Threshold For Action

Threshold For Action

All right, good morning, Greg, and hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to The Human Behavior Podcast. Just a quick reminder to our listeners: we have a Patreon site. You can check out all the links from the episode details where we have all kinds of different, more information, extra episode stuff, and things we release to our listeners. Of course, we answer any questions on there as well. We also have, depending on what podcast player you are listening to, there should be a little link on there that literally says 'Send us a text message.' You can send in a message or response or question right on there. It's not something I can really access live or something on here, and it doesn't allow me to respond directly to you, but at least I get some feedback. So, I just want to remind everyone that's on there, to check that out, and also follow us on social media.

So for today, Greg, we're going to go over a few topics. Some of this comes from conversations we've had, and some of it comes from a lot of questions we get from people in general. It comes from when someone kind of goes, 'Well, how do I know when I'm seeing something and it doesn't feel right? Maybe I can't articulate it like you guys, but I know there's something going on here, or I think there is, or how do I tell, and when do I meet this intervention, or when do I take action?' Which, I would phrase the question as, 'When does it reach a threshold for action?' That's a tough one.

The other one is, in general, as human beings, we don't know what to do with information sometimes; we're really not good at it. We're really good at the pattern recognition part and not so great at the analysis part, right? That's the most important part; that's where things go wrong because you lack a fundamental understanding of how we process and perceive information. There's also this temporal element to everything; there's a time element with everything.

So, what I wanted to go over today is that when we've covered things like what seems normal or typical and how to describe that, but really, when am I supposed to recognize that there's something that requires some intervention, or there's something that I need to do? And what do we do with information, and how do we categorize it? There's a bunch of things in here that we're going to get to when it comes to that when we talk about HBPNA (Human Behavior Pattern Analysis), the 'A' – the analysis part – and when it meets that threshold.

Because looking back, we use different case studies and different examples. Some are obvious, some are not obvious. We take them from all over the place, in all kinds of different situations, to really give people understanding. A lot of times, people go, 'Well, yeah, that's great. Looking back, you can pick all this stuff apart, but like, that person at the time, how are they supposed to know that?' And that's a legitimate thing to say. But a lot of them, you could have intervened. You should have noticed. And there are reasons why they didn't, and there are reasons why they sort of either stepped over their own intuitive feeling about something, or gut feeling, or instinctual response to say, 'Oh, it's probably nothing,' right? And that happens all the time, and you're never going to have all the information.

So, of all these topics, I want to throw to you because I know you have a few examples to bring up, and we can jump into it from there. The big takeaways I want to get are understanding that it can be complex, but it isn't if you look at it correctly. If you look at how to understand some of the situations you're going to talk about, then we can know if I'm in that moment, I can go, 'Hey, wait a minute, this is one of those things those guys are talking about,' or, 'This seems a little bit different. I need to investigate this further.' Does that kind of make sense, Greg?

No, it's spot on. It's down to what Brian always tells you folks: it's how to look, it's not what to look for, it's how to look. For example, right now, you should be looking at my 1983 Greg outfit. I look like David Byrne. 'Watch out, you might get what you're after.' 'Cool babies.' I mean, do I not look like the Talking Heads? I just noticed that on the camera.

So, what we're going to do is we'll break it up into sections, right? The first one, and there are three that'll make this abundantly clear as we talk about different things. The first is a position of trust issue. Just a couple of days ago, we had 42-year-old Misty Clinton Roberts, the former mayor of Deridder, Louisiana. She resigns just before she's arrested for rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. An important caper, and it's a type of caper, like teachers sleeping with students, that we need to get after.

The second being a family annihilator. In Ohio, we had Chad Dorman last year that just got sentenced. In Alabama, just a couple of days ago, we have Brandon Allen Kendrick, who has five counts of capital murder against him, a mass shooting at his grandfather's property in Russellville, Alabama. How does that happen? How does a family annihilator— and in both of those instances, Dorman and Kendrick—the shooter is still alive, but everybody else is dead.

Then the third, and this is to contrast and compare, this is how we build a baseline for understanding how to look at something: an ambush scenario. We just had it in Lake County, Florida, where a Master Deputy, Harold Howell (I apologize, reading), and two others entered the house during an unknown trouble call. He was shot dead there. The other two were injured and are in the hospital right now. But the important thing about the caper is it was set up as an ambush. It started as an ambush. It didn't turn into an ambush, which is an important differentiation.

So, if we just take a look at those three, Brian, and we compare them, what we've got now is we've got anytime a person in a position of trust is sleeping with a student or, you know, a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, or somebody in there. Then we've got the second one, which is anytime we have a situation where a family annihilator, and everybody looks back and says, 'Well, we never knew,' is what they say at the beginning. And then they go, 'Well, there are all these leakage signals.' And then finally, the ambush-type scenario where something goes horribly sideways so quickly, and guess what? We always say, 'Well, nobody could have predicted this.' And I don't think that's true.

Okay, so one thing real quick, actually two things real quick: are you hearing me, and is the audio okay, or did I just switch?

I'm hearing you loud and clear on my end.

Okay, so we're all good. Sorry, I don't know, this thing keeps switching on me.

You brought up three seemingly completely different, completely different situations. You ended it with something that I would agree with a lot of people: we have this idea, 'Well, how am I supposed to know that that's going to happen? We could have never predicted it,' or, 'That was so rare.' And I immediately, my big thing is to go, 'Hang on, everything can be predicted.' That doesn't mean you can predict everything, but everything can (be predicted), right? You know what I'm saying? But if I look at it that way, then it allows me to see things. Like, I can't predict exactly where lightning is going to strike, but I can predict when it's likely, when all the conditions have been met for lightning to occur. And then you can look out and say, 'Okay, all conditions for lightning are here, and we're likely going to get lightning.' A meteorologist can tell you that, right? And then you can say, 'Well, what is that likely going to hit in this area?' If we're in a big open field, there's a giant metal pole in it, I go, 'Well, there's a good spot for it.'

So, that's the idea. And this isn't a bash on people that didn't intervene sooner or didn't see it coming. It's because we're conditioned to think this way in a sense. We don't understand that all of these things have pre-event indications. So, these three seemingly different ones, you're saying, first of all, I would ask, what is the common theme? Out of these three completely different cases, why are we— why are you chunking them together for this discussion? I want to start there.

Yeah, I'm going to answer in an unconventional fashion, but it'll make abundant sense once we get it out. Yeah, surprise, I'm back to the Talking Heads.

Listen to me: we are too close to situations to judge them because we get the pattern recognition, but we fail on the analysis. And this is what Brian just told you about. Even nature continues to nudge us to tell us things are about to happen to allow our predictive analysis. For example, dawn and dusk, they repeat. Why? Why does dawn come up? Dawn comes up, 'Hey, fresh new day, let's get started, let's get out there.' Dusk, 'Hey, things come out at night, we don't want to be out there and get eaten.' Why do the seasons change? 'Okay, well, we have to plant now, we have to harvest now.' So everything in the world is designed to cue us in to certain things, right?

But when we get too close, and we get busy with non-survival essential things, then our brain goes, 'Well, shit, they don't need me anymore. I'm going to go rest.' And your brain becomes dormant to these cues, to these inconsistencies, and incongruent clusters of cues that are right in front of you.

So, what's the same about all of them? Well, let's take a look at Ohio. One of the two that I briefly discussed about the family annihilators is Chad Dorman. Chad Dorman just got... folks, look it up, it's a big caper that happened a year ago. He just got convicted of a number of life sentences. He killed his three sons. He shot his wife; she ended up living. The daughter runs across the street; you all remember it. And the Clermont County prosecutor says, 'This was lightning from a blue sky. There was no way we could have predicted this incident happening.'

Now, when we go back to the ambush at Lake County, Florida, these were coppers that were responding to a call that never in their panacea of wildest dreams said, 'Hey, wait a minute, somebody might be setting us up for an ambush.' Even though one of the neighbors said, 'I don't know what's going on in there, but they kept trying to lure us into the house.' And this was seconds before the coppers made entry to check on the welfare.

And in the first one I talked about, which is the third one I'm talking about now, with Misty Roberts, she's a mayor, she's 42 years old. Why in the world would nobody in that position ever predate on a kid and have sex with the child or lure a child into an inappropriate relationship? So, what's happening is our attribution error here is that we say, 'Well, this could never happen,' and therefore we become... 'if thy eye offends thee, pluck it out.' We blind ourselves to the possibility, Brian. And once we do that, what happens is our baseline becomes solidified, and we don't add the right things or remove the right things. People forget, Brian, that you have to take things out of the baseline when they don't fit, when they're conclusions that aren't logical and reasonable.

So this is part of when we get into extracting normalcy for your environment and internal versus external baselines. What is my known? What am I comparing this to? What happens over time, especially with your family annihilators, especially with the mayor, the woman in a position of trust, or a teacher, whoever, predating on a student or a child, that baseline shifts. So we're looking at it right now today, especially the family annihilator one you brought up, it's like, 'Okay, well, this guy was schizophrenic, and he would consistently stop taking his meds, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.' So, what it becomes is we're no longer comparing it to something typical. The baseline has shifted. This is what people talk about, even just what in psychology is called habituation, where you start doing something, and then you get less novelty from it, less stimulus. It's like next thing you know, you're on social media for 12 hours a day, and you didn't even realize that until you had something show you, you know what I'm saying? So, that can happen over time.

That becomes very difficult to do because we simplify things. I was having a discussion with a friend one time, and they were just trying to learn more about how we see the world, and he's like, 'So, you're telling me that the bartender who just served us a beer could be a serial killer?' I go, 'It's highly unlikely, but yeah, it's completely possible.' He was like, 'Whoa, they're so friendly!' I go, 'Everything you're attributing to them means nothing. It means this in one interaction that lasted 90 seconds, and you're trying to figure out something from that. You can't. You need to have time and you need to have observation; you need to look at things exactly.' The reason why I bring that up is because that baseline changes over time, and with slow, steady changes, we're less likely to notice it. That becomes why it's a seemingly bolt out of the blue. It's like, 'Well, I had no idea that could happen here.' It's like, 'Well, no, it can. It can happen anywhere. It's unlikely, but it can.'

So, how do we get past that? How do I take those initial, because the— and I brought up the temporal element, the time element, all this. But for the law enforcement one, the one example you gave about the ambush, it's like, what are they supposed to do? They just got there, you know what I'm saying? Like, they had no history about, you know what I'm saying?

Let me take you on a history tour. It was 1997, and I was having a discussion. I was a supervisor as a copper, but a road supervisor, not stuck up in the 'coup' all day. I was talking to a detective that I admired and respected up until this conversation, and this just—just lost a couple of steps. It didn't lose me forever. But it was about Mary Kay LeTourneau, and Mary Kay LeTourneau is a 34-year-old teacher who is banging a 12-year-old student. Now, that wasn't the part that we were talking about. We were talking about that when poor Mary Kay LeTourneau gets let out of prison on a probation/parole-style situation, just a few months after going to jail, 'she's going to learn her lesson.' She's caught by a road cop in a car down the road with the same student. She ended up, Brian, having two kids with them. I don't want to speak ill of the dead because she died of some horrible crap very recently, very young.

But the idea was that, listen, she was given a number of chances, and she could not keep away, and she went back to it. Do you honestly think—and this is what the argument was over—do you honestly think that she was making out and making meetings—and this is before texts and stuff, so there had to be notes and written things and clandestine meetings? Do you honestly think that nobody noticed a difference in this 12-year-old? Are you honestly telling me that Mary Kay LeTourneau's husband and her friends and family didn't notice the change?

Today, there was an article about, 'Hey, let's outlaw black clothing in schools because black is a depressing color, and that's going to change school shooters and people from committing suicide.' How about we look at the science here for five minutes? Do you get what I'm saying, and do a test? LeTourneau gave cues, Brian.

So look at those cops that were newly on the street. And somebody's going to go, 'Hey, listen, you're talking about something with the memory of these cops, you better tread on thin ice.' No, I won't tread on thin ice. At 9:03 PM, the copper, the Master Deputy on the scene, had so much information that shit was going on in that house that he disregarded everything else. And for the safety of that family, he made entry. The minute that he crosses the threshold of the house, his body-worn camera picks up the frames of an adult male behind the couch with a rifle ambushing him, that starts to shoot, and the two daughters are in there shooting as well.

So what happens is he made the decision, 'I have to, based on all the information that's incoming right now, make entry on this house.' Why? Because the nutty woman that he met outside was given Bible phrases and just odd statements. They handcuffed her, and she's supposed to be the reporting party, and the call didn't add up. And Brian, you remember Sean always talking about the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. Listen, when the cues that you're getting don't add up, your instincts are telling you, 'Rush in there! We need to save everybody!' But what you have to do is, for survival, you have to give yourself the gift of time and distance. You have to say, 'This call is so different that I have to give the kaleidoscope another turn and imagine what might be happening.'

In engineering, they talk about baselining, and when you change a baseline, they said, 'Whenever a significant change occurs, a project may be re-baselined.' This means issuing a new, updated baseline to measure against. If those coppers in Florida would have done that—and everybody's going, 'Oh, don't second-guess, don't armchair,' hey, kiss my ass! I was a copper, been on a ton of shootings, I got scarred tissue, but I'm not dead. And I'm not dead because I use the gift of time and distance. I'm not saying these cops had that choice. I'm saying that if that was a choice and they had availed themselves of it... Look at the situation here: it's a one-in-a-zillion lightning strike from Mars, Brian. Nobody in their right mind would have said this family conspired to create this call to lure the neighbors. This was apocalyptic cult shit.

So, it was so outside of the realm of what this Master Deputy had seen that he fell for it. We're all victims of falling for it. And he's an honored veteran, Master copper, that made a mistake, and this mistake cost him his life. So, let's not turn it into a bad thing. Let's turn it into a good thing so we can learn: whenever the cues add up and tell you, 'This makes no sense,' you've got to give yourself extra time, or you're on the wrong baseline. That's my suggestion.

I see what you're saying with your explanation here. We keep reiterating what seemingly can sound like simple phrases or simple principles to use, or simple ways of looking at things. It sounds intuitive; it's like, 'Okay, yeah, that makes sense.' I mean, all kinds of people talk about, 'Yeah, you got to create some distance, you need more time,' but we don't actually get into how to do that. A lot of people don't get into how to do that because they don't technically know, right? It sounds like we can do that. It sounds intuitive. Anyone we brief or talk to always go, 'Well, crap, that makes a lot of sense to me. I see where you're getting at.' But actually doing it is very different. And because it's, you need training.

You're exactly right.

Right, right. To actually implement something like that, it takes time and it takes practice. And also, because it's seemingly counterintuitive to how humans think in these situations, especially decision-making in extremis, or when there's some time constraint, or when there's some stress, or when there's some threat likelihood, whatever the situation is, it muddies the waters. It becomes seemingly more difficult to make a decision or take that step. And so, it never seems to meet that threshold for action.

So, if I want to implement this, or if I'm looking at something that, from what I gather, a lot of times a lot of our questions that we get from people fall under that, it's like, 'When does it meet the threshold for action?' Because it's easy in some ways to take it on a case-by-case basis. Which is why then people get into, 'When you see this indicator, it means that.' It's like, 'Well, no, it doesn't. If all of these circumstances are here, then yes, it does.' But if you change one of them, it can change the outcome. But when, how do I know? What's a good measurement if I'm just listening to this podcast and I'm going, 'Wow, this is kind of interesting to get to that threshold for action,' right? Because that's really determined by the situation at hand. It's determined by the environment, the elements in the environment, all of the contributing factors in the situation. Because if I oversimplify it, I'll miss things. But if I overcomplicate things, I'm never going to know how to look for things; I'm never going to know when it meets that threshold for action. So, it's like I'm caught up in this cognitive dilemma in a sense, where there's a time element. I'm here, I got called here to do something, or I'm taking a look at something; it's just a snapshot in time, and I got to make decisions quickly. And I think because people think that way, that's actually what causes these a lot of times, right? So you're kind of saying, 'We have more time than we think,' or, 'We're not looking at time in the correct manner.' Is that kind of what you're saying?

Exactly right on those points. I would give you the additional point of saying it's more of a Möbius loop in my mind, meaning that certain things become inevitable when you press temporal and you lack distance. So the idea there is you're accelerating the situation because you think the situation is going to have a good outcome if you accelerate it.

I'll give you an example that sounds so odd because I'm talking about the cop one, but let's apply that to Mary Kay LeTourneau and Misty Clinton Roberts. If they would have taken a knee and said, 'Okay, I'm 42 and the mayor of this town, this kid's 13 or 15 or 17. I'm feeding them drinks, and I'm going to blow him,' or whatever the situation was, and I'm paraphrasing, folks, don't get me tied down to gosh-damn details. You would have said, 'Wait a minute, okay, this is inappropriate. This is not the relationship. This is not what relationships are founded on.'

And Brian, if you would have looked for baseline comparisons, you would have said, 'I know nobody in my circle of friends, nobody that's another mayor, that decided to quit and have kids with a 15-year-old.' You understand? It just doesn't fit. So it's the round peg, square hole thing.

So what's a baseline? A baseline is the measurement of a condition of an environment, of a situation that is already in progress. What we do is we take a snapshot of that at that point, at that time, and at that place. And what we want to do is we want to use that comparison over time to observe changes. Changes can rise to the level of an anomaly when it surprises us, when it's there and it shouldn't be, when it's missing, and we should see it.

Those type of things get me to the kaleidoscope reference. The kaleidoscope is a constantly changing pattern or a sequence of objects that you see in an environment. But the idea is if you watch long enough, and if you turn enough times, you're going to get the same pattern. But the idea is that this tube containing the mirrors and the pieces of colored glass and everything seems too much information. This is why large models of information and data can work for us, but they have to be studied. And this goes to my point of the training you're talking about. People that go, 'Yeah, but give me three cues that I can look for all the time.' Come to the training, and we'll give you a thousand cues, and guess what? You can pick the ones that you want to make the three, and they'll last your whole life. Everybody wants that list, and they want to put it on their visor, but Brian, it just doesn't work that way.

So when we look at the kaleidoscope, we have to pick it up, and we have to start turning it. And if the patterns seem random and nothing's fitting together right, we have to compare that. In all the other times I played with that kaleidoscope, I saw ever-changing patterns. This time, all the blues are sticking together, and that doesn't make sense. If they would have done that in Florida, if they would have done that in Alabama, if they would have done that with the serial killers or the family annihilators (I apologize), we would not have this situation. When your baseline doesn't seem to fit for the situation, you have to change your operation, or you have to change your baseline. So, in other words, you have to change the method of the information processing.

Yeah, that you're getting because something's wrong there. You're not processing the information correctly, or you have to change the baseline, what you're measuring that information against. You said something that was interesting earlier where you said, 'Nature,' and I'm paraphrasing, I think you said it like this, but, 'Nature reminds us of the important things.' And you talk about dusk and dawn. Can you explain that a little bit further, what you mean by that? That nature reminds us of important things?

So, dawn is obviously an important thing: to get up, to move around, to establish whatever it is—the patterns that are going to help you live a long and healthy life. Why? Because it's good for the Earth, it's good for procreation, it's good for families, clans. Your brain's chemistry is set up to support that. We have circadian rhythms that get us up and put us to sleep, and if we work too much on midnights, we don't get the allotted amount of rest. So, all of those prompts are lined up to lead a prudent person to believe that it's important to get up in the morning and get out. A rooster crows in the morning. A rooster is audibly significant to us and wakes us up. Now, somebody's going to go, 'Oh, that's all random crap that's putting together.' Is it? I'm saying it's not, so prove me wrong.

The thing is, go out there and take a look at all of those things that you have. Look, it's healthy to do this in the morning, but it's not healthy to do that later in the day. What are the three things that you want to do? '3-2-1' from our buddy, Corum. Three hours before, don't eat anything. Two hours before, don't drink anything. One hour before, don't watch any television, and you'll get good sleep. Why? Because sleep is essential to us. So, when it gets dark, that's our message to our brain: 'You got to shut down for a while because we've been running at capacity all day long.' And those hints come in such a repeated fashion and are reinforced by our brain's chemistry and our neural wiring that we have to pay attention to them. There literally is a goal behind all these things.

Did you happen to see the Olympics at all and see the guy that set the record for the wall climb, and it looked like a spider going across the floor? It didn't even look real. So, imagine the person that has to beat him, what are you up against? We know that there are certain limits. Why I'm bringing it up is there are certain limits of human performance. We're going to get to a threshold where we just, without chemicals or changing some factors in our environment, we're not going to be able to exceed those. But simple things in our environment, like the change of seasons, like the calm before the storm, those, God, Buddha, Vishnu allows us to process those and predict so we can take cover, so we can get hydrated. The symbols or the signals that your body gives off for dehydration, you think that's accidental? There are these cues in our environment.

So, when those cues are so obtuse, when those cues don't fit any pattern... Let me put it this way before I finish that sentence. I would say, interview every copper that works in and around Lake County. Give them what this call was like at that moment where the lady's running around, she's doing the Bible verses, she gives a false name and says that she's a prophet, and all these other things, and there are noises in the house. And the neighbor comes up and goes, 'I don't know what's going on, but they try to lure me in.' And then louder noises to lure you in. They've never had a situation like that before. So this novel situation, how do we function in situations we don't have a file folder for? We're more likely to get killed or seriously injured in those. There's not as much opportunity; there's much more danger. So we got to reestablish the baseline. That's the time to take a knee and go, 'Something is wrong here,' before we step across that threshold. We've got— And you're saying, 'Yes, but people may die.' Yeah, but it shouldn't always be the coppers and first responders dying, should it? If you continue down that road to that IED-likely position, and you see indicators that would give you a reasonable suspicion that an IED ambush is in place, and you low crawl up and still poke it with your knife, who's at fault? That's hard to say. People hate me for making those comparisons, but I'm not talking about a person and their failure; I'm talking about how you should use that information and process it forward. That's the essence of situation awareness.

Well, that goes back to: we're not great at analysis, we're great at pattern recognition. So people talk about situational awareness, understanding the elements in your environment, perceiving them, understanding them, knowing what they mean and how they fit into place. But what we don't focus on is then, okay, the third element of that is projecting that forward, right? Going, knowing what I know now, okay, what can I likely expect next? What is likely to occur next? What's the most dangerous thing? Am I gathering any evidence to support where this is going, or if this is what I expect? Or if this is a benign situation, if this is, 'I'm talking to the mayor, and I don't think she is molesting a kid,' right? What else should I expect to see then if she's not doing that? And then what should I expect to see if she is doing that?

It's that simple framework of going, 'I'm going to attempt to gather evidence to both prove or disprove my hypothesis here, and then I can test that as it goes.' I can send that out into the world and see what comes back, right? I can gather more artifacts and evidence, just as long as I'm weighing this. And that projection part can be seemingly difficult because our own training, our own cognitive processes, get in the way of us arriving at a reasonable conclusion or doing really, really good analysis. I mean, everyone's an analyst, right? Just go on social media or anywhere, and everyone's going to give you their opinion, their analysis on something, but rarely is it ever good. And rarely are people ever consistently good at their analysis, because you need to have a process or a framework.

So, what it sounds like—because this is what you're saying, and this is why I'm bringing this part up—because you brought up, 'Nature reminds us of important things,' but nature also kind of screws with me, right? It kind of wants me to take the simplest route or the easiest answer, or the path of least resistance. It's forcing me; it's continually forcing me down that road. 'That's what I've done my whole life, Greg, and I'm still alive right now, so why would this be any different?' And so that's always, to me, what I would describe as the crux of the problem there, is going, 'Well, I'm set up to think and act and do things this way, but what you're talking about, Greg, and what we talk about, it's seemingly like, 'Well, that's counterintuitive. I have to spend, I have to burn extra calories. I have to...' So how am I supposed to do this if it's not..."

Let's go there.

Yeah, explain. Let's go there. It's seemingly at a topical level right now, just what I want to say is that it's like, 'Why are you talking about it this way? Why are you teaching this? Why are you going through this process? Because if it's counterintuitive to how humans operate, then it's really never going to be successful. I'm never going to fully grasp it,' which isn't true, but you see topically what I'm getting. You could have sort of addressed that.

You're spot on. The point is that complacency will lie to you. Laziness is much easier than going to the gym and working out and eating right. So we fall for those traps, and then we tell everybody around us, 'Well, it's nature.' Now, that's not nature. Nature is all about survival, survival of the fittest and the fattest, and all those other things. But what we do is we have a fundamental attribution error where we say, 'I'm just fine. I fit in great. What's it going to hurt me?' And the more we do that, that pattern reinforces itself, even if it's wrong. 'Hey, listen, smoking is not going to take but a couple of days off of my life, and I really enjoy smoking.' Those lies that our brain tells us are reinforced with chemistry that we provide. Our brain doesn't provide it. Our brain doesn't yell and go, 'Hey, go back and sleep in the cave!' What it does is it reinforces us to go back and sleep in the cave when we choose that option. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So we have to knowingly go into that dark cave and lay down on the pillow, and the brain goes, 'Hey, this is wonderful!' And now our cortisol and dopamine start messing with us.

I'll give you an example of exactly that, that you can understand in the Misty Clinton Roberts caper. I want you to understand, everybody, that these are merely allegations that this former mayor had sexual relations with the juvenile. She hasn't been convicted of anything. They're conducting an investigation. Yes, she's been arrested. But here's the thing: I would guarantee that what Brian said is absolutely correct. What happened is she allegedly had sexual intercourse with a juvenile victim while she was mayor, and there's a bunch of things wrong with that. But the idea is that I don't think that she did it because she's a pedophile. I think what happens is that abusers like her and Mary Kay LeTourneau, what you have there is you have somebody who early in their life got their emotional needs met through sexual behavior. There was something lacking. They're going through a divorce, or they had a bad experience with a man or a woman or their significant other. And now all of a sudden they get this position of trust, which brings with it power and authority. And now all of a sudden, what happens is, 'I'm cool, I'm in charge.' 'I see this person that back when I was younger I certainly would have banged.'

And then what happens is now the inappropriate relationship doesn't start with the sex. It starts with, 'Now I'm going to cross a boundary, and I'm going to talk about my personal life with this juvenile.' And then that person's going to share some of their stuff, and then I'm going to share a text, and then it's going to continue to get inappropriate because now it's going to be kind of a date where we meet somewhere. Look, if you're doing it clandestinely and you're doing it out of the public purview, it's likely wrong.

So what happens is all those environmental triggers and the nature of life telling us, 'This is somehow wrong.' Guys used to call it, in the vernacular, it's a street term, guys used to call it, 'the guilty dick syndrome.' They'd come to me and they'd go, 'Hey, I'm cheating on my old lady, but I can't get an erection.' And I go, 'Well, that's the guilty dick syndrome. What's happening is your brain and your body are telling you, 'This is wrong. You've got a significant other; go home to whoever that person is.''

So what happened with Misty? It didn't happen all at once. She wasn't in love with this person for 25 years and decided to become a mayor, and as soon as they grew up. So the same thing with the ambush: little clues were missed. And what happens is when we step back and we look at it, have you ever seen pointillism? Have you ever seen a painting by Seurat? When you get really close to it, hell, Ferris Bueller (a perfect example), when you get really close to it, you can't tell what it is. But the further you step back, all of a sudden, things come into view.

And again, I'm not bagging on Lake County. They did their best; they're heroes. What a great job, and they did it for the right reasons, to save lives. But sometimes, I read the other day a copper that died around here, and he died almost 80 years ago, and nobody knows his name anymore. And how did he die? On the way to his house from shopping, he was driving around in a vehicle, and he saw what he thought was a drunk driver. He said, 'Look, this guy's so bad, he's going to kill somebody.' So with his family in the car, he makes the traffic stop, walks up, and the guy drives off with him hanging on to the car, and he dies right in front of his family. That's again a hero, Brian. But what would conventional wisdom tell us in that situation? The danger, just like with Roberts, is raising. And if we allow the danger to keep raising and we don't do anything about it, that level, that pot is going to boil over. And so what we have to do is we have to take those things off the heat. And to make an entry into that house seemed like the right thing at the time, and upon retrospect, we'd see it wasn't the right thing.

And let's go to Kendrick. Kendrick is the Alabama guy, the schizophrenic that you were talking about earlier. Five counts of capital murder. Every single person said that he had become more and more deranged, not only over the years but in the few days before he shot them all dead. And people were commenting on that. Let's go back to Ohio with Chad Dorman. Chad Dorman's wife said, 'You know, it was a setup. All of a sudden, he started talking about the three boys and how much he loved them, and how it's going to be hard to kill one of the boys more so than the other two.' And he kept luring them into the house and then to the back bedroom. Then he went to the closet and got the gun, and the whole time she said, 'It's like watching a movie.' She knew what was going to happen, and she couldn't. Well, I'm telling you, she's not the only one. I'm telling you, the family that staged that ambush in Lake County gave up signals, and the neighbors knew, and their friends knew, and there was leakage at school. I'm saying with Dorman and Kendrick, I'm saying there was leakage all over the place. And I'm saying that with Mary Kay LeTourneau and Misty Roberts, there was leakage.

Now, you're going to say, because Brian likes taking Devil's Advocate, you're going to say sometimes, 'Hey, listen, well, these are all linked to mental illness.' Yeah, we all have a version of mental illness there somewhere. What happens is that we tend to want to go for immediate gratification now, rather than waiting for things, and that's how we can get into the trick bag. And the same thing with the ambush. The woman lived through the ambush, and she's in jail now, so hopefully she'll talk more. But Kendrick and Dorman, they both lived through the ambushes as well. And we have to look out for that, Brian, because trading our lives for somebody else's lives might seem noble, but in many instances, it's unnecessary. Now, some things are unpredictable. Today, I walk out of my front door, I get hit by an asteroid. I'm going across the street, and a guy's looking down at his GPS, and he clips me, right? I mean, come on, that's...

Yeah. That's the thing. The asteroid is a perfect example. It's like, 'Well, no, technically, we— that could have— that's tracked, and they're going to know exactly where it's going to impact.' Now, that information might not have gotten to you in time, but there's a process...

Or I may have disregarded it.

Exactly, yeah. And meaning, having the mindset of 'everything is predictable' helps; it helps me see things clearer, right? It helps me look at this and not feel this helpless, like, 'Well, I got to be prepared because this could happen anytime, anyplace.' It's like, 'Well, no, I look at everything as, like you said, nature reminds us of the important things.' There are environmental indicators that I can look for and feel and sense and understand intuitively as a human or instinctually as a human, and then the more practice, or the better I get at it, it becomes more intuitive.

But some of this is kind of like the language we use to talk about it societally and how we justify things or how we make ourselves feel better. You brought up the mental health thing. It's like, 'Okay, well, there's no real— everyone has something that is causing some turbidity or cognitive dissonance in their life.' There's something that you dealt with or haven't dealt with or deal with it on an ongoing basis. Everyone has something that affects the way they act and behave. And so sometimes the language isn't used in a very constructive manner to really understand these things. Like, 'Well,' like you even said, 'Darwin, and in the view of Darwin, you view of biology, human evolution,' and it's like, 'Oh, it's survival of the fittest.' And what it really meant was, 'species are just attempting to survive.' But that's not at an individual level; that's at a species level. And it's not—when people think 'survival of the fittest,' they think, 'Okay, the biggest, baddest, strongest, or whatever.' It's like, 'No, no, no. It's the fittest is like, who can adapt the best?' And that adaptation can come in a number of different ways. Maybe your species needs to literally get physically stronger or bigger, or maybe it just needs to get smarter and needs to grow and develop more intellectual capability, whatever it is.

And we get down to this individual level, and it then it's not as clear because you're part of a much, much larger system. So when you look at things like that, it's like, 'Okay, but that's as a species as a whole, so it's not really like I can just be stronger, better, faster than everyone out there and I'll be good.' It's like, 'No, no, that's not possible.' And so the hard dose of reality that nature can play in biology and physics can play on you is there are parameters in there, there are certain things that you cannot control. And I think people believe that one of those things that they cannot control is time, and I disagree. Because one, you can—well, language is a perfect example, because time is sort of this construct of language and how we talk about it and how we sense it and how we experience it. But we get in these moments, and they can be very overpowering where it's like, 'Well, crap, I have to do something right now! And we got to make this decision, and this needs to happen!' And it often—it rarely does need to. And when it is something that needs to be acted out instantaneously and immediately, I go back to your comment of, 'Nature reminds us of,' or, 'It's so obvious,' right? It's so obvious that you have to do something right now. You don't have to train for that; you're going to know when to make that decision. It's the training and the reflection and the analysis has to occur on the seemingly benign, the seemingly obvious, or the seemingly everyday minutiae. And understanding that, and if I understand the everyday minutiae, the things, the normalcy, the baseline that you're talking about—what should happen and what shouldn't happen typically given these set of circumstances—if I just get really, really good at that, these non-standard observations, or those things that are different, will become clear, more obvious, and more apparent to me when they come up, regardless of the situation that I find myself in.

Because you use those three examples, and a lot of people go, 'These are completely different things. You need different tools to go after these, and it's a different thing.' It's like, 'Look, I get it, it's a different situation, but if I look at the foundational elements and what we're talking about using those lenses, it's not, because that doesn't matter.' There were certain indicators here in all. And again, it goes back to, 'Well, we have to look for someone who's in a position of power to be...' It's like, 'No, look. Some things are because that person is driven towards that behavior, and some are that you become a product—we all do—of our environment and the situation you're in.' You'll see that a lot too with, like, when people get famous or something like that. 'Man, they were no one. They were this, and they struggled their whole life.' Then all of a sudden, they started getting attention, now they got money, now they got people around them, now they got this. Now they go down this path of, 'Oh, I like this.' And then one thing leads to another, and yeah, then now they're predating on people, or they hadn't done that previously in their life. That was a—that was a process that maybe took, maybe it took that mayor or Mary Kay LeTourneau years and years and years to get to that point.

Exactly. And so when you, but then for that, it's not the diabolical grooming. I mean, and then that behavior becomes reinforced. So if you look at, what's his name, Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, or whatever, right? It was like, 'Okay, was he doing that when he was broke? No one had heard of him?' No, he didn't have the power to do that, right? He had no ability to; he didn't have access to victims. But he didn't construct his life in a manner where that was the end goal. No, he wanted to be the big-time Hollywood producer, who's who, and the big-time guy everyone coming to him. So then what comes along with that type of person or individual or behavior? Well, there are these other influences that come in. So they don't all go—people don't all go down that path; in fact, they rarely go down that path, or it becomes a spectrum of behaviors, I guess, or a continuum, I guess, would be a better word. But where, 'Okay, now I'm in charge, now I'm in power, now I'm getting drunk on power. Now I'm doing these other things I shouldn't.' Then it's maybe just an inappropriate relationship where it's just not physical yet, but then, 'I kind of like that, and that was exciting. My brain got a reward from that.' And now it keeps going, keeps going, and unless some outside force acts on that, that's just going to continue to happen. But maybe I just continue to take over every company, and I'm a ruthless CEO, and I'm a multi-billionaire, even more companies, right? But that's all I'm doing, though. I'm not using that to sexually assault minors or something. I'm just—I get my reaction and my titillation, my excitement from this thing, so they can spiral out in different ways. And that's why I bring it up, because it's not—we try to oversimplify some of these things when we don't need to, and it's unhelpful. And a lot of the language we use for that isn't very helpful.

So, let's do this. First of all, if you're listening to the sound of my voice, write down on your yellow pad '40:00.' Go back to that when you're listening to this podcast. Everything else is a waste unless you hear Brian's words starting at about 40 minutes, where he talks about this and he puts it in clear, concise chunks for how to do this.

Now, what I'll do is I'll go back to you, and I'll say this: I'm not very profound. You guys know me, I'm an old, balding, overweight guy that's very opinionated, but I've learned some things through my life. So I'm going to give you an H.G. Wells (quote), and that is, 'You are your own time machine.' From the earliest parts of me teaching any of my students, I always would quote stuff like Peabody and Sherman in the Wayback Machine. Why? Because you've got to get historical perspective. How many times, Brian, do I bring that up when we're talking about a new client, or going somewhere, or doing this? 'What's the historical precedence that we set? What's going on here and there?' Well, those things are important because you're your own time machine. You can regulate time because time is nebulous anyway. And the idea is that it's not constant, it's not consistent. So the idea is you can play with it, you can manipulate it. Science is good with that, physics understands that. So that means you can give yourself time and distance.

And it is that easy. It is easy saying, 'No, I'm not going through that door right now. I'm going to take cover. I'm calling more people.' What do we tell kids in combat all the time? I told them, 'Don't go into there unless you know.' You would never want to go someplace that you can't send a drone, a camera, a bullet, a missile, a robot. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So why are we now changing that?

And Brian, when we talk about Peabody and Sherman, I want everybody for a minute to think of the Great Barrier Reef. What happens is all this stuff—there's a reaction that starts building it, and then more dead stuff piles on, and then there's more microbes, and the sunlight hits it, and there's a reaction, and what happens is it metamorphoses and metabolizes until you've got this big reef. That's a baseline. And there's stuff that's stuck to your baseline that's old, that's crap, that was just you glancing at an article rather than reading the full scientific breakdown. And that stuff is not useful, as Brian says. And as a matter of fact, I would go the extra step to say not only is it not useful, it's harmful. So you have to, like ants at a picnic, get up and shake off that gosh-damn blanket that you're on to get some of the crumbs and the ants off and get back to tabula rasa. Because at tabula rasa, you can start the ETA sketch. You can start putting things back in place and going, 'Wait a minute, this is consistently wrong. This woman being outside and this thing...' It's—the Lake County thing, to me, Brian, felt like when I'm reading through the timeline, the distraction for a pickpocket. 'I'm going to bump into you.' The pickpocket's going to get close, they're going to work. There was all this street magician feel to it. So when it feels that wrong, you've got to stop.

And you said something at the end, I'm just paraphrasing part of your argument to give it to Huberman (referring to Andrew Huberman's '360 view'). You said something at the end. I want to take you into the mind of a copper. A copper's never been anything. Now all of a sudden, he gets a badge. And what I mean by that? Yeah, you were good in high school and shit, but this is your first real job, and all of a sudden people have to stop for you, people have to listen for you. And I don't care if you're a boy or a girl, you've got a gun, and you've got a badge, and there's all this power. You can kill somebody on the street if you feel it's necessary. Congress has to come together to put somebody to death. So all of a sudden, you go up to dispatch console, and you're going to get a call for the night, and the dispatcher is a same-sex or other-sex, whatever it is you're attracted to—I'm attracted to furries—and that person across from you says, 'Hey, good job out there tonight!' And man, all of a sudden that dopamine, and you've got the oxytocin, and you're liking that voice. And then you go out and you do something on the street, and you come back in, and they go, 'That was great!' Next thing you know, you're in the Motel 6 nailing them.

Same thing, you go to the Cabbage Patch, you're at the Ram's Horn or whatever restaurant that is, and that waitress that's got six jobs and three kids at home from two failed marriages (or boy or girl, again, I don't give a damn about it) is nice to you. And when you go home at night after midnights, your old lady's gone, or she can't build breakfast for you, or she doesn't know what to do on the street, so you just can't communicate. Well, you see how that starts to form where all of a sudden, Brian, that becomes the reality, but it's not the reality. So it's easy to cheat when you allow your emotional mindset to hijack the baseline rather than look at the facts. 'I'm a wonderful, loving father or mother, I'm a good cop,' and that means that there's an ethical dilemma I'm going to be put into. And when these other people are nice to me, it doesn't mean they want to bang me; it means I have to be tougher and smarter and stronger. You see how that works? So I can apply these same principles that we talk about in my personal life, in my professional life, in a situation of danger, or a situation of opportunity.

You know how I feel about stoicism, and my daughter's a philosophy doctor. The reason I don't like that stoicism is it only applies to my internal baseline. And you say, 'Well, yeah, you're external because how you treat other people.' No, it doesn't, because I look at a situation, and I say, 'What is the baseline telling me? Where are the anomalies? And what can I do with this information?' That's my 'how.' I don't need the 'why.' I understand that the 'why' is going to be present for me. That's the changing of the seasons and the dawn, and why the wind blows differently before a storm, and the barometric pressure drops. Those are all triggers. And we were meant to grow our brain, so the barometric pressure dropping or rising before a hurricane would warn us. We didn't have the brain to do that when we were a child. We didn't have the brain to do that 500 or 1,000 or 3,000 years ago. So our evolution has to be cognitive; it has to be that we're smarter than the average bear, and then we'll be able to overcome these situations and see those cues before the situation occurs.

Yeah, and you know, humans, we have not had a software update in a really, really long time. So we now have more data and more information that we have to process that we never had to before, even 30 years ago, let alone 300 years ago. Absolutely. Three hundred years ago, you didn't know what happened outside your village, and maybe you heard once a month about something that occurred or whatever. But I mean, and I'm exaggerating, you still had lines of communication, there was still that happening, but it was so much slower, which gave me more time to understand and process. Well, now we seemingly have so much stuff and so much information out there that our hardware system and our operating system is what it has always been, and that software takes a lot longer to update, and it's always behind the curve, right? Just like on your phone, it's like, 'Oh, we release this,' and then we realize, 'Hey, there are all these bugs, so we got to fix it,' and then we got to update it. But that update doesn't come until after something happens, right? Until there's some exposure, or something that's been exposed that was an issue.

It's funny because you brought it up. You gave the law enforcement example from your career, and it was actually a great example of your baseline shifting. Because here you have all of this power and authority, and it's significant, but you've been doing it so long you don't even realize where you're at. It reminded me of even being in the Marine Corps, like in Iraq, and we're in someone's house, and they're like, 'Yeah, these people are up to something. They're kind of acting shady. I don't like this.' I'm like, 'Well, I don't know, maybe a bunch of dudes flew 10,000 miles and walked into their home with guns, and I'm setting up Claymores and doing this, so maybe that has something to do a little bit with the way they're acting.' This is not typical for any human being on the face of the planet, no matter where you're at. So, maybe just maybe that's it. But because this is something we were doing every single day, day in and out, it just was so lost on us. And that's very difficult for everyone, and I don't care what your profession is or what you're doing. I mean, that's like the teachers who get burned out or forget about what they're doing, and a doctor not having good bedside manner. It's like, 'Hey, yes, you've been a cancer doctor for a really long time, you're really good at what you do, but this is the first time this person has any experience with cancer, and it's in their body.' You know what I mean? It's something that we just fall victim to as humans, just because that's how life is in a sense.

And so, getting back to what you're talking about, about time and distance, and this temporal element, it's so fascinating, intriguing to me, and we don't have a good concept of it as humans. And I don't think we really understand how much we can influence it, which is why I love your quote, 'You are your own time machine.' You actually get to lay your finger on the scale. You get to process how that happened, and that can be done. And where you get on and where you get very ineffective.

Exactly, yeah.

So, we covered a lot here, and we talked a lot about some of the issues that impact us. But the big takeaway for me is always time and distance, which we can say over and over again. And people can say in different training that they do, or how to approach things, but if you don't have some sort of process to know what that is, it's going to be very difficult. But it is something—I use that with, you know, 'the insurgent' (referring to his daughter) too, because she's getting older. And then she was gone; she's on Christmas or summer break, and she was just gone for a while, and she goes and stays with her grandparents, and gets to be a free-range kid for a while. Then she comes back home. Well, me and Micah (Brian's wife) had to have that talk, right? It's like, 'All right, she's coming back.' Because we're all excited, she's home, she brings so much energy to the house, and Micah obviously missed her so much, and so did I. But then it was like, 'Okay, we got to give her some space for a few days because there's going to be a huge adjustment from which she was just operating—the speed she was operating at—to now you're at home, and you're not in school yet, and we have chores, and we have this stuff.' So it's like, we're going to give her a few days to get through all that before I start saying, 'All right, this is what you have to do every day. This is what you're—this is what I need you to do in the yard. This is what you're going to do to prepare for school.' Like, no, you have to use that time to go, 'All right, there's a transition period here. It's difficult for her. She's going to be an ass because she's not used to getting told what to do for the last month because she's just been running around having fun.' So, we have to sort of ease into that.

That's sort of with everything, and we all jump to this. We have these checks and balances that you have to instill with other people. That one's a perfect example. Me and my wife had to sit down and do that together. You and I do that with different stuff, where I'm on top of something or working with a client that we're cooking, and we're moving forward, and this is going. Like, 'Hey, I want to get in this.' You're like, 'Yeah, no, we do, but do we need to do that right now? Or do we want to just start here?' And I'm like, 'Ah, crap, you're right. Let's chunk this a little bit. Let's not get overwhelmed. Let's not throw everything at them. We have time here.' This isn't— So you have to sort of have that person to do it, or a way to look at it even internally yourself to go, 'Is this the right thing to do right now?' It goes back to even our good friend Brian Willis, who's an amazing guy. He said, 'I love when he sends me an email because I see it at the bottom of his email. It says, 'Remember what's important now.'' And I'm like, 'Damn, that's—it's just like you're so right with that statement.'

Right now, Brian, time is like a river. It's constantly in flux; it's constantly in motion. So that's why we can't just put our finger on it and hold it because all that water behind it's got to come from somewhere, and it's going to go around, and it's going to dig a channel. Look at the Royal Gorge. So you're always really smart when it comes to coming to me with ideas that I hadn't considered in that way before, and then together we put them together, and we come up with a great answer because we have answered so many really, really hard questions for clients. And I love that we have the ability to do that, and when we don't know, we go to experts. What does that mean? Well, we know about large language models, and we know about large data sets, but the idea is that two things that will get you in a trick bag faster than anything is failure to process that information correctly. In other words, the time that you're putting on the analysis and what you do with that information in the moment. And the point of that is communication: internal and external communication, team communication on these issues. You got to tell somebody, 'This is wrong, this doesn't feel right. Why is she going with this kid into the closet?' But we don't articulate that, and it's not because we don't have the words or the lexicon, Brian, it's because we want to stay out of things. We don't know how to approach those things.

I'll give you just two quick examples. I know we're running over an hour, but let me just tell you. P.T. Barnum comes up with the idea of the Solid Muldoon. He's in Europe, he comes back to the United States. He takes some elk bones, some monkey bones, some cow bones, puts them together with Portland cement, and he tells everybody, 'Hey, take a look at what this is! This is some creature that's never been there.' Charges a nickel, everybody comes through and sees it. And then finally, the doctor even certifies, 'Yes, this is part human and part whatever else.' He paid that guy off. That guy eventually on his deathbed said, 'Yeah, Barnum put me up to it.' So Barnum makes a ton of money on that, and it's very famous. What does he do? He goes out further into the West, past the Pony Express, past the telegraph line, past information, Brian, how information was communicated. And he goes just to the edge of that where people didn't know about the Solid Muldoon, and he does it again, and he goes, 'I found the missing link!' And he digs it up in some Western state, and people come in, and he makes a million again.

Brian, we can't touch time. We can manage time. We can influence time in our own lives. We can be our own time machine. But the one thing that we can manage in our lives that'll make it better is processing information and communicating the results. That's how predictive analysis works: 'I tend to see this pattern. I've analyzed it, and it leads me to believe that we're in a crap sandwich,' or, 'It's coming up gold,' or whatever else is going on. In each of the three situations we talked about today, if somebody would have communicated their suspicions, you would have found out what was going on before it occurred, and perhaps been able to mitigate. Perhaps, because you never know, right? I mean, but I would rather have the chance.

Yeah, take the—that's the thing. You're working with probabilities and likelihood at that point, so I'm always going to take something that—I want to increase my odds every time. I want to play games that increase my odds.

Historical perspective has to come in. It has to be a situation that ethically you're feeling comfortable with. Do you get what I'm trying to say? All those things have to fall in line. It can't just be statistics because sometimes statistics can show something that's less weighted than something else. So you have to be the arbiter of fact. You have to be the person that steps in and says, 'This thing is more important than these.' And again, in all these three situations, if that would have occurred, the person wouldn't have gotten in a trick bag in the first place, and it's my just personal opinion on that and my professional opinion as a matter of fact.

All right, well, we covered a lot today. So, if you're listening, if you're still at the tail end of this, please reach out to us with any questions. Obviously, you can always go to the Patreon site as well and reach us on there. We got more information on there. We'd love to get some feedback on what you thought, and what you liked, what you didn't like, or need us to clarify something, because we can always do that. Hopefully, you got some good takeaways on this. Any other final words, Greg?

Yeah, everybody in Lake County, you're a hero. I'm sorry the situation happened to you. Other coppers in the nation, let's pay it forward on duty roll call. Let's not get in a trick bag.

All right, on that, thanks everyone for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the discussion, and don't forget that training changes behavior.