Negative Space; Understanding What You CAN'T See

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. When something catches your attention, how much of what's happening around it are you actually taking in? Today, Greg and I are talking about negative space — the information around the person or situation that can change your understanding of the entire scene. From traffic stops to a trip to the gas station, we explore how using the surrounding information in the environment can help us understand what we can't directly see. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content. Please consider leaving us a review and, more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time. And remember, training changes behavior. All right, good morning, Greg. Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in. Excited about this episode today. Greg, we're just going to jump right in and we're going to be talking about negative space and understanding what you can't see. The purpose behind this discussion is to explore how the information surrounding something that we cannot directly observe helps us make reasoned inferences, build and test explanatory storylines, and anticipate what may happen next. We get fixated on objects or people or places — specific things that we're observing — and something captures our attention. Just like we talk about sense-making and problem-solving in class, it's easy to jump to an initial conclusion or inference. This is a process your brain is constantly doing, no matter what the situation is, whether you're actively observing, passively observing, or completely lacking situational awareness. The recurring question and theme today is: what does the surrounding information allow us to infer about someone's likely intent or about what's happening, and then how do we check whether that inference holds up? I see something, but there's a lot of negative space in the environment — all of that in-between stuff, everything that's around what I'm directly observing — and that's what really makes up the scene. It's the context of what it is that I'm seeing. We're going to go through three recurring examples. First, a traffic stop — a police officer makes a stop for an observed traffic violation, no apparent crime in progress, just a civil infraction. Second, an interview — say you're conducting a parent-teacher conference with a single parent about an apparent incident of unruly behavior with the child. And third, my favorite: gas stations. You pull into an unfamiliar gas station and see some activity going on. I love gas stations. You really do meet the best people at gas stations. I've spent a lot of time there. I still go to the one down the street from us all the time just to grab a cup of coffee and chat with the ladies working there — one of them does a thing where you throw in a couple bucks and she brings in homemade food on Fridays. It's pretty cool. But anyway, those are the three examples we're going to be going back and forth with today. I want to start with how we observe an environment. For those of you who've been to our training or heard about it — our Detecting a Cunning Opponent course or any course that deals with observation and perception — we use this in a very literal sense. We teach people how to observe an environment and make sense of what's happening. Within how we process information, for your eye and brain, we get into positive, negative, and dead space. If I'm looking at the storefront of a building — say, a Home Depot — everything I can directly see right in front of me, anything that has mass, we'd call that positive space. Dead space is everything I can't observe, like what's behind the building. But then there's negative space. Think about those sliding doors at the main entrance, the windows, or maybe a shaded area where something's covered with a tarp — there are things underneath it, but the space itself appears empty. That's what we mean by negative space. We get into it a lot because of certain physiological limitations in how your eye and brain work — your brain tends to paint those areas out and doesn't attend to them, essentially deciding there's nothing there. But if you train yourself, you can look into those areas. You can look through the window of a gas station before you walk in to make sure you're not walking into an armed robbery. Inside that negative space, there's a lot going on. Criminals hide in negative space. It's something we practice in a very literal sense in class. But today, Greg, I want to take that discussion further and apply the same idea to situations — when we're observing a person or a scene, we don't always have access to someone's intent or the full picture. We're sort of teleported into it. But we can observe the information around it. The setting, the relationships, the timing, and the activity around it can help give shape to what we can't directly see. The big-picture question is: what does the surrounding information allow us to reasonably infer about someone's intent or what's happening, and how do I then use that to check myself — to test whether or not that inference holds up? That's the big-picture concept, Greg, and I want to throw it to you with an opening question: when we teach positive, negative, and dead space, what are we trying to change about how people look at the environment?

A couple of clarifications for our frequent listeners and for new listeners. You don't have to have attended our class to find value in our podcast, and you don't have to have been a combat hunter or a vet to understand these principles. This is science. What we do is we try to street it up, break it down so you understand cognition and how it can improve your play. When Brian was talking about seeing through things, we call those burning techniques — burn through vegetation, through darkness, through cover. We'll also routinely say negative, positive, and dead space, or NPND, or dead, positive, negative — don't even worry about the order. It matters how you learned it. The negative space is the key because it's the center focus. I'll give you a definition from Rogue Manor West here, where I'm broadcasting from my home. We have chipmunks — the kind of Western chipmunks that have to fight for survival every minute of every day. When I come out, the positive space I see is my pickup truck parked just before the sagebrush, and the tire is also something I can see. Behind the truck I can't see — that's my dead space. But there's a point between the tire and the fender well that's always darker no matter where the sun is, and the chipmunk sits on the tire in that position, no matter what he's eating, and looks around. Elevated position — that makes sense. But why does he choose the negative space? Because prey always moves from position of cover to position of cover; they're always looking for a potential exit. My use of negative, positive, dead space gave me an explanatory storyline I can now check out. I've seen that on other vehicles, not just at my house — now we've got a robust file folder, Brian. The negative, positive, dead space becomes a mechanism so we don't just fix our attention on a thing. We have to contemplate the entire experience — we call it the Hoberman; we want to look 360. On a traffic stop, it's much more complicated than TV shows or the police academy first teaches you. There's negative, positive, and dead space just in picking where we're going to stop, and sometimes you don't get to choose — sometimes the driver of the suspect vehicle is doing that. Then the driver has his own NPD. A smell — is it coming from him or the car? Is it burning marijuana or packaged marijuana? Is clothing disheveled? Has he dropped food on himself because he's under the influence of something? All of those things are within that package. And then the dead space — is there a gun under the driver's seat, something in the glove box? The negative space is what's just behind the headrest to the right shoulder before I get to the center console. If I have to move or use a thermal, an NVG, a flashlight, or kneel down a little bit, we're probably talking about a negative space. That connective fiber between the positive, the negative, and the dead space is where the seams and gaps are — where stuff hides. For an interview, Brian gave us one in class. If we get so fixated on the mission, we're going to make mistakes. Say we're here to address a student's unruly behavior — we still have to consider: when is the interview, what time of day did the incident happen, where did it happen, who else knows about the counseling session? If it goes sideways, I don't want to get accused of saying something improper. If the parent or caregiver gets upset, do I have an exit? We don't think about those things because we wrote the note late, we want to get it over with, and we walk right into it. We don't even ask what the kid was going through — were they going through a breakup, a bad day, a medication change? If we don't know those things, they become negative space issues. They're not unknowable, Brian, because we can investigate to get them. A dead space issue would be something we genuinely couldn't know.

Or there's no way you can see it — that's the dead space. I can't see it unless I move and go over there. But negative space, you know it's there, and it helps you construct what's happening.

I love when you say that for the interview, and with the window. A window at the gas station — I'm in the parking lot, I look through the window, I can observe what's happening inside. That's not dead space to me, but I can't observe it clearly and I don't hear sounds or smell, yet I see them. So that's just as important. If I use negative, positive, dead space to help me define boundaries or groups or sets or challenges within it — the positive space is what I see and who I see: the vehicle, the people standing in front of the building. The negative space is: are they lingering, is it an unmanned vehicle, am I seeing graffiti on a second deck — which means if a graffiti artist can get there, a sniper can get there. Garbage, door locks, signage — all of this fundamental stuff that creates fidelity is normally in that negative space. A parking sign is positive space, but a sign of drug use when I'm seeing vials on the ground — that's that transitory position, and that becomes my negative space. The lights are missing, people are lingering but very close to the dead space — why would somebody choose to be there? I go back to the chipmunk. Why is he standing right there? It's warm, out of direct sunlight, but he's got an escape route. These three examples should cover everything our listeners would likely run into in a day, and if they get fluent enough with NPD they can use it to help frame their structured observation.

We're using these specific examples, but they're meant to be used in a general way. Don't think, well, I don't have a kid, I'm not going to have a parent-teacher situation. It doesn't matter what the interview is, or what news article you're reading — the mere observation of an unfamiliar route or nervous demeanor does not immediately establish deception or nefarious intent. Same with the gas station — is the person hanging out there trying to get someone to buy them beer, or waiting for a ride because it's right by the school? One thing isn't necessarily meaningful; you can't jump to an unreasonable conclusion. It's not a static thing either — everything's dynamic, and it's about relationships and interactions. Within that design space — the gas station, the teacher interview, the traffic stop — there's a lot going on, and that background, that negative space, is what gives meaning to the individual observations I make. It can push me in the wrong direction or the right direction depending on how I process it. So one question I'd have for you is: what becomes available to us when we stop looking at the specific person, incident, or location? It's easy to see how you can go the wrong direction — the guy's drunk, whatever. But what is available when we stop looking at those individual things?

To use the metaphor — you can't infer what you can't see. Take the dead space out of it: is it complicating the issue by offering a place to hide? That's a consideration you make every time. But for this process, the positive space can actually make me stupid. I see it's a gas station, people go to get gas, I mentally check out the dead space — I can't see it, so it doesn't make me afraid, so I don't think about it.

There's nothing there.

So now what we focus on is that negative space. When we take a look, we start doing things like: what are the possible outcomes of the observed or perceived actions? It appears that those people are linked in some manner. What's the timing in the sequence? Nobody paid attention to me until I got out of the vehicle, and then all of a sudden I see some motion and it appears that those people are coming towards me — and now one person's hanging back. That's important to me because that's above and beyond a normal, ordinary, everyday clinical observation. My structured observation says that's interesting. Now there are a couple of explanations. The person's going to come over and say, hey, you just drove over that thing, it's hanging from your undercarriage. Or, hey, did you know you have a flat? Hey, you're going the wrong way. But when I see those things, I have to measure them. An inference stays with us, and it has to be something that my observation initially supports. I remember being on the East Coast one day and having an argument with a second lieutenant — perhaps, well, it could be, well, I don't know, not enough information. Look, I don't know everything, but what can I learn? Can I learn something useful without knowing the complete story? What I want to do is have a better question. I want to be able to conduct a better interview — asking a real question of my environment with my observations.

And that's actually a good example of why people do this in a clinical sense. You're asking maybe a doctor or a lawyer for a legal or medical opinion, you give them something, and they might say, well, I can't give you a reasoned inference based on just what you see — which might be a completely accurate thing to say. However, your case of the lieutenant — it's like, well, maybe it could be, you don't have enough information. What we're trying to get here is that there is enough information to start somewhere. So where's the starting point? Maybe you don't have it all, maybe you can't commit resources, but you can start. To go back to the traffic stop, there's an implied relationship between what that driver maybe tells you and how that information relates to where they're going. They could be completely wrong unintentionally, or they could be telling me a lie. Being near the destination or starting endpoint only tends to support part of the driver's account. There's the story you're telling, the place you initiated the traffic stop, what you typically see, the time of day, the weather, the environmental conditions — this all plays into it. And when someone says, oh, I'm going here, they might be unintentionally saying the wrong thing. Maybe they're coming from there. We almost look at it the same — no, I witnessed this, you said this. Yeah, but I didn't mean it. Okay, now they're being accepted. So how do I put all that into some sort of usable format or context?

You're spot on. The positive space gets in the way. Put a block on your desk in front of you and look at it — that little Lego block or building block or whatever. When I look at it, that positive space makes me go, it's a block. But it could be a number of things. Why is it there? Is it holding down papers because of the wind? I can't consider what's behind it because I can't see that. I have to go with my fives and twenty-fives first. Positive space — but what does it mean? That would be the negative space. Where are the shadows? Where are my angles? I have to use the basic information I have and then force some additional context to help me distinguish confusion from a deliberate intent to deceive me. A person can be confused. Look, being stopped by the police scares the shit out of me even now.

I'm looking around like I got dope in the car or something.

I'm like, what do I have in here — sound like Porky Pig. And then a person goes, oh, it's deception. Hold on a minute. Consider the interview at school. The student already had the opportunity to explain what happened to the parent or caregiver — why am I getting called into the school? Oh, Dad, you don't understand. Now all of a sudden I'm there and I'm looking at that negative space. Wait a minute — does that account line up or corroborate the evidence that I'm seeing right now? Does it tend to demonstrate that the person is explaining it away? Or lying about it? Context helps me weigh things. It helps me determine an ML and an MDCOA. And you know where the context is going to be found? In that negative space.

You said something I want to follow up on for a second. You said I need to force some additional context. That's an interesting way to put it. What do you mean by that?

It's a great question — now I'll be accused of forming a Gregism. But I think force and forge are two important words to use in your everyday life. I have to force perspective. I have to force myself to look for context and relevance. I have to force myself to search for artifacts and evidence to support a number of storylines to find out which one's more reasonable. And I have to forge ahead to do that. That may be taking a knee, it may be using binos, it may be sitting in my car for a minute. But the idea is that I can't just rely on what I see, because that's the lure — the magnetic lure of positive space.

I like that you put it as I have to force myself to do these things. This goes back to how perception and sense-making and problem-solving work — our default mode is, here's the solution. Your brain does not want to be surprised, so it just fills in the blanks. That's what we're running on autonomically: it is what you think it is, it is what you see. So you have to force these additional context cues and clues to go, okay, am I building an actual baseline, does this make sense? What you're talking about is using the surrounding information, things in the environment, known comparisons, to fill in some of these blanks with good information — versus what our brain's going to do anyway, which is make something up or go off the last movie it saw. So we're constructing an explanatory storyline. You're on the traffic stop and the driver's saying this, this, and this, they're traveling from here to here. Or the kid in the interview is saying, well, this happened and that happened. I want to know: how do we organize those observations into competing explanations? When do we have to sit here and go, all right, we need to assemble these observations into a story, and when do we have to take an existing story and deconstruct it? I'm either constructing something bottom-up, or I'm deconstructing top-down. Walk me through that a little bit.

The first thing is — and by the way, I've changed glasses three times this week, so I don't know if these are better than those.

The Clark's ones you had were interesting.

The thing that you're saying begs an earlier observation. If you go in primed to say this is a binary thing — is it true or is it a lie, is it honest or is it a deception — you're already screwing yourself. You have to start from a position of: what do the artifacts and evidence tend to show? What is it I think I'm seeing? So don't fall for the trap of just saying, is it a gas station or is it a movie set? Is what I'm seeing right now set up to lure me into an ambush? Is it to make me stop to sell me potatoes at the roadside market? Am I getting lured in by the lower price of gas for some other reason? Whether it's the traffic stop, the interview at school, or the gas station, we have to construct the storyline by saying: how do these observations likely fit together? No square pegs in round holes. And deconstructing means saying I have to look at the facts and assumptions that support the account — does the likelihood fit the artifact and evidence? Both processes mean I have to consider alternatives. I'll give you one — on the traffic stop, remember Graham versus Connor. This is something Brian and I talk about a lot when we're dealing with police crowds. In 1984, diabetic Dethorne Graham feels an insulin reaction coming on, so he asks his buddy to drive him to the local convenience store for orange juice. He jumps out, runs in, immediately sees the line's too long, and comes bursting back out. A good copper doing his job sees that and goes, holy shit, it's a crime in progress — robbery or shoplifting or whatever. He fixated on one storyline. He looked at it binary. So when he makes the traffic stop, think about what a diabetic reaction looks like: slurred speech, unsteady on your feet, a little angry. Because he went down one path, he's now misreading everything. The passenger jumping out, the behavior — it all starts fitting that one storyline. But it's one storyline. He didn't look at the negative space. He considered the positive space — it's a stop-and-rob — and he didn't consider what might have happened just inside the store, or what might have happened to this person before he got there. And you're going, that takes time. It takes the exact same amount of time to jump to an unreasonable conclusion as it does to jump to a reasonable one.

Graham v. Connor — you actually pulled in both examples, the gas station and the traffic stop, that we were talking about. You're getting into those incoherent storylines — it was not a reasonable inference, it was an unreasonable inference. And this is kind of the default mode for our brain. It wants a simple answer, it wants to know everything, so you have to force yourself to pause — the concept of time and distance — hang on, before we jump to an unreasonable conclusion, what's really going on here? When you gave the examples like, is this a gas station or a movie set, people are like, okay, that's dumb. But that's actually a great marketing analogy. When you get something online and you're like, oh, this is really interesting — it's actually a marketing thing for whatever the guy's selling. They're talking about it as if it's fact or science, but they're trying to get you to buy something. And look, we are too in a sense — we're trying to get you to buy some concepts and a way of thinking. So how does that influence you when the initial explanatory storyline is supplied by someone else — your friend, your social media feed, a witness, an accuser, an accomplice — and how does that affect really seeing the negative space?

I'll jump back into Graham versus Connor for just a minute. Other cops came to help Connor, and those cops only knew the storyline that Connor gave them. Connor was convinced there was wrongdoing, so they started from an unstable base — incorrect assumptions — and it turned into a shit sandwich. That's why it happened in '84 and we're still studying it every day today. It's become case law. Something you said is happening in the news right now. It's early October 2026 for this podcast, but it's just as relevant five years ago or ten years in the future. Kratom — the two recent deaths from overdose and trying to link to that. A lot of people use kratom. Every gas station I've ever been in on long road trips sells it — eight different brands, ten different colors. So if I go by the marketing information and word of mouth, there's nothing wrong with it, it's absolutely normal. See how that can get you in the trick bag? Somebody goes, what is that, is that a drug? And you go, no, it's kratom, it's everywhere. You're starting on faulty information. So everything you do from that point on, without questioning what you're seeing, is delving into negative space without a rudder. The positive space is it's kratom. But the negative space — the questions you should ask — is it addictive? Yeah, it's almost immediately addictive because it works. Is it dangerous? Brian, we don't ask that about our soda.

Most people are just now asking that.

Most people take aspirin and then go to the doctor. I've been in a doctor's office a lot this last year — trying to get pregnant, folks — and the doctor tells me I've got to take these meds. I'm always asking about side effects. One doctor straightened me out: you ever take an aspirin in your life? Yeah, a bunch of times. You ever read the warning label on those? We take for granted the things that are in the positive space. We don't turn it around and see how many fat grams there are. My point is that you can do a lot by understanding that the person you're dealing with probably doesn't have a grasp of the negative space. On that basic traffic stop where you're supposed to walk up and issue a violation, you have a plethora of information you just saw — you saw him pump his brakes, change lanes, do a U-turn. That's all interesting. So when I go up and the driver asks why I stopped him, that opens it up. I need the license, registration, proof of insurance — and hey, what was that move back there? That's an open-ended question. And the person goes, I saw the Thai food restaurant and realized I was on the wrong block. Okay, those are plausible. Does that fit what I'm seeing, smelling, feeling, hearing? With the kid you were talking about in an interview — did you talk to your mom and dad about this? Yeah. What did you tell them? What did you tell your friends? Did you tell your friends the same thing? Why did you change clothes after? That's interesting to me. Because a demonstration of intent is always going to be visible — you just have to scratch the surface a little bit. Remember the soap on the windows of a closed business when you just wanted to see inside? A construction site takes you from the positive space — you can't see the dead space — so they cut a hole in the wall so you can peek through and see what's going on. That's what we're talking about. We're literally talking about cutting that hole so you can see into the construction site and come to your own reasonable conclusion on what's going on.

This is where it gets kind of tough — how do I determine the run-of-the-mill normal, everything's fine, from, oh wait, this is going sideways? That's always where people fall into that trap. I want to avoid treating inconsistencies as self-explanatory, because there are things I have to observe first. So last weekend the Red Bull Flugtag was here in Minnesota. We went down to the river with the kids, me and my wife. Super cool — shout out to the Edmund Fitzgerald Flugtag team, the hometown favorites. For people who don't know what it is: Red Bull does these all over the world where they build a little launch platform on the water, your team builds a plane with no power, and you launch one of your teammates off it to see how far they go before hitting the water. Really cool, really fun. So we're walking up. I've got Max in the ruck on my back, walking up with my wife. We go to the entrance — it funnels into this one entry point with a big Red Bull sign, people with Red Bull backpacks handing out free drinks, music, the whole marketing setup. I see one guy off to the side. He's on his phone, and his functional field of view and orientation are pointed outward — he's inside the gate but looking out toward something or someone. He's talking, but he looks like he could be security except he's clearly not, based on what he's wearing. He's standing in an area where an operations or security person would logically be — checking people coming in — but they already had uniformed security over here, private security over there, and a group of cops standing together watching the crowd. So I'm thinking, this doesn't make sense. I snap a photo and turn, and sure enough, coming around the corner is another guy on a phone, looking up the same way — and then they do the wave-nod and both put their phones away. I had to take all those contextual cues and ask, who do I typically see standing right there? Ticket scanners, security, crowd management — not someone with no apparent reason to be there. And why is his field of view and orientation pointed away from everything that's going on behind him, fixed on this one central entry point? It was all of that negative space in the environment that I had to draw from, and it took a moment of sustained observation — which always pisses off my wife. She's like, what is it now? And I'm like, just give me one minute.

Give me one minute, and you'll stop and look. One of the things you said is really important — you want to avoid treating inconsistencies as self-explanatory. And I'd add the inverse: we also want to avoid treating inconsistencies as automatic lies. You have to weigh and measure things and constantly do the math in your own head. The minute something seems plausible — positive space — you stop calculating. That's wrong. You have to think of your sense-making as a feedback loop that keeps coming back to update your assumptions. You actually used that phrase yourself just now: I have to make sense of this. The storyline — what's the likelihood, what does it feel like — has to stay under continuous evaluation. Whether it's an interview where I'm sensing confusion, or I'm hearing imprecise language like on a Graham versus Connor stop, or I'm a cop arriving to help and I ask what do you got and the other officer says I don't know, I think I got a robbery — all of those things are clouding the issue right in front of you. So what you have to do is let those scales fall from your eyes, open that aperture, and get back to baseline. Sensing confusion, hearing imprecise language, receiving mistaken information — those are all things that should take you somewhere different. With the storyline, stop and ask: if this is true, if the storyline is logical and fundamentally right, then what should I feel, see, hear, smell, or taste next? You were at an event called Flugtag — you speak German, flug means fly, tag means day, things flying. But the behavior you observed didn't fit your initial positive-space definition, so you had to dig deeper. And where did you dig? You dug in the negative space.

And speaking of smells — Max had his first experience smelling someone smoking weed, which was hilarious. We're down in that crowd, I smell it, look over at my wife, and then in front of everyone — because there were degenerates there, there were families there, just a full mix of people — my three-year-old goes, something smells funny, Dad. And everyone around us started laughing.

Brian, what you're saying is that perception led you to a conclusion, and that's exactly what we're talking about. Let me give you two fast examples. There's a video out there, probably 25 years old now, where a state trooper — New York, New Jersey, somewhere like that — pulls a guy over on an on-ramp to the freeway. It's a long ramp that drops down below street level, thinking it's a stolen car. The guy takes a moment to stop, doing the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go onto the freeway thing, and finally pulls over. As the officer walks up, the guy fast-talks him: Officer, you have to understand, I'm about to take a shit in my pants right now, I have to go — and then floors it and leaves. He left because the cortisol dumped into his brain mid-stop and he made a run for it. That was a pre-event indicator sitting right there in negative space. In positive space the officer could see it, but he missed what it meant. One more that connects to your marijuana smell. We had two great cops — both are gone now, long story — good officers on the road but genuinely the laziest two guys I ever met. They're driving through a subdivision, heading from a coffee shop to a restaurant presumably, and they see a guy come out of a garage driveway onto the street covered in blood with his hands up. They immediately stop and jump out. The guy sees two uniformed officers in a patrol vehicle and says, Hey, I just cut myself bad on my lawnmower — is there a hospital nearby? They throw him in the backseat, drive him to the ER, drop him off, and leave. Then the call goes out: homicide on this street, suspect fled through the backyards. That guy committed the homicide, hopped the fence, and handed them a plausible explanatory storyline. Why did they fall for it? They got trapped in positive space. They never stopped to think, this is too good to be true — what else could be happening here?

So let's try to make the inference explicit, because these are so contextually based. How do you get there? How do you not do that? Right there — the officers see a guy coming from the backyard, covered in blood, and he immediately comes out with a story. You don't have any other information yet. So how do I move from here's what I observe to here's what I think it means?

Human behavior is consistent, and when it's inconsistent it's anomalous and you should investigate. In a situation where you already have a gating mechanism — ML and MDCOA, most likely and most dangerous — the reason that's useful is because it sets up two explanatory storylines. Most likely this guy's telling me the truth and we need to get him to a hospital. But what's the most dangerous conclusion I could reach? This guy was shot committing a robbery. This guy just butchered something illegally somewhere. So I can run those two scenarios in my mind at the same time and start looking at the baseline. What do I see? What does it mean? Which pieces fit? If I have too many inconsistencies, it's likely not the right story. If it starts to fit naturally or iteratively, and the person is telling me that information and I can corroborate some of it, that tends to confirm it. Then you ask yourself what you can do to confirm it further. Show me the injury. By the way, there was no lawnmower — is there grass cut? You smell a lot like weed. It smells like the garage out here. There's so much information and negative space to draw from, and you're limiting yourself. It's not a function of time and distance, because a wrong conclusion takes the same amount of time and calculation and energy. So once you have the two explanatory storylines, stop for a minute and investigate further. Maybe you're not in a position to stop the other person, but you can stop you. You can seek cover, drive to another gas station. Your personal survival has to weigh differently in those situations. If it starts feeling like an MD and that explanatory storyline starts popping hot, you've got to do something.

This is what's hard for people to grasp sometimes. We're talking about negative space and things that happen in the environment, but we're saying put yourself in that environment — which means you're on the inside looking in, not the outside looking in. Pure physics says you influence the environment. You may not be able to control the situation, but you can still influence it. One of the things — and this came from Dan Chavez on our team, he's so good at this — in the stories you tell, Greg, you make connections very quickly. You created HP PRNA, you teach this, you've written on it. So what happens in your reasoning in these situations that a less experienced observer might miss? How do you get to that level?

Great question from Chavez. Experts compress several steps into a more rapid assessment — we're just faster at it, flash to bang. But familiarity with the pattern doesn't eliminate the need to check that it fits. No round peg, square hole. What you have to do is explain with supporting connections in your mind in order to distinguish facts from assumptions. If you're still running on purely assumptions without artifacts and evidence, without seeing something tangible, your answers are still in negative space — they haven't taken a form yet. So you have to ask yourself: which of these observations are supporting the interpretation I formed? Which am I getting from the environment, which from the people? Like we said earlier, if you walk up on a vehicle on a traffic stop and a car has been running hot through subdivisions fleeing scout cars, does it smell differently? If you didn't know there was a pursuit in an adjacent area, what would that smell tell you? And then you smell burning marijuana — that's different in context from smelling packaged marijuana at a hotel where you can't even breathe. Those are things you can weigh. Why would the person be telling me a lie at this juncture? Well, maybe it's embarrassing. There was a fingerprint example I talked to you about — I couldn't get this guy to break, couldn't get him to talk while we were fingerprinting him, and it turned out he didn't want to tell me he was using his brother's name because he didn't want to get his brother into the system. There's an additional explanatory storyline there. Are you doing anything to find it or to confirm it?

That's what you're talking about — testing the storyline before increasing your confidence in what you're seeing. Keeping this open-ended running storyline is difficult because our brain is trying to give us the answer before we get there. This is why you have to stay naturally curious and not fall in. What happens when people get overwhelmed is they say, you're bringing in all these additional questions and I don't have time for that, or how am I supposed to find that information in the moment? What I'm trying to get at is: what is the additional information that would help us distinguish between alternate explanations? You brought the guy out — okay, I cut myself mowing the lawn, can you take me to the hospital? That's one possible explanation for why he's standing in front of you covered in blood, but there may be others. Getting to that confidence level to make a decision is difficult. The reason I asked you about subject matter expertise is because there are a lot of people who have it in law enforcement, but you didn't have it at the doctor's office in the story you told earlier — you didn't automatically go, oh, these are just the side effects. What that shows is that outside your area of expertise it's very difficult to do this. But you can still use the same process.

It's exactly the same process. All wounds are self-inflicted — meaning metaphorically — so if you're sitting there saying I don't have time for this, if you're not in a fight for your life, you've got plenty of time, because you don't want to be in a fight for your life. There are a lot of gas stations out there. If you're running late, it's because your planning sucked. If you say you don't have time to ask follow-up questions, why are we doing this at all? You have to plan ahead of time, look at the storyline, weigh artifacts and evidence and witness statements and your own observations, and predict what's likely happening next. That's MLMD COA, and they're not weighted equally — if it's ML, you have time; if it's MD, you'd better get to the answer fast. Whenever a cop tells me they don't have that kind of time on a traffic stop, that's funny, because the law gives you plenty of time on a traffic stop unless you're fishing or you're wrong. What am I seeing? What do I still need to see? If I have at least two plausible outcomes, I gain confidence in one story over the other by asking follow-on questions and seeing the evidence. You ask the guy to lift his shirt to see if he's got a gun — that helps you determine whether you're in danger. Same thing on a traffic stop: you tell the driver over the loudspeaker to pull into that parking lot because there's more light. That's you taking control of the situation, living long enough to get an alternative explanation.

I don't want to complicate it and add conundrums I don't need. With all these examples—the traffic stop, the school interview, the gas station—you likely have some context and some baseline for that situation. The gas station is such a great one: you've been to a gas station countless times, so what do you typically see, and what's different about this right now? That's enough to keep it within the frame of the context and the environment, without adding in, well it could be this, or it could have been the one-armed man. Those aren't reasonable.

Those aren't reasonable. We've been on the East Coast, West Coast, North, South, 53 countries, been all over the place. So there's some place that we go where you look and you go, what's that? And a person goes, well, that's the alcohol store, the package store. Can I buy alcohol at the 7-Eleven? No, not in this region, state, city, or whatever. It's not so egregiously different that you go, I don't understand that. You go to Scotland and a guy's wearing a skirt—now in America some guys are wearing skirts, so it's not so different. You have a category, and that file folder for that information is something you can use. So if you're sitting there going, I have to make a distinction—what is it I'm observing and what am I inferring? The inferring is the dangerous part, the positive space. And what additional information would change that assessment? What's the next question I need to ask? What's the next thing I see or hear that's going to lead in or out of that?

So in a sense it's like correctly labeling and understanding—okay, here's my actual observations. I saw a guy in a yellow shirt cross the street. And then here's what I inferred. Here's what I saw or smelled or felt—this is a perception.

You're reading Mac's books again. I'm sorry.

I am. When I drop them off at school I say, have a good day, be a good monkey, and he laughs because that's what the man in the yellow hat says to George. But no—when you can accurately separate what you observed from what you inferred, that comparison alone makes you go, oh wait, hang on, I'm seeing some gaps. Because obviously you want to create an explanatory storyline that's accurate. You've been doing some sense making, you think you know what's going on, you've tested it, and you're getting more evidence to support what you think is happening. So the next step is to predict and act—working from an explanation, what can we anticipate, what decisions does that help us make? Everyone's always jumping to here's the decision or here's what's gonna happen next, but without all of that pre-work, the prediction and action and updating isn't going to matter because you don't have a solid baseline.

You didn't fully investigate the negative space, so you're working off a faulty assumption. Let me ask you something about prediction. Would it be likely for me to predict, going to a shots-fired call in uniform, that there's a good Samaritan who isn't the shooter running around with a gun? If I haven't considered that, if I haven't played that game in my brain, I'm setting myself up to shoot a citizen or an undercover cop. You go, well, that almost never happens. No, it does happen.

Well, it happens more and more now, too.

Of course it does, because more and more people are carrying guns and more and more people are trying to intercede in a bad situation. So if you go in and you're saying, hey, I've got to confront my kid right now—that's an emergent situation, they're about to get on the bus. What do you have to do? You have to slow time down, because you need a minute to ask a better question. If I have to call in sick to work to drive my kid to school because it's going to take me a minute for that conversation, fine. If I have to park across the street from that gas station and take five minutes to watch what's going on before I decide I'm not stopping there—do it. Because what you're doing otherwise is trading your safety for sense making, and you can't do that. Sense make, problem solve, decision. You have to do it that way. You have to look for those unresolved questions, but you can't dwell on them. You probably have enough information to draw a reasonable conclusion and drive on.

And even when you say you don't have enough information to take action, what you're really saying is you've established the explanatory storyline and it hasn't met the threshold for action that your policy or your situation requires. You've already done the work—it just hasn't crossed that line. Is that the confidence piece? Is that accuracy?

So now you've just answered what the next step is—stay on or get off. Go back to Keanu Reeves and that girl in Speed. Do I want to stay on and ask some more questions, or do I want to say, you know what, this is too much input and just find another restaurant, find another thing to do? That's a simple choice that we make. But what happens is we're running on impulse power because we see things in positive space and just interpret and assume and infer. All we're saying is take that extra second, or nanosecond, to confirm or to insert an alternative, likely storyline of what might be happening.

So let's bring this back to the concept of negative space—when we can't directly see someone's intent or the whole situation, how do we use the information around it without filling the gaps with our assumptions? This is the big thing about negative space that we're talking about today. You referenced the Hoberman sphere earlier, and maybe that's a good place to say, all right, this is what we mean by negative space.

So when you take a look at a Hoberman sphere—and if you haven't seen one, look it up, do your due diligence—everywhere we go, we leave Hoberman spheres and a jack-in-the-box behind. Both of them are positive space. They're things you can hold and look at and take a photo of and tap. The beauty of a Hoberman sphere is you can grab it and as you expand it, you see the negative space. All that negative space is holding information. There's hypothesis testing, there's loops of understanding, there's directions you can go and explanatory storylines that lead nowhere. That's where you need to be to avoid getting into the trick bag—because the jack-in-the-box is always in the dead space, and the dead space reveals itself. And by then you're too close.

We talk about the gifts of time and distance, and we have a very odd perception of time—I don't want to do the Matthew McConaughey time-as-a-flat-circle thing, but our perception of time and its effect on everything from memory to lived experience is something we don't really grasp. We have to navigate the world, so we have clocks synced up, time zones, all of that—but those are artificial constraints put in by humans so that as the world expanded and there were more people, we could be a little more precise. And like any technology, yes it helps you, but there's always some part of it that will make you miss things or not fully understand things. You keep bringing up that in a lot of these situations, to make a decision—should I stay or should I go—there's always another gas station, another restaurant, you can drive your kid to school if it's that important. But our default mode is, oh, I'll do it later, it's probably not that big of a deal. And once you do that, all of those things you'd previously identified as anomalous or worth your attention—they go away. You've kind of deceived yourself into thinking you don't have to worry about those things anymore. Your brain goes, okay, the prefrontal cortex is smarter than me, I'm just the limbic system. And then you write it off. So now you're walking in already at a nine or ten, and it's going to go to eleven, because your baseline has shifted so much.

I'd like to add one thing to that—danger is always in the dead space. So when a dispatcher, another teacher, a friend down the road gives you some advice or inkling or information, unprocessed that information can never really function as intelligence. Taking it at face value means you're already on an unstable base. Oh, that guy across the street is a drinking man. Oh, that guy on the motorcycle is this or that. The idea is to go off your own observations and perceptions and test your assumptions against reality. That's a much better way of going through life than operating in that positive-space mode of just believing everything you're handed. That's how advertising fools you, that's how people on the street fool you, and that's how dead space creeps up and becomes that jack-in-the-box.

There is a lot of useful information around the thing that has captured your attention. Everyone's done it — you see something out of the corner of your eye and you stop and take a second look, usually because something captured your attention enough that your brain said, hey, slow down, we may need to look at this. A lot of times it's not necessarily the actual thing itself — your brain is running off the context of the situation and the background, going, oh wait, that doesn't make sense here, so I better go look at it. There's so much information in that negative space. During the traffic stop example, the driver's explanation is part of the picture. The location, the circumstances, what the officer can independently observe — all of that helps make sense of the explanation. During the interview, subtle changes to the story that either support or contradict the evidence may help you determine truth from misunderstanding. At the gas station — one of my favorite places — you notice something or a person at first, but then as you look at how other people interact with that individual, where they move, what happens afterward, your sense-making improves. That's the connection to negative, positive, and dead space we've been talking about today. The information around something can help give shape to the part we can't directly see. When we explain our reasoning, separate your observations from your inferences. Here's what I saw, and here's what I inferred — because that's what you're doing autonomically without even realizing it. What did I actually observe? How did I connect those observations? What else could explain them? And what would cause me to change my mind? If I'm pretty confident about something, I ask: what would have to happen right now to change what I'm thinking? That's how we build and test an explanatory storyline — it gives the basis for anticipating what might happen next and choosing what to do, while staying aware of what we still don't know. That's the hardest thing for a lot of people. It's okay not knowing everything; you're going to have to make decisions based on incomplete information all the time. To the listeners: the next time something catches your attention, take a moment to look at what's happening around it. What relationships, conditions, or interactions help you understand it better? Keep asking the question we've come back to throughout this episode — what does the surrounding information allow us to explain? What are we still assuming? What can I prove, and what can I infer from what I'm proving? I do this with every article someone sends me, every Instagram post, every news story everyone's talking about. You're going off someone's reporting of an event — not the investigation, not sworn testimony, not the video. You're going off what people say. And people say a lot of things even when they're trying to be really truthful; the brain just makes stuff up. I'll pass it to Greg for any final comments. We got through a lot today.

There's so much that you don't know, but there's also so much that you don't need to know. Frame your day — what do I need to know right now about what I'm doing? I have a meeting later, I should have some water, I need to make sure the tire pressure is good on the car. We go back to those very basic things. Why? Because if you follow a procedure, the plane won't crash. If you check the wing, if you make sure your dashboard doesn't have a warning light, you're probably going to be okay. That takes time and focus. But if your focus is too deep on the matter at hand, you're going to let those peripherals in the negative space slip by — and that's where all the information is that coalesces into a plan, into a reasonable storyline where you can go, okay, I can see this coming and avoid it. If you don't, you're playing pinball for the rest of your life — bouncing off this, hitting that, and it's all reaction. Very few people want to just go through life in pure reaction.

We met two.

Two came immediately to mind — that's why I had to correct myself.

Usually there's some sort of chemical interaction or mental health issue involved — emotionally disturbed. That's a different situation, and it's generally pretty obvious when you see it. We got through a lot today. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We have a lot more on our Patreon — you can sign up and check out the additional content we put there, and it lets you ask us questions directly. If you haven't been to the Arcadia Cognarati website, the links in the episode details will take you to the podcast page, and there's a search function to find different topics across the episodes we've recorded. We appreciate everyone so much for tuning in. Thank you. And don't forget — training changes behavior.