L.O.G. 227 Demonstrations of Intent

Alright, Greg. We'll go ahead and get started on today's episode. First off, thanks everyone reaching out and giving us some feedback and giving us some suggestions for some of the podcasts we do. We very much appreciate you doing that. In fact, this is kind of where we came up with today's topic of the day, which is a deeper dive into some of the things we're talking about when we got into our episode on the first principles of human behavior that we teach and we base everything on, in a sense.

One of those was about demonstrations of intent. Humans—well, first of all, demonstrations of intent are more important than motive. People telegraph their actions. There's a bunch of things to talk about, but we focus on demonstrations of intent. So some people had some questions on what we mean by that. We can sort of start there with a general definition and then what we see, we'll get into where we see people kind of where it goes wrong, especially when you see these different video breakdowns of things, because a lot of folks are looking for something, "Okay, give me a specific atomic action, or what does it mean when someone demonstrates their intent?" Which all depends on the context that you're in, right?

This is what we see a lot, especially when things pop up and we're sitting there watching the video going, "Well, right there, what's likely going to happen next, because they're already demonstrating that fact?" That's kind of what we stick to, but that's a big idea for the topic today, Greg. What are demonstrations of intent? What do we mean by that? When we say that, can we have some examples and just explain a little bit more in depth? I get where people are coming from with this, because you kind of have to take it on an individual case or individual example and say, "This is where that person is," but there's also big-picture understanding of it. So I'll throw it to you. Maybe start with sort of the definition and what we mean by demonstrations of intent, because I know we talked about it on the previous episode, but that was a couple of weeks ago, and I don't want people to have to go back and listen to that section or something.

Here's the thing. First of all, disabuse yourself of timelines. The thing is that if you're going to think of time as a beginning, a middle, and an end, then you're never going to truly understand how to train yourself to see demonstrations of intent. What I mean by that is, you've got to go to current events, you've got to go to historical perspective, you've got to go to people, vehicles, events, and you have to look at them in the context of their meaning to a specific time in an event.

What I mean by that is, if you take a look and deconstruct the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon, the Tsarnaev brothers made two bombs. They set the timers on the bombs differently, and they set them at two different locations, literally anticipating that the first one would go off, first responders would move in to check out what was going on, and the second bomb was specifically designed to cause mass casualties to those responding to the first event.

What do you got there? Okay, that's not an accident; that's intentional, that's deliberate. So the demonstration of intent here was followed by not just the placement, not just the building of two bombs, but the reconnaissance necessary, the route selection, predictive analysis on who would be in which areas, where the finish line was going to be. So Brian, all that took creative juices. Now, it took a very high level of organization and low sophistication, we'll get into that later, right?

But the idea is that here you have at least two people that sat there and said, "Where are we going to get the most bang for our buck? What if they run this way? How big should our black package be? Where are we going to get those items?" Each one of those specific things: having an ounce-to-gram scale or a triple-beam scale with which to measure your explosive powder, making sure that you soak the threads on a pipe bomb so you don't create friction when you're putting your pipe bomb together, going to a place to purchase Cannon fuse and using cash so as not to leave a record, and falsifying an identification, and using a stolen credit card. Each one of those specifically is a demonstration of intent, and mens rea is present—the guilty mind. This person knew that the thing that they were performing now was going to cause something later on. "I know that creating this false ID is going to confound any attempt to find me for purchasing illegally these drugs or explosives or anything." That's intent.

So we think of intent, Brian — this is the conundrum. We think of intent as, "I walk up to a car in a traffic stop and the guy drives away. Oh, he's intending to flee." Okay, hold on, hold on. What we've got is, yeah, nobody wants to go to jail, okay? So yeah, I can completely understand that. But now the person accelerates away from you. Okay, those are factors we have to take into consideration. But pulls into oncoming traffic, drives directly at a scout car, extinguishes the vehicle's lights. These are important because they demonstrate guilty knowledge, and they demonstrate intent. "I'm going to risk your personal safety and my own to get away from you."

Well, it changes the stakes.

So a demonstration of intent can be that low-level, "Hey, come here," and then the person turns and flees. But if we only think of it in those contexts, we're going to miss the more subtle cues that are repeatable, like using a natural line of drift, attacking a person at a habitual area. Those are things that now, after the training, and specifically the folks that have attended our training, you can go to an event that has already occurred, look back at it and go, "These were key points." Why would I want to do that? Because then I flip my compass, Brian, and I make those concentric circles the other way, and now I start saying what I learned from the past I can project towards the future. We learned that in cooking, we learned that in math class, we learned that in language. How many of us went to the classic language class and then all of a sudden said, "Okay, well I can winnow that down to just these three or four words in this new language to get what I need." That's intent.

So we have to take a look at the intent, and the intent is demonstrated by the person's behavior and their actions in the moment on a timeline, but stop thinking that the timeline matters more than the behavior.

Yeah, so this is a good explanation, and it gets into what we focus on because those demonstrations of intent are often completely autonomic, meaning the person either doesn't realize they're doing it, or which kind of betrays what they were planning on doing, or they are aware of it because they thought about doing it. They're both just as powerful of a signal, in a sense.

Exactly. It's like when we talk about one's more primitive, Brian, one's more primitive, but it doesn't mean it's less deliberate. Right?

Yes.

So a well-thought-out plan or that I'm turning and running from it, both are equally as dangerous in the moment. So we can't weigh one more, and like you said, they're equally as deliberate in what it is that you're doing. It's just one maybe was an autonomic reaction in the moment, like you said, like, "I'm out of here. All I'm trying to do is flee and get around," versus the, "Okay, no, I intend to do something else." Right?

Either way, they're similar, but they came about through different mechanisms, in a sense, or different pathways, I guess, which is again why we try to focus on these key things, because then it doesn't matter where it comes from. If I look at what this person's trying to demonstrate here, and that's even in line with some of the other things we talked about, about people teach you how they want to be treated, and people telegraphing their intent. That's going to happen, especially in the moment, especially in high-stress situations where you have limits of cognitive performance that are affecting you. It's going to become that much more obvious.

We give different examples to explain this concept, and like you brought up, the backpack one is always good. It's like, "Okay, why is this person carrying a backpack in this scenario?" People are like, "Well, that doesn't mean anything." It's like, "Well, no, not necessarily that on itself, but what's in the bag?" The reason why I want to know what's in the bag is, "Is it a change of clothes and some snacks, or is that the bomb that they're bringing in?" The idea is, that's how people get past it because they go, "Oh, it's a backpack, there's nothing there." Most of the time that's true, and when you get into, like you said, if you rewind that tape back, it's, "Who brings an empty backpack into a store?"

Well, at Walmart all the time it ends up with a shoplifter. Man, you're good. No, how many watch them pull an empty bag out of their trunk, it's completely light, throw it on, and I mean, it's like, but now in this age, Brian, they're charging you now for plastic bags at the grocery store, right? So we see people bring in empty bags to a grocery store that fits our baseline. It's not anomalous. Now, if you saw somebody bring a full bag of groceries into that store, that'd be interesting. Okay, what's going on here? Right? Now then you start doing your spirals, right? Okay, so the person's going to go to customer service because this wasn't the bag that they ordered, or it was delivered and there were items in it that are wrong, or "I have a complaint, it just can't wait, I'm walking back in the store," right? But any of those explanatory storylines is not going to reach a level where the intent demonstrated is dangerous because it's food, and the person's walking to the counter.

Now, all of a sudden you have a heavy bag, and that person's walking into that City Market store from the parking lot. Well, wait a minute, now I have to account for some things. What's— that's why we pointed out in these situations where people can go, "Well, that doesn't necessarily mean anything." It's like, "No, I know, but if you don't recognize this, you're never going to see that thing coming, because you have to see this first. And if I see this first, I can then determine out there in the parking lot, 'Oh, okay, their likely intent,' and that's it." And then you can move on, because 99 out of 100 times it is.

But if I don't start with that, because I've had people say stuff, and it's like the perfect example. I know we talked about it even in the recent class about Salman Abedi, the Manchester Arena bombing at the Ariana Grande concert. He's walking in with a large hiking rucksack, basically, and before that he had that in a big giant blue suitcase, and then inside that was the bag that had the bomb. It's like, that's why they missed it, because they never took the second to go, "Does this make sense in this context? What else could it be?" And so if that recognition up front isn't there, then you never get to the point where you're doing it. So it's always weighing it out, but the idea is, if I focus on those areas, then I don't have to wait.

The most recent that I can give you, and not the most recent, but a recent event that happened twice in very short order was the two bicycle things. And I queued people onto the two bicycle things, and the coppers looked at me and said, "Okay, you've got a photo of a guy riding a bike and he's pulling a bike." And I said, "Yes, and that's interesting to me." And they said, "Well, why?" And I was like, "Well, one bike per person, man. I mean, what is he going to do at a certain point and go, 'Okay, for this pavement my [expletive] feels better on the second bike?'" Yeah, I go, "It's a bike theft." And the person looked at me and goes, "Oh, I never saw it that way." Okay, that's the key. The key is you never saw it that way.

So if a person is going and they've got two different bikes with them, you may want to look around and see if your lock is broken and lying at the bottom of the thing, and you're going, "Oh, well, a bike is a small thing." Well, not in Afghanistan where you pack it full of C4 and park it near a MEDCAP and kill a whole bunch of people. The idea is, don't think about the value. We're back to time again. Don't think about what might happen. What you've got to think about is what could this mean? This could mean that there's going to be devastating effects, so I'm anticipating that this anomaly or incongruent signal could cause death, harm, or opportunity.

So when somebody comes to me and goes, "Well, it could be anything," I immediately say, "Okay, classic obstructionist. It can't. It's something. Now, it may be something that we don't investigate, but without giving it a few moments to measure it against the known and the unknown in the baseline, how are we ever going to know when an anomaly is going to turn deadly or dangerous?" Right? Why do we make a traffic stop? The officer observes behavior by the person that's driving the vehicle and says, "That behavior is incongruent with the other drivers on the road. It's too fast, no signal," whatever else, and "I'm stopping that." All we're saying is take that same imagery, that same mental process, to say, "This vehicle out of the hundreds," and take a look at that person, or where that vehicle is parked, or why that vehicle is idling and occupied with three people, right? And the only space that's available says, "No parking, armored trucks only." Okay? And you're going, "It's never that simple." It's always that simple. It's always, because to get to you, the shark has to swim through the bait fish to get to the tuna that it wants to eat, right? So it's going to be influencing an environment. The person that wants to rob the store has to actually—you can't call in and go, "Report a robbery," you understand what I'm saying, right?

So all of that motion, the only advantage that we still have, Brian, and I'll give you another immediate advantage for all our coppers and HR people that are in the audience and teachers: we don't have friends anymore, not like we used to. Why? Because everything is social media. People are glued into and responding. So it's like tabular when you see people meeting in public; they're looking down at their feet, they're doing this and that. Well, that helps us as human behavior profilers take a look at that behavior and measure what's likely going to happen next. And then through those predictions, the best predictive future behaviors, past behavior, we can determine likelihood. We don't need to determine certainty. We need likelihood, because then likelihood makes me walk across the street and go, "You with the bag." Now we're going somewhere, see? But the catalyst for that has to be the human behavior, the human performance that we're seeing in front of.

And so you brought up the likelihood versus certainty, because everyone wants, "Well, I want to know, how do you determine, is it A or is it B? Is it something I need?" It's like, "Well, you don't even—the law's not set up that way." This is my point. Nothing is set up that way. We feel that we need to arrive at a conclusion immediately and understand what it is so I can either continue to invest mental calories in this or move on, right? And so the idea is, it's a level of likelihood that could increase or decrease given new and incoming information or a new set of circumstances, and it goes right back to intent.

So if I have a gun rack in my truck, that's my intent was there to have my rifle or shotgun there to go hunting, right? Because that's what it's used for, and it's carried right there, and I can drive in and out, right? But that's my intent behind putting that in there. But now you cut me off, and now I'm broken down and we're fighting on the side of the road. Well, that changes the math a little bit, right, within the situation. So when I go to pull that rifle out in that situation, that's no longer there for hunting. You know what I mean? It's there for defense or whatever the person's doing. But when it comes to that, we stick to areas of likelihood when it comes to this stuff, or is it a high or low level of likelihood, because you can't ever be certain until it happens, right? You can't be 100% certain until it happens. You can say, "I know this is going to happen," but you don't want to let gravity and physics take over and just allow the situation to go. That's the whole point.

See, I got it. Let's go back to your weapons. Your weapons one is such a great potential for a new person or an intermediate person that's learning this skill. Brian's going to post in the episode details a video. And the video is going to show coppers that are showing up to talk to a couple of people. Allegedly shots were fired. Allegedly a gun was waved around. Allegedly one of the people's arm—he's going to put it on there. Now, I'm not going to narrate the whole thing for you, but the idea that you were primed by dispatch that there was a shooting, shots fired, people with a gun, now you get to the scene. The first witness walks up and says, "She has a gun." Then the coppers walk over and go, "Hey, come over here for a minute." She says, "I don't have the gun. They have the gun, and I've got a video of them with the gun and shooting." And a scrum develops.

What happens is we've got to go back to the very beginning of that and say, "Is it likely that a gun was involved?" Well, absent the word gun, who would be there? Well, none of the participants would be there, right? Okay. Now, if there was a gun, who else might be called to the scene? Well, the cops. Well, now, Brian, you see the way the math is starting to add. There's a greater degree of certainty, and all the information starts to add. There's more evidence to support what the call was about as soon as you get there.

Exactly.

Now, I wasn't on the scene. I didn't see what they saw and all that other stuff. But I'll tell you one thing: when I show up and people say, "Gun, gun, gun, gun, gun," everybody's getting searched for our own personal safety. Then we'll calm things down and we'll talk about it. And the female did, in fact, have a gun, and there was a shootout. You'll see it for yourself. When we start receiving information, what we have to do is make sure that we don't put a round peg into a square hole, but we also can't see all the information starting to coalesce and look away. And that's what we do, Brian. And you know who does that? Experts do that. Mountain climbers do that. They go, "I've climbed Himalayas tied to these other people for so long. Today, that's nothing different." Rafters do that, and they go, "The cubic feet per minute of the water that's flowing down through there, I've seen it like that before and I've done it." And guess what? Skydivers do that, Brian.

Yeah.

So all of these people that are challenging themselves, that are at the top of the game, and you see those people die if they can die because they miss a cue right in front of them, you need to slow time down. So the gift of time and distance is something that demonstrations of intent give us, because when a person balls up their fist, that's a demonstration of intent. Now that alone's nothing. Shelly (Greg's wife) does that to me every time I talk. I'm always afraid of being pummeled. Pardon me. And then demonstrations of intent: fighting words, leaning my chest forward, showing my jugular, giving those anger cues. Okay, that's fine, Brian, but those have to break a plane to come into the likelihood that there's going to be an assault or a fight, or I'm going to reach for something or do something. And we can't just go like atomic actions are so important because the orientation of the eye and the brain and how that functional field of view is going to lock on, now mission focus, Brian, those are the additions I need to make. Not just a single atomic action, one plus two equals three. It's got to have that threshold of, "Now I'm likely to do something because of the intent and I'm moving in my environment, I'm moving towards it."

And this is how we get into the failures of sense-making. It's just how we look at it as humans too, because like you just brought up this great example: the balling the fist, then my shoulders come out, and then I get the anger cues. It's like, "Oh, okay, got it. So if I train and I look for those, that means that person's going to fight." Well, no, no, it doesn't necessarily mean that. You have to take in everything within the situation. But this is where it kind of goes wrong, and I see people try to do, especially when you get the — and I'm using air quotes everyone — "body language experts" that I see all the time, you're trying to take one atomic action from a human and then say, "Okay, this extrapolates all this other [expletive]." And extrapolate that across an entire population. One, that's absolutely ridiculous. You can't do that. You don't necessarily know within a given context, is it what rises above or below the baseline? Is this anomalous? Is this incongruent behavior based on what's going on that you can do and say, "Here's why I thought it." But it's several things.

Like again with the anger cues, you're at the bar and people are drinking. You see that happen, they go, "Oh man, that means there's going to be a fight." Or that guy took a bite of his food, and it's absolutely disgusting, and he's angry, and it's making him sick, and he's going to [react] because he just paid a lot of money for that plate. You're going to see the same reaction. So let's extrapolate exactly that type of scenario. Now we're at a fast food restaurant, and we're watching other people. We're the fly on the wall. We get to do that because we're humans and humans are interacting around us. It's not one at a time, right? Life is not sequential by any stretch of the imagination. And so we see the two people locked closely at the cashier's counter. And that's not normal, Brian. People come and go. And now we see the person that's making the purchase is leaning on the counter, and we see those anger cues, and we see the other person give the polar bear salute, arms back, "I'm relaxed," and stuff. Then that person starts getting mad, and we have this little tête-à-tête. We're arguing at the counter, and now the customer walks away, but a few feet away they stop, and now they do the slow turn, and they start... You get what I'm trying to say? So that could be, "Oh, I forgot my straw," but in this context, is it? So that likelihood needs to be investigated, because if it's not, "Hey, and another thing, hey, I forgot my straw," or, "Hey, I dropped my [expletive] glasses on the counter and I'm going to come back to pick them up." That's where it's going to happen.

Yeah, so you might as well start putting crime scene tape there. The idea is all of those things, the demonstrations of intent, suggest an inevitability. Now that doesn't mean it's going to be inevitable. There are myriad things that could change. But in that instance, if you're looking for the nexus, if you're looking for a place where there could be a scrum and that friction could lead to a shootout, a stabbing, a fight, or whatever else, you've got it.

So we can do that in traffic. The person that continues to drive over the speed limit, that's weaving in and out, that's getting too close and locking on their brakes, if that continues, sooner or later that person either themselves is going to get into an accident or they're going to cause a chain reaction.

The traffic ones are good examples, because I see there's entire accounts on social media and stuff that post different crashes or things like that that happen, and a lot of them aren't just — because a lot of people now have, especially people who drive for a living with their delivery or whatever, have a lot of cameras in there, right, to capture it because they get the most stuff. Then people try to lie and say it was your fault, right? So everyone's got their cameras on there because they're like, "Yeah, no, I don't think so, dude, it's right here." So that's why. But these are actually just people a lot of times with their cell phone recording. And the just the simple fact that they're recording before the accident happens, it shows. Does that imply they know in that moment? Maybe not explicitly where they can explain it, but they recognize that, "Hey, this is going south. I want to capture this." Right? "I want to see what's going to happen." And then sure enough, there's the accident. So what that means is, everything is—that person knew that it was likely to occur. It could.

But we're humans, so you know what we call that, Brian? We call that instincts. We have 75 cues that present themselves. And remember that "I'm going to go to the lobby and have myself a snack," remember that from the movies? All of them are paraded in front of you like that little vignette, right? And you're seeing everyone play out, and then all of a sudden you guess right, and you avoid whatever, and you go, "You see that? That was my instinct speaking to me." No, it was all the environmental cues. It was the environment demonstrating the intent. And your brain reads those. Look, your amygdala is a genius, okay? And your limbic system is meant to keep you oriented in your mind.

When you take a look, the cerebrum and the cerebellum—the cerebrum, the brain; the cerebellum, the little brain. The little brain processes 65 million more signals per [expletive] minute than any other thing that's on the planet. Why? Because that's part of your survival system. That's the one that's keeping you breathing and keeping you oriented away from danger and getting you prepared to fight or flight. So when you, like we recently had somebody go, "Yeah, the course is great, but I could have done without the brain stuff." I get it, okay? Because in your mind you don't understand exactly what that means because you're such an adept subject matter expert that you've gone past, in other words, you don't even consider those things anymore. They're habits, Brian. So habits of very successful people that are on the ground. But what you've got to do, a habit of a very successful person on the ground is, roll tape back to when you were a white belt or a yellow belt or a brown belt, and you were just learning. And if you understand, "Wow, that was my brain cueing me into it," it's not instinct. That's my self-defense onboard systems that are designed to keep me from collision. Now we've got something.

And I would even say it's like, no, your instincts are not good, because instinctually you should have slowed down and exited the freeway or gotten out of the way, but you didn't. You sat, turned on the camera. You actually overrode your instinctual reaction that your limbic system should have said, "This is a bad one, we might not make it." And it's not bad. It's just how humans are.

And that's the thing. Exactly.

So if I'm giving the example of a random individual recording from their vehicle as they're driving on the freeway, but that same thing occurs to the Highway Patrol officer who literally drives all day long up and down a freeway for their job and knows every little thing out there. So instinctually, well, that — you end up, you're the opposite of the spectrum, right? You miss it because you're so comfortable operating that environment and created such amazingly good biases, right? And you've created these indicators that implicitly mean something that you also sort of fall into that trap, in a sense, right? That's why it's a failure in sense-making on that case. It's the mountain climber who goes, "I've climbed every mountain. This is not a big deal," and that weather...

So it sounds like we're going after subject matter experts, Brian. It truly sounds like we're going after subject matter experts. But the reality of the situation, I've got a black mark right here. So it looks like, on my camera, I think it's that the type of mustache we're no longer allowed to wear. To disabuse everybody of that, it's the lighting in the room. Holy Moses. Now I just noticed it. I didn't exactly—now I cannot notice it. But no, Brian, you see, it sounds sometimes to the uninitiated that we're bashing on SMEs. We're not bashing on SMEs. We're calling SMEs to be accountable. Your expertise sometimes makes you miss the most important thing right in front of you.

And how do we know that? You ever heard the old thing, "The carpenter's house is always the one falling apart?" Same thing. "Yes, I'm a psychologist, and I've been married three times." Doctors. Doctors are a great one. How many doctors do you know that, yeah, they're the most brilliant people in sometimes the world in their field, and they're like downing bourbon and ripping cigarettes and they're overweight? We know some of those folks, and it's like, "Hey, have you thought about, 'Physician, heal thyself'?" We went to a gig, Brian and I, once, with non-attribution all the way around, and the first thing that we did when we first sat down was, "It's like, everybody got the strongest drink." This guy was in the lead, or female, and all the appetizers that were on the menu. And we'll start with all of that, even before you come back and bring us our water or our silver or anything else. A bunch of booze and a bunch of appetizers. And then everybody was lounging about. It was the longest dinner I've ever been involved, and most expensive.

And it was just, "Remember, oh, that was the one too, when everyone said, 'Oh, we'll go back to the Airbnb, we'll pick up a bottle, we'll hang out and talk.'" And then, but the problem is, everyone went on their way back and picked up a bottle. So everyone came back with like, "Wait a minute."

And then it's incumbent upon us, Brian, make sure that we don't insult anybody by not drinking their booze.

Exactly. I think at one point, look.

If you're a subject matter expert, the idea is that sometimes what happens is we're so in tune with our environment that we forget how to "street" things up. And when we talk about demonstrations of intent, we see them happen all the time, and we predict right more than the other people. Why? Because we're experts. We're expected to. We're expected to get on base more. We're expected to hit the runs in, right? And that's why people come to us and call us experts. But we have to say, "It was the grip tape. It was the pine tar. It was these other things." And so when we do these podcasts where we step back and we see it from its inception, from white belt, from the street, from the beginning, it clarifies those things. Because if we constantly speak as an expert, that person's going to say, "Hey, I don't flip that tire. I don't climb that rope. I don't shoot those X-rings. So I won't ever get this."

But, and to why we boil it down to a simple phrase of: "Demonstrations of intent are more important than motive." So what is a demonstration of intent? What we're talking about, it's something that signals some next step or future action. What that allows, it consistently does that to a degree where we can say that that means intent. That's the difference. It's not just "this sometimes means this." It's that each time we hit a keystroke, there's an action that's going to be performed. And the why behind it, right? The reason why we focus on demonstration of intent is because it leads to—it's another example of something that leads to a reduction in false positives and false negatives, right?

So the video you even talked about with the police one, it's like they had sort of this false negative, "Okay, well, she's not the problem. There's no issue here." And then that turned out to be the problem. Or the false positive is, "Okay, this is the person that the issue is with," and you're kind of wrong. And so that's—and you're doing 70 of those, and you've got calls stacking up, and now...

No, no, well, that gets into the limits of cognition and performance, and that's a major contributing factor, a major barrier to understanding the situation.

But the reason again we boil down to these small sort of takeaways, in a sense, is to cut through all the noise that's out there and reduce any bias that you may have because those are two different things that affect the situation, right? You've got noise, there's a lot happening, and then you've got your own biases that you can't really control other than the fact that knowing you have them. But the idea with that is, if I can cut through that, what is this person's likely intent? And that small way of looking at it is far more important than saying, "Well, what's the reason for them being here? Well, why, what side of the issue are they on on this, or what are they..." It's like, none of that stuff matters. You try to balance a little bit, but I can't boil that down, which is what we all want, and everyone wants, is a simple, "Well, just look for this indication, action from a human in this context," to go, "And that always means this." And it's just not—it's not that simple.

So here's the first point of clarity. Let's go back to temporal issues. Let's go back to time.

Yeah, time is... So you keep bringing that up. So what do you mean and why?

So I'm asking, because we were talking about a police context like three or four different times so far in this podcast, I'm asking all police officers that ever listen to our podcast: How many calls are you on? When you're at that call, you're on one. What's the most important call of your career? The call that you're on. So if that's a barking [expletive] dog, or if that's the neighbor that shot their grass on your property, the neighborhood complaint, or if that's a turnstile jumper, or whatever that call is, that's the single most important call of your life. And take it like that. Take as much time as you need to take a look and see if everything you think is going on is going on, because if not, you're going to video and audiotape your own homicide or you killing somebody, because it's going to escalate so rapidly and turn into the [expletive] sandwich that you can't hold it.

All situations where, if you, I want you to ask the copper that was involved in that and say, "From the minute you got out of the car, you knew this was going to end in the fatal?" That almost never occurs. Okay, you've got an active shooter situation, or whatever they call it now, we can't even get active shooter down—active killer. Yeah, whatever. Sideline that [expletive] for a minute. But if you come up on a scene and you get out of your car and you initiated the traffic stop or the person contact or dispatch sent you somewhere, that call is the most important. Could a missing child turn into the fight for your life with a barricaded gunman? Could that child be in the house? Could that child be the victim or the aggressor? You've got to stop thinking that I've got somewhere to go, and I've got to solve this, and let's get to the point. You talk next. You talk next, Brian, because we'll never be able to see it unfold. We'll—the scene in Ferris Bueller, where they're looking at the Seurat painting at the Chicago, I think it's the Chicago Institute of Arts, I'm not sure. And as they start backing off and you see the pointillism, right? And then all of a sudden it starts making sense. Folks, that's your key. Your key is that life is handing you these pictures, but because we've seen so many paintings and we've been to the Louvre so often, they all blend together. So you have to slow time down and really look at this one and say, "What am I sensing here? What am I feeling? What am I seeing? What do I smell?" Those things are demonstrations of intent.

So if I followed that explanatory storyline, would that lead to things becoming better or worse? And are things worse now? Look, we ask about pain all the time, "Is pain okay now, or is it better or worse than when I first got here?" If we do that in triage, why wouldn't we do that in human engagement triage? Why wouldn't we say, "Wow, we're not getting anywhere on this caper. Well, what are the key things? Well, there was the mention of a gun earlier, and we haven't been back to that for a while." Right? You know, the video in question bothers me too, because not only is the female waist-aware and everybody misses, and again, I'm not second-guessing you. You're great cops and you did the right thing. But also the fact that she keeps saying, "Well, I have evidence, I have evidence on my phone." And at the very beginning, because they're not listening to her, they say, "Well, show us." And she goes, "Well, video evidence. I just wrote down all the things." Okay, there you go. Or the recent HBO documentary about a convicted felon where she begins by saying, "Yeah, this is my truth." Yeah, okay, okay, I got it.

So the idea, Brian, is we need to give ourselves the time necessary to solve the problem, because if we add a clock ticking behind us, that is going to impact our human performance more than virtually any other. And it's going to confound us coming to a reasonable conclusion.

Because now with the ticking clocks, I mean, that's why it's so captivating for those movies and TV shows where the clock's ticking down in the bomb, because the anxiety is just hanging over you, which is going to negatively affect your performance. And you're now creating a situation where you're creating an inevitability and an ending that's got to happen soon, so you start to force that ending. You really do, without realizing it and certainly without meaning to.

But your thumb is clearly on the scale, and you can't see it. You can't feel it. So you've got to look for that thumb on a scale. Domestic violence kills cops. Yesterday, a copper killed on the way to domestic violence. Happens all the time. Domestic violence calls on a shift are ridiculously high numbers compared to other calls that are on a shift, right? More than noise complaints, more than disorderly, all that other stuff: domestic, domestic, domestic. In big cities, you run a lot of those. Almost never does that domestic turn out to be a violent encounter, and almost never does that violent encounter end in the death of the participants, including the copper. Yeah, but it still happens. And we still go to those calls and discount that this call might be the one that ends my life. And it's a frame of mind that you have to be in.

When I hear stuff, and I'm not bashing anybody, don't listen to me and think that I'm going after anybody, but I hear "resilience" and "grit" and all this other stuff that's thrown out there, I would throw out math. You increase the number of domestic violence calls that you go on, sooner or later, you're going to increase your chance of becoming a victim or encountering violence, and it may be deadly violence. That's just a fact. If we look at it that way, the longer you drive, and the faster you drive, the likelihood is going to change. So what do we mean by that? So the demonstration of intent is that the call was a domestic violence. Then we go and we start picking up cues from the scene: house is a mess, front windows broken, elevated voices, all those other things. As that hodgepodge of seemingly insignificant cues starts to coalesce into the photo, into the painting, into the Seurat that we're looking at, we have to be able to back up from it à la Ferris Bueller and take a look and go, "Man, it's a beautiful day in the park."

If we don't do that, Brian, then we'll walk into something and we get into the deep water, and all of a sudden, we didn't expect a riptide, and we didn't expect the sharks, and now we're fighting for our lives. And that's all a matter of timing and perspective. Two things: timing and your perspective.

Yeah, and the, um, yeah, there's a bunch of things with time, and of course my saying is always, we just as humans don't understand probability whatsoever. Statistics is such a foreign concept to our brain that it's very difficult. Even, I mean, that's why you see even people who are trying to do it right with different studies or scientists, they still get it wrong, and they're actually legitimately trying to do it correctly. The books are written about them getting it wrong.

Yeah.

Or other experts poking holes in their theory, which, yeah, because it comes out with a great theory, and then even then they have to walk it back five years later when someone goes, "Hey, wait a minute, this is junk." And they go, "Oh, wow, I didn't know that at the time. My bad." We're talking brilliant people. Well, and you, so you bring up time and looking at it that way, and you made the comment, "What's the most important call you're on?" And it's the one you're on right now. And what you get out of that is obviously one, you become more deliberate, right? And so when you're more deliberate with this, because I do that sometimes when my daughter, "the Insurgent," interrupts me in something because she wants to tell me something, it's always at the most inopportune moment when I'm like, "But..." It's like if I can take a second and go, "Yep, okay, what..." Be very deliberate. The situation resolves itself or is done faster than if I go, "Give me a minute, just come back. I'm in the middle of something," because now I'm prolonging it, right? But the idea, or the point I'm making, is sort of being that deliberate and present. That alone allows you to use more of your own cognitive resources that you have available that you don't realize. And if I—the second we put that time on it, I start missing all that stuff. I start missing those demonstrations of intent, and I start missing those cues because I'm not fully there. I'm not being deliberate about it. And so there's different ways to do this. With us, it's just behavior and cognitive performance. If I look at those things, then I'm going to be right far more times than I'm going to be wrong.

That's so true, Brian. Who are we asking to narrate the story of their life? We're asking the victim of a crime. We're asking the suspect that we don't even know is the suspect yet. And then, "And then, and then, give me more. Give me more," because we're trying to reach a point where you make a decision: "This person goes to jail or they don't." Stop. That's it. It's like a psychiatrist going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Go on, go on, go on, go on. Oh, wait, now that's the point I want to get to." No, you can't do that.

So if I've got somebody protecting my up and out because I can't be everywhere at the same time when I'm talking, and that person's making sure that I don't miss the guy coming out of the closet with the gun or whatever else like that, and I can literally sit down at the kitchen table with you or stand in the living room or sit on the front steps next to you and go, "Okay, what's on your mind? Okay, well, how did that make you feel? Well, then what happened here? Well, okay, but let's go back two weeks ago." And most cops are going, "I don't give a [expletive] what happened two weeks ago," because I've got other calls that are stacking up. I'm sorry for the language, but think about that, folks. Think about the guy on your shift or the female officer that said exactly that. That's where we're doing the disservice, because the [expletive] we don't clean up now or that we rush through is going to be the other officer that's showing up in a month and a week and something else. And everybody's going to go, "Well, that guy hated cops, and he shot those officers."

Look, we saw that in combat, didn't we? When an area, I can't say the nation, but there was a nation that had coppers in Afghanistan or soldiers, and those soldiers were really brutal in this specific district. And so when the U.S. forces opted out with the NATO forces in that area, man, Brian, you could see everybody was a little punch-drunk, right? You've seen that on calls, right, on domestics? You've seen that in fights and places. The idea is that I can't get to the root of the issue and all those cues that are trying to tell me something if I'm just going, "Come on, come on, come on," and I'll stop you when we get to where I want to be. That's not the way life works. And the person that's telling you that is only giving you their impression, their opinion. That doesn't allow you to walk around the house and see for yourself those things. And you're going, "Well, we can't take that much time." Well, then don't go, because if you don't take that much time, you're going...

And it goes back to, let them show you what's important. Let them explain the situation, because you can't not do it, especially with the example you brought up and that video that I can put in the episode details. That was not a planned incident by any of those people involved. It was spontaneous, in a sense. There's Java. Meaning, they didn't have some plan to bring those officers in and then do something. None of that was there, right? So there's no level of organization. Demonstrations of intent, even when we rewind the time back, what I'm getting at here is that they have to then, "Oh [expletive], these guys showed up. I've got to come up with something now on the spot." How good is that going to be? You know what I mean? If you're trying to do it right? So that's what I'm saying, is they'll demonstrate that through their behavior. So if to kind of just tie it back to the top of demonstrations of intent, that's what's going to happen. It's exactly right. Either it's going to be one or the other. It's a spontaneous or it's something well-planned out, right? I have to be able to detect the use of deception. The use of deception in that context is a demonstration of intent.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I don't need to apply it to a police context. I can apply it to my son or my daughter or my grandkid when the grandkids are going, "No, just going down to McDonald's to meet with my friends." Yeah, okay. I just fell off the turnip truck. Yeah, you're right. "Go here, money, here's my crack pipe."

Yeah, no, and that's all that's what it means. I do that with, absolutely agree, same thing. I always tie it back to family stuff because it's obvious, especially with kids. But when you do something, you're demonstrating, "Okay, I know when you're..." "Oh, I've got this," when my daughter (the Insurgent) is like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to do a workout with Mommy in the garage, and then we're going to, I'm going to fold all my clothes, and I'm going to put this stuff away. We're going to do that." I was like, "Yeah, but here's the thing, you're supposed to get this homework done tonight because you have practice tomorrow after school, and you won't have time." "Well, you know, I don't might not have time." She's creating all of these other things she's doing because why? Well, she doesn't want to do the homework. So those are all demonstrations of intent.

Individual acts are a demonstration of intent. So let's put it this way: you're out there and your intent is to catch a fish. So the first thing you do is you go buy your Zebco rod and reel kit from Walmart for 10 bucks. They're always great things that last forever, and they're really cheap, and you don't have to spend a lot of money. You go buy a lure, which the single lure you buy is probably as expensive as a rod and reel nowadays. That [expletive] has gone crazy. And you go out and you stand on the shore and you cast that lure in and you pull it in one time and you get no hits, and you go, "Screw this, I'm done." That's not how life works.

And so if you then thought about, "Well, I don't have to stand, I can get waders. I can go deeper in the water. Maybe that'll catch a bigger fish. Or I can get a boat, or put things together to fashion a boat." And then, "You know what, I don't have to throw a lure. I can throw live bait." "Well, live bait's illegal." "Well, I can throw a Carolina rig with a rubber worm." "Well, rubber worm..." "Well, I can spray something on the rubber worm to make it..." That's life.

So the idea is, whatever you do, folks, if you're listening or watching us, whatever you do, whether it's mowing the lawn better than anybody else, golf game, fishing, bow and arrow, any of that, those individual skills aren't all just one thing. They're all of these precise little things that have to occur in your eye and your brain and your fingertips and the gear and where you stand and the environment and the weather. And it's morning. So why would you want to reconcile all of that when you go up on a police call or a traffic stop and go, "It's just this one thing?" Now, if you don't, the anticipation, Brian, of seeing signals is as important as seeing the signals, then being able to compare the signals against the baseline and understand, "These four were demonstrations of intent." The ruse, the dodge, the, "Hey, wait a minute, I dropped my wallet," those type of things, because then that gives us that tactical and technical edge to get that time built in. Because the more time we can push into an event, the more time we can grab like this nebulous cloud that's around us and push that into the event in front of us, the better things are going to be. The more time we give ourselves, the better things are going to be.

No, and that was—that's a great way of tying back into the previous episode when we talk about what is situational awareness and anticipation. And if you're not, no one gets into anticipation. Everyone starts with perception. But if you miss, if you don't understand anticipation, you don't do that, you're far less likely to ever perceive something. And you're not only less likely, but you're also, if you're waiting until that occurs versus seeing it before it happens, there is no—you can't do the predictive analysis part and create likely outcomes if you don't have some sort of anticipation in there, right? What was likely to happen when I do this? What's likely to happen next? If I see this, what else should I—what could that mean? But if I don't see those next follow-on cues, then I can relax because I don't want to be hyper-vigilant or hyper-alert.

Brian, my dad actually took us there as kids on the, I believe it was the Alameda Central Railway. My dad was an odd character, man. He liked odd stuff. I think he was a hobo in a previous life. But this is a very sad story. I don't know, I'm making light of it accidentally, but a husband and a wife and their dog were brutally killed by a grizzly during a grizzly attack with what was reported later as an aggressive bear and was euthanized. Now, if you look up the history of bears and grizzlies and anticipate that you're going to be, like fishermen have to do when they go fly into Outback Alaska and all that other stuff, Brian, there's a chance. Now, it's a very, very, very low chance that you're going to get attacked, mauled, and killed by a grizzly. That's why it makes the news. But the idea is, you can just get some bear spray. What does it give you? It gives you a standoff. What's a standoff? Standoff is time. It's time to think, "Holy [expletive], it's a grizzly." Yeah, and I'm going to run.

So all of those things can't happen. We're right back to dropping the rock in the pond. So I want to look and, "Still waters run deep," all that other stuff. Those all are there for a meaning. I want to throw the rock in a pond and see where those ripples go. And guess what, Brian, today the ripples all went left. Well, that's impossible. No, it's not. There's something happening that I'm not seeing, and that's the magic, because if we can identify that one cue that's out of place, that cue that doesn't seem to fit, now I have an incongruent signal and I can latch on to that, Brian. And that might be the difference of life and death, or winning the lottery or failing the lottery. I don't mean lottery as chance, I mean lottery as availing oneself of an opportunity that's present.

Yeah, I think that's a good spot to wrap on, actually. I think that's a good way to tie that back in together big picture and why we took the time to get into demonstrations of intent today, because all those, I know we covered a lot with that previous podcast with our first principles and then with what is kind of situational awareness, but maybe we can deep dive some of the other ones, because we covered all of them topically, but this is one of those things that we can get into and talk about. I mean, that's—for not forever. I mean, it's demonstrations of [intent are] so powerful, because once I can key into those, that's when I start getting good at intervening sooner or reading the situation better, because, and you're far more correct, and you're far more accurate in your observations and your sort of calculation of likelihood, right? You're better at it because you were recognizing, "Okay, well that's a demonstration of intent. That person didn't even realize that they did it." So I'm—you're already how many steps ahead of them now going, "Okay, now I can come up with a better plan because I'm ahead of this person." So that's kind of why another reason why I just wanted to deep dive.

And if I had to wrap, if I had to wrap my side of this, Brian, stop thinking of time as being just a line. Time is all around us all the time, and it's always moving different directions, and it means so much different stuff. Part two, every single religion, science, dating relationship, psychology, physiology, is based on intent. The brain predicts what's going to happen and starts dumping chemicals. Your mind starts interpolating what's happening, and certain chemical things support that. So all is based on demonstration of intent, either that we're perceiving that are coming into us or that we're giving off. And so our entire environment is predicated on that, and so is every science and everything around us, philosophy, all on demonstration of intent. So if you can sit down and wrap your head around that and stop thinking as time as linear, you're going to be so far ahead when it comes to sense-making. And what's the key to problem-solving, Brian?

You've got to sense-make before we problem-solve. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, I think that's a good place to end on for the, for sort of the, "so what" and why we get into this. And so I think it's a good good good wrapping point unless we have anything else to add other than...

I'm exhausted for the, um, Shelly's sick and Shelly yelled at me, Brian. So I think it's important to bring that on. So, editor, listen to this, datestamp this, timestamp this. We're recording. Exactly. So, but book, come on, let's talk. We get that the textbook is out, ready, in a sense, for our Patreon members. I know they have already been able to order it and they're going to go, "Let's see, this will come out next week, so it'll be ready to ship out probably a week after this podcast comes out." So I'll have the links available. Right now it's only for our, I guess, the supporters that have already placed their order. But just reach out to greg@thehumanbehaviorpodcast.com if you're interested in it. But I'll start putting it out there once it's completely set up and ready to go.

And so I know there are technological issues with people ordering. If you're a hater and you absolutely hate Brian and I and The Human Behavior Podcast in Arcadia Cagara, we'll give you the same discount if you buy the book as our insider. What do you think?

I'm okay. If you're an hour into this podcast and you're listening, you need serious, serious help and you need to go talk to someone. Manifesto page, I get listening to the first few minutes and not liking us and tuning out. That's normal, that's fine.

I'm okay. I don't like us.

Well, neither do I. That's why people are like, "Why are you still doing it?" "Because we have so much anger to work through." That's what I've had someone say to me, like, "Brian, you're the only person who runs a social media account in the history of social media that actively tells people, 'You probably shouldn't follow us.'" I'm like, "Well, I'm trying to keep the riff-raff out."

Yeah, so hey.

Also, Brian, the book, great stuff. More out there. Loved, loved the John Peters podcast. Very heart... Loved seeing Debbie Wright apologize to Ann L.I.O.N. (Ann Lion) and our dear friend Clint. But carry the load, folks, down in Dallas. Fort Worth. That training facility, wow, thumbs up. Fort Worth PD, well done.

It's a nice place. I think it's funny how they have, "This side is police, that side's fire, and we don't cross that line." It's like a line down the middle, there's two separate buildings, remember? You come down, you come to the Y there, you either got to go right for police or left. I think it's hilarious.

You don't sense the irony? Because I'm surrounded by firemen even in my own family, right? You don't sense the irony, but who's the best barbecue? Who's always selling barbecue at special events? It's the firemen. Okay? You can't get enough of that fire. So I've got to get back there. You know what I'm saying? They've got a whole episode: "Keep employed staring at the flame, poking it." Yeah, that was a good one. But we appreciate everyone tuning in. Stay tuned for more. Any questions or anything, of course, reach out to us at greg@thehumanbehaviorpodcast.com. And thank you. If you enjoyed it, please share the episode with your friends. It helps us out a lot. Leave a comment, leave a review. That would be great. And give us a thumbs up. And don't forget that training changes behavior.