Sense Make vs Scents Make

All right, Greg, and those listening, welcome to the inaugural episode of The Human Behavior Podcast. Those fans of our previous work who've been following along for a long time, you'll still appreciate the new format. But today, we've got a very special first episode, coming back to your roots, Greg, here on a wonderful, gray, cold, snowy morning right near Detroit, recording this episode. I thought it'd be fun to be able to do this here, kind of not far from where you grew up, and jump into it today.

For this first episode, we're going to be talking about sense making versus scent making, or sense making. And what I mean by that is when we talk about human behavior and we talk about how people perceive things, we refer to it as "sensemaking"—how do you sense make in your environment? So, if I'm thinking "sensemaking" like that, I'm thinking of Sherlock Holmes. And if I'm thinking "scent making," I'm thinking, you know, making a stink, Pepe Le Pew.

This sort of comes from something you wrote a while ago, Greg, that I really liked a lot for a number of reasons because you explained how things go wrong, how we have failures in sense making and we don't see things properly. So therefore, we don't respond or we don't make the best decisions simply because of an error in how we perceived what it was that we were experiencing. So, that's kind of the frontload here to this episode. I was thinking, if you wanted to, you could read what you wrote, and then we can unpack some of the concepts in there. I'll let you talk a little bit about what you wrote and what it was for.

Very briefly, and thank you, Brian, and congratulations on the first episode of the new podcast. The idea was that we spent a lot of time in hotels, going from training venue to training venue, overseas sometimes, and outside the wire sometimes. What happened is I would write a series of what I called "instructor development pieces" for down and in for our personnel. This is one that I wrote, and without further ado, I'll read it.

It's a beginning. I got done rereading Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho recently, and my renewed interest had more to do with the hidden sociopath, Patrick Bateman (played by the kid from Newsies), who operates freely amongst us. Some of my earliest memories of using human behavior to predict danger, rather than a gut instinct or the look of a psychopath or sociopath, came from me being exposed to Hitchcock's twists and turns in the movie Psycho. Hitchcock wasted no time wasting Janet Leigh, and the deranged killer ended up being the fresh-faced lad from next door—here, the original American Psycho, Anthony Perkins. Even as a kid, sitting in a theater watching the screenplay, I knew it was coming before it happened. What amazed me was that the people around me didn't. The adults didn't have a clue, and I shrieked at all the key points in the film.

Humans have more than a natural tendency to turn the dark or the unknown into something preternatural. We have to turn a bump in the night or a strange occurrence into something supernatural. It's a physiological imperative. While science teaches us deductive logic, abductive logic, top-down or bottom-up processing, and thanks to William of Ockham, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected—and that's the essence of heuristic processing. It's much easier and faster to chalk the unknown up to something unknown or spooky.

So, whether you read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or, as I do, watch reruns of Scooby-Doo, the process is the same. Each week, the Mystery Machine goes out to solve a conundrum, and while the Misfits run from a ghoul, the smart kids figure out the problem using logic. So, whether you tend to follow Sir William of Ockham or solve the Gordian Knot like Alexander did, the essence of sense making and problem solving lies in seeing things as they really are and measuring them against the societal, environmental, financial, et cetera, baselines.

As an advocate of Game Theory and M-Theory, it was initially hard for me to understand this bias of sense making, which tended towards the absurd. But I only had to look to my favorite pacifiers growing up—cartoons and horror movies—to see the answer. Bollywood, Hollywood, comics, commercials, they've all added ridiculous standards to our internal baseline, which has become exacerbated when the neurochemical cocktails are influenced by fear.

So, it's essential for our human survival brain to learn lessons from our environment. When the lesson isn't so clear-cut, we tend to fixate on the super criminal or the super serial killer. The reason is simple: it would drive us mad or keep us hunkered down in a cave somewhere if we had to process the fact that many people and situations are dangerous and every human has the capacity to kill us, dismember us, and eat us. We would never get anything done. So, rather than acknowledge that Elliot Rodger or Kip Kinkel, Jared Lee Loughner, Cle Bol, Old Harris, our next-door neighbors, or worse yet, our children, we have to invent a reality where those people exist in only the most extreme environments of psychopathy and cases of severe mental illness.

Hollywood and advertisers and teachers and parents understand psychology and instill within us, or at least allow the ruse to continue, a typ-cast for the dangerous human animals in our midst. Seemingly, we can't get enough of it. The demented, downside-up current trend towards demonizing our phase from our childhood is only one example. We don't want Snow White; we want her frantic sister, Hail Black. We don't want Smurf babies or Ren and Stimpy; we need the anti-hero universe where Batman fights Superman. It all plays into our electrochemical neurotransmitters, which keep us loaded with dopamine as long as the mindless pablum we're watching or listening to doesn't get too scary.

This isn't new. Authors, playwrights, dramatists have a long history of skewing reality—Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, for example—into blockbuster movies Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. The truth of each case is more interesting, disturbing, and amazing than any script or screenplay could ever touch. But we're okay with it because, unlike reality, when the house lights come up, we can walk out of the theater safe in the knowledge that these characters were just actors playing a role.

I've written before at length about the experience conducted in the martial arts dojo with relative strangers. The bottom line was that every kid we interviewed created a "stranger template" that was virtually identical. And remarkably, the logo for "Kids Don't Go With Strangers," a national movement, mirrored almost perfectly the stranger picture that they invented. It wasn't a case of life imitating art; it was art screwing with our memory—our long-term memory—to erase reality and create a prototype of the bad guy. That prototype becomes "cognitively close enough." So, stop putting the round peg continuously into the square hole and saying "close enough."

In many of the situations we study, people miss the predatory looks or the mission focus being exhibited by the criminals or terrorists around them because they're stuck in a template match for danger. So, our prototypical matching is faster, easier, and much more right than wrong. Our artifact and evidence-based approach and scientific method, using the "6, 5, 7, and 3" (a specific methodology), consistently pick out the anomalous. And somewhere in the anomaly lies the criminal, terrorist, pedophile, et cetera. So, keep current, study hard, and be on the lookout every day.

And at the bottom, Brian, in red, is: "Before you can read us, you have to learn how to see us." Invoke taught me that when I was a young kid.

Right. And it's a powerful message at the end. For those of you who just listened, of course, all of our Patreon subscribers and those folks can read the actual article because there are some great images in there that go along with it and really highlight what you were talking about. I really gravitated toward this for those reasons. I love the analogies that you use and the different metaphors that you use in there, and how movies and what we see on TV really gives us those corrupt file folders for what we think we are—especially if you didn't grow up in a neighborhood where you had to survive, or you didn't see something, you don't have a lot of experience out there. You're only getting it from one place, and that messes with us. So that's why I thought it was interesting.

I have to caveat, too: today's episode is sponsored by Advil Cold & Sinus and Excedrin Flu because I have a head cold that I'm getting over. But I wanted to pull out—

It makes your voice deeper. The baritone is kicking in hard.

So I want to pull out a couple of things you talked about that I think are important to unpack. One of the things you mentioned in there, you said, "Humans have more than a natural tendency to turn the dark or the unknown into something preternatural. We have to turn a bump in the night or a strange occurrence into something supernatural. It's much more than a tendency; it's a psychological imperative." What do you mean when you say it's a psychological imperative?

Okay, so let's rewind tape a little bit and talk about preternatural and supernatural because most people don't understand the street terms that we like to use to make hard science simple and easy to follow. So, "preternatural" is anything that's above and beyond natural or regular, but it certainly fits the laws of physics and math and science, right? Something that's rare in nature, but can be repeated other times in nature. Now, "supernatural," rather, is exceeding what's possible or explainable in physics and science and math. It literally exceeds the material world, so it's chalked up to the hand of God or a miracle, right?

So, what we have to understand is "imperative." The word itself means a command that is likely to happen because it's critical or pressing. So, most people, when they hear "psychological imperative," they think, "Well, it's bound to happen." Well, it doesn't mean that. It means it's at the threshold; it's about to happen, right? This is your unconscious mind directing the behavior of that individual in that moment.

So, what do we mean by that? Let's compare it simply. You have a dog and I have a dog. Your dog is Bailey and my dog is Java. They're different ages, but they would respond the same way to the doorbell ringing. When the doorbell rings for us, we go, "Oh, it's the UPS guy. I heard him drive up. I see him." For the dog, it's a supernatural event. Their entire world is turned into chaos, and they respond accordingly. They bark, they jump around, they're knocking things over because they have no idea what's outside the front door.

With a human, the only thing a human would fear on the other side of that door is something preternatural. "Okay, it's an armed home invasion. I didn't expect that." Or something supernatural. "Okay, I open the door and there was nobody there." So, rather than chalking it up to a momentary lapse in a battery or the electrical system, it's Sasquatch, it's a UFO, aliens were there to abduct me. Why is that the first thing that I do? Because I'm hardwired to perceive danger in every event that kept me alive for so many years. But now we're in an age of information overload, and information is immediate. So what happens is, instead of stopping on the first, most dangerous, my mind is allowed to wander. A psychological imperative means it's going to happen, and guess what? If I'm not prepared for it, then it surprises me. And anything that surprises me is anxiety-born, danger-born, and I make mistakes.

And we don't like uncertainty.

No, we hate uncertainty, as a matter of fact.

So, we hate uncertainty so much that we repeat patterns of behavior over and over and over to release chemicals in our brain. It works both ways: the chemicals release in our brain so we do repeat those patterns. Why? So things are familiar. The more familiar things are to us, the better we like them. Anytime something disrupts—like this morning, it's snowing outside. Certainly didn't predict that when we got up this morning, but it is. So, now that we have to deal with that, all of those cards, all of those responses and reflections have to deal with that new event. When something surprises us, we have much less time, and time and distance doesn't allow us to critically think. Therefore, we come up with these notions, the sense make.

And we also as humans kind of want to have a causal relationship to everything, right? We have to say, "Well, this is what caused that. Now I understand it." Because I have to take that—like, the doorbell ringing and I go and there's no one there. That's a non-standard observation. My brain doesn't like those, so it has to sense make and go, "What could it be?" "Yep, my house is haunted." "I don't know, so it must be." "Yeah, there's someone living under the stairs."

Exactly.

But that goes to what you were bringing up in some of the examples with movies. We'll fill in something when we don't know. When your brain doesn't have an answer, it's going to jam an answer in there. It can't walk away and say, "Well, I don't know." It's very difficult to do. So it has to put something in there, and if you don't have those experiences to draw from, it will make them up based on experiences that you've had. That experience might be, like you brought up in the article, watching a movie, hearing a story from somewhere. So that's how it starts to muddy the waters a little bit. People talk a lot about now, "You've got to be a critical thinker, and you've got to use logic, and you've got to use that." And that's all great to say, but humans are kind of heavily emotionally based, and, you know—

Let me give you an example of exactly that, Brian. We have Jeffrey Dahmer who preyed on other humans in his neighborhood. He would first have sex with them, then would kill them, then would hang different body parts around, and freeze some of them, and eat some of them. Jeffrey Dahmer had friends that he didn't kill and eat. He also had neighbors that he didn't kill and eat. So, after the police were there and the crime scene tape is up, and people said, "This guy's been killing like it's a contest," the neighbors had to come up with something when the cop came and said, "Well, didn't you smell the decomposition? Didn't you notice him? Didn't you hear these late hours and the screams?" Right? So, how do I come up with that? I either reconcile that, "Oh my gosh, I missed everything and my neighbor was a serial killer," or I said, "You know what? He was a master criminal. He knew how to control his emotions, and we never saw it." Why do we do that? We don't do that for Dahmer. We do that for us so we can survive tomorrow and not think that my neighbor is a massive serial killer.

No. And it kind of brings it right to the next point that I want to discuss in here. You said, "Science teaches us deductive logic, abductive logic, top-down, bottom-up processing. You know, you brought up William of Ockham, Ockham's Razor: 'Amongst competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.'" And you talk about that that's the essence of heuristic processing, which it's easier and faster to chalk up the unknown as something unknown, right? So what is heuristic processing? What do you mean by that?

So, step number one, and it's great because we get from different clients, our name, "Arcadia Cagnara," very old, very Greek. So, I like to reach back because something that's really old sticks around. When you talk about a heuristic, you could spend the entire rest of your life studying heuristics. There are so many varieties, there are more heuristics than there are biases, right? Which is an inside joke, but you'll get it. A heuristic is simply a mental shortcut to arrive at a decision much more quickly than having to sit down and conduct a number of experiments. In Greek, "heuristic" literally means to discover, to find something out.

So, what a heuristic template or prototypical match is, it's just a cue in our environment that helps us quickly choose an option or make a decision or solve a complex problem. So, it's a much more, it's a faster, robust way of using artifacts and evidence in your environment around you that you've already seen to deduce or induce what's about to happen next.

And that gets into—because you mentioned it on here a lot, and especially you brought up that the article specifically—but is that what you mean when you say "cognitively close enough"?

Again, Brian, great question. Let me preface it this way: I've worked in environments in urban and rural settings. I've worked more homicides than most people have ever met people in their entire lives. And when I go there, there's logic, and there's reason, and there's evidence, and I put those things together, and it points to the likely killer. If you go in saying, "Hey, this looks like the work of so-and-so," then you've biased yourself. So, that's the first mistake.

The second mistake is when things happen and they're scary. So now you're chasing the killer into the building and he doesn't want to go to jail. What happens is you see a bear in your environment, and the bear goes lumbering by. We want to see a bear when we go to the Detroit Zoo, not so much when we're out there in the woods with my kid playing frisbee. So what happens is my mind scans through all available prototypes and templates that I have on board, and none of them say, "Hey, it's likely a bear," but the first one says, "Oh, it was lumbering through the woods, and it was big, and it was furry. That's a Sasquatch."

Now, every environment has a Santa. Every environment you go to, any place on the face of the planet, and they've got this magic guy that's going to come in and bring stuff. Every territory and village and tribe on the planet has a Sasquatch story. It's Sasquatch, it's Yeti, it's Bigfoot, right? So, what happens is it's much easier to say, "That's inexplicable," because I don't have the words or the history to explain it, so I'll make something up. A light in the sky that was brighter than yesterday. Well, everybody says it was a flame-out of a 747 engine over Anchorage, but the people that didn't read the news, they say it's a UFO, and that begins the abduction theory. Now it's really hard to get rid of those.

Loch Ness. We know that the original Loch Ness Monster photos, we know that they were fake. The guy on his deathbed said, "Hey, I want to withdraw that. I want to take it back." But then what do we say? We say, "Yeah, but there was a saint that fought a beast, a sea beast, and this is what he was talking about." So, we even go back and reconstruct crappy history.

We'll take bits and pieces of things that did happen or you can prove, string them together.

And that's the scent right there. That's the scent that doesn't pass the smell test, right? And that's the idea with it is: what is it that you're using? You brought up artifacts and evidence supporting a reasonable conclusion. We'll call that "in extremis," you have to have an answer, is what I keep going back to.

Well, and you said it simply, so let's put words to that. That's making order out of chaos. Your brain, your eyes—your eyes will impixelate something, they'll dump a bunch in your visual field. You've got a very, very small functional field of view and an even smaller lens with which to view that information. So, what happens is not everything that we see can matter to my brain because I don't have the bandwidth for it. So, what my brain does is it chunks certain information, and if that information doesn't fit, it excludes it, right?

So it doesn't measure that too, which gets into just confirmation bias.

Exactly. I mean, everyone says, "Well, you know, pieces one through four fit this pattern, so piece five is likely to fit the next pattern," right? The idea is we have to remain cognitively close enough so we can make fast decisions in extremis, in extremely challenging situations or Spartan situations, or situations that don't have a lot of fidelity. That's survival. But we've lost the ability to rehearse survival in our brains, so our brain immediately thinks it's a dinosaur that's going to eat us. That's why we run or we flinch at a danger, right? And that's why the dog still does it when the doorbell rings, right?

Well, you brought up—and you're kind of talking about it now—but in one of the things you mentioned here, you said, "Hollywood, Bollywood, comics, commercials, they added ridiculous standards to our internal baseline, which becomes exacerbated when the neurochemical cocktails are influenced by fear." So, there was an important term in there, "internal baseline." What do you mean by an internal baseline? And the existence of an internal baseline must mean there's an external baseline, right?

Yeah. So, we look, whether you're a cop or whether you're an HR person, whether you're hiring or firing somebody, we always see things from our point of view. And the problem is, if I don't put your shoes on, if I don't see today from your point of view, I have no idea where your cup is. So, if your cup is already full and I go, "Hey, Johnson, I need to talk to you." And now the anxiety starts building, "Hey, come on into my office and close the door." Anxiety's building. You see, it's not going to be a good day. Johnson's not getting promoted, we already know it. And each second, each minute is driving his internal baseline towards the red. Imagine that gauge, right? And it's flapping, the RPMs are going way over, right? But we don't see it. Why don't we see it? Because it's just another firing. Johnson's just another employee. It just happens to be Monday.

So, what happens is the kid comes in and shoots up the school, and every student knows it. But then everybody else that comes and goes, "How would we have known? There were no signs." There were signs and signals. The problem was you weren't wearing your glasses. There were smells and sounds and feels and tastes before the car accident on the freeway this morning, just before we got to Ferndale. But, you know what? Nobody put those gems together and said, "Ah, cold road conditions, it's slippery." I may—what happens is you have to take a look at a situation from the perspective of the situation you're in, not how I've always been. Because if I rely on my internal baseline, I've never eaten human flesh. I've never seduced a person to get in my house and then hacked him with a machete. Well, there are other people that do that for a living.

So, what I have to do is I have to acquiesce. I have to take a step back and I have to look at that situation and take a knee and go, "I wonder how he or she is feeling right now?" What does a cop do when they come up to the scene? A cop has an agenda: "I have this agenda: you keep it down, you sit down, you stand over there." And if anything starts misfiring on any of those command and control issues, the cop's anxiety starts going up. But wait a minute, you're an internal—stop for a minute and go, "Hey, I wonder what it would be like if this police vehicle screeched up to the corner and everybody that jumped out had guns?" Right?

So, we have to balance that. The place that I sought first and foremost was on the streets of Detroit where, when somebody pulled up and slowed down while you were walking along the street, they weren't going to stop and ask directions, right? It was probably going to be something else. So, I had to think about what their likelihood was. What is the evidence showing me? And we go right back to the preternatural, supernatural, Brian, when it first started.

I remember being in Iraq, and I would see soldiers and Marines either die or be seriously injured, and I would look at the situation. These Marines and soldiers had sandbags and they had plywood. So, they said, "You know what? They're trying to blow us up and shoot us. We'll build these structures." Now, we hadn't had a class at Pendleton about this structure, but we'll build this structure, and we'll put a folding chair in it. And I saw those collapse and kill or injure the Marine or the soldier before they ever saw combat. Why? Because the sandbags collapsed. Why? Because they couldn't play out the likelihood in that situation. So, that's internal: "I want to protect myself." But external: "How many sandbags can this 5/8-inch of marine ply hold?" Do you get what I'm trying to say? There's a science to it.

And, you know, I've had discussions about this before, and almost a little, not necessarily disagreement, maybe just a lexicon issue, maybe it's a language in how it's described. But it's very difficult to take another person's perspective. Psychologically speaking, that's because it turns into a platitude. It's like, "Well, you've got to see it from their eyes." "Well, man, I didn't grow up on this street. I didn't have those experiences. That didn't happen to me. How am I supposed to do this?" Which is why I like it when you kind of break down between internal versus external baseline. Just using the context of the situation, you can figure it out. You don't have to know everything about that person. You just have to be able to take a step out of yourself for a second and take the drone view, in a sense, to go, "All right, you're in the middle of a neighborhood. A bunch of people were sitting here, and you came screeching up and slammed on the brakes. Well, what would you—"

Exactly. So, juxtapose that, set that right next to some experiences that you and I had, not together, but jointly. We were in Afghanistan at different times, and we had different experiences. Then we came together a couple times, ultimately it ended up in Arcadia. Think of this, I mean, forming the business, think of this: when we were in Afghanistan and we were outside the wire, we weren't near a FOB (Forward Operating Base) or a COP (Combat Outpost) or a base that we could stop in and get gas and all that other stuff. We had to make do in the environment, yes. Some of that was finding food, some was finding water, and some was getting a haircut—something that simple that you needed to get done, an administrative thing.

So, with pointy-talky (gestures and pointing) and with looking at the context of the villages that we're in, we could figure out who is who. "Well, this kid is the mayor." You can tell that he's actually running around with this old guy that is making the decision, so that makes him the shot caller. And, "You know that place over there looks a lot like a barber shop in my—" Now it doesn't have the same sign, and the building is made out of mud huts, right? But the idea was that when we went inside, the feeling, the atmospherics were exactly alike.

So, one of the things that we have to do is we have to be able to get outside of ourselves, to use an external baseline, and say, "What piece does this satisfy in the village that I'm in? What thing does this like—" I've never been in an American city and seen people sitting on the side of an SUV or a bus. Now, everywhere else in the world—I've been in 53 countries—if there's a space on the roof, that's where you're going. You're going to climb on and you're going to help the other little kids get on too. That's why sometimes in India they have horrible train accidents, or in Pakistan they have a bus that overturns and kills a lot of people. We read that and what do we go? "Look at those backward, second-class people." We never for a minute consider ourselves in that environment, and if you wanted to get to the medical facility that day, that's how you had to do it.

So, a comparison against a baseline and making sure that I don't immediately jump to an internal baseline, which we use the word "prejudice." An internal baseline has to be prejudice because it's based on me. So, it cannot not be. It's inevitable, right? So, if we go back to "psychologically inevitable," the idea is to walk softly and listen a lot more than you talk, right? If you do that, then you'll find out, "Hey, this is just like me. This is just like my house. I have a favorite chair. This guy has a favorite chair." That's the kind of thing that I want to get.

And that goes into, obviously, one of our first principles of Arcadia about people are the same all over the world. We could do an entire episode just on that and what we mean by that. But it's looking for those similarities, not the differences, to help you assimilate those new environments. You brought up the examples of going to places like Afghanistan, which is about as rural as you can get. You don't speak the language, and you can still get by. It's not like going to Mars.

Exactly. We knew that cars would go in a certain direction. Let me give you an Iraq thing. My first time to Iraq, I came back and now I'm facing Marines that are about to go to Iraq, and I saw a lot of death and destruction. So, the very first thing that I did that pissed off all of the supervisors was I turned one of the Marines around and grabbed the strap on the back of their kit—you know, the big body armor you guys had a term for it—and I said, "Does anybody know what the strap is for?" And they all go, "Yeah, it's to drag a buddy out of combat."

And I walked out and I let him think about that for a couple of minutes, then I walked back in and I gave the class. Why? I wanted to smack them with reality so they would step out of their internal and look at their external and go, "Holy crap, I'm wearing a strap that somebody created on my back because they're likely going to get my legs blown out, or I'm going to get shot, and somebody's going to have to give me first aid." There's nothing more sobering. As a matter of fact, instead of giving a coin, if you gave somebody a tourniquet, now you're getting them to think outside of the internal and start to process the external.

And people talk about "situational awareness." Kiss my butt. What you're doing is you're oversimplifying something that's a hard process: a template and prototype match for a heuristic in every nuanced environment. And that's really hard to do. So, somebody that writes and goes, "It's easy," they're out of their minds. Every scholar is still having problems writing about it, and every movie is having problems filming it. So, you've got to slow down, and internal/externals are a really, really good way to do it.

And, you know, you brought up in there, again, going with the baseline and taking another perspective, and some of the different examples you used, you talk because you talked about serial killers, and there's such a fascination out there for people with that. And I understand the fascination because they think, "Oh my God, this is so odd, it's so rare," and they want it, that this must be some unique individual that can do this. There must be some, everyone wants to throw out some different psychological term for it. And there are podcasts on that stuff. You get all those documentaries because people are just interested again, because it's novel, they really don't understand it, which is why I think they're so powerful.

But you actually said in this, you said, "The truth of each case is more interesting, disturbing, and amazing than any script or screenplay could ever touch. But we're okay with it because, unlike reality—" this goes back to the documentaries and the movies about it, "—when the house lights come up, we can walk out of the theater safe in the knowledge that these characters were just actors playing in a role." And so that fantasy versus reality—those lines can get blurred, right? And that's what you're talking about, the whole article too, is that that blurs those lines, and I can enjoy that in that setting, in that context, because it's okay because I'm just looking in the Fabergé egg, right? I don't have to live inside there.

You don't live in the village, so you just described perfectly with the Fabergé egg analogy. You described two things: Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and internal versus external perspective. You can only see and know what you see and know, and if you base all your assumptions on that, then you come to a knee-jerk reaction, "Oh, this guy, here we go," right? And that's always going to lead us off in a direction that we don't want to.

So, I've had, I don't know if it's luck, to actually have to interview killers, homicide suspects, and people convicted of homicide, multiple murders, and serial killers. You know that sometimes that happens in the oddest times, and I always jump in and avail myself of that because I don't want to miss the opportunity. The thing that scares you more than any film I've ever seen in Hollywood is where we're sitting exactly like I am with you, and he says, "Yeah, at that point I knew that they knew it was me, so I stabbed him in the jugular. And then I had to lean him real quickly because I didn't want it to bleed all over the floor. I tried to hit the floor drain before I decapitated." And they're talking like it's a walk in the park.

Not three miles from where we're sitting right now, I had to investigate something that was a pretty bad incident. A father and his kids went to a Home Depot-style store, and they bought a mattress. And the kids were excited because it was the bunk beds, you know how that is, so imagine your first bunk bed. And so the dad, they went to a place where they could tie him down on top of the van, and the girl said, "Oh, let me sit up on top and I'll hold him down." And so the dad made the fatal choice of letting his daughter get up on the van. It happened on the freeway not far from where we are right now. And of course, when they reached a certain speed, wind shear lifted the mattress, and the girl got hit by a number of cars and died. So, I had to interview Dad.

Now, imagine Dad had no idea what was coming next. He never had an intent. He loved his kids and never wanted to see an injury. Now, put those people in the chair that you're sitting in and imagine the difference in those interviews. When people don't understand how interesting the human mind is, both of those people had to process the same information: one as the delivering agent, you see what I'm saying, one as having to react to those things that are going on. And if we're internally biased, we're never going to see the angle of that interview. We're never going to be able to ask that next question, "So, what were you thinking then? What happened then?" because we're already going to have a likely conclusion in our mind. That's why we go with heuristics because heuristics are a template or prototypical match at a rapid speed, based on artifacts and evidence, to come to the most reasonable conclusion. Now, guess what happens, Brian? In a month, if the DNA comes back and it's different, I'm a scientist, I change my opinion, right?

Well, and this gets back to how do you make this—it goes back to what this is about, sense making, and how do you make it more clear-cut? How does that work? Because you're giving, you're sort of giving examples of it, but it goes back to, you know, we use music a lot in our training courses, and we have a whole playlist for people, and it creates memory-emotion links. We did a whole episode on why music is so powerful. You ended it with a perfect Vbog quote: "Before you can read me, you've got to learn how to see me," because that's what everyone wants. "I want to—" Everyone's got the "I'm an expert at reading human behavior" or whatever on their LinkedIn title, which is hilarious, which immediately—

They couldn't read a book. Exactly.

Well, but the idea is like, okay, reading human behavior, it's not like that. It's not a^2 + b^2 = c^2. It's not an algorithm. It is an algorithm, but it's not one that, like you just said, there's complexity there, and it changes. So, I think that's part of the reason why we get things. Once I arrive at the answer, obviously confirmation bias, it's very difficult for me to ever change that answer. I don't ever—I will fight against it. "No, I know this is what happened," even when all of the evidence clearly points to that. And so, because we're biased, in a sense, all humans—and I use that term, that term gets thrown around a lot now, in "cognitive bias"—a cognitive bias is something you cannot do anything about. There's nothing you can do.

Yeah.

You can understand it and get a better know-how it affects you, but you can go retroactively, you can go back and go, "Wow, I suffered from that. I was an idiot. Yeah, I saw that the wrong way. I didn't see that coming." But those are going to affect us. So, what everyone wants is the simple answer of, "Well, how do I counter that? How do I not fall victim to those things?" Because at the same time, you brought up, you mentioned, it all comes down to time and distance, right? The further away I am, the longer time I have. I can right now sit here and that's fantasy at the furthest distance and at zero. But even with my own life, I can sit back here and look at stuff I did 20 years ago and go, "Oh, okay, yeah, I see where I did this wrong." Because one, I can look back on it, and I can learn. I've got the benefit of time. But when—and then obviously, the more immediate that situation is, that clock is now ticking faster and faster and faster. We've got the 24 show or whatever, where it's ticking down to that kickoff, and we're back to Hitch. We're back to Alfred Hitchcock with the bomb under the table, and only he knows it, and the counter is going. The temporal—it plays right into my limbic system and right into my survival mode, going, "This is immediate right now. This is a threat."

So, a lot of people, what I see is everyone goes, "Okay, this is going to happen, and when this happens here—" It's like, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Can we wind that clock back and not get to the point where I'm making—I'm Pepe Le Pew? I want to be Sherlock Holmes, right?" So, how do I wind that back though, and not ever get to the point where I'm now making life or death decisions, even though it's not a life or death situation?

But everything is a life or death situation first to your brain. Acknowledge that. Your brain will see it as such. It's very binary when it comes to that. As a matter of fact, your limbic system is overriding your PFC (Prefrontal Cortex) every day to tell you that. And if you can read that, you're going to have a wonderful, rich, beautiful life.

I'll give you an example. I'm going to play Theresa Caputo or John Edwards right now. I've never been in this building before, right?

Correct.

Okay. You set everything up.

Yep.

Okay. So, I walked in 35 minutes ago. I've never met any of the people in the room.

True. True.

Okay. So, right here out of my periphery, there's a book, and the book is Berry Gordy: To Be Loved.

Yeah, I saw that.

Okay. So, you know where that takes me? 1958, a boxer. We have a person, Little Jackie Wilson, singing "Lonely Teardrops." Berry Gordy says, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing! Let's produce it." Comes up with that, "To Be Loved, to love." What a great song.

So, why is music important? Because that book on that shelf, in a room I've never been, helps build the atmosphere of this room, and is going to help me talk to the people in this building and be better at my job. So, I see a money counter. That's important. I see the things around. So, what are those? Those are artifacts and evidence. So, if I walk up on your car in a traffic stop, and I see that it's a disheveled mess and it's horrible, and I've got food packages and cigarette packs and everything, you're not going to be the serial killer. You know why? Because you can't even hold it together in your own house with your food.

The funny thing is, in here, on the bookshelf that you can't see, it's behind you, there's a stack of running books in there, right? All these books: "Better Runner," "Be This," "How to Run." And so I'm like, "Okay, I wonder," and my brain immediately went, "Okay, I wonder who the runner is." Well, the owner, who's not here today, who just called before we started, goes, "Hey, sorry man, I just finished a half marathon down in Miami where I'm at." I was like, "Oh my gosh, I guess this is his place."

Brian, all the cues are available all around us, but listening skills in humans blow. We really suck at listening because while your lips are moving and you're talking, I'm already thinking of what I want to say next because my internal baseline is much more important than anything that you could come up with. There's the fear. The fear is that I can't separate fantasy from reality because the life I'm living at home that I repeat every single day: I get up, I go to work, I stop for coffee here, I go in and say hi to this person, I do the minimal standard, then catch up on my LinkedIn or play Angry Birds or whatever else it is, and then I come home. On the way home, I stop at the beer joint, or I stop at a fast food place, or right across the street, or whatever. Well, rinse and repeat. Why do I rinse and repeat? Because it gives me a sense of comfort, like that baby blanket that I held on to till I was 11 and my dad finally slapped it out of my hands.

So, what are you thinking? So, I have to be prompted by my environment, and when my environment speaks to me, if I'm not paying attention, guess what happens? I'm missing all of these great opportunities to make sense out of the future because everything I learn as a kid or as an adolescent or as an adult, I can pay forward to the next thing that happens to me. That's why I don't exhibit road rage, because I've already anticipated road rage. That's why I don't get upset when a kid sneaks out the window and has a cache of clothes somewhere, because I've already anticipated that those things are going to happen. Brian, anticipation and the gift of time and distance are the two most important factors of any human reconciling what's around them.

And, you know, a lot of folks want to say, "Well, this is something you can do. Go out in your environment and look for these things," and that's great and maybe that works sometimes in some very rigid and very important environment. But you almost have to do the opposite of that. You're talking about reading contextual clues or cues in your environment, and that's what builds the story. So, you want to build as accurate a story as possible.

Yes.

And so we do—I do that everywhere we go. It's just when we talk about human behavior and what's normal and what isn't, it's more like really what's typical than what's typical scientifically. But then what you're trying to do is that's all based on the situation that you're in, in that environment. That's very different in here than it is down the hall at whatever other office is here, which is different than the parking lot, which is different than this. So, I don't have to—there is no such thing as a list of these are the pre-event indicators, and if you see these things, you can stop this from happening, or you'll see it. It doesn't exist. It's not there.

But what you can do is just get really good at figuring out what's normal, what is just normal baseline where I'm at right now. What should I expect to see? Should I expect to see people driving a little bit slower because of the weather today? Yeah, but am I also going to see some people that don't care and aren't taking that into account? We saw it, and what happened to them? Car pileup on the way here. So, all of those things kind of play into it. Because some of the concepts we talked about, we just hit the wavetops and are extremely complex, it becomes, "Well, this is too hard then. How do I learn all this? How do I know all this?"

Let me give you an example of a couple of very simple things to show you how easy it is to do an on-duty roll call or come in and take a knee with your team just before you go out on the field. We were training SEALs at a base that I can't talk about, and I sent an advanced party out to take a look at different locations where we could observe for surveillance at elevation during a scenario. The Advanced Party came back and they go, "This is the place." I won't say the building because everybody will know what we're talking about because other Tier One operators have used it. And they said, "Oh, it's perfect. We can see here 1,000 meters. We can see here 1,100. We can see this. So these would be perfect."

And I go, "Okay." So, Shell and I show up, we're starting to allocate the teams where to go, and I go to their OP (Observation Post), and there are all of these deciduous trees with all of the leaves on, and I can't see 15 feet. When do you think the Advanced Party went? The Advanced Party went in the fall. You get what I'm trying to say? And so they go, "Man, I can see forever," never considering that those trees would populate leaves. So, we had to come up with something. Now, that's anticipating time temporarily forward and saying, "What's a likely spiral that can come from it?"

I'll tell you a situation that happened in combat, killed a lot of people. They said that uniforms were stolen, so be on the lookout. You'll remember Camp Korean Village and the horrific event that happened there. It was soon after Camp Korean Village. But, you know what? Uniforms were stolen: PT gear. And the people that came in the wire were wearing PT gear, running in formation in plain sight. Why did people miss it? Because that BOLO (Be On the LookOut) never specified that the uniform was a physical training outfit. So, Brian, we exclude that which we don't consider, and we do it automatically. So, if I don't think critically about what might populate the environment I'm going into externally, then I'm stuck in the internal, and all I can compare the known and the unknown against is my own experiences.

You tied it right back to, "Before you can read me, you've got to learn how to see me." We know more about outer space than we do about what's in the bottom of the ocean.

Exactly.

And our phone can process more information than a computer did on the Lunar Lander. But think about that. I mean, we study, scientists study outer space. We're sending, we've got some drone on Mars right now collecting information, looking if there are Japanese people. But their view is upside down. We send stuff all the way out there, and we're constantly probing, and we literally don't know that much information about what's in the bottom of the ocean that's right here on Earth. Why? This is not being oversimplified: I can't see that. I can't see what's down there. But if I look up, yes, I can see what's going on up there, and if I get a telescope, I can see even farther. And then I can launch something out there to see even farther. So, I can see up there, but that dark, scary place down there, the bottom of the ocean, I can't see it.

When we did the test with the kids, we did two tests on the same weekend at the dojo. And both of them got picked up by DOJ (Department of Justice). The first test was draw a picture. Every single kid that came into the dojo drew a picture of what a stranger looked like. And everyone came out with—folks, read the article because the photos are there, you'll be able to see it—every comic villain mirrors the look that they made.

As a matter of fact, you and I were in a class and we were talking about EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) and bombs. And I asked the young female that was in the class, "What was your impression of a bomb?" And she mentioned the round bomb with the fuse that we saw in all the cartoons with a coyote, because you'd never seen an IED (Improvised Explosive Device). So, you can't be expected to formulate an opinion on something or compare it if you've never had an experience. So, training is specifically designed to put you in experiences that you can pay forward.

"Look, I'm not sure what a bomb looks like, but I think if a bomb was in that garbage can sitting by that door, that would cause more danger than one sitting outside." "Okay, so whose bag is that?" "Well, I'm not sure." Do you understand now how I'm building a case that this might be something? I didn't have to peer inside of it and see it was a bomb. Same thing with the sniper guy on the roof during a parade. If he ain't carrying a camera, guess what? I need to take a knee, get my binos out, and figure out, first of all, where's his orientation? Could he be looking at the parade? Then, is he attempting to conceal himself in any way? Do you see artifacts and evidence put together? That's reason. And our dogs—our dogs don't have reason, right? So, they didn't come up with, "Where did Brian go?" because you went out to get the paper. They said, "Oh my God, Brian abandoned me! He's never coming back." The dog is, you know, he's manic because of it, and then so excited when I get back, right?

No, my dog's not very excited when I come home. And, you know, there's a lot more we can unpack with this, but I really wanted to start it out with this in "errors of sense making" because there's a lot of things attributed to, "That person was an idiot," or "They're stupid," or "I would never have done that." And that automatically means you're never going to learn from that incident. You're never going to take anything away from it unless you went, "What if that was me? How would I have made—how would I have gotten to the point where I made such a stupid decision like that?" And then once you unpack it, you realize, "Well, wait a minute, in that point in time, that wasn't a stupid decision."

Exactly.

That made a whole hell of a lot of sense to that individual at that time because—

And being overwhelmed. We have to acknowledge the fact that sometimes information comes at us so fast that we're going to be overwhelmed. That's where training steps in, because even if I'm overwhelmed, I'm likely to react positively to the situation before it becomes fatal. So, training has a function: one, to experience things that I haven't experienced, but two, to be able to pay forward likely outcomes so I can decide now before I go down and slip on the ice, I can decide to change my shoes or my hat because it's raining or snowing. Those are critical decisions in modern-day sense making that'll keep you alive.

I think that's probably a good spot to sort of bring it in for a landing. Again, we covered a lot. I'll post this on our Patreon, the actual article and some other stuff on there, so folks can reach out with different questions, and we love it when people get on there and ask us very specific stuff about some of the episodes, or, "Hey, you brought up this, what did you mean by that?" Because that allows us to really kind of dive deep into it, and then it informs future episodes of what we're talking about.

But for the first one of the new name of the show and the relaunch of The Human Behavior Podcast, I really wanted to start here because I thought that's a great starting point for understanding human behavior and how it works. Because you have to be able to make sense of your environment in order to make an informed decision. And if you start there, you're literally less likely to be wrong. You're going to be right more often than you're wrong because everyone's going to make a mistake. You're going to see something incorrectly, but you can fine-tune your own innate ability that was given to us by, you know, God, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, whoever you choose to believe in or not believe in, whatever it is. We have that on board. We're just not used to using it anymore.

And I would add something. I would add that I was born and raised—born at St. John's, born and raised at Eton Grosse Pointe, not far from where we are right now. All of my experiences came to me from growing up and living on the street and learning about people. I would say that every once in a while, you need help. You can get help reading a book or watching a movie. You also get help by going to those people that were there, that lived those experiences, and talking to them. Motown—we're in Motown, and we talk about the memory and emotion link of music and how we can warn you. The famous story of the SEALs we trained, and training those same SEALs that were at that place without the green leaves, they went into combat, and what song did we prep them with during that? It was The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

If you feel that song coming up in the environment, that means that your unconscious brain is there before you are. That's why we can memorize every lyric of a song. That's why we can be driving along and all of a sudden hear a song and go, "Damn, I left the iron on!" because we've associated that. So, if you—and I'll leave you with this for our next episode—if you study the string theory and you understand those vibrations are important, stringed musical instruments playing in the background, the "wall of sound"—another great concept. So, we've got so much to unpack. I'll leave it there, but I'll tell you, we're not done giving yet. This may be the first episode, but we've got hundreds before it that informed where we're going.

Yep. Well, I think that's a good point to end on. And we appreciate everyone for listening and tuning in. Always reach out to us. All the links to everything we discuss will be in the episode details, and same with our contact information. Follow us on Patreon, we've got all kinds of extra stuff on there. And don't forget that training changes.