The Perception of Time

No, I think it's great. The one impression that you do better than anything is Matthew McConaughey, and that's only with your abs alone after he did Dallas (referring to Dallas Buyers Club). All right, all right, so why I got to reference that movie? You could have been an extra!

The idea I'd like to posit here is that the reason we had such success with our scenarios with ASAT (Adaptive Situational Awareness Training) and Combat Hunter—the reason we tried to start a revolution, and we're going to keep fanning the flames for AI (Artificial Intelligence) and VR (Virtual Reality)—is that they're situations where we can control time. That is so important to build a memory and emotion link, and the repeat performance over time. We'll talk about that as we go along. But to start, time isn't what we think it is.

If you're at Ground Zero, time is giving us a direction to our memories, our thoughts, and our experiences. What does that mean? Let's think of a GPS. A GPS is less accurate in Boulder, Colorado, than it is in Maine because you're 5,280 feet above sea level. So, they have to adjust time in Boulder. And then, all of a sudden, when we get even higher—let's say a satellite that's orbiting the Earth—that's different than if we were on the face of the Moon. That's different than if we anticipated being in Mars or outside of our solar system. Time changes. Gravity messes with time. Different external factors mess with time.

We're consistently thinking that time is one of those elements that we can always count on: we have this many nanoseconds, this many seconds, this many minutes, and that screws with us. That human construct, to help us identify in what order things happen and to normalize our predictions of the sun coming up and going down and when it's harvest season and everything else, those were set to reduce our anxiety. But because we now rely on them too heavily, we forget that you can slow down time. You can move and influence time, and even if it's an illusion—time is an illusion—so that's okay. That sounded like your Matthew.

But what I'm trying to say is the red and blues on a police car make us dumber. The red color of a fire truck makes us dumber. Rushing to the sound of gunfire can get us killed because we don't completely understand our relationship with time, and whether we influence time or time influences us.

Yeah, and I would say, on your last point there, it's sort of both: we influence time, and time influences us. So let's get into some of the factors that really play into our perception of time. You even brought up what we call memory-emotion links, and emotion is a huge one. Emotion and time: when you're happy, excited, everything's going well, time flies by. When you're bored, it just drags on. And then, especially in high-stress situations, I'm sure some people listening have experienced that, where it's like time slows down.

So, let's define what we mean by this, because you brought up a number of great points that we can define within this example. We're all having a good time, time flies by, because there are a lot of emotions going on, but it's positive emotions, and it gives this perception that it's just flying by. But then, I would say the opposite end of that spectrum is when your limbic system is basically taken over. You're in some sort of survival situation, or something that your brain perceives as a survival situation. You get this idea that time slows down. And then, I'm sure other people have heard of visual narrowing, tunnel vision, that kind of stuff. It has this effect as if time slows down.

What it really comes down to is it's about attention and what you're attending to. You're actually basically using 100% of your brain power in that situation. So, it gives you this effect as if things have slowed down when, in fact, it gets rid of all the outside crap that you don't need. That's why you get that tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. It says, "Don't worry about any of that stuff. This thing right here in front of you is the scariest thing on the face of the planet, and this is the first time you get to use all of me." This is your brain talking to you. At that point exactly, it gives this perception as if time slows down. Does that make sense in the way I described it?

Yeah, but you're on the cusp of something that's great because you explained it, but some people listening won't completely understand what you're saying. So, the idea that the brain perceives a situation as a survival situation—one, your brain is constantly measuring everything around you in survival mode. Your brain has only one mode. Your brain's mode is, "It's me against everybody else, me against the world, me against everything." And so, that anxiety fluctuation, fight or flight, that's always the first thing that you're thinking about: "How is this going to impact me? How is this going to hurt me? Affect me from breeding, eating, whatever else it is?"

So, what's happened is the longer we've stayed alive, the less attuned we are to that, but it's always the first response of humans. Why is that important? Because that means that your anxiety level stretches or compacts time in a manner which is best for your understanding for future events. So, it assumes you're going to survive this event and it's saying, "What can I learn and progress for future events?"

You said something that was really great that I don't think everybody understands either. And look, we're nobody, we're nothing, we just know one thing, and that's human behavior. But I'll tell you this, when you're talking about, "Now I'm finally using 100% of my brain," there's so many studies and pundits and talk out there about, "We're only using so and so percent." No, you're not! If you're awake and alive and aware, you're using 100% of your brain. Now, a brain may or a... but right now you're as highly as you can. You're not going to all of a sudden have some gosh-damn epiphany at the last moment. You get what I'm saying? That's not driven by chemicals like your adrenal cortex or endorphins or something that are going to make you superhuman for the second. I get it, but that's not going to expand your capacity for decision making, let's say.

Once you understand those two things—that the brain's always perceiving it as a survival situation, and you only have 100% and you're using it—that's why time slows down. The perception of time slows down in that moment. And all of a sudden you get auditory exclusion because you don't need it right now. You're in a fight for your life, and you know what those things have to take a stand on, and everything is going in slow motion. No, it's going at regular speed. It's just all of a sudden all of those sensory perceptions are so important to your brain that it's saying, "Okay, let's put Tommy over here, and I want to see the muzzle flash there, and now the car is pulling up." It's almost as if you're in control of the fast forward and the slow on your TV. And I understand for the scientists in the room that's not an exact representation, but it's a depiction that's close enough for all humans to understand it so we can accept it.

You know, Brian, to give you an example, Rachel Ray does these cooking shows. You know me, I'm a cooking show guy, and she always says, "Okay, I'm going to make all of the meals for a week on Sunday, and therefore I'm going to save time so when I come home." Well, you're not saving time, you're moving time. You're adjusting time.

But that has to do with the quantity versus time, right? Like it takes just as much time to make, you know, four pounds of meatloaf as it does two pounds of meatloaf or something.

Yeah, but that proves that there's a mathematical quality, and that also reinforces spacetime. You have time, and then when you add the three dimensions of space, then what you have is now a four-dimensional continuum, and that can be manipulated. You can, for example, you said time speeds up when you're having fun. I would throw the corollary: "A watched pot never boils." That means that when time is laboriously slow—and we all knew about it because some Greek guy carved that into a gosh-damn Parthenon pillar—the idea is those things are real because the perception is real to us. So therefore, the actual time never changes. Time keeps plotting along. But where we come into it, the angle that we approach it from, that's a classic argument. We have been conditioned to think that time is an arrow. It starts at the left and it goes to the right, it's a continuum. And then, my joke is always a tightrope walker: there's only two ways, he's going forward or he's going back. What happens is time is relevant to what our social construct is, because it'll continue in perpetuity even if we don't. So that's why we have to really, really attend to it. And when you say attention, that's a key function of understanding how time relates to you in the moment.

Yeah, so let's get into that, because attention is extremely powerful, even with your example there of that high-stress situation, where it feels like time slowed down. Or even to the myth—I don't know where that came from, where someone says you only use 10% of your brain. I don't even know where that came from, I got to look that up actually. But the idea is, no, you don't. It just comes down to is you can only attend to so much at a given time. So, what it is is, and this is why they have everyone talks about the Flow State and all this different stuff, and all it is is paying attention. Yes, I agree, you are so distracted that you have to train yourself to get better at attending to things in your environment. That's absolutely true, because there's so much coming at us and the way our phones and technology is.

So, the idea is that attention is a very integral part to our perception of time. So it has to be what we attend to, which is also why when things are boring and it's moving slow, there's not a lot of brain activity going on. And it's the opposite, obviously, with the examples we gave. But attention is extremely powerful because that explains what you were talking about, the perception of time slowing down in those high-stress incidents, because it just tunes everything else out. It says, "Here's the one thing you need to focus on right now," and it does feel like that.

To make sure we don't get too abstract with the conversation, one of the important things to understand is, you gave the idea of, "Okay, time starts on the left, it goes right," or "we have this single line." And I get it, for the areas of the galaxy or really, really small elements, that changes a little bit. But it's really important that we understand that time influences us and we influence time. And you can slow time down in a sense. You look at different, even like cultural differences, a bigger city where people are moving around, moving fast, versus you go down to the South and people talk a little bit slower and things go a little bit slower in a small town. That's what we're talking about. It's still the same timeline, but because of the amount of information we're taking in, maybe more versus less, or the feeling of being busier or something, it adds to it.

This is always interesting to me because I think it's very hard for us as humans to grasp this concept, because we're like, "No, I have an eight-hour shift," or, "No, I have this to do, I got to go pick up the kids at three." It's like, "Yeah, but three could be in a little bit, or that can be a long time from now depending on what you're doing." And when you can take that perspective, it helps you influence how you perceive time, and I think therefore how you use time. A big thing people talk about is, "You got to have really good time management." And I look at it as, "No, I like having good personal management. I know me and what works for me versus the time." The time can stretch and be an accordion, but it's how I operate within that spacetime. Does that make sense?

No, no, let me give you an example of exactly that. So, you know that I had to, this is ancient history, but you know that I had a drive with Sean and then with my brother Jeff out to Colorado a number of times before Shelley and I made the move to Colorado, because I had to get my Michigan law enforcement officer training council certification in Colorado to continue my law enforcement stuff. So Shelley and I were making a series of 23-hour trips back and forth to get that done. And I remember pulling into, I think it was Eagle, Colorado, to a City Market, which is just a convenience store, to grab some waters for the hotel room and a couple of minor things. I had them in my cart and I'm in line, and there's only two people in line, that's why I chose the line. And the lady in front of me and the guy that was doing the checkouts were droning on about everything. "Oh, and it's going to be a fast spring, I'll tell you what. One thing that I know, yeah. And we have that, well, when you're peeling back the frog on that horse's hoof..." And I'm sitting there tapping my foot and finally I go, "Hey, come the F on! What's going on here?" And they're like, "Oh, you know, your timing is all wrong on this. You got that big city mentality."

Then looking back on that incident after having lived in Colorado, I'm the guy, I'm the old man on the porch with the rocker and the lemonade, you know what I'm saying? Because what's happened is that culture influences your perception of time, just like cognitive attention or fear or any of the other things that do it. And what happens is you are either in on that, you allow that, and you go with that flow—there's your Flow State—or what happens is you buck that trend and you fight against it.

That goes directly to cop work. And I'll give you an example of that. When you show up on the scene and the guy's shooting, he has an agenda and his timeline is different than yours, different than yours. And that's the key. So let me go backwards in time.

Funny.

Yeah, exactly, which you can, by the way. But look, what is the function of sleep? The function of sleep is to allow your brain time to rest, because it does so much. How many calories per pound does your brain expend compared to the rest of your body? So we know the brain is a hugely important mechanism for more than just trivial things like blinking and swallowing and breathing, or we wouldn't have different regions of the brain that controlled that, right? So the brain is so, so hugely important, and time is one of those things that humans build to show us the order of things, and that makes life less anxious and scary.

And so, when we can slow time down and understand the days and the seasons and the hours—like Brian, you and I are going to meet—well, we can't just name a time, we have to name a time and a place. That's something my brain can grasp and pick up and turn around, and that goes to organization. So all of those things are absent when we come sliding up to a scene and the person's lost their flow of time because they're doing insane or seemingly crazy things right in front of you and you're rushing into that.

Look, if we rush to a scene just to give us more time for critical thinking, that would make sense. And then somebody right now is saying, "Well, you don't have the time, you got to shoot or fight or you do." Well, wait a minute, if you're trading your life for those at the scene and it's not wartime, something's wrong. You're moving too fast. Of course, in wartime, even experts are going to die. Why? Because they're dropping bombs and they've got all these other external arousal things, mines and snipers that are trying to kill you. But that's not so in first responders, in firemen, in cops, in school shootings, do you see what I'm saying? Those things are less obtuse, they're less prone to us missing cues because we can slow time down. And slowing time down is a function of not moving slowly through your environment, but saying, "Wait a minute, before I cross this threshold, time left to right with the arrow, I must make certain things sure. I have to make these things certain. Do I have cover? Do I have support? Am I wearing the appropriate armor? Is there more than one opponent?" Do you see what I'm saying? And those are things that we're naturally geared to make. Those are decisions that our brain is already ready for.

This is where I get what you're saying, but I would disagree that we naturally make those things, because we're so emotionally based and emotionally responsive, and everything is filtered through our limbic system in a sense. We don't react unless something is emergent, and therefore we overreact or we speed up time needlessly. Meaning, I agree. So, because you brought up some good examples, like right, our timelines are different. Everyone knows, especially from training folks or operating in the Middle East or different cultures like that, it's like, "Oh yeah, they have Insha'Allah time." It's like, "Well, if Allah wills it, that's when I'll be there." And I would literally be like, "No, no, no, pre-combat checks go at 2300 (11:00 PM)." And it'd be, "Insha'Allah!" Like, "No, Insha'Allah 2300!"

It's a time.

Exactly. But that's what I mean, it's no different than what people call "doper time," where it's like, "Wake up at the crack of noon, I have no timeline, nowhere to be." So I figure out my days, I go, and I'm basically, "I'll meet you in the Burger King parking lot at noon and it's 5:30." They're doing that, just going through their environment.

But the reason why I kind of want to, or what I mean by that, to sort of clarify when I said I don't agree, is that we typically wait until things are obvious and apparent and a problem, and then we feel that we need to react. Even though I get what you're saying, that intuitively our brain is trying to predict everything and it doesn't want to be surprised. And because we don't know how to perceive things correctly sometimes, or how to analyze things sometimes, that we aren't tuned in or not primed for the right type of recognition in those areas. And so, like you're saying, you're going, "Okay, our thing is, 'Oh crap, drop everything, let's go!'" I mean, that's consistent throughout so many different factors. We're not really primed to sit back and go, "All right, well, let's conduct some predictive analysis here." Because you keep talking about you can slow time down, and so I want you to explain what you mean by that. But I would almost push back and say it's a little bit counterintuitive to how humans typically operate in that sense.

And I would say this, I would say your misgivings are well-founded, but they're, in a sense, wrong because you're forgetting the cardinal rule: do we influence time or time influences us? If we're walking down a trail and a mountain lion steps out in the middle of the trail, or a bear, something that's vicious that could eat us, our natural instinct is to freeze, bend up, back up slowly, and raise our arms up to try to look like we're bigger than the animal. That's spinal-tuned. That isn't something that we were taught by our parents and our grandparents because they survived a bear or mountain lion attack.

So, what happens is to even the score, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah gives us certain file folders that are partially filled in, hardwired. And one of those things is that we have to eat, we have to breed. And the other one is that when we're facing danger, get loud, get big, scream. And then we get the fight. Well, I'm going to fight. I'm not going to fight a bear unless the bear grabs onto my leg. And then those decisions are already predisposed, they're already in our brain. Now, if we don't choose them, the great thing about it is the bear kills us or the mountain lion drags us into the cave and eats us, and then we don't have to worry about adversely influencing the rest of society. Survivors influence society, and that's where we learn those lessons from. And they're hard lessons to learn. But the great thing is we've had hundreds of thousands to millions or billions of years of evolution to help us.

So you're sort of saying that this instinctual freeze is sort of our biology giving us the gift of time and distance?

That's exactly what it is. And let me fight that argument a little bit further, Brian. So, weapons, and a lot of people that are listening to this would understand that fundamentals are weapons. So what is a pistol designed for? A pistol is designed to get you to your shotgun. What's a shotgun designed for? It's designed to get you to your rifle. And a rifle is designed to get you to your sniper rifle, to the artillery, and moving back further and further. Why are we moving back? Because up close and personal in that interpersonal distance, anything can happen. It's a crapshoot. Even an untrained opponent can stab you or kill you. So why then, if we have a pistol and the training is at 25-meter targets and we make ourselves sure that we can hit them with multiple rounds, why then are most of the shootings at seven yards or less, multiple rounds, and they're not fatal? You get what I'm trying to say?

And that's a function of us fighting our hardwiring. Our hardwiring is saying, "Give yourself time and distance, take that cover, wait a minute, are you seeing this incident correctly?" But our push past that, our rush to get in there, our emotional selves are the ones that are integral in our undoing. And that's what I'm trying to say. I'm not disagreeing with you, and I see the way that you would think that you could disagree with me. But if you understand the fundamental underpinnings of all humans are identical, that we have those warning systems, the people without the warning systems are the most vulnerable in our society, and they're the ones that are predated upon most.

So would then, and this is kind of just to pop in my head when you're talking, but would then almost denial in a sense be sort of the gift of time and distance? Is it the other side of the same coin that you brought up?

Because denial makes sure that we don't expend calories, because back when we were formed, there was an environment that was equally as dangerous to us. And finding food was hard, shelter was hard, building a fire was hard. So you didn't want to go out there half-cocked and expend a bunch of calories on something that wasn't a danger. So denial was, "Hey, are we absolutely sure?" Now, what's happened: technological advances, the surety of food and shelter, have made us dumber over time. So now denial is exactly the opposite way. We actually slow down. Our brain is trying to learn, and we don't understand that that primitive kick in the ass was designed for a good thing. And now it's become a bad thing. Now it's inaction when we should be acting.

So, that is again a look at time. Time is flexible, time moves. And so once we understand that, the perception of the person at the scene that we're about to shoot or use less-than-lethal force on is different than ours. They think they have a lot more time. You get what I'm trying to say?

They're making a decision or trying to create more time.

Exactly. So, we have to be in tune with our place in time, the distance between us, their place in time, and all of the other external arousal factors. And what do we know? That when those external arousal factors raise, the number is going to certainly become insurmountable at some point. So our best decisions are going to be made before that inverted U, and better decisions will be made if we're at a greater distance, that we slow time element down. In other words, it's not inevitable, and that we take things like cover. Cover is a gift of time and distance.

Okay, so I get what you're saying now. So, let's jump into it because you keep saying, "All right, you can slow time down." How do I slow time down? What do you mean by that? Because you're giving, obviously, some high-stress incidents or complex situations, or like you're talking about a police call where someone's shooting up a place or something like that. So you're in a certain category with that alone. But just to keep it broad at first, what do you mean by, "We can slow time down," or, "I got to give myself the gift of time and distance"?

So, camouflage gives you the gift of time and distance. So cover scent. And now let's just go a different direction, let's talk about hunting. If I want to hunt something to eat it, and I use the cover scent—skunk scent or urine—to fool the animal that I'm in estrus cycle, so they think I'm a breeding female somewhere that's around there. And camouflage, if I add just those two things, and then add something environmental like I'm upwind or downwind to something, what happens is that buys me the gift of time and distance. So now, when that animal's natural instinct would have been to alert before that and avoid that specific trail, I've fooled the perception. I've increased my perception and decreased yours, and that's acceptable.

So, if I am going to give myself the gift of time and distance, let's talk fishing. I use a chartreuse bait because that's known to stand out against the water, and then I make sure that my bait has a pattern that's similar to a fish and maybe a little rattle, a couple of beads that are in it that vibrate, that attract the fish. So what I'm doing is I'm fooling the fish's senses to say, "Hey, this is another fish," to make them avoid seeing the hook. And so now they're hooked and they go. I'm using the gift of time and distance.

So history is full of examples, and I could go on and on in different things. The Trojan Horse is a gift of time and distance, right? What it did is I fooled you into allowing me inside of your border by doing a ruse. And so if we use that efficiently, Brian, then what we can do is we can buy time. And again, that's a colloquialism. In an event, and likelihood changes, likelihood of events changes, and that's magic. I mean, to know that you can change this from a lethal encounter to less-than-lethal, that's amazing! To know that something like the Heimlich maneuver is a gift of time and distance. The Heimlich maneuver is turning a certain death by choking into a possible save by doing a few simple steps. That's magic, Brian. You see where I'm going? I'm saying this is true Harry Potter.

Yeah, and there's, I understand your examples because you've even brought up deception basically as a form of time and distance or a form of slowing down time. But it's hard in those moments to do that, right? So obviously, like you said, the closer I am to that "bang" in a sense, of that chaotic situation, the less time I do have. And I think because that's objectively true, that actually influences then how we act and perceive in those times. That's your point about influencing time and time influencing.

And it's like our own, I think our own way of perceiving these things, or, and this is why I brought up, even the language we use influences time. And the last episode we did about, where we talked about the myth of, "Anything can happen." It's like, "Well, if you think that way, if you perceive things that anything can happen, then that's chaos for your brain and it will never, it just, it can't." So you're affecting your cognitive abilities. So you're actually speeding up time when you're doing that, rather than slowing time down. Saying, "Well, okay, what I don't know what this is, but what isn't it?"

These are sort of theoretical questions you can sort of ask yourself in the moment, because like you said, we always want to get in and get something done, "All right, hey, let's go do this!" And sometimes we got to take a step back. So I understand the fact that I can, "All right, stop before I go up there, pull up the binoculars and look." But you brought it back to training, is that we don't, we don't really do that stuff a lot. If I don't, if I don't put that into these actual thinking points into how I train, those inevitabilities are created.

And there was, someone had showed me and they asked me about it, it was a law enforcement traffic stop thing. And it was like, "You're talking about time and distance, and look, this guy pulled this guy over and he came out and immediately came right up to him." I was like, "Okay, stop. You..." And I asked this person, "How many times you pulled someone over?" They're like, "Thousands." I was like, "Okay, has anyone ever jumped out of their vehicle and started walking back to you?" Like, that's the decision point. It's not that you're already so obvious. And what I mean is, we don't build in these thinking points into how we approach it and to know what that is. So then therefore, it's very hard for me to apply it. And obviously we could say training, but I think this stuff is conceptually even hard to wrap our heads around.

And that doesn't, Brian, I'm so in agreement with you, but that doesn't mean it's an excuse. You see what I'm saying? That's what we're doing is we're allowing it to be an excuse, saying, "Well, it's hard." Kiss my ass, it's hard!

So, here's the thing, let's equate it to something quite different. Let's equate it to cheating on your spouse or a significant other. Why is that fun? That's not fun because breeding is fun. You got somebody at home you could breed with, you got your hand you could simulate breeding with. The reason it's fun is because of the novelty, and novelty makes things exciting again. And what happens is now all of a sudden, "Let's sneak around and there's some subterfuge and, man, you're looking at me different than my spouse or significant other does." And that none of that's true. What happens is the routine, that word, of your relationship has lost its peaks and valleys. It's normalized. And that's up to you to fix that. But what happens instead is it's much easier to go across the street and bag Mrs. Howell that lives in the corner apartment. Because that's novel and somehow feels new and fresh if we could wrap our heads around that, that we've sanded down the peaks and valleys, time has done. You get what I'm trying to say?

I don't know if Mrs. Howell would go for that. She does seem like that kind of lady, but...

Oh, she does. Couple of drinks and Mrs. Howell is crazy.

But no, so that was actually, you're talking about novelty versus routine. And because our, and this goes back to, I kind of had said that we're not sort of primed for this because our brain is constantly trying to make things routine. It's trying to get rid of novelty. It wants to normalize everything. So therefore, that's a huge factor in influencing my perception of time. Something that's new or novel, well, that's different. Now I have more attention, now I'm attending to that.

Exactly. And this came from survival, Brian, that came from survival because this is somehow different than all these other file folders I have. I've normalized all of those, and this may be danger or opportunity. And that's exactly true. So, your last statements are so powerful and true, they need to be repeated. Look, you normalize things. That doesn't mean it's the way that things should be. That means that that's the way nature makes sure that you don't expend needless calories and only jump when there's a real fright. Our brain doesn't want to do that constantly.

Yeah, and that's obviously a huge factor in this perception. And then how we describe those things, and how we articulate them, then that's where the language comes in. But how am I supposed to do that? How am I, meaning, and this is again getting into why we talk about everything starts with cultivating curiosity. And going, "Looking, if you can prime yourself just to be curious with your environment." Yes, there's a world out there, there are many worlds out there that you would be hopefully fascinated by. But that's what we're kind of getting at with the gift of time and distance is, overall, I would say is get rid of, stop making everything the same. And look for novelty in situations. I, and that, because if I look for novelty, it's a generalization. I don't need to, there's no specific thing I need to look for because it's so contextually based that I can just say, "Well, what's the..." This is why again, for those of you in our training, where we talk about incongruent signals, like, "Okay, hmm. Oh, a piece of candy." It's the Peter Griffin, "Ooh, a piece of candy." You know what I mean? If I look for that kind of stuff, that is a way for me to affect my perception of time and therefore create time and distance. That is, that's a way that I can influence time versus just time influencing me. So you can, you can change that dynamic and change the influence in any situation. Now, maybe only a little bit in certain ones, but it's still, it's still a possibility. And that's hard. I think again, because I go, "Well, why, why is this difficult for people to really understand?" It's like this double-edged sword of how we're primed biologically, if that makes sense.

That's true. That's absolutely the truest thing that everybody needs to understand is that hardwiring messes with us our entire life because we think we're smarter than the average bear. And we just, we just got the hat and we got the tie on and we're looking for picnic baskets.

And we shout out. Shout out to the park rangers. We did.

Exactly. Yes, thank you, guys and ladies. So look, Brian, you talked about incongruence. So what's incongruence? Incongruence is a frequency, it's a musical note. It's the balls at McDonald's in the playground, and they're constantly in motion, and that can be read and it can be felt. And what's the Doppler effect? As we're going fast down that train track, that siren and that whistle becomes less powerful to us because all of a sudden we have to reassess where it's coming from. And what does that mean? That means that the faster we go, the more incongruencies we're going to miss. We're going to miss that turbulence, we're not going to see that turbidity, and that's how we form anomalies. Anomalies don't just pop up unless, like we joke in class, if a person's kneeling down putting a nose cone in an RPG (Rocket-Propelled Grenade) and oriented toward your direction, you don't have to wait for three signals, right?

But what happens is at the wide end of the funnel, at the biggest end of the funnel, you're searching for novelty. You're searching for nuance. You're looking to be interested in cultivating curiosity. That's going to lead you to, "Wow, there's not a lot of frequency here, so my baseline isn't very animated. But look at all of this noise over here. Hmm, that might mean something." As you approach the noise you go, "Wow, this is very incongruent because it's not a band playing, it's people yelling, and it's not people yelling for a sporting event, it's people yelling at each other." And do you understand what that's doing now? Now the funnel is narrowing in the time and distance space, which are the two outer rings. And what we're doing is we're coming towards anomalous behavior. An anomaly is something above or below a baseline that needs to be investigated. Bingo! Now we have reasonable suspicion. Now we're there.

What we've done is we've slowed time down by managing time, by naming time. Rachel Ray didn't save a gosh-damn second. Rachel Ray moved time around so it was more economical for her, which is a math problem. And not all math problems come out the same when we get further and further out into the galaxy, which shows you that you can even at your atomic level influence the outcome of a situation by adjusting your perception of time. I know that sounds big, but it's not, it's a very simple construct.

It is a big concept though, but I get what you're doing, an excellent job of simplifying and explaining what you mean, especially when you're talking about buying time. It's like you can, that is a little bit easier for me to understand, right? It's going, "Okay, I see, I'm going to do all of this at once right now today so I don't have to spread it out over the week." So yeah, I technically will save a couple minutes here and there because of economy of scale, meaning I'm not starting up the vehicle and driving. I don't go to the grocery store, then come home, and then go to the whatever other store and then come home. I go to all of them while I'm out because that's, there's a little bit of economy of scale there, sort of, in a sense. But I get what you're saying in terms of buying time.

But how do I then prime myself in a way? I'm sitting here listening to this podcast and I got Matthew McConaughey and The Nutty Professor on here talking about their...

Yeah, you instruct some time.

But how can I prime myself with this? I know we're giving examples. You get what I'm saying? We were talking about training, but I'm listening here, what do you do, knowing what you know, Greg, in the moment where you go, because we've done this before, right? Where we've had conversations about business stuff and you're like, "Hey, do we have to answer that right now?" And it's like, "No, we don't. So let's push that down." But that's a business thing, and it works, right?

So, let's talk about that in two layers. The first layer is an example that my great friend Brian Marren uses when we're on the road that sometimes people miss. Brian points to the thermostat on the wall and says that is such an important idea because that thermostat says 69 degrees, and that 69 degrees is the same in East Timor as it is in Mexico City as it is in Kansas City. And therefore that won't change. That scale is constant and consistent. But how I view that 69 – "It's too cold for me," "69 is too warm for me" – that changes how we operate human behavior. So now I put on a jacket or I take off a jacket or I put on a summer hat so I don't get sunburned. So that's what you're talking about. That's the street answer. The street answer is, "So what?" And the "so what" to time is, "If I have more time, would I come to a better decision?" So where can I economize that time? If I'm racing to the scene to take cover and evaluate the situation, if I'm racing to the scene because a person is fighting for their life and those nanoseconds count, two different standards.

So what I have to understand is what I'm measuring it against. So the gift of time and distance on a choking baby, I'm not going to sit out and bring out the gosh-damn Funken Wagnal's and read up on the gosh-damn circulatory system. You understand what I'm trying to say? So there's certain things, and so what training is supposed to do with us is training is supposed to expose us to those so we better understand how to manage them personally.

So let me go back to something I said 40 minutes ago about our gosh-damn scenarios and the revolt we started with Haberman. The idea that we wanted to bring, and we still want to bring to AI and VR is the fact that it's unbelievably cheap to redo the scenario over and over and over and get a different outcome. That needs to be in every single scenario, that I can go, "Wait, I want to try that again. Roll tape." We go backwards and we start over. "Wait, I want to change what I said," and that changes the outcomes. If we can't do that, then the system is flawed.

The second part of that is we've proved that a number of ways and a number of studies, and one of the most easy ones that if anybody's ever met us, Brian, when they saw our scenarios, we would do a tactical freeze in the scenario and we'd ask a certain amount of questions, something you can't do in real life. And then we'd say, "Okay, at what point can we roll tape back to where an influence—an outside of a word, a statement, a bullet, a question—would have changed this likely outcome?" And the real answer to that is everywhere. But they say, "When the guy came up with the bike and he walked up with the bike, that was interesting to me." Go on. And so we roll the tape back and we replay it and we replay it and we replay it. That's training, Brian. Our brain loves that. Our brain needs to find Waldo, but it needs to look first because if we don't develop the looking for Waldo, we'll never understand the necessity to find Waldo. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, and that's what it is. And you brought up a good point with that, is that meaning when we're talking about, "Okay, stop, roll tape back, let's, what was that part?" Because we can't physically do that in real life. You can mentally, you can go back and you can conceptualize in a sense. But what we're talking about is that, "Okay, pause, what was it that you saw? Okay, that's interesting. Why was it? Let's go back. Well, okay, knowing that now, and we put that together, what decision would you make now?" And that's what your brain, that's what your brain loves. That's what it goes, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, I can change the outcome. Oh, okay, I can do this! I can influence it!"

It really is.

But that's what life is, except we don't get to look at, there's no picture on the front of the box that we get to compare to. We're just trying to put the pieces together in a seemingly logical manner. And so, yeah, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't work out, and it's because that's perception. But the, looking at those incidents because you want, if you want to do some time traveling, you can in a sense do that with your own memories, knowing that you literally have your own time machine.

Well, and time is another thing that influences memory so much, because you know what happens over time. We start jumbling things together. It doesn't remember small details. It's the, "Hey, yeah, I remember when we came to this restaurant a few years ago." And then my wife's like, "Yeah, that wasn't me, buddy." It's like, "Oh, whoops, sorry." But memory is another big issue when it comes to time perception, how we do it. But what you're talking about in those examples is, I even try to do that with the insurgent at home. It's like, "Well, okay, what would happen if you did that, or why did you see that or find that interesting? Well, most cars I see around here don't have that. Okay, well, knowing that, what could I expect?" And it's sort of that "what if" game, but it's using actual artifacts and pieces of evidence versus just coming up with it in our head. So I like how you describe that. And getting people to think that way is tough, because again, it's like we don't fully recognize our ability to influence our time and perception of time, and then therefore act within a space.

Now, you'll see people who are like maybe real successful or started a bunch of companies or did this, and they'll kind of write about it. But they write about it in a manner that not like we're talking about it, but they're talking about the same thing. They're going like, "Well, you got to see it differently and you have to understand that all of the different influences." Meaning they can't even describe what they're doing because it's so sort of implicit and tacit that they learn.

Yeah, that it's like, "Look, there's like, at least I get the visual of the ball pit at the McDonald's and how that influences." Because we've all been in a ball pit before. But for a lot of people, when they talk about, and I see different articles or a book come out about something, I'm like, "Yeah, he's talking about spacetime and how you can influence it." People are like, "He's not talking about physics." I was like, "Well, neither am I. I'm talking about your life right now."

Exactly.

But see, that's the piece, Brian, the brain, look, again, let me reiterate: you're your own time machine. So you control how things happen, in which order they're happening. Ask Carl Wunda if he'd like to have that nanosecond back when he underestimated the situation that he was in, even though he was a top trained athlete. People, look it up, I'm not going to explain that one any deeper.

I will also say that your brain is like a Wonkavator. It goes upways and downways and sideways and frontways and backways. So use that to your advantage because that alone, being able to cycle more quickly through available file folders and pick one that's closer to the ten ring, is much more important than flipping tires and climbing a rope. Yes, your physical health matters. Yes, your sleep matters, we talked about that with rebooting the brain and everything else. But Brian, if you don't survive the incident, all of that other stuff is not. So those decisions that you make have to be decisions that are informed by time and by distance. And we have to understand which we can accelerate and which we can't. And historical perspective is a great teacher, so we don't have to go very far.

This epiphany thing that I get, the only social media I have is LinkedIn, and I think some days it makes me dumber reading somebody going, "Hey, you got to read this book." Look, just because you just now had that epiphany that the other ones have known for 100 years or something. You get what I'm trying to say? It's like, "Do me a favor, do you understand, we're all out here working on that same problem every day, and we have been for decades!" So the idea behind being able to take any situation and turn it into an on-duty roll call example. Like, for example, we go back to "watch pot never boils." So I would start off with that. And then we would say, "Well, let's put two pots on two different stoves in two different rooms and let's measure the results." And now in one room we have the pot boiling on its own, in the other room we have spectators. You get where I'm going with this, right? And then lo and behold, guess what happened? In three minutes and 20 seconds later, both pots are boiling, and guess what? It was identical time on both. So, is "watch pot never boils" true? And then everybody goes, "No." But you say, "Then what makes it true?" And you say, "Emotion." "What do you mean, emotion? Well, memory-emotion link while I'm sitting there waiting for it." Anticipation is a... and that takes more time, but it really doesn't take more time. But the perception of time is equal to my memory of time.

And so now what did you just do with on-duty roll call? You didn't, well first of all you confused everybody in the room, but the second thing is you go, "So what?" And "so what" on that is that you have more time than you think you do, because if time is just like that thermostat on a wall and it's 69 degrees, what does that mean to Brian and what does that mean to my suspect and what does that mean to the question, "Hey, can I have a cigarette before you put the handcuffs on me?" All of those things are in play. And that's what we don't do, Brian. We don't do training with enough external arousal to make it almost impossible to manage. Training must push us to those cognitive limits where it's almost impossible for us to make the right decision, and then come back and say, "At what points were we able to influence this and how can we use that to our advantage in the next encounter?" If we don't have time as an element, as a matter of fact, situational awareness, the best part of that definition is the last part: "What does that mean for future state?" So that's time and distance too.

Yeah, we covered a lot, and there's this, I don't know who said the quote, but it was something like, "The only way to fully understand a theory is to directly drive the conclusion yourself or prove it wrong." And this is one of those things where you really do have to try to derive that conclusion yourself, because you're not going to prove it wrong in this case. I know that.

And denial is trying to prove it wrong. That's your basis for that, and you're specifically right on the right track there, because that's what humans constantly do. Instead of accepting things as it is, we constantly say, "This can't be."

Yes, and part of that is looking for things for what they can be and not just what they are. You're that "Anything Can Happen" Brian. One thing we didn't hit, we hit on a lot. One thing we didn't hit is just kind of in general, I do want to throw in here because it's important, not just throw it in here, but age. As we age, the perception of time changes, but I think overall, yeah, I use this one in class. When you think back to when you're a little kid, from when you're nine to ten, those birthdays when you're a kid, or Christmas or something like that, it takes forever to come around. It's like, between the age of nine and ten, you just lived 10% of your life. So that's a significant part of your life so far. But then, from 49 to 50, time starts speeding up. You just lived 2% of your life, and you have a ton of life experience. So you're like, "What? It's already my birthday again? Jesus, wasn't that just a few months ago?"

But I, and part of that I think has to do with, obviously as humans, not knowing that one day we will die, but not knowing when that is, hopefully. But, you know what I mean, how age and just how we look at time, because we don't, because look, you're bringing in all this historical perspective, and even down to the physics level, and how long the Earth has been here and the solar system, the galaxy. But we cannot comprehend that as humans. We do not understand infinity, we do not understand... you would not understand the difference between a million and a billion. It's not conceptually possible for you to really do that. I can't understand more than about ten things. Once you get about ten people in the room, that's about it for me. You know what I mean?

At least ten. You've just, you have absolutely discovered the key and it's worthy of note. So let's do two quick things. The number one thing is, the sun and the planets condensed 4.55 billion million years ago from a bunch of interstellar... possibly even longer. So that's one that we know and we can prove that number. And we can say that the fiery beginning was about 13.8 billion years ago. So that's a lot longer before that with a vaster level of cosmos. Why is that important? Because we can't control that. Those are things that are outside of our ken, which means that we don't need to worry about them. And we can opine about them and sit and smoke opium in a rocking chair and talk about them, but it's not going to influence anything. Okay, well, did I go too far? Is that the line now?

So let's tie that into what you just said about age and time perception. Look, things are less novel, they're more routine. Even just with the passage of time, our teeth are worn down more, our muscles are worn down, our hair, the skin. So what does that mean? That means that time perception changes over time because we're not that same person that we were. And now all of a sudden we've got an immense amount of file folders that could come up in a different situation, and therefore, "Seen it before, not shocking me now." And that's what the goal was supposed to be of training. Training was supposed to be that drop on your tongue that gave you that experience, gave you that novelty early on so you could work with it.

Now what happens is most of the great that we know is when we're in our late 60s, early 70s, and we go, "No, we can't do anything with it." And then we get angry about it, and that brings up your death potential. The, and now the impact of fear or boredom or being without my kids starts to influence my perception of time. "I'm here all alone, time is lasting forever. I wish I would just..." So what has to happen again is because we sand down those peaks and valleys, we have to bring them back. We have to bring back those ridges, we have to bring back that challenge. And if we don't, what's going to happen is we're going to wind down. And when we wind down, guess what happens? Time becomes so slow that we don't even notice it anymore, and we're dead. And look, I'm mixing biological with metaphorical. The idea is to make it simpler for people to understand. Big things like 13.8 billion years don't make sense to me. I don't need to worry about them. It's not going to change how I save a choking baby or how I pay more attention when I'm driving so I don't ram into the car that's in front of me. Gift of time and distance, right?

So, gift of time and distance, Brian, the reason I talk about that so much is it's a thing that we can control in our day-to-day lives that'll lessen our anxiety and has the opportunity to make us more successful and avoid danger. Why wouldn't we want to avail ourselves of that? Why are we fighting so hard with AI and VR to get people to listen to how important and impactful it can be in a machine where we can control time because we can't in our lives? So, we'll get there. It's a lot more fighting, I feel there's going to be some more fistfights and knifefights on that road. But sooner or later, I mean, they have to come around our way of thinking because it's science. And look, we're not expert scientists. We're talking about things at the street level that influence you every day that you can control, and that makes it powerful.

I think everyone listening now is realizing, "Well, they weren't kidding when they said they have a no-drug-testing policy at Arcadia Cogar."

Well, Brian, between that and the AIDS, you know, we got a lot on our plates. You know what I'm saying? HIV.

But HIV positive, not HIV negative. That wasn't the Matthew McConaughey reference I was going for, but you hit it right between the headlights.

I'm just telling you, Dallas Buyers Club, everybody, rent the film.

So, yeah, all right. We covered a lot of topics about time and perception, time and time distance. We gave a lot of examples of the "so what" and how you can do it, and the big takeaways are is we have much more control over the perception of it and how we interact with time than we realize. And just understanding that, I think, is a powerful concept. And there's a lot you can go, there's so much more, especially when it comes to time perception, memory recall, everything you can get into. We could have gone a hundred different directions with this. I didn't know where we were going to go with it other than...

I still don't know where we went with it. I don't.

Yeah, I don't know where we ended up. I remember where we started with Kairos and Kronos, and quantitative and qualitative time and what that means. But it is something I did want to discuss because we haven't explicitly had a podcast about time in our perception of it. Now it comes up in everything that we do because that's, it's a major element.

But if we have any questions, folks, you know, thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. We also have our Patreon site, you can go and check out there. We answer everyone's questions on there and have a lot more information. But reach out to us, call on us, whatever you want to do. Be more than happy to answer any questions. Greg, any other parting words here?

Keep the "call on us" to yourself. I only want good information and happiness. I don't want any that when I'm smoking opium, the last thing I need is a Debbie Downer. So please don't be that on the porch with my rocking chair.

Oh my God. All right, I think that's enough for today. Thanks everyone so much for tuning in. Please share this episode with your friends if you enjoyed it, and don't forget that training changes behavior.