L.O.G. 216

Alright, Greg, it looks like we are recording and ready to go for today. So, today we are going to talk about something we actually did a couple of weeks ago as part of a webinar series that we do with one of the companies that we work with, Milo. We've built a new training scenario for their video-based Trainers for law enforcement. We did a whole webinar, and we got a lot of good feedback on it and a lot of great questions. So, I figured we'll discuss it today, and I'll put the link for the webinar if you want to watch it in the episode details.

We brought up some rules of cognition. We brought up some things about predictive analysis and how we look at things. So, I thought it'd be good to share with our podcast audience how we look at these things. It started with the presentation itself, which began with a video of a traffic stop. A young police officer pulled someone over in the middle of the night. They were by themselves. The guy gets out of the vehicle, gets out of his driver's seat of the truck, goes into the back of the pickup truck, and reaches in there. The police officer yells, "Stop!" He doesn't stop. The police officer ends up shooting him because he pulled out something long and metal. The police officer thought it was a rifle, or a gun, or a shotgun, whatever, and it turned out to be this old, like, 90-year-old man's cane. The guy lived, right?

But everyone – it's just like every video I see of every incident of a concealed carry person, or a police officer, or whatever the situation is, a homeowner fighting in the front lawn, right? All this stuff is out every single day. In my opinion, about 95% of the analysis I see on all these is f---ing terrible. It's really, really bad, and it's all just so... and that's why you always got to look out for it. It's just, it's really bad. But anyway, what we did with this video is rather than going into that and Monday Morning Quarterbacking it from some technical perspective, what we tell everyone is that could happen to anyone. That will happen to you. That's a stupid mistake, what becomes a stupid mistake, right?

In the moment, you don't think it's a stupid mistake. In fact, you think it's quite the opposite. And what we look at them as is just a failure in sense-making. He didn't conduct really good predictive analysis; he failed in the sense-making part. Therefore, his decision was terrible; he made the wrong choice. Now, part of the reason – actually, a major part of the reason why he made the wrong choice – was his training. Meaning, we can train incorrectly sometimes, and so it forces us or allows us to make bad decisions because it can create an inevitability in a situation that isn't necessarily there to begin with until we add that in. And these are things that can be corrected and fixed.

So, in this webinar, we brought up a few different rules. We talked about predictive analysis in general, and I'll have you define what we talked about in there. Then, we brought up some basic rules of cognition. Those three basic rules of cognition, we'll get into each one, but that's kind of what we used as a general foundation for, one, specifically that webinar, but two, also for cognition and decision-making and how to train for it. Because the whole point is, how do you build a cognitive gym? What does it really look like? What does it need? And everyone can obviously, I'll have that link in the episode details, can watch the webinar, but I figured we'd jump into it today. So, I don't know if you want to start with how we talk about predictive analysis, Greg, or jump into these basic rules of cognition, but I just wanted to set it up there for everyone listening.

So, a good setup. I would say give me the opportunity to go back and talk about the video for just a second and your comment about inevitability. The idea is that we come up with all of these great platitudes that work into people's gyms, not necessarily their cognitive gyms, and we put a lot of faith behind them: "Train the way you fight, fight the way you train." Oh, that's what we said. We saw that channeled in that video. Now, why? Because we train the brain that the danger is going to come when you're alone, and you're going to be fighting for your life, and it's going to be at night, and the f---ing demon monster that's going to kill you, no one's going to be there to help you. And so, it doesn't matter what level of experience. As a matter of fact, the officer in that video was highly experienced, right? But what did he see? He saw what he wanted to see, just like a night or two ago, to your homework, folks. A cop sees a gun in the car, and the guy that he's got on a traffic stop is fumbling around. So, the officer decides, "I'm going to go for the gun in the car." The guy puts it in reverse and backs up and mows down the officer. Look, why does that keep happening, Brian? Because we continue to tell – I'm not going to tell the story about the Marines on the roof, but I will tell you that we continue to tell folks that they have superhuman traits, and they're not bound by the laws of physics or the laws of physiology. And we do that starting in the selection process, we do it at the academy, and we do it further on through their career. All of a sudden, we want to take that extra leap. We think we can outfight that or outrun that person, and then all of a sudden, we come around the corner and we're facing a gun, and it's like, "F---! We wish that would have been one of the spirals that we taught." Do you get where I'm going?

Yeah. And I think we're our own worst enemies sometimes. We actually are. And sometimes it takes a different perspective. For some reason, that just reminded me of a video I saw where it was a police pursuit with, I don't know how many vehicles, a dozen vehicles. People want to get into all these different decisions and everyone jumping out and running and not communicating, and so forth. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to go, "Well, you had 12 vehicles with lights and sirens going, loud noises, chasing after someone who was a wanted felon, and none of you are coming." From the outside, you're kind of like, "This is... this is a clusterf---." Not knowing what they know and haven't been through that training. It reminds me of sometimes in class when we've shown a traffic stop video before, and right when we started, or as we go through it, depending on how we do it, you have different special police officers like, "Okay, there's this. He could do this, he could do that." And then, anytime we have in the class, the only people who notice it typically in the class right at the beginning is someone who's maybe in the military but never a police officer, or they're just a civilian. And they're like, "Hey, wait a minute, this guy's foot is still on the brake. He never put the vehicle in park." And you're going, "Oh my god, that's so obvious!" Well, not when you do that every day. And this is kind of what we're getting into: the failures in sense-making. Because an expert creates cognitive biases that help them be really good at their job, those can also get in the way of how we do things sometimes.

That's spot on, Brian. Listen, I'm saying "you" but I mean a person like you. We have different experiences, exactly, for many reasons. But listen, I would ask somebody that's listening right now to imagine, unless you grew up on the streets of Chicago or Detroit and you were hustling, selling drugs and doing those things, how many times have you walked up to the driver's side of a window to talk to somebody inside of a car? And the second part of that question is, when you did, how many times was it a good response? You don't often do that and come up and go, "Hey, I just want to compliment you on driving on my side street." Normally, that's a very rare occasion, and there are high stakes.

But what happens to police officers, Brian? They do that 70 times a week, right? Okay, right. So, now what happens is some part of their brain quantifies that and says, "These 67 times were non-stressed," even though they were high-stress, right? They were thought-provoking because you never know what you're getting into. And now, these last three ended up being fight for our lives. That is what changes our brain circuitry. You just brought up the math point, and I always make the point: humans are, we just don't understand probability and statistics very well. That's why we're horrible at data science, that's why we're horrible at a lot of things. But it's because it's very, very difficult.

And what you just brought up is a perfect example of flipping the coin, right? If I flip a coin, I get a 50/50 chance that it's going to be heads, right? So, the same thing, 50/50 chance it's going to be tails. If I flip that coin 99 times in a row and I get heads, that 100th time I go to flip it, it's still a 50/50 chance. But that's not how our brain works. Everyone goes, "Well, you haven't had tails in a while, it's got to be tails," right? But that's not true. It's not. I know. I'll give you another one. I'll give you an irony, and it just happened yesterday.

So, I'm reading this long, protracted article on, it's a very good bill that they're trying to enact about workplace violence, but this one is bullying at work, rather than a domestic partnership or relationship. And so, the lawyer that chimes in at the beginning of the article says, "This is lancing a boil that's been festering for a long time, because we need to talk about the lexicon, the language of bullying, and define it." And I absolutely agree, but the very first thing that didn't really gross me out of the topic, you couldn't f---ing come up with something better than that? How ironic is it? That's hilarious. As soon as they said that, I'm like, "Okay, where the hell is this f---ing going?" I was like, "Well, wait, that's a good one." Have him in his brain when he was writing that.

So, you have to understand Rule Number One: no matter how well-trained or experienced, all humans have limits to their cognitive performance. What does that mean? That means that you are going to put your foot in your mouth. You are going to stick your own foot in your ass. You are going to make a mistake once in a while. Because, like we had a whole episode about priming, folks, if you haven't seen it, look it up. The idea is that if you're so primed to say something like when somebody catches you off guard, I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I had to run into town and get a gosh darn chip fixed in my windshield. Instead of paying the insurance, I had to pay the people to do glass. Gunnison's a small town, so I go in and I ask the lady at the counter, the most wonderful people I've ever met, Gunnison Glass. The lady at the counter says, "Hey, that's Kenny, and if you go out and ask him, he'll take a look at it right now and tell you how long it'll take." So, you know my hearing, so I know the guy's name is "Keen"? I honestly don't even know what she said, right? Okay, so I went, and that's how it sounded to me. So, I walk out in front of this nice guy's truck, and I go, "You, Keen?" And he goes, "Nope." I go, "How about a variation: King, Kane, Cone?" And he looks at me like I'm selling him something. He goes, "No, pal, wrong guy." And I go, "No, man, I just need you to check my windshield." His name was Kenny. I'll set it, and you know my frequency loss in my hearing.

So, Brian, what happened is I made up a story of what his name likely was. And when I went out, I was trying to be very nice and fish for the name, and what I ended up is creating a standoff. Do you see what I mean? So, we can be our own worst enemy because we don't understand that that limitation to my cognitive performance was my ability to hear correctly in that environment and determine the person's name. So, listening skills are important, but it's more important when I try to breach in that gap and go, "Hi, I'm Greg, by the way. Hey, let's start over." And that's what I ended up having to do. Greatest experience in my life, I love these folks and hopefully they're listening to The Human Behavior Podcast. But Brian, that's how it happened. So, imagine that happening with a known wanted fugitive, and you're at the door, and all of a sudden he figures out, and you figure out the guy. Okay, those are what we're talking about in that Rule Number One: no matter how well-trained or experienced, that carved video is going to happen because that gun and that cane are going to be in your mind the same tool. And when the guy starts not listening, that's going to inform, all of a sudden, the water's pouring into that, right? And then meanwhile, this guy's not listening because he can't hear you, and he's not understanding the last time he got pulled over, you know, 63 years ago, he was talking to the nicest guy in the world, and to walk back, so you don't have to walk up. But that's not the way it fell in. So, Keen and Kenny never occupied the same space in my mind.

So, how do we prepare for that, Brian? That's part of training. That's where Hoberman (company/concept) came in. And people right now, listen, if you want to make a change in training, you got to call Milo and go, "Hey, Milo, spend a couple of bucks on training." Because the idea is, Milo's a great partner and we love their strategic nature of it, but they're going like, "Yeah, but is this really a necessary change?" Yes, it's a necessary change, and it's a necessary change in all of police work because we talk more than we shoot, we talk more than we drive, we talk more than we ram a car. And then the next thing is driving. We drive more than we shoot, we drive, right? More traffic accidents, fatal shootings.

That's a great, great point. A lot of that, when we talk about how we do training and where we're at at different levels and what's good enough, you have a number of factors you're deciding on: one, what do I need to train for? How is that going to take place? What are the necessary skills? Some things take more time than others, but we focus on those things that we can control and that we know. I mean, that's the whole thing. I always give my buddies, when we talk about this stuff, my analogy is, "Alright, you're..." I have friends that shoot like crazy and they can do certain kinds of wild stuff. It's like, "What do you like shooting better at, a paper target or a steel target?" "Oh, I love hitting that steel against that thing!" I was like, "Yeah, you get immediate feedback, right? And you know you're doing something, you know you hit your target." When I'm sitting here, Greg, talking about communication and critical thinking, I don't feel like I'm getting that feedback right away, right? I don't get that hard ride, that adrenaline. Correct. Right.

So, part of it is that kind of decides on how we do stuff. But I like the framing of this first basic rule because it ties right back to those videos you see. It doesn't matter who you are or how well-trained you are, there are certain limits, right? So, everything – and we don't have to get too much into detail – but there are limitations to your eye and brain and what you can process. You have only a very small functional field of view, right? You can only take in so much. And now, if it's at night, you can take in way less, and you can see so much less than you actually think you can. I always give the story, if anyone's ever had or experienced tunnel vision where you really lose everything around you and you only see some (things) if you've been in some chaotic experience, that happens. And my thing is like, "Okay, good, that's actually all you ever see all the time. The rest is basically visual and perceptual fill." So, you actually...

Exactly. The definition of Rule Number Two: there's only so much information that we can receive, process, and use at any given time. So, people are going, "Well, what's the difference between one and two?" One and two is the understanding that you have limitations, just like you have physical limitations. And if you exceed them—a cop pushing the car out of the intersection because it's stalled, then you have a heart attack, a myocardial (infarction), right down and out. Okay, that's number one: understanding and being prepared for it. Number two is, what is that physical limitation? You're exactly right.

So, listen, if your periphery (vision) is damaged. I have a dog now, Charlie. And I have a lovely dog, Jabba, I love her. She's sleeping like a foot away from me. She has no peripheral vision on her left-hand side, so she constantly runs into stuff, furniture and everything, on her left-hand side. And you can't play catch with her, like throw stuff to her, because she doesn't have depth perception, and it'll hit her on her nose, and then she gets angry and doesn't want to play anymore. So, what do we have to do? We could either keep doing that and making sure that she runs into things and plays the game where she hates us. Or what we do is we modify it. Now, we roll stuff to her, and she goes, "Wow, that's absolutely amazing!" And we make sure that we're on her left side. He (Brian) called to her, so she uses the right to respond to it. Now, look, that is adaptation, right, Brian? And the idea is, Rule Number Two is that if you exceed the limitations of the information that's coming in, then what's going to happen is something has to give.

So, we have these trainers that we absolutely love, and they have smell generators and sound generators, and the amputee is flopping on the ground as you come into the room, and they're shooting at you with simunition. Brian, you'll be able to take that. Two things will herald the beginning of you being able to take that. One, it's going to be 500,000 years before your brain can process all of that because you never had to before. Your brain has limits. Okay, the second time is that that's like doing... was it Jeremiah Johnson? What was that movie recently with the guy on the wild where a bear attacks him, and they have the whole thing like two-thirds in the movie? No, before that, but you're on the right track. Yeah, I did. Brian, look, somebody out there right now is saying, "If you get a big enough tire, if you get two ropes that are heavy enough, you'll be able to take on everything and anything." And that's not the truth. Your brain has a capacity, and that capacity, Rule Number Three, diminishes in a volatile or uncertain – yeah, no – in a complex environment. That's the key, that's the key.

But being able to do all that stuff is good because you can then continue to get into those volatile situations and then recover fast. You still want to be in better shape, you need all that stuff. But there are limitations. And again, if folks want to watch the webinar, they can get into all the different examples we talk about. I don't want to get into everything on this because I do want to get to some of the questions that people probably (have). Yeah. But yeah, so you have certain limitations, it doesn't matter who you are, or how well-trained you are, even within your specific sport or thing that you do or expertise, there are still limitations to your performance. That's where you get this difference.

Well, it's a gymnast that had a bad day. You remember when we talked about Simone Biles, man? Like, she was like, "I can't, I can't stay." Literally, she's so wonderful, a great speaker. So good that they redefined, they named different moves after (her). They have to grade her basically on a scale that no one else gets graded for. One of her biggest performances, she's like, "I can't do this." They called the tactical timeout. She said, I forget what it was called, they called it like "the spins" or "the..." I forget what they call it. Something where she loses, basically, kind of like proprioception. She loses where she's at in time and space in the air, and she doesn't understand it anymore when she was rehearsing. And you obviously can't have that. So, no, no, great move, but you're landing, you know. Yeah.

So, it's just some more examples. And then yeah, that third rule is obviously our... it comes down to that sort of decision-making part of that video, or any other example, right? Is that your capacity to make good decisions will diminish in a volatile, uncertain, complex environment. So, basically, when that stuff happens, we're – we've reached the threshold where we aren't thinking anymore in a sense where we're not thinking critically. We're thinking about our survival and our immediate needs, and we're in our limbic system, which means we can only handle so much again. So that uncertainty, in general. But humans – because, man, humans – we do not like uncertainty. That's why patterns work. That's why you jump to unreasonable conclusions. My brain wants to get to the answer before I'm consciously aware, before I do the math, before I finish writing out the algorithm. It's already giving me the answer, right? And that uncertainty will increase the speed at which it gives me that answer. That answer might not be correct.

That's a great, great way of putting it, especially like the ChatGPT and different large language models people use. It's basically all it is, it's math. So, it's a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared. It's giving you c-squared, it's giving you that answer, but you're putting in the a-squared plus b-squared part. Here's the thing, though: you're putting in some part of that algorithm, and if you're not putting in accurate information, it's not going to give you the right answer. Or if it doesn't know what you're inferring or trying to do, it's still giving you the most mathematically logical answer to your question that may not be the correct answer. Precisely.

So, my point in that, briefly, this is a great one for Rule Number Three about decisions diminishing in ambiguous environments. You and I know a great company, a huge data company. One of the things one time that we're discussing is like, "Left-handed tea drinkers top a list of people that would ultimately beat their dog." It was just a really pure weird thing. That's a good one. Do you get what I'm saying? Because I have non-attribution. But the idea is, if you don't have a human on the other side saying, "Every once in a while, a tunnel is just a tunnel, and a cigar is just a cigar," you've got to sometimes throw out the highs and the lows and go for the median, right? But what happens is there are people out there that are building their f---ing careers around them, right? Do you get what I'm trying to say?

So, I would say that you have to understand the limitations of your brain when it comes to emergent processing. And what does that mean? That means like, I'll give you the feeling: have you ever thought you were going to choke? Have you ever had like a piece of cheese or a piece of meat or something and thought, "Oh, f---! My airway is obscured!" That feeling is what we're talking about for Rule Number Three. I remember having to testify: a cop misapplied an LVNR (Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint), and the person thought that they were being choked out. So, the level of violence increased, and that person punched out that cop very badly. And the idea was that that person didn't... their brain did. Why? Because their brain said, "I'm dying," and they were doing absolutely everything they could, just like the people that drowned when they swim out to help somebody, and then both of those people think they're going to die, and everybody drowns. Brian, understanding that means that if we're trainers, we can work those hard situations and decisions into our training because cognitive training has to be as robust as physical and physiological training must be.

No, and those are all good examples. Especially when we're talking about law enforcement, when you get into uncertainty, this is why I think a lot of people get it wrong with how they do the training. But I think it's also what makes it so uncertain and potentially volatile and all those things: most of the interactions you have are going to be completely benign. They're going to be normal, they're going to go as planned. But the problem is, every one of those has the potential to spin wildly out of control, turn into a gunfight, a car chase. There's really no other line of work like that, there really isn't. No one else has that issue, and that's the differentiating factor here. I agree. The two things are that, one, obviously you have to account for and understand, but two, almost – I don't think we train for those things correctly sometimes. Meaning, because those things can happen, what do we do? Well, we always go worst-case scenario. Or we think we have to have this response, and it has to go this way, when it's a little bit more malleable than that. It really is. You can change the situation a little bit better. So, that's the whole, that's a big thing that we're in. So, every one of those things is a high-stakes situation. You don't know what you're walking up on, but it's likely... it's the coin flip though, that's the problem that gets in the way of our thinking.

And so, what this was awesome about – we got a bunch of questions about too – was predictive analysis and what that means. And like we gave the example in the webinar that this was based off of: you said that it's not tarot card reading, right? We're not just making something up, it's math. It's more like poker, it's more like blackjack. For example, if I'm at a casino playing single-deck blackjack, I can count cards and have a system to know what the likelihood of me getting that next card is going to be, where it's going to be in the deck, and how it's going to be. And that's one I can... you can mathematically do that, and you're going to win more times than you're going to lose. So much that even if they just think that you're doing that, they'll boot you, they'll kick you out, take you out. And that's what we're talking about.

And then, what everyone always asks, and what we got some good questions (about) is, there are a few. One was, how do I overcome oversimplistic thinking and (be) unable to broaden my thinking (or) problem-solving when needed in order to not make those assumptions? The big thing is always, "How do I not overthink something, and then how do I not miss something? How do I land in that middle part where I don't want to be on opposite of the spectrum? I want to be within that first standard deviation, right? That's where I want to be. I don't want to be out on those extremes." And that's the big thing, right? So, I think that's part of the discussion I'd like to start with too, after this. Is that, how do we do that? How do we do that as a human to not overthink something, but also don't oversimplify something? Because that's our number one question before a course, anyway. Usually people have a better answer, you know what I'm saying?

Let's ask this in a different way then. Let's approach it from a bias that we probably haven't considered. I would guarantee that everybody that listens to The Human Behavior Podcast has heard about shootings or cop killings or this or that because they're in the news about violent encounters. How many times in just a week have you heard about a police officer being gunned down responding to a man with a gun or reports of shots fired? So, here we're back to the priming. If we're thinking that we're responding and that the urgent nature of our response is essential to stopping this danger, then we allow ourselves into a situation where our basic safeguards fall to the side. That's exactly the Hero Quotient I'm talking about that I saw in Marines and in soldiers in combat, and in our Coalition Partners. The idea that that person just got shot down in front of us, and our need now to run to that exact position, grab that person and bring him out of there. If the sniper or the bomb or a secondary is planning on that ambush, somebody has calculated that and they're thinking about that.

So, when you're in your house, even if it's domestic violence and you've already shot somebody, and you're shooting around, and you're shooting at your neighbors, a cop is just another person, Brian. It's hard to unring that bell. But the police officer is thinking, "Listen, I'm still going to be reasonable and logical and tactical." Is that the other priority? No. The other party is completely spinning wildly out of control. So, you have to take that extra second, even though everything inside of you is saying, "You need to save a life, you need to rush in." There's a famous video now of a person responding to a mass shooting that's in progress, and they say, "Oh, there's a real hero there, watch that person." That's not a real hero; that's a person developing tactics on the run because they're not sure where the person is, and echoes are playing, and they're seeing deceased people. What we have to stop doing is vaulting people up and saying, "You're some kind of hero, and when you're in that situation, your training is going to allow you this calm, cool thinking to reason all these parts." And Brian, we're abandoning basic principles of cover and concealment, we're abandoning teamwork, and we're rushing to the sound of gunfire, which is okay. But what I'm telling you is, your bias is going to set you up to die because you think time is more essential than the gift of time and distance. Does that make sense to you? Yeah.

And I would say, and it goes back to the first rule we discussed in this, but you brought up with the examples here where someone's overriding their own training. Meaning, they've abandoned the things that they've learned and they've been taught, and that they've, whether we've taught or learned through experience, they're abandoning that for the sake of the emergency, an emergent situation, or for the sake of what's happening right now, and the next level, f---! And you're thinking that, "I got this," and you don't got this. You've got to reassess. That's where training comes in, Brian. Realistic cognitive training stops you for a minute. I would say the best way to rehearse for this is to have a conversation and listen actively, proactively listen to the conversation, and try not to make any decisions before you get there. We don't do that, and specifically, cops don't do that because we're like, "Yeah, come on, come on, give me the basics! I've got to move on this information!" Yeah, that abandons our training and puts us in the trick bag every time.

And so, the same thing with the pursuit. "Hey, I've driven pursuit at the academy, and then I had one more time." Paraphrasing some other cop, "But I drive every day, and this guy's fleeing, so I'm going to follow him. And even though the stakes are getting higher, Brian, I'm going to continue to follow." Who's at fault here? It's our cognitive thinking that allows us to have this feeling that we can do things that are superhuman when we can't. And I'm not saying you don't run to the sound of gunfire, I'm not saying you don't give CPR to your buddy that's down. But I'm saying that nanosecond of logic and saying, "Wait a minute, he's down at that location. Is there another way to get to him? Is there a body bunker handy? Can I go on an angle or have somebody throw a flashbang to distract while I do that?" We're not doing that, Brian. We're trying to do it in the moment. And then some Timmy comes back stabbed to death and we go, "Holy f---!" It's a travesty, a tragedy.

Now, if you hang on to a 6,000-pound vehicle and that felon wants something with you hanging on, Brian, you are going to get injured or die. We have to be pragmatic. And that's a good example because that'