Probability

Probability Language The Cost of Being Certain

Brian Marren and Greg Williams

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Human Behavior Podcast. In this episode, we're talking about probabilistic thinking and why language matters more than most people realize. The central idea is simple: most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information; they come from mislabeling information. When we apply labels too early, we collapse probability, reduce our options, and lock ourselves into conclusions that may not be accurate. Today, we'll break down how this happens, why your baseline matters, and how small changes in language can dramatically improve your decision-making under pressure. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the episode, and don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber-only episodes. Enjoy the podcast. Please consider leaving us a review, and more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time, and remember, training changes behavior.

Alright, and we're recording, Greg, so we're going to go ahead and jump in after my 37 clicks here. Hello everyone, and thanks for joining us. We've got a great episode here today. So, we're going to be talking about a few things: probabilistic thinking, language and how that impacts that, and why we use a specific lexicon, focusing on how it frames things around language and probabilistic thinking. And the general episode thesis is that most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information; they come from mislabeling information. So, as we go through this, think about it from that perspective: it's not necessarily a lack of information; it's mislabeling information.

And we talk about that too, Greg. We talk about it in other episodes when we say, "Oh, someone made an error in sense-making which led to a poor decision." Well, the big thing is, language can really prime us for it, which is why we have a very specific lexicon and why we use certain terms or don't use other certain terms. And we'll get into some examples of that in the show, but I think it's important to start out quickly, Greg, if you could give a definition of what probabilistic thinking is. Because I'll argue that probability and statistics are often counterintuitive to how humans think. We use it in a sense, but at a mathematical level, we're terrible at it. And even I've seen data scientists screw this stuff up because of how human intuition is and how we want to think. And actually, statistics as a math wasn't... it was kind of the last one to come around, you know what I mean? Because...

I agree.

I mean, it was always there; it was just the last one to really be clearly defined and articulated.

So, to that point, Brian, just as an opening volley: I read (my only social media is LinkedIn) this morning that somebody was being critical about science and police work, saying, "Now these scientists are coming out and talking about police work." It's like, look, things can be scientific and police related. For the love of God, man, you know what I'm saying? Let's not do that. So, what is probabilistic thinking? It's what we do every day. Probabilistic thinking is nothing more than a decision-making framework that is designed specifically to evaluate a situation based on likelihood. So, likelihood of potential outcomes, rather than certainty. Using data, logic, and reasoning, what you're doing is estimating the probability of various future scenarios, which helps you manage the uncertainty and then identify the Most Likely (ML) and Most Dangerous Course of Action (MDCA) of the various encounters. That's what we do all the time. But the difference there is evaluation based on likelihood. If you evaluate based on certainties, you're going to say, "That depends" at the end of every sentence, and you're going to get rolled over by the steamroll, you know.

No, and that's a great way to look at it. And it's important why I brought up the math part of it, right? Because we're talking about likelihood, but not to some sort of statistical calculation, saying, you know, "based on these factors there's an X amount of percent chance that..."

"...this person is going to run or this person's going to pull out a gun." It doesn't really work that way. It does in a sense, but to mathematically compute that, you can only do that after the fact. So, in the moment, you can say, "Well, what's more likely?" And what's... (you know, we talk about the Most Likely, Most Dangerous Action or Course of Action). But the idea is you're thinking, "Okay, based on what?" because it all comes down to "based on what" or "compared to what." You actually said something I want to hit right up front before I jump in with this opening example: you said you had a fear of making a temporary event a permanent characteristic. Let's discuss that, because this is an important problem that we're facing when we're not thinking probabilistically, or we're not basing it on some known. We're just coming up with solutions based on what we think, and we may have already come up with a conclusion before we have the right information or the right way to label things.

Yeah. So, remember, if it's probabilistic, it's based on likelihood. So, making a temporary a permanent characteristic means that we're going to knowingly create a damaged file folder, intentionally creating it. And whether you intentionally or unintentionally create a universal description for a whole thing, person, or event, what you're doing is saying, "This is a thing" rather than defining the behavior. So, I see the behavior. Somebody says, "Man, my hinky buttons activated." Okay. And then they say, "This guy's acting shady." Okay. Well, what you're doing now is you're creating this enormous ball of (expletive) around an incident rather than specifying, "This is above or below a baseline; this falls short of my expectations." So, we're not saying that you have to change your language. What we mean is your language to your brain. In other words, a lexicon. Give your brain a chunk of information that it can process more easily, which decreases the complexity of the situation.

No, and that's a great point. Language is how we articulate and label it. That's why in some places, I see... okay, I get your point why you want people to use this specific language, but you're doing it wrong, or that's not important here, or that's not... like, "Okay, hey, they're not homeless; they're unhoused people." I get your intent behind that. It's the same thing when it went from, "Oh, they're inmates" to "a person in custody." I understand, historically, when you just refer to them, you're trying to say it's not "us versus them," it's not this; it's just "this is a person, they're in our custody" because that's a vanilla term versus saying "an inmate" or "a convict" or something, right? It's not a loaded term. So, it will change the way you perceive the situation. It will change the way you interpret and articulate the situation. So, I get it; it just sometimes we go too far with that.

No, no. So, let's give an example of cognitive load. You can increase your cognitive load past what's normal, clinically normal, for your brain when it's operating. For example, if you give me three choices on your name card, and then it's not a "Mr." or a "Mrs." or any of those other things, what's going to happen is I'm going to stumble through a normal situation. I'm doing it now trying to be politically correct while I'm bringing up a point: anytime your brain pauses, it means it's got to go back and take a look at characteristics, and then it's got to weigh them, and then it's got to say, "Okay, before I open my mouth, I want to make sure that I have this absolutely correct." Well, if you're stuttering, that means that it's incorrect. That means there's something wrong with it because it's not iterative and it's not intuitive. In other words, the least amount of language you have to get across to open dialogue is actually better at reducing your cognitive load. So, the less pronouns, the less horse crap that we align... that's why we argue about the biases all the time, Brian. Biases have gone off the reservation...

...because now there's 37 different biases, and none of those are helpful for me to understand and articulate the situation.

And you don't... they're unconscious, and you don't even know when they're affecting you. So, yes. But, okay, that's kind of what we're really going to be talking about: the language, how we interpret that, and the problems with today.

I want to give one example of probabilistic thinking and how it's counterintuitive to the way humans perceive situations. There's a famous one; you can all look it up: it's called the Monty Hall problem. I'll explain it to you because you're going to imagine you're on a game show. So, I'm going to walk you through something called the Monty Hall problem. Don't worry, this isn't about math; it's about thinking. Imagine you're on a game show and there are three doors. Behind one door is a car, and behind the other two doors are goats. You get to pick a door. So, you pick a door, and at that moment, you have a one-in-three chance of being right. You've got about a 33% chance of being right – pretty decent odds, better than you get at some casinos for some stuff, right?

Now, the host, who knows what's behind every door, before he opens up the one you pick, he opens up one of the other two doors and reveals a goat, right? He doesn't open a random door; he deliberately opens the goat door. So, now there are two doors left: the one that you picked and the other unopened door. At that point, the host would ask you, "Do you want to stay with the one that you picked, or do you want to switch?" Most people think, "Oh, well, it's down to two doors; I've got a 50/50 chance," right? But it's actually not. When you first chose, there was a two-in-three chance that the car was behind one of the other doors. When the host reveals the goat, that original two-in-three probability doesn't disappear; it just shifts to the remaining unopened door. So, if you switch, your odds double.

And here's the part that matters: this mistake people make, it's not mathematical, it's cognitive. They look at two doors and label it, "Well, it's even odds." They collapsed the probability too early. They assumed the structure changed just because the situation looks simpler, but it didn't. Probability didn't collapse; they collapsed it. And that's what we're talking about today, because in real-world decision-making, most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information; they come from mislabeling information. The moment we label something "suspicious," "shady," "aggressive," "under control," we reduce the complexity, which is something our brain wants to do, right? We stop updating that probability. We literally lock the doors in our mind. We stick with what we had in our first door that we chose.

And this is why language matters, right? Correct cognitive labeling (which is what we have in our lexicon and why we give words and terms to seemingly innocuous things) is important, and we'll get into that. Correct cognitive labeling preserves that uncertainty, even if it's just a little bit, just long enough for you to be accurate. And that's also why we focus so heavily on the baseline. Because without a baseline, without "typical," without some comparison, you can't properly assign probability. Without disciplined labeling, you'll collapse too soon. So, in the Monty Hall example, without that baseline of "there are three doors, two of them have goats behind it, and one has a vehicle," it all starts there, and then you update everything from that known baseline, right? And most people don't do that.

So, it's actually a really interesting one. There are some cool YouTube videos and explanation stuff you can see. I would absolutely recommend anyone check it out. Just get on there and look up "Monty Hall problem," and you'll see it because, actually, this was posed even in a newspaper one time, and the editors wrote out, "Hey, what would you do?" And this one person wrote in, explaining the way I did, "This is what it is." And all of these people said, "No, you're wrong" — mathematicians, scientists, people like, "No, you're wrong. That's not right." And then eventually, like, "Wait a minute. We did the math here." And like, "Yeah, that actually makes sense. What you're saying is you updated that probability to just that door." And all of these people that wrote in were actually the ones that were wrong.

So, let's talk about this. Brian and I, I'm not proud of it at all, but one of the drunkest we ever got was at a (expletive) Cheesecake Factory.

I don't recall this, Your Honor.

What happened is they handed me the menu, which is like the King James Version of the Bible; it's as thick as you've ever seen, with chapters and all this other stuff. So, if you're thinking about probability and you're not understanding complexity, you'll collapse it too soon because what you'll think is, "I'm going to open it, and I'm going to see and be overwhelmed by all the complexity and the information. So, I'm just going to rip a page out of the center and say, 'I'm just going to choose from that page.'" Well, that's not how it works. What you've done is reduced your choices, and that's absolutely backwards to how cognition works. It's absolutely backwards because now what's happened is you've said, "I'm going to go for simplicity, the easier choice." And when you do that, you limit the Most Likely Course of Action and the Most Dangerous Course of Action; it's not even any longer on the playing field. So, you can't do that. You can't say, "I'm going to fold this paper and not look at the complexity; therefore, it doesn't exist." You honestly have to take a look at it because we're prioritizing things. We're prioritizing our emotional response to the current situation, the recency, how quickly things happen over and over. Simplicity is much more important to me than the statistical likelihood. And you can't do that. You can't make decisions based on how you feel about the information. You've got to make it based on the information at hand, at that time and at that place.

Which is admittedly very difficult to do without some form of structured observation, common language, and some cognitive adaptability. It's difficult to do without some practice, but once you start practicing, you start to see it everywhere, right? For example, if you said... if I go back to what you just brought up, the example of Greg and I having too many drinks, if I were under oath, I would say that happened a nonzero number of times. I don't know how many, but it was definitely a nonzero number.

So, this is what gets to the language now. This language can accelerate that probability collapse. Like you said, the menu in Cheesecake Factory is a perfect example because that menu, I get anxiety there. I can't get past the first page because there are too many options.

That's why we got drunk. We got drunk as a coping mechanism, Brian.

There are too many drink options! Just bring me one of each.

Exactly. Start at the bottom. Go to the right. Yeah.

So, this gets into why we use... and go back to baseline development, right? You're already talking about how our brain chooses recency, simplicity, heuristics. It uses selected priors. It uses these different knowns, these things I've seen that are cognitively close enough. It's constantly trying to do the "cognitively close enough," right? We give the great example of my "little guy," right? I've got the little "terrorist know-it-all" too, right? We have a dog, so he's always playing with the dog, right? I take him to a petting zoo, and he goes running over, saying, "Dog, dog!" And he's petting a dog. Well, it's got four legs, it's got hair, it's got floppy ears, and it's licking his hand. It's a goat, but to him, it's a dog. And, you know what? He's absolutely right. That is a completely logical way to see that situation based on his level of education, training, and experience as a two-year-old. His brain went, "Okay, I've seen this before. It's a dog. Look at the dog. It's exhibiting all the same behaviors." But he's wrong. So, then I have to teach him and go, "Alright, Max, this is not a dog. This is called a goat. Listen to the sound it makes." "Oh, yeah, that's different than a dog." So, now he has a category of "a dog." Or even if you just say "a dog," like, okay, a dog could mean everything from the little tiny yapper that you're going to accidentally trip over, to, have you ever seen those dogs, the Leonbergers? They're like 175 pounds. They live in the snow. I mean, those are all under the same category of "dog." And that's what we're getting to by this cognitive labeling. In a complex situation that's time-compressed, that has a danger element to it, I may not need to get into details or don't have time to get into details, but sometimes that can be important. Does that make sense?

It's more important. It's more important. So, in the classroom, we're constantly referring to and carrying around a Jack-in-the-Box and a Hoberman sphere. Why? Because those help us understand that if we're too cognitively rigid, if we promote cognitive rigidity and only believe those things that we know that we've studied and only rely on our own file folders, what's going to happen is that collapse is going to come much more quickly. So, I've got to be cognitively flexible. The stubborn, unwilling ability for me to see items as how they might be used avoids me from seeing something as a street tool. All of a sudden, that box cutter takes over a plane. All of a sudden, that Phillips head screwdriver becomes an edged weapon because we didn't consider all of those factors. And you're going, "Yes, but considering too many factors is going to cognitively overwhelm me." No, it's not. That's not how your brain is set up. Your brain is set up to categorize those things, and your viewpoint matters less than what category it falls into. So, the idea is if you build robust baselines, then what happens is your brain triggers on that, and then all of a sudden it says, "Hey, I'm witnessing these things; I have to fully appreciate other things." Like the goat example: there's a different smell for a goat than a dog. A dog will eat almost anything but not goat food. A goat will eat anything. What about the way that it runs? What about the way that it lays down and gets up? What's happening now is those—and they're finite; it's not infinite—but those finite nuances are what exemplifies goat from dog. So, when you're making the observation and you're trying to share that observation with somebody else, that gives them robust, fidelity-filled information for their baseline. So, you're actually reducing complexity by increasing cognitive choices. And it's like... now instead of "goat versus dog," it's "wallet versus gun." It's precisely, "Oh, their furtive gesture" or "a 45-degree arm bend to get the wallet out." No, it's how you get a gun out. But Brian, it makes sense. At first blush... listen, this is the difference of science. At first blush, when somebody gives that to you, and they're a street scientist, you look at it and you go, "Wow, that makes sense. Oh, that makes sense to me. I could see that happening." But the problem is then it goes to peer review because I just said, "I endorse your opinion." And now we can't get off that (expletive) opinion. The idea is without structured practice, without rehearsal, without tests and retesting the information, then you're not relying on statistics or analysis; you're just coming up with (expletive). And that (expletive) happens to fit today.

So, let me give you some real, simple examples of what we mean about probability collapse in real life, and how it goes wrong, versus, you know, this is real life, not the Monty Hall game show. Which is great—and any of those games (we talk about this a lot)—those are great to understand how humans make decisions. Game... not just game theory, but literally watching certain games and how people do that under pressure and time constraints, it's just a great, very almost antiseptic way to look at things, like you're in a lab. But that is different than the real world; that is different than the street. I don't care if it's the reality show you watch, you know, "The Real Housewives of Whatever." Yes, those people might not be the greatest humans on the face of the Earth, but they also create these situations that allow for behaviors they likely otherwise wouldn't exhibit in real life, but now they're on camera, now they're on a show; now it's primed for it.

So, some examples of how those things go wrong: the dog hits, there's dope in there. Someone's being compliant, meaning, "Okay, the situation's under control." "Oh, they have a calm tone, they're not dangerous." "They have an emotional tone, oh, they're escalating the situation." Once we assume those things, it's very, very, very hard to walk back, simply because of how our brain's wired. It's like, look, "cognitively close enough." It's a goat; I don't need to know anything else. I can now enjoy my time and play with this goat, right? It's the same thing; it's laziness. Your brain wants the simplest answer in the shortest amount of time that makes the most sense, but it can be wrong even when you're trying hard to be right. Even when you're trying to say, or really think through it. So, how does this... we started talking about this: language can accelerate this probability collapse. But how does that work then, Greg, or do you have a real-life example from yourself?

I do have a real-life example. But look, everybody that's listened, remember there's a vast, uncertain reality in the high-dimensional space. Our brain is constantly trying to knock that down to just a few items to save energy, to store calories. So, when we do have an emergency, we can jump to it. But the problem with that is that the other side of the issue is that we limit ourselves with comparisons. Therefore, the fewer choices, the more efficient it seems. But that's actually the mistake that we make. We run towards an unreasonable conclusion because we didn't look at all the possible options.

So, I just got out of the gym. When I say "I visited the gym," I literally go by the gym in the hotel and look in and go, "Hey, you've got a (expletive) gym!" You know what I'm trying to say? So, I'm done with the gym. I'm wiping up and I go, "Holy (expletive)! A buffet breakfast between the gym and my room. Obviously, I'm going to stop." If you've ever been with me in a hotel, you'll know I do things in two. I've got two orange juices, two plates – one's got the fruit. I don't want my fruit touching the (expletive) vegetable, all that other stuff. And what I do is I make like 19 trips and I set it up. Everything's got to be perpendicular. And then I'm setting my jacket down. I'm very anal about that. Back to the Cheesecake Factory, here we go. So, the idea is that I'm getting set up, and Brian Marren comes in. We're in Detroit. Brian Marren comes in and he walks over. He goes, "Holy (expletive)! How many people are eating here?" What he meant was completely unbiased and unfiltered. It was just he was laughing at how many pairs of things that I had out there. I immediately got butt-hurt, and I thought, "Oh, (expletive)! He's talking about eating too much." And I do. Okay, so that would have been a fair statement, but I immediately opened the emotional file folder, and when I did, I limited my options. By doing that instantaneously, I reached the wrong conclusion, and then that conclusion I reached, I failed to come off of it, and an hour later, even after I came down to...

No, this is a good one because let me give it to you from my perspective: I'm walking out, I've got to walk past that area, I see you sitting at the table, but I see...

(My) inside voice, baby. I was so pissed.

...you know, both sides of the table, a plate; both sides of the table, a cup of coffee or two cups; I see then I see both. So, I'm looking around like, "Who the hell are you eating breakfast with here? Who did you meet? How many people are joining the table? Is there not enough room?" And you just...

You got so pissed!

You got so pissed! But that's a great example of how we do that.

So, again, back to what you're saying, words can do a few things. They compress the complexity, right? So, they make it more simple so my brain can understand it. They start to signal certainty. And, you know, I always say, "Nothing is certain." Well, what? Death and taxes, right? That's what my old man taught me: there are two things that are certain in life: one day you will die, and you're always going to have to pay taxes, right? But the big thing is it reduces alternative hypotheses. So, even you...

...like having that reaction to my reaction to the situation, right? You're already going, "Well," you're speaking internally. You're on internal Greg, going that internal baseline of, "Oh, you son of a (expletive), you know, you think I eat too much," blah, blah, blah. And so, what that does, okay? Cognitive labeling is a method to make sure that we're appreciating the complexity and allowing the options. Because I have to be able to describe my thoughts and emotions and data points in a manner that my future attention will focus on the relevant information and anchor those memories rather than reducing my cognitive load in a bad way. And you're going, "Well, how can you reduce your cognitive load in a bad way?" Look, you filter it so exactly that you take away stuff like error accumulation, then guess what? The ambiguity can't be used as a comparison. So, now I only have one file folder that I go to. It doesn't mean it's the best file folder. So, by reducing my mental fatigue, I think that I'm increasing my chance of being right. The two have nothing to do with each other. The idea is that I have to be wrong once in a while, or my brain doesn't understand what right looks like. I have to accumulate some scar tissue, or I don't understand what a corrupt file folder feels like when I get to it.

But I would say almost daily, there's always a little bit like, "Oh, okay, I didn't know that part," or "Oh, I..." And it could be something small. I try to do that even with the kids or with my... especially with the little guy, right? He's two, two and a half years old now. So, they're so regimented. My wife and I are good about keeping a specific schedule. We do these things before it's bath time so he knows. We do these things before bedtime. So, it's that very routine focus because they need that, right? And it's helpful. And then now they're just going along with it even when they don't want to, where he'll start to throw a fit, and I'm like, "Okay, but what do we have to do now?" And he's crying, going, "Get dressed for school." And so, it's awesome. But then when you see things, it's funny because I watch how my wife reacts to it versus me. It's like, "Oh, well, he didn't do this," or "he didn't do that." "I think he's sick," or "I think he's allergic to this." I'm like, "Hang on, before we..."

Exactly. We're both seeing anomalies, but she immediately wants to have a conclusion for it, or she immediately wants to have a causal relationship, where I'm like, "Okay, that might be, but we need some sustained observation, or it could be these other things." And then we go back and forth, and I just say, "Yeah, you're right, and I'm wrong." But that's a different jump to what you jump to is two things: one, the reduction of alternative hypotheses, and the second is the signal certainty. So, when signals get shorter, we think they're more robust. And in that instance, what your son did... with my... we were lucky enough to watch the grandkid, so Baby Z was here. Baby Z decided things that she doesn't like are "owie." And we said, "That's not good enough. You have to say, 'I don't like that.'" So, then she walked around all day Sunday saying, "I don't like that. I don't like that." And what... but she was misapplying it. Of course, that's what we're talking about; she's testing the environment. So, what happens is the higher demand environments allow us, with correct labeling and not mislabeling things, to reduce the mental effort to interpret the information. That's why Brian and I, because we travel together all the time, speak in such short bursts that Dan has said, "Wait a minute, what did you just say? What was that?" Because what's happening is it comes out in chunks. And so, we do that in emails and memos, and we always talk about signal brevity. Higher functioning teams can resort to signal brevity because they understand that the reduction in complexity doesn't mean reducing cognitive load; it actually increases it. So, what you have to do is do better cognitive labeling. I stop and then say, "Wait a minute. That's not exactly what I meant, Brian. I meant this."

So, let me give some simple examples to get your reaction to it. That's why we don't use a term like, "Oh, that's suspicious." We go, "That's interesting," because interesting could mean all kinds of things. It's just, "Hey, it's interesting." It caught my attention. It's worthy of interest, right? So, that's one. Then there are things like "aggressive" versus "elevated." This is why we don't call it a "threat," right? We call it a "pre-event indicator." It's like when you say a "pre-attack" or a "threat indicator," you've taken out any other option, and you've already come to the conclusion before you have enough evidence. That's why we don't use those terms. And even things like... I like "someone who's compliant" versus, "Well, currently they're cooperative." Okay, that's a great term when I hear those things: "Well, right now, here's what we know," or "This is what we saw." And I go, "Okay, that's great," because what you're doing is, when you're transmitting the information that way, you're allowing me to keep an open mind about it and think about alternative hypotheses. So, I want to throw those out there and get your thoughts about that, because sometimes that changes in a high-demand environment, right?

You said earlier, "Most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information; they come from mislabeling information." So, the threat of mislabeling information is you can't find it when you need it. And in a game of nanoseconds, imagine that you're saying, "Listen, in that almost-everything drawer..." Everybody in the kitchen has an "almost-everything drawer." It's got some tools, matches, you get what I'm saying? It's got that piece to some (expletive) thing we don't remember.

Random coupons that are expired a year ago. Yeah.

Old book that was relevant in the 70s. Well, whatever, though. Okay. And what happens is that each time your focus changes, and you use one of those words—and "suspicious" is the first one, I'll just throw that out there—when you say something "suspicious," all of a sudden my attention narrows, and I can't get off of "suspicious." I'm not updating a baseline because I already found the bad guy. I don't look at ML and MDCA because you've just given me the MDCA. Imagine driving with me. If I go, "Hey, do a U-turn. What do you got? I got something suspicious." You're going to violate traffic laws and maybe get us injured or killed to get back over there because you're already thinking what I'm thinking. So, you can't do that. You say out loud, "That's interesting." What do we say when we call 911? You and I have been together so many times, and we've had some (expletive) happen right in front of us, and we've had to call 911. And when we call, we always say the same opening line.

Listen, this is probably nothing.

This might not be anything. But we always start there, and then we give our probable cause or a reasonable suspicion, and let them decide. Because if we don't, then the hypotheses that you should be considering in that situation are gone. They're null. They're void. And therefore, you're not conducting an experiment anymore with reality. You're not seeing reality as it actually is.

Well, and you brought up a good one with the "everything drawer." So, one of the things I do is always... it's interesting to me how, you know, because one, we've got the little guys. So, this is great if you've got kids for understanding all of this, to see how they interpret things, where they put their stuff when they're cleaning up. Like, "Alright, Max, it's time to pick up the trucks." And where he does it, it's interesting to me because he's got his little methods that he uses, little areas. Same thing with my wife putting things away. One, she packs the dishwasher like a (expletive) raccoon on meth or something; there's no... it's just chaos. But then putting certain things away in the kitchen, and I'm like, "Okay." And then I'll ask her, "Hey, where's this? What's over here?"

And I have to be like, "Well, why did you put it there?" Now, she thinks I'm trying to argue with her or something. I was like, "But I'm genuinely just going like, 'Well, why did you put that there?'" And she goes, "Well, it's with those other things right there." I was like, "Okay, but I put it over here because it's a tool that's going to be used right here and for proximity and this, but I get it. You match this item with those other similar items and thought that, 'Okay, it's like that stuff is fascinating to me.' But it's a great... if you're listening, you've got someone you live with – spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend situation, whatever you've got – like..."

At the root of all arguments, though, it's small things like that. What you're just talking about is cognitive labeling, and because your cognitive labeling differs, you're trying to force a baseline. Instead of assimilating a baseline, you can't do that. You're literally going binary. You're saying, "It's this or it's not. We're doing it my way, or we're not." But that's how relationships are. And relationships are based on what? Perception. So, the perception of that event, that item in the drawer, those things are more important than the reality of the situation around it. It...

It isn't. And I cracked the code on what it comes from: for my wife, it's more about the aesthetic or the look, where I'm all about functionality. Like, "Where is the most useful? How are we going to use this?" So, it was funny when we got the house here and we moved here over the summer, I was like, "Hey, let me put everything away in here and let me explain why." And she looked at me like... you know, I spent hours in the kitchen putting the stuff away and unpacking and this, and I explained to her the whole thing. She's like, "What is wrong with you?" I'm like, "But this is how I think because this is how we're going to use this area. So, I want this to be in terms of how we use it and organize the fridge." And she's like, "Why do you put so much thought into that?"

But listen, what we're talking about today. Let's go back to preparing soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines for war. I was going into a very rigid environment because I knew how to find things, and I was really good at it. And then the military handed me a thing like an RPG or an AK and said, "Yeah, but, you know, when we're doing sensitive site exploitation, they have to understand myriad versions of AK, AK-74, AK-47, AK..." I was like, "No, no, they don't, because it's called 'match.'" And I said, "I'll show you how easily I can throw you off kilter." We had an RPG set up against the wall. So, I went over and I took about a 6-inch piece of reflective tape out of my gear bag, and I put it from the nose cone towards the piezoelectric cell. And then on the AK that was next to it, I had a balloon. So, I blew up the balloon, and I tied the balloon to the fore-end, you know, stuck it in between the little cleaning rod looking thing there in the front. And so, I said, "Okay, so let those Marines walk by and take a look at the courtyard and just have them keep going." So, we're doing sort of a makeshift limited objective experiment. And the Marines walk by the Zuber Platoon (phonetic), and I come back and I go, "What was in the courtyard?" They go, "Balloon." "There was something flapping in a breeze that looked like a piece of electrical tape." I go, "Okay, so what did they focus on, Brian?" They focused on the file folders that they were most familiar with and the item that was attached to it. They never thought, and I said, "Think hard." They couldn't think hard. And then we walked over there, and guess what? The scales fell from their eyes because the idea is it was mislabeled. So, mislabeling is more dangerous. Look, misinformation is accidental; disinformation is deliberate. So, I engaged in disinformation to fool their brains, and all I did is interrupt their processing. So, can you imagine why the wallet becomes a gun? Can you imagine how you'll fall on the wrong file folder, and you're going to run with it? So, you can't... that's why we take such great expense in the classroom. We take the extra time to make sure that you clearly understand the (expletive) lexicon because if you don't understand the lexicon, you're going to come up with a corrupt file folder and draw your inferences from that.

And so, let's jump into why we use that specific lexicon in HBPRA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis). I know people who have been listening to the show for a while know a lot of what we do, and we've defined it as we go. And if you've been in class, it's very specific, and we're like, "No, but there's a difference here." And then once people get it, and they practice, and they click, they go, "Oh, okay, I see it." For example, when we talk about access, right? You can gain... very simple for a crime, "I've got to bring you to the crime or the crime to you," right? So, there's an element of access. Well, there are tools that give me access. A ladder gives me access. An example of, "Well, if I need to get access into this facility, maybe I have to hide in plain sight." So, I'll use some urban masking and social camouflage; I'll put on the orange vest and a hard hat. That gives me access. So, when you think about it in a broad theme, it actually allows you to make more of these connections about different possibilities or potential hypotheses versus just, "Oh, you need a blowtorch to get in there," or "you need a card reader to get in there," right? So, I'll pass you, but I just want to hit real quick...

...we don't use certain words because they prematurely close probability. So, our HBPRA language is descriptive, conditional, context-aware, behavior-based, and what I would say is "probability-preserving," meaning it's meant to be open to interpretation because it's meant to be used in a number of situations, whatever that is. So, it has to preserve probability, meaning there isn't certainty in everything that we do. There's always an element of uncertainty – sometimes more, sometimes less – and it's up to you to make it more certain, but you're never going to know if you're 100% right until after the fact, right? And that's the hard part, right? So, we emphasize this correct cognitive labeling because it doesn't eliminate uncertainty; it acknowledges it. So, we're saying there is an element of likelihood here. That's why we're going to use this terminology, these phrases, and this descriptive language to talk about it, because that allows the end-user to use that not in a deterministic fashion, not to draw a conclusion, or not to go in with a conclusion and then find the evidence that supports it. It's the exact opposite.

(Go ahead.) No, no. What you're talking about is cognitive maturity. You're talking about the ability to choose based on a number of choices rather than being in a reductionist mode when you come in. Probabilistic opens; it's up and out rather than down and in. There's another term that we use in the lexicon over and over. But guess what? It's context-dependent and it's conditional. So, why do we use those? Because, if (and I'm going to show how old I am) you've ever played a pinball machine or seen a pinball machine, if we just had the ball and the plunger and two paddles and the hole, it wouldn't be a lot of fun because the ball would go out, it would come down, it would fall in half. So, you may or may not hit it with the paddle. But the idea is that all of a sudden, now there are other bumpers, and those bumpers light up and they make a different... that's life. And what's happening is if we restrict them and say, "Yeah, but it's going to be easier to get to 100 if I only restrict it to the 100 and take away these detractors and take away this thousand that I'm never going to get." So, by limiting your choices, you're thinking that you're limiting complexity. No. And you said it great when you said, "Hey, I want to talk about this episode." You sent me a Brian quote: "Accuracy increases when certainty decreases appropriately." You didn't say proportionally; you said appropriately. So, what does that mean? What it means is that you're going to produce more correct results. You're going to be accurate more by acknowledging the limitation and reducing the confidence. In other words, having lower certainty when you're faced with ambiguity or a lack of information. What that means is being almost right is always better than being absolutely wrong. And that's what we teach in class. You can't be absolutely right all the time, but you're going to be cognitively close enough if you look at all of the panoply of potential decisions. If you don't, you're going to be absolutely wrong. You're going to run on information that's already broken. And if you do, everything you touch from that point is going to be tainted. It's like not getting a search warrant or lying about a search warrant, and the exclusionary rule is going to take all of that potential evidence and limit it from you. So, cognitive labeling doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It acknowledges that there is uncertainty, and uncertainty is absolutely essential to figure out probability through comparison. You said something: being almost right is better than being absolutely wrong.

Yes. Can you go into that a little bit deeper, or explain what you mean by that when we're talking about it, because...

...because all these podcast episodes and everything we do in class is one big sense-making exercise, right? It's how to make sense based on the contextual cues, based on the relevance of your observations, how to compare and contrast those, how to use probabilistic thinking and label it so that I can make...

...better, more informed decisions faster, sooner, at a greater distance, without overreacting or underreacting, whatever the cognitive limitations are, right? It's supposed to be this cognitive operating system that is in use all the (expletive) time, and you've got to practice it at first, but eventually it becomes the intuitive, iterative skillset you get better at, right? But that's a big concept because especially, you know, you're talking about your background in law enforcement, where you've got situations that escalate seemingly out of nowhere. Now, we'd argue whether or not it did, but, you know, it can go from something simple to now it's a chaotic event, and it's a multi-state pursuit, and all this stuff's happening, and it started as a simple, "Oh, the guy didn't signal when he turned," and now I'm going to go over. You know, it's seemingly highly complex and volatile. But you said being almost right is better than being absolutely wrong. Where a lot of people would say, "Well, we have to be right all the time, and the bad guy only has to be right once."

You know what that is? That's called justification because I have to sleep at night, and I feel shitty because I did something bad. And so, those things can exist in the same universe. Everybody that watches cartoons or reads comic books knows how different things cross-pollinate the universe. Well, life isn't that easy. I'll give you an example. Every police agency I've ever seen, worked with, audited, did a ride-along with, taught at, has what they call a version of a "heavy car." That's a car where there are a couple extra coppers that are in it, or a couple extra people in a van, ready to jump out. They put them in a high-crime area, and they literally prowl, looking for a series of events to coalesce, and then they jump out and say, "Gotcha!" And now it's off to the races.

While I understand why you do that, without the proper training, that can go right into the "trick bag" because now what you've got is everybody primed to just look for this information. So, we're in an ambiguous environment. We're only looking for felonies, and guess what that makes me look at? Everything is a potential felony. So, "this is less of a felony than that." Now, all of a sudden, we see a person standing in an area, in a high-crime zone, and they're outside of a door, and I say, "Hey, maybe that's one of those felons we're actually looking for." As we close in, the person starts doing what? Their behavior changes because there are four of us, and we're armed, and we just jumped out of a car, and we're moving rapidly at night towards them. So, what's happening is we're creating this self-licking ice cream cone of likelihood rather than having an off-ramp that says, "Let common sense prevail." And what is common sense? That's my baseline. My baseline says, "Look, there are a lot of people out on the porch." Why? Because it's a hot night. And where do people spend their night in this area? Out on the porch. Do you see what I'm saying? So, the reasonability metric here, the meter that's going back from reasonability, if it's stuck to one of the extremes, I'm probably seeing the situation as I want it to be. And if I see it as I want it to be, I've automatically limited my options on a comparison to what's most likely actually happening. So, "most likely" and "most dangerous" can be there, but that doesn't lower my uncertainty. It doesn't eliminate it; it acknowledges that there's uncertainty, and that's what makes me more careful. So, I'm actually more careful rather than just shooting first and figuring it out later. I'm going, "What else could this be? What else are they showing me?" And, you know, we named that so many years ago as "the gift." And the gift is the gift of time and distance. The gift of seeing things as they really are. The gift of not getting too close before the situation unfolds past my ability to draw reason from the artifacts and evidence.

Yeah. And I think there are a couple examples of this where, well, one, we get people that reach out to us, or we discuss certain cases, or they ask us questions. They're talking, they come to us almost like asking for advice, which, one, I'm honored by and I appreciate. But I'm sitting there listening to them explain it, and I'm like, "They have the answer. They know this already." But they're talking it through, and then we've had different cases where they end up going, "Oh, wow, I didn't look at it that way." And then, "Oh, hey, we got that. Remember the one we won't say along the border?" We're like, "Hey, we got that search warrant, and we'll be in late to class on Friday." But...

...because of the class, informed by what they learned in the class.

But all it was was restructuring that and that cognitive labeling, saying, "Oh, so you're saying this? Oh, so you're saying this?" Like, "Yeah, but it's kind of circumstantial." I go, "Well, what's the likelihood that that person is true?" "Well, it's got this," and they're going, "Okay, well, what's the likelihood that it was anyone else but that person?" They're like, "Well, it couldn't have been." And it's like, "Oh, okay. So, you're calling it this, you're calling it that." And they're like, "Oh, I get it." And all this is because it ties into this next part about understanding the baseline, because you're bringing it up: everyone wants that list of things, or the missing piece in the Kelner (phonetic) case, or they want that one thing, or "Can you take a look at this and see something else that maybe I didn't see?" And I'm like, "There is no way..."

...like, one, you're really good at your job. You've been doing this a long time, and I've never worked on a case like this before or been a criminal investigator like that before. So, I'm guessing you know a hell of a lot more than me. So, what did I really help do? It's just to frame it differently or look at it using these lenses, or that correct cognitive labeling, for them to go, "Okay, wait a minute." Because it all goes back to this baseline, and we keep hitting on that so hard because, especially if you're in that profession, your baseline for what you think is normal or typical, it's going to shift over time. And especially, is law enforcement the best? Because, you know, when you ask a normal person on the street, they're like, "Oh yeah, most people are good, and most people want to do well." You ask a cop, they're like, "Most people are terrible humans." And you're like, "No, you just deal with the bottom 5% or 1% of the population that no one else wants to deal with." So, your baseline is shifted. So...

This is why we keep going back to that. An anomaly without a baseline, you're just imagining things. It's nothing; it's meaningless. There's no relevance without some sort of context. So, if you don't know what normal, expected behavior is, what the environmental pattern is, the anomaly is almost a projection; it's like a psychological projection. So, this is where we...

...looking for a specific anomaly, Brian. Okay, so the projection... go back to that. But if you're looking for a specific anomaly, then guess what you're doing? You're looking at a stack of needles, and you're saying, "I want to get the needle out of that stack." You're not doing the needle in a haystack anymore. What you're doing is you're so specific that your brain is now fixated on that specific anomaly, and you're not going to look at how patterns work. Patterns suggest things. Then it takes you looking at the information and making it intelligence. So, an anomaly alone is meaningless in an environment. Anomaly against a good, robust baseline? Now I can start searching. "Okay, what else is going on? Well, I have this, I have that. Hey, if those two are together, and that third one comes into play, we might be in a (expletive) sandwich." You cannot do that if you're looking and searching for an anomaly, or if you don't understand what an anomaly is in that region, or in that... that's like going, "Okay, you go to the doctor, and you tell the doctor nothing about your symptoms, and the doctor goes, 'Okay, does it have to do with your foot? Does it have to do with your eye?'" Can you imagine what it's talking about? So, a robust baseline allows me to get right at it, to get right to the situation. "Listen, I've been in a thousand interviews. This is somehow different." "Well, how is it different? What are those factors that came up to you in that interview?" You see...

And what do I always go back to? It's like, "Okay, well, tell me." They're like, "Well, hey, I want to run a few things past you because I saw something that was interesting." And I go, "Stop. Before you tell me what you think is interesting, I want you to tell me what you normally see when you deal with this case. Go, keep going." And I just keep pulling stuff out. "Then there's this, oh, then I typically see this, then I typically see this." I go, "Okay, so what was the interesting part?" And now the lightbulb goes off; they're like, "Holy (expletive), it's so obvious. Never mind. I don't even need to ask you about it because I got it." And that's why, even when we go back to, like, how many times have I brought up the parking lot principles on here? Like, "Okay, where do people typically park?" "Well, there's a million reasons why someone could park off to the side over there." No, there's not. There are maybe three, four, five – maybe it's single digits – but there aren't a million reasons. So, there are only a few reasons why. So, now it's up to you. So, it's really going back to that.

And the one thing I did want to hit on, and I want to hit on this because it's something that we talk about a little bit more in class, and I think it's a big part of conversation out there, and I think a lot of people get it wrong, but it's well-intentioned when they talk because this goes back to that Monty Hall example at the beginning, where we talk about humility and uncertainty. Humans, we are primed; we have an ego system. We are the most important thing in our environment, in our world. And so, that's important for survival that every person has. So, when I use the term ego, I don't mean it in a negative way, like, "Oh, that person's got a big ego." It just means we all have an ego. And so, there's this element where we feel like we need to be in control of things. And if you can get past this idea of "I have to be in control of situations," it's like, "No, you have to be in control of yourself and how you perceive things." You don't have to be in control of any situation that you're in, right? Because you don't control the structure, and if you misunderstand the structure, you assume some sort of symmetry where it doesn't exist. And so, that's literally... that's literally our ego. We are uncomfortable admitting that we're wrong. And this is why, like, I even have... I always talk about, like, "Look, man, I'm a knuckle-dragging, dumb Marine. I type with my fists. I turn my computer on by headbutting it. I don't know (expletive)." I literally have that because I'm more likely to see something that way. I'm less likely to jump to an unreasonable conclusion where I walk into a room and I assume everyone in there knows way more than me. They're smarter than me, they're stronger than me, they're better than me. And I let people show me whether that's true or not, right? So, there is this way of, you know, admitting that, "I'm not sure" feels weak. How many times do we say, "I don't know"? "I don't know. My first... Have you ever heard of this guy?" "I don't think so." And then a minute later, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's right. I have heard of him." It's like, no, because I don't need to know everything.

Exactly. Exactly.

And what that ties into... that sort of language ties into probabilistic thinking, right? It allows me to leave some uncertainty to inform my baseline, to continue to gather more information. And so, having that way of not looking at it as "I need to be in control" or "I need to have this," it actually opens up the potential for other hypotheses. It opens up the potential for other avenues of approach. It just keeps that little bit in there. So, it's something that we don't really get into because we look at it as a functional thing, not like, "I don't care what you think about yourself or others or whatever." It's like, "Hey, this is a structured process. If you follow that structured process, like you said, you're going to be right more than you're wrong, or you're going to be close to being absolutely right than absolutely wrong." And that's all I care about. If you want to talk about your feelings and your ego and your thoughts about the world, hey, that's great. But that's not practical. That's not functional. That's not something that's going to help me in the moment. That doesn't help me right now go, "What's going on here? How do I predict what's likely going to happen next?" In fact, that kind of stuff may get in the way, right? It may go, "Well, you know, we're all..." I don't want to get too much into that, but that's what I mean by the language of it.

Yeah. So, let me further refine your thoughts by giving you a street example. I read a lot. I watch a lot of (expletive) films on the plane and everything. There was one, gosh, if I could think of it, Alice Eve in the film "She's Out of Your League." The kid from 'How to Train Your Dragon'... (the main character's friend) works as a TSA agent, and one of the subplots is that they've got a friend named Stainer, and you can imagine why. The kid, you know, in junior high school is called Stainer, and he lives up to it, and he owns it, and it's part of the funny things that are going on. Well, guess what? The mislabel led to a future cognitive distortion that now that person can't get away from. That specific temporary behavior that you witnessed becomes that permanent trait.

I've been in... there are detectives all around, and somebody goes, "Hey, the Waldorf got hit." And they go, "That's Jimmy Jack. He loves those high-rises or whatever else." Shut the (expletive) up! What happens is we think that this complex environment, we're going to make it better. Cognitive load shapes our performance. So, the information has to rely on our predictions. We go on predictive analysis. So, what do I have to do? Do I have to take a look at every single thing in my baseline, or can I chunk the information? Well, if I chunk it, I have to chunk it right. So, that's where the labeling comes in. The labeling actually allows me to take a look at the information as it is. And now I'm reducing cognitive load, increasing efficiency performance by using time and distance. Because if I don't do that, Brian, what I'm doing is I'm just learning from bad examples, and then the corrupt file folders are going to continue to come up. And that's why you see marriages where I marry the same person over and over. You see coppers that are more likely to escalate force over and over. You see certain events that happen out on the street that coppers respond to. It's the same thing as early Iraq when kinetic Iraq was going on: "military-aged male" that screwed everybody. So, those are the types of things that we're trying to talk about. You can learn to operate in an environment where you've never been before just by using the appropriate cognitive labels and then applying them in a series because you're going to become more efficient. You go, "That's wrong. This is right. Now, let me update my baseline. This is correct. Okay, these two things work together. This is wrong. It doesn't fit. Let me update my baseline." And we're doing that in nanoseconds. Don't think it's laborious because your brain already wants to do the pattern recognition.

Yeah. That's the biggest point out of all this, what you just said: your brain wants to do the pattern recognition. So, if you do the pattern recognition correctly with the correct cognitive labeling, then you're just going to iteratively get better, right? I mean, that's the whole thing. With each exposure to a new environment, a new situation, you go, "Oh, okay, I get to update my file folders, and I get to update my experiences, and I get to update what I'm drawing from and what I'll recall in the next moment," right? I won't be forced back down into that abyss of just fear and uncertainty and anxiety. I'll actually be able to assimilate or adapt to a new novel situation that I haven't been in before because I'm drawing from all of these past experiences. And then, going back to the language part of it, that's like, "Okay, instead of 'this person's aggressive,' it's 'well, their behavior is elevated relative to the situation or relative to the baseline.'" It's incongruent with what I typically see in this environment. Oh, okay, well, now you can figure out why or what else there is. But it's not...

(A defense attorney) can't challenge that, buddy. A defense attorney can challenge... so, "They were aggressive." "Oh, they were aggressive? Are you a master of aggression? Are you a subject matter expert on that? What level would you give it on a one to ten?" You see how that opens that to the wrong interpretation. So, you don't want to collapse that. What you want to do is not eliminate the uncertainty; you want to navigate it. You want to make sure that you fully understand that uncertainty has boundaries. And if I can organize my information better and more accurately, then guess what? I'm improving retrieval. Memory degradation goes away. I'm now comparing knowns and unknowns at a level that's higher than you are because I have a better basis for comparison. The better the baseline, the better the comparison. And that goes right into the intervention strategy, right? Because it's like, "Okay, this guy's tossing tables at the fast-food restaurant because they got his burger order wrong." Okay, well, that's completely unreasonable, right? That's unacceptable behavior. But it's also to go rather than go, "Well, this is unacceptable; I'm going to have to pounce this dude." It's like, "Hey, man, what happened?" "They got my (expletive) order wrong!" It's like, "Damn, that sucks. I hate when that happens. That pisses me off. I know what that feels like." Now I'm like, "Okay, I get that." And "I don't like that after a long day, and I get some hungry as hell, and you screw up my favorite order." Now I'm not going to start flipping tables, but what am I doing with the guy now? Now we're talking, right? It just informs everything: how you label the situation. So, it's... and it all goes back to updating the baseline and avoiding those emotionally loaded terms, like every politician loves to do. But that's...

...especially now.

Yeah. Let me give you just another street one. First of all, I told you about people that don't like shaking hands. One instance a long time ago, one instructor soured you on that, and that's a form of human communication. So, if you're not going to shake hands with me in this situation, and you don't have a damn good reason for it... Yeah. Or you know the last three guys that shook hands with them got teeth knocked out. I get it. But that's different; that's updating your baseline with the knowns or the unknowns. So, I had one DTI (Defensive Tactics Instructor) a long time ago at an academy, and he said, "I always carried this with me," and I had this big mouthpiece that he put in. It was multicolored; you couldn't miss it, trust me. And he said just before he went hands-on with somebody, he would show them that, and he would go, "Okay, hold on." And they'd put it in and go, "I'm ready." Okay, wait a minute. Can you imagine taking that apart on the stand? "Oh, I get what you're saying. So, it's going to be a scrum." De-escalation and the whole process is a labeling exercise. So, if you're going to use an emotionally loaded term in that moment, understand that the behavior is going to change because of it. And so, therefore, look, what do we keep referring to Hippocrates for? "First, do no harm," Brian. And this is a perfect example of label it right the first time. You're going to retrieve it better. You're going to have a cleaner sample with which to compare it against, and you're going to end up being more efficient. You might not reduce the complexity to the level you think, but you're going to be more accurate in your decision-making. And I think that's important.

That's a win over time, especially like that. That's the thing: everyone wants, "Well, what's the right solution?" It's like, "Well, you're not going to know that one until after the fact, and you can analyze it really, but you're not going to know that until the situation presents itself." So, you just need a framework to sense-make, to understand it, so that you make the best decision possible with the little amount of information that you have, at the furthest observable distance, with the most time that you can, right? I mean, that's the goal. People go, "Well, that's kind of a nebulous goal." It's like, "Well, no, it's not," because if you have that as a strategy, then over time, individually, your team, the organization is going to get exponentially better at this. And so, that's the whole thing: it takes time. So...

If you're thinking probabilistically, then you are thinking the right way because the Most Likely, Most Dangerous Course of Actions are going to come up no matter what the encounter. And the more you do it, the better you're going to get at it. If you're looking for absolute certainty, that that...

Death and taxes, exactly. But you are going to increase your accuracy on your predictive analysis. There's no question that you're going to do that, and that's going to make you more efficient. And what does efficiency mean on the battle space? Safer, harder to kill. I mean, those are all wins, too.

Yeah. So, a big takeaway is the whole... again, I'd recommend checking out the Monty Hall problem. But it's not a math problem; it's a cognitive problem. Most bad decisions don't come from a lack of information; they come from mislabeling information. And language is how we can either lock doors in our mind or open more doors in our mind, right? By using that right language. So, again, correct cognitive labeling doesn't make you certain; it makes you accurate, right? And the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty; it's to navigate it without collapsing it. It's just to make it through to make, like you said, a good enough decision right now based on what we know. So...

Being almost right is better than being absolutely wrong, buddy. I'll stick with that.

We'll do some more on Patreon and give some examples and some cognitive labeling exercises, and of course, the episode cliff notes for everyone who's a Patreon subscriber, and we appreciate those who are. So, Greg, any final thoughts on this one?

No. I like one of your quotes. Again, I'll bring it up: "You can't identify anomalies accurately if your language is distorting the baseline." It's as if you were looking at one baseline for apples and oranges, and somebody hands you a lawn chair and says, "Where does this fit?" So, correct your cognitive labeling. Do it early, do it often, and incorporate it in your training. Incorporate it in your virtual reality training. You'll be happy that you did.

Okay, I think that's good. We appreciate everyone for listening. Please, if you enjoy it, share it with your friends. We've got some good guests coming up in future episodes here. It's going to be some good conversations, and we thank you all for those of you who are sharing the episodes. We do appreciate it; that really helps get the message out there. If you enjoyed it, always reach out to us. There's more on Patreon. You can always hit us up on email or connect with Greg and I on LinkedIn as well. It's actually a great one; it's Greg's only social media. So, definitely if you want to get a hold of him...

It was a legal decision. By design.

..."How come these other things don't work on my phone?" "Oh, no, no, they don't. They don't work on your model of phone, Greg. Sorry. You can't go on there." But we appreciate everyone tuning in.

Cheesecake Factory!

I'm not saying it's in the area of the country with more cameras and more security, more law enforcement than anywhere else in the world. But anyway, thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.