Non-Standard Observations

All right, Greg, we are ready to roll today on another episode of The Human Behavior Podcast. Going back kind of to the original studio, the virtual one that we're in, because we got some travel coming up where we can record some more at some local spots. Shout out to folks in St. Louis; we'll be there eventually here.

But today, we're going to jump into a topic about kind of understanding the importance of the minutia, the background observations, the little things, all the things that are going on, the set dressing, they would call it in Hollywood. Because that really sort of frames not only a person's behavior within a certain context, the environment, right, but my observation of it. So a lot of folks talk about reading human behavior and looking at this, and especially when we get into the folks that love talking about body language, it's like you're missing an entire world, possibly a universe, you know what I'm saying? You're literally missing everything that's going on that is more important, which is why we tell people to really, really look at those things, because that's your comparison. Every observation you make is a comparison to something that you've known in your life, and if you don't know it, your brain will make it up. So what are you comparing things to?

It's actually the vanilla, the baseline, the everything that's happening that is the most important part, right, because that forms the relevance of what you're viewing. So that's kind of big picture what we're talking about, but I want to start too with taking a part of one of the lessons learned that you wrote. And folks, if you're listening, you can read the entire thing and check out the photos—there's some personal ones in there from Greg too—on our Patreon site, so you can always check that out. But I wanted you to, there's a kind of a personal story in there too that I wanted you to share, and then we can kind of talk about everything that we're going to get into today, if that works, Greg.

Sure, no, that'll work. This couple of paragraphs references Joe Mick and Topper (obviously, my love for The Clash oozing out of every pore). So, one early morning, I glanced over at the car next to me at the traffic signal and noted that the driver pulled up his sleeves over his hands and was driving that way. "Interesting," I thought as I drove on, and denial had inhibited my advanced critical thinking.

So, within seconds of passing through the intersection, the 1982 Clash hit "Should I Stay or Should I Go" is pounding inside of my head. I had chosen that song to act as an internal trigger anytime my conscious mind was missing a non-standard environmental cue, such as this guy's sleeves pulled up over his hands while he was driving. The trigger compelled me to turn at the next intersection and reacquire my target, the car, and I attempted to initiate a traffic stop. And it was off to the races, now pursuing what turned out to be a fresh rip (a newly stolen auto). The suspect driver didn't want to leave fingerprints on the auto, so he used a field expedient method to accomplish that feat and unconsciously demonstrated his evidence awareness by covering up his hands with his sleeves. Remember, that's a demonstration of intent, guilty knowledge.

And then I compared that in another incident. Shelley and I, our CEO Shelley Williams and I, survived a close quarters gun battle when we were searching for a fleeing felon in a crowded residential neighborhood at night. We didn't have a very good description, and a bunch of uninvolved personnel were flooding the scene because of other things that were in progress: a house fire that the guy had set to distract some people. And while we're going through the crowd, we noticed one subject. And he was wearing a sports sock on his left hand, and he bladed his body away from us as we approached him. And then as we advised him to stop and show us his hand, he turned, and it revealed that he had a sock on his right hand as well. And that gave us the tactical edge to draw our weapons, fearing that we were in imminent danger based on our experience.

So, evidence awareness in this situation, coupled with the subtle motions that we had encountered in training and in real life, merged to tell us that this subject was likely armed. Now, he completed his turn and brought up a pump action shotgun. And sadly for him, he was behind us on the tactical loop that night. He died, and we lived. So, that's a pretty, pretty powerful.

Yeah, I, I take that a little bit further and I apologize, still gets me a little bit, Brian, emotionally. So, what I meant by that is hearing whistling in a subdivision at night while moving slowly through a neighborhood, seeing a suspect making eye contact with another person while you're searching a car, seeing a characteristic lean under the driver's seat while you're approaching a vehicle. Each of those is a non-standard observation, and they're cues when combined that may offer you utter facts and evidence to support your reasonable conclusion.

So, training and your personal experiences allow the human behavior student to access comparison of gaits and tattoos and scars and graffiti and smells and tastes and other less than obvious information to use when they're comparing events and the baseline with which to determine potential threats or danger. So, if you couple that with the gift of time and distance, the ability to pore over your environment and actively compare non-standard observations against the baseline, that can be a lifesaver.

You know, that's a powerful story, Greg, and I appreciate you sharing it. You know, what right off the bat is, because you mentioned it in there, is what I like about the story and how you, how you wrote it out. And folks, like I said, you can go to the Patreon, read the whole thing, there's a lot more and some hilarious ones in there too, some great ones, all part of that same "Lessons Learned." But you know, you didn't start with "he had his arm at a specific angle, I knew that means that you're going to turn around with a pump action shotgun." No, it was literally everything you mapped out beforehand that showed you, "okay, this is leading somewhere." So had you not picked up on those things, comparing against what you typically see, then you, you would have been behind him in that situation in a sense, right?

Exactly, exactly.

So that, that gets to the absolute sort of subject starting point of this conversation, which is how to understand the importance of those background observations, right? And I see this, you know, a number of not just training environments, but you know, we were also talking about movies and stuff and TV shows, like if you ever know those kind of B-movies or TV shows that are kind of, you know, maybe not as well-funded or whatever it is, like after you've been to a Hollywood set or a sound stage and you've seen that stuff, especially when it's anything involving like the Middle East stuff too, when you see these action shows, they have like if it's not shot on location somewhere where they really put a lot of time and effort into making it appear to be a certain area, you can tell and it's so bad to me. To me, I can't ever look at those because I'm like, "This is so fake. This is clearly a set. This is so bad." And it doesn't matter how good the acting is, because it just, I'm not believing it. It's not real. But when you have that really, really, really good background, it doesn't, you don't even need as good of acting in a sense, because my brain is involved and I'm eating it up and I'm bought in. So that, that's just one comparison I make.

So, you know, in your story there, right, you noticed something as simple as a subtle cue of someone putting their hands inside their sweatshirt or whatever when they're driving. And you know, most people are like, "Well, okay, it could be cold." Like, yeah, it could be, right? But if I don't stop now and take an extra second or minute or ten minutes, whatever, to look at the situation further, I'm never going to know, and I'm just going to always assume it's the most likely course of action, right? But because you had the experience in training and knew it, you went, "Well, yeah, that, that could be. Maybe they're putting their hands over there because they're cold and the heat's not working in their car or whatever, or it could be because they're trying to hide their fingerprints or do whatever." So since you have those other experiences in file folders, you're able to say, "Well, I can intervene here a little bit sooner." And that's everything that we get at with what we do for training, but it's actually how you read a situation. It's not about "what's the odd thing? What do I need to look for? Give me some cues?" It's no, it's, "look at the situation and get the best, purest signal for the baseline, for the context," right? Am I kind of saying that correctly in how you walk through that process?

You're spot on. So, look, everything that you do leaves an imprint somewhere on the universe, but more importantly, it leaves axon and dendrite trails inside of your head, in your brain. And if you reinforce that, then what happens is it creates a synapse, and then ultimately you get a file folder for it. And if it's a sticky file folder, it lasts. It doesn't melt back into your brain and turn into a new file folder, it remains.

And so when I was growing up in Detroit, we had an extra lot that was next to our house that was never used. So my dad, the former Marine, would go and flood it, and we would ice skate four months out of the year like madmen. So I, I remember the coolest and the M's and all the different neighbors would come over, and a couple of them like us didn't have a lot of money, so their gloves were a pair of wool socks. You know, somebody gave an old wool sock, they wore it. I remember the little kids had old wool socks that they pulled up over their head sometimes. So socks were important to me, right? And so I was thinking, "Okay, what does sock equate with? Sock equates with gloves." So glancing over there and I'm going, "Okay, everything is fine," and the kid kind of gives me the eyebrow flash, and I'm going like, "Oh, that's interesting as well." And then all of a sudden, it starts going back to the file folders because I overthink everything. And specifically when the song hits, listen, the people in our class get the additional benefit of us showing them how to create internal triggers. Like, "Hey, I need to work out today," right? "Hey, this is how I need to get motivated before I walk in this room and start teaching." And we use music as those triggers, right?

So all of a sudden The Clash comes on and I'm hearing Joe Mick and Topper in the background. And when you hear "Should I Stay or Should I Go," I'm going, "What? What did I miss? What did I miss?" And then I went back and I thought, "Okay, socks equate with gloves." So this guy's showing me that he's wearing the gloves. And Brian, it worked in both incidents, because when we were walking up on the guy that was trying to blend into the crowd, he had done a number of arsons and assaulted a female and did an attempted murder in a neighboring jurisdiction. I mean, this guy was on a path of destruction. But he was blending in. So the only thing that didn't fit were the gloves on hand. So what's he trying to do here? Well, he's evidence aware. Now, that's called likelihood. So it's most likely that this is a storyline. And as I add the granularity to the storyline by looking at the environment, guess what? It forms a much clearer picture.

And that was what the problem was with your B-movies. You had a very clear picture, and the problem was that it wasn't a little blurry. If it would have been a little blurry, you would have maybe bought into it, right? But what happened is you go, "That's not the way that is. That's not the..." Like, I'll give everybody that's ever been in the Middle East a sense memory, if it's okay. Take a shoelace or some paracord and wrap it around a water bottle that's empty, now that you've refilled with sand. Now, if you put that up and over a door, what you have is an automatic weight for the door to close. So you don't have to go close the door every time not to get the sand in. Somebody puts a piece of plywood up or something to act as a door that acts as the counterweight. So if you saw just that piece of paracord laying on the ground and you saw that empty water bottle in the sand, where would it take you? Now, if your answer is nowhere, then you got to get to class. Because that's what separates us. It's the training for fidelity. It's the training for granularity. And those two aren't the same. Fidelity means the action of me creating the connection between the glove and the sock, but the granularity is many socks over many years, over many experiences. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and actually the way you said it even just now in the moment, rethinking back to it, is, is was, was perfect. You said, "That's, that's interesting to me." You didn't say, "That's suspicious" or "that's a," you know what I mean? Like, "that's demonstrating that." No, you didn't go right to it. You said, "Well, that's, that's novel, that's, that's unique, that's interesting." And that's, you know, especially when we're talking about here on the podcast and our social media stuff, if we can just get people to be mildly entertained or interested in their environment, it's amazing what you will see. Because you know, when, and I know you, you don't see this stuff on social media because you don't have it, which is probably a good thing for you and for me. For me, definitely for you. So, but the, you know, is kind of people, yeah, I can see where people get it wrong. It's like, "Well, you said there's nothing suspicious about the person parking here." And I go, "It's funny because in the video, you never said suspicious. You said interesting. And it's novel and it's unique." And so those are things I attend to to understand why. I, there has to be a reason why you do it. Okay, you like to park way out here because that's your way of working out as you walk really far into every store and back because that's all you can do. Okay, or you have a nice car and you're worried about it getting dinged up. Okay, that, that makes sense. But, but it's not typical. It's atypical to what the, what people do and how they set patterns.

And so if I can be interested in those, well then that allows me too to go, "Oh, that's the worker. They're here on break. They're taking their lunch break." Or, "Hey, wait a minute. That guy's doing surveillance on someone over there and they're trying to hide out." Or "they're waiting to exchange the car because it's a dope deal," which happens in every major Home Depot and Walmart parking lot near a freeway all over the United States while you're shopping there with your family. So, so let's talk about how people get things wrong. Over-analysis is not the way to go. The way to go is to be triggered by non-standard observations, to be more interested, then apply the standard of ML (most likely) and MD (most dangerous course of action).

So, I'm in a stairwell at Western and University here in Gunnison, and as I'm going up through the stairwell, somebody comes tearing ass down the stairwell past me, and I hear footfalls above me. Now, I could immediately say, "Well, you know, they're celebrating 9/11 by going up and down the stairs, and they're going to match the number of stairs of one of the..." Okay, that's a great conclusion to come to, but there's no information that's leading me to believe that. It's not September. You know, the kid didn't run by me with an American flag. All of that other stuff is what feeds my observation. But I do know that an ancient trigger for danger is running from the danger, or if something really cool is happening, it's running to the thing that's really cool. And what happened is the food truck has just pulled up outside of the dorm. And so these kids were beating cheeks (moving quickly) to get down to the food truck so they don't have to wait for a long period in line. So that's what you should be doing.

And I'll give you an example to parallel that, just a perpendicular, but it's in the same vein. So it's an offshoot, right? So Texas is passing a law, and I think they just passed it yesterday, but don't quote me on this because I'm not sure when the law was passed. But they're saying that now in any school, if the fire alarm is triggered, before the kids exit the school, the staff will look to make sure that danger is actually there and that it's a fire, and then let the kids go out. Brian, do you understand the reprogramming, de-programming that's going to happen to students for that? So here's an alarm, but it's the "everything okay" alarm, and we're going to have another alarm after that, but that alarm is going to be sort of a higher standard. And then if the teacher is a little screwy, we're going to have an administrator that vets what the teacher's saying. Brian, you can't do that.

So, like, I was teaching Marines one time and I really didn't like it because the Marines that were in the room were just so anti-everything. They were just classic obstructionists. They didn't understand, you know, like, I bet you get snipers online that remark on a 10-second podcast clip, but they're the genius, right? They know everything. So I'm sitting in this room and I'm talking about something, and I go, "When you take a look at this, what do you see?" And the guy in the back of the room goes, "Not enough information." And another person goes, "I need more." And no, you don't need more. What you're doing is you're saying that you've been classically trained, and classically trained human beings want the answer, and then they want to go back and be able to deconstruct it. Well, life doesn't work that way. Life gives you heuristic template or prototypical matches, which means standard observation. Remember, heuristic equals standard, it's something your brain already gets. So it's a tactical shortcut. So a non-standard observation that comes up anywhere in your day means, "Why is that here and why is it there?" Now, the gift of time and distance allows me to step back and in nanoseconds go, "This could mean danger, or it might be just an indicator that the food truck is here." That's my life, Brian.

And so when I walk around, I look for new, novel, interesting things. That's why we call them pre-event indications. We don't call them pre-event indications of danger or anything else until after it's been explored and investigated and we're testifying and in the report. But when we're saying something, "Hey, I see a pre-event indication." "Well, how do you know that?" "Well, I see that kid pulling up his right pant leg and walking towards that bike." So, ergo, I put those two things together. The next likely thing I'm going to see is him getting on a bike and driving away. So, that's what life is filled with. And training your trained mind, like author Stephen King, can spin an Iron Man and he can get you scared in daylight at home reading a book. How does he do that, Brian? By putting all that background action in, by making the B-roll vivid, by allowing you to feel as though you're in one of your own file folders, right? And then you do the rest. Your imagination takes over and does the rest.

Well, and even at just a basic level understanding that process, you can do that because we had a great, we had a great comment on one of our, our Patreon posts, and so shout out to Doc on there who was like, "Yeah, I know. I did exactly what you guys were talking about. I saw this guy running along this kind of grassy hill and like he had like a military, you know, like looking uniform, this, this ruck on and he was just running really fast." And so I was like, "Wait, this doesn't make sense." I stopped, I looked, and then I saw over from the perspective of the person running, he looked over and saw there was a bus right there waiting and he's going, "Okay, he's running to catch the bus that's sitting there." This now makes sense. But I was like, "That's so powerful!" Because he's like, you know, this guy was saying like, "Look, I have no training in this. I just love listening to the show. I'm trying to utilize this stuff." I'm like, "That's, that is training! That's a win!" You just established, you took an explanatory storyline. You came up with an MLMD (most likely, most dangerous) CO. Okay, is this guy going to run into that building and pull out guns and start shooting people, or what's the situation, right? And then you, you basically conducted some particular analysis, "Okay, there's a bus." And then you said, "I, he's likely running towards his bus." And then all it takes me another few seconds to go, "Yep, I've proved my hypothesis. That's where he's going."

And those little daily things you can do every single day, just by understanding the background action of what you're at. If you focus on vanilla, on background, like that's everything because that's, that's what, that's how you read an environment that you've never been to before. That's how you understand the atmospherics and the geographics of where you're at. It's just, it's all background, what people call noise, but there's a lot of great, great signals in there that you can read and determine likelihood. You can come up with a reasonable conclusion alone just on some very, very basic observations. And if you're going, "Well, so what? What does that matter?" It's like, "Well, that's the difference. That's how you identify, that's how you identify, that's how you give yourself the gift of time and distance. That's how you identify pre-event indications of anything." I don't care. Start by learning pre-event indications of something of cows needing to be milked. Listen, that's how you train yourself.

So, look, one of the differences between you and I, you and I and Shelley and Sean and our close center circle and the people we've trained, and the average person out there without training, when I see somebody wearing what appears to be a wedding ring on the wrong hand, okay, and it's on the same wedding finger, but it's on the right hand, that's interesting to me. So I say, "Okay, I have to walk up and talk to that person." And you know what I found out over the years? Okay, they're involved in a lesbian relationship, they're from Europe where in certain parts of Europe that is the wedding ring finger, and the person liked the gold on that ring and decided, "Well, I don't want somebody to mistake that I'm married, so I put it on. It fit that finger better. And I don't want to, I'm not married, so I don't want to put it on my left hand." Yeah.

So then with all the flying that we do, we see a lot of people and I see the tattoos on one arm, a sleeve they call the tattoo on one arm, and I always go up and I go, "Left-handed?" And nobody ever turns their back on me and just walks away. Everybody wants a piece of the reply. So they look and go, "Yes!" And I go, "You know how I knew?" And they go, "Yeah, my tattoos." And I go, "Yeah, you a sniper." Only one time did I get a person that that was not their shooting hand. And you know what they were? They were an artist. And that was the mojo. That was the magic with which they painted. And so they put the sleeve on there to commemorate that mystical art that was coming out of there. So, Brian, there's a reason for everything, and life is so much more interesting when you go around asking people, "So what, what's that mean? Why did you park this way? Why'd you leave your car running?" Those things to me are interesting.

No, and, and, and those signals can, can often be, be powerful if, if you know, if you can wind that tape back, you know, and just realize where you're at. It's understanding sort of where you're at in the moment of space and time and what the day of the week is and the time of the day. And in humans in general, we have so much more knowledge about this stuff than we even realize, because we don't pay attention to this stuff. We don't attend to those things in our environment because we, we haven't been taught to look at those things or read that situation, right? So there's a whole process you can do that with. I mean, obviously, that's, that's what we train people for.

But if you look at how that then gets into how everyone looks at scenarios, I mean, you, you look at even whether it's video games or AI stuff, you know, there's a, there's a recent one I saw and it's, it's really cool because you generate video by AI prompts. You can prompt, "Hey, I want this, I want this." And someone did like this downtown Tokyo person walking down the street, and it was a really cool video. And it was the, I mean, the granularity on it was, was awesome, you know, the lighting and how it looked and it was like, "Wow, that's really cool." But it was complete nonsense to me because I was like, "This isn't how humans move. This isn't what you do. Like none of this makes sense. It's just fluff and it's stuff." And, and but that's also because that's what I look for and that's what I try to measure everything against. So if that initial measurement is off, it's like, "Well, wait a minute, something doesn't make sense here."

And then you even go to the video games where they're now coming out with, because they're, I mean, the some of the same video games, like the big one, the Grand Theft Auto one, has been around forever. And I remember I got that one for my, when it first came out, for my brother. He's like eight years younger than me, so like he still talks about it as like one of the coolest things ever in his life because he was like 10 years old or whatever, got Grand Theft Auto, and my parents were pissed because it's all about, you know, carjacking and beating up prostitutes and stuff. My parents were like, "What the hell? What the hell is this?" And then next thing you know, a week later, my dad's playing the game going, "Oh, this is fun." But, but the, but the idea is like, you know, they can create these maps and these worlds now that are so big because of the computing power and because of the graphics. But that's the whole thing is now everyone wants to, "Well, I, I, you can't just, you can't just like overlay the same part of the city and make the city bigger by just quadrupling how many squares are in there with the same." No, no, no, you have to build out the whole thing because that's what people now are recognizing. They don't know it. They don't know why they like that game more then, but that's because they've made all of that background interoperability. The train leaves the station over here. If you drive to the other end and you sit there for 20 minutes, it's going to get to the next stop. They built a realistic, sort of working model of what you should expect to see in a city. That's why we love it so much because it's real to our brain because that's how real life is. And we, we kind of don't even, don't even realize all that stuff too. And, and those background observations are, are everything.

And so, I, I, the, with, with the, the technology stuff is, is a big one because, you know, often focus on the wrong things. Everyone wants the list or "what do I need to have in there?" And it's like, "Don't worry about that. Focus on these elements." And that's where the cognitive reality comes in.

Yeah, we can, we can throw together a very brief synopsis of that by looking at Fort Benning, if it's still called Fort Benning, and Leafield. So, what happens, all of a sudden the GITMO work that I did (do your homework, folks, I'm not going to go through it), they're all going, "Wow, this stuff works!" And then JeffCom (Joint Forces Command) was still around, and they said, "Okay, what would you do if you had Benning?" And General Brown was still a guy on the Army side. It was a force to be reckoned with. And I said, "Well, this is what I would do." And they, they gave us Leafield. And I specifically asked for Leafield because Leafield was an old airborne post, and they had forgotten about his history and the amazing things that he had done during, during the war. So I said, "Well, Leafield is abandoned. Let me have it. It's a thousand meters by a thousand meters. It's got this beautiful building, bathroom's up top and an observation post, that'll be our command center." I said, "Then what we need to do is fill." And right away I got stopped by all the people, "Look, we're not buying conexes and building this and making a Hollywood set." I go, "No, I, I need somebody to go out to all those targets that were blown up on different ranges and bring those targets, which were all shot up conexes, and bring them in just to create flank, create corners, and create alleys." And what we did is we created a factory district and a residential district, and we created the government center, and we created a couple of outlying areas. And Brian, it was unbelievable. There were no doors and there were no windows, and all the paint was like a couple of them were rail cars, if you remember. All the paint was different, you know, and there were, there were markings and numbers on some of them. And guess what? When people got behind the glass 800 meters, 1000 meters away, it was a village. And then they were all like, "Well, we need the clothing and we want role players." And we were like, "No, we don't need the clothing and the role players."

So we demonstrated for all those generals. Everybody wore a white T-shirt to work that day and blue jeans, and they were only known by the role. "This guy is obviously the bicycle guy." "How do you know?" "Oh, there's bicycle tires and bicycle parts, and he's working on a bike." So, so it's the behavior, right? So what we did is we created a fidelity-filled scenario that was cognitively close enough for the lowest amount of money. And when we pulled a rental car on it and a person got out and put a piece of paper on the hood, everybody said, "That guy's lost." "How do you know?" "Because that's a map." "Oh, and what's he doing?" "He's a ranger, Brian." So the, the mind is such an amazing thing, and the human brain can be pulled and molded and taught to do these things. And the most important part for us is then they can pay those things forward. So just not on the range now. No matter what zone I'm in, I can then see. So what we did is we bargain-basement, we, we put people out there under the glass. We created complex scenarios of behavior and demonstrations of intent, and they had to decide what was going on with just a few minutes, hours or days of watching. And it became so powerful that the US Army sniper school adopted our methodology of training and turned it into the first couple of days of their course. That's, that's, there's your tale for AI.

Well, and that gets into, so everything is obviously captured on video now and everyone loves looking back at different events or whatever happened and they're right there sort of at the moment going like, "Well, here's, you know, where it went wrong and here's where we need to focus on and here's what it is." So what is it? So even though in some of the times, some of these videos, like you'll have the whole day or you'll have an hour before it happened, everything captured. And which those are awesome because then you get to see it really play out. But what is it about, one, obviously there, there's a temporal element, a time element in there, but what is it, what is the cognitive process that, that, that produces sort of this shortcoming in how we understand these things? Meaning, why, why is it that even though now we can capture everything, everyone still falls into the same sort of trap and goes, "Well, here's where it went wrong," or points to the video and say, "See, this person said that and then they did this," or "they should have looked over here" or "they should have stood here"? And it's like, what is it about that? Because now we have the video evidence, and that happens, right? Where before we didn't. And now you can really see it. And obviously the, the camera doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the whole story, right? And that's another issue. But, but what is it, Greg? Why, why is it? Why is it that humans still fall into that and look for all of these things after the fact, or these major, "I want the list of things that I can look for"? I mean, what, what, what is it about the brain and cognition?

Yeah, two-part answer. So you've, I'm going to depose it briefly. You've eaten at a restaurant with me before. Okay. Would you agree, you've eaten with me a number of times? And, and is there ever a time that you've eaten with me where I have not engaged the person that's serving us in conversation?

No.

Where it was just you and I talking?

No.

And, and was I gathering information on that person the entire time during that conversation?

Yes.

The idea is, and I apologize, folks, there's a brief delay between Brian and I, so if it sounds like I'm the village idiot, I usually am. The realization comes when a person comes to the table and they don't make eye contact with Brian and I, and they tell us what the specials are today and, "Can I start you off with a drink?" And still no eye contact. That's not good enough for me. So then I start with the conversation, right? And I start talking to them and I ask them, "Hey, what's the most popular special?" And when they say that, you know, like appetizer, drink, or whatever, then I go, "Why do you think that is?" Because I want to know a little bit about who's serving me. And you know what I get? I get the blank stare because we spend so much time ordering a number three in a clown's mouth and asking it to be super-sized that we've lost our killer instinct. We've lost our survival instinct. So that's the first part of the answer, and the more technology that we get and the more we're staring at this thing, the less we're aware of our surroundings. So that's all first, first part.

The second part is that we can't believe that we got fooled by nature. There's just no way that we're going to allow ourselves to understand that something missed us, you know, missed our attention because we're the smartest people in the world. And you said it one time, and if I can use you again on a story, Brian was telling a great story to a number of servicemen who served in the Gulf, and he was saying that he was not calling in all of the pre-event indications that he was seeing. And one of his supervisors came up, the sergeant came up and said, "Hey, Marren, what are you seeing there?" He said, "Just a bunch of farmers working." And the guy had to turn to there and grab him by the collar and go, "Those aren't farmers. Let me show you what they're doing." Why? Because at that point in his life, Brian hadn't had the experiences of a farmer. He didn't go to that Wisconsin dairy farm. He didn't have to muck stalls. He didn't have all that rich, wonderful granularity with which to make decisions. So a guy with a couple of other guys around him in a field digging was a farmer, right? If it would have been closer to the road, he would have called it a road crew. That's where we're all at without training. What happens is it's just light, it's just pixelation, and our brain makes up a story about what it is that we're seeing. But with a little bit of training, all of a sudden we're going, "Okay, those are bombing placers. They're hiding a weapons cache. This person isn't just watching the parade and filming it. He's taking a prone position and oriented towards it. He may be a sniper." That's what we care about.

What we care about, look, the rest of life is beautiful. I love that beautiful boy or girl or wife or husband or I love, you know, gourmet corn dogs and relish. All of that is just the fluff that goes in to create life. But if you look at just that stuff for a minute, you'll start seeing patterns emerge. And those patterns can tell you, "Hey, this person's here for the carnival," or "this person's here to create trouble." That's what we're talking about. Where do they stand? How do they stand? You said it earlier about the bend in the elbow and this, that's all goddamn horseshit to me. And the same thing with neurolinguistic programming to the point that you're able to determine this, look, in a very limited context, controlled situation, demanding circumstances, yes. Okay, we don't ever get that, Brian. We're walking down a plane and we got to make a quick decision. We're walking through an airport and we got to make a quick decision. We're in the food court and we hear a plate drop and we have to make a quick decision. So you know what we do? We take a look at the heuristics and we get there first because getting there first, the gift of time and distance, works both ways. Okay. Getting there first means that we've got that extra second to take cover or to shoot the threat or, you know, to get there when the free T-shirt is given out and be towards the front of the stage. That's what the beauty of life is if you can attend to it.

No, and I, I think that that brings, you know, you, you brought up the point of the, and well, I brought it up too, but things that we, we tend to focus on and then train towards. And, "Well, I need to learn these things." It's like, "Well, maybe that works in some very, very, very specific context." And okay, yes. But if you're, unless you're in that very specific context all the time, why would you want to take the time, all of that time and energy and resources into learning something that only works in a very, very, very small situation? Because I, I want to use something that's going to work every second. Ideally, I want it every second of my day. I want to be able to use it. I want to be able to have something, some knowledge or skill or that I can use no matter what the situation is, just because that's more efficacious, right? It works better in more situations. So now I, I get better at it. And then now when I go into a new situation, I've got so many different perspectives on this one piece, one skill that I can, well, I can use it here too. And then I'm not surprised and it doesn't lead to the chaotic situation, right?

I, what, and what I'm getting at is, you know, we, we focus on when you get into obviously training and education and knowledge and skill transfer and all that, there's certain things you can take time. So it's like, "Well, what are you spending your time on? And are you going to be able to utilize that or how often are you going to be able to utilize that?" Because that's, that's an important aspect in all of this. Is, is we're talking about cognitive skills that you can pick up fairly quickly because you, it's like you've got a bunch of that information in your head and it's just not connected yet. And all you got to do is work on the connection because that's what everything in the world is about: an interaction between molecules, people, chemicals, whatever the interaction is. Meaning, you know, there's no such like, you know, I always give the example like drugs or guns or anything, they aren't inherently bad. They're just sitting there on the damn table. It's the interaction of a human being with it that that can, can either be something good or bad or great. You know, I mean, that's the whole point. So it's the same thing, sort of, I look at it in how your brain is wired. If, if you can, if you can achieve more connective fibers between your different memories that you, or, or experiences, I, I should say, really, but, but it's memories that's stored in there because you have an, your brain has an unlimited supply of memory. Now your recall and the way you utilize that information is, is, is very limited, yes. But, but you can connect, you can make those mental connections by, by understanding how things interact with one another. Does that kind of make sense in?

But more importantly, and you're right on. More importantly is the obverse, the opposite of what you just said. If you don't train your brain to make logical connections, it will make illogical ones. The brain, the human brain hates chaos. It's constantly trying to make order out of chaos. So where does it find that? It finds that in the B-roll. It finds that in the background. It finds that in the granularity because it can't find that in the thing that's right in front of you. So it moves that out of the way and starts looking at the area and going, "Well, guess what? I'm not sure what this is, but we're in a forest, so it's likely a tree. Nothing to look at here." And it's a camouflaged sniper. That's the idea, Brian.

So, so you have to train your brain. You have to follow the breadcrumbs and show them the house at the end. Then you have to show them the house is made of gingerbread. That's interesting. Then you have to open the door and go, "Hey, the crone that's inside is cooking something. That's even more interesting." If you don't make that connection, your brain will never make it on its own unless what? Unless there's a pivotal, earth-shattering, changing event. A person pulls a gun and shoots you. Now, all of a sudden you're going, "Wow, I'm in a life or death situation!" That's way too late. So, so we don't have to wait for that. Our early lives, our early lives were challenging. They were very simple. They weren't simple, but they were very, you get it. So, so what has to happen is training has to be simple because we haven't grown our brain to them. And people are going, "Oh, well, we, we're on the moon and we're here, we're there." Yeah, but our hardware is still survival.

Yeah, but we, you, that's a perfect example. But, but I can't, I, we know more about outer space than we do what's underneath the, the ocean. Because you know what? It's hard to look beneath the surface. And that's what we're talking about right now, is looking beneath the surface. I would say it's harder to, it's easier to figure out the, the moon and the planets and the solar system than it is the parking garage you're about to pull into. That's where we've got to start. We have to start being able to assess those things right in front of us. We, we, because we think the math is different too. And, and you brought up, and the, the simple part of how humans are is, one, we're, we, we think simply.

So, so perfect example is like, like diet and exercise. I go, "All right, man, like, I'm getting fat. I know if I stop eating fat foods with fat in them, then I'll, I'll stop getting fat." Well, that's very logical. Now, it's completely wrong, but from a very, very simple perspective as a human being, as an animal, right, I can go, "Well, that makes sense." And everyone go, "Yeah, that makes sense." But we know that isn't true. We know that, right? That that's actually, in fact, your body needs fat. That technically your body only needs to consume protein and fat and it can make carbohydrates, it doesn't even need those. So, so but, but we don't understand that, right? We, it took time and learning and a process and people studying it to go, "Oh, wait, we understand the systems of, of, of how the stuff works better." And that's kind of what we're talking about. And, and the keeping that, that thing simple. Those simple solutions our brain will always go to. And in the moment they are very logical. Like they're not illogical. They actually make sense because we don't know, because we didn't sense make properly, because we're not utilizing and looking at everything that's going on around us to go, "Wait a minute, I'm getting these indicators. Things need to coalesce. If this continues to coalesce in the manner that I see it, it's likely a certain environmental situation."

So, if I learn to identify those elements, if I learn to, to go, "Okay, well, that's a, that's a specific type of bolt, but that's only used for like lightweight things. Here, I can hang that, that, that, you know, real light door, inside door frame, but I can't do the heavy exterior door of my house on that. I need to get really good wood screws to get it buried in deep because it's heavier." But if I understand all of the elements in the process and how they work, it gets me to understand and sense make better. And I can tell just by basic physics, "Okay, this door is heavier. I should probably get a stronger, bigger screw to hold it in." And that's literally what we're talking about, right? I mean, it's not any more simple than that. I don't know how else to simplify this sometimes. And just recognizing those elements is, is the first step of, of opening that sort of world into something to go, "Oh, there's a lot more going on beneath the surface."

And then you brought it up too with your story about the, the, the server coming up and taking our order when we're, and you engage them in conversation. Like that's you manipulating the situation and my environment.

Exactly. Your environment, yeah.

And, and, and you, you, you can do that. You can, you can, you can take a walk 10 feet over that way to get a different look. You can stay in your car for an extra second and look around. You can drive over there. I mean, that's the things like we get this static, very simple way of looking at things because our brain just wants the answer and the conclusion. It goes, "Just keep going on with your day," right? But you get to influence your day however you want to be able to do that.

You're exactly right. And so I look at it again, over-reliance on music, but I look at it, Phil Spector, also killer, homicidal maniac. But, but, and what hair Phil Spector had. But Phil Spector, when they were talking to him about how he created hits, because he was a hit machine, so he knew, he knew it was the look and it was the feel and it was the taste, pun intended, and he built the wall of sound. Okay, because he wanted to make sure when you heard the hook that it stopped you dead in your tracks and you had to listen for a minute. And if you listen for a few seconds, you'd listen for a minute. If you listen for a minute, you'd listen for the three and a half minute song. And then people say, "Well, you know, when MTV came out with videos..." Look, there was all these shows that were on. They were called television shows and American Bandstand and Soul Train. And that's where I got, you know, you had a 24/7, and N were the only channels you had. And then you had to get in between 50 and 35 on the VHF to actually get one of those channels. But then guess what? He had, he had a beautiful woman with backup singers, or he had a man that had a great outfit that also had a great voice. And, and guess what? We were hooked. Well, life continues to do that for us every day, and we forget stuff like sunrise. We forget stuff like sunset. Now, what does it matter? Well, if it's sunrise and you're still out creeping around, that's interesting to me. If it's sunset and you're still wearing glasses, it's interesting to me.

So what happens is, against that tapestry, against a rich background of life, certain influences start floating to the surface. And when they don't coalesce, they're as important to me as when they do start linking up. And so interest in those things is why I'm still alive at my age. It's why you're still alive.

And it's like you brought up another great one with the, with the, with the sunglasses. It's like, no, you don't wear sunglasses when it's dark or inside. It's like, "Well, well, yeah." I'm, I'm, because it, it makes it harder to see. Literally the functionality of that is to block some of the light coming in so you can shade your eyes and not get strained and stuff like that when it, when it's sunny out. So if you're, if it's not sunny, it's, "Well, I like it because it's a fashion thing." Okay, then you did it for a specific purpose. But intent.

Intent, right? But that guy did it to hide his eyes for the biometric machine, or didn't want... And the guy behind him did it, you're exactly, the guy behind him did it because it was Stevie Wonder coming in the house and he was blinded. And, and guess what? That's how he was conditioned to respond to his environment. But the idea is there's always a story. There's never not a story. And, and, and the story that you're paying attention to might be the story that's going to kill you. It's going to end with you surrounded by evidence tape and saying it's your last breath. So why wouldn't you want to take an active role in manipulating your environment and understanding it better? There's always a reason that there's heavier traffic today. There's always a reason that traffic is at a standstill. There's always a reason that a person parked in the no parking zone, left his door partially open, left the car running, and ran into the store. And you know what? Sometimes it was to get medicine for the kids. Other time it was to kill a spurned lover. And that's your job. Your job is to determine because not everything is valued equally. And that's where training comes in, the difference between training and education. Not all of life's allegories, not all of the beautiful fables that surround us are equally weighted. So training teaches me to focus on those ones that are outliers, that are anomalous, that are unorthodox, because those are the ones that usually hide opportunity and danger. Is that simple?

No, and it, it really, it really is that simple. And, and so you can get into all of the finite details and reasons why people do certain things, but there's some very, very simple elements that you can pay attention to. Like you just said, there's, there's a story and a reason behind everything that's happening, right? There's a reason why that weed pushed through your grass at this point and not over there. Like, I don't fully understand that stuff, so I don't know why. I just have to go out and pull it, you know what I'm saying? But, but, but someone with enough requisite knowledge can say, "Well, Brian, because of the pitch and the slope of the grass and where weeds like to grow and the amount of sun," like there's someone that can do the math for me. There's always an algorithm or math or, or explanation in some scientific manner of, of why those things occur. But I don't necessarily need to know that to determine where I need to put all of my weed eater, you know what I'm saying? Like I know it's more likely to happen. Or you could go the exact opposite direction and spend all of your money putting weed eater everywhere. Now, is that efficient? Is that the smart way of responding to your environment? Clearly not.

So, look, one of the parts of the story, and folks, please go to Patreon so you can read the entire story. There's a lot more in there, there's some great ones. So, Shelley and I buy the Powderhorn Ranch. Okay, Powderhorn, Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, you know, 1.5 million acres of national forest, 64,000 acres of primitive wilderness surrounding it, and it was a beautiful thing. So the very first thing that you see when you walk into Ross Lodge is this incredible stone fireplace built by a bunch of stones. And there's "Don't touch," "Don't wash," "Don't get wet." There's these little signs all over the place that get right to your face. I mean, you're like, "Wow, it's a beautiful lodge, but could you put one more Post-it note on this fireplace?" Right?

So, so I asked the, the kid that was a head wrangler that was showing us around before we bought it, I go, "What's with the signs?" He goes, "I don't know, but you can't touch fireplace, never put a fire in there, don't wash it, don't scrub it." There's all these rules. And I go, "Okay, cool." And he actually shows me the employee handbook and it's in there, "Don't touch the fireplace." So people were buying the place from, "What's with the fireplace?" And they go, "Man, it's a thing. You do not want to touch it. It's one of a kind. Don't do anything. Don't paint it, don't wash it, don't do anything." So finally I meet a guy that lives down the road and he's a Thompson, an original Valley resident, a pioneer in Colorado. And I go, "Hey, you know anything about that ranch?" He goes, "Yeah, it used to be the Thompson Ranch. My grandfather owned that place. It was the stage stop." I go, "So what's with the fireplace?" And he says, "Well, Will Rogers and Wiley Post crashed an airplane in the South pasture, and when they came up there, it was the only light in the valley was that fireplace. And they signed it for the owners, the Thompsons, with pencil. That's the only thing they had." They signed that fireplace, "Will Rogers and Wiley Post." And he came down to the ranch and showed me the signatures. So everybody else was so busy trying to protect the signatures that they lost the story.

What we're saying is, shake the bottle, shake the goddamn box of puzzle pieces up and see where the story is, because if you find the story, you can unpack that story, Brian. The socks were the story. The socks on the hand, the pulling the sleeves up over the hand. Okay, that was all prologue to that story. And if I miss it, I'm going to go away. And you said it perfectly. There's always danger, there's always opportunity. There's gradations in between, but those are the two big ones, aren't they? We don't want to miss out on a great opportunity. Opportunity only knocks once or whatever that horseshit is. And we also don't want to miss out on danger. I would, I would tell you that you're missing opportunities and danger if you're not trying to look specifically for those things.

And, and, um, and they're, they're everywhere every day all the time. I mean, that, that's the thing. It may be something small, it may be significant, it may be something like, "Oh, there's a, you know, missing piece of evidence in the Kellerer case," you know, you don't know what it's going to be, which I think they killed that guy, but put him in the three years ago. But, you know, and, and that's, that's the thing is that that's why we, we focus on all of those non-standard observations are the most important part about anything. And that is not the one that you need to worry about. It is the non-standard, it is the unorthodox. That's why is it called anomalous? Why did we spend the time to say, "This is worthy of note?" Because it's weighted, it weighs more, it's weighed more in, in evidence against other things. That's why there's Rules of Evidence, that's why we have a supreme court. All of our lives are predicated about these observations are much more important than these. And we've lost the ability to pay attention to that because it's not as dangerous outside anymore. And that's where we have to go back.

No, and it goes back to the, the one I was telling about the, the Instagram post where someone was like commenting like, "Oh, look at this guy, his untucked shirt and his, you know, jacket that isn't tailored, blah, blah, blah." And then someone else commenting was like, "Yeah, dude, uh, those are Merrell shoes, which you can actually kind of, they're pretty tough and you can run in those if you need to. He's got jeans on and that shirt and that jacket could hide any number of different weapons or things on that belt. I think you're kind of seeing it wrong." And it was such a great, great, you know, a comparative comparison some processes it. And I love it because everyone tries to do those things and they typically get it wrong because it's like, "Well, if that person had taken a step back, looked at our account, looked at who they were, they probably like, 'Okay, there, there's something here that I'm missing.'" And, you know what I, this has nothing to do that because I, my joke is I, you know, I responded to is like, "Hey, this is clearly not a fashion account, you know, there's plenty of those out there." Not ours, which my side of the street is your side, probably not.

And I would, I would add to that, for old people that knew Greg, old Greg, "Come get some." You think you got a problem with that, come see, come check in. So, but, but listen, the, the thing was they weren't seeing things in the totality of circumstances. We rarely use the term totality of circumstances because it's a legal term and it takes people in a certain direction. But the idea is that it's all of those things. The atmospherics can tell you that something is going well or poorly before you ever walk into a place. And that's why we always say, "Stop, look, listen. Take a look, Brian." Yeah, we've said this a thousand times in on-duty roll call training, which we pioneered how long ago? And we're saying because police have sirens and they have lights on there, they're so in the mindset that, "I got to get there first and handle this scene." Nobody says, "Get there first and figure it out," do they? Nobody says, "Get there first and, you know, apply advanced critical thinking." They're like, "Hey, don't worry, once I show up on the scene, I'll handle it." That's why we're still getting cops that are killed. That's why first responders are sometime behind the power curve. We, we miss those signals that are right in front of us.

Yeah, and, and, and that's kind of the, the, the, the big sort of "so what" takeaway. And I'll, I'll let you, you get some final words here too. But it's, um, you know, even just learning this. So like, I always like to, you know, break down, especially on here, is, "I'm listening to this podcast. I don't do anything that you guys do, you know, what am I supposed to do?" And I think we kind of, we hit that obviously throughout the episode is just focus on everything in your environment. The, the non-standard things. What creates this situation? What's normal about it? What's typical about it? What should I expect to see and why? And just those simple things of going, "Is this a demonstration of intent or or not?" I mean, it really is how we find stuff or we see stuff. You know, that's constantly, even when we're driving to different stuff, and it's like, "Hey, take a lap. Go around behind the building. I got something." Like, that's what it is. It's just noticing that, "Wait a minute, that, that ladder doesn't belong there." And, and being entertained with your environment. You know, why do we tell people to look for stray cats and, and look for the feral cat in their neighborhood? Because they hide out in negative space and they're everywhere. And so you'll actually find one and get a little hit of dopamine and go, "Oh, I'm good at this," you know what I'm saying? And so what you're really doing, the reward circuitry, is how you train yourself in that environment.

Exactly. Okay, well, I, I think we, we, we hit, we hit on a lot obviously and, and we hit on all the different kind of the idea about background information and the environmentals and everything that's there are, are screaming at you. Those are indicators and those are important to, to view. And then I, I of course also tell people, check, go to the Patreon and check out more because one, obviously we give all kinds of different examples, but you get to read the, the stories in here because there's even more in there. There's a, there's a great one about you knowing some random background information for where you're at and then they were like, "Well, I guess I guess you belong here because clearly you know more than I do." That's that mind manipulation. That's the bamboozling people with information.

Yeah, that's right.

So, so, so that, that's another great one. But I'll get any, any other kind of, kind of final words on everything.

Yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to end my, my part of the podcast today by just reading one of the paragraphs from "Lesson Learned 31." And, and, and before you hear that, remember, everybody listening to the sound of my voice, every single time you repeat a behavior, you pay less attention to the fidelity of that behavior. And guess what? That adds up and all of a sudden things become routine, and that's where the danger lies. So, you know, near the end I, I added, "So what?" And bolded, "Each day that you drive, bike, or walk, you pass by signs, signals, plaques, icons, or graffiti without ever fully realizing the significance of those observations or perceptions. These nuanced observations create the fidelity, the granularity that comprises the very fabric of our memories." And Brian, that, that right there synopsizes exactly what we're trying to show folks to, to take a look at, to revisit in their lives today.

No, I think that's a perfect spot to end on. And, and thanks, you know, everyone for listening in. Like you said, we got, you can always reach out to us at humanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. You can find more on Patreon. If you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. Leave us a, leave us a review. All that stuff helps kind of get the message out there. And it's, it's a, so we appreciate you for doing that and for listening in. And don't forget that training changes behavior.