and they're going, and they go, "Hey, we got a thing." Now the next phase of it is now they have to solve for X. We've got the right door, and they went in. And during the training, a ceasefire was called, "Lock and clear all weapons." "Okay, we have an injury here." And it was the drag dummy. "I have to move the drag dummy from location one to location two, and I have to try Evac strategy while taking fire." Now what you're doing, Brian, is you're making a think piece that's involved with all the training. Skillfully blending a scenario isn't just saying, "Hey, one time we walked into Buscemi's and it was getting robbed." And I know I'm poking some people in the eye, but listen, I've seen your stuff, and just because you're a PhD doesn't mean your stuff holds water. There are elements of training that have to be vetted and tested, and those elements of the education have to be infused at the right point for it to be true cognitive training.

And Dean asked... Dean made a comment about Li's (L.I.) a research paper in 2022. And, Brian, we can put a link. I'll put the link in it, so you can go ahead and read. So basically this is...

Yeah, I've got it right up here.

And so he said, "Mounting evidence from human and animal studies reports Li's (L.I.'s) concept of a new roadmap of how threats are processed in the sensory cortex. And this theory fills a long-standing gap and resolves an important controversy and myth in the research of threat processing." So the point being that the brain's sensory cortex stores long-term mnemonic representations of threats, meaning humans can relive the past or simulate future scenarios by integrating features of their memory into the assessment of a new situation. Pause. Your brain already does it.

It does.

And just because what you're doing is, you're saying, "Hey, the amygdala is the old center of fear." What we found is that the sensory cortex lights up before the amygdala. Of course it is not the only one, right? Yes, so we've got visual cues, we've got auditory cues, we've got the sensory perception from your Dactyl, from skin, from touching. We have your fear part of your amygdala doesn't trigger fear when it's testing; it's testing the environment so you don't go to your fear response. And it only inhibits the prefrontal cortex when it gets enough sensors that say something is going sideways. So, not to make a Dean, your question, yeah, it was great, valid, and perfect. And it was based on a great study. I agree, it's a small test group hypothesis, yeah. But I'm telling you what they didn't do: they didn't tell you this is how things already are, because all of those things, like Brian said, your sympathetic and your parasympathetic are constantly sampling your environment. Why? To make it less dangerous and stressful for you. Why? Because your brain doesn't want you to spend any of your sensory neurons on useless shit. Why? Because they've already been cataloged to do what, Brian? To measure your own environment for danger or opportunity.

Yeah. So, so it's a great question, and so the bigger question he was asking is because this influences how we respond to fear triggers, couldn't we use it in training?

Yeah.

And we're right back to where you started.

Absolutely, but we can't use cognitive behavioral therapy in the sense of developing training. But we can use inoculation training to enforce cognitive behavioral therapy. For example, Brian, I remember your first IED encounter. It's still in your brain like it happened yesterday. I don't want to trigger it now because we're not going to get through the gosh damn podcast. But the idea is, if I gave you—and we discussed this with General Steve Layfield, Maness, and Amos sitting out at the back of the IIT that one day on those folding chairs before the big section was built—if we could have that Marine that has PTSD, or that soldier walk back down the street that we can recreate infinitely in those environments, and have a successful outcome to that IED encounter, defuse the situation, to see that they could get people out of there, would that influence them? And the answer is clearly yes. Because attitudes and beliefs change. An inoculation theory would function as a motivational strategy to protect your attitudes from change. So you would still be the center of your world. You wouldn't have collapsed when those people died. You would go, "Okay, I got knocked down, but I get up again." Chumbawamba. And look, I can make a difference here. I can give myself first aid. I can call for a unit. Do you see what I'm saying? All those things that you felt disabled... What are our worst fears and our dreams? We're pulling the trigger, and the gun's not firing. You get what I'm trying to say? The big monster is coming, and I can't do anything about it. That flashlight's not working in the basement.

So, Brian, cognitive behavioral therapy is one thing, and it's the most effective means of treatment for things like substance abuse and mental health disorders. Why? Because you change and challenge the patterns and beliefs and trade them for something good.

Yes.

But in training, you have one chance to do it right cognitively. And what you have to do is you have to set up cognitive cues that lead to a likely outcome, and does the person achieve it or do they not? And if you don't set it up that way, then basically what you have is, "Tom flipped the tires faster than Billy did, and June did the fastest reload after climbing the rope." What does that data give you? How does that data prepare you for the real event?

On this one, and so, yeah, and that goes back to the, you know, "Is this... are we eliciting some sort of physiological response due to exercise, or are we eliciting it because our limbic system is engaged and we're having a sympathetic nervous system response?" And there's something there. You know, I get, "Yeah."

Add to that. Add to what you just said because that's a great thing. That should be the center argument. We're supposed to be replacing poor coping skills — cognition and emotion behaviors — with more adaptive coping skills, right? So, how can it be fear-triggered? How can we rely on training that's only about fear? That's the thing.

Is that, you know, I... you've heard me give the example to people before when they're talking about doing this, "Well, you know, we have these certain physical requirements, and then we're going to make it, you know, run around the building and throw the kettlebell around and do burpees. And then you're going to come in and you're going to do whether it's the video simulator or the live fire range." And, "Okay, like, that's skill building, and it's marksmanship training."

It's marksmanship training.

And it's working out. Those are the two things you're doing. It's like, "Well, no, it's developing this to operate under this response." I'm like, "No, you want to learn how to do that? All right, I'll tell you what right now. Give me your pistol and your three mags. I'm going to load them up. I'm not going to tell you how many rounds are in each one. I'm going to have you do no running, no lifting, nothing. We're going to go to the range, and I'm not going to tell you the course of fire or how much time you have until we get to each line. And then here's the thing: if you fail, you're fired." Which one would you rather do? I'll take the workout all day long because that uncertainty and creating that sympathy, like... Meaning, I'm not saying go do that. I'm saying that's an example of that. That to you is psychologically terrifying, whereas the other one is physically difficult. Two completely different things.

But you need both, right? Listen, cops die pushing a stalled car out of an intersection because they have a myocardial infarction. So we need the help...

The tactics for the reload...

No, no, I'm saying you have to say that because there are people listening that are combining those things together when they can't fit. And you're saying, "Yeah, but in a real event I have to run and jump and do..." Yeah, I got it. But you know what your cognitive brain is going, "Yeah, I get all that, and I'll be ready when you're ready." Okay, what it's saying though is it's saying critical thinking and advanced critical thinking. So what's the difference? Critical thinking, everybody does critical thinking, "Holy shit, should I have this next hamburger or should I go to the gym?" right? We all do that all the time, and we make decisions based on... So what's the difference between advanced critical thinking? Advanced critical thinking is when you start lining up the options and you say these have certain benefits, and these have certain outcomes that are not beneficial. And guess what? I want to replace my errors in thinking by doing healthier and smarter patterns, right? So that's advanced critical thinking. So not just, "Can I use it to get myself out of this room," you know, one of those games where they got the challenges, "Get out of the room"? But can I apply one thing that I learned from that room next time I encounter somebody on the street, or I'm on a traffic stop, or somebody comes in waving a gun around? If you can't equate the challenge to the real event, then what you're doing is you're having fun, but it ain't training.

Yeah, and and it's... well, it's not... it's certainly not. So, that kind of leads to, "What is stress inoculation training then? What does that actually mean? Can... is that even a real thing? Can I actually do it, and what would it actually look like?" And it's not that it's a real thing in that sense, but I think a lot of people get mixed up, and I've always called it, "Are you doing stress inoculation, or is this just sensory deprivation?" Meaning, the first time I eat a flashbang, dude, that thing's brutal. You do enough of them, you know, you're throwing them at each other for fun at that point. Okay, it's not that I'm really... that doesn't... removing that or not having that be such a powerful stimulus to me anymore, yes, of course, in a situation that's going to... it doesn't... it doesn't increase my ability to sense making, problem-solve. It just doesn't. I won't get as overwhelmed cognitively, like my cognitive load will become overwhelmed in that situation because I've already been exposed to this thing before. However, that won't help me think any better in that situation. It will in the sense that I'm not overwhelmed so I can... I have more cognitive bandwidth, so to speak, right? But it doesn't give me better options, you know what I'm saying?

So it limits your options, and this is why it's dangerous. So today we're doing the CS gas house, and we're going to take our masks off in the middle, as always, march around like idiots saying something. Okay, and so what I learned through my inoculation, meaning that each time that I do it, I hate it more, is that on that day I'm going to go to the dentist, or I'm going to find another thing to do so I can skip it. You get what I'm trying to say? Because I don't want to do it. So avoidance isn't an effective means of treatment. Yeah.

Okay, so then what do you learn from the flashbang or the gas room where you go in and they light you up with the paintballs or ammunition? Right? What do you learn? You learn not to go in that damn room because you know when you're... So what's happening is your cause and effect is skewed, and you begin to do what scientists have referred to as gaming the game. So you have adaptive coping skills, that's what we teach, and you have gaming the game. Where do you want to be when this ends up?

And so what do you need to add to training? Well, you can have 10 people in line on a football field and have your person with their SIM gun ready to go, and then one steps forward, one puts the thing and runs their hand through their hair, and then one lays down on the ground really quick, and one reaches and comes out with a wallet. You can do that all day long, and the flinch reflex is going to start becoming inoculated against those rapid movements because there's only one or two out of the people that come up with a weapon, and one is a guy with a bat, which is easy, and one is a guy with a gun, which is much more complicated. Brian, what consequences did I learn, right? Are those consequences immediately adaptive as a future coping skill? And if they're not, here I'm back again, you're not training, you're just having fun. And I know I've poked some people in the eye, but it's not meant that way. What skills are you transferring?

Well, that is a... I'm training for a faster response, and that's what all...

How does that replace an error?

That's what I'm saying. I'm with you. So I know a lot of what this comes down to is what I see is, you know, you're getting better and better at training for your response to something, and you are, and you're really good. But we're missing the point, and the point is, you don't have to let it get to that level. You know, the point is there's a series of events that happened before that, or there's things I can determine or influence the outcome. If I'm constantly going through, you know, it's like everyone... I... it's like people I know of every different type of gadget and weapon system and this, that, and the other thing they got all at their house and this, "Well, if this happens, then we do this, and if this..." And I'm like, "So you're just going to wander through life just reacting to whatever situation comes up?" Okay, I got one for you. Eventually you're going to reach one that you didn't think of, though. You know what I mean?

So here's two for you, Brian, to get you going. The one is that every single movie and book that were written about a person that was going to go to the gas chamber or be hung or anything else was that their last meal they were going to ask for a turkey leg so they could fashion it into a weapon and stab their way out. So if you're sitting there going, "I've been in solitary for 23 years, but my weight is like..." and it's right on the gallows, probably not a good life insurance plan, right? Well, you had more time in there to think of something, I don't think so.

So the second part of that is we encounter people sometimes that come up with good, rudimentary, but good, cognitive challenges. So, for example, "During this scenario, you have to make a chess move, not a checker's move. You have to play this chess match and keep it going." Now listen, I'm not making fun of anybody, that's true cognitive training. Yeah.

But but it's not outcomes based, and what do I mean by that?

What I mean is, if you go up against a chess champion in the next challenge, well, you're going to have an advantage, right?

I... so here's... here's how I would explain that and say, I've seen stuff like that before, and I think it could be good. I think it's good if obviously the outcome is not what you do in the chess game, the outcome is what you do in the training portion. But...

Right now, if it's equally weighted, how do you... No, no, no.

Well, as long as how you're measuring that effectiveness. And even then, you have to remember, too, it's not how well they did at the training, it's how did this work out in a real life situation? I mean, that's the ultimate, that's what we... And honestly, I see a lot of great stuff where I'm like, "Hey, this is good, and I love your measurement. Oh, look how well it works." It's like, "No, that's how well the training works within the training scenario." Like, yes, you have to... the measurement comes because it, which is which is the most difficult part of all of this, because—and this is why I caution in general, why I said it at the beginning of going from the science in the lab to the street—because there's a big, big, big, big gap there. There's a big jump. And so it doesn't always translate. Some of it, or maybe at a theoretical conceptual level it will, but not in the way you measure it in a college course with a bunch of folks going through getting their PhDs, different Master's, and undergrads, right, versus an actual real-life situation. And you can mimic that so much, right? But to get it close enough, you can't always measure all of these different things that we're learning and trying to do. So, so you have to because because it's not just these micro interactions, maybe, Greg. It's exactly what cognitive behavioral therapy is: recreating those micros, yeah, very specific context.

And recreating this because your fear of elevators elevated your fear of public speaking, so I'm going to go have you public speak.

Okay, well, now what we're talking about is, "I've got to understand the situation, and I'm going to simulate it, but it's not going to be anything like... it's not going to be like the one you're going to experience in life." Meaning there's going to be some differences there. So if I can't get you to extrapolate and conceptualize that information from this training exercise to a real event, that's where the leap has to go. That's where the... that's where the most important part of that leap is to get it in the street, because the science is great in the classroom. And I'll read the book, and I'll put it right back on the damn shelf where it belongs, because it does not impact dendrites. It cannot. It cannot.

So, so look, you can teach someone how to categorize problems into emotion-focused or problem-focused. So you have these two things, right? And the idea behind both of them is so they can better treat their negative situations by giving them a skill that they can use to cope with the stresses. So you can ramp that back to the left, so it's at the trigger points. So a scent there makes sense, or a sound there makes sense. Why? Because in the behavioral therapy, meaning in a controlled setting, now you say, "Hey, you use this term a lot," you say, "Hey, listen, I knew better than going to that house because it was domestic going on at my own house, so I just went to their neighbor's house to eat." We both have that experience growing up, you know, and it's just how things were in Detroit, in Chicago, right? So you learned that. You don't know when you learned that, but there's certain triggers that came with that memory. And this is right back to Dean's comment, right? So now I have that mental model, and it's tucked away, and all of a sudden I come in and I hear a plate get dropped, and then I hear a loud voice, Brian, and I smell that something's burning on the stove. And immediately I'm transported back, and now I'm back into a negative interpretation, a negative cognitive interpretation that I have to overcome. And what did we do? We cried, or we hid behind Mom's skirt, or we ran.

So what we tried to do with Holderman—everybody kiss my ass, I'm not trying to sell Holderman, I'm just trying to talk about habits and behaviors—what we did is we swapped negative cognitive interpretations, but more gosh damn consequences for positive ones. So what we did is we made the lava, and if you stepped on the lava your foot burned, I'm being metaphoric. Yeah, yeah. But listen, you don't have to step in the lava 17 times at the beginning of a scenario to learn that. But now what we did is we did the the... what's that guy's name? Raiders of the Lost Ark. We went in, and he stepped on the thing, and it fell. Then he had to play the... Yeah, what we did is we put hard but solvable situations. So we took the CBT challenges, Brian, but we put them into a real event. Not for that scenario if you're watching that scenario and going, "Well, I may never encounter that," that's the point you're getting to, the point of what we're getting at here, too, is I...

The one, the first rule of simulation is, you can simulate anything, but you can't simulate everything. And you don't need to.

You don't need to, and you shouldn't.

So, so it's taking the element, like you brought up a bunch of different situations, whether it's an interaction with a group of people, a domestic violence situation, a car accident. I can boil those all down and find out, you know, what's the core elements that are involved in all of them? What are the ingredients? And then now I can take this...

Exactly.

...the role of a trainer, and set them up into a scenario, right? And as long as those ingredients are there and they happen in a somewhat logical manner as if they would in real life, it doesn't have to be exact, right? It's just close enough. Then my brain learns. I'm actually dealing with, "Okay, I see what the situation is here. There's way too much salt in this right now." "Okay, I see what this situation is here. There's way too much pepper here." "Oh, I see, this is cooked." So now, no matter what I'm eating, I will understand what that underlying issue is, and then I can address it. And if I put those into different simulated training events, then I'm doing it for real. It's like I do with the the Insurgent at home. You know, I always do scenario-based training, but I do the Miyagi sometimes because that's the way the girls will listen to me is I have to be training them without them knowing that they're being trained.

That's so funny because you're outnumbered.

Well, it's the I used to do the story one with the Insurgent where we tell stories at night, and then I would have her... we go back and forth. I'd start, or she'd start it, and then we'd take these characters. But what I'm doing is a soft interrogation because I'm inputting different characters in to elicit responses out of her because I'm trying to see what's on her mind or what's important to her. So we just did this one, but as she's getting older now, it's getting goofier or funnier, or she kind of knows it. And then she came up with this one, and then there was this weird thing where this girl was sleeping and she was having these crazy dreams, and she went in this whole thing. And then I ended the story because I wanted to go to bed, and I go, "Yes, and it turns out the police came to the house, and they got everyone out, and they didn't know what it was. And then the fire department showed up, and they found it was just a gas leak underneath her room." And I go, "And that's why we change the batteries on our carbon monoxide detector every year." And she busted out laughing. She's like, "Why did you end the story that way?" I was like, "Because I have to tie in a lesson here somewhere."

Okay, Aesop.

Something so simple. And she's like, "You're so annoying!" But the point I'm trying to make is interjecting those spirals into it. I get to, one, challenge you cognitively — you're controlling the outcome — and two, make minor corrections in stride. So what you're talking about there is, look, there's a paradigm shift because for all the thinking people in the room — and I don't mean that as an insult, some of you tune in just to hear Brian and I swear. Some of you tune in because you're wondering, "Can I get fatter and still sit in his chair?"

Whatever you're motivated by. Care products, exactly. And what pants are you wearing today, right?

But the idea is that the bottom line of it is, this inoculation training at its inception was designed to give you small doses of what you're going to face so when you did face it, it wasn't going to be as bad, right? And while well-meaning, okay, the real way to do something is to say, "Listen, you're always going to have fear. It's shitty being in a firefight. These explosions near you that rip that person in half, and now you've got all this black shit coming out of your nose, and you're not sure if you're going to live and die." We all get that. But you can power through it, and here's how. So what you've got to do is you've got to challenge a person's way of thinking because before it was saying inoculation is built so we can't challenge your way of thinking. We can't change the fundamental who you are. But the idea is you have to do that. You have to change my way of thinking and reacting to certain external elements or I'm not adaptable. And the key to resilience is adaptability. So when I go in, I'm always going to be scared. It's okay to be scared. A damn dispatcher is going to be scared when they're sending you to a shitty call, and they're not even there. Ride that wave. How do I put forth my best human performance in that situation? And real cognitive training challenges exactly that. It's not a magic pill that you bite and I'm not afraid anymore. You're always going to be afraid.

Yeah, and you know it's creating the right, the positive kind of biases, right? Because I know everyone thinks that "bias" is a bad word. It's absolutely...

It's not a bad word.

Exactly. But the reason why some people are really, really good at something is because they have... they have built up the expert level biases in that specific domain and allow them to think faster and move faster and see things before that one within. We call that an expert model, right?

Yeah.

So that whether it's in sports or thinking, that that's what those are. And kind of what you were talking about, too, is how we frame those discussions and how we look at it. I mean, you know, it used to be, "If you ever have to shoot someone or kill someone, it's going to be the hardest thing you ever have to do, and it's going to fundamentally change your life." Well, yeah, now it will. Now it will be... you train me to think that way. People are doing it every day. It's, well, Greg, it's been a trend since humans have been around.

It's...

I don't think it's going anywhere. There's... I read about, we do it a lot less now than we used to, actually. But you get what I'm saying, it gets into how you frame it, what you're talking about. If I get... if I give you the option, if I tell you this is what's going to happen to you in this situation, then that's what's going to happen in this situation. If I tell you that you have options... I just remember literally one time I was doing a thing, and I hadn't slept in two days, and hadn't eaten in three days, or whatever it was, or two days. And I was like, "You know, this guy's like, 'Well, hey, how are you feeling?'" I was like, "I can barely stand up. I... I'm so tired, I'm so hungry." And he's like, "Yeah, you haven't slept in two days, and I think you ate once the other day. So they should be..." And it just kind of hit me like, "Oh, okay. So I feel normal." And they're like, "There you go." Right? Normal, given the situation that I was in. But you get what I'm saying, it's, I can't get... Exactly that frame, right there, can reduce the number of errors that I make in reasoning.

Attributions should equal error correction, meaning that your training should have positive outcomes that we trade for likely negative outcomes. And the interpretation that your brain makes can either be emotion-focused or problem-focused. So training that is only problem-focused means that, "Okay, we have to be diverse and have equity and inclusion, so when you go up make sure that you don't use these nine words when you're talking to this next person." So now I'm front-loaded for having to do contacts and relevance on lexicon, rather than saying, "Does this guy have a gun or not, or how do I de-escalate?" I can't occupy that same room. So what do I mean? I mean now that I walk up to the guy and I go, "Hey, boys, listen up!" And a guy goes, "Boy?" Oh, here I am, I'm in the shit. So now what I did is I went from a problem-focused approach, where I wanted to come in and de-escalate, always be considering de-escalation, and I drove home in an emotion-focused answer, because now I'm pissed, they're pissed, and I have to come back through everything. So how do I do that? So what I do is I get into a situation. How do we get into a pool? There's two ways. We get my toe and go gradually, or are we jumping? So a problem-focused approach is we're jumping. An emotion-focused approach is we have to understand the urge to jump in, Brian, but we have to give ourselves the gift of time and distance and control, who, us. So if we can infuse into training controlling us, so you said biases, are there helpful biases? There is as many or more helpful biases that we use every day than negative biases. Yeah. So what do we want to do? We want to trade them. I come in and I go, "Look at this piece of shit here!" That's the first thing that's coming out of my brain, not out of my mouth, but out of my brain. So who do I got to fix?

And we recently went to a bunch of great people that have, what they cultivated is, an outward mindset. So, if you can solve you, then you can take that emotion-focused problem and regulate it, and solve the problem-focused question. And that's what training needs to do. Training needs to teach me the skills, not how to reload my weapon, I get that. Not how to be better marksmen, I get that. Not how to smell a Catholic and not, you know, make sure that I call the right people. But what it's doing is it's saying certain elements are going to come up during the training, and what we want you to do is solve for X by telling us which of these elements are more weighted than the other. And then a person goes, "What do you mean?" Well, for example, if I see a triple-beam scale and I see some emptied cellophane packets on the counter, and I see a shrink wrapper, and I also noticed that the place is a rental, you get what I'm trying to say? And the name is Kevin Smith, and there's traffic 24 hours a day. Houston. If I add all those things up, I may have an intent to deliver situation for a drug. And you're saying, "Yeah, but we would all know that." No, you don't know that because now what we do, Brian, is we put the things outside on a folding table, and we put a piece in the garage, right? We put a piece under the floor mat of the car. True cognitive training means if I have these external influences and stressors, can I still operate cognitively to do advanced critical thinking and come up with likely storylines? And that's the answer, no.

And to and then now to how do I induce some sort of arousal out of that to to learn faster, because we're all about accelerated learning. There's a lot of even just the skills of the basics. I mean, yes, people need to learn how to shoot and reload and all that stuff, but a lot of that, yeah, we understand that, you know, a lot of that takes way longer than it should due to how it's trained, but I'm not going to even go down that path. You can move a lot faster with adults than people choose to do, but you know, whatever. But what you were talking about is, one, obviously I'm creating that idea of how to sense-make, problem-solve. But I can... I need a little bit of arousal in there. And, you know, and meaning the way I... I kind of describe it is your brain hates being wrong more than it likes being right. I mean, they almost like being right, and we like craving that dopamine, so, and that's what it's expecting, and that's what it wants. So when it's wrong, it really does not like being wrong. So if it is wrong, you make a mistake, it will want to rapidly correct that mistake. But it can't be too powerful a mistake.

And when that interaction was funny, and I don't want to get into too much detail, the phone call we literally just got off of with that organization, and they were talking about, "Well, if the this..." because they were, you know, AI and data behind it, and they're acting with an avatar-based thing. They said, "Well, actually, we found the sweet spot was just slightly negative, but not too much that they didn't like it, because if they were happy all the time and interacting, then it just became a happy thing, and they weren't getting out of it. So this slightly negative way of doing it." And I was like, "Well, obviously that's how humans work," which it's just funny how they measured it down to a decimal point on their scale, which I thought was cool. But that's something we could have said right at the beginning. So while you're going to want to make it slightly this way, and what am I getting at is that that story it has to kind of intrigue me, and it has to have a potentially dangerous outcome, but I need to see that there's a win, and I need to see that there's a lot of exactly that can get me to that win, that I have options. It's not this scary thing that I'm going to go through. It's, "Ah, look, you're going to... you're going to see this. Here's what it smells like a little bit." You know, you...

You know, "You okay, go drive the car on the track for a long time, get those tires heated up, the engine not, so you can, 'Oh, okay, I know what that smells like.'" Because that sense memory is just like cooking. Like when you go to a fancy place that's got the piano playing in the background, I'm thinking of Bruno's in Madison Heights. Anybody that knows where that is, oh my gosh. When you go in there, Brian, a good chef is not just picking the right meat or the right vegetables; they're picking the right cooking temperature, and how long, and do they have the for the taste on the tongue? Oh my gosh. And the right knife to cut the sushi. There's all of these things, and that's the situation you're facing as a cop or a first responder or any human resources or as a school teacher. So you come in, and you've got all of this palette of beautiful things that you can build. What we're saying is, look for the gaps in those palettes, and look for the incongruent signals. By the way, I'm going to add marbles to your omelet this morning. Those things don't fit. When you get those, those are the cues in your environment that something's going sideways.

And I'm going back to my DEI remark only because DEI has been around since the dawn of man. It makes you have a stronger culture and team, so embrace it early. Next, you have to control your emotions when you're going into the situation because your emotions will screw you and make you limit options. And then we have to have enough problems in training that when I come to a newer, novel problem, it's kind of close enough to that other one. Brian, I'm not dealing with a bulldozer, but it's a semi-truck, and you know what? So it's close enough. All guns are close enough. Okay, yeah, all the explosives are close enough. So again, so let's not sit there and spend our money on useless interactions with inanimate objects that don't force my critical thinking. And you know what takes blood? Your brain takes blood, yeah. So the minute that you're not getting that rich oxygenated blood to your brain, you're not thinking. So what are we saying? We're saying change your entire training protocol? No, we're saying just like that cooking example, you can add a little bit of garlic, or a little bit of acid, or a little bit of endive at some point in the process, and you can make your training so much better.

Yeah. So go to somebody...

Yeah, it enhances, yeah. It creates more fidelity, which creates more options.

But what's the danger of fidelity? You don't need to. Yeah, you need a little bit, yeah, exactly, you don't. And that goes into you don't... it's cooking, right back. You don't need everything to be perfect. It doesn't have to have this perfect fidelity, whether it's the best graphics or the best... you can practice with a folding chair. All of this... No, that was that... that was a military thing with like, "Okay, we're going to get signs and buildings that we're going to make up to with all the set dressing to make it look every license plate. And then we're going to get people that speak that language." Any people in this training unit speak that language? No. Okay, so it really doesn't matter what language. We could do Pig Latin. You just want to simulate a language barrier, that's pretty easy to do, right? Just, you know. But it... and it's... it's, I don't need to look for the exact thing. It's a prototypical match. Your brain doesn't exactly... it really doesn't care.

Precisely. So a template match is exactitude. It's the exact same part that's being built on an assembly line to microscopic perfection. Your brain doesn't work in that. Your brain chunks information, which means that it does prototypical matches. It's where we get the concept of "close enough." And all you posers out there that are using my shit and not saying it, those things are the things that you need to understand because a prototypical match is cognitively close enough. And guess what? You spend a lot less money, Brian, so you can spend more money on your community. You spend less on the details on your scout car and those flipping coins that you're passing out, and you can spend more on yourself for triage training. Hey, you can kiss my ass today. You're so anti-coin. And then, and build something to a fallen officer or something, because that coin... you know what, a long time ago they go, "Hey, we're with this Beltway company," and they go, "Hey, what do we want to give out? We're really hot on coins." And this was double digits years ago. And we said, "Hey, you know what we want to do? We want to make a pink—my favorite color in the whole planet—for amputation tourniquet." Sorry, long day, my back is killing me. "We want to give out a pink tourniquet." And the guy goes, "Why the [expletive] would you want to give out a pink tourniquet?" If you look in your kit and you see that pink tourniquet, you'll remember immediately the value of the training that you've just got. And what's really important. I don't feel that way with the coin. I don't hand out tongue depressors to remember that, "Okay, I got to go to the dentist."

I just... I know, Brian, but see, with me, why do we link emotion in the...

You know, it grinds my gears, but emotions, Brian, are what ties... You know what? There's a segment of our audience that listens to this just to hear me blow off on something stupid. Sean, our consigliere, sent me one yesterday. I admonished somebody or cautioned somebody by saying, "Hey, you're washing your colors with your whites," you know, and I was talking about the clothes. And Sean just... he just sent me a [message]. And I'm like, "Hey, you know, but we really mean what we're saying." Someone would take that, "Yeah, that's stupid." I mean, I'm not even going to respond to people who want to do dumb shit like that. Don't spar with us because what we're trying to talk about is that whether it's an industrial accident, a domestic violence situation, or an ambush, you can change a negative interpretation of a situation for a positive one, and you can do that through your training, and it will linger, it will last.

But that's the... that's the point is, and that's why you boil it down to elements. And you brought it up, but I was fortunate enough, like, the first time, you know, I ever got hit by, it was a massive IED, and one of my buddies died and a lot of us got pretty messed up. But like, I was fortunate enough that the next day, we actually had the chaplain came by and put our whole team together. I was like, "All right, this is what happened. We're going to talk about it right now." And he, but he reframed it as, "Okay, but what did we do well that day?" And then so we sat there and did an After Action Review (AAR) of everything that happened, but we talked about, "Well, actually we did this really well. Hey, you know, we know that Medevac procedure actually, you know, it wasn't enough time to save his life, it was never going to happen. However, the process worked. Hey, what else did we do?" And so we...

Exactly.

But that was for a different purpose. And the idea, it's the same thing of any of those situations, like, "Well, here's all of the elements that we have in there. What are the ones that are difficult for you to understand? Let me explain, this is what that means. This is what it smells like. This is what it tastes like. This is what it feels like," right? "You're going to get this. Now let's go into this new area where we don't understand, how can I apply that?" Okay? And those simple ways of doing stuff. And you always call it, you know, like doing the morning roll call training, the five minutes I believe over something is huge. And you added in the example that was like, especially the HME one, or the home and explosive one. I mean, meeting with the with the ketones, with getting a nail polish remover on the thing, because there's only one place you should ever smell that, and that's...

And if you're not in a nail salon, right?

Or underneath my sink in my bathroom with my wife's stuff. Like then I shouldn't smell that anywhere else. But that's how we learn, right?

Right. So, so you've been around with me a long time. You've been... before we even knew each other, we knew each other. And before we were friends, we had to work together. And before we were colleagues, we had a different situation that we encountered. But all that time, you remember when I was training instructors, I would pick the senior instructor that had the best emotional memory and problem-focused approach, and I would put them in front of you consistently. And what types of things did they do all the time? And well, so what does that mean? Okay, end every sentence with, "Your Honor," right? Why? Because you reinforce things. Now I also have to reinforce that you're always going to be scared because you're telling me, but sitting down and training a cognitive interpretation for the real event is going to fix fear. And you can't fix fear. You can't fix your amygdalic response to it, but you can anticipate fear. And the anticipation of those situations make you smarter when the situation is happening.

And if you protect the elements and you're not surprised... a lot of that comes from the the fear we come from a surprise in a situation. What we're saying is actually focus on everything before that. Yes, there's going to be a little bit of fear, but it's not going to be as as much if you're figuring out because you're picking up, going, "Oh, okay, I see what's happening here. I see where this is going. I better do something now." So now I'm not in that paper where I'm, or I'm scared, or some fear response. Yes, it's going to be on board because of whatever the catastrophic situation is, but it hasn't... I wasn't surprised by it, therefore I can operate very, very well, in fact, better for short periods of time in that in that, you know, in that area.

I'm reading one the other day, and it just ticks me off. My back is killing me. And by the way, no tourniquet at all, folks. Send tourniquets. No, you can't do that through the mail. I'm reading one on LinkedIn, my only social media, and it's this person telling me how to be a life coach and all this other stuff, and they're 22 years old, and, "Look at me and I'm beautiful and I'm healthy and I'm wearing great clothes and I'm on a yacht." "I'll be your success model." And I'm just steaming. And so I tell Shelley why I'm steaming, and she goes, "Yeah, but you've got a kid in London that you're looking at that's like 30, and you're always thumbs up in all of his gear, Adam Parr." And I said Adam Parr almost died from a horrific injury when he was a kid. He grew up in a shit where he had to fight for life in a broken family dynamic. Adam, I'm not going to tell you a story, you tell it great. But that kid learned more, Brian, right before you had pubes, than most people will do in their entire life. So I would rather put my money there. So what am I saying? You also for training need a high-valence role model. What does that mean? That means somebody that knows how to get tap into that emotion because the emotional memory will last much longer than your problem-focused architecture. You... that's why they have to put those on laminated and they call them checklists because your brain doesn't need to, you know, that's why there's a nine-line. How many times did it take you doing a nine-line before it was flawless? Yeah, exactly. And then what did the helo or the A-10 pilot tell you, "No, no, no, kid, just tell me you know where you guys are. I got it from there." Yeah. How many times did things like that happen? That's how we learned, Brian. So training should mimic likely real-life events and challenge me and have an emotional toll, but it can't be fear-based and it can't be surprise-based every time because those will create a negative feedback loop, and your brain will just say, "Well, screw it, I'm not going there." And then you'll be doing the "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" in your car on the way to every call.

That makes sense, right? Because when when when living or dying is is so narrow, I want to make sure that my training is broad and deep, that's all I'm saying. No, and and I think that's kind of a good place to kind of start, you know, to to wrap it on. Um, you know, is is focusing on what what elements do I need to have? What don't I need to have? Is this really producing an outcome? What are my actual objectives? Even if it's something small like, "I have to have some objective to if I'm going to talk about something for five minutes, okay, what's... Okay, I only have five minutes, great. What's the one thing I want you to get from that?" And then so let me give you whatever. But that's the idea is is what's what's the what's the absolute takeaway here so we're not wasting anyone's time.

An old soldier that's retiring this month, a great cop, I'm not going to say any more than that. Early in his career, we're FTOing them, and Chantel will know who I'm talking about. And this kid's running from a stolen, and so we're right on the verge of our area coming into another area. So I'm absolutely unfamiliar with the way the streets go, and I tell the kid that's doing the running, I'm saying, "Don't go far because I'm not sure exactly where we are yet," right? You know me, you know map recon. But it's a foot pursuit, so this speedball that's just in amazing shape not only runs this kid down, but he tackles him, and they slide 15 feet on the pavement. Jeez. The kid that he tackled from the top of his head to the tips of his toes was one large gash bleeding. We had to go to the emergency room, we had to do everything, right? So the lesson for the day was, even right back to Jurassic Park, even though you could, should you have? Because wasn't there another option like on the grass? Okay, or a less lethal force munition, or rounding him into a corner and then when he goes to ground? Right? So what we're trying to teach in training is there's options, and certain options that you take have consequences. So spending all night in the ER with a kid for receiving and concealing stolen property. That's going to be a misdemeanor. It's going to be bounced on. Right now he's felony at the beginning, but you know, yeah. But you see what I'm trying to say? But how do you do that without crushing that cop's creativity? Because he did what he was trained to do. He's trained to, "Hey, they run, we chase them. They try to get away, we catch them." You see that balance that's there? So we've got to be legal, we've got to be moral, we've got to be ethical, but we also have to stimulate creativity. And creativity, the best, comes from advanced critical thinking, because your creativity is saying, "Hey, we're going to light a gas pump on fire and shoot it into the stolen tower," or, "We're going to do something else." Yeah, those are creative, and that's what's called case law, and you get a prison. Yeah, exactly. So let's give them good options. CBT gives people good options to trade for bad. Good training does the same thing.

Right at a cognitive level, right? Yeah, it's giving people the, like he just said, good options, or understanding that you have choices. And those better options than you're using, maybe focus on these, or what are the decisions I'm making.

Yep.

It also helps me understand that I have control, some control in the situation, right? I have something. I get to influence my own decision-making, so therefore I can write that outcome.

Brian, we're right back to how CBT could help suicidal behavior. The thinking on the therapeutic side. Why? Because if I know what is suicide, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. But not for the person that's pulling the trigger. They think it's never going to get better, right? So a CBT option would be to show them that they can trade those triggers and cognitive interpretations for a positive interpretation. Brian, so isn't that a form of training? That's what we're talking about. We're trying to stimulate minds. So if you're listening to us, we're not saying we have all the answers, but we're saying that these scientific answers that are based in valid theory are where your money should be going, not some gosh damn technological crap that's just going to sit in the corner and people are going to hang clothes on.

No, I'm saying we are the only ones with the answers. Yeah, exactly.

No, that's a good question. That's a better business plan doing anything like that. No, but Brian, no, no, no. You know why my ass is kicked? Because my assault bike fights back. It does so much, and guess what? It kicked my ass, and then I went and I lifted, and I gosh darn pulled a muscle, and I'm in pain because I'm trying to better myself. That's great, because when I go to somebody else's basement, Brian, their treadmill, I see all their clothes from the laundry hanging on it, and I see books stacked up. And that's not how you want to be, folks. If you've got a job and that job could kill you, you need to get your shit together and learn about what's best in training.

Okay, I think that's a good point to end on. So thanks everyone for tuning in. We do appreciate it. We obviously have more on the Patreon side, and you can check us out at the The Human Behavior Podcast. Please tell your friends about the show. If you enjoyed it, send them your favorite episode. That really helps us out a lot, so we do thank everyone for listening and those of you are sharing and obviously reaching out with questions, because that was today's topic, and this entire discussion was focused on a question and an article someone sent us. So we like to get to that and discuss it back and forth and get their reactions. Obviously, we do more of that on the Patreon side as well for those folks who want to help support the show, and we appreciate all of you for listening. We do thank you so much. We got a lot more coming up this year, so please stay tuned. And don't forget that training changes behavior.