Masters of Uncertainty

Alright, Greg. Today, for this week's episode, we're going to be talking a little bit about uncertainty and some of the things around it and associated with it. Just to frame the conversation a little bit, this came from a few weeks ago, or a few months ago, whatever it was. We did an episode called, oh, I forget what it was called. It was "Anything Can Happen Is a Myth." That was the name of it.

What we were talking about was, people sometimes have this, especially in a training environment or any time where there's uncertainty, and then people want to go, "Well, anything can happen. Anything can happen. You've got to be prepared for anything." That's just factually wrong, it's not true. My biggest problem with saying it is unsustainable. That's my biggest issue is when you have that kind of idea, or that mindset, that actually helps create uncertainty, or increases the level of uncertainty in a situation, and can make it more complicated than necessary, which can lead to errors in sense-making and then decisions that are bad, or less than ideal, simply because there's a sort of cloud of uncertainty.

So, what I think we should do first is define uncertainty and risk. Then we'll get into some different examples of what we mean. Again, to inform everyone who's listening – current listeners, past listeners, new listeners, it doesn't matter – we try to remove as much of the uncertainty from a situation by taking a systematic approach to reading behavioral and environmental cues, comparing knowns against unknowns, against the baseline, and understanding context and relevance. There's a whole bunch of different ways that we do that. The whole idea is to give you the ability to say, "Oh, wait a minute, this isn't that uncertain. I know these things, so therefore there can only be so many possibilities, and then I can plan accordingly."

So, that's a big, 30,000-foot explanation, I guess, that I can do in a couple of sentences. But, let's, I guess I'll throw it to you to start, Greg. Maybe we define some of these terms up front so that we all are on the same page of what we mean by that.

It's going to be broadcast again, Brian, just the intro. While we're doing that, we're both jet-lagged as an MF. It's funny because we really want to talk about this, but it's like, holy smokes, we've been talking all week. So, let's do that. Let's define uncertainty for our purposes.

What we're going to give is a "street definition" that Brian and I use that you'll understand simply so we can have this discussion. Uncertainty simply means that you aren't sure about something, whether it's an upcoming meeting, an event, a situation. When I mean meeting, I don't mean just a meeting in an office building, I mean like a meeting on the street. You don't have enough knowledge about the likely outcomes or the potential options that you might encounter. You have to understand that risk aversion is a survival tool. It's pre-programmed in all humans, and you have this risk avoidance strategy that is constantly sampling your environment.

Yeah. Then, can you kind of give the difference between uncertainty and risk?

Oh, yeah, certainly. So, not knowing what's going to happen creates both; it creates risk and it creates anxiety. In your brain, those are two definite, and do they cross paths at points, but it's like a train station. There are two separate, distinct train stations on the same track.

Risk is that ever-present possibility that something negative is going to happen. Again, electrochemical neurotransmitters side on the negative. Tie goes to the runner, because they don't want you inadvertently, accidentally, or unintentionally going into a risky situation. So, the uncertainty builds to stop you, to make you look before you leap, from making a stupid error. That's the essence of uncertainty and risk. It's supposed to be there as a safety blanket to cushion you.

Right. I get what you're saying, that's sort of like from a cognitive perspective, in a sense, there's some overlap there in what happens to you cognitively. Then, big picture, risk could be, risk can be managed, mitigated, you can plan for certain things. So, if you have a job, if you work construction, your job is inherently more risky. There's more risk there, in a sense, than if you're a computer programmer or something like that, right? Because there are just so many more things that could happen. There are some safety issues. There's a lot. But that doesn't mean that it's inherent. If your job has risk, it doesn't mean what you're doing is inherently risky. It means that there are these known risks, there are these known things that can happen, and so therefore you account for them in the way that you do things. Sorry, go ahead.

No, no, no. So, you bring up a great point, and here's where science confuses people, and it doesn't need to. So, you know those rail jobs, those drag racers that you see that go so fast, and all of a sudden they've got a little parachute that comes out, and the whole race is over in a matter of seconds. They use a type of fuel that is really, really, really unstable and unpredictable, and they've kind of mastered it. I say "kind of" because people show up still to see the explosion that takes the entire million-dollar car apart and vaults the driver.

So, that driver, that engineer, those people that work the pit crew, Brian, that's not risk. What it is, is the risk of doing something dangerous has been minimized to almost zero. There are very few instances, you don't see those attacks and dangers and explosions all the time. So, being risk averse doesn't mean avoiding those things that are risky. Risk averse is a strategy that your brain goes backwards in time. So, that time that it's talking about, there were no internal combustion engines, there wasn't flight, there weren't explosions and things. You see what I'm saying?

So, what we've got to do is we've got to look at it as a survival-based mechanism where, like we try to adjudicate, we have a lot of friends that are in like safety and executive dignitary protection, and doing risk assessments on a building, for example. That's a different kind of risk, that's an exposure risk. You see what I'm saying? An environmental risk. What happens is your brain is calculating risk all the time and it always sides to the negative. It's always going to say, "Hey, we're in a survival situation. How bad is it going to hurt?" Once we get that, then we can function in our environment with much reduced anxiety.

Right. When it comes to risk, like you just said, you can do a risk assessment and say, "These things may go wrong," or "You may be exposed," or where it could be an unsafe, or whatever the situation. The risk doesn't necessarily have to be like physical safety. It could be financial security or something going on, right? But then what's different is that obviously, well, and risk can be sort of, you can plan for that. It's the uncertainty that creeps in, that is, "Okay, well, we, there's so many unknowns, or there are things that I don't know out there." The more of those that there are in my environment, whether that's, I start to kind of, it starts to affect my decision-making and, like you said, my brain is always going to go primitive. I'm going to look for the lowest common denominator, "What's going to keep me alive?" kind of thing.

So, if too much of that uncertainty creeps in, then I can almost become sort of like, I become overloaded, overwhelmed by the situation, right? I get, my cognitive load is too much. I get OB (over-burdened), as we would call it. I can have, and my brain defaults to this limbic system, the survival system, right? So, the uncertainty or potential uncertainty of a situation leads to then sort of what you talked about, about anxiety.

Anxiety, basically, anxiety is something that all humans have. It's what's kept us alive. Anxiety is not a bad thing unless there's too much of it, or you're overly anxious or something. But a little bit of anxiety actually goes a long way, meaning it's why humans, despite our greatest attempts, are still alive, right? So, the anxiety is that sort of that fear of the unknown or fear of something in the future. Because people talk about fear and anxiety because they are two different things. Fear is there's something happening right now, "I'm scared," or "There's something, I'm in fear for my life." But anxiety is that, "Hey, there's something up there on the horizon. I'm not really sure what it is, and I'm getting a little nervous about it because I'm getting these signals." So, they go hand in hand, they're similar in some ways, but I just differentiate them a little bit like that. As anxiety is something that's, okay, even fear, I mean, is something that is designed to keep you alive. I mean, that feeling you get is technically a survival mechanism, that's a good thing. It's only bad when it gets turned on in the wrong situation, when I don't need to be, when I fear for something that may not be something that's going to cause me serious harm or kill me.

But my brain, remember we talk about those like kind of you and your brain as sort of two separate entities, just for the purpose of discussion and training and talking about it, right? It's one and the same, it's just a complex system, and this is all sort of happening unconsciously that we don't recognize sometimes. Which gets us into the trick bag. When we say, "No, you're already doing this, you're already," like, we always say, especially with the law enforcement crowd, it's like, "No, you're standing on the side of the road with cars zipping past you at 70 miles an hour. You've done that so many times that you forget how freaking dangerous that is. Your limbic system hasn't forgotten that. So, it still knows how dangerous that is." So, even though your prefrontal cortex thinks, "Hey, this is fine, it's another thing I do," it's kicking underneath that surface already without you kind of really being consciously aware. Does that make sense? Is that a good way to describe it?

Absolutely. But, you know, again, here we have to go back in time a little bit. So, you have to understand that risk and uncertainty seem like the same thing, but they're not the same thing. So, and anxiety occurs in both, of course, and people hate change. Change produces anxiety because of the fear of the unknown. So, that would go on to the uncertainty side, "I'm uncertain." So, that's predictive analysis side, right? But the risk side, risks are measurable. You can say that jumping off with a bungee, there's a one in 1,275,000, or whatever, that your head is going to hit the bottom of the Royal Gorge and you're going to explode like a pumpkin. So, that's the difference there.

The problem with uncertainty is that it creates this persistent or overwhelming anxiety, and that starts to interfere with your daily life or your business operations. So, uncertainty means a foggy view of the future. In human behavior, unpredictable behavior is anxiety-producing. So, that's not risk. Now, if we're talking human behavior, and we're talking risky behavior, unprotected sex, drinking and driving, those type of things, then that's going to increase your risk. But risk can be managed better than uncertainty. There's a plan for uncertainty, you see what I'm trying to say? But risk is much easier to manage, and that's why people go to that. That's why people hire those people, Brian, because I can go to a dry erase board and show you risk, but it's really hard to demonstrate uncertainty.

Okay, that's kind of the, I think, the heart of the issue there, or difference between the two, or way to look at it. So, risk is that's the actuarial table that an insurance company uses to say, "Okay, based on your age and your history and this, we know you have a likely percent chance of this happening, and so your car insurance is going to be less or more based on these factors that we've known at a macro level with millions of data points over decades and decades." Right? So, we can quantify that and you can give it a number in some way, and then you can say, "Well, you've had a bunch of speeding tickets or you've been in several accidents, so you're more likely to continue that behavior, so therefore I'm going to charge you more money."

So, I like looking at it that way because risk, again, it can be calculated. You can say, "This is what it's going to cost," in some measurable fashion, whether that's money or time or resources or whatever, right? So, we know that. But, like you just said, the uncertainty, it's kind of hard to measure because it's, it can be, it can be very subjective, right? It can be, it's hard to quantify, and that's when you get into anything with complexity, too, is like, "Well, there are all of these other factors, there's this stuff, the things that are occurring within you, within the situation, how you're sense-making it." If you start to go wrong somewhere, then you could be way, way, way off farther down the road because you started at a really bad point. Now you've overwhelmed yourself with uncertainty, and now I don't know what to do.

So, which is why we just, we are constantly giving the example of, "What are your knowns versus your unknowns? What do you know based on your past experience, based on what everything the situation is telling you?" Right? What can you compare something against? And you have to, that baseline comparison is always the most important part, more so than whatever this thing or this observation or perception is that you're having that's making you feel uncertain or giving you that anxiety. Because that thing, that thing alone, could be, could be different. You know, I always make the, like, the joke, even in class, where I'm like, "Hey, if I called 911 right now, I'd say I'm surrounded by a bunch of people with guns." It was a subjectively true statement. Now, they're all law enforcement officers in a class that I'm teaching, but, you know, I failed to leave that part out. But, and that's the way you look at it. So, without that baseline sort of comparison, that's actually where a lot of that uncertainty can creep in, right? Because I get a little bit anxious because I'm a little unknown, I'm not sure. Like you said, "I fall back on what's the worst thing that's going to happen to me?" Then I start comparing everything to that. If it's cognitively close enough to what I think that might be, it's real to my brain, whether or not it's an actual survival situation. If you feel like it is, then therefore it is to your brain.

Yeah, yeah. So, and this is not unlike an instructor development. So, let me dig into what you were talking about so we don't go too far from the science, and everybody can yellow-pad it with us. So, negative emotions are absolutely essential to human survival. They make us think that this endeavor that we're about to become involved with has a possibility of going sideways, has a possibility of being a negative experience, and therefore we should avoid it. So, those chemicals are on board as a mechanism, as a survival, a risk avoidance strategy.

Every program I've ever built, going back to Sensei Williams' dojo and Combat Hunter and ASAT and everything else, the reason the science has been there is there's a similarity between Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's Cat, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, centripetal force, centrifugal force, gravity. What do those things do? And people don't get that. People are always conflating. Somebody comes up with a good idea and they go, "Oh, this is so important." No, I'll tell you why it's important. The reason it's important is our accuracy in predicting mental states of others and human behavior encounters diminishes whenever we're emotionally aroused. So, if we take a step back and go directly to the science, our prefrontal cortex allows us to attribute mental states to ourselves and to others in these contexts. So, therefore, it manages risk and lowers uncertainty. For example, if I know I'm not going to spin off into the sun, that manages and lowers my level of uncertainty.

So, the science part of it, for example, if we talk about Heisenberg when it comes to humans, the Uncertainty Principle helps me because it's independent of personality, and it can take me outside of human emotion and I understand things like the observer effect, Brian. That if I'm observing you, I'm changing the baseline, I'm having an impact on what I'm trying to study. So, I'm trying to stay at 30,000 feet for everybody and "street it up." What you must understand is there are certain things we can control and certain things we can't. So, if we're talking about managing risk and putting it on a table, we can do that. If we're talking about uncertainty, uncertainty is uncertain for a reason. If we could figure that out, then life would be very simple. We wouldn't have the relationship problems that we have, and we certainly wouldn't have certain unique individuals that go off the rails and do stupid things, right? So, uncertainty is there, it's the cloud, the fog of war that we have to search through to find things. If we didn't do that, we wouldn't grow. So, that's an essential construct between us and our brains.

How, well, first, I don't see a lot of people, well, some of this is language and how people talk about it, but we don't focus on managing uncertainty, or facing uncertainty, or figuring out that we kind of focus on decisions, or what to do, or policy and procedures, or like the solutions. Like we're like, "Here are all these solutions." It's like, "Well, hang on, we haven't clearly defined the problem yet and faced this uncertainty." In fact, many of these situations are, are, are, are less uncertain than we think, maybe. So, I guess my first sort of question about it is, why should we manage uncertainty? But then what does that even mean? You know what I'm saying?

That's a great question. So, but let's build it slowly. Let's not dive in and try to give a sentence as an answer, because what we talk about is, and that's why it takes a long time. Look, most people want you to read their book, and their book has one fact and then 15 chapters of going back to that one fact. That's not us. What we're trying to do is expand your brain by taking a look at all these things from different angles because there's a lot to consider here. Brian used the term "complexity" perfectly.

So, uncertainty in human behavior, in human relationship dynamics, you can see it all around you. Some people resort to drugs or drinking, or some form of false ego, an egotism, a super ego, bullying, superstition, philosophy. All of these are self-defeating ways that humans cope with uncertainty because we're afraid, Brian, we're afraid, little creatures walking around in an environment that might kill us. So, the best way simply to deal with uncertainty in human relationship dynamics is to use that uncertainty as a motivator to learn more about your interaction. That's where Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis comes from. If you apply that to yourself and your significant other, you'll grow more closely aligned because you'll understand them, but more importantly, you'll understand you.

Back to the observer effect in physics. So, the influence of the measurement on that which is measured. The act of the measurement changes what you're attempting to measure. So, the closer you look at something, the more you're pushing it away. That's why your behavior pattern recognition analysis has to be based in science. Because if you're looking for a person to commit a crime, you're influencing the battlespace. If you're looking for your significant other to cheat on you, or your kid to lie to you, you're influencing that baseline, and you're influencing it negatively, and you'll never see clearly. So, you've got to stop using emotions as a guide. For example, emotions make my feelings, my perceptions, my observations self-validating. I'm a self-licking ice cream cone. If I'm afraid, you must be creating the fear. If I'm ashamed, you must be judging me. If I'm angry, you must be doing something the wrong way. Tell me that doesn't sound like every failed relationship that you've had. And you've had many, Brian. Brian is a poster child for failed relationships! But think about that. Every time you go into a business relationship that fails, or a chance meeting on the street, or an encounter, or you want to go up and get a job, these are the things that go wrong. Why? Because we understand risk. We're not really good at understanding uncertainty. So, the more time we spend, I think, the better we'll get.

So, would you say, one of the things you said, so you're saying, "I take my lucky quarter with me everywhere I go for these certain trips," or something. I'm just trying to think of something. I don't have any talismans or something that I carry. Well, let's, okay, the little baby sunglasses that we found years ago on that one trip that we bring everywhere. But, something like that, when people do that, are you saying that that's sort of a way for them to cope with this fear, or uncertainty, or the fear that uncertainty will bring? Is that what you mean by that?

Yeah, exactly. So, the thing in your pocket, the thing in your notebook, the bumper sticker on your car, that's not accepting the unknown. That's actually a call for action. That's you saying that, "You know, listen, I could roll over and just accept that uncertainty, but that's unacceptable because that's inefficient. That's not how humans run." So, what you do is you create patterns, and the more patterns that you do, your brain says, "Hey, wait a minute, I've adapted to this uncertainty through this process. It's a, we call it a plan." Now, guess what? The more times through that plan, the more resilient I become.

Now, there's a problem with that, because if you're comfortable understanding that uncertainty exists and that it can be overcome, then facing that uncertainty becomes a mechanism for you to get better in every encounter. But the corollary is true. So, every traffic stop I make, I get better. But every traffic stop I make, I get dumber. Every human behavior encounter, I get better at reading humans, but every human behavior encounter, I get dumber. You know what that means? That means that I take my foot off the gas, I take my eye off the prize. Simple stuff: the sun rises in the East, sets in the West, water's wet, the sky is blue. That's great. So, that makes our encounters occur with a degree of certainty, and that fights uncertainty. But the more that we get there, the less we appreciate it, and the less attention we pay. And that's where situational awareness comes in. Situational awareness is that you increase your level of awareness to manage the uncertainty, not to have eyes in the back of your head. I get so pissed off when I read these articles about, "Oh, the shooting and this and that and the other." Put all the rounds downrange that you want, if you can't read the situation, you're going to die with your own gun. Let's do that, let's have that training go on. But nobody wants to talk about that because it's scary. And there you get the fear again. Where does the fear come from? Fear comes from anxiety, not from the uncertainty.

Well, and, I would say it goes to, you know, because we don't always know how to explain these things, articulate them well. There is, we just go, "Well, you know, you just got to plan for it," or, "Well, you know, there are some things that are, that you just can't tell," or, "There are some things that are just uncertain, you never know." It's like, "But, but, but I, but I would say that's rarely true, if ever." I mean, yeah, you don't know where exactly the bolt of lightning is going to hit, right? But you know when there's going to, you can predict when there's going to be a lightning storm. So, I mean, certain factors have to be present in order for that lightning to occur. Now, if you walk outside your house and it hits you in the head, sorry, someone had it in for you, it was your day to go, I guess. But most things aren't like that. I mean, that's why it's literally, that's getting struck by lightning, it's pretty, pretty rare. Getting bit by a shark, you know what I'm saying? These things that scare us so much, you know, are incredibly rare. And so we're, we're surprised when some things will spiral out of control, or we didn't see something coming, and it's like, "We never would have been able to do that."

I think just that our, it's almost like you said, that's a coping mechanism, just like the little talisman I carry around with me. I go, "Well, I, because I don't know how I, there must not be a way, so therefore I'm just, I have to accept that anything can happen to me today." It's like that's actually creating a lot of just like cognitive turbidity and uncertainty. It's like there are only so many things that can happen in the situation.

So, so let me, let me ask you a question. I'm going to depose you, and do it playfully, because I don't want you to choke me next time that you see me. But I want you to help me decide, what's the minimum amount of stuff that I could take to leave my house right now and be okay, going to name a place in your mind? So, I would agree with you that if you said pants, because I need a pocket, and I probably shouldn't expose my dick getting on a bus, okay? So, I have to have a couple of things in a pocket. Maybe not a shirt, but a shirt would help, because some places I've read, "No shoes, no shirt, no service." Right? So, now we've got shoes, we've got to have the shoes too.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay. And now what's in that pocket? Well, we've got one good credit card, if we've got a couple of bills of cash. You know what I'm saying? And what else would we want? Well, probably a cell phone, okay? But, Brian, if we went to all the other things that we carry in our life, those become talismans. They just make us feel better. Because the minimum standard stuff, that's the stuff that reduces our uncertainty. It doesn't do anything for our risk, because the risk is calculated differently. But what it does is it makes us feel safer, less anxiety-producing. Why? Because we go, "Hey, listen, I can head to my car and I can always purchase gas on the way. If my car breaks down, I can use my credit card for a rental. If they won't accept the credit card, I've got a hundred bucks in my pocket and various bills where I can likely pay. If not, I've got that watch that I stored in my ass for all those years in concentration camp that I can trade out for, for gosh darn." You know, I'm trying to do the, you know, the from Christopher Walken. Yeah, it's not good. None of my jokes are good, but I know it.

But the idea, Brian, is if I look at those things, that's a way to manage uncertainty. So, if I wanted to understand training, you know what I would train for? I would train going up to you, you're playing this game with me, and handing you my credit card for the groceries I bought because I'm hungry, and you looking and handing it back and saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, sir, your credit card limit's been reached," or, "We don't take that credit card here," or, "That credit card is reported stolen." Now, those are contingencies, right? That's where I need to rehearse and learn a strategy because that will manage my uncertainty. It does nothing to lower my risk, but it does manage uncertainty. And guess what? That's going to handle my anxiety, because if I know that don't worry, I have a backup plan, and I have a PACE plan, then all of a sudden I know I'm going to likely survive this encounter. There are some unsurvivable encounters. You say it all the time in class, "I take a left instead of a right and I get hit in the head by an asteroid or a meteorite or something like that." But almost everything that's anxiety-producing is that uncertainty. The more I lessen the uncertainty, when I make that traffic stop, there's a procedural side, that's my risk side. But the uncertainty side, I can't read your mind. So, I better take a class that teaches me what are some of the pre-incident behaviors? What are some of those artifacts and evidence that I should watch out for that historically have proven beneficial to my survival? That's it. I mean, in a nutshell, that's a simple way of assessing risk, managing it, and lowering your anxiety, I mean, uncertainty.

Yeah, and that goes back to kind of what I mentioned with knowns versus unknowns, and what do you, what do you know right now? And then, what you're talking about too is sort of, what's, what's the likelihood here? Not what's the probability, right? Because that gets into risk, I guess, something measurable. But what's the likelihood that this is going to happen or that's going to happen? How likely is this to occur to me right now, here on this day? When you start, then this is again why we don't always explain when we're talking about stuff, we use these terms. There's a lot of meaning to them and a lot of reasons why we use them with specific kind of lexicon, right? We talk about likelihood and most likely and most dangerous and, even when we're talking about uncertainty versus risk, it's important to differentiate between all these things because otherwise, it kind of, it gets a little cloudy, it gets a little hard to understand.

But likelihood is a great strategy, right? It's like when we say, "Look for incongruent signals. Don't look for the guy with the gun or the guy sneaking in with the bomb." It's like, "No, no, no. Just look for something that seems to be out of place because you're going to find something, and then you can determine what it means in that context." But looking for something like that, that allows me to sort of again, it's like a strategy for reducing that uncertainty, using things like likelihood, using things like incongruent signals. When I have any type of comparison, I have to be careful what I'm comparing to because, like you brought up the law enforcement examples, like, "Well, I, maybe if I'm in law enforcement and every time I pull someone over they run or they shoot at me," like, or every few times that happens, it's like, "I'm going to fall back on something like that versus the 95 other times where everything goes completely normal," or as normal as those situations can be, meaning it's, it becomes safe.

So, because my brain automatically attributes more value to these things, and it's always going to fall back on that. Now, once I see it, well, look at what happened after the plane crash in DC, where the helicopter ran in the plane, right? Suddenly everyone's an air traffic control expert. Suddenly everyone's going, "Look at all of these things that are happening with planes!" It's like, "Those were always happening! That's how many times planes crash or something happens!" Like, that's, that's been continuous. In fact, it's even shown, gotten safer as every year goes on, in general, it becomes more and more safe. And when you talk about risk, you're more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the airport than you ever will in a plane crash, or at least if you're flying in the United States, that's for sure. But, we suddenly now we go, "Oh my God, this is a thing I forgot," or, "I didn't know this was happening." So, now, because we have that uncertainty, "Dude, I just get in this aluminum tube and go somewhere, it's like magic to me. I try to fall asleep, I wake up and I'm in a different city." Like, my brain doesn't comprehend that. And so it goes back to these things and it's like, "Oh my gosh, this is now prevalent, this is now a problem." It's like, "Is it? Or has that been going on? You just, you just found out, you just started attending to this specific novel circumstance, and now you're finding it everywhere."

Yep. Yep. So, let's talk about the risk side. So, let's, meaning in my mind right now, I've created, and on my desk, a yellow pad that's sitting horizontally, and on one side I've got the uncertainty side, one side I've got the risk side, to make sure that we can talk about that and track those, because it's a deep topic. So, on the risk side, I have moments of sheer terror and moments of sheer boredom. Why? Because that's when you're in most dangerous waters when you're in an encounter. So, if I'm completely over-burdened or I'm completely under-burdened, you know, to coin, yeah, you know what I mean, you just stamp your name on that one. Now I'm in, somebody will be using it by next week on LinkedIn.

But the idea is that I'm in a risky environment, right? So, talk about the uncertainty side. So, you and I travel at the airport a lot. So, let's think about that. The more, now this is the fourth trip that we've made in a very short order. So, by the fourth trip, our brains are mush. So, what does that mean? So, okay, I'm going up to buy something out of one of those vending machines at the airport, and I still have cash, which is hilarious to some of you that I still put money in a machine. But as I'm walking over there, all of a sudden, guess what? My uncertainty side kicks in, and I've got anxiety. Do I have enough to buy that sandwich or those Skittles, or the Skittle bra, because I want to put them in a beer like Homer? Do I have enough money to do that, or the $9 bottle of water? Everybody knows what I'm talking about.

So, listen, because this is different to me. This purchase isn't in my normal ken because I haven't been at this airport before. I haven't walked up to this machine before and everything else. How would I lessen that uncertainty? Well, I can do a probe. I can go over and read the menu and see what things cost. I can assume certain things. Well, I've never left a house without money, so I likely have money. And I'm with Brian, so if my funds run out, maybe I can rely on Brian. Those are passive strategies. And what I mean by that is psychologically, sociologically, we assume certain things that are going on. But those aren't real anxiety busters, Brian, because I don't know. And so, the active strategy is going over to you and going, "Hey, if I'm overdrawn, do you have a couple of bucks in your pocket? Do you have that corporate card? Can I put them on that?" Or, "Hey, how about we stop at the Alsop's, or the Leonhard's, or whatever the Kroger is on the way home and just buy some cheaper stuff to throw in the hotel room?" You get what I'm talking about there? So, none of those are a risk. None of those. And that's why they don't produce that sort of psychological and cognitive anxiety. The turbidity you're talking about always comes from the uncertainty side, where you're just not sure. And almost always, we could overcome that with doing stuff as simple as surveillance, or asking a few questions, or historical perspective. You talked about historical perspective before. What's always happened? What have humans always done? Those are great ways of reducing that anxiety almost instantaneously.

Okay, so how is that, your airport vending machine example, how is that similar or different than like, you know, go back to your, your, one of your roles when you're a law enforcement hostage negotiator? So, I'm imagining that would be an extremely volatile circumstance with high and a lot of, a lot of uncertainty, certainly risk involved. But, but how is that mental process any different or the same? Or is it the same?

It's exactly the same. So, the more I know, look, I wrote to you one time, "the more you know, the less you blow," because you remember in the dojo back in the day, in the late 70s, it was SM OBM, "show me or blow me." What I meant by that is a euphemism, so people would understand that it's high stakes, high return on everything. So, if we're going into a hostage negotiation today, today, we just use, "prove it." It's a little bit more work. Better Life University, for example, and in grade school, you don't want to be telling a grade school kid, "Show me or blow me," you will be in prison.

But the idea is that when I'm having those situations, I need to know as much as possible. I want an officer out there telling me, "What was in the getaway car? What did they do? Did they adjust the seat in the mirror? Am I dealing with somebody that's shorter or taller? Is that person wearing shoes or not wearing shoes when they ran from the cops? Did they cut themselves? Or were they shot with a chemical aerosol spray or a taser? Was there something physiologically going on in that person that I don't know about, Brian?" Because if I don't, what I'm doing is wearing 16-ounce gloves in a dark factory, swinging until I make contact with somebody or something. And that's uncertainty.

So, the more I know, the less I blow. The more I know about that vehicle before I walk up on it, the more likelihood, as you use the term, which I love, I see a bulge in your jacket. Now, could that be your cell phone in one of those leather cases that I see old men wearing all the time? Yeah, but until I confirm what it is, I now know that that's a level of uncertainty, not risk, that I'm not willing to accept. Okay? There's risk inherent in the traffic stop, there's risk inherent in the job. But the thing that gives me the anxiety, now we're back to the uncertainty. Does that make sense?

Yeah, but yes, it, I don't mean to say "but." If, how can I do, because what you're talking about is then, you rattle off a few things, "Hey, I want to know this about the guy, I want to know this, I want to know this." So you're saying, like, the more information I have, the better decision I'm going to make. But, we obviously can't, sometimes you get too much information and it's not relevant. So, do I look at each situation as, and try to extract what's normal, what's typical out of that specific situation, not out of something else? Like, what's normal for you going in and buying something to drink and a little bag of chips at the gas station is different than, okay, you're called here for the hostage negotiation, or you're dealing with your kid who's coming home from school. Differently. But then I think that's where a lot of things can go wrong in the sense-making department, right? And we can increase our, the uncertainty, or increase our level of anxiety in a situation because the comparison that we're comparing it to, we don't, if we're not clear on where that is, then we actually don't even know our own start point. Does that make sense, where we're starting from?

So, look, BTK, folks, do your homework. How many times do I have to admonish you to do homework so you know BTK Caper like the back of your hand? So, the problem with going and interviewing anybody like that, now you're going to interview Dennis Rader. If you go in there and go, "Yeah, I love screwing my dog. People talk about screwing the pooch, but I've actually done that. And I used to wear a dead dog on my head into the shower every day, and man, I like raping children." Okay, Brian, you're never going to be able to pull that off because that's not you, that's not in any of your DNA. You've never done any of those things before. So, your default has to be to a baseline of societal normalcy, of history, of past performance. You can leverage that information and work it into intelligence and avoid tripping over those hidden risks. Because if not, what happens is I'm going to degrade to your level, and then we're going to be talking about those uncomfortable things that increase the anxiety. So, my goal is to decrease the anxiety.

Look, I don't know what it's like to kill a person, but I've had a really shitty golf game. Is there any similarity there? And the person goes, "No." And I go, "Well, what's more similar, getting in a car wreck?" And they go, "No." And I go, "You tell me what's more." And the next thing they tell me is, "People put cigarette butts out on my back while they were raping me as a child." Wow. I don't understand anything about that. Did your family know, Brian? What are we doing now? Now we're having a conversation. So, this passive or active surveillance is a way of me planning for that uncertainty by asking certain things and knowing what my left and right limits are and my limit of advances. Brian, there's no different in conducting hostage negotiations and going in for a job interview, or dating somebody, especially if you're married, or, you know, going out and deciding to, that was a shitty joke again. Or talking to your children about something uncomfortable. Look, this is a big topic, and we should be comfortable talking about that. And it is uncomfortable. So, what do you do to make it less uncomfortable? You reduce that gosh darn uncertainty.

So, when I go into that situation, look, a great old John Wayne quote, "I don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be dead." Picked up by Clint Eastwood in a later film. I love that line. And I'm ready to use that at any time. But guess what? That infers, that infers that the level of violence isn't going to abate. So, now I have to come up with something different. "I have no idea what I just walked in on, but I'm afraid I'm going to die. Can you help me? Can you tell me what's going on here?" Now there we go. Now what I'm doing is I'm saying, "Hey, I'm searching here. I'm not ready to kill anybody. Let's ease off the gas and see if we can get through this together." You say it best again in class, folks, get to class, do your homework, "Kill, Capture, Contact." I came up with that standard because Marines got that, Brian, and it was a quick decision methodology, right? But you can't go around in life with that on the tip of your tongue all the time because life isn't like that anymore. So, what we've got to do is we've got to lessen the stakes, unless the stakes are high, and we've got to lessen the anxiety, because if not, you're walking through life hypervigilant, and it's unsustainable. What I mean by that is you're driving yourself crazy seeing danger in every potential situation. Your brain's already doing that for you, so come off the gas a little bit.

No, and the "come off the gas" is what we mean by time and distance, right? Everyone says that, and it's been a known thing, like, "You know, you've got to like, hey, you know, you want time and distance." But, like, "Well, okay, that, you can't just say that. What does that actually mean? What do we mean by time and distance?" And this is, well, this is what you're getting into with reducing that uncertainty is that we're, we, we want to have a decision right away. We especially put our own sort of thumb on the scale of how important or how relevant something is, even when it's not. You know, I do that just in relationships now with my wife, and we've got this going on, that happened, and this, and then all of a sudden we want to, it's like, "Hang on, Hannah, stop. We don't need to do that right now. Let's put that on the back burner until next month. We have a block going on, you're traveling, I'm traveling, we've got this happening, that happening." So, it's like, "Let's, let's focus on," or the Brian Willis email sign-off, "What's important now?" It's like, "Alright, hang on." That, it's the, it's the element of that, that time and distance to help reduce the uncertainty and just not walk into your own homicide, in a sense. And I know that's the most extreme case, but walk into anything that can blow up in your face or backfire on you.

And, you know, it's kind of like, it's weird because, well, it's not weird, it's just because we have that survival-based way of thinking, and because anxiety is what's kept us alive, it's also our way of, of sort of coping with a situation to just fall back on that because it, it's literally worked for hundreds of thousands, or millions of years, depending on how long you think we've been.

Exactly.

And so it's like, it's like our go-to is sort of can be counterintuitive because it's unlikely that we are in an actual survival situation, whereas maybe 200,000 years ago, almost everything was a survival situation.

Exactly.

It's just not that way. And because we're sort of primed for that, where automatically that card is already there. It's like when you talk about the Jack-in-the-Box, and you said like, "You know that you're winding up, the music is going, waiting for the jack to pop out." Like, "Well, that music is always going, it's going right now, and it's in the room." Now, maybe it's not very loud, maybe it's not emergent, maybe it's not something, but there's always that, that music playing in the background. So, it's like, if I don't attend to that now, then Jack's eventually going to pop out of that darn box and scare the crap out of me. I mean, there, there, and so what this is, this is when, when managing these kind of things is, everyone always, and I get it, we want to take away the, "Well, well then how do I go do that? Well, what am I supposed to do?" It's like, "Okay, well, you have to learn to understand the external baseline and the environment that you're in, and get really, really good at what is typical, what is normal. How do I, what, what is my comparison? If I see something that that seems incongruent or odd or different, or I don't understand it, I know I'm going to fall into that trap of anxiety and uncertainty. So, how do I, how do I get it back over here into the certainty part of it to say, 'No, no, that's a known,' or, 'Wait a minute, no, this is really different. I do have to investigate this further.'" And that's, that's the balancing act, I think everyone plays. And just those cognitive factors alone that are sort of fighting against you. If I don't have a process for doing that, my default, the easy button, is always violence, death, fear, hate. Like, that is the easy button. And so that's sort of what you're fighting against. So, it's, and again, it's because it takes some mental calories to do that, to walk through that, and to see through that. It's, it's fighting against you because obviously your brain doesn't want to burn any more calories than it absolutely has to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you've got to get dirty, folks. Listen to Brian. Go back, press the recording button to the left, go back and listen to what he said again, because what he said is you have to get dirty. And what I mean by you have to get dirty is if you're prepared for every situation, you'll be prepared for none, and you're going to die at first contact. And what I mean by that is that when you're studying, and we say study, study, study, and if you have a good enough instructor, and you know, leaders are readers, yeah, I get that. But what the heck are you reading? So, if you understand Gordian Knot, if you understand Occam's Razor, you're understanding that second law of thermodynamics, and you're going back to Heisenberg. And what you're doing is you're starting to measure things. I can be risk averse, and in my day-to-day, I can do that through a certain amount of the certain types of training that are available. Uncertainty is different. If I manage too much uncertainty, I'm going to be blinded by the situation at hand because I'm going to be used to things. I'm going to say, "Oh, yeah, well, that's common here. It's common for a person to throw a punch. It's common for a person to carry a gun in this area. It's common for a person to want to resist me during an arrest because they're going to have the drugs on." Brian, if I try to assimilate those, and I don't get scuffed up a little, I don't see the danger in the situation, I don't feel a little dirty, then I'm not going to respond correctly.

So, the idea of "pay it forward thinking" is that every encounter, I get smarter, I get faster, I get harder to kill. But I never get to the point where I don't understand how complex uncertainty is, because the minute that I do, Brian, now I'm complacent. Anybody wants to know how complacency kills? That's how it kills. That this is just another traffic stop. It's just another chance encounter on the street. It's just another 7-Eleven I'm walking into to pay for my fuel. And that's when it bites you again. That moments of sheer terror will likely get that, will likely see that, smell that, feel the burning sensation as it's coming. But the moment of sheer boredom just before the person sticks that knife in my back or gut or punches me in the head, that's the one that we have to be prepared for. And that's where your training comes in and has to be critical for the event. Because if you think you've got it down by having some check-in-the-box training, you've got the risk side covered, but you're not even touching the gosh darn uncertainty side.

I, I, I think, you know, sometimes when you give, like, your vending machine example, it's like, we kind of, people tune that out. They're like, "Okay, whatever. Oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah, no, I know what you mean." It's like, "No, no, no." And that's why I was like, "No, stop, think, listen for a second," and go, "Those, that same thing that's happening to you, when you're going, 'Do I have enough money to pay for this cup of coffee? Or do I have to run back to my car?'" Or, "Do I?" Like, that, that's that mental process of what's happening right there is exactly the same in maybe a much more serious, chaotic situation. It's just, and it's, it's affecting you the same way. It just sometimes you're not, you're not aware of that, right? You don't, you, it's hard to, in the moment, reflect on how your performance is going in the moment if you're not doing the, "There's the cognition, then there's the metacognition." Right? There's the thinking, and then the thinking about thinking, like, "Alright, well, what do I need to think about? How can I prime myself to set myself up for success?" And even just those, obviously we, we bash it in everyone about time and distance, but that's, that's an extremely big concept in the way we, we talk about it. Much bigger than even most humans can, that, that we realize how, how much it affects us because it's just, it's, it's just something that's, we've taken for granted for so long, or just operating away so long that we don't even recognize it's what we're doing. And, having that kind of structure of saying, "Alright, how do I reduce the uncertainty? How do I, you know, what, what can I compare this situation against? What do I know right now? Don't worry about all the things that I don't know." It's like, "Well, let's, let's focus on what we do know right now," because there's always going to be a missing piece of the puzzle. There's no such thing as all of it laid out in front of us in logical order. It's just, it's just not how it happens.

No, no, you're exactly right. So, what Brian just said is humans are already masters of uncertainty. If you weren't, we wouldn't be talking about this and you wouldn't be tuning in right now. We make countless important activities each day look very simple. All of them have a great degree of uncertainty and some have risk, and we make those decisions in stride. We don't even think about it, we don't calculate that. So, I stick to what I understand and what I know.

I sent you an example about uncertainty that happened in my real life. My dad, the Marine, used to take us to Cedar Point, and he would save up enough money in his coffee jars. That's exactly how he did his coffee cans, the Maxwell House, that once he got it full enough, he would say, "Okay, we're going." And it would be a road trip in the 1970 Cadillac Sedan de Ville. Everybody bounced into that son of a gun. We'd leave at 3:00 in the morning because that was my dad's plan. And so, a few weeks out, I remember him calling us to the kitchen table. "Okay, what about the weather? What are we going to do? Who's going to be carrying the sunblock? What about the lines? Where are we going to meet if there's a thing?" This is my old man, Brian. You know, you had one too, you know that was exactly the same way. "How about the long drive? What are the games that we'll play along the long drive so you don't get on my bad side and the big meat hammer comes back and punches you in the head? Will there be construction, Jones, that are going to delay my arrival?" And back in those days it was maps and calling the state and everything, because we didn't have computers and those type of things. So, that operational, strategic uncertainty, this was a level of tactical uncertainty my dad was mitigating before we ever left for Cedar Point. Now, risk would have been assessed if there was a hitchhiker along the way and Dad rolled the dice and said, "Ah, what the hell?" and picked up a hitchhiker. You see what I'm saying? Now we would have had a calculation.

What are the chances that two serial killers are in the same car at the same time? My dad and this guy, right?

You're spot on. But if we understand that that's all a function of planning for the likelihood of an uncertainty, then that's what has to manifest in our training. You and I still fight with the people that do the virtual reality training, because what they're doing is creating an incident, and I can go over the incident and they go, "Well, yeah, there's a lot of branches in it." Everybody has branches in their incidents. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't increase the complexity. It either increases the likelihood of a shoot, don't shoot encounter. Well, that's fine, but that's not making me think my way out of a complex situation that's ripe with uncertainty. So, we feel that that's a completely different animal. We feel time and distance, and therefore we train our people to be independent, critical thinkers. And that way they can apply it to any novel, nuanced, or future situation, rather than, "Hey, you know, if I get shot in my right hand, I'll switch and do the left-hand reload." Those are great, keep doing those, but that isn't going to help you out-think an opponent.

Yeah. And you know, when you say things like, "Use history and past performance as a guide," right? So, you use that as a guide. But, even with that, you have to make sure you're using accurate historical precedent. I mean, it's, "Well, you know, airplanes are falling out of the sky now." It's like, "No, they're not. Look at, look, look at the history of, of airline travel."

Understand the, Brian, understand the irony. This morning I wrote something for LinkedIn and posted the Monday thing, right? And it was about a six. And as I'm showing it to a couple of people that I trust and admire, they're going, "You understand how ironic this is?" And I go, "Yeah, because before the clock, there was always somebody saying, 'Hey, look out behind you.' Ask the Romans about that. Ask, well, we won't get into that, the Ides of March. But I would say that if you speculate it, being attacked from behind has probably got a higher likelihood of many other attacks. Why? Because it works. Because your eyes are in the front of your head, your ears on the side of your head, you don't have a mechanism behind your head. So, what I'm trying to tell you is, you're safer risk, okay, if you consider the things that are behind you. Now, that's not uncertainty. I'm not reducing my uncertainty level. Do you get what I'm trying to say? I'm reducing a risk, okay, by taking into it that every once in a while, I check my six. Okay? If I wanted to reduce my uncertainty, I'd put a gosh darn rearview mirror on my hat, you know, so I could see behind me as I was walking around. And again, unsustainable. Hypervigilance is unsustainable. Most people create a jeopardy that they feel that they're, as a law enforcement officer involved, but they, they, they create this situation and then they're surprised by the likelihood of the outcome. How can you do that? How, how can you be surprised by anything that happens to you in life? If you're in a vehicle and you've got money and you pull over to get gas, the people looking at you go, "He's got a car, he's stopping for gas, he's got money." You're an instant victim. Come on. That, that's a simple calculation, Brian. That's baseline plus anomaly equals decision. That's not rocket science. And I'm just saying that, that, that we can dumb down a lot of the decisions that we make, and we make a ton during the day, we never even consider.

Yeah, and that, that's, that's another big takeaway too, it's like, these are things that you do consistently throughout your life and you don't recognize that you're doing it, because you've done it so much and it's an intuitive process for humans. So, it's, it's just get, why don't we just get better at that intuitive process that we already do, and get better at looking at what matters, better at looking at what the comparative baseline is, better at looking at everything in the environment that's around me, and being curious with it? Because that's, I mean, that's the essence of what everyone talks about with this stuff, especially with any with decision-making and situational awareness. It's just like, "No, like, you don't have to be constantly like scanning everything and looking everywhere." Like, I see people doing that stuff. I'm like, "Man, that's got to be exhausting. Like, I could never do that. Don't you teach this stuff?" I was like, "No, I teach about human behavior."

Exactly. What else would you be doing during that time? Do you know what I'm saying? There are so many other things. Like you and I, one of the best, folks, one of the best things about traveling with Brian is getting into these rich, wonderful discussions that we don't tape. Gosh, we should run a recording all the time. And then we get to meet people, and we're constantly on transmit, so we're constantly on receive when we're out there meeting people. And then we're in these unique, wonderful locations, so we want to find out about that. The Uber driver can tell us about this, and the guy at the bar can tell us about that. We spend a lot of time in Ubers and bars. But if I'm constantly on this defensive mode, and I'm thinking that negativity is the order of the day, Brian, I'm going to close off all of that. I'm not going to see any of that. I'm not going to enjoy the rich tapestry of life. And you're saying, "Yeah, but my job is to do, hey, I get it. I can see your trooper hat and your belt and all your gear on there that's shining at me already." But that doesn't mean that you have to change who you are. These types of decisions and uncertainty and risk are not personality based. That's you bringing that to the party. It's a very simple calculation in all humankind. The gift of time and distance applies to everybody in any society.

Yeah. And that's, that's the big point is we, you know what, that's another kind of explanation of what I meant when we unknowingly put our thumb on the scale of the situation by bringing in our own personality-based ways of doing things. And it's like, "Look, you exist in a much larger system. Take a look at the system and how it operates. Take a look at how this person is operating within that system, and see how you can influence a situation. Okay, you think these things are going to happen or you think that's what's happening? Okay, well then why aren't you acting accordingly?" "Well, I don't." It's like, "Okay, so you don't really think that's going to happen then, because otherwise you probably would have made a better decision." It's like, "Well, yeah, I guess you're right." It's like, "Okay, so, you know, I mean these are, it's, it's like a self-questioning process as you're going through that, and that's being situationally aware. What you, it's the opposite of trying to take in everything." It's going, "What's going on?"

Exactly. Exactly, Brian. And so that's, that's where it starts. It starts to sort of like, "Where am I? Where did I just get teleported to?" You know, I always make the "Quantum Leap" joke, remember that show where it's like, "Okay, where, where he's got to figure out, where am I, who am I, what's going on, what is this character I'm playing?" You know, or, "Who am I, did body am I in this time?" You know, it's that, that Quantum Leap thing. And it's like, yeah, that, that's all an exercise in sense-making. "Where, where am I in space and time right now? And then what's likely to occur based on what I see?" And I, it's not, don't, don't overcomplicate it, is what I always tell people. We really don't put your thumb on the scale, because you're just going to go off into, you know, playing the, "Well, what the, you know, little people with machetes taped to their hands come out of the back of the van?" And you're like, "What is, what scenario did you just dream up here?" So, I, I, that's, that's my biggest thing is like, you should be, it's to prove it. Alright, you think these chaotic things didn't happen, prove it. How, how would, how would it work? How would it work right now?

We talk about irony, Brian, let me give you something ironic. So, everybody, replay Brian's words. I tell you to do this, listen to a podcast two or three times, you're always going to come up with something missed earlier. So, Brian talks about Quantum Leap. Scott Bakula, the actor in Quantum Leap, Dean Stockwell was the guy that was always talking him through stuff, the old okay Ziggy or something like that, his little cigar and his little thing. Yeah, the cool thing about him and a great jacket, always had a great sport coat. The great thing about Stockwell is Stockwell was Kim in the earliest Kim's game. So, when they did the movie Kim, about the Kim's game that the Marines yelled at me and said, "No, it means keeping memory." Dean Stockwell was the young boy character that played that Rudyard Kipling character. So, how have we come full circle in this gosh darn podcast back to Leap and Dean Stockwell? See, and you know what that is? That's centripetal force, that's gravity, that's life keeping you in those lanes. Is there some stuff that's unexplicable out there and hard to understand? Yeah, but if you street it and you stick to the science, it makes it so much easier to calculate likelihood. Once you've done that and you understand the gift of time and distance, you're so much less likely to get into Felix's trick bag, man.

Yeah. Okay, well, I think that's, we covered, we covered a lot. So, obviously we have, we have more on Patreon, and we always answer any questions on there too. And we appreciate everyone tuning into this. Greg, any other final words on uncertainty and risk and anxiety and fear and all the, all the things that you experience every morning when you wake up?

I've got it right now. So, listen, folks, if you're listening to the sound of my voice or Brian's voice, you're part of the cagare. Cagare doesn't mean that you just sit back in a passive example. Go out, do something, talk to people, get the training, read a book, write a book, say something, give us a thumbs up, get on LinkedIn. Because if you do that, then what you're doing is you're raising the social consciousness and the awareness of everybody that's around you too, not just sitting on some what might be important and valuable information. And we love to hear from you, as a matter of fact. In fact, I would venture to speculate that almost all of our podcasts come from some viewer or listener Brian saying, "Hey, I want to know more about a topic." So, I would really ask.

True. Actually, pretty much all of them do.

Yeah.

Alright, well, we appreciate everyone for tuning in. Check out more if you enjoy it, share it with your friend. Thanks so much, and don't forget that training changes behavior.