L.O.G. 233 Heuristics and Mental Models

Alright, Greg, I think we're recording and ready to go here this morning. Happy, happy—yes, you have a herd of antelope may come by and join the podcast as they're waiting at any time just outside your house right now.

Exactly. They're soon to be inside the house the way they were looking at me. Maybe they're hungry. They're hungry and cold probably. Only one of them had a jacket on, so you could tell they're like kids at a school bus, right? They never want to show that they're cold, and the one kid's like, "I don't know what you guys are doing. My parents said I had to wear my jacket."

Exactly. Alright, so today we're going to talk about heuristics and a lot when it comes to sort of sense-making and problem-solving, and there's a lot in this category. We haven't really discussed this specifically on an episode. Obviously, we talk about different examples or use this all the time, but there is a lot out there on what people call schema and different mental models and when it comes into decision-making.

But the purpose of this is we're going to be speaking at a conference here in a few weeks, and we're going to be talking a lot about this critical thinking and heuristic type thinking and prototypical matches and what it all means and how we sort of package it together to make it very user-friendly, which is obviously why a lot of people like our approach so much. It's because it's scientifically sound, but it's also, "Okay, I see what you're saying here." It gets a little—we try to simplify it a little bit for the purpose of use. So there's a lot to unpack with this category, but just to kind of give everyone a little background, we are going to be talking about this. So I wanted to sort of do like, we got to get on The Human Behavior Podcast and talk about this stuff because there's a lot in it. I know the people that are going to be attending the conference will want to hear it. If you're not attending the conference, as a matter of fact, we'll still get a lot of information out of this episode and the way we describe it. But that's sort of the kind of the preface to the conversation.

I think I'll start with you, Greg, because to give sort of our definition of heuristics and how we use it, because those of you who've been to our training, you know, we get into six domains, heuristics being kind of the big one, sort of in a sense, the meat and potatoes. The idea behind sense-making and cognition is heavily relying upon heuristic type thinking that we do. We give all kinds of examples throughout our course, and even the examples we talk about on The Human Behavior Podcast are very similar, right? We're giving them here on all the different episodes. So I think I'll start with you to maybe kind of define how we define it, and I can always give some more examples of stuff that people see out there. But I guess I'll throw it to you to get started, Greg.

Yeah, and again, I'll be Debbie Downer here because there are hundreds of definitions of heuristics that will help you in your day-to-day life. So one is—and the one is the one that we've adopted by amalgamating a number of them into one pile. So I'll give it to you like this: heuristics are cues that our brain recognizes in our environment that offer just enough information for us to draft a reasonable conclusion on what it is that is transpiring, and our knowledge is interpretive. What that means is that we have to associate and anticipate things just to get through the day. That abductive reasoning and logical inference of information is the simplest and the most likely conclusions that come from the heuristics in our environment.

Now, right now you're going, "Okay, what the [expletive] is he talking about?" Well, just wait just a second. Brian, you've got two kids at home now, and I guarantee that you've already played the memory game with your daughter and sooner or later with your son, you're going to play the memory game as well. You lay the cards out on a table, there's like 20, 40 cards, whatever the number of cards is, and you flip two of them over. Then if it's not a match, you flip them back, and now you have to use your memory and you have to look at that card in your mind and go, "Holy crap, where did I see that?" Well, at the beginning of the game, there's a lot of flipping. In the middle of the game now it's, "Oh, it's that second card over there. Oh, I hope that whirlwind comes up again." Okay, well that's what your brain does. So imagine a bunch of file folders. And right away your teacher is groaning because they go, "The brain isn't full of file folders!" Yeah, it is. Back up, listen for just a second.

To define that because we use that term all the time.

We use the term, so this is what I mean by a heuristic. So on the manila file folder, there's got to be a header. Language—heuristics are independent of language. Language has only been around a short time in our development, so we don't use it when we're categorizing memory and when we're putting placeholders in our brain for anticipating future encounters. So what happens, Brian, is now on the outside of that manila envelope, you've got a starfish. Just a little picture in the corner of a starfish, and all the pictures on every file folder are in the same place so Brian can retrieve them very quickly. So you know what's in that file? Well, there's a star, and there's a fish, and there's an ocean, and there's flippers, and there's the galaxy, and anything that could possibly be related to starfishes in there.

Now, why is it like that? Because you have to drill down and go to different file cabinets in your brain to get all of the information. But heuristics are cognitively agile enough to navigate it. Then these complex encounters that come up, we don't deep dive. We don't deep dive and, "Holy [expletive], internal combustion engine, I recognize that noise." You see what I'm saying? "Must be a car," we go.

So like in that sort of in that manila folder, if I open it up, like the starfish example, there's star, there's fish, there's all these things. So each one of those things that are on there has its own set of file folders behind it. Once you open the file folder, there's another file folder, it keeps going, it keeps going, it keeps going, almost like it's fractal, right? But we don't, because we don't have the time to go into each one of those and check everything. We go, "What's that first file folder that comes up, what's on that page?" And it sticks with that.

And this is where people are wrong, because people constantly write in their journals that heuristic thinking is different than cerebral cortex investigation or advanced critical thinking. It's the same thing. The idea is your brain chooses one over the other based on priority, and priority is based in humans on emergency or danger, okay, or opportunity. So you don't—when you walk around, they're trying to say, "Well, sometimes they're wrong and sometimes it's guesswork." Yeah, if I come up on starfish when I'm looking for scuba and I'm at a conference where somebody goes, "Okay, the trivia question is scuba: self-contained underwater and you have to finish it," like that, and all of a sudden, your heuristic brain is going through the file folders really quick and goes, "Starfish, that's ocean related." And now you're digging around in there. That's not the way it works at all.

What it works at all is it's like a series of stepping stones to get across a slick part of the stream. Your brain is smart enough to go, "Look, I can walk down to the bridge, it's right there, I can see the bridge. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to step on that log and that stone, and I'm going to go across here, even though my shoes are going to get a little damp on the other side." Why? Because it's practical, and they know that the decision they're making in that moment doesn't rely on their safety, security, livelihood, or any of those other—if it was in order of their, if it meant life or death, Brian, we wouldn't be resolved to only using heuristics. That's when my brain goes, "Okay, I now need a heuristic to get me in the ballpark, and I also need artifacts and evidence based on the cues and clusters that are forming around me." Do you get what I'm trying to say? Those things happen autonomically. We don't have to think about them because our brain goes, "Holy [expletive]," and the minute our brain goes, "Holy [expletive]," another wheel inside of our mind starts turning, and it starts anticipating the problem, and it starts bringing up the five or six file folders we're likely to encounter next. And so if you think of it in those terms, that hierarchy of how you think, we're constantly trying to make order out of chaos, right? To create meaning from the experiences, but most experiences are meaningless when it comes to our survival. Is that—

Well, and you brought up a couple of good things that I want to hit on. One, the trivia thing, a great example because think about it, you're in a sterile, safe environment getting asked trivia questions or watching Jeopardy on your couch. That's a very, very different way. You can access more information that way and even process it faster because your brain's primed, knowing, "Hey, I got to look hard, I got to look deep, I got to figure out."

And they even give you a category, Brian, and even if the category is ironic, it's a category. It contextualizes the information so that it allows you to rather than just say topically on those manila file folders, it lets you dive deep into those. Now, you have a time limit in that, but it's not tied to anything other than a fun game. And your brain knows you're playing a fun game versus out in the world trying to figure things out and it's maybe a life or death situation because—

Exactly. You brought up, and I just want to hit it real quick, your brain using abductive reasoning, where you basically have just a bunch of incomplete observations. You've got all the sort of input, and then your brain puts it together with what's the likeliest possible explanation for all this, which is very different than the sort of deductive or inductive reasoning where you have very—where you can—where you have some sort of structure. Like deductive is like, "Okay, I've got this thing, I need to reduce that down. I need to take the elements and come to a very specific conclusion." Inductive reasoning, same thing, a little bit opposite way of doing it, but you get a little bit more of a general one, where the abductive is like, "Okay, good enough. Here's what we think is going to happen." And now your brain is always trying to get to that answer before it's consciously aware of it.

It has to. It has to because it's learned over time that that's the most successful and most efficient way of navigating these conundrums that you face every day. And when I say conundrums, there's nothing like the conundrums we used to face. We used to face the tiger, we used to face the mastodon, we used to face the antelope that was actually potentially—

Right now they're like, peeking their heads.

Exactly. "What's going on in there?" Tap, tap with their little hooves. But, Brian, listen, why is this important in the development of HBPR, RNA, and Arcadia? Because back when they asked me how I do what I do on the street so well as a copper and would that be applicable to soldiers looking for snipers, IEDs, and insider threats, my answer was yes, and Madison Conway said, "Prove it." So we came out and we conducted a series of studies to prove it, and the reason that we used simple heuristic overlays is because we would show—and you remember this—we would show a group of people in class a hotel counter, average hotel anywhere in the world, and we'd say, "What's this? What's this? What's this? What is that? Make that." "Well, that makes it a hotel counter, at a motel, hotel, anywhere. Look at the Formica counter."

Okay, and then what we would do is we'd put a gun on the counter. Okay, and it's a little blurry, and it's a little far away, and you're looking through binoculars to see it. Now, what is that? "Well, it's a gun on the counter." Okay, but if you use your reasoning and deconstruct and reconstruct the event that you're seeing, what's it most likely? Well, most likely it's a hairdryer, why? Because a hairdryer is found in that environment. Okay, so if you were building a bomb to kill me, what would you make it look like? Well, I'd have to make it match the context and relevance of the surrounding area. And how would I do that in Afghanistan? Well, I guess I'd put it on a roadside and maybe use a covert so it was hidden. So what we were doing is we were trying to create critical thinking through heuristic prototypical and template matches so that we weren't fishing for the [expletive] Marine.

And people still don't understand what we were trying to do. We weren't trying to give the Marines a book, so, look, here's what separates—you kind of go prototype, template matching, let me back up and we can dive into that deeper. But look, you got a lot of people that say, "Well, I was on a GIDO contract." Yeah, but I worked for GIDO. They say, "Yeah, I was on a JFCOM project." Yeah, well, I worked for JFCOM. I was the guy that came up with the idea that they wanted to buy. You get it? There's a big difference. So these other people that are looking at are going, "Well, how did you get to that point?" We got to that point because what I didn't want to do—there were other people that were competing for the same thing that I was doing at the time, and what they did is they went forward and found the bomb maker. They went forward and found the IED. You know what? They taught the Marines nothing, and they sold a bunch of books.

What we wanted to do is turn that on its ear. We said that look, a heuristic template match is an identical thing like cars coming off an assembly line. Everyone is identical. Now you look at the car and you go, "Everyone's a little different." Yeah, I got it, but the spec—the specifications that they're built to are the same. Yeah, they're identical to that. And so when we start thinking about how our brain matches information, it certainly doesn't do it with a template. Our brain looks for prototypes. So instead of being a gun or being the blow dryer on the counter, what if we put a drill on the counter? Your brain is going to solve for X, but it's going to figure out the most logical and reasonable answer based on the surroundings.

So are you saying I could find a gun by using the different pieces that would likely make up a gun and seeing them in the environment? Yeah, so that tube kind of looks like a barrel, and that piece of wood over there kind of looks like a handle, and those little things that are laying on the ground kind of look like bullets. So even though my suspect or the person that I'm chasing has spread-loaded them throughout the room, mentally I can reconstruct or deconstruct or put things together very quickly and go, "These have the makings of an IED, that has the makings of a sniper hide." And that's called prototype matching. Prototype is when you use heuristics, little pieces of your environment, to infer the rest. And that's all a heuristic is. A heuristic is enough of a clue that you can infer things from it, and those things are going to be right way more than they're wrong.

And there's—that's a very simple way to put a very complex process. And so that's that, and that's sort of our goal, our point with it, right? I don't need to know what—

That's our goal in class. That's our goal with everything we've written, all of our webinars, every one of these podcasts, and certainly the book that came up. The idea is that can you as a normal human wrap yourself around these really grandiose theories, these really big deep thinking theories that you use autonomically every day, and can you unpack them to use them to find a lost kid, to find that knock in your engine on your motor vehicle? Come on.

And this, this goes into anything that's to create a fidelity-filled environment that's cognitively real is what we're talking about too. Not so—so we're talking about how you sense-make in your environment, how your brain works, and then obviously we tie that to how we do that in training because your example right there is we'd be in a classroom, we'd move stuff around, and then have people act out certain things, and they'd go, "Oh yeah, it's a hotel lobby, he's checking in, doing this." And you're going, "Like, we're in a freaking classroom." Your brain filled in everything down to the point where you—I mean, it will take the reality and add in what it needs to make it real so that training is real to your brain.

Only if it fits. Only if it fits. Your brain will not take disjointed information and jam it together unless there's no other answer, and your brain is now forced to put those things that are incongruent together. So it'll either—it'll drop something that is unnecessary to be there if it needs to arrive at a conclusion, or it will sort of create so much cognitive turbidity that it has to explain what the hell that element thing is. So therefore it'll bring something in that's cognitively close enough—a UFO, a Bigfoot, a Loch Ness Monster. You get where I'm going? Because, "Hey, I got to close the loop. I can't leave a blank. I cannot have my file folders go, 'Uh, uh, starfish, scuba tank, uh, dolphin and then blank.'" It can't because that would be a—that would be a missing piece of the puzzle that could get me killed in the real world. So the brain will search for something in other file folders and compile them differently and keep jogging them until it comes up with something and go, "Hey, it looks like a starfish," and somebody goes, "Well, that's a seahorse." Okay, close enough. Boom, put it in.

And that's how your brain works because training for anticipation is what we're talking about when we talk to Milo and Axon, and when we try to talk to Virt and guys, what does that mean? That means that your brain is constantly trying to frontload the file folders that you might need for this encounter that's coming up. And when you get a hint like you were talking Jeopardy, they've got a category. I'm talking dispatch going, "Man with a gun." Okay, the anticipation of what we're likely to see at that event, that chaotic event, is going to happen with schema, and schema will pop up in my brain. Well, if you stretch that word out a little bit right now on your paperwork, schema is like S-C-H-E-M-A, which means that it's a plan. So your brain will come up with a preliminary plan so it can navigate that upcoming encounter because your brain doesn't want to ever be caught flat-footed.

But that's the problem is that it doesn't ever want to be surprised, and it doesn't want to figure things out especially if it's potentially survival based, right? It's that's the core.

You just hit on the core, right?

But it so it will create that schematic, like you said, but that's also where we get things wrong, right? We, if we build that tree that's schematic, if that schematic is wrong and I didn't get the right foundation, everything I build on top of that is come crumbling [expletive] down when that five-mile-an-hour wind hits the corner of that building. You didn't plan for that, right? I mean so—

Two things to firm up your argument, which is already very, very, very strong. One, let's go back to the Greeks, who invented the word heuristic. It meant to discover. It meant through all of your perceptions to discover likely things from items on the table. It's the original Kim's Game for the Greeks. Okay, and then to be cognitively agile enough to come up with inferences based on that information and deduce and induce the simplest and most likely conclusion that takes abductive reasoning, which means that you're sampling your environment quickly but you're not doing it recklessly. You're looking for artifacts and evidence, it's not guesswork.

So every time I read a thing that says, "Oh, what it say, availability heuristics are characteristically dangerous because they're so wrong." No, they're not. They're only wrong in an experiment that you created, yeah, where you create the inevitability. In life, they're rarely wrong. You know, and when they are wrong, it's so comical that in a movie we go, "Well, knowing what we know now," you get what I'm trying to say? And we all laugh about it because those inferences that are around us, the information that gets through from our brain, which samples everything, and everything's in motion and reality changes over time. Does reality change over time? Look at this entire world we're in now where we're not sure if it's fake news or AI generated, or if the history has been rewritten, or let's take down the monument because, you know, our thoughts and feelings are not—well, your brain doesn't understand that, Brian, because your brain is running on heuristic template and prototypical matches. Templates are the things that are solid enough in my environment. A doorknob is a doorknob anywhere, and therefore, even though it's a little prototypical—this one's a latch, and this one's round, and this one I have to pull instead of push—my brain will figure those things out quickly. That's the beauty of a heuristic. I know that that's a window, okay? I know that that's likely an exit. Those type of things my brain does all the time. "Don't get out of a moving car." Those are the type of things, right? "I look—"

Yeah, my brain has to do a calculation, Brian. The pitcher throwing a ball from the pitcher's mound and you being able to hit it with your bat. That's a great example. And actually, because I know what some of the questions are going to be, it's like, "Well, how—" because a lot of people, especially—I mean, you brought up some law enforcement examples, like, "Yeah, most law enforcement officers have more, you know, file folders, more experiences than the average person by orders of magnitude," right? Just because they're constantly dealing with people all day, or if you're in customer service, same thing, or you're a server or a bartender, right? You look at someone and go, "For that environment—"

But now the difference with the police is usually it's so many different types of environments in a sense. Like you're in someone's home, then you're in a business, then it's this call, then it's that call, right? So you have to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Yes. But does that mean that you're less canny when it comes to anticipating? Let me give you an example, and then you put it into the other term. You get—

Yeah, I just got a screamer of a headache. The [expletive] me out.

No, no, what's going on, Shelly? By the way, that was a heuristic: taking off, grabbing the bridge of your nose.

[chuckles]

I think your headache is actually making you slow down and be way more logical, so that's good.

Thank you. It's that—it's that the handful of Advil PM and the shot of bourbon that I took started this at seven.

So I want—I want to give an example that and then you do that because, you know, it kind of gets back to how do we do that and why do we sort of get things wrong in a sense. So a perfect example is there's a great—I think I've talked about it on The Human Behavior Podcast before, I certainly talked about it in class—there's a great documentary called Fastball. It's all about the evolution of the fastball in Major League Baseball and how, you know, because they went back and said, "Well, where was it measured and who had the fastest?" Because then they figured, "Now, actually Nolan Ryan had the fastest because where they measured it from, technically he was throwing like 107 miles per hour, but back then it registered lower." But either way.

And so what they explain is, you know, they'd have these—they had some professional ballplayers on there, some hitters, and like, "Oh, you don't understand, when that guy would pitch, when he'd throw his fastball, just as it came across the plate, it would rise up as I was swinging. It would actually—it would actually go up in elevation," which is defi—would defy the laws of physics because as—

Defies logic, certainly.

Right. Well, as the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, it's coming down, especially if it's a fastball on a specific trajectory, and it's falling because of gravity. Now, how straight that trajectory is also has to do with the speed of it, right, and the rate of fall. But what these guys—what, you know, the scientists would then come on explain, would go, "Well, you're used to hitting a 100-mile-an-hour fastball. So your brain has already made that determination to swing as that ball leaves the pitcher's hand," right? Because you don't have time to wait for it to get in closer. So you already made that decision. Your brain is using heuristics. It's calculating exactly where that ball should be, so you know exactly where to put that bat. Well, the problem is, if you're used to hitting a 95, 98-mile-an-hour fastball and someone throws 107, that ball hasn't dropped as far. So it's actually higher up than it is. But because you made that mental projection of where that ball should be going and where the trajectory is, all of a sudden it looks like it appears to you, you perceive it, it is rising as it comes across the plate. Well, it didn't do that.

So that I—I just love it too in the documentary like, "Well, here's the best part of that." You know, the scientists explained, "Well, this is how heuristics work and this is what it is." And then the batter is like, "Alright, man, you get in that batter's box and you tell me what happens!"

Exactly.

There's like, "I know what I saw!" And it's like, "Well, what you saw was a mental—it's how your—how your brain has to capture it so it can repeat it because that's the idea: 'I have to create a file folder for this encounter, and therefore those assumptions lead to theories, those theories lead to scattered breadcrumbs so I can find it again.'"

Well, that's the schematic, right?

Exactly. The schema, and you're exactly right.

So, uh, let's talk about two things very quickly. First of all, you know, my dear departed friend, Dr. Bill Harrison, his site Slow the Game Down. Ryan Harrison, still taking that now. If you want to look at what Brian's talking about, look at the series that Brian's talking about and look up my good friend Brian Harrison and Slow the Game Down. Explains a lot of that. And Brian, we did a lot of that research to save Marine lives and to pick our optics and do all that other stuff.

The second thing is that when you are building a file folder, the critical thing you have to remember is you're not picking and choosing who gets in. You've got an entire team inside of your brain that's going, "I'll take that one. No, that belongs over here. Yep." That's where things can go horribly wrong. So if training is well-intentioned, but training falls short of creating mental models, then what happens is information gets jammed into file folders, significant term, willy-nilly, that Brian uses all the time. And then like my antelope friends in the backyard, it's all confused and mixed up, and when it comes out, it comes out as a jumble of information that you still have to sort through, which is inefficient. And so your brain calls that a corrupt file folder.

Okay, corrupt file folders are constantly coming back up. "Hey, do we want to fix this one?" "Yeah, not right now." "Do we want to fix this one?" "Yeah, but it'll likely never happen again." "Hey, shouldn't we fix this one?" The schema keeps coming up because it's broken, and the AC and DC and the power and the light doesn't go on. You get what I'm trying to say? So your brain is taking an inordinate amount of time trying to fix corrupt file folders, and you know where that comes from? That comes from when you don't understand the training you're in, and it doesn't have a logical sequence for your brain to pick up on and go, "Okay, it's Where's Waldo, except this guy's got a gun. Oh, wait a minute, it's not a gun, it's a hatchet. Oh, wait a minute, [expletive]." Yeah, that's not—you can't prompt the brain to solve for X in those circumstances because it's not realistic based on what they have on the ground. That's based on surprise. That's based on the jack-in-the-box, and my brain has a hard time equating when that would be important. Like, for example, I'll give you a calculator—

You can't, you can't, you're rolling the dice. You actually cannot—

Can't use it to project when that's gonna happen.

So so B doesn't fit in the door, so you're looking at it in the yard and going, "Gosh, wouldn't it be great if I had an arch infection?"

So let me give you a heuristic that we all violate all the time. Have you ever had your fuel light come on to tell you you're okay?

And you kept driving on the freeway? Yeah, a little bit.

Way—I'm coming from Utah, and I'm not anywhere near Grand Junction, and it comes on, and Shelly goes, "You got a lot less than a quarter. That's the, you know, you're out of gas light, whatever it's called." And I look at her and I go, "Based on all these cars, you got another 55 miles, right?" Yeah, and I'm saying that, and we're going, "Okay, what do we do with that engine warning light when it comes on? Do we go and get it checked immediately that morning?" No, as a matter of fact, we're more inclined to put a Band-Aid over it so it doesn't distract us while we're driving back and forth to work, burning oil like a 1912 tank. Okay, the idea is that, Brian, we violate our own best policies. Why? Because we constantly try to outthink our brain. We've evolved to the point now where this Rolodex of file folders comes up to prepare us for the event, and we push them out of the way and go, "Hey, uh, number three, and can you supersize it?" And those things that we do.

I'll give you one more. Conflating that language matters in these encounters, your brain isn't looking at each single letter and whether it's capitalized or italicized and where it falls in the word, and how my brain sees each one of those different, gosh, you know, cave drawings. That is just going to complicate things. So if you go into a training scenario and you're too ambitious, you're actually undoing how your brain works to save your life. And so when they do the things like the red triangle, right, square, all that other stuff for that moment at that time, they're gauging you. That's a parlor trick. They're gauging how quickly you can get on that target. You think that's going to help you when you're out on the street de-escalate a situation with a man with a knife? You're out of your mind. That's what I'm trying to say. And that's why we're so vociferous. We—that we're loud. I know we're loud, I'm a lot louder than you, but we're loud because every time that I read something about heuristics and somebody says, "Oh, it's prone to failure and, you know, it's merely guesswork." That's horseshit. Your brain has been doing it for tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of years. You need to stop, take a giant evolutionary step backwards, and trust your brain signals.

Well, and that you—you—you brought up a number of of—God, you brought up a number of stuff, and then I threw in there Bayes as well, but the idea is—

I like Bayes though. I—I—here's why I like Bayes: Bayes is a working architecture that if you understand Bayes, it means probability and statistics also assist in you making decisions, and your brain calculates that while you're in motion. They went to the point to actually write it down: "This experience plus this experience." Okay, so I'm Bayesian in thought, but I don't apply his statistics to my analysis. Does that—

Yeah, because his whole thing was, you know, based on prior knowledge of conditions, you can determine the probability of an event. Now that's likelihood, that means he's predicting. And I like that.

Well, we absolutely use it at a theoretical level, not in a mathematical sense, because you can't, with a lot of the situations that we're talking about. You could with the things that he was describing and that they were talking about. But once you take it outside the laboratory, Brian, it's a different set of standards where the logic still applies, but the per—the individual assets that and facets—

You brought up but this and this that goes into what everyone's trying to do with different data collection and looking at it, and it's they're trying to give it a score or a number or percentage or likelihood. It's like, "Well, it's—it's—it's not about likelihood. You—you can't calculate to some number of likelihood of this happening, but you can use it as comparative. Is—is this person more likely to give up right now or are they more likely to keep running?" So as a—as a Bayes based on your prior knowledge of the events, you can use that as a comparison between between between right, between likely outcomes. So I can't say, "Is a 97% chance of continuing this," or "He has a 20% ch—"

No, but you don't need to go into that. But you can say, "If we keep putting the gas pedal down and chasing this guy, we'll run an intersection." Because that's the thing. That's the thing, especially with the different police incidents, because of the complexity level of them. We look at it from what the person is doing and forgetting to put in all of the input for what we're doing and how we influence, and how the random person walking by and pulling out the video camera now influences the situation. And all of that is in play. However, as unique as each one of those situations are, because that's why you can't—and we've had this discussion with someone before—was trying to just create, "Well, you just can repeat these certain ones and that's all you need." Like, "Well, no, because these are all non-repeat—they're naturally backwards." That's not how your brain will calculate them forward. Each interaction is a naturally occurring event that is not repeatable because if you changed one, one factor, just one small seemingly small factor, would completely change the outcome of the situation. So, so, so—

This is why we rely on heuristics. And that's why in Human One, we had the officer view an officer already on the scene. Why hasn't that been done? Perspective is everything, and that focus pulling—

So, Brian, use your logic, go back one minute, folks, and listen to what Brian is telling you. So Brian is saying that if we use Bayes as an architecture but we don't use the math equation, when we get out into the street, we'll still come to the same logical, logical conclusion. So I will tell you to prove that by using gravity. Okay, so there's a law of gravity and how things fall in a vacuum or in or on the earth. Yes. But we know that if the guy jumps from that balcony and it's too high up, he's going to squash like a bug. So what we're doing is we're reducing the algorithm to a usable chunk, understanding that the same thing with when we're driving, centripetal force and centrifugal force, and not being able to make the turn and driving a big old Crown Vic and having the anti-stop brakes and sliding through the intersection and T-bone somebody because I'm overdriving that car. So what we're doing is we're using math and physics and science, and we're using them at a level that the average person on the street can understand without saying A squared plus B squared because we don't need it. And that's what a heuristic is. A heuristic is cognitively close enough. It's enough information to form that reasonable conclusion. And we don't stop there. This is why it's not guesswork. We add artifacts and evidence to support reasonable conclusions. We do sense-making, and we do it to problem-solve.

Okay, so how do we do that? We adapt the sense-making. Look, we're constantly negotiating our relationships with our environment, with society, with other humans. And while my brain is doing that, it's using pattern recognition. These things generally add up to me going to lunch: the siren in town, my stomach grumbling. Those type—those are all heuristics, and so those heuristics in the moment tend to tell me, "Hey, it's time to go to lunch." So don't relearn the wheel. Start adopting this into your training. Now those heuristic templates and prototypes, and we did it with Combat Hunter, we did it again with ACED, we did it again with Kodiak, and guess what? People became better at spotting anomalous or incongruent behavior in their environment. And that's where the danger lies all the time. So heuristics are the key to that thinking, right? We didn't have heuristics and heuristics were so faulty, we would not be able to do what we do with such a great degree of accuracy.

And and that's why we, you know, say it's not about, you know, what to look for in your environment, it's how to look in your environment, it's how to process things. You can't know what to look for there unless you're doing something solely laser focus and specific. But at that point, and but that's a, that's sort of a different, different case. You know, what everyone always wants to know is like, "Well, well, how do I do this? How do I not jump to an unreasonable conclusion?" And and not just that, but, you know, you're talking about, so, so if we add an element, okay, if we're going to look at all this is sort of this algorithm or I'm taking in all this information, it all depends on the context, and there's certain things that are going to weigh more and factor in more. So so one, obviously, the situation. Two, when it becomes something about survival or it becomes, you know, tied to that in some way, whether it's your survival or the other person in the incident, that increases the pressure on the system.

But you actually—I mean, you tell me this, you—you tell me what you think when I when I say it this way: you actually limit the amount of potential possibilities there are because—because when meaning when someone is in sort of that um survival mode—and I'm using that in a general term, whether everyone just likes to say fight or flight, it could be freeze, it could be whatever. But but it doesn't matter what what it is, they're they're in that um because your cog—your your cognition is very limited in that point and it's only focused on your survival, you—you're only going to choose a few outcomes. It it limits the amount, the range of choices you have. We're in, we're in that, we're watching Jeopardy, Greg, and we're trying to come with the answer, I've got all kinds of things I can use, I've got time. But but but it's not a survival situation, so so it's not going to be as narrow focus. So so in and even though the time is counting down, the brain realizes it's a game. The temporal element is extremely important, and if I add that, which is why you brought it up with the Even book, Slow the Game Down, why why would you call it Slow the Game Down? Because if you, if I put a ticking time bomb on, that's why those shows are so exciting, that's why we all think this is the worst, that's why we all think, "But what if we need to get this Intel out of this person because they're going to fly another?" It's like, stop putting that temporal element on it because you're limiting your ability to to sense-make and problem-solve in the situation. Does that kind of make sense? I mean, because what everyone wants to do is, is how, how do I do this and how do I not get it wrong? Like, how do we get the whole—

We had to fight. And it wasn't just us, we had to fight about non-criminal barricades. How many times did we have to come up for air and say, "Look, why are you surrounding this house? Why are you using all these resources? He's alone in that house. He can't hurt anybody right now except himself." And while that would be tragic, that's not what your SWAT team and this cordon and everything else is for. And then people started thinking, "Wow, well, maybe that applies to other things." Yeah. There's rarely a caper you have to drive over the speed limit to with your lights and siren. And as a matter of fact, everybody that's ever been a copper, an emergency worker, first responder, understands that there's an additional element of complication and danger when you are running lights and siren. That's why there's laws about those things, Brian, and that's why there's the rules and training and everything else. So what you're talking about, the gift of time and distance, applies universally along all of these things. The more time that you get, the better decision you're going to make.

To your second point, having less to think about, when you go from your prefrontal cortex, your executive center of your brain, back to your limbic brain, your limbic brain starts excluding things: sounds that don't matter, emotion that doesn't matter, vision that doesn't matter, Brian. And why does it do that? To prioritize. But it chooses what it thinks matters and doesn't based on what it believes your survival is.

Exactly. And it can only choose from what it's been given: one, hardwired stuff that we're hardwired like breathing, blinking, swallowing, autonomic reflexes, parasympathetic nervous system responses, all that, and sympathetic, of course, heartbeat, circadian rhythm. Okay, so here's a whole book right here. But these other things are things you learned along your life. Like when Dad comes in and Dad's had a couple of drinks and your mom is already [expletive] screaming at him from the driveway, you know there's a beating that's coming, and you know that if you're at ground zero, you're going to get in—get—okay. So all of those things coalesce, Brian, and that's what we're talking about. Why—why our system—look, if we only stopped at heuristics and only walked around looking for them through a big spyglass and we wore the Sherlock with the calabash, okay, then then yeah, we're going to be wrong sometimes. But if we use that as a gating mechanism, we use heuristics to get us on the field, and then we use our artifacts and evidence and reasonable suspicion and probable cause and all those other things, we're going to be right a lot more than we're wrong.

Are we still going to make mistakes? Even the best scientists with the best—look, ask Sally Ride if that's the one that exploded when they were going up into space. Those people were the best scientists in the world with the best pilots, the best everything. And Brian, [expletive] happens. Okay, so what you can't do is you can't look for a zero defect, right? What you have to do is you have to look for optimal Human Performance given the complexity of the situation. And I will agree with you, there is no more complex thing than being a law enforcement officer because the law—look, look at how many things are in the law. We have Congress, okay? We have SCOTUS, we have the Bill of Rights, we have all of these different, different things to make sure that the law is right. And you're out there with a six-gun on your hip, and your job is supposed to be to interpret all that stuff. Well, they get the luxury of interpreting it for four years or for six months or pouring over it with, you know, the greatest minds in the world and a compressed aside.

Now, look, I'm not saying it's not dangerous to be a 7-Eleven clerk, but rarely will a 7-Eleven clerk have to think in the moment as under such dire circumstances, right? And conclude that a bunch of lives are going to be lost.

Well, because it's they're only—they're only, you know, they they can be an an inch wide and a mile deep, where where the in in the other case, you have to be a mile wide, but you only get you only get to be an inch deep, you know.

You only get 17 seconds to do it because we always think we have to get there faster. We always think that we have to make a decision quicker, and a lot of times that complicates us to the point that we fail. Something breaks. And what breaks is our advanced critical thinking skills because we think that right now if I don't intervene, like the whole idea behind de-escalation has been around forever, and that's where we got the gift of time and distance, and that's why we capitalize "The Gift of Time and Distance" for you to remember that it's that important. Why Slow the Game Down like the Harrison's say? We don't need to rush to a conclusion that's going to put a round peg in a square hole that's going to be an unfortunate accident that we see coming, but we were first. You know what I mean? Like in a pursuit, Brian, you don't have to be first. You're kind of going to be second no matter how and and maybe third or fifth.

So we have to stop thinking that way. We have to think heuristically because heuristic thinking is what your brain has been programmed to do anyway. So if we can lubricate those channels, build myelinization or myelination, depending on where you were went to school, then we can have those synapses firing just as fast and draw much more reasonable conclusions, and we can save a life on both sides, both sides of a barrel, both sides of a bash by slowing things down in here in your my gigantic German cranium before that [expletive] spits out of your mouth.

And you know, that that goes back to um, sort of that that anticipation of likely outcomes. And and that's the thing is that is again still based on prior knowledge and past experience and the given within the framework of the given context that that you're in. And and that anticipation is so powerfully important. And and that that's what allows you to get ahead of the curve so you're not reacting, so you're not relying on the jack-in-the-box method.

What's the job of your amygdala, Brian? To search out those things in your environment that may be a priority cue and lead that person by hand. Your amygdala takes them by hand to the front of the line in your limbic system and knocks on the door to the prefrontal cortex and goes, "Hey, you may want to consider this." And it does it tens of thousands of times a second as you're moving through your environment because sense-making is the most critical part. That's why SPAR (Sense-Make, Problem-Solve, Adaptability, Resilience). Read about in the book. If you get the book, go back and watch us on webcam highlights. Come see us in class. If you can sense-make faster than a cunning opponent, you can save a life or you can get an opportunity.

And and you're just trying, you know, you're trying to to to get ahead as much as you can, whether that's a quarter second or a day or a month, it doesn't matter.

Whatever a piece of paper or a leg of lamb. Survival is measured in nanoseconds. It's measured in food and water. I'll give you an example. The guy died up on the mountain and—I haven't slept in a couple of days because this damn headache, it'll go away, it's fine—stress related to to my dear friend Brian's baby or something. Chalk it up, it's not the antelope in the yard and the bear that's digging through our trash.

But as you're looking at these things in your environment and you're trying to make sense and order out of them, life happens, and life is a complicating factor. And now that cop that's pulling up to the scene, that's stepping out, that's thinking about his dry cleaning, that has all those other situations, those are issues that are going to belabor that person's brain. But if we don't equate them when we go into the training, Brian, I take so much time, I'm in minutiae that when I hand you a student guide for the upcoming whatever it's going to be, how many pages is it average? How many chapters? And you always look at it and you got that smile now, you're looking, you go, "[expletive], here we go again." But why do we have to go in that level of detail? Because that's how things work. That's what your brain is taking apart. Your brain rarely gets one message that's big enough and strong enough and powerful enough.

I'll give you an example. So you you will be looking at a female in a bar and you go, "I want to be on that." And now you have a drink, and all of a sudden the limbic system starts taking over, and your amygdala is measuring, "Do we have any other suits?" And, "I don't want to get too drunk, but I want to be drunk enough to be cool and not be an idiot," right? And all this stuff happens, and now we create inevitabilities down that path, but we stunt our sense-making and our critical thinking. Why are we willing to do that? Because we're our own worst enemy. So so if that happens in a bar when all the influences are right and going towards something we really, really want to love, and it's probably going to be fun, not dangerous, imagine what happens if we turn the tables and now we've had too little sleep, too little food, too little time. You get—you get what I'm trying to say? And that's why we take so much time building those scenarios so your brain goes, "Man, they weren't really talking about the stolen car, they were talking about all the other factors that we missed on the way to the door with the driver." And that's what I'm talking about, Brian. Not everything in police news work comes out with a fatal consequence, but that's where we go.

The The Grand Central Station—everybody calls it Grand Central Station—is like your brain, but it's not a station, it's a terminal. Grand Central Terminal. Why is it called that? Because that's where all the trains end up. They end there, that's the end of the track. So if you're thinking of your training as Grand Central training, the inevitability of it ending with a violent confrontation, then you're not considering the 350,000 other capers that happened that day that didn't make the New York Times because they didn't—they didn't end in a violent confrontation.

And that that that's that you're getting into how the our own, not ours, but how how in general our own way of training for these events can can get in the way of us doing this because why there's always an inevitability, there's always something's going to happen. There's—it's like how many times do we have a scenario where nothing happens and it's like, "Well, wait, they didn't do anything." It's like, "No, but you have to explain to me what's the hierarchy of that group? Why do you think that? Why did they come in this way versus that way? What is—does this mean over here, and does that mean in three moves the white chess piece is going to be in a position to shoot the queen?" See, that's what we're trying to think of, Brian, but you can't do that if it's a Barney Miller episode or, you know, what's Buddy Ebsen, Barney Miller? Right, where it's an episode where it's going to be solved in 30 minutes or an hour or a Family Guy where we're going to get six laughs and then they're going to get to the punchline. That's not how life works, so you have to stop thinking of training in that manner.

And and people tell us when they're doing the training, "Well, you're only going to hold their—" If you go to our stuff, we've had for hours out in the sun, Brian, in camouflage with a spotting scope, and they're breathing, yelling at each other, right? So that's what we bring to the table. And that's what we bring with the heuristic, the umbrella that carries Mary Poppins in, says heuristic. It's a big H all over. Everybody thought it was heroin. It's not.

That's that's a deep reference right there. Um, now that's that's um, that's a lot to unpack.

And there's more. Listen, listen, we could sit here and talk about four or five different types of heuristics and we could explain why the brain uses them. But then you know what we're going to do? You're chasing our shot group. Exactly. We don't need to, Brian. In this issue, if a human being understands why we use heuristic thinking, template and prototypical matches in this manner to build fidelity-filled file folders, okay, if they understand that basic, then they're going to go, "Holy crap, these guys have something I've never heard of before and nobody else is doing." And this is why we give the our our examples to people like, "You know, go find a feral cat or wild cats in your environment." "What the [expletive] does this have to do with learning?" Like it has everything to do with it because as a matter of fact, Schrödinger is out there right now going, "Kitty, kitty, kitty," because he loves the idea so much, right? The point, same thing with the shopping cart. If you see a person out there searching for a shopping cart on their day off, you know they've been to our training because that's weighted differently. You said 30 minutes ago, the things in your environment are weighted differently.

Exactly.

And if your brain prioritizes information, why don't you—why don't you prioritize training? And there's a ton of training out. Why? Because after a bunch of cops got killed, they flooded the market so absolutely every kubotan instructor, sidekick match this and that. But is that in your best interest? Is that in your best sense-making problem-solved leading to a decision that's a better critical decision? If the answer is no, then that training is just taking up time. I'm not saying don't go to training, I'm saying go to as much training as you can, but fund the type of training that's going to build your cerebral cortex, that that's going to take your brain and open doors that you never knew you had. That's the type of training I want to go to.

No, and then everyone calls it, "Well, yeah, we got to build in some critical thinking skills," or that, you know, "There's some decision-making in this." And it's like, "Well, no, you're laying it out and you're saying there's only these two or three decisions to make." And it's like, there's a whole world out there of things that you can do. There's an entire timeline that you can manipulate.

Let, and I'm going to write this down because I don't want to forget that, Brian, you're so canny, uh, uh, uh. There's this thinking of worldview and we hear it in the press and we hear it everywhere else. Worldview is actually killing you because what's happening is you're seeing that there's one set of circumstances, there's one ring that combines them all, you know, that rules them all, all that other thing. There isn't. Okay, so stop looking for it. The idea of this one thing that you can apply to everything, Brian, the idea is that critical thinking is key because your brain already does it sociologically, physiologically, uh, uh, it does it in so many psychological, uh, uh, things that you anticipate. And and if that word, like some people go, "Well, psychology is still yet," so is math. Math is still a growing science, we're learning [expletive] every day. So what I'm telling you is stop with your lexicon. Stop insisting on new biases. Stop coming up with words like, uh, uh, uh, you know, impostor, you know, syndrome and all this horseshit, and look at what we're telling you. We're telling you you've probably learned enough in your life right now to navigate things daily. Huh? Yeah, to get to work, to get home. If you're alive and listening to this or watching, probably doing okay. You've got you've got something to start with, so why wouldn't you use that packaging, Brian? Why wouldn't you use that staircase? Wouldn't you use that underpinning in future decisions? Because your brain wants to go there anyway.

And anything that you're doing outside of that, that that—and people go, "Well, you're going to learn more." Yeah, you're going to learn more and it's going to complicate things. And I'm not saying be stupid, I'm saying go down to the minimalist decision-making points, and heuristics will take you there. And heuristics will serve as a wonderful, uh, uh, uh, uh, scenario builder for your training, as a wonderful answer key for off-duty roll call, as a wonderful catchall at on-duty roll call. "Hey, uh, what's the brake fade on that, you know, Scout car parked down in Park?"

"What's brake fade?" "Sage, yeah."

Exactly. And then you go, Brian, "Those are the heuristics!" I love you throw it out there, right? And and now minds want to learn and they grow. What do we do with kids, Brian? We do the same thing. What do we do with STEM camp? We did the same thing. Everybody else at STEM camp is going, "Yeah, I'm going to go out and fly the drone." That's cool because you got to use that. But who's opening up your brain to all the things that you need to know before you grab that toggle and all these other? That's us. And you know what? We're restricting our job market because a lot of other people are saying, "Well, yeah, I go from training to training to training." Okay, we don't do as much, but when we do it, it's profound and it sticks around. I'm still getting calls from people that took our training 40 years ago. You get what I'm trying to say? And say, "Hey, saved another life," or or, "You know, the SEAL team that says, 'Hey, that song that you got in our head that earworm helped me not get into an ambush, Brian.'" That's magic. We get that all the time, and we're very lucky because we stick to one thing.

Actually, just got a couple on Instagram as well. Another guy from a group out at Fort Bragg was like, "Hey, wait a minute, was that guy teaching soft classes back in blah blah blah?" And I'm like, "Yeah, man." He's like, "Holy [expletive], I've been using that every day since I went to that class. I still use the terminology today." That was 10 years ago or eight years ago.

Did he ask if I was fatter?

No, I think you're you're thinner now, probably. You're actually way thinner this morning.

The workout which complicates my head.

[chuckles]

And I haven't been sleeping well because we just had updates on both our flu shot and COVID at the same time, and so for whatever reason, it just threw off a rhythm. And it happened with the sun going up and coming down different because the hour change, right? So so this morning I go, "Okay, when I get on to that," because I got the elliptical and the the assault bike right next to each other, I said, "I'm going to warm up on the assault bike, go over, and I'm going to run as fast as I can for a mile on the elliptical and then come back over." Guess where I ended up? I ended up on the floor in the bathroom crying going, "Okay, that was stupid." Uh, but see, in my brain, Brian, I'm still that guy. I'm I'm still the one that can pull it off. But guess what? The heuristics that I created in that room led to me being wrong. That's where heuristics can go wrong. "Hey, I've got all the tools, I must be a [expletive] gymnast."

Okay, but what I didn't do is I didn't check the Fitbit.

You understand what I'm trying to say? That's a great—that's a better way. I I I should probably start using that instead of using the one that just pisses people off, where I'm like, "Yeah, oh no, you got all the gear, you got the short barrel rifle with the suppressor and the optics and the helmet and this, and you've got all that [expletive]." And man, and I always look at it and go, "Hey, that's really clean equipment. You must spend a lot of time cleaning it." "Oh no, you don't." "Oh, you just don't spend a lot of time [expletive] wearing it."

Exactly. Like, you know, that's my biggest thing. I never see so much clean equipment before in my life.

I was like, "Hey, man, agencies are full of it, man." And here here in a big agency, the guy that got killed with SWAT and you're going, "What does that mean?" That means that anybody can. It does not matter where you are in the chain or in the stack or when you're going through that door, you have the same risk as everybody else, even the person sitting out in the car or or stopping vehicles at the intersection. And you have to learn how to manage risk, and part of what we do is we teach you how to manage risk internally. And I'm still making mistakes, Brian. I'm 62 years old, and I'm still making those mistakes. So that means there isn't a perfect answer. There isn't a threshold where once you get there, you have everything. You have to learn every day. You have to get out there in the environment and mix it up.

That's even a whole whole another conversation. We do tend to—

Stewie, whole another. Exactly. We we still—we we want that that the answer then. Okay, so is it then we need this type of training, right? But I I went to the answer. You get what I'm trying to say? Is when I got thrown into the closet downstairs, okay, the idea was that I had the answer. I had the answer right in my palm. But you know what I didn't do? I didn't have the support group to put together for that answer, so I fell short of the mark. And that's what we're doing with our training. What we're doing is we're saying a certificate or an accreditation or those other things are going to save me. That tactical vest is going to save me. That helmet is going to save me, when at the end of the day, it's you that are going to save you, and you that are responsible for your safety and security and your well-being and your marriage. Look, if you're a great cop and a shitty dad, if you're a great cop breaking up with all your relationships, are you really a great cop? That's all.

Well, that that's that's that's the thing we get so domain specific or just one area and we can grab on to that and we that's the classic. I know so many guys who just are total studs in the gym and they just put up more weight possibly imagine. They eat like they they damn near count the grains of rice on their plate, you know what I'm saying? And then the rest of their life is a complete mess. And you're like, "Hang on, you have you have the discipline, you have the the work ethic, are are what element your—" You'd be an unbelievable human.

Look at the people we respect and admire. Yeah, William Atkinson. Look how he started, look how he ended, okay? Look where he is ended like, it's not over. We don't know that today with, you know, with a ligature mark. But the idea, look at Eric Koerner. Koerner is the same way. Koerner has discipline in everything he does. Still our friend, uh, uh, uh, Chris Rhodes. Look at what Chris Rhodes aspired to. He bit off more than anybody could chew, and guess what? He's still nibbling and he's still moving forward. So so, uh, and everybody else out there that I'm not mentioning now, Brian Willis is another good thing. When we're talking about the secured dad, or we're talking about the distinguished savage. Why have we been friends with those guys for so long, Brian? Because every single day they put on the gloves and they get in the ring and they're ready to go. They're ready. When that bell rings, they're ready. We don't have to go, "Hey, where is that guy?" How many times do we have to come out of the hotel at 4:30 in the morning when we're headed to the range and go, "Could somebody call his room? Could somebody go up there?" Right? Because there were six guys in the stack and invariably the two or three people down in the car had to wait for everybody else. Brian, that's the type of stuff we're talking about, man. And and again, the topic was heuristics, which is vast. People study their entire life on one aspect of it.

Yeah. And I think we did a great job of bringing it down to usable chunks, you know.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope I understood what I said.

Well, I did too. That's—there's two of us. We must we must be right.

But it's the same bourbon. Yeah.

Yeah. So alright, well, that's yeah. And Brian, I only—I'll shut up now. Anytime I hear that heuristics are guesswork or heuristics aren't critical thinking or there's a difference between, I'm telling you, stop reading. Look, I love Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, all that other, but and I—I—I—I love our buddy from University of Central Florida, Klein is is a genius. I love all of them, but every once in a while you got to walk out that door and go out on the street and and see that the application is where heuristics—

No, and I've had other subject matter experts at that level say this kind of similar stuff about Klein. It's not bashing Gary Klein at all, it's he's a freaking genius. But but it's it's the, "Okay, well this is in the book, you have to go—" it's not translating out on the street.

And and that that's the that's the thing. The theory does—the theory does, but I'm talking about the practical application. It's it's—

It is. And and, you know, to that, that's what you you this is why we focus too, especially when on on anytime we have people in front of us that we're teaching is, "What does this mean to you? What is your experience with this? What is your example with this? I gave you an example for me, now you give one from you that you instantly recalled when I put that photo up or that you—when you when we told that story." Because why? Because you have an entire lifetime of of experiences to draw, and I don't care how low you know level your experience is, you have so much to draw from on your own that you can use in a new—it's not everything you walk into is new. There's certain elements that are always going to be the same.

You knocked it out of the park. And let's talk about another heuristic. So you know, my dad and my uncle both worked for Sears. Don't even know if Sears, Roebuck and Company in any manifestation of it still even around, right? But Ted Williams was an incredible baseball player and was sort of the thing. So every pistol or rifle or shotgun was a Ted Williams edition if you bought it through Sears. It was a special edition, you know, that people right now buy a certain type of batting glove or a certain type of catcher's mitt that's got the name of the person they admire. Why? Because it's a totem. We think in our brains that that's going to imbue those skills upon us when at the end of the day, Brian—

That's why all of these companies that are out there right now and that that's the perfect explanation of what every gear, tactical company, gun manufacturer, the same thing. "Oh, those guys use this." Like, I get that. I mean, and it's so it's so strap-on and you got it and it really clouds our ability to make, you know, good decisions. This this is why influencer marketing—

Human condition. Yeah, because that's who we are as humans, and that's why as humans evolve, the part of that shouldn't have evolved was the part that we want competition to the point of "I'm better than you and look at me and this." And if we would have stayed, "We're optimal Human Performance." What we are now is in the nether regions past that where we're saying, "Man, that energy drink is really going to spike my power and I'm going to, you know, be able to do this and that." And you know what? It's just a human, and humans have limits, and the Earth has limits, and you're going to run into both of those one day and you're going to go, "Holy [expletive], I wish I would have spent a little more time in the library." Just saying.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a that's a good that's a good point to to kind of—

This my headache is gone first of all. And I—

That's bad. Does anybody else smell burnt toast, Brian? Is this going to be one of those where you're like, "Hey, I when when I die, I need you to check my brain"?

Is it one of those within the—it's it's worse than that. "I need you to check my browser." Yeah, remember? Not funny, man. It's so true. So, alright, that's no, hey, really great conversation. I really enjoy these type of—

I do, and I would love some some feedback from listeners on it. Um, and because I I'd like to know what parts speak to people or what they have other questions on. And I know we have our Patreon side, we always answer questions on there as well.

It's okay to disagree with us. We use what works for us.

Yeah, no, I would that that's what I would love too. You know, we don't get too much of that where people say, "Well, no, you got this part wrong because here's why." But I would I would I would welcome and love those conversations too because we don't we don't, you know, it's more just, "What do you what do you mean by this?" Or, "How do I use that? How do I use that?" Because that's the big thing, and I know everyone's going to ask, "Well, how do I use my past experiences then? How do I get that?" It's like—

But Brian, there's got to be something that's relegated to the webinar, to the in-person class, to the book because we can't do it all in an hour format. We just can't. And even if we did, even if we did, even broke down all of the chapters of the book and the usable chunks and lecture series and all that other stuff, you're not going to get it as well as being in person with us at that venue, at that environment, walking around. And the, you know, what makes the class, the in-person class, the people in the class, there's never been two that were the same, right? And the influences of those folks and that were in Fort Worth or that were in, you know, Alexandria, that changes everything, Brian, and that's the most fun. That's why I'll never stop traveling. You know, I'm going to burn burn out in the class one day and just faceplant and you're going to have to cover me with a raincoat and keep teaching.

Those days, you know, you will anyway. "Push him out in the hall." "Should we check to see if he's okay?" "No, he's dead."

"He's probably dead." Exactly. "He's close enough." You know.

"I think he's still breathing."

Exactly. "Yeah, he's talking to you, Brian. Shut up. Just put him in the hallway. He's asking you to call 911." That's what I was going to tell you. So the the resilience, last thing. The resilience. The guy, the mountain climber. The headache ended so now it came back to me, Brian. He died in August. His dog was alive and healthy and waited next to him and didn't eat him all the way till they rescued him this week. That dog found water, found stuff, found nourishment and kept coming back to that hiker expecting his hiker, his man, was going to sit back up and walk off with him. If that's not a tale of of how much you could do with training—and you're saying, "Yeah, it's a dog," I get it. But the idea is the guy died, the dog didn't, right? So there's certain things in your environment that that you can change and you can challenge, and training will get you there. So man, shout out to that dog. Glad he didn't eat the corpse of his hey, it's going to be a hard sell at the puppy pound, you know? "Hey, dog's pretty resilient." "Is he? He's got bad breath."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, exactly. You know, once you get the taste for that human flesh, I would say don't sleep too deeply the first month that you have him." Right? "Make sure make sure his his his bowl of food is always always over full." "Hey, I got to go check on my antelope."

Yeah, yeah. Alright, well, thanks everyone for tuning in. We did cover a lot in there, so there's there's a lot to unpack. But I I would appreciate if if people have questions, you know, reach out to them at The Human Behavior Podcast at gmail.com. Reach out to us.

And if you got a thumbs up every once in a while, it's great to hear good news. It's great to hear that we helped you in some small way navigate your life.

Yeah, yeah. Well, uh, so you know, I think that's a good good spot to end on. I appreciate everyone for tuning in. And yes, don't forget to feed your dog and that training, training changes behavior.