O.B.E.

Good morning, Greg, and hello to all of our listeners. We're recording this podcast kind of early in the morning, an early start to a long day. I want to get this in first before I become a victim of what we're going to be talking about today, actually.

So today, we're talking about a term that we use called O.B.E. (Overwhelmed By Events / Overcome By Emotion). There are two sides to the coin of O.B.E.: one being "Overwhelmed By Events" and the other meaning "Overcome By Emotion." I want to talk about this as it relates to human behavior because it sounds like, "Okay, I'm overcome or overwhelmed, this is a chaotic situation." Often, you're at that level before you even realize it.

This is another one of those barriers to situational awareness, in a sense, kind of like we talked about last week where we got into complacency in great detail. We talked about how that's a barrier to having good situational awareness, or really, just sense-making in general. So this week, we want to discuss O.B.E. and how it clouds our judgment and our perception, causing poor decision-making. There's a lot I want to get into about defining what those terms mean, how those situations occur, and we'll give some examples and talk about some of the contributing factors. There's obviously a lot that we're going to talk about with it.

I don't want people to hear the term "Overcome By Events" or "Overcome By Emotion" and think it has to be something crazy and chaotic. It can be something quite simple. So, to start off, Greg, I'll throw it to you. If you want to define those for us, then we can jump in from there.

If you understand the reason that there are two of them, you'll be further ahead than most of the people you're going to meet today. The first one, "Overwhelmed By Events," is a very simple one to understand. We'll give a couple of extreme examples, and Brian and I will both give you a personal example you can hang on to.

I would tell you that, last week, my flights were delayed. I took a two-and-a-half-hour Uber ride. I had a 36-hour layover at an unfamiliar airport. All of those things contributed to me being a little bit "Overwhelmed By Events." When I say "a little bit," that's my ego talking; I was completely overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that bad. It can be, "Hey, Dad, can you drive me to the library?" just before the kickoff or they dropped the puck on the Wings game. It can be having that flat tire and knowing, "This was an important business meeting that we are going to, and goddammit, now I know I'm going to be late, and when I show up, my knee is going to be dirty and my hands are going to be filthy."

So, "Overwhelmed By Events" is simply what happens. You have 100% of available attention, and anytime you start slipping outside of being able to attend to numerous things, you feel anxiety, which triggers emotions in the brain that say, "Danger, Will Robinson! Something's wrong!" Once you get to that phase, which is much earlier than people think, then you're not functioning at 100%; your human performance drops.

Now, if we look at the other side of the same coin, we see "Overcome By Emotions." Because Brian and I both have versions of P.T.S. (Post-Traumatic Stress), Brian and I can be in a class talking about a topic and work each other into the level of being "Overcome By Emotions." I remember having to stand up and talk at a funeral. I had written a nice thing for my dear friend Bob Sunderland, and I had to pass it off to Nico. I couldn't get through the first sentence; nothing would come out.

So, what you have to understand with emotions — and we'll dig deeper into this in a few minutes — it's physiological first, psychological second. When it's "Overwhelmed By Events," it's psychological first and then physiological. I know that sounds goofy, but let us dive into the episode.

I'd like to give you a personal example, Brian, of a big "Overwhelmed By Events" that happened to me back when we were building A.S.A.D. (Adaptive Situational Awareness and Decision-making) for the Army (not Combat Hunter for the Marines, A.S.A.D. for the Army). We were traveling around with General Robert Brown, a three-star Army General, great guy, incredible leader. General Brown says, "Hey, take me to the range with these other one and two stars. I want to see your perspective."

So we're walking around, marching around all day long on a live-fire thousand-meter range, a big village, going in, meeting people, doing all that. My phone is ringing off the hook, and it's our company back then. It says, "Hey, you've got to get to T.B.S. (The Basic School), the leader school. They need a speaker to tell them what this program is." That's a 45-minute drive back to base, this, that, and the other. I go, "Yeah, I'm with General Brown." "Yeah, I got it, but he's not paying the bills. Get your ass back," one of those things.

Then, on the way back, there's one of those movements where they've got all the, they used to call them "the trains," where all the vehicles are going by delivering stuff to a war zone. So you've got the smaller trucks and the medium-sized trucks and the bigger trucks and security in front. Then there are these orange-vested guys blocking the road. I'm sure it's Convoy Ops training because it's not a live-fire zone (LZ), but it's blocking me, and the clock is going.

Then I pull up in the parking lot. A guy meets me and he goes, "Hey, I just got hired by your company. I'm the new program manager. By the way, you didn't get a choice, it's me. This is how things are going to be."

Brian, I could not think of what to say when I walked into that room that was ready for me, going, "Hey, you're a little bit late." The first slide came up, and I had to sit down. I didn't know what to do. What had happened is I had exceeded all of those file folders that I had ready, all the preparation that I had done, all the anticipation for the event had just been swept away by these external forces. Now I couldn't hit. It was like a rotor that was going by, and it was wet, so it wasn't hitting the spark just right, and nothing was there. I must have looked and seemed like an idiot because then I walked out and the program manager asked, "What's the deal?" I said, "I think I need to go to the emergency room because I'm not sure. I've never had this feeling before. It's so debilitating that it scared me."

You see what I mean? Now that's an extreme example, and I didn't add all the minutiae of being dehydrated, having smoked eight packs of menthols in the rental car on the way there, stuff that I did 15 years ago, 12 years ago. But listen to me, I felt it physically, physiologically, and psychologically, and I could not finish. It's the first time ever in my career that I couldn't just get up in front of a group of people and start talking.

No, and that's an awesome example of exactly what we're talking about. It's something you do all the time—public speaking to a program that you wrote. So, you're 100% completely in your comfort zone with everything. This isn't even you in some outside element, you're not forward deployed or something, back in the U.S. under fire. No, and that's definitely why I wanted to bring that up right at the beginning.

I do want you, though, to jump into this because I'll share some other stories as well. You talked about "physiological first, psychological second" and "psychological first, physiological first." What do you mean by that, and can you explain it? I think that's a powerful way to look at it, to understand the different mechanisms that come into play and how it affects you in those moments, and why it's a great reason why we call it "Overwhelmed By Events" or "Overcome By Emotion." That's why the two sides are there. So, please explain that.

For purists out there, you can use just one term (O.B.E.), because O.B.E. itself will cover both sides of the same coin. But we create the differentiation because when you're functioning at a high level, you have to understand the brain and how it works in human performance.

Anytime you have more than one task, we call it multitasking. Anytime you multitask, you go from the 100% level down. You only have 100%, so you can never exceed that. Even with training, you can manage it better, but you can never exceed it completely. What happens is your brain has glucose, and glucose is the metabolic essential fuel for the brain. Each time that you're processing information, you get a reduction of brain glucose. But what happens with multitasking is now you're pulling on those reserves from different angles, from different levels, at different speeds. You get to the point where the glucose impairment now starts impairing other physiological functions: cognitive functions, reflexes, autonomic abilities start to fail.

If it's not rapidly corrected — and I don't mean just having a Powerade; I mean you have to sit down, separate yourself, do some breathing exercises, focus back to where you were — it can lead to brain damage or death. I'll give everybody an example: if they've had any service member ever in their family, when you're deployed, the first thing you're taught if you're in a leadership position is to stay up longer than everybody else. There's no scientific reason that you have to do that because you're a leader; you've got a team. You're taught that by your mentors, by other people that you see, whether it's formal or not. You think that you have to stay up longer. What happens is that's a huge depletion of your brain's glucose supply, and multitasking depletes it even faster. Now you're in "stupid" (as in, "Jack stupid," my made-up word). You're surrounded by this fog of stupidity, and it's hard to get out. Brian, sometimes it becomes so overwhelming that it leads to physiological death, or it is a downward spiral, trending towards a death-like feeling, and then you can't help yourself and you could die.

So, the ultimate end of it is that your emotional toll and the events that are around you can lead to a debilitating low of essential metabolic fuel. It hits the brain first and then it goes to the extremities. The further the extremities are, you get none. So now you're flopping around, feeling like a dinosaur, like a T-Rex.

That's a good way to look at it. Again, you said it right off the bat, O.B.E. is the same thing, and I look at it as just from different mechanisms at play. So I can have all of a sudden something chaotic happens in front of me, and there's all this going on, and I've got to rush to the scene. I'm already "Overwhelmed By Events." But before I get there, maybe I've got a lot going on in my life, and I'm tired, and I haven't slept well, like you talk about. Then I've got all this other stress, and then I've got money issues, and I've got this. You start to become, you get that anxiety building. You can become "Overcome By Emotion" before you even get in.

That's kind of what happened to me in a time when I was in the early days, when we were still starting Arcadia, and I was still working, doing some of the tactical training stuff. I was flying up, and I was working basically every day for like five straight weeks, and a couple weeks off, and then same thing, kind of going back and forth. I was away from home and was still engaged to my now-wife at the time. I was taking a break and going to go up to Michigan to one of my best friends, one of my buddies from the Marine Corps I went through sniper school with. He was getting married, and we were going to go up there and meet. I was going to meet my wife there when we landed and go there.

I'm stressed already, doing stuff in the background, trying to get Arcadia going. I was still finishing up grad school, working full-time, in long hours in the Georgia heat. It was tough, man, I was in it. I remember I was flying up to Chicago. We were linking up there, and then we were going to drive from there to Michigan, to my buddy's place, like two hours from where we were meeting up at. Things are looking good. I was a little rushed to the airport but got there, realized I got a free upgrade to First Class because it was Delta all the time. So I'm like, "Oh, this is great. I'm going to chill, I'm going to have a beer." Then what had just come out on Delta too was a documentary on the '85 Chicago Bears (which was the '86 Super Bowl, but the '85 season). It was like, "Oh, cool, this is awesome. I'm going to sit here for two hours and reminisce about the Bears and have a beer, and it's going to be great."

Well, I don't even have anyone sitting next to me. The plane's loading, plane's loading, then it's kind of getting a little bit late. Then all of a sudden, this woman comes on. Based on her behavior and things I've seen before, she looked like she was intoxicated in some way, whether that was alcohol, drugs, a combination of both; there was a little something going on. Sure enough, she sits right next to me, and I'm like, "Okay." She's doing the awkward, like, saying hi to everyone, trying to kind of co-opt people as she goes, like telling the flight attendant, "Oh, I really love those earrings," and, "Oh, not like, really not an animal!"

Right, right, yes, I know what this behavior is.

I've seen this before. So she sits down, and she starts to try to talk to me, and I'm trying to be polite because I don't feel like talking to her, and I'm just watching this thing. Then she gets a glass of champagne, and she's still talking to me, spills the entire glass on me, knocks it off the little armrest thing, and the whole entire thing went into my lap. So I'm like, "Okay," I'm starting to get heated. She doesn't shut up. I'm sitting down, so now I've got the headphones in, staring at the little screen in front of me, just trying to get into this show. She keeps talking to me, and like, touching me, and being like, "Hey!" interrupting the show. I'm like, "Hey, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, I just really kind of want to watch this. Actually, it came out a while ago, and I didn't get a chance to see it, so I'm just kind of, I've got a lot going on, I really just want to chill here and watch this."

Then she kept talking, it kept interrupting, kept going on, and then started arguing with me. I was so, because remember, add the anxiety of "you're in a plane, I cannot go anywhere, no exit strategy here." It just, I could feel it building. I'm looking at her just wanting to grab her head and jam it through the airplane window and let her get sucked out. That was what was going on in my head, and I could not stand it. I literally had to stand up, and I walked up to the flight attendant. I said, "Is there anywhere else on this plane that you can put me and I can go sit down? I don't care if I'm sitting the whole flight, I don't care if it's in 47F with someone's kid in my lap, I don't care, just put me anywhere."

She was like, "Oh my God!" And so thankfully, there was a guy across the aisle who saw everything happen, and he was a little bit older, and he was just chilling there like with his scotch. He was laughing, and he walked right up. He goes, "Hey man, why don't you take my seat? I'll sit there." I was like, "Thank you, sir, so much, I appreciate it." And I sat down. But the point was, in that moment, I was like, because of all of those factors, look man, just trying to get, I want to get to my buddy's wedding, I haven't seen my wife, my then-fiancée, for a few weeks. I'm stressed out. I'm just trying, I just want to go let loose with the boys who I haven't seen in years. All this went into this. I had to take special days off, I had to get it all approved. All this stuff is going on in my head, and I was O.B.E., man. I was completely overwhelmed, I was "Overcome By Emotion" in that moment. I had to, thankfully, stand up, walk away, take a breath, and someone intervened on my behalf, thankfully, which was hilarious because then he talked to the whole flight. We got off, and I was getting off, and then he grabbed me in the terminal. He's like, "Hey man, you owe me like a really nice bottle of scotch." I go, "I owe you like a case of scotch!" He goes, "That woman was bat-crazy!" I go, "I know, and it was really bothering me." I hugged the guy. I was like, "Thank you so much, I don't know what I was going to do." He's like, "You're all good, I saw it happen."

But the thing was, it wasn't any one of those individual factors, like we said, it starts to add up. But I was first, because when she was first bothering me, I'm sitting there going, "I'm already pissed." I was coming in at this level way up here, and I had all this going on without the recognition of that happening. And so it automatically took me to that place where I'm just like, "I am going to kill someone on an airplane. This is going to happen."

When Brian and I talk a lot to other people, on podcasts and in webinars and everything, we always make the distinction of "normalcy," and we say "clinically normal." Some people know what that means, some people don't. So, the first part of unpacking Brian's story: humans are social beings; they need to belong to a group. It's not a desire to belong to a group, it's a need. You have to fill the need. So that's why she was walking around playing her game, because she knew she's an outlier, and she knew that she had to get into the good graces of the group of people to belong, even for that short flight.

But emotions are a distant early warning system, and they're hardwired into your brain. So you got the "Danger, Will Robinson!" warning when she was coming through the threshold onto the fuselage of the plane. You smelled, saw, felt something about her that was different from the baseline that you anticipated to have in first class on Delta, because you had done thousands of flights at that time. So now, if you have those two things alone, you have turbidity, you have turmoil.

We understand that fear can trigger this fight-or-flight response. Now you've got the binary: stay in face of danger or flee to safety. But you're in a situation that you can't flee; you cannot leave that physical structure. So now the cost-benefit analysis starts tipping towards her. Now add to that that your emotions are preparing your body for action. The amygdala is specifically triggering emotional responses to prepare you because it senses something different. It doesn't know whether it's fear or anger, and it doesn't care. It knows that what it needs to do is motivate you to do something in this moment, and that motivation can be negative or positive.

What do I mean by negative? You biting her head off, you choking her to death, you punching her, throwing her out. Or positive? You're going, "Ma'am, I apologize, I have to move seats. I've got to do something because this just isn't cutting it." So what you have, again, look, if you're a cop, or if you're H.R., or if you're a jailer, what you have to understand is these things are always in play, and the brain senses the change first. So it starts building up the chemical interactions for the fear or the anger, and that starts taking those choices out of your physical, corporeal control.

What does that mean? That means that the program is running without you, and all of a sudden you find out that you're swept up in the program, and that's O.B.E. The moment that you realize O.B.E., O.B.E. has already been running for some time now. That could be nanoseconds, Brian, but it doesn't matter, because that makes it feel out of your control.

I want everybody to envision being a trapeze artist, and you're going off, and you're swinging, and you're now going to let go, and the other person's going to catch you. And you look while you're in mid-air, and there's no one on that other bar. That's what you feel like. You feel like sailing through the air with no safety net. You're Wile E. Coyote, and all of these effects are happening to you, and that has a psychological toll as well as a physiological toll. You feel it inside, and it manifests as an emotion.

These things, we had to name them because nobody else had, and everybody had a description of them, the doctors and the scientists and everything else. So the O.B.E. just sounded right, it just felt right. Then somebody says, "Yeah, well, is there a difference between emotions and events?" And it's, "Yeah, clearly there are." So we can make those distinctions, but you don't need to.

Well, we explained this in a couple different ways. You said sometimes psychological leads to physiological, sometimes physiological leads to psychological. But either way, that's why we break down that sometimes it's the events—the environment—sometimes it's your emotions. Then when those two things combine, like in my situation on the plane, I had all that, and I like the way you said it, "It's like a program that's running without you." So that's on, and then, hopefully, there's a recognition. In my part, I was like, "Okay, I need to change the situation." Some people don't have the skills to do that. This is why you see people freak out over little things. It's never really about that little thing; there's always something else going on.

Even with the kids, even with "The Insurgent" (our daughter). She gets pissed because I'm like, "You've got to get up, you've got to get that done now," and she just all of a sudden freaks out out of nowhere. That's when me and my wife look at each other and are like, "Okay, why don't you go take a breath?" I'm like, this reaction—because it's great in kids too—it's so obvious where you have this wild overreaction to something, and you're like, "That doesn't fit." So clearly there's something else that she was thinking about and going on in her world that we had no idea that she was thinking, because we're like, "Why are you acting this way?"

My mom, my old-school mom—and I mean old-school, old-country mom—would always say, "Kids and crazy people always tell the truth." I would have to pick at that to see what she was talking about, but she meant they had the most pure form of emotions; they didn't filter the emotions for us.

Brian, your brain is set up, and we know this, but I'm talking to the crowd and the audience, we hopefully have those three people sitting up this morning. The idea is that your brain gives you a series of chances, and it reintroduces file folders to get you to catch on. Now, it will do the survival mechanism without you if it has to, but it would love to go along with you. So I'll give you an example of that: animals growling or animals showing their teeth, a snake rattling. The animal's emotions are giving us that final warning before they strike. Now there were other things that we should have noticed before that in the environment, but we missed them.

So humans do the same thing: humans engage in non-verbals. I'm so sick and tired of reading these gosh-damn people come back and forth with all the "neural this" and "that" and everything else. Look, the facial expressions were set up to display your personal emotion at that moment in time. Whether you're lying, a fake smile, the giggle, all that other stuff, they indicate intent in a social situation. Your intent is to comply; your intent is that "I'm getting angry and I'm not going to comply." Facial expressions are so important in every social interaction.

Then what did we try to turn that into? Kinesics: "This means this." No, what you do is you watch for the confluence of all of them. Whether you're on a traffic stop, or whether you're talking to a kid in school, or whether you're about to let somebody go, the face determines the likelihood of the action via emotion. "I'm looking around, I'm not making eye contact, I'm scratching my face. Hey, I'm thinking of not being here." Those type of reactions. "I'm bearing my teeth, I'm leaning forward to you, and I'm pointing and indicating you." That's indicating that I'm at a threshold, and I may lash out. So we have all of these non-verbals on board to help lubricate social interactions that are uncomfortable.

And I really like how you brought it up right there. Those are the last warning signals, right? That's the shoulders coming up, the balling of the fist, the bulging neck vein. The thing is, you brought up where everyone goes, "See, these are the indicators, the pre-attack indicators." It's like, "Okay, I get that, but there's this entire world beforehand." That's why we use that term O.B.E., because that's the time and distance part. The reason why we're talking about O.B.E. when it comes to human behavior is the recognition of it: "Am I O.B.E.?" And adding to the situation, "Is this person O.B.E.?" Because if I can identify that sooner, I don't have to wait until they take a step back on that foot and bring their shoulders up, because that's when the punch is coming. It's too late at that point. Those are so obvious. So these are the less obvious things.

When you're outrunning your headlights, when you're driving too fast in the rain, when it's the snow blindness, when the snow's coming down hard where you're at and it's storming real bad, you cannot process that much information. It's too much. You have to physically slow down. So if I think about it in the vehicle, especially if I don't have the right type of tires and I don't have good driver training or whatever, I'm driving in the rain like you are outrunning your headlights, traveling that quickly. So you have to slow that time down; it's taking your foot off that gas pedal.

So those events in the environment combined with the different emotional state, that's the powder keg. You can recognize all of those elements laying out there on the ground before someone walks up with a lit match, and you're going, "Oh, I see what it is."

A little thumbs up just popped up. I don't know, there's little emoji things out here when you do hand signals.

It did come up. It did come up.

Listen, let's change lenses but stay focused. Paridolia. Now, we've talked about that in other episodes very briefly, but it's what causes people to see faces in inanimate objects. If somebody asks me, "Well, you talk about 'cognitively close enough'?" Yeah, paridolia is "cognitively close enough." What does it mean? It means you're going through an environment, and all of a sudden a cauliflower hits your peripheral vision because some waiter's walking by with it, and you look at it and you see the baby Jesus in the cauliflower. What it is, is your file folders are constantly moving, trying to match, trying to anticipate the situation you're about to get into.

Now, while most of that is sedentary—we eat and sleep a lot more than we think—what happens is when I see a trigger in my environment, that trigger sends a message to my brain saying, "Hey, be aware, that might be your neighbor from across the street." And because we need to be part of this social fabric, I have to grin and go, "Hi, Jim. Hi, Mary." Paridolia becomes that emotional distant early warning system to make sure that you don't miss those connections that are essential in your world.

Now, because the female that came on the plane wasn't essential to your world—you weren't planning on breeding with her, you weren't planning on killing her and eating her, you didn't need somebody to fill in that long flight with conversation—what happened is you socially excluded her. I guarantee that you gave a facial expression. I guarantee that numerous times you verbalized those non-verbals and said, "No thank you, no thank you, ma'am." But she wasn't catching on. So now this social contract that was inevitable, that you were forced into, that wasn't your own, now you have to act it out. You're on the train and you can decide to stop at the next station, or you can pull that thing that stops the train and everybody rolls forward, you know, in the old movies. But your brain never wants to pull that thing because it says right on the box, "For emergency only."

So, there's always a dance. Your emotional processing network—your amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex—are constantly functioning to make sense of your environment, and emotions are how you do that. Emotions are so essential to fulfilling that social contract. Look, what do we warn people about if you're writing a manifesto? "Houston, we may have a problem." Why? Because those people have a broken social contract. They don't have the necessary human performance to be in the tribe anymore.

Look, I want you to look at all of the stories that were written about "City Mouse and Country Mouse" and written about the grasshopper that didn't take time to fill up the food store and ants did. Did you know that ancient ships, Brian—and I mean ancient from a long time ago, like from the 1400s, these big masted ships that we saw recreated off the coast of San Diego—they carried supplies for two or three years? Why? Because their social contracts were longer. They were going to be on that ship for a good long time. So you have to create these relationships through these emotions and events, and guess what? If we get overwhelmed by them, we're not functioning at 100%.

No, and we get overwhelmed. That's why I brought it back to "we're getting overwhelmed." It's almost not the best way because of what people picture when they say "overwhelmed," and that can happen so quickly. You brought up a number of different things; you were talking about, especially, this expectation of how things are supposed to go, and then you talk about pareidolia, about, "I have to find meaning in everything that's happening so my brain can make sense of it." That's the "I see the face in the clouds" or the "Jesus on the piece of toast" was one of my favorites. I will attribute meaning to these different objects or symbols or something that I see because that's just my brain making order out of chaos, and it sort of has to do that, like you said, as a defense mechanism so I'm not surprised by anything.

But O.B.E. can happen rapidly. Your level of cognitive acumen, training, life experience, emotional maturity, and all these things you want to call it will dictate how well you respond to it. But eventually, everyone has a point, no matter who you are, no matter if you're the Dalai Lama himself. Remember the Pope? He took a swing at someone when they were pulling him with the handshake. He slapped her because she was grabbing him and wouldn't let go or something like that. I was mixing up the Tom Cruise one where he got sprayed with water at a movie premiere; he didn't know what to do because he didn't expect it, and he's supposed to be there and act a certain way, be professional, promote it, and be happy and approachable because he's a star. Same thing with the Pope. He's supposed to do all this stuff, and these are the people, and then the woman was hanging on too long, and it got him, and he became O.B.E., and he slapped her.

So it's like, if the Pope can do it, what chance do I have of not becoming O.B.E.? That's our approach to everything, in a sense, with the Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis (HBPRNA) and how we approach situations and sense-making and decision-making. But the idea is, I don't want to get to that level because it's going to have an amygdalic response that cares about my survival. So it pushes everything into, just like me on the plane, "Hey man, this is rough, this is not good. We can't get out of here. I don't like this." And it raises that anxiety level, and then that can manifest itself in certain ways.

But no matter how well trained you are, no matter how emotionally mature, and no matter how long, Greg, you've been reading your stoicism books that you love reading, it doesn't matter because you're still going to get that physiological and psychological reaction to that situation which limits your cognitive performance. It limits your ability to make better decisions. It limits your ability to sense-make and problem-solve.

So everyone wants that, "Okay, what do I do?" And that's great; you can do the breathing and focusing. But my big thing is, it's one thing at a time, it's one step at a time. When I get to that level, I have to stop and say, "Hold on here," and use the Brian Willis term: "What's important now?" What can I look at or effect change in right now? The great one is, you can always start with yourself, in a sense. You can always go, "Maybe I can't de-escalate you, Greg Williams, but I can de-escalate Brian." And that alone is a way to regain control. When you have a little bit more control, because that was back to me on the plane, I'm completely out. I have no control of the situation, literally. I cannot change where we're headed. I'm in this aluminum tube of emotion, hurling through the air at 600 miles an hour, and it's just building and building.

I do. So I would say this, though: use the gift of time and distance the way it was designed. Say to yourself, "I anticipate that this situation that I'm going to do in 45 minutes has all the earmarks of being an O.B.E. situation. Therefore, I'm going to conduct predictive analytics, predictive analysis, and know going in what those triggers might be." Now what you've done is you've changed from being "in stride" where it's occurring as you're walking down the street or riding a bike or a knock on the door. Now what you're saying is, "If the knock on the door comes, I'm ready for it."

I want you to see yourself first naked, and I know how hard that is for some people, but envision me naked if that hurts. What happens: your naked self is your brain, and then the emotions are the clothes that you wear all during the day. Those emotions are playing a vital role in creating connections and building attachments. That's why you "go along to get along"—you've heard that term before. And they motivate us to act. In certain instances, what I mean by that is your emotions are helping coordinate your interpersonal relationships as a guide because what they're doing is they're measuring our expected level of safety in a certain situation. "How will I get out of this? How will I be treated? Will the food be good? Am I going to like this vacation?" Those things are happening to the left of "bank" (Left of Bang, referring to anticipation). So why wouldn't you want to use the gift of time and distance and plan there? You have to be in the moment to measure what those emotions will be like.

I'll give you one that we haven't covered yet: grief. Grief is essential; it's hardwired. So go back to "naked Greg." You haven't put the clothes on yet to go to the funeral. Why are funerals important to humans? Because the grieving process shows that other people care about me, that just because my primary caregiver or my dear friend has died, I still have a support system. That's essential to community building, Brian. The sociological implications of grief are such that you're hardwired to accept that this is going to be sad for a while, and then it's going to get better. And look who's around me: these are the folks that are going to help me get there. If not, then everything would be the, "It'll never work, we're all going to die." You see what I'm trying to say? And we'd never come out of the cave. Plato would be pushed to the side, and the fire would run out because we'd run out of fuel. We can't do that.

So the vital role in those connections is so essential, and the motivation to act is going to be there. So you might as well get left of it as far as you can and anticipate. So what type of situation would that be? A busy parking lot. Okay, anticipation: "Hey, anxiety is going to be high. I know that I might get O.B.E., so let's calm down." Road rage: "I'm on a busy road. People, there's a construction site, people are cutting in without turning." So if you can learn to anticipate those and predict that they're the situations that are going to be the most turbidity or turmoil, then you can ease your way through those situations with training and with repetition and with rehearsal. But people don't do that, do they? People are like, "Oh, here comes the, we're going to have the donkey for the gosh-damn birthday party, and we're going to have the piñata and all this other," and then it rains, and their whole life is on edge from that moment forward. You've got to have plans, you have to plan ahead to allow your emotions to rule those things that they do, and you rule the things that you do.

The anticipation part is huge. We'll do that for simple things sometimes, like, "Okay, it's raining today, crap, I've got to leave 10 minutes early because I know traffic is going to be bad." That seems simple, and we've done that before, or, "Hey, it might rain today, I better bring an umbrella or bring a jacket." I mean, those are basic-level things that we don't often apply to situations where we should, and we don't often think about how it's going to affect us.

It just reminded me of one, actually, when I was in the Marine Corps. One of the deployments I did was a M.E.U. (Marine Expeditionary Unit), and you're on ship, and you go around, stop at different places to do training stuff. We had to—we were going to go into the Philippines, and this village just had this huge mudslide, killed a ton of people. It was just a national disaster, basically. We're going to go there, send us in to help out and clean up and bring in supplies and water and food and all this stuff. So there are protocols and procedures for that stuff when you're on that type of deployment. People are packing, getting their stuff ready, and who's going, who's not. I didn't actually end up getting to go on that one; they only used so many people. But the idea was, everyone's going through their normal procedural planning stuff.

Then, thankfully, one of the leadership pulled everyone in and said, "Hey, I just want to frame this for everyone. I want you to think about what we're going to do. These people just lost members of their family. This is a national thing, and this is a poor area, so it's not what anyone even in the U.S. is used to seeing. These are mud-hut villages, basically, with straw huts, and you're going in here. Here's what just happened." Everyone knew that, and everyone had seen stuff like that before; everyone was already combat vets and everything for the most part. But it took one person to say, "Stop. Let's think about what we're doing." People had their own things going for this, and you think about it like, "Well, that's implicit, you guys knew that." It's like, "No, we didn't. We were young, and we were thinking about our mission and what we had to do." So how would our approach have been if we went into that situation without being cognizant of that? Again, it sounds so basic or simple, but it really isn't, because that's anticipation that allows me to say, "Oh, okay, I can see this from a distance. I'm going to be dealing with grieving people. How do we best approach that and not just be so laser-focused on our mission that we piss a bunch of people off or something?"

It was because it was outside the role of what Marines typically train for, right? It's not, they're a fighting force, not a F.E.M.A. National Disaster Response Force. So it was outside of the purview of what you're typically used to seeing. So it took someone to go, and then everyone went, "Oh yeah, crap." It's not that we weren't taking it seriously or something, but the emotional recognition wasn't there beforehand because we're not used to that stuff. So that five minutes or three minutes that he took to tell everyone that was probably one of the best things they could have done to impact the effectiveness of that mission and how people acted and how they treated everyone.

So when it comes down to what you brought up with anticipation, that helps with time and distance, and we always hit time and distance, time and distance. Well, this is another thing of not allowing yourself to become O.B.E. and the recognition. You actually gave the story, I think, last week, of when we were in St. Louis, even just recording a podcast, and you would hit that point because you were tired, and we had a long week, and you were sick, like physically sick. Now we're having an hour and a half long conversation with two great professionals, and you're trying to perform, in a sense, in this really tough situation, even though there's other people. And you become overwhelmed, and you say things you don't always mean, or you say things and they come across wrong, and people take it the wrong way or whatever can happen. But it's those little things that are how the situation can spiral out of control.

So all of those elements are laying out on the ground. If I have that recognition of what those elements are, I don't need to see the bomb put together. I can see enough pieces and go, "Hey, I think we're in a bomb maker's house." And that's what you're talking about with sort of this "Overwhelmed By Events" and "Overcome By Emotion"—it's the recognition of the anticipation going into a situation and just having those mental models to draw from. It's enough to not allow the situation to get out of hand. Does that make sense?

Exactly, and you're spot on. This goes back to the allegory of the mirror. In all old houses, just before you go outside, there's a mirror because they had to make sure that your hat was right, your ascot was perfect, all your buttons were buttoned and everything else. Now people really don't care much about that, but there's a mirror in your car, there's a mirror hopefully at your office, your desk. I always carry a very small travel mirror, actually a signal mirror with the hole in it, when we travel, so I can look up at the plane—a survival tool. But the idea is, I glance at it just before I get out of that hotel room, just before I get on the elevator, just before I get out of the car. Look, things are about to happen. Am I prepared for this?

Now, I don't give a damn if it's going in and getting a burger and an order of fries. Am I ready for the fast food experience that I'm about to engage? "Hey, I've got the dog on a leash in one hand, I've got the keys to the house, and I've got all these other things going. Am I ready to walk out this door right now because there's a little bit of snow on the ground? What are the likely effects that I'll be facing?" If I get used to doing that, then it becomes a habit, and a habit is a hard thing to break. What I've done is I've named and given a physical form to anticipation. Those anticipations mean that I'm not going to get surprised.

Look, I put on the red and blues (emergency lights), I picked the spot, I ask the person over the loudspeaker, "Go a little bit further off the road," because I don't want to get squashed. Those considerations are easy to make. But just before I leave the car, why don't I adjust my own mirror and take a look at myself and say, "Hey, I don't want this to be my homicide scene. I don't want to watch a suspect kill me on body cam (to not use the term officer-involved shooting)." If you do that, Brian, that spinal tuning, that adjustment of your critical thinking, is essential.

No, and that's the same thing I do, and I like how you pose it as a question, almost as a challenge to yourself. Everyone has different ways. I see different types of advice out there, but I know how I am and what works for me, and I kind of know a little about what works for all humans. That's the perfect example. Before, let's say if we're traveling or doing a training course, whatever, we're going in for the day, I do the same thing because every hotel has that mirror somewhere, usually right by the door, almost like a full-size, wall-size mirror. I would stop, take a look at myself, and it's not, "Hey, you got this!" I'm not doing this Stuart Smalley, "You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggonit, people like you!" No, it's not that. It's not the "talk yourself up" confidence. It's, "Are you prepared for this? Are you ready to give 100%?" So literally, "Am I squared away? Do I look professional?"

But it's that looking yourself in the mirror, and you even just brought it into the car, looking at yourself in that rearview mirror. You're like, "Okay, are you prepared to handle this?" Because one, your brain loves challenges, and two, it's forcing you cognitively to step up your game without having to have a checklist of the things you need to do, or where to look, or what you're carrying, or where your gun or knife or whatever weapon is. No, it's, "Are you prepared?" And those little examples of psychological priming are kind of what you're doing, because you likely know what you need to do. You likely have the ability to handle that, so it's just, "Are you prepared?"

Those small, deliberate steps are how I prevent myself from becoming O.B.E. Because there are times in the morning where, you know, I got in late, didn't sleep well, had to—we made some last-minute changes, and I was going through it in the morning to make sure. That's when I have to stop and I'm like, "Okay, I'm in the safety of the hotel room. We've got plenty of time. Greg's already down there by the car. We said we're going to leave, and it's only 6:45, and I'm already walking down to the car." So it's like, take that breath and stop and go, "Okay, let's not focus on any of that stuff that happened yesterday. It's what can I do to give my best today for those folks that are going to be in class?"

And time and time again, I really make it, I put it back on me, not "Are you prepared to handle this chaotic situation or this, that, or the other thing?" It's like, "No, are you at your best? Are you operating at your best right now?" That's when sometimes you come in, and I'm like, "Greg, I slept terribly last night, I was up, I was this," or "I was sick." And then you'll be like, "Oh, all right, cool man, I got it. Don't worry, I got it this morning." Now, it didn't change our roles or how much work we were doing or whatever, but I know that you're like, "No, I'm good man, I'm ready to get this." So cognitively, what does that do? That prevents me from going, "Oh man, I'm going to screw up today," or that anxiety is not going to creep in. We do the same thing where I'm like, you're calling sick, and I'm like, "Hey, we've got to stop at Walmart to get this medication, I might have to go here." "I'm cool, I got it, don't worry, I'll take this stuff, this stuff." And you're like, "You're still going to go out, wonderful for me." Yep. But it takes away some of that turbidity; it makes it a little bit clearer.

What Brian's talking about, folks, is reducing cognitive load. Everybody's got a cognitive load, and everybody's used to functioning at that load. The more load that we put on the truck, the suspension is going to interact, the fuel, the mileage, everything changes. We're wearing out the tires sooner. So what you like to operate at is a less cognitive load.

I'll give you an example of that: every single time Brian and I go into a venue, we set up the room, and we move things around. What we're trying to do is reduce cognitive load. "Don't worry, folks, you sit here, and you sit there." By making those choices for folks, you're telling them, "Welcome, this is cool, it's a safe, happy environment," and that reduces anxiety, that reduces turbidity and turmoil. So if we do that in our normal life, like "What About Bob?"—you remember the movie, "Baby steps, baby steps, the elevator"—I take a photo, and you know this because sometimes when we share photos, I'm sure I share ones that you don't want to see, but I take a photo in the mirror of the hotel that morning before every class, me standing there. You've probably seen hundreds of those of me.

The idea is, "Greg, are you ready?"

(Sarcastically) I just asked if you could send them to me after you put clothes on, though. Listen, I'm like the doll that you dress in different clothes; I give you options, Brian. "Does Greg wear the skirt today, or is he going to wear the slacks?" But the idea is that by looking at that photo—that photo is for me, that tattoo is for me, that icon is for me—what it does is it gets me out that door in the morning. "Am I prepared for the challenge on the other side of the door?" Now I'm in the hallway, "What should I see? What am I seeing? What are the smells and feels and tastes from here to the elevator?" When the elevator door opens, you know me, man, I'm looking. When we're on there, and in the rental car, I can tell if you're on the phone making the Starbucks order, or if you're on the phone looking at the map, because there's been a change in direction or distance. Those things fill my cognitive load at the exact right level, and that makes me feel good. But if some of those things are lacking or there's too much, we're right back to the "baseline plus anomaly." Then I know that there's going to be changes.

Now, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah has given us shock absorbers to take up some of that. There are stress relievers, like laughter, for example, is a perfect stress reliever, and it can be spontaneous.

Alcohol.

It's alcohol. Yeah, it was in Brian's life. But the idea is that if we don't engage in those cognition management tools, then we're going to be playing pinball all day long, and we're going to take all the damage, hail damage to a car. We're going to be out in the hail all day long, weathering the storm, and then by the time we get back to the room or to have dinner, to work out, we're going to be toast. You can't operate at that for a long time because it will make you overwhelmed, and once you become overwhelmed, you're not at peak performance. So here we are back to that human performance.

Everything, look, I'd love to say that we only teach a skill that's useful in combat, but it's not. It's the same skill that I would use the first time I met somebody or talking to a neighbor's kid that just busted a window accidentally playing football or baseball or something. These are life skills. The life cycle is such that because we understand the emotional register and we understand the weight of upcoming events, we can manage them. People that manage things, have you ever seen a person that was traveling alone, completely asleep at an airport? What happened there? How could you do that? Even sleeping on a plane, I don't know these folks unless I'm with somebody that's being my guardian angel. I can't do that, and that worries me about society. Because when I see those things, that's like the article I just sent you about the 26-year-old kid that said he'd been homeless on the streets for nine years. Brian, we're broken if that's a true story. You see what I'm trying to say? We as a society are broken because O.B.E. is a warning, and if we understand that warning, now we can do steps to mitigate it before the next O.B.E. And I think just the knowledge that there is such a thing as O.B.E., both sides of that same coin, should make you smarter or should make you more cautious.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing; it's sort of that, if I have words to put to something, I can get better at the recognition of it, right? I mean, that's even just my day-to-day stuff. If I've got back-to-back calls and I'm stressed and something happened and this is that, when I go back into the house from my little office here, that doesn't come in with me. I have to go, "All right, now I've got to be Dad." So it's that taking that breath and not bringing that in and going, "Okay, well, that's work. Now I have the kids and the baby and my wife." So why bring that in there? Everyone will say, "Well, that's still on your mind." It's like, "Yeah, it is, but it's not right now. Right now I'm being deliberate on this." That allows me to not become overwhelmed when "The Insurgent" (our daughter) is stressed about whatever and talking back to her mom or something like that. I'm less likely to come off the top rope.

That was a big one for me too. I've told this story on here before, but I remember back in the day, working with, the first time I was working with, like, the Infantry "MEOC" (Military Emergency Operations Center) trainers, behavioral scientists, cognitive scientists. We're talking about what people call stress inoculation and making these types of scenarios and how to cognitively get people involved and the emotional regulation. They would have these sidebar conversations and ask me, "What about different experiences or how I handle things or how this works?" I was like, "No, I'm pretty good at this. I was out with my buddies, and we were hanging out at the bar, having some drinks, and this guy said something, and man, I was so angry. I was pissed. I was really just picturing just grabbing him by the back of the head and smashing his face into the bar. That's all I could think of. But I knew that wasn't good, and so I left. I paid my tab, and I went home." So I'm doing pretty well. And they're like, "Okay, Brian, let's wind that back a little bit. You don't have to get to that point where you're that angry over something. What this person did didn't really need to rise to that level." I was like, "Oh." That was an initial exposure, like, "Hey, wind the tape back a little bit. Here are the things that bother you, and then know that going into here and expect certain things." Because that way, it just doesn't affect you; you don't get that same emotional response, that emotional register.

So, let's focus, pull that situation, Brian. Let's take a look at it from another's perspective, the essence of tactical cunning. If I now came home from work, the kids are just sitting down at the table, I see that the wife or significant other (husband) has made a meal, and I start eating the meal, and we're engaged and embroiled in an argument, and it's a spontaneous argument, the same thing always about working tomorrow and you getting the overtime and who's going to take the kids. Now the argument escalates, and I drop a plate, or I throw a dish, and now the argument escalates, and all of a sudden I slap you or you slap me or throw something at me. Neighbors had called police; the police are on scene. Now I'm in my own house with the prospect that you're going to put handcuffs on me and take me to jail. I'm completely outside of the register of the normal, clinically normal. Now all of a sudden, all those baseline elements have come in, and I'm not only "Overcome By Emotions," I'm "Overwhelmed By the Events" of the situation. You go, "Well, sir, turn around, I'm going to take you in custody in front of your kids and your wife," and screaming and all that.

And we wonder how these situations escalate to a cop getting killed. We wonder how a husband or wife becomes a family annihilator. Brian, the emotional toll is such that our entire society is based on emotions to keep you in check and form a society and go forward. So those are big-ticket items, and if we can understand that—look, if I can understand them in me, I can turn the flashlight on you. If I can understand them in me, I can turn the laser on you. And that understanding is crucial, and that's where training comes in. Training helps me prepare for the real event by anticipating spirals.

I think that's a great way to kind of wrap everything we've talked about.

A fun story, you know. Yeah, well, a fun story about the suicide. Let me throw that out, about the suicide to the Earth.

Yeah, that's definitely something that, how it's both the emotion and the events that transpire together to lead to just—the likelihood of a bad outcome is so high in those situations. So the anticipation must be there. We have to slow down. We have to use the gift of time and distance.

So one thing I'll throw at you, my final comments for the episode, Brian: suicide. We look at suicide from the person that commits it. I say that we need to look at it from societal grief. What emotions do we have post-suicide as a society that that person couldn't equate in their own life? If we can take a look at that, that's a good starting point, and nobody's there yet. So, please call us. It's a great O.B.E. kind of example.

And then now you get into how people deal with that or how they react to that. Some people, for the suicide example, they take on more responsibility, meaning they're saying, "It's all my fault. I'm the problem, so I'd be better off, and the tribe would be better off if I wasn't here because I wouldn't be draining resources and time." Whereas the person who then goes and shoots up the place or kills some people, they're doing the exact opposite. They're taking no responsibility. They're completely O.B.E., but they're taking no responsibility.

No consequences.

Exactly. "It's not my fault, it's everyone else's fault, and that guy's fault, that girl's fault, and I think it's because they won't sleep with me," in whatever stupid terms you want to come up with today. Or back to the Andrew Kehoe one (the worst school bombing in U.S. history in 1927). He posted a sign, "Criminals are made, not born." It's like, "Oh, okay." So you're then—that's you saying, "I take no responsibility for my situation in life. It's everyone else's fault that caused me to be here." So those two are great to sort of contrast, because they're the same thing. It's O.B.E., one person taking way too much responsibility, and the other taking none. So it's a good way to compare those two.

I agree. And for the record, Brian and I were both incels in junior high school and high school, and we didn't...

Exactly. Good point. And good episode, because, look, we've circled the wagons and explained both sides of O.B.E., and from the inside and the outside. Folks, if you have any further questions, just write Brian.

We can go much deeper on Patreon. It's all in the textbook if you want to look it up.

And there are many examples that we give in class and on our webinars. Absolutely. There's always more. There's always, "always room for Jell-O," and we've got a lot of Jell-O. So, thanks everyone for tuning in. We appreciate it, and please share it with your friends if you enjoy it. It helps get the word out there. And don't forget that training changes behavior.