Whats Shaping Your Perceptions

Alright, Greg, we are recording. So, we're going to go ahead and jump in. Hey, everyone. We've got a good one today.

So, Greg, today I want to talk about some of the scientific principles behind what we teach, without getting too sciency. And the reason being, you know, we have our own process and method that we talk about, especially on the podcast and in class. And then people a lot of times we get questions about like, "Well, where are you citing this from, or where is it?" And it's like, "Well, hey, this has been standardized, well-known areas of study for a really long time." And we're taking the fundamentals of it and applying it. And even though we stick to the science, we don't always get into every single nuanced area, meaning we don't state it explicitly, right? They're not always front and center in class or on the podcast because I'm more focused on utilizing the information correctly in a way that anyone can understand, right? It's about the outcome and what you're doing with the information, not just being able to recite something. I mean, anyone can go to school or read a book and cite all of this different stuff or talk about these different theories. And that's just absolutely not helpful in the application of it. We know it or we have to understand it because we're teaching it in our way. So, we know where it comes from, but that's not the important part of what we get into. And that's why we do a lot of storytelling because that's obviously easier to learn and remember. It's the oldest way to learn, but they're not always front and center.

And then what I see a lot is now, especially on social media—LinkedIn and Instagram and all this stuff—is people talking about these different scientific principles. And it's like, "Okay, great. You read a book and you studied this. That's awesome." But so what? And it's everything from some psychological theory. Psychology is the one that's the worst because it's all pop psychology. Some new thing comes along, and everyone gets excited, and then a few years later people are like, "Oh, well, maybe that didn't really work out so well." And it's like, "Yeah, these are just ways that people came up with to explain something that they found interesting, and since you related to it, you also found it interesting, and now we're going to use this." It's like, "Well, hang on, that's one thing that you're looking at." Let's look at the big picture, the sum of all the parts. But we have to start with the little things in there, I guess.

So, just to kind of frame the discussion in that, because we are going to be talking a little bit about emergence, Gestalt psychology, and some of the theories behind it. This is a wide area of study, which a number of people fall under, and how we explain these things, but it's all about perception and processing. So, we're going to talk about—even without getting into the eye and the brain (I mean, we are talking about the eye and the brain)—the process on which we perceive things.

So, first of all, why do scientific principles matter but aren't always front and center in class or on the podcast? Why is that from your perspective, Greg?

No. So, you brought up a bunch of great things. To "street it up," Brian is saying that when we go to the range to qualify, the instructor first doesn't ask us to land in the grooves on the weapon we're about to fire. As important as that information is, that doesn't have anything to do with what we're about to do. So, in class, we move at a fast pace. We assume that you're going to understand some of these principles, and when you don't, there's a lot of source documentation that's out there.

So we rely on science because science relies on evidence. We rely on science because it provides a systematic, reliable method for understanding the world, for solving problems, and for making better-informed decisions, especially in extremis. So science leads to everything. Science leads to advancements in technology, in medicine, and overall quality of life. So why wouldn't we lead? That's our heavy hitter when we go in. But we don't have to dig so deep, Brian, that everybody has to read "Integration" (you know, "Holy crap, there's a topic") or even when we go into heuristics, Brian, you could spend the rest of your life studying and not apply it. And that's why we use it. We look at The Human Behavior Podcast (HBP) and what we do as a living system, rather than these bullet-point theories where it's like, "Okay, this comes from here." It's like, "Well, but it also comes from over here." And then people are like, "Well, that's confusing. Which one?" And I say, "It's all of it." These things are complex interactions. And what a lot of these different theories or procedures are is everyone stops, takes a snapshot in time, and looks at this right here and goes, "See, I'm going to explain everything through that lens." And I go, "Yeah, but the second the situation changes, that's no longer relevant."

So, you can't just rely on one thing. So what do we mean when we say that The Human Behavior Podcast (HBP) is a living system, rather than just a list of bullet-pointed theories?

Yeah. And you know the funny thing you just said again: every time that you see a book that Brian or I own, it's dog-eared, and it's got highlights and sections with arrows. That's only confirmation bias internally. We're reading things and going, "Yeah, well, that makes sense because of what we know." I don't then take a picture of that and send it to Shawn and go, "Did you know this?" because Shawn is going to send back, "Yeah, because it's science."

So, it's just a funny side note there. Look, you're thinking of The Human Behavior Podcast (HBP) as a structure. Think of it as a structure like the U.S. Constitution—another living system. So, that's an absolutely accurate way, Brian, that you just brought up, of looking at it, because science never changes, but the system is and was designed to be adaptable and evolve over time. What does that mean? That means that it can allow for changes based on the application; it can meet the needs of a changing society. It's not Iraq anymore, and it's not Afghanistan anymore. So, as much as those stories to me are vital for me to remember a principle and pay it forward, that might not be important to you. And you make those connections with people all the time through your stories, but you said it best one time—as a matter of fact, you said it an hour ago on a different business call—that look, one day you were speaking to a church group, that afternoon to students in elementary school, and later that evening to Navy SEALs. You didn't change a thing about the science. You might have changed your delivery methodology. You might have had a "Touch Me Here Elmo" or whatever to hold up to entertain the—I don't think that's what that's called for the SEALs.

Yeah, but that was for the SEALs. Yeah.

But the idea is, at the end of the day, Brian, the principles—the psychological, sociological, and physiological underpinnings—have never changed.

Okay. So, let's jump into some of the ones that we're going to talk about today. And the big one being Gestalt psychology. And so I'll let you define it, but it's like I mentioned, it's where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Meaning there's a few things involved with it: I don't have to see everything to know what it is that I'm seeing, but also my brain is searching for an end state to what I'm seeing. And it will guide it in that direction based on what I know and what I've learned throughout life, even if it's wrong, even if it's not there. Right. And so that's the overarching theme, but I'll let you jump into that and explain Gestalt psychology and why it's so powerful.

And you just again nailed it right on the head. Brian and I refer to Gestalt psychology. There's a Gestalt theory that's very deep and goes on, and it's like the second law of thermodynamics; it goes on forever. Okay. But in psychology, Gestalt psychology explains why we tend to see the world through organized patterns. What happens is that interrelated events and structures may not be (interrelated), but our brain organizes them. Why? Because our brain is constantly trying to make order out of chaos. So, in German, "Gestalt" literally means form or shape, and it helps us because what we do is our visual information says, "Okay, these are patterns, these shapes fit together," and even if the final outcome is wrong, our brain will go there. So, it's designed to be helpful, but this is where eyewitnesses can be wrong. This is why visual evidence can deceive us. And your comment that "the whole is merely the sum of its parts" is more important. That's so important to understand from the concept of "theory close enough."

What happens is I had to invent something to name what I was seeing happen on the stand. Cops would testify, and then all of a sudden a witness would testify, and then you'd have another witness testify, and it didn't even sound like the people were at the same story. So then the defense attorney would jump in and go, "There's a bunch of scrum there. This obviously means that they're lying." And I'd say, "No, it's a theory close enough." Your brain tends to group things together, whether they fit together or not. So the other problem is that you anticipate certain things in an environment. So the thing you saw fits that pattern. So therefore, you have to deconstruct your memory. You have to deconstruct what you saw to make sure you're actually seeing what you thought. Because they didn't conduct a detailed investigation. They merely group things together under stress. And the untrained mind believes what it expects, not what it sees.

And I'll give one example, and then you give another one that we've used before in the past. But even what you just brought up as perfect is eyewitness testimony. Everyone was like, "Eyewitness testimony is terrible." And people are like, "Well, no, I know what I saw." And I'd say, "You really don't." And there was a great one where they had someone who claimed that they had witnessed a traffic accident. They're like, "Oh, yeah. I saw the truck go through. It blew the red light and T-boned that other car." And then the camera footage revealed that the person heard the crash, turned, and looked, and saw that it was red where the person should have stopped, and their brain created that entire story, which was the actual story. It was what actually happened, but they didn't actually see the events take place, but they didn't know that. They literally said, "Oh, yeah. I did it. My brain went, 'Oh, wow. I just watched this truck run into it.'" It's like even though you were a quarter or half a second behind, you just heard the noise and then oriented in that direction, and your brain said, "Okay, I know what happened here now." It was absolutely correct, but they didn't actually see the accident. You know what I'm saying? That's how powerful this stuff is because we have to make that order out of chaos. So, I know you've got some.

Well, you remember the early days of Combat Hunter? It was me bouncing around, wearing my "shitty Walmart jacket" and my untucked pants. I was probably hitting you up before a pre-deployment somewhere at some base on one of the coasts. That was just the norm—or in country in a conex wearing an amazingly large one-piece, fire-retardant Marine bodysuit in tan color that did not look very good on me at all. And what happened is I would show pictures that I took (I take a lot of pictures and tell a lot of stories). I would show a picture of a hairdryer—the same exact hairdryer in every photo. But the first hairdryer would be on the counter in the bathroom of a hotel. Everybody knows a blue Formica counter, mirror in the background, and everybody immediately could associate that. Well, now have that in your mind right now and set it to your left. Then the next photo that I would take is a photo of the same exact hairdryer, but it's partially revealed under the passenger side of the car seat. Now, the people that I showed that to on the right-hand side, where it's partially concealed by the car seat, all said "gun." And everybody that saw the hotel bathroom all said, "Guess what? Hairdryer." Okay, now let's take that further and take the hairdryer photo from the left. Instead of on the right having a gun, what we did is we put it in a woodshop up there with some clamps and saws and some different things. And guess what they said? They said "drill."

So, the idea is that priming is so strong in your brain. And guess what? The theory of close enough comes up, and Gestalt literally says we can't be comfortable with a missing piece of the puzzle. So I have to make sense of what I'm seeing in this situation. So my brain helps. But what we're saying from the very basics of this conversation is sometimes that brain is unhelpful because the information it provides you get fixated on, it might not be the truth. Brian, that's the key.

Well, and you brought up, which is why we always talk about when we get into "baseline plus anomalous decision." It's like that context, that baseline, is the most important part to fully understand because that shapes every single perception you have. And you just gave two perfect examples. Like, "Okay, here on a..." (referring to the slightly blurry photos you just blurred out a little bit, right?). It's like, "Okay, that's a hairdryer at a hotel. Okay, that's a drill on a workbench. Oh, wait, that's a little submachine (gun), a little Uzi or something like that." And when I put it next to other weapons, it's like, but to your brain, it just says what should fit here. Okay, this is cognitively "close enough." And that's why we use "the theory of close enough," which is why it's so important to understand that context and where you're starting that from.

And this is exactly it. Again, we never really talked about this one a lot—the Gestalt—but this is where a lot of this stuff comes from. And it's a complex interaction between your eye and your brain, your visual cortex, your memory, the context, the environmental indicators and cues that you're getting, your mood that day, how nervous or scared you are, how happy or excited you are. I mean, there's so much; your emotional state really plays into it as well. And so, we show people how to do that and how to recognize patterns quickly, and then act on them sooner so I can say, "Oh, wait a minute. That is the gun," or "Don't worry about it, that's just a drill." Now, that's just that example, but there is this concept within Gestalt theory about emergence. And this emergence in behavior is what I would call that "click"—that moment you go, "Oh my God, I know what that is! It's the 'Ooh, it's a piece of candy!' kind of thing." This is where that comes from. So, can you illustrate emergence? This is where all of those things from the environment come together, right? And we get that "aha" moment.

So when it manifests, it's when we talk about recognizing that threat or opportunity before it's aware—either before that person's aware of it, before someone else is, or earlier on in the sequence of events that I find myself in.

Exactly. And those "aha" moments, those "clicks"—that's where it's at. So, how do we talk about that in the classroom? Because I can sit here and be like, "Oh, wow, you want me to learn about emergence and call that emergence?" It's like, that's great if you want to go read a book about it, but then how do I use that?

Yeah. So, let's play a game first. Let's deconstruct it first and talk about two things. Let's say that you've never been a cop before. What I want you to do is go in your kitchen right now, bring your trash can out of the kitchen, and dump it on your floor. And you're going to go through that, and I want you to put things together in your brain until you decide what was for breakfast and if the person has a cold. What emergency thing did they have to do to sew on a button? It's all there. It's all in that trash can. Now, cops, you'll have the chance to go out and do a "trash pull" and do the same thing. Make sure you've got your gloves on and you lay out something so you're not tampering with the evidence and pour it onto that tarp. Okay. So now, everybody that's listening to my voice, you've got that trash bowl on the left side, and you've got the trash can on the right side. So what?

So, Brian's example: "A piece of candy" from Family Guy. Peter Griffin's trapping James Woods in that old deadfall trap with the stick and the string. He's got the box weighted, and then he uses Reese's Pieces. As James Woods goes by the alley, he goes, "Oh, a piece of candy." And he follows that candy and gets right in. The joke there is that he doesn't see the forest for the trees. He doesn't see the deadfall trap, and James Woods gets under it. So, if we go back in all of the elemental sciences of psychology and we look at the giants like Koffka and Wertheimer from the '30s, we see that they understood that people didn't understand the "aha" moment. The lynchpin was that emergence hits people at a different time, and they referred to it back then as "the laws of seeing." So now we call it the "fog of war." Brian, there's a million terms that came out of that, right? But the idea—and I love that "laws of seeing" thing. So, visual perception is defined by the emergent properties of the whole. So, the pieces of candy, which we have to gather, then have to be put together, spun around, and taken apart. And until we put them together again, we don't understand exactly what we're seeing.

So that's the gift of time and distance. That's on one hand. On the other hand is our initial battlefield inertia that makes us form a decision quickly. And that "seat of the pants" (or gut feeling) is "the theory of close enough." So they're in a constant battle together. The whole cannot be predicted from the sum of its parts. They can't. The idea is that if we set things together, that could mean any number of things. So there's got to be the Gladwellian "tipping point" where enough things would suggest it's one and not the other. So there's enough puzzle pieces to come together and go, "Holy cow, the Eiffel Tower is just in the background! They're trying to show me these two cats with the ball of yarn." And that's emergence. That's when the brain finally goes, "Oh, I see now." And it can grasp the entirety of the situation you're in.

And from a learning, teaching, and training standpoint, that's an extremely powerful concept to understand. Because now what you do, well, that's the whole thing. If you lay it all out and then go, "Brian, this is leading to the deadfall trap," I go, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I got it." But that's not as powerful as me getting to that "aha" moment on my own. And some people may need a little bit longer than others. But if you create that "hook"—this is even like those suspenseful movies or even sometimes with comedy—that's powerful too. It's like, "Where's this going? I think I know where this is going. Oh, I get it now. I see! That was the guy the whole time. He was the insider threat!" I had that insight. I put it together. So now I'm hooked in and entertained. But from a learning and training standpoint, that's so powerful because if I just lay out the breadcrumbs, if I lay out the pieces, and then you come to the "aha" moment by yourself, well, guess what? That lesson is sticking with you. That's not just me saying some information, you writing it down and trying to memorize it. That's in there, man. That's hardwired now, in a sense. Your brain goes, "God, I love that."

And part of the problem is kind of what you mentioned: it's hard to see what it is as you're putting things together, right?

So, you have to be able to envision it. It would be like, almost, puzzles would never work if they didn't show you the finished product on the front of the box. If you just dumped out pieces that put something together, you'd be like, "I have no idea." Alright, I can find the four corner pieces, but then how long is it going to take me to try and fit those pieces together, and how many times will I put the wrong one together, right?

You will be able to do it, but think of the discovery learning that you'll be going through. You're exactly right. You're "spinning your wheels," and it's going to take way longer than looking at it and sensing the themes. So that's why the brain gave us something. Gestalt named it, but it's always been there. It wasn't that the German guy one day said, "I am Gestalt and (Gestalt says)..." (you know, that never happened). What happened is that somebody goes, "Why is this?" So why did I come up with the term "the theory of close enough"? Because I had to talk a defense attorney off the wall and explain to them, and then the jury goes, "Hey, that makes sense." And now you win the case.

So, here what we have are deep scientific principles that have been around forever, and people are still conducting studies on. And what we do is we "street them" so you can use them. We give them to you so you go, "Oh, I got it." Because you know what the other danger is, Brian? If I show that variously and in pieces, you're going to watch the Family Guy episode and you're only going to come up with, "Well, there's some relationship between Peter and James Woods and candy." Okay, well, that's too perfunctory. There's nothing there. And then you're going to say, "Well, this is about Skittles." Well, no. And it has nothing to do with James Woods' love of candy. The idea is that that's where we're going, right? It's like spending a lot of time with the upside-down puzzle pieces, with only the cardboard side. What we're doing is the brain has to survive in a complex environment. So, Gestalt naturally wants us to tend to put things together, but we also have to understand that with that comes danger. So, as long as we understand the balance on it, most instructors I run into, Brian, they go, "Hey, I love listening to your podcast, but some things I don't understand."

Exactly.

And so, Brian and I don't either. And that's why we're still doing this, and that's why we're on the call talking about it right now, so you can fully grasp these deep concepts.

Yeah. No. And you know, the Skittles one got me too, in The Simpsons episode where Homer walks into the Kwik-E-Mart and says, "Hey Apu, you got any of that Skittlebräu, Homer?" Apu says, "I don't know what you're talking about. We don't have that." Homer then says, "Oh, well, just give me a six-pack of Duff and a package of Skittles." What was he doing?

So, actually, what was happening there is he was not only involved in Gestalt, but he also got to the point where he was reifying. So reification comes where a past memory is so strong. Homer drank Skittlebräu, okay? But he forgot that you couldn't just go to a store and buy a Skittlebräu. I love that. So there's so much science. The two TV shows that you and I watch that have the most science in them are Family Guy and The Simpsons by far.

Yeah. Well, you brought up the next part: reification, the filling in the gaps, right? Our tendency to see more detail or completeness in an image or concept than is literally present, right? So, reification is that part that helps you fill in the blanks, right? As you watch behaviors, interpret an environment, and anticipate actions. But this is where you get into practicing understanding the distinguishment between real patterns from assumptions or biases, so you don't wrongly fill in missing info. So, again, and for people listening, know that a bias isn't a bad thing. It's just that's not what is meant by that term "bias." It's been used incorrectly a lot. Really, subject matter experts and people who are really good at what they do create and form these really great biases that allow them to make quick, fast, intuitive decisions. However, we can still fall into that trap: "Oh, I've seen this before. I know where this goes," and it could be wrong. So, we have to balance it out. But that's actually kind of part of reification. So, maybe you could explain that concept for everyone.

Yeah. So, let's take a history lesson again because I love historical perspective. So, when I got into these "ethos" arguments on the stand, or working with attorneys, they never really understood. Like, they'd be great at the law, but they never had a street application, or you'd be great on the street, but you didn't understand there's not a law for that. It doesn't work that way. And so, there was "turbidity"—this turmoil I try to end by saying, "Hey, look, your confirmation bias is that you'll tend to go out there and look for evidence that supports your theory. It's not science." What you have to do is go where the science takes you. So, remember that garbage that we dumped out? Take a look at that garbage and don't read into it. Tell me what it shows. So if it shows mostly peels from carrots and a Band-Aid, then guess what? Maybe you cut your finger preparing a salad. Okay? That's not to say, "Hey, you had a blood test earlier in the day and came back to get vitamins." What we're doing is we're creating that reality. So reification is the earliest example of a psychological explanation for what confirmation bias does—not what it is, but what it does. And so, we define these abstract concepts—concepts that leave us with a missing piece by filling in those blanks unconsciously. The brain hates chaos again. So it hates a puzzle with missing pieces. So what does it do? It forms something that's "close enough," and even if it has to push a little bit, it'll push that in. And that's why we say stuff like, "Don't put a round peg in a square hole." Because when you're faced with that conundrum, when you're faced with that mystery, your brain is going to fill in that missing information with things that you've experienced, or things that you think, or things that you know, or what you anticipated—you primed yourself to believe was going to be there. I expect this at a crime scene. So, I'm going to add it, Brian. And guess what? Those facets of emergence can be harmful or dangerous. The two things that we hold very important to us when we come to your zone and give you training are the Hoberman sphere (thinking of a thing in 360 before you get there) and the "jack-in-the-box." Nobody wants a surprise. So we'll tend as humans to fill in missing bits of information, even if it's patently and blatantly wrong.

Yeah. And there are just questions. I mean, that's like where "if-then" statements come from, right? If I see this, then what else should I expect to see? What's likely? What's the most dangerous, right? And we use degrees of likelihood because, like you just said with the carrot example, right? There are peeled carrots or the carrot peels, and then there's a bloody Band-Aid in there. It's like, "Okay, well, that makes more sense just going off of what I see right there. It's likely that, 'Okay, did they cut themselves while they were peeling carrots?' versus what you said, 'Oh, they went out and got blood drawn today, and that's the Band-Aid from...' It's like, 'Well, you see no other evidence.'" I'm not saying that didn't happen. I'm saying, based on what we know, what can we likely assume? Where are we at here?

And so, logic, reality, and tendency, and all of these agencies that are in our brain already—that's why one of the other things that Brian and I bring to class all the time is the "funnel." Listen, look at that funnel for a minute. What's much more likely than these? And I remember those two young Marines on the East Coast that day said, "Well, anything can happen." And Brian, we're the staunchest people, and no, not anything can happen. That's not the way life works. Certain things are more likely to happen. So, let's stick with science and likelihood, and we'll come to better decisions faster.

Okay. So, one of the reasons why we talk about this stuff on The Human Behavior Podcast is because you can listen to it and you can find out some of the background information on some of the things we discuss and where it comes from and how to use it. But, I kind of want to talk specifically on why we don't memorize theory in class, why we're not like, "Hey, write down Gestalt and remember that." "Hey, write down 'emergence,' write down 'reification.'" No, we can hit on that without getting into it. And so, the idea with The Human Behavior Podcast (HBP) is that its design is about practical sense-making under pressure, especially (or usually, even if it doesn't matter, it still works). We don't drill down to the academic language of this. We have our own lexicon to use to articulate things, but I don't need to remember all that, right? We can go into them without calling them by name because it's important for me to understand the concept and how to apply it, which is more important than what it's called. And I almost use the analogy, especially for our law enforcement listeners: you don't have to memorize every single case you're going to use for case law and precedent, as long as you're acting within the letter of the law, within the intent of the law. You don't have to go, "Well, I know that that's Graham v. Connor. I know that that's Mimms." (You know, I don't have to remember that). As long as I'm doing what those cases allow me to do, what the legal precedent is. If I'm staying within that, that's far more important than being able to remember what—you know, you brought up the range example to begin with—how many feet per second my weapon system is. It's like, "Well, okay, I don't know what that round is traveling. It's fast. It's faster than I can move, and it's going to kill me if it hits me." I don't need to know the specifics, right, in order to use that effectively. So it's the most effective use, and that's also where I see some things go wrong. Does that make sense?

So, you have your own way of saying, "I know, it makes too much sense." So, what's more important at that point, at that time on the range? Do you need all those things? Do you understand nomenclature and terminal velocity and all those things? Yeah, you need that. Okay. But if I'm going to be in a firefight, I don't need that right now. There are certain things that are survival-based, split-second choices that impact my survival that I need first. So those things that I need first are the things that we like to train your brain on. So, the idea is that the examples that you give are consistently great examples. But I would tell everybody that's listening to us, "How many times have you heard my voice say, 'Do your homework'?" And what I mean by "do your homework" is look at your situation. Examine your baseline. I don't know where you work. I don't know the people you work with, but you do. So, to make the best decision, if you do your homework, you don't (need to rely on memorization). For example, Roy G. Biv helps us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But you know what? God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah gave us a better thing. Gave us a rainbow. We look up at the rainbow and we go, "Wow, that's interesting." And then when we look at a prism, we make a comparative analysis and go, "Did you notice that those colors were in that same order?" And then, guess what, Brian? That's called learning. Now he's learned something. Pink Floyd invented that, right? With their album cover, right? It was Dr. Floyd. So, I'm more a "street music magician" than I am a scientist or a doctor. But what I do understand is how to take these concepts and make them more digestible. So, if we listed out all the scientific principles that we cover in class, you might never come. You might not understand that this higher learning has involved both Brian and I's entire lives, and we're still learning every day. Now, we're really good at it. That's why we're noticed, notified, and regarded as the subject matter experts in this field. But I just read something the other day on LinkedIn. We joke about LinkedIn, but we love it. Don't get me wrong, LinkedIn is a perfect way to get your ideas out there, to get work, and to find similar work. But I read a guy that put on there, "Now, go by my Roy G. Biv example." He goes, "Well, the first thing I learned is 'Bivwack to the Rockies, mate.'" And I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to call my dear friend out. But then he took each letter of "Bivwack to the Rockies, mate," and each one meant a thing that he had to have in his rucksack before he went on a mission. Holy cow. Do you get what I'm saying? If it's past three (items, or steps), you're walking on thin ice. And why does stuff like "HOMES" (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior) to name the Great Lakes, why do they work? Why does Roy G. Biv work? Because you just have to jam it in your head over and over and over. That's not a recallable memory that you want because it's no fun anymore. And it's for one thing: it's for only the Great Lakes. What you want to do is have a whole bunch of memories that you can put together and pay it forward. So, it's not a closed-set shooting, driving, or self-defense scenario. They're all closed sets. The Great Lakes, it's a closed set. There's an end to the number of Great Lakes, colors in the spectrum. Well, we now understand that there are many more colors we'll never see. But guess what? They all come from Roy G. Biv. Every single one of them has an origin story that's there. So, under stress, your brain and body are going to react the way that you're programmed or the way that you're trained. What do I mean by "programmed"? You're hardwired when you come out of the chute with certain things. Some people got them, some people don't. There's always that third choice. If you're not programmed that way and you haven't been trained that way, then there's the "crapshoot." And that means that third choice is that you chose poorly, and you're going to die. And people are going to go, "Well, that's a fatalistic view." No, what I'm saying is that no training in the world can overcome split-second stupidity that interrupts a major component of your survival. If you lose your ability to respirate, you are going to die. If your heart is pierced by a piece of shrapnel, you are going to die. There are certain inevitabilities, and Brian, we call those evolution. So we're saying, if you understand a couple of these principles that God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah, and science combined for us anyway, and you understand to play within them—much the same as you would on a pinball game, where the ball goes up and lights up (if you do it on that pinball game)—you'll generally be right more than you're wrong, playing within the left and right lane markers and your limit of advance. So understanding science is more important than being able to recite the scientific principle. And by the way, Brian made a great point right there: because the U.S. Supreme Court has said even if you name the wrong court case, as long as the elements of the case that you were acting under were right, then they'll accept it. You don't have to remember Graham v. Connor as long as you were going with the spirit of it. So that's a great comment, and science is exactly the same way. Science is very forgiving. You might not know what that's called, but the Pythagorean theorem is still going to work. And your analogy of the visible light spectrum, right, Roy G. Biv, is a great one because at a certain point in the history of the world, that's all we thought existed. We only thought there was red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Well, it turns out—and we found out later on—there's something called infrared that we can't see, but we can if I have the right tool. And there's something actually called ultraviolet. And you know what, there are other parts out there too that we can see or we can't see, but we know exist. And then, light itself is actually—it acts as both a wave and a particle. So, as things develop, there's more and more. But my point is, it's all in this, not in the class (because we don't have time in the class to go through every one of those things). So we had to put it somewhere. But my point of that, though, is what still stands well and that I can see every day. Well, Roy G. Biv—and that has stood the test of time—and maybe we'll find out that light doesn't act that way when we get a different type of sensor for it. So it's reinforcing what I mean by this: when we latch onto these different things that pop up, it's going to continue to evolve. So we're working with what we know today. Might there be something better out there? Sure. Maybe 10, 20, 50,000 years from now. I don't know, and neither do you. You know what I'm saying? We don't think about science; science will adapt to it. Brian, one of the things—let's go back to what our friends teach all the time: they teach shooting, and now it's whatever type of sight the guns have—iron sights or red dots—and whole agencies are going to that and everything else. So, I'm really good with my iron sights. I stick with what I know, and I hate change because I'm a human. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Now, does that mean that I can't spar with you? Does that mean I can't have these discussions with you, work the road, or defend my family? No, because I can take a long time to glam onto that as long as I understand the science behind it. And that's the key. I don't have to make some paradigm-shifting, life-altering change as long as I understand that gravity exists and that gravity will pull. Centrifugal force and centripetal force are important to me. And guess what? Before Roy G. Biv, Ugall and Mukhtar were staring at the sun, Brian, and they knew there was something there. There's something there. Yep. It's always been there. Just as with everything we're talking about, someone comes along and says, "Well, I'm going to name it this." And then if it's good enough, and enough people adopt it, it sticks around. And then someone else comes in and goes, "Well, it's more like this." And then maybe that theory sticks around for a couple years, and they go back. It was back even when I was doing different academic work. And I was like, "Well, I was using Jukes and Dugdale, or something, years ago." And they're like, "Well, you should really be using newer stuff." And I was like, "But why? These guys nailed it 100 years ago. It's still just as relevant today as it is." And it's like, "Well, yeah, but there's better." And I was like, "But is there? Because this is where it comes from." So, I'll ask you: we oversimplify it. It's not oversimplified; it's actually very complex, but it's seemingly oversimplified, or people don't understand the significance of it when we use practical frameworks, right? We talk about things that are incongruent or anomalies. But coming down to when we say, "Hey, baseline plus anomaly equals decision," and people go, "Oh, okay. Got it." It's like, "But do you, though? Because this is where everything lies." And so, what does Gestalt, emergence, and reification have to do with "baseline plus anomaly equals decision"?

Yeah. So, the idea is that stories are the best teaching tool. So let me give you an example, and then you deduce from that or induce what you need. So, Iraq—kinetic Iraq during the time I was hired to make our soldiers, Air Force soldiers, and Marines safer in that environment because they were getting killed by two things. And the two things that were the number one things on their list were snipers at that time and IEDs (homemade devices with things that would blow up). So, first, to find the type of people—the bombers, people said, "Well, we need this surveillance technology and we need that." And this is before I even knew what a "G-boss" was and stuff. And so, what we did to find the perpetrators in a certain area is we hosted a "Christmas in July." Now, in Detroit, we do that by parking a truck, and in the back of the truck, we have a TV box. Wait, first, let me explain "Christmas in July."

Well, let me explain it very briefly. So, you see this truck that's broken down on the side of the road, and inside the back of the truck, where I'm sitting in the shade trying to call the wrecker. You see the boxes for the plasma TV and for this and that and the other. The boxes are all empty. There are a couple of rocks in them to give them some weight. And what I do is I stay on the phone, and I walk away from the truck like I'm going to the local gas station, and I leave the truck. Now, Brian, what's happening there is I've created opportunity. And now, a normal person would go, "Hey, I'll keep an eye on his truck, and if anybody messes with it, I'll call 911." But those criminal elements in our society will look and go, "Woohoo! Piece of candy, free TV!" So what happens is when they jump in the back of that semi to go and grab that box, the semi's back opens up to a hidden compartment, and there are a bunch of cops, and they go, "Yahtzee!" And now that becomes the "Christmas in July." If it's too good to be true, it probably is. So, all I did is take that selfsame thing that we had done on Detroit streets many years, and say, "Okay, who's got a shoebox?" We took the shoebox, a toilet paper roll on the end of the shoebox, and then a shoelace hanging from the back of the shoebox, and we made a security camera. Understanding "the theory of close enough," reification, and Gestalt allowed me to duct tape that to a pole and have people come by and try to destroy it, thinking it was a surveillance camera. It wasn't. It wasn't even close to that, but it was "close enough." So, you can use Harry Potter's magic wand for good or evil. It's up to you.

Same thing: spilling into a place that looked like a butcher shop because it had a drain in the floor and it was covered with blood. But then, trying to figure out why they were keeping all these VHS tapes, and why there was a tripod there, and all the other things, figuring out that's where the brothers Al-Qaeda were doing all their beheading videos. Okay, Brian, it took me time to re-identify. I had to conduct a reification and a re-integration in my brain to figure out why these things would be here well before I watched a VHS tape. And now I was able to come back, fly back before my next deployment, and teach Marines about that. "Hey, if it looks like this, guess what? Jack-in-the-box moment!" Do the Hoberman 360 (degrees). Afghanistan. We're sitting in an ECP and watching all day long on "binos," and all I'm seeing are these pink prayer clocks coming across from Pakistan into Afghanistan. And so, finally, I go, "I can't be on the binos anymore." So I walk down and I grab one of the prayer clocks. And you know what it had? It had a 10-foot extension cord on the back of it, Brian. And I look and I go, "Okay, they must not have a lot of power, or they must have that prayer clock running outside to the generator." So, I asked a couple of people some questions, and they go, "Now, just like your house, our clock is close to the outlet." And I was thinking, "Holy smokes, they're smuggling in the copper wire so they can use them on the bombs!" So, Brian, a clever "hood"—a clever criminal on the street—has to use unconventional means to fool me because I'm on the lookout. So, I have to have that trap door in the semi to hide the illegal. I have to have a compartment in my vehicle to hide the cocaine. Well, it's no different. So, I could go on all day with examples. So, those examples were how I learned. So, what did I do? I turned them into teachable moments for the Marines by doing two things: one, in class, I would show them those theories by showing them certain videos or photos that I recreated. Then I would take them out behind the place that we're teaching and hide an RPG by just using a couple of simple devices in the backyard and putting it with things it didn't belong with, like a shovel and a hoe. You get what I'm trying to say? And then put the observer out there holding another shovel. But nobody's digging. Nobody's harvesting. And then what would happen is once your brain came to that epiphany moment and had the "aha," you would never forget it. And guess what? Immediately those units in combat were spotting those snipers and those triggermen and those dangers.

And that's also why we have things like "urban masking," "social camouflage," and "street tools," right? That's a better name, and it's more real, and I can come up with my own examples than go, "Hey Greg, give me some examples of reification that you've seen." It's like, "Well, hang on, this is kind of a complex thing. What do you mean?" It's like, "No, no, it's got a little... it had a little reification with the reintegration, and the next thing you know, you're sitting there (thinking), 'I don't have enough yellow pads!'"

Exactly. Yeah.

So, it's "keep it simple." I have to—the way my brain categorizes things, and the way the context in which I see them, and how they're laid out—it creates a story, and so that story has to make sense to my brain. So it will force it to make sense no matter what. Whether I'm right, wrong, or indifferent, it doesn't matter. I'm not walking away without knowing the ending of the story. I have to know it, otherwise I can't handle it. So, let me take you back to that example and give you one more. Okay, so we've got the garbage piled up in our living room if we're not a cop, and if we're a cop, we've got the dumpster tipped over, and we're out there with the flashlights. We're taking looks at stuff. Okay, you and I have set up for the years that we've worked together, and before when you first met me, you saw this example. I took a simple photo, turned it into a video of a traffic stop, and had the cop walking up on a vehicle. And I stopped the tape before anything else and I say, "Give me a number of things that you notice." And people are yelling stuff at the screen. You were one of those young Marines yelling stuff at the screen. And when I got to a point, I let some stuff hang in the air and I said, "What's the matter with this?" And I pointed to the rear of the car, and the brake lights were on. Well, guess what? If your foot's on the brake and the brake lights are on, Brian, that means something. And nobody was seeing what it meant—specifically the cop—and that meant that the person might be ready to drive away. So once that epiphany moment hit in that class, those Marines were on to that. And then the next few "pieces of candy" that we put on the floor of the carpet in front of them were easier for them to pick up and assume what was going to happen next, to think about the process. And that's advanced critical thinking: being able to throw those items around from that garbage and say, "These are the most likely." Now, "these are the things I don't know," and they become my unknowns. So I have a pile of knowns. I have a pile of unknowns, and guess what I have if I have an unknown? I get an extra set of eyes on it. I take more time, or I get behind cover. I mean, there are so few things that I have to think about now. And that's survival-based thinking. Everybody thinks survival-based thinking is what you eat, and you know, "flipping the tire," and having the fastest gun draw.

Yeah, that's all important. I agree. And stick to that because you're really good at that, but let us handle the critical thinking stuff and how your brain works in those dynamic situations.

Yeah. And then, one of the issues with this—even with "the theory of close enough," intuitive decision-making, and seeing a pattern emerge from a few simple cues, clues, or things that I'm picking up on in my environment—is that people have a hard time going, "Well, I think this is it, but I may be wrong." Or people go, "I know what this is, and it's that," and they are wrong. So, there's either that hard part, which is avoiding pitfalls (an ethical dimension). And I think—you tell me—the best way to guard against snap judgments or incorrect, faulty biases is more about that contextually-based process of doing it right. I have to have a way to look at it. I have to understand and try to see what the front of the puzzle box would look like, even though I haven't seen it yet and I've got the pieces laid out at me, because there are only so many possibilities. It's like, "Okay, I see some whiskers and an ear. Okay, that's a cat. So, it's a scene involving a cat. What could possibly be involved in that?" And then I can start to put it together from there, if that makes sense. Because that's one of the biggest things I see: either a failure to act (because it's like, "Well, I don't want to be wrong, 'cause maybe I'm not as confident in my observation") or an overreaction ("Yeah, dude, I've seen it before, I've seen everything there is, I know what it is"). And they're both equally as dangerous, I would say—the failure to act or overreacting. So, that's one of the toughest things with any observation and predictive analysis, right? Is that fear of being wrong, or fear of being too right (where a hundred times that would be correct, but in this situation it's different). Well, why is it? So, how can I understand this better? Or what do I do to avoid some of that?

Yeah. So, stay away from the "more study is necessary" mentality because that's for academics, that's for scientific principles, and every one of your friends will hate you. But conduct experiments all the time. So, when I was younger, growing up on the street, Halloween really meant something in Detroit and the Detroit metro area. You had "Devil's Night" before (which I won't go into), but there was a lot of smoke, arson, death, and mayhem, and then the night of Halloween. So, what I saw when I was a kid and growing up from being a kid to an adult is that kids would have a mask that had Dracula or Frankenstein or some zombie character or something else, and they would have it on their face. But the problem was that you would constantly see them tip up the mask and have it off their face, and everybody's first thought was, "Oh, well, it's too hot," or they were looking around, or anything else. What it was, is they were scaring themselves when they had the mask down and they saw the face on the mask. They scared themselves, and they didn't like it as much when they could have that mask ready, but they had it up on their face. And then I saw the interactions with the other little kids. So, let's protract that. But if you get where I'm going, let's protract that to the first time you saw a baseball game. The first time you saw a baseball game, you had no idea what you were watching. And you sat there, and you saw that there was a form and a rhythm, and there were certain things that happened. And you heard that some things were good because you heard the crowd scream, and some things were bad that you heard the crowd boo. So the same thing as me watching those kids and trying to figure out what was in their heads on Halloween happened to me my first Tigers' downtown Detroit baseball game. I had questions. And so, what I did is I looked and I said, "These are the logical answers to those, based on reality." Well, we go counterclockwise. "What do you mean?" "Nobody ran to the third baseline." "There are hits that are really good, but the longer hits are caught much more frequently." And the hits infield, guess what? If they can beat that runner to first base, you're out. So, I start establishing the architecture of the observation. But where do both of those things start? From a baseline. I have to fully understand the baseline, and I have to compare the knowns and the unknowns against the baseline and what I expected to see. And I have to anticipate, and I have to have curiosity (is what I'm explaining here) to be able to walk across and go, "Why does your kid want to be a 'wolf man,' but when he sees the 'wolf man,' he screams?" So these are the type of things that we're talking about. So, what we do when you come to a class is we take all that wonderful science that we use and we make it practical in your life. So you can see it showing up at school. You can see it during the HR interview. You understand walking to church. And now, by understanding the baseline, we give you these conundrums. We give you these conflicts and different ways that you can test them, and we say, "Okay, well, this exterior schema occurred here," but we don't call it a "schema." We go, "This guy is carrying whatever," and by trial and error, you start coming to the epiphany moment on your own. So we "crawl, walk, run" it through until you now say, "Pass me the baton, I'm at the end of the race." Now, that was a long way to get around a tent, but the idea is there's no better way than to think about something that you don't understand. How long would it take you to sit and watch and then conduct little tests before you understand it? That's how you learn to ride a bike. That's how you learn to go swimming. That's how you learn all the lessons that lasted your entire life. And all we're doing is recreating that in a classroom in an exciting, fun, educational, entertaining way. Because if we didn't, Brian, it would just be like high school. You forgot 90% of what you learned in high school, and you'll never remember it, right?

Yeah. And it's really what we're talking about is learning to see the whole picture, right? How do I see that whole picture? So, everything we just talked about—Gestalt, emergence, reification, reintegration, everything we mentioned—that's a constant that's in your life, that's always going on. That's something that's happening. So, what I always like to do is, "How do I get better at that? Or how do I get better at understanding it?" (You know, use your own life experiences of something you've gone through before or seen.) And you go back and go, "Well, why did I choose option A when I should have gone with option C?" Or, "What was it about that situation?" And then it's easier, obviously, in hindsight, to go back and reflect on those things. And especially, it's easier if it's personal to you, 'cause you were there, knowing that maybe you didn't get the full picture. But let's break it down. What were all the elements that happened? And then I always find the most value out of doing that is going back and being like, "Oh, I get it." This is why my wife had such an attitude when I walked in. It had nothing to do with me. I should have known. Oh, wait. She just had this happen at work, and then this, and then Max was sick, and then this, and then that. I'm like, "Oh, that was what it was! These were all of these contributing factors to that negative interaction we just had." It had nothing to do with what I said or did, right? We, and so what's easy to do is then you can go back and pull out those pieces, and then it just builds your own library, builds your own schema, your own mental file folders of going forward, especially if it's for a specific context, right? You're doing interdiction, you're doing fugitive apprehension, you can go back and go, "Wait a minute, there are all these commonalities between all of these. What are those things, and what else would they look like?" And then you build that mental rolodex. So you have an infinite amount of examples that you can draw back on. And now you're building that, where your brain is using all of these concepts to its advantage, going, "Hey, wait a minute. This doesn't fit in here because you've seen this before." It wasn't exactly the same, but it was cognitively "close enough." So now I have something to go off of. Now I have a comparison that's accurate because it happened to me—real experience, something that occurred in a situation I was in. So, I can draw from those experiences and go, "How is this the same? How is this different? What else should I expect to see from that?" I knew what the outcome was there, and that was bad. Or I knew that the outcome was there, and was really good. So, how do I mirror that, or what similarities can I draw from to get me to a more reasonable conclusion, just seeing the whole picture? I don't know if that makes sense.

And so, let me throw this at you. We use behavior—human behavior in interaction with a baseline. We never use race or religion or ideological differences or those type of patterns. And when we do use context, context is relative because context gives us a way to take a look at a situation and go, "Well, there's something I didn't understand." So, the way (for example), I'll give you this example: it's much easier for me to tell stories. I'm getting older, and I'm forgetting that sometimes it's easier just to give you a practical example. So, I get everybody lined up in a classroom, and I take half the class outside and I go, "Johnny Cash is a Hasidic Jew. I need you to take a minute and come in and prove it to us." And then I take everybody in class. I'm "Miss Carmy," by the way. And I say, "These guys are going to come in and say, 'Johnny Cash is a Hasidic Jew.' Why is that wrong?" So, the first thing is: what's the postulation? What's the hypothesis? What are we working on? Well, every time I've seen Johnny Cash, he's wearing black. As a matter of fact, he's called the "Man in Black." Hasidic Jews wear black. So, what's that called? Well, that's called "the theory of close enough." I'm jumping to an unreasonable conclusion. I'm putting a round peg in a square hole. What about a Hasidic Jew? Because of their religion—and here's where culture becomes context, religion becomes context—I add that to my baseline and go, they have to wear certain clothes over other clothes, and a hat, and those things. So what I'm doing is I'm framing learning not about religion. I'm learning from comparison. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? And what do I have to compare it against? I have baseline, and you're learning how to draw reasonable assumption conclusions based on artifacts and evidence. And when I don't know something, I'm not going to rush to an unreasonable conclusion. What am I going to use? I'm going to use the gift of time and distance to go, "There's something happening here." Why does this person wear black all the time? And you know what, Brian? It might be something as simple as a fashion statement, but I've run it through scientific rigor. I've run it through academic rigor. I just didn't know I did. So, that baseball game, Brian, something's going to happen in the baseball game, and that guy's going to hit a rope. And you're going to wonder, "Why isn't he running?" And then your dad leans down (or your mom) and says, "Because it was out of bounds." "What do you mean?" "You see that line in the paint?" "You see, through our lives, we need that coach, we need that mentor, we need that trainer to teach us about bunts and to teach us about ground-rule doubles." But we don't have to have that to play baseball or to enjoy watching baseball. So what we do is we bring the science-based evidence that's been vetted and we bring it to you and we just allow you to sit and have a hot dog and watch the baseball game, but you're still learning. You're learning a bunch of valuable stuff.

And those are simple things you can practice even throughout your day. Alright. What are the pre-event indicators I see? When the insurgent comes home from school, it's different when she comes right up to me versus when she goes straight to her room, or something. Or when they do this. What are those things that tend to show that I know where this is going? This is where you become the genius and take over the entire company and corporation because you don't need me anymore.

What's it look like around your company before lunch? What's it look like before Jim and Tammy take their smoke break? Give me the pre-event indications that you see so you can tell 15 minutes before that you're 15 minutes out from whatever it is. The Olsons are going on vacation. Prove it. Show me those things. And Brian, those artifacts and evidence abound. They're there every single day. What we don't understand is we don't understand how to increase the likelihood by using a scientific methodology of comparing them against knowns and unknowns and a baseline to determine what's relevant and what's more likely than not. And all we've got to do is make better decisions. We don't have to make the best decision. Many times we'll never get to that. We won't have the time. There's no best decision, right?

I look at it as, "What's the best decision now, or what's good enough?" Because that's a win over time, though. That's a huge win. I mean, you don't have to knock it out of the park. You're looking at singles and doubles, and back to baseball, you've got to get on base, don't you?

So that's—well, you got me on the baseball one. So, now I want a hot dog (referring to a "hot bastard"). You're getting hungry. It's lunchtime for Greg.

Yeah. Exactly. Alright. Well, we covered a lot. And I think we'll add in some more and do a few more examples for everyone on our Patreon page. Folks, you can check it out. You can even check it out for free for a while. We've got a ton of information on there. We've got even more, and it's a good centralized location. I'm putting more of our content out there that we even put on LinkedIn and other places, so you can just access all in one place. I'm trying to get it all there. Just that way if you want to follow along, there are articles, blog posts, videos, and, you know, I do a lot of summaries of the different podcast stuff for little takeaways, so you can practice on your own, too. It's all on there, so you can check that out. But, I don't know any other final comments, Greg.

No, I was just thinking of Shelley when we were doing the baseball example. You're hungry. So, yeah, I am. And at work, somebody approached Shel with the "brackets," and you should have heard her. She ranted for 45 minutes on "brackets." Why? Because she understands nothing. She doesn't understand the concepts about it or anything else. And Shelley likes knowing everything. So what do you think she was doing all last night? Putting together brackets and trying to figure out the math and where the angle is. So look, when we say, "Do your homework," we are in a group of people that are constantly intellectually challenging themselves to be the best that they can be. And improving your cognition improves your overall safety and survivability. So part of it's on you.

Yep. All right. Well, I think that's good. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Don't forget to share the episode with a friend if you enjoyed it and give us a thumbs up or a like. It really helps out a lot. We do appreciate that. And don't forget that training changes behavior.