L.O.G. 234 A Horse Named Twister

All right. Well, good morning, Greg, on this chilly morning by you. I'm guessing it's that time of year now, so it's probably like, is it above zero degrees right now? Or is it seven above zero?

People don't think about that, Brian, until they look at 32 as being freezing and you get an idea.

Yeah, exactly.

But it's four times warmer than it was yesterday morning. You do the math.

I don't even know. I wouldn't know how to do that. That's too much for me. All right. So, but just understanding that there is math is enough. Anybody out there that knows us knows, "Wow, that must be colder," right?

So, today, the kind of overall topic is going to be about naming conventions and why they matter. So, how we name things, why we name them, and we're going to get into kind of a few different sort of, I guess, subtopics, a few different areas in there about, you know, the intent behind a name, what are you doing with it? Is it used to explain something? You know, we'll talk about lexicons in general and priming, meaning how calling something a certain thing will elicit certain responses and will influence how you process what that is, whether it's the name, title of a movie, you know, title of our podcast, whatever it is. You know, when you call something, give something a name, it's important. And sometimes not a lot of thought is put into that, and sometimes a lot of thought is put into that, especially when it's something high dollar amount.

I always look to the movie industry for that, where they'll make the entire movie, do the sort of the preview for a small audience, and then they'll kind of walk up like, "Hey man, we got to change the title. That didn't—that didn't—we're losing this entire potential audience." Just by changing the name of it, automatically, completely kind of changes the, you know, it almost changes up the context so much, right? So it changes up how relevant that that is. All right, but I wanted to kind of start with you because I know you got a, you got a good story about that that will kind of tie in some of the little lessons we're going to be talking about today. So I'd love to sort of throw it to you to start with that.

Yeah, and I, I, I hope I'm going to tell the right story because I got so many written down here this morning. No, such, such information happens, Brian, when all of a sudden you're thrust on the, camera comes on and you go, "Wow, that would be a great story," and you don't want to mission creep. So I've separated my brain: clever and cleaver. And the clever means that, "Wow, I can learn something from it." And the cleaver means, "That's so stupid that I want to attack you with an implement of, you know, cutting edge."

I like that. That there, that that'll be an overall thing we'll follow: clever versus cleaver. I like that.

Exactly. So, I remember going down and taking a look and taking a ride with Shelly on a horse that we were about to buy from a dear friend of ours. We had 44 horses. You got to keep the numbers up because you got different riders, different terrain, whole, whole side story, but the idea was that we went and saw a horse named Twister. And the horse was named Twister because it was unsafe in the gate. And when it started backing up, it would twist around and it would crush you against the wall of the pen. It would dump a rider in the arena. It would dump a rider coming through the gate before they mounted to get to the arena. There was just these horror story after horror story, and it was called Twister.

And so right on its brand it had a different name. God rest his soul, and it was a square letter D brand from where it had been trained and bought some years ago. And so I looked at these guys with fascination. I go, "Have you ever been sued?" And they go, "Yeah, but it's a great horse. I mean, it's a bombproof horse." But it's not really bombproof because it throws a lot of people. And I'm like, "Well, did you ever think that maybe you were priming some of that? Why didn't you call the horse Square D, Brian?" They all looked at each other like I came off of Mars. You know what I'm saying? I just came out of a UFO. And they go, "Why would we do that?" And I go, "Well, Square D doesn't start at Twister. Twister literally means that you knew or should have known that this horse was going to spin around and throw you or dump you." And they sat there and they go, "You know what? We never thought of that."

You know who thinks of that, Brian? Attorneys think of that. You know, litigious people think of those things. So there's two things really that are going on there. One, are you being clever? "Twister! Hey, that bastard twisted around and just dumped me." Or are you being cleaver? "Holy crap, we're setting ourselves up for a lawsuit that could close down our part of the industry, our dude and guest ranch, our riding facility." You get it? So now that clever-cleaver part comes right in there.

So, you know, I think, like, I won't attribute, but there was a person that you're very familiar with that we worked with in a different life, whose call sign was Poacher. Now, Poacher is a really, really good call sign inside because it's an inside joke, down and in, and it wasn't poaching eggs, Brian, I'll just give you that. And it was a very real legal standard. That's why the name came up because there was trouble in paradise, right? So that was a cleaver. Now, now, we wanted to be clever and throw it out there thinking, "Wow, look how smart and clever we are." But when it came down at the end of the day, we're kind of really using a naming convention. We were more involved in taxonomy than we knew. And what were we setting up for a potential future? We were, we were priming unintentionally, yet we were exposing ourselves to risk deliberately. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and, and, and this is, this is why that stuff is so important because, you know, in hindsight you can look back and be like, "Wow, we, we probably really should have seen that coming when we bought that horse Twister, were we thinking?" But at the time, you know, you're not thinking of it. And but it, but it really you, you, it shows, it shows that you knew, knew a lot more than, than you, than you really thought you did or you should have known something. You brought up when it, of course, when it comes to liability where you, you, you knew or should have known, right?

You know, I think of so many different people with different call signs or nicknames, whatever you want to call it. You know, someone who was like, "Oh, he's, that's, that's Hammer." It's like, "Why? Why is it Hammer?" It's like, "Oh, because he comes in and puts the hammer down." It's like, "Uh, okay. Could we potentially see that spiraling out of control in some situations?"

Exactly. Exactly. You don't want to name one of your trainers Rapy, you know, because he gives off a Rapy vibe when he shows up. You know, God's crying because he's here now. But think about that for a minute because, like, you know what buyer's remorse is, right? So I would say the clever-cleaver standard has to be where you go, "Wow, everything feels right. This feels like the right thing to do. Let's sleep on it or let's use socialization or let's interpret what spirals could come from this event." Right? If we do it that way. Like, like, what's life trying to tell me right now? When all of a sudden I come in and this person, like, look at the elves. We always go back to Disney because he was a genius, right? But what did we expect to get out of Sleepy? You know, what? What were we thinking when we said Dopey? What's your idea?

Yeah. So, so if we, if we take and I'm not saying dumb it down because that's simple and it's wrong. What I'm saying is that you have to take a look 360. You have to give you a perfect example. Just happened this morning. Just read an article before you came on about an investigation in a part of Colorado. Non-attribution again, for incentive exposure, in a number of investigative sources that went along with it.

So the first thing that comes to mind, priming, chemicals, emergency, your primitive brain, the first thing is somebody exposed themselves to a bunch of kids on a school bus. "You bastard! If, if I was there, I would, you know, beat you to death." Had nothing to do with it. This is Colorado. Wavy Gravy, Chili Palmer, pass the bong. What happens is there are a bunch of springs and these springs are hot springs and this is the time in the season that people will park on the road, take off their clothes, and walk into the hot spring right at the side of the road. And then they'll smoke a joint with a couple of other people and they'll have great fellowship, Brian, and they'll get back into their car and they'll go to work. This, this is so common, it's, it's ridiculously normal. But what does somebody driving by from Iowa see? "Holy crap, a bunch of naked people wandering around by the roadside." They call it. And now the dispatcher has to name it something. "Do I have public nudity? Public indecency? Indecent exposure?" Well, what do those words mean? So words are hugely strong. And here we have, Brian, if we were going to name a bias, we'd call it the dispatcher bias because the dispatcher got to write down the card and say words. You get what I'm trying to say? So, so you can put your thumb on the scale accidentally or incidentally for that matter with just a word. And a wrong place word or title or name at the wrong time can lead people to have theater of the mind and go straight to cleaver.

And and no, exactly. And, and it also gets into why we use, we use our, because there's, you, you brought up which I forgot to mention, you know, taxonomy, which is more about kind of, sort of classify different things, right? Right, right. So, uh, would be on one side of the coin, a taxonomy would be the other side of the same coin because we, like, we have our own lexicon that we use. And everyone does. And lexicon just kind of any sort of sayings or terms kind of within a certain context or, uh, certain, like there's certain professional sports have different lexicons, like what they call things, you know? Um, but, but, you know, we, we have our own on here and we use that deliberately, right? Because some of it can be simple to, to, um, you know, again, prime a certain response or a certain shared file for, it's almost like a meme. It's a, it's a way to transmit a significant amount of information in a very short word or sentence or description to where we, you, the person receiving that, automatically knows what that means, right?

Yeah, it's a barcode. It's a, it's a barcode that goes by your brain so quickly that you're not scanning, but your brain goes, "Oh, I get what they're animating. I get where they're leading." And therefore that becomes sticky. In other words, a neuropath is created and it's myelinated, so it's faster than another neuropath, which means you get there quicker. And that can be the key to winning or surviving.

Right. Right. And it's like when we use, we talk about, you know, we've used it before in the past, "Are you up and out or are you down and in?" And it's a very simple understanding of are you down and in, so focused on what you're, you know, that, that you, you, you're almost you lose any sort of external arousal, notice it anymore. But or you up and out and paying attention because it's very simple for me to look at you, go, "Hey, that guy's down and in." And go, "Okay, that's why he's not hearing." We both are on the same theory-level view perception, rather than, "He's, he's, he's distracted by something else and he's not paying attention to what you're saying." Right? I could say all that or I could say, "He's down and in." It transmits the same amount of information.

So these things are, are, are wildly important, extremely important, and that how things can go wrong sometimes or lead to sort of these errors and sensemaking that we talk about a lot, simply by, by, you know, the, the, you know, the call you get. The call is, "Is it, there's a man with a gun in the park?" Or was it, "Someone reported that I think I saw a gun?" Because those are two completely different things. Right? One is, or a man in the park that said he had a gun. And so you're exactly right. So now, now what we're doing is we've got that spiral, the rotor spinning, the spark plug is going, and we're generating combustion whether we intended to or not. And that's the key. What, what were your intentions and have they been met? Have my outcomes been met by what I'm saying? Because have I lit the fuse on four different potential spirals, Brian, that have nothing to do with what I intended by my first phone call? And did you take the ball and run with it? And now we're playing that damn telephone game. "What did he say? How some guy killed a guy in a park?" Here we go.

And, and that goes back to, to kind of the big, the, the big sort of one of the big takeaways in what we're discussing today is that that intent, right? What, what was your intent when you named it that? Because sometimes people go, "Well, I didn't really think of it," or "I just saw it out there. I thought it was clever." You know what I mean? Or I just, "It came to me." It's like, "Well, well, hang on. What are we talking about here?" Because the intent behind it is everything.

Like even with, I, I give the example the podcast. It was called "Left of Greg." Well, that's, that's kind of an inside joke, right? If you get it, you know, one, I'm always sitting, you get it, I'm always sitting to the left of you when we're driving, right? And and you, so I'm, that, that was where these discussions sort of came from. The idea behind the podcast was us driving around when we're going to training or traveling somewhere, right? And I'm always sitting to the left of you. So I'm sitting left. And then it was a take on the term, the, the "left of bang." And so it, it was, it was a joke with multiple levels. But if you don't get it and you're just watching this "Left of Greg" show, what is that? I mean, you would literally have no idea what our show is about if you...

And I just giggle every time somebody says it, but we're not getting new listeners and we're not opening minds. Then have we missed what our intent was? Right?

Exactly. So simple. And it goes back to this, why it affects everything that we do and, and, um, and, and how people perceive certain things, which is why we, of course, always go back to what was their intent because a lot of times people name things or do it and just they, there was zero intent behind it. They just thought of some description to call something and thought it was clever or just didn't even put any time into it when you have this.

Or it looked good when they wrote it, you know, in calligraphy. That font is a lot better. I give you another one. And I got to—today is a bad day for Gunnison in Gunnison County because I got to use non-attribution because these people are still alive or their relatives still live around here, right? Yeah. So, and and I live here. So, Brian, there was a guy from many different genres of interest, called Shooter Bob. And he was a security person at a, at a place locally. Okay. So right away you get what I'm trying to say.

I do. I already have a mental image of what you're talking about. So that's powerful.

So when people go, "Uh, Bob, Bob," and then somebody would look and go, "Bob?" And they go, "Shooter Bob." And everybody go, "Oh, right away they knew Shooter Bob." So you, and let me get the other side of that. You're still thinking, "Okay, they're talking about something, but I don't see the harm." Be a cop or a soldier and be accused of a negligent discharge. Okay. Now you, you fired your weapon and when you, when you weren't supposed or didn't mean to. Right. You got it. So then you also have the next standard, which is the same standard, accidental discharge. You hear law enforcement saying that a lot. But what it actually is, is an unintended discharge. And you're going, "They're all the same." According to law or not? Not when you're up for your Article 15. Not when somebody is taking your weapon and s— How many people back in the day, Brian, during GWOT (Global War on Terrorism), you came up and somebody was carrying a shotgun at the gate and you go, "Oh, security must be high." But then you looked at that soldier's holster and it was empty. That meant that they didn't qualify in their weapon. It meant a completely different thing. So the only weapon they had qualified on, they're carrying at the gate. Right? What I'm saying and what you're saying and what's very important here is that if we don't match our intent, if we don't match our desired outcome with that taxonomy or lexicon or research or nickname or something, then we can do a great disservice. You know, the, the bullying is one thing, but then getting tagged with a nickname for the rest of your life. Like, yeah, you know, that's a quite another thing. "Well, that wasn't my intent." Yeah, but it happened. So how do we reign that in? It's one logical question. How do we see that coming? And and those are critical thinking skills. Those are things we don't consider in the moment that have ramifications that are going to live long after you and I.

No. And, and it's, uh, we, because that's a normal part of human communication to kind of give things a name or call it something, especially a lexicon, especially within, you know, if anyone listening, just think of, you know, where you work or your family, you have your own language, right? Because language is so adaptive and it's just con—like how many little nicknames Micha already has for Max and what she calls him based on how, it's so funny, what time of day, what's going on.

Yeah. Yeah.

What's he doing? Oh, he's got the sillies tonight. Silly Max, you know, because he's goofy and laughing all night. He's like, I call Mad Max when he gets upset when he hasn't eaten in a while. You know what I mean? But, but the idea, you start calling it all those things, and that's a, since it's a natural part of human communication, um, we, we, we sometimes fall short or we don't put enough effort into what we're calling like this program that we built or the training thing that we're going to do or, or what we're, what we're going to set up here. Because even us with some of the courses we teach, like, you know, we don't have like an off-the-shelf thing. I mean, we, we, we do in the sense of like when we're training a certain audience, like a law enforcement, security, you know, or audience, there's going to be, uh, most of, 80% of it's going to be similar, or 60% of it.

KSAs are.

Yeah, are similar. But, but what we even, even what we've called things and then that's why we kind of came up with the "Navigating High-Risk Human Encounters." And people like, "Oh, okay." Because it's just meant to elicit, like, what, what does that mean? That's a general term. It's not, you know, very, very specific that could mean a lot of things. But that's sort of the point in some way because then we follow up, you know, "Proactive Detection of Threats and Opportunities." It's like, "Okay, well that's also looking at two sides of the coin." So there's a lot in it and and it's, it's deliberate when we do those things because we've used different names for different courses before based on the clientele and what we're calling it. Right? And, and, and the point is, it automatically sets some of the context for the information you're about to receive. And so, form of priming.

It's a form of priming.

And that's what I was getting at. So, so when you do that, one, it makes the information more digestible and it gives that context so I don't have to figure it out as much. So if me, I'm just hearing it for the first time, I'm, I'm less likely to go to a wrong area. Right? I'm less likely to go, "Oh, that must mean that over there." And how many times does that happen even with, with, with different consumer products, with, uh, different, I always go back to movie stuff because those titles really elicit something. They put a lot of time, a lot of creative energy goes into that by a bunch of people who are, you know, subject matter experts in their field of, of, you know, film and making movies. And so they take all this time and they're sitting around a table.

Exactly.

"And what about this? And let's do a test audience and how does that play on them?" Because why? Because it's so important upfront, meaning that initial exposure to some piece of information, uh, is so extremely powerful even in a totally, you know, a relaxed, calm, benign environment. Right now you throw some sort of stressful thing into that or something chaotic or something controversial, man, that becomes even more powerful what someone called it. And I don't think we, we, we take a lot of time to do that sometimes simply because of the nature of communication and, and how much people talk because communication spills out of our mouth at a, at a rate that's not controlled by our thinking brain.

Okay. So, so we're just reacting to those things that are around us and and responding. And a good way of looking at that, and you made a great example about how a big business has to spend a lot of time and create pilots and suggestions before they, they actually come up with it. Take a look in my backyard right now. It's snowing outside. Okay. So I already told you it's seven degrees and it's snowing. So seven degrees snow and below zero snow and at freezing, 32 degrees snow and a few degrees more, 35, 38, 40 degrees snow. Yes, it can snow at 40 degrees. Trust me. Uh, uh, the idea is each one of those is a different snow. Now, you have sleet, you have hail, which are forms of condensed cold moisture, right? But they're not snow. And then you've got thundersnow. Right? Got video of it. Okay. So, and you've seen thunder and lightning during a snowstorm, only in Colorado, folks. Maybe you have the same experience where you live.

What I'm trying to say is then we look back to the ancient Inuits or we look to a different culture and somebody always comes up with a statistic. I don't know where they get it, but they go, "Well, did you know the Inuits had 37...?"

Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it is.

Yeah. And and they only had one for polar bear, right? But they had 37 for snow. Polar bear was, "Yeah, all the time, run!" Right? But, but the the idea there is that those things that we now are understanding why taxonomy and lexicon are very different, right? Those things that over time are adopted like, uh, "killer bee." Right? Okay, I get it. These bees along the border, you know, killed other bees and colonies. And if enough of them got on you, they would kill you. But once you ring that bell, you can't take it back. So what was it last year? It was "murder wasps" and then it was, "Oh, the murder hornets." You remember? And so now we've got to come up with "nuclear infused wasp bite." Well, murder implies intent. I mean, so, so wait a minute. They're thinking, they're all sitting on the hedge out there going, "That guy comes out. Kill him dead!"

Okay. But the idea is, as funny as that is, Brian, that's how things are created. You know, so, so we have to going forward, we can accept whatever happens. As a matter of fact, look at how all of these places that used to make encyclopedias but still create dictionaries, they're just now in a very different format online. They pick a new word of the year or they pick a term of the year because it's so profoundly magic that you have the ability with mere words to change or modify somebody's opinion or mitigate situations. You know, "stop" means a lot, you know, in a lot of different ways, except in Colorado where everybody's smoking the kind bud and standing and watching a stop sign waiting for it to turn green and you got to go out there and, you know, push them along their path. You know, that's, I don't mean that as a joke, that actually happens.

But those ideas, so let's go back real quick to priming. So electrochemical neurotransmitters in your brain create these connections. And and I always use file folders. Some people still argue, "Well, they're not file folders. The brain's not set up that way." Study more. They are. And what happens is file folders influence other file folders and they grow. They grow in complexity. They grow in fidelity and they spread load to different corticals of the brain, different areas, different hemispheres of the brain. Why? So you can come to a conclusion that's reasonable much more quickly than the environment is unfolding in front of you. Why? Because it's a survival trigger. So you have a chemical survival trigger that is naturally going to collate and staple and correct and put information in folders for you. But its intent is always honorable. You sometimes create a fractured file folder. You create a file folder that's not whole. You create that, that, that one snowflake that comes down and and goes sideways rather than straight down and you don't notice it right away. Why? Because how many words do you use in a day? How much stuff do you think about during the day? How many interactions do you have? Right?

So what happens is that file folder is created too and it's not the right file folder. It's the, it's the demented, broken file folder. Okay. But guess what, Brian? It's still picking up stuff. It's, it's like a, you know, a garbage can in a hallway and you forgot about the garbage can but everybody else walking by didn't and they're still throwing crap into it. So you have to be careful because if you allow that to, to grow, it can grow exponentially over time and lead you to the wrong conclusion. You know, you, you can see a thing, you can assign an importance to the thing and then drift away from it and then come back to it a couple other times on your way to work. And all of a sudden what you've created is a knowledge of that thing and that knowledge is faulty. So, so those file folders can be worse than having no file folder. And, and so I just want to say that sometimes you are saying negligent discharge in a, in a the court of law. So you were negligent. "Yeah, well, that's what I'm trying to prove, your Honor." You know, Title 42 Section 1983 and you win your lawsuit. So we have to be careful, Brian, when we're building file folders or reviewing them. Let's say that our sensemaking problem solving was sound in every one of those aspects.

And and part of, part of the reason why I wanted to kind of discuss this with you on here is because, you know, being what we do and talking about behavior, we always say, you know, obviously the, even the saying, you know, "actions speak louder than words" and focused on what people do is far more important than what they say. Um, and it's not that, you know, because language as we know it today has only been around so long and it's so, it's so adaptive and it's constantly changing. And, and the meaning behind words change all the time. Um, that's, that's a normal part of, of, um, of human communication. And so we say, "No, it doesn't matter as much what someone says." But it, it words do still matter, especially when you call something something because it automatically, it, you attribute value to things that you otherwise would. And it gets ties into the social media arguments and why, why people, so many people get on there and and and get into these divisive debates on social media is part of it. It's, it's not just the, uh, you know, it's, it, it's not because that's who that person necessarily is all the time. Yes, it's because of the context of the situation and how I took something simply by the words he chose to use.

I, it's devoid of any meaning or context when it's just in print and it's always been around like that for so long. It's the cave paintings. "Oh, it must mean this. They're great hunters." It's like, no, that, that we don't know that was the the preschool for cave kids, you know, back in the day and that's the only thing that they could draw. But we're sitting here saying, it's the...

Spending entire semesters discussing it. Right.

So look, you have to understand that we do it, Brian and I do it. Even though Brian and I travel together, we, we eat together, we talk in the car, we're together all the time when we're on the road. And then we teach together. And so the one morning in Detroit, I just come back from what I thought was a great workout and I'm a very organized freak. I, I have mental problems. So I've got my two juice glasses, my two coffee glasses, I've got my yogurt and my roll and and I've got them all lined up vertically on my table, which is a plane. And and I keep walking back and filling things in left to right and up and down. And so Brian comes in and just casually goes, "Hey, how many people are eating here?" The minute that he said that, I was crushed because I was thinking, "Look how fat I am. He's saying I'm eating too much. He's making a value judgment." That was never the intent. So you have to remember that when you're tuning your message to transmit, you have to sometimes understand almost always understand what the intended recipient is seeing and is it consistent context and relevance with what you intended.

I, I give you a very simple example other than that emotional example. Chevy had a very, very important car called a Nova. Yeah. Okay. Now, work, work in most of North America, except for our Southern border and all of Mexico and Latin America. Why? Because no va means "no go." It's not moving. Okay. But Brian, how was that overcome? It was the sheer power of Chevy and the name and the look of that car that people go, "Okay, I get it." And guess what it became? It became The Human Behavior Podcast. It became an inside joke that existed for a tremendous amount of time and people acquiesced and assimilated over that time. That doesn't mean it's what it meant. That doesn't mean that, "Oh, by the way, like a future civilization coming in and going, 'Why would they build a car that didn't go?'" That's that was never the intent, but it occurs. It occurs.

And, and that's, that's a, that's, um, sort of a historical perspective of, of why those things get wrong too because we look back, "Oh, well, you must have meant this." It's like, well, that's not what that person meant at the time when they said that and they wrote that and they published it. And so we, we sort of have this, this odd comparative baseline because we, we don't always go to the right file folders. We don't go to the right area of the brain or the right experiences to draw value or, or attach value to what it is someone's saying simply because of that error of misunderstanding the intent behind something. And, and and we have like, because we use both, right? We have a taxonomy in what we do, but we also have our own lexicon. Like everyone knows listening to this, like, because we've had people reach out before and say like, "Hey, you guys, could you guys put out like a, like a vocab list of some of these terms that you—" It's just hilarious because I'm like, we were so used to doing it. Like you always call a car a sled, right? And it's just, I don't know why and I don't know how long, but I can't think of it in another term. You know? Yeah. And so it always comes out and people like, "Sled?" And it's like, if you haven't heard that before, "Oh. Oh, vehicle." Right?

And and the even that the difference in like, I know in in the Marine Corps it was always called a negligent discharge, but then the Army called it an accidental discharge. And Marines like, "Well, no, you're negligent." It's like, I think accidental is probably a little bit more descriptive of what actually occurred because I, I'm sure or unintentional, like you said, is a more accurate term.

Because they didn't mean to do it. Because I'm thinking in legal terms in the courtroom and and that's not legal terms on the street.

Yeah. And, and remember when, so we've got hundreds of, of, uh, uh, students, you know, miles of terrain, uh, buildings, uniforms, weapons, and then we've got vehicles that we're using to make these scenarios realistic for soldier, sailor, air, Marines that are going forward into combat. And so I have to speak quickly to make these things move because once the buses come to the range, everybody's checked out and they're going home. And in between it's really hot and I'm going to deploy. So the, the ball better be up in the air. The SEAL might be dancing the whole time or I'm going to tune out. So I would have to abbreviate how I thought of things so that sled wasn't just a normal sled, that was a baby sled. Okay. And that sled that the terrorists were using to do the abduction and the beheading, well, that was the death sled. And then this, I still run into people that still use those terms.

Those terms. Yeah.

And I laugh my ass off. Do you remember that? Because then the, the idea was that this group of role players, they're just for seeing, they're not for doing. Uh, so they're the meat puppets. And and then we go through, "Well, what happens is," again, I intentionally invoked those jargon bits to be descriptive enough that you would catch on and be able to fill in the rest of the story. And I, I tried to use the right words to make that so it would become sticky and be part of your file folder. And unintentionally I created a whole subgenre of language.

Yeah. That's still used today when we go to bases and they go, "Oh, that's the baby sled pulling up." And I go, "Hey, do you know where that term came from?" The guy goes, "No, man, it's always been used." Yeah, it wasn't. And I can show you the exact day. That's what I love about language. But Brian, there's different, there's differences. Why do we say a picture paints a thousand words? Because it does. So pictures, even though we can interpret them differently, say a thing, an entire story, because there's so much to it. But with language, we have to add words, uh, uh, and and then we change words and we adapt words. And then we've got stuff like inflection. And then we've got, uh, uh, different cultures that have different languages, but they have jargon too. Like my mom and aunt spoke street German because they grew up as street kids outside of Kckb and Byron. Okay. So they didn't go to school because there was a war going on and they invented Pig Latin in German that had nothing to do with our Pig Latin. It's a completely different thing. So they could communicate when they were with other gang members and my mom and my aunt siblings could talk and nobody else would be able to understand what they're going. Do you understand how amazing that is? Right? We could do, we could do a college course on just the German street Pig Latin to survive World War II. That's what's amazing about it.

And and so when people go, "We only use 10% of our brain." One, you're not using any of it, you're an idiot. Two, think of how complex language is and how simple we try to make it when we're doing something like, "Well, the language of de-escalation." Shut up. What are you thinking? This is so, this is such a huge concept. But why do we try to break it down to intent? Because intent makes our language manageable. It makes the outcomes achievable and repeatable. And I think that's, that's science, isn't it? You know, at the end of the day.

That's that's the thing about language. So we, we're sort of coming at it from, from both sides here. You know, saying that it's important when you're putting your name on something or calling something or what you're using to describe something. But, but it also only, uh, it's only as important as the intent behind it that you meant priming, uh, because like you just talked about it like you the, the de-escalation language thing. You're like, what? There, there I get it like for perfect example, don't ever tell someone to calm down because no one in the history of being told to calm down ever goes, "Okay, you're right. I should." They're going to go high and right. But if you say, "Hey, your behavior is inappropriate for the setting. I need you to get control of your behaviors." Well, that's different because one, I'm not telling you you're the problem in a sense. I'm saying you, you, you have options here. You can take control of what's going on. And I'm, I'm articulating the the situation. I'm not just not just saying, "Hey, you're being a dick." You know what I mean?

I mean, which in some context, "You're being a dick," is hugely important. You're at a wedding, your daughter is crying, you've had a couple too many drinks and the best man steps up and goes, "Hey, you're being a dick." What is that? That's an attention grabber. Now my world just got smaller and now I can start extrapolating other words and and and behaviors. Right? That are going on. So let's call that another subset of emergency language. You know, "stop" is part of an emergency language. No, but again, what's the intent behind those? You can say, "No," when somebody asks you, "Do you want more coffee?" Or you can say, "No," because the person's about to kill somebody. So those things in our brain are separate and distinct.

Yes. We think when we're talking. Yeah. Can you, can you explain what you mean by that? They're separate and distinct.

Exactly. And, and you brought it up with writing. So writing is a good example. When a person says a word, it's different than me seeing a word. And each one of those letters becomes its separate piece of artwork and and hieroglyph and petroglyph and all the the different sand architecture that I can make a wonderful thing out of or a a one of those the the chet, you know, that I carve and and make into a Scooby-Doo. What happens is each time that you are reading something or when somebody is saying something to you, your brain is deconstructing, reconstructing it and fitting a model that your brain has created because you're unique and different. Now if we've all gone to the same school and we all understand the same alphabet, then we also have to understand that there's lowercase and uppercase, there's capital letters, there's underline, there's bold. So each one of those takes precedent and you're going, "Well, how long do I have to process it?" Well, uh, nanoseconds, you know, gigs, right?

So, so the idea is that the, that when we went to verbal and written language, we constructed different neural paths and sometimes those neural paths skim over relevant emergent dangerous things faster than they would if it was a visual clue. So light, motion, edges. Why are they there? Light. Okay. Triggers me that there's a difference between light and dark for survival. Motion. Something's moving towards me or away from me. That's good for hunting or me being hunted. Then edges. I can tell something from the environment or background to determine its likely location and whether it's closing in on me or not. That's not capable. My brain cannot do that calculus with words. And we're still learning words. So, so we're still learning words and assimilating language and then finding out that there's nuance language that a kid uses that a computer can't and that AI uses that I can't. So that complexity is what it, I don't want to make this bigger than it is, but that's the complexity of calling a gosh darn horse Twister. Right? We don't see the harm in it and then the person taking it says, "Oh, that's beautiful. Anti-m, anti-m, Twister." And then somebody goes, "Yeah, but Twister was a cyclone and destroyed that entire village in Kansas." You see what I'm trying to say? We come at it differently.

So survival-oriented vision looks at the situation. It prioritizes information and then sends out and receives, uh, uh, chemicals to make us do things quicker. So sedentary lifestyle makes us live less long but we also take less chances in our environment and we don't get, we get exposed to heart disease but we're certainly not going to get shot, run over by a car or robbed. And those are the tradeoffs with it, right?

Exactly. Right. Language is a whole bigger issue. But with it comes pitfalls and that's why, Brian, what do we value? We value a good book. What do we value? We value some of Shakespeare's soliloquies. What do we value? The Bible is still the best-selling book. Is it, is it all because of faith or is some of it because it's a gosh darn good read? A perfect example of because it ties back to what I was talking about earlier like why do so many people go when they make, when they adapt a film from a book and people, a lot of people go, "Well, I really like the book better." Why did you like that book better? Because you created the story in your head and then you did it. They were your characters. It was your story. It, you experienced it how you, how, how, whatever your brain came up with. So when it went to the screen you go, "Wow, this, this is different than the book." It's like, well, even if they stuck exactly to the story in the book and use the script word for word, it doesn't matter. You're, you're having that, that sort of, uh, there's that turbidity, there's a cognitive dissonance there because it's different than your story. And so, so that's that. And and I appreciate bringing up the, the, the why people enjoy reading so much and be it's because you have to create it in your your brain. You have to and it's a difference between even like, I like listening to, to some books too, like the audiobooks while I'm doing stuff, but it's so different than reading and it all depends on narrators, right? I got my guy.

Oh, I'm sending one too.

Like my my new favorite who's been my favorite for a while, my favorite philos—he's not a philosopher, but I love his take on philosophy, he's a physicist, uh, Brian Greene. When I read his books, it's awesome because his voice is like nerdy enough but exciting enough that it's I understand the complexity of the topic and engages me. But if I try to listen to like Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about, "Hey, and we're out in the outer space." I'm like, "Hey, I might want to order a drink or something." And I go so off topic because I'm like, "Funny. It's too cool for me. It's too slick. Like I want this to be technical. Like I have to dive into it." Now I'm like kind of off track. And so so listening and reading are two completely different things.

We perform to train, educate and entertain. And that's why we're exhausted at the end of our training day. And that's why people come to our training. And that's why people said, "I've been a lot of your training. No two days are the same." Well, first of all, it's the audience. It's the venue. It's the day. It's us. Are we on our mark? Is the slide the topic? So much goes through it because we're creating a performance.

And and let me give you just a sidebar because both of us love film and both of us love music. So, there's a a film, The Front Page, and a great story, old, very first was a stage. That one then became a black and white film in the '30s. Then in 1940, you get Cary Grant and and and Rosalind Russell to play the characters. Well, the original idea of this was Cary Grant and Walter Winchell were going to be the two men, two fast-talking reporters. There's a guy that's going to be executed in 24 hours. Can we get to the truth? A great film. And and anybody if, if you want to watch it, watch it. But what happened is when they were trying to pitch the film, because remember, it was already a stage play. It was already a film about, you know, five or six years ago with the Manj, whatever that guy's name is, I can't think of, Alberto or whatever. But now this director Howard Hawks is going to go in and go, "Hey, I want to pitch this to a studio." So the studio's sitting around and they got Cary Grant. Everybody goes, "Oh, we love Cary Grant." So Cary Grant is reading for the script. Guess what? They don't have, they don't have enough men in the room to read the other parts. So one of the producers and one of the directors says, "Well, my secretary is here." They called him that back then. I'm not meaning anything insulting by it. "Have my female secretary read with Cary Grant for Walter Winchell's part." And everybody had the epiphany and they go, "Holy crap, this works. It's a boy and a girl." And then one guy said, "Yeah, they'll be divorced but they're getting back together." And the other said, "Yeah." And just, Brian, that happened because two different people spoke the same words.

Yep.

But in a different context at a different time in a different office, and one of them happened to be a woman. That's magic to me. That's the kind of story that keeps me going when, when I do a hundred lessons learned. I'm just typing away. I've got journals full of crap like that, Brian, that could not have happened with just visual. Right? It had to have the words associated with it. And while it wasn't their intent, look at that amazing outcome. I, I think the outcome is beautiful. But if an outcome can be that beautiful, guess what else can happen? They can mistake everything that I meant and now I show up to watch the opening of the film and I go, "What's this crap?"

Yeah.

And you go, "Well, wait a minute, you sent me the note." You know.

"Well, this isn't what I intended." You know.

And and that's the key. The key gating mechanism throughout our evolution must be intent. It must be general or specific intent and whether those outcomes were desired or unintentional. I think if we break things down that way, Brian, I think it remains in the scientific realm. And we can't fault somebody for saying that. Why do we have freedom of speech? Yeah, freedom of speech and do you have the ability to have recourse? Well, recourse and discourse are are words that I love because discourse is when we disagree with something and we do it often. Recourse is me being able to come back and raise my hand and go, "This was crap. I, I got the short end and I didn't deserve it." I love that. But what, what were those policies in a tribe? They were much more brutal because we didn't have as many choices as we now have with language. Language gives us a superfluous amount of choice sometimes. Too many choices. You ever go to a restaurant and see so many items on a menu? Sit there.

That's the, that's the The Cheesecake Factory problem right there. There's, I can't, I get, I get anxiety because I there menu like reading a novel. And I'm like just...

Two problems with Cheesecake Factory. One, we were introduced to a a drink called an old fashioned. Okay. And and it broke the bank. But the second thing is you're exactly right. They've got nine chapters in salads alone. Yeah. You get what I'm trying to say. The guy wheels the book out to you.

No, no. And that's the point. That's the same thing with a lot of these streaming services and Netflix and all that stuff. You're like, you, you people, I can't find anything. You have too many options. I can't find anything to watch.

800 channels.

Right. So it's, it's, you have too many options. But, but you know, it also gets into why we can, humans, uh, can communicate at a very basic level without speaking the actual same language, right? There there's, there's so much universality because when I can't live when I, when you literally speak a foreign language and I don't know that you don't know English and I don't know, let's say German, right? We but we can still get along and work together and figure things out as we go. It's not just going to be like, "I don't know this person. We, we'll, we'll never figure this stuff out." No, because there's enough, uh, uh, going on in the situation between two humans are so similar enough to figure things out as you go along without ever speaking a word to each other. And and and that's, that's why we focus, obviously, that's why we focus so much on behavior. Uh, but too, it's how language can really make things spiral out of control. I mean, just by, by the wrong name, by the wrong word, by, by some, you know, mis—even just a mispronunciation. Um, absolutely things can go so far south. I mean, where I grew up, it's like, you don't, you get someone's name wrong. It's like, "Hey, man, you don't call someone out of their name. You don't do like, it's like, you, you pronounce my name wrong." It's like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm reading this off of a a piece of paper." But someone's immediately offended by that. It's like, "You don't call me that." It's like, "Crap, man, I didn't mean to call you that. This this is what..."

But, but how long have you worked with me? Do I ever call anybody in class by their name? No, I created a nickname early on and then they became whatever. You know, and this table is Blue Man Group. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. But, but everybody gets my intent because they can read the context and relevance because I'm there. And I only saw that fail once. Shelly at the ranch, probably 15, 18 years ago now, had just come in from a ride and Shell's a perfect cowgirl, man. She looks the role. She can ride. She's just hard as nails. And she went to the office at the dude and guest ranch that we owned and there were a grandmother and a granddaughter that were there ready to sign in. And Shelly went in and Shelly goes, "Morning, boys. How are things?" Or something because, you know, she's, she's always there and she's so engaging and wonderful. And the grandmother lost her crap. The grandmother says, "Well, clearly we're not boys, we're ladies. And you need to treat us like ladies," or something. And Shell was like, "Nope, not today," you know, because Shell's like, "Hey, the customer's not always right. Kiss my ass." But the idea was it was the first time in got over 40 years knowing Shelly that I saw her on an uneven start, right? Because she was joking and the joke didn't make it across. But again, there's classic obstructionists in the world. Yeah. That's there's people that say something, there's people that walk or talk, and there's people that talk or walk. You know, and and the idea is that that was so rare it's remarkable. And I'm telling you that, uh, why? Because now it becomes a lesson. So lessons are how we navigate life. Uh, uh, repetitive behavior, uh, uh, meaning patterns is how we navigate life. So when we put those together, uh, uh, uh, then what we come out with is a language. And and a language is so much more meaningful than just words and and letters and paragraphs and all those other things. It's, it's the story that's told by the environment and the story within the story and many times the unintended story. We have to consider all of those during an investigation and any surveillance is in fact an investigation, it's just being conducted in real time.

And and what I mean by surveillance is any encounter because that's how I treat them. Every encounter as I'm walking up to you, I'm looking at the big picture and I'm looking at small things and looking at the gate of your walk and how you're dressed and the wear of your sleeve when you shake my hand. Brian, you know me and I know you. And that's the type of stuff we value and that's how we determine what likelihood we're about to face.

Yeah. Dangerous? Is it deadly? Is it fun?

It it, and that helps determine the relevance of of what you're, you know, of that observation sometimes. Absolute, or the relevance of of whatever, whatever it is that you picked up on. Because, you know, the, this kind of goes back to sort of the, the, the takeaways for, for today in a sense is that, you know, what we choose to call something, um, can have, you know, massive second, third order effects. And it can completely change the, um, the relevance of what we're trying to get across. It can change the meaning of it and it can change how it's received. You know, which is again why we always focus so much on intent because even to the social media examples, like when there's outrage over something, you know, I always tell people, what, what was their intent with that post and what was your intent with your comment? What was your, what are you trying to do here?

Or between those?

Well, right. And and and sometimes it's people don't think that much about it. They aren't that deliberate about when they're doing but they're not realizing the the potential of it. Right? Meaning you, you the more deliberate you are in some of these things, especially when it comes to any type of lexicon that you're using, whatever those terms are, what those descriptive things that you're using to explain to something are so incredibly powerful that it can completely, uh, shape or reshape the, the, the conversation just based on something that that you weren't even thinking of. And and that's why, you know, explains what, why we use some of those terms over and over again. You know, like those mission focus and predatory looks. It's like, look, here's all the, the, the physiology behind that. Here's the neuroscience behind that. But don't, but do you understand what I mean when you say that? It's like, "Oh, yeah, I get mission focus now. That's when someone's so down and in, they're so busy that they bump into someone because they didn't even see them." Okay.

Exactly. So, so if I look for those things, you know, and then I couple that with what a predatory look is like, well, everyone in your mind right now can think of, think of you're listening to this, what is a predatory look? You've seen something like that. Okay, let's call it this. So when I out of context, exact, why did we spend two half years writing a textbook? Because we wanted to make sure that when you read it, you go, "Ah, this means this." And we're not together. And I wasn't able to use a a dry erase board and show you and you didn't see my passion or smell my exasperation. So that's why it's so important that before you launch, listen, we're not talking about your day-to-day conversations, you know, with the cab in the car. But, but I'll give you a higher, higher level one. And and again, not attribution. But working on a program for very important Beltway type folks. And one of the people talking said, "Yeah, that red dot is on me." And I immediately turned three shades of purple thinking, "Wow, there are two operators in this room and me, an outsider, that are looking in. And we all know that what you mean is the sniper with the scope, you know, putting the SOFLAM (target designator) on the target, meaning the rubber hits the road with me." If you know MPA (meaning "my fault") in Latin, that's what he meant. Yeah. When he said those words, but we were speaking to an international audience of over a hundred people.

Yeah.

And in that context, that went so many different places. It was like Casper the freaking Ghost sneaking around in that room. And you saw it going through people and changing people and people writing it down and people looking it up. Brian, that's what I'm saying. Sometimes a casual offhand remark can go to areas you never intended. And that's why we spend so much time in rehearsal. That's why we script certain things. And other things are just us discussing in a car. That's why The Human Behavior Podcast is opinion-based testimony, right? And it doesn't come into the classroom. Right? You get what I'm saying?

And that's why we kind of make a clear distinction too between the podcast and we're teaching because the intent is different where this is a conversation to talk about different topics, free form, unstructured, un, unrehearsed, unedited. You know what I mean? Just, just is.

Yeah. That two-sided.

And then that's very different than taking a deliberate approach. And, and you can't, what, what I see go wrong, which is kind of some of the examples you, you've even brought up, is when those two things get get mixed. It's your offhand comment, making a joke or whatever, but that's fine in some context. But when you do it in here, it's like, "Well, well, wait a minute. Is that part of what you're teaching me? Is that part of what you're training me? Is that what you're telling me?"

And where do I put that note? Where do I put the arrow to tie that to my curriculum? To to your remainder? And I'm so with you on that, Brian, because that's not, that's why, uh, uh, you're in the line at the Church's Fried Chicken and the guy in front of you is taking too long and you say something and it's like, "Hey, partner, speak, speed it up." And now we got to turn and, "Hey, I'm not your partner." It's immediately to the wrong zone. And we wonder why, "How did that homicide occur?" Exactly. I never asked that. Okay. Because I've seen how that can spin wildly out of control. And the next thing you know that that Orbiter is going into the sun rather than following its path to the to the moon. So we can have another great, uh, uh, adventure.

The idea is that some things like computer use and AI are completely universal and it doesn't matter the language or the culture or anything else. But that thing I sent you this morning, when a person was talking about respect and saying respect changes from culture to culture. No, it doesn't. Respect is one of those few binary things. You have it, you don't. Yeah. You're getting it, you're not. You're giving it, you're not. You get what I'm trying to say. And if you can hold those few things together, then you can understand how people work. And that's our goal. Our goal is to say these patterns have been around because they tend to be cohesive and hold tribes together. These patterns are around because they tend to make people aggressive and that's how war starts. Right?

And, and so when what we're doing is we're trying to create these, uh, big lenses to small, not to burn ants, but to flip them around and act as a binocular so I can see a long way. It was Eric Kjer's birthday yesterday. We both love the big shaved ape and remember we used to joke on the range all the time and Kjer would say, "Man, that enemy's a long way away." And I'd grab the bino and turn them around and go, "Holy crap, they're on the wire." We would laugh and laugh and people didn't understand that that's what I meant by this comment, Brian. If you're not focusing on the intent, then you could be wildly off that base when when you approach the target or the X or the, yeah.

No, it's a, it's a reminds me there's a, there was a meme that it was like it was three, you know, it was a Venn diagram with three circles and one had a bunch of words, it's a, you know, talking to your dog, talking, the other one was, you know, talking to a baby and then the third one was starting a fight. And then where they overlapped was, "Hey, buddy." And it was so funny because it was like, you talk to a dog like, "Hey, buddy, hey, buddy." And then it's like, like, "Hey, buddy." And it's like, I love it.

When it comes to language like that because it's so...

But what did we do? The, the drawing, the caricatures, the cartoon, the diagram was what put it together as being funny, right? Because if not, you would have had to act out each of those components, but your brain did the rest. So that's the essence of critical thinking. Did you receive enough artifacts and evidence and information from the original exposure to deduce or induce the rest? Right? Isn't, isn't that what we're really talking about here? Because that comes down to intent. "Hey, before I go off to handle, what did they intend by that?" Right? And we don't do that as much.

No. And I, I think that's a, that's kind of a good point to, or good, good, that's kind of the overall, uh, thing we're getting at here with this episode. So I say the overall takeaway is that it goes back to what we always talk about, intent and demonstrations of intent with behavior. But it, but it's with words too. It's what, what did this person mean? What did they intend by that?

Transcript is not the same as being in the courtroom, baby. Right? And, and, uh, uh, being on, uh, Zoom or a Teams isn't the same as being in the room. Consider those, folks. Consider those today. Take just a minute and when you're staring at your desk before you get up to go to meet with somebody, think of those things. They'll make you smarter, stronger and harder to kill.

Yeah. Might save your life. Right. And and I, I know I don't, we didn't kind of have time to get into too much, but just because of the mass amount of communication and how much people are texting and and and commenting and emailing and all that stuff, we, because we're doing it so much more, we're not as deliberate and thinking about it as much. So there, there's an even greater chance that things can spin wildly out of control by some comment. I mean, just because of not...

Not my comments. Not my comments because I sit there and I make sure that I I have a picture with my text and then nine different emojis at the end and I hit send. So stupid.

That's why all of that stuff was invented. That's why we have emojis and GIFs and memes. That's why...

Eiffel Tower every time I send one.

It it all came about because a text message or an email is so devoid of any context that you can, you have to have those things in there so that's how allegory of the cave is formed because you're still far enough back that you can hear some mumbling but you're seeing the flicker of the light and you're attributing, uh, uh, uh, knowledge and information to things that were never intentional. You know, and and I'm, I'm really, uh, white belt in that but I think everybody that's, that's the, that's the point I think.

So yeah.

All right. Well, anything, anything else to add for for the listeners?

No, I got the Santa suit story but I don't know if that's right now.

We'll do that, we'll do that a different time. That's a perfect story for Patreon. Yeah, it is. Yeah. We'll go over the Santa story on on there. Um, so we appreciate everyone listening and thank you so much. We do have the Patreon site that you can go to and we, we do episode extras and all kinds of extra content on there. And then you can also check us out on social media. And if you enjoyed listening to us talk for the last hour, please, please share the episode with your friends. It helps out a lot. But, uh, we thank everyone for tuning in. We appreciate it and don't forget that training changes behavior.