The Human Behavior Podcast
Do you ever wonder why people act the way that they do? Join human behavior experts Brian Marren and Greg Williams as they discuss all things human behavior related. Their goal is to increase your Advanced Critical Thinking ability through a better understanding of HBPR&A (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis.) What is HBPR&A? It's a scientific (and fun) way to understand and articulate human behavior cues so that you can predict likely outcomes and it works regardless of your race, religion, political ideology or culture!
The Human Behavior Podcast
If It Walks Like A Duck
Mental errors don't just lead to embarrassing moments—they can be fatal. When your brain categorizes something as familiar and routine, it filters out critical information that could save your life.
The duck versus platypus problem perfectly captures this dangerous cognitive trap. Both creatures share remarkably similar features—broad bills, webbed feet, semi-aquatic lifestyles—but only one has venomous spurs that could put you in the hospital. When you mistake a platypus for a duck, you've missed the most important detail.
Through two powerful real-world examples, we unpack how this error pattern repeats in high-stakes environments. A paramedic, responding to what appeared to be a routine medical call, was fatally stabbed by a patient with a violent history he never knew about. Law enforcement officers, celebrating their successful drug bust, failed to properly search a suspect who was carrying a loaded gun all the way into the jail. In both cases, what people thought they were seeing wasn't what was actually there.
The second analogy we explore—outrunning your headlights—explains why we miss these critical signals. Sometimes we're moving too fast to process what's in front of us. Other times, we've forgotten to turn on our mental headlights altogether. Either way, we're blind to dangers lurking ahead.
Our brains are wired for this type of error. Each time we successfully navigate a situation, dopamine reinforces the pattern, making us more confident and less careful the next time around. We follow our unconscious roadmap rather than creating our own, questioning, and exploring the territory.
This episode isn't about blaming victims of these errors—it's about recognizing the universal human tendency to miss critical information when we think we already know what we're dealing with. By slowing down, paying attention to incongruent signals, and getting comfortable with not immediately knowing all the answers, we can create the space needed to see things as they truly are.
Have you encountered your own duck versus platypus situations? We'd love to hear about times when slowing down and questioning assumptions made all the difference in your life or work.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. Today we're breaking down two of our favorite analogies that highlight where sense-making often goes sideways, especially when lives are on the line. First up, the duck versus platypus problem. Just because something looks familiar doesn't mean it is A platypus. Looks like a duck, swims like a duck, but it's got venomous spurs and if you miss that detail it could kill you kill you. Next, we're talking headlights, specifically outrunning them. Whether you're driving too fast to see what's ahead of you or forgot to turn them on in the first place, the result's the same You're blind and bad things are coming fast. We unpack two real-world cases that perfectly illustrate how these mental errors show up in the field and how easily confidence and routine can set the trap. This episode is about slowing down, paying attention and recognizing when your brain is about to walk you into a mistake. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber-only episodes. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider leaving us a review and, more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time and remember training changes behavior. All right, craig, so we're recording and we got a good one today.
Speaker 1:So today, everyone, we are talking about a few things. We're talking about ducks and platypus, headlights and a whole bunch of other things, and let me just start off by explaining what I mean by this. If you've ever heard the saying, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and you know, acts like a duck, whatever it's, it's a duck. Well, there's also something that's very similar to a duck and if you're not familiar with this, you can go down the internet rabbit hole after this episode but it's something called a platypus, which a lot of people, a lot of people, don't even know, when you talk about it, that it's a real, actual animal. I think you've seen it like a cartoon or something they're like wait, a platypus is real, but the idea is the duck and the platypus have a lot of similarities. They both have broad, flat bills, they have webbed feet, they're semi-aquatic, they live in and around the water, they're excellent swimmers, they both lay eggs, which is actually extremely rare for mammals. But they kind of look similar, they act similar, they talk similar, but the key difference is that a platypus has venomous spurs on its hind legs and now they're kind of used for?
Speaker 1:Yes, they can be used for defense and things like that. They're toxic. They're actually used for reproduction, almost like a roofie type situation there. But there's other uses for it. But if you get stung by those it could really hurt you, and if you're a little kid or something like that could probably kill you.
Speaker 1:So the point is not everything is a duck that looks and walks and talks like a duck, and so that's sort of my preface right there about that. I'll get into why we're talking about that in a minute. But we're also talking about headlights. Today Sometimes we outrun our headlights if you've ever heard that meaning you're driving faster than what you can see, and then sometimes we completely forget to turn the headlights on and we're driving blind in the dark. And so what I'm getting with these analogies and we're going to jump into a couple of cases and explain what we mean is that it's a big thing we talk about.
Speaker 1:People often mistake a duck, thinking it's a duck and it's actually a platypus, or the opposite, where they're like oh man, that's a platypus, it's going to sting us and it's really just a duck.
Speaker 1:And sometimes there's there's kind of opposite ends of the spectrum where we're we're go, go, go, go go. We're onto something and we're I start outrunning our headlights. We miss really important things and then sometimes obviously you know we're, we're, we forget to turn them on at night and we're driving blind in the dark and so we're going to hit something, we're going to run into something, and so those are the kind of two main topics, greg the duck, platypus, analogy, and then our headlights. So I'll throw to you to kind of set up the story and some of the examples we're going to use. But this is something that's common. All know these all the time. This is everything that we talk about, basically summed up in headlights and and ducks and platypus. So I'll let you kind of be the one to to set up the story and and make sense of what the hell is brian talking about today so a couple of things.
Speaker 2:First of all, if we use the beginning of this, I think we could get an involuntary commitment for brian. If we gave no context and just had you blabbering about ducks and platypi, you know that's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Well, that's not. That's not hard to get involuntary commitment.
Speaker 2:And anytime you just have me talk to a mental health professional, they're immediately hitting the red button Cancel my afternoon calls and our good friend, our ground branch guy from New Zealand, jason Jones, if you're listening, spent a lot of time in Australia and New Zealand says that platypus tastes just like chicken and also you brought up toxic reproduction, which in fact is under my photo in my high school yearbook.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying. I was going to say there's a lot of people who are the product of toxic reproduction and we're out.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. And the call's over production and we're out. You know what I mean and it calls over no. So so look, those of you that are our listeners, that were lucky enough to visit the powderhorn guest ranch and you came in on the road to the middle of nowhere, which was just beautiful in the primitive wilderness and everything you remember passing reese tree. It was a huge old willow that grows by the savoy on a dirt road to nowhere. I mean, there's only a couple of ranches back there on that road and there's huge scarring on the tree from people hitting it.
Speaker 2:And so, based on my own research and the research of the people that lived in the valley and why it was named after Reese, is what happened is people at night would outrun their headlights. You're on a dirt road, you're getting to go real good at a clip, you know the road by heart, and then all of a sudden something steps out in front of the car or you get into a little bit of a skid and overcorrect. You don't want to go into the river, which is on your right side, you don't want to go into the mountain, which is on your left side. So guess what? You're per dork a tree. And what happens is we all do that. Look, think of the beginning of Star Wars, not Star Wars, star Trek, ooh, she was my favorite. Oh my God, the masturbatory fantasies. But I want you to think of being driving and all of a sudden the snow is coming at you and you make the mistake, at night, of turning on the high beams. And when you turn on the high beams, all of a sudden it becomes overwhelming. You can't see shit through your front windshield because the snow is taking everything. Well, that's what happens to your mind. Everything. Well, that's what happens to your mind. Your mind gets clouded and all of a sudden you're driving and then you go a little bit faster, and a little bit faster you think, oh my God, I have to get there. I have to get there right now. It's important. Well, here's two capers, brian, that we can talk about today, that both talk about outrunning your headlights and it can be fatal, and both of them deal with the platypus. So the first one briefly, and folks, do your homework, it's in the story details and Brian will have all the links set up for you.
Speaker 2:The first one is very simple. There's a female going down the freeway that's bleeding. Somebody calls EMS. Ems shows up Sure enough disoriented female walking in the media and they know nothing. They know nothing about it, but it looks a lot like a duck and the duck is bleeding. So they get her into the back of the rig and while she's in the back of the rig with the paramedic, she pulls out a knife and stabs the paramedic fatally. He ends up dying on the way to the hospital. Nothing they could do. Not only that, but jumps out of the back of the rig and tries to steal the vehicle. So she's overpowered by a couple of coppers and other firemen.
Speaker 2:Listen, that copper that saved the vehicle couldn't save that paramedic. Why? Because God, buddha, vishnu Allah put these things out in the open for us. And guess what? They're covered. They look like a duck. It's just another call, brian, it's just a female in distress. What they didn't know is that she had just bonded out for an assault on a copper a day before that, that she had a violent and unpredictable history. So here a guy doing his job encounters the platypus, and this sting was vital. Okay, now hold that in your mind for just a second, then we can break these down.
Speaker 2:Second story copper's doing his job, copper, and it doesn't matter male, female, I don't give a shit about those things. Think about the story and think about the heart of the story. You can always look it up and dig deeper on your own. But copper sees a sled go by and says those windows are illegal tenant. That's great. That's great because copper is interested and wants to look at their environment and, as being curious, picks this car up and now it's a legitimate stop, it's a legal stop. On the stop goes this guy's acting squirrely and I'm getting the information through my senses, my five senses, that there might be drugs on board. Now, based on my experience, that means at this point I call two people. I call window tent guy to confirm the tent so I can write the ticket, and I call dog boy so dog boy can bring the dog by and see if the dog hits on it. Sure enough, dog hits on it. Long story short, do your homework.
Speaker 2:They captured a guy. He's got narcotic paraphernalia in the car. Further search determines that he's got two types of drugs on him. Then they get him back and he makes some rest, just a statements, and they get a search warrant based on his interview and interrogation. And you guys know what I'm talking about. That street interview, rest just I statements go a little deeper. Now he's in custody, he's not free to leave. He makes statements that are protected. That's what the whole caper was about. And they execute a search warrant on his house, brian, they get gun components and they get more drugs and they get all this other stuff. Great caper, but but. But this guy started out looking like a platypus and once they had him in custody he looked like a duck. No further information needed, buddy. He's fine. Guess what they do when they get to the jail they pat him down and he's got meth and some other drugs with him and he's got a loaded gun Headlights in both.
Speaker 2:Pump your brakes once in a while, because if you're out running your headlights and it looks too much like a duct, you're going to relax too soon and that could be fatal. In both instances you had people doing their job and they were doing it well, brian, but what happened is now, on this caper with the tinted windows, do you see how the entropy and the centripetal force and the third law of thermodynamics are starting to pull in, the second and third on this one? And all of a sudden, what happens is you're going fuck, we're hitting a thought Pardon my language You're hitting a bat in a thousand. And then what happens? Some guy up in the jail goes. Hey, what about the bag of dope and the loaded gun? That could have been a fatal sting too. So, simply put and I apologize for the rant we sometimes get into misadventure, and those misadventure can be fatal, because we don't consider the entire picture of what we may be facing over.
Speaker 1:And these are two kind of examples of one, sort of outrunning the headlights right, you've already got a search warrant and searching his place and this guy hasn't even been properly searched yet. And this guy hasn't even been properly searched yet. And then the other one, obviously being the you know, never even shined a light on it, never even thought of this, never turned the headlights on to see if this could potentially you know what this could potentially be, and so you know. They're good cases for comparison. And here's why, first of all, with the paramedic, fireman shows up like that's the. You know they're coming from this. And we've got plenty of folks that have reached out to us from different agencies and shout out to the distinguished savages Walt, who is, you know, three decades in EMS and is a first responder, and but you know it's you're going in there, going, I'm here to care for someone, I'm here to do this Like you're not coming in. From the same perspective as, like the law enforcement case you mentioned, where it's okay, I'm here to arrest this, I've got probable cause. Now I've got this. Holy crap, this is, this is good, like you said, this is the, this is everything's laid out in front of me, right.
Speaker 1:And so that's kind of when we miss the, the, and it goes back to the duck, platypus, things like well then, I don't, I don't see it. That right here is is, is the? Is the threat? And and neither one of those in the similarity in those two situations is that the sort of deadly threat was, was right there in front of your face and and they didn't see it. So that this is, this is the, the, you know the, the crux of a lot of these problems where we get into and talk about errors and sense making, but it's not, it's the how to see part right, it's the recognition that this could be, yeah, it's likely a duck, but it could be a platypus. So what elements would lead me to see that? And then, same thing, the opposite. Okay, we've got him, he's in custody, it's this, it's no longer a threat, it's like, well, that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 1:And so balancing those two things out, I think, is because if you go too far in one direction, you're going to be hyper-visual, and if you go too far in the other direction, you're just going to be completely oblivious to your surroundings, right, so it's. How do I go back and forth or stay in that middle area where I can see and handle those things. And that's what the whole duck platypus analogy is. It's a comparison, it's an MLMD COA, it's is this everything that I expected it to be or is it not everything I expected it to be? And so the reason why the overarching reason why these things happen is because we are wired this way for it to be. And so the reason why the overarching reason why these things happen is because we are wired this way for it to happen. Right, I get a hit of dopamine when I do this, and I'm correct, and I'm correct in this over and over again. So my brain goes aha, I know this. And it just gets rid of all that minutiae. Oh, don't worry about that, I already know where this is going. So it's now pulling you along right, rather than you determining the path and where this is going. So your brain, your unconscious brain, your own you know thing that's that's meant to keep you alive and can make all these great decisions and can do all these amazing things, is leading you to your death or leading you to a place that isn't good, unknowingly, unwittingly, in a sense, right, and so we're just. Yeah, the hook gets sets in and I follow that, and I follow that and ooh, a piece of candy, ooh, a piece of candy. Ooh, a piece of candy. Right, and that's why we fall into those traps is go well, rather than just following along with what your brain, your own self, your own unconscious mind is telling you to do, what's the path you want to create? And how do you explore that? Because I may have to poke my head around this corner to see what's up, and then poke my head around this corner to see what's up, and they go yeah, you know what, we're good on this one. All right, you know, and, and and that's the essence of time and distance. But you have a lot of people that say, well, you're not always going to have the time.
Speaker 1:And I say, yeah, you fucking do like you always have you actually do, you always have the time, and if it's, if it's something that's so, the the the simple ones are the obvious ones. Where it's obvious that you don't have time, well then that means that it's such a significant threat, or so obvious that it is, or it's so obvious that this is just benign, that it's easy. Those are simple problems that anyone can figure out Like you don't even need a lot of training or experience to see those. It's all the ones in between that are a little bit more complex, where everyone wants to have these different attitudes about it.
Speaker 1:Greg never wants to say like, oh well, this could happen. It's like, well, no, that couldn't. But you guys are saying, well, this could be the platypus. It's like, yeah, but show me, Prove to me that it is, Prove to me that this is different than the one that you're going, that you're typically used to seeing. And what measures have you put in place to sort of regulate your own response to the situation, to regulate your own thinking? I don't mean like response, like okay, step back, do this, draw your weapon or tactic technique procedure. I mean how are you thinking about this and how are you approaching this? Because you're jamming in solutions and you haven't clearly defined the problem yet. And that's the biggest thing that I see with these situations, Greg, Does that kind of make sense?
Speaker 2:I don't know. So it makes too much sense. So I'll tell you this, and this is Brian, and I've already had three or four Zoom calls and a Teams call this morning, and so we jump into this with very little or no thought. We exchange a couple of emails and say, hey, here's the topic for today, and I wrote down if you're a trainer, if you're HR, if you're a copper, courts corrections, a lawyer, if you work anywhere in any job, get out your yellow pad Because I wrote down, in just the last five minutes and 30 seconds, seven things that you talked about that are huge, that you could turn into training. So, first things first, go out and buy yourself a life game. Go to the secondhand store you don't got to buy, you know the most expensive one. Open it up, throw everything away except that little spinner thing in the center, break that off of the game and take it with you to work. And no matter what you do at work, what I want you to do, I want you to spin that and whatever number that that lands on corresponds to a card that you've created with a conundrum, with a problem with the situation, mental health issue at work, at home, you know a sucking chest wound while you're driving down the freeway, whatever it is that you're likely to encounter in your job. I don't know your job, you know your job. So you wrote down, write down some of those things and have basic and intermediate and advanced things and you know what. Every once in a while, just spin that dial. That's a lot like life, and if you have an answer to those things that are coming up and it's just theoretical, you got to work a little harder.
Speaker 2:Well, I bought Shelly a gun for Christmas. Let's say, well, you know what else I bought with her? I bought the proper holster, I bought some range time and I bought a first aid kit for her and the person that she shoots. Okay, well, maybe that's the way I think you get it, because that's a plan and plans work and so if I do the life game, that offsets what I got to talk about. Look, probable cause never diminishes. We have boobs that are still out there in our industry and I love some of them, but they're boobs because they're saying, well, you can't control time. Yeah, you can If you don't go, you're controlling time. If you put it in reverse, you're controlling time If you make a mistake and shoot first and kill an unarmed guy. You're controlling the time. So the idea is do you want to control time or do you want to have time control? You Stop it for a minute, because what you're doing is you're teaching coppers the wrong way. You're teaching people that in some instances you just got to flip the tire and climb the rope and just gun it out Okay, but those are so few and far between as to be remarkable, and you're shooting nine times out of 10, and you're not thinking one time out of 10. That balance.
Speaker 2:Prim did a good LinkedIn on it. Look up Greg Prim LinkedIn this week. He did a great story on that, folks. So what does that lead us to?
Speaker 2:I'm in an ambush in Iraq, brian, and the idea is that I think through the ambush and I write down some things, because a person died in the ambush and it was so stupid because we were teaching. Probably 600 feet away, maybe 1,000 feet away from where the ambush attack occurred, we heard the gunfire went out. Soldier that's doing gate guard with a trusted partner said hey, I want to get a photo. And a guy goes yeah, we can get a photo. And he goes hey, step back. No, step back further. No, we want to get the gate. And then ends up. The coalition member shoots the American soldier and kills him by getting him to pull away from his partners far enough that after he shot him he could run away. What is that? Duck platypus 101. What is that Outrunning? Is that Duck platypus 101. What is that Out running our headlights?
Speaker 2:And I felt the same way when I read the story back to your point on dopamine about the medical call. That paramedic had done 10 calls that day, 15 calls that day, and guess what? He had the dopamine dump every single time that he went out to help somebody. He wanted to be Hippocratic first, do no harm and help. He didn't want to go. Hey, this is the lady that might stab me to death, but you know what that's on that life spin, you got to spin that son of a bitch. And every once in a while picture yourself surrounded by gosh damn yellow evidence tape. You know the tape that says police line, don't cross.
Speaker 2:And this would have been a perfect situation where, based on the situation, perhaps something was different. We never know, we can't interview him and the woman's not going to tell us, but the idea is that what was in his head at that time and place is woman on the freeway needs our help. I'm here and she's bleeding. We have to slow the clock down, brian. We have to take a look at the situation and go. In this instance, if it's drugs or mental health, do I need to do a cursory search for offensive weapons before I begin? Should I have somebody else with me? And somebody right now is going well, you would have never known that. If he worked on the fucking job for a day, he would have known that, heard that, saw it or been trained in that. Now am I blaming the death? Am I victim blaming this? No, I feel shitty that he died and she should go to the electric chair of the firing squad. But the idea is I can't turn back time and imagine how important it would have been if that person would not outrun their headlights on that day. One thing could have changed everything, brian. So let's go to that final gosh damn thing.
Speaker 2:When you talk about those guys getting safer, the further they were in the police station, it's exactly what happened to their brain. We used to call that on the road to happy. You know, you know the guy's in there. He's now in, booked in processing who's going to die? Well, I'll tell you, the Warren police station in Warren, Michigan, is named after somebody that's going to die when, at the last second, somebody goes Yahtzee and pulls a gun out of their crotch.
Speaker 2:The idea is that you and I have both been on these same incidents, and I don't want to. Both of us have been in a fire alarm in a gosh damn university setting where nobody did shit, nobody even got up to check, and I was at a fire alarm in an airport that you'll remember that I videotaped the entire, whatever you call it, on a phone. Now I get to that videotape. I taped the son of a bed's, not tape. I recorded it. No, recorded whatever. Yeah, I don't know what's the word is right, I captured it. Okay, I captured a lot of things, but I captured that entire thing and you saw everybody was saying run for an exit. This is an actual fire, this is not a drill. And nobody even got up from the Starbucks, nobody got up from their chair. So, brian, we fail to consider these. Then we go to training and sometimes training goes over. Oh my God, do the body drag, drag, throw the flashbang, do the shooting.
Speaker 2:What we're talking about is an exercise in psychology and sociology and in pathology of the internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we in you know, we we cover that in in other episodes about you know. You know, the more I'm exposed to something, the less likely I am to to see it and or or the. You know the every time, the. You know who even looks when a car alarm goes off anymore, you know, I mean because we hear that stuff or there's sirens, like you said, the.
Speaker 1:But my biggest here's what, what, what fascinates and interests me, brian, we go third person here, right, always, which is why you know, part of the reason why I'm in this line of work, in a sense the, into training how we respond and how things change, right, we do like a breakdown or an after action of an incident or a thing, and then we just randomly pick something in there that we're familiar with, that we think we can control and say that's the problem, if only we had better optics on our weapons, if only we had better this, if we had that or if we had this technology that could do this. And we're, we're just so entrenched in that way of thinking because I but we are, but we do that with with everything. Oh, you know what I? I didn't, I didn't, I didn't wash my underwear and we won the big game.
Speaker 2:It's because I didn't wash my underwear again. You know like.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it that sounds stupid, but that's how I'm telling you, this is how everyone thinks. All of us, me, you, everyone, like, we just arbitrarily say, well, I think it's because of this. And then, if we get enough people to agree with it, that's what we do. And it's like wait, how did you arrive at this point that this is the thing we need to address? Because maybe there's a thousand issues or contributing factors to a situation and you chose these as well. Now we have to write this policy to do that. And it's like well, hang on, what were all the things that played into this and why did this person get here? And like and then we come up with a new term for something. And then it's because of that. And it's like what? What we're? We're conflating issues and we're not going to the.
Speaker 1:The underlying issues with all of these are are these errors in sensemaking? I, I didn't see something that I was supposed to see. I didn't recognize this when I should have. I failed here. But these, these are, these are sort of cognitive problems. These are, um, you know, these are principles that you can. You can align and follow to solve for X in any situation.
Speaker 1:So we get so hyper-focused on. This is the we get so focused on well, what's the best decision? It's like well, fuck, it depends on what the context is. It's like well, each one is different. But even though each one of these things are different, there's underlying things that occur in all of them. Right, you know, it doesn't, doesn't matter what it is.
Speaker 1:If it's a parent who misses their kid is suddenly changing behavior because it's slowly, over time, like you miss this and you should have seen this coming, but you didn't. So it's the school's fault, or it's the gun's fault, or it's like no, no, no, no, hang on, I understand this is difficult. Maybe you don't know how to do it, but these are all the things that went into this problem. So how do we want to address that with now, with a solution that's going to get really complicated sometimes, especially if you're talking about, like, a policy or a law or something like that. That's going to get complex because that's the application of it, but just to determine what can and cannot be done, what's in your control and what's outside of your control.
Speaker 1:It, it, it. That's where you to me, that's where you start. So what and this is just back to what I first started this. This and this is just back to what I first started this, this kind of part of the dialogue with is is. This is what fascinates and interests me so much, because why you did this to me. There's so many things that people just attribute value to and I'm like that has fuck all nothing to do with anything.
Speaker 1:And you can't get them on and these are smart, reasonable people, and we all do that too, and stuff, we all do this stuff. Are reasonable people, and we all do that too, and stuff, we all do this stuff. Oh, it must be because of that, oh, it's because of this, it's like. Oh, it's like. Well, how do you know that? Can you prove to me that you know if you had known that or if you had this different?
Speaker 2:tool or tactic.
Speaker 1:It would have changed the outcome because it would. If you had that already, well, it would have changed your approach. So, so it would have been a different outcome, but maybe that outcome might be worse, brian if you brought that up in court they would say cause for speculation.
Speaker 2:Your Honor, it would be an objection.
Speaker 2:So if you can't use it in court, then you can't use it in the realm of science. So I will make Brian's point, which he made very succinctly, but I'll make it by turning the Hoberman three quarters of a turn and looking through the orange side. So you know, if you're a long-time listener, if you're first time and did any research whatsoever, that Brian and I used to take the time to break down videos and we haven't done one in a long time and we do it in class still. But the difference is between us and everybody else out there that breaks down a video. They're all going to tell you what everybody did wrong and suggest tactics and training. Okay, what we do.
Speaker 2:We don't give a shit about what happened at X on the bubble. We say, look at all these pre-event indications that went on that were missed and look at how that could have informed what happens later. So we don't show the stabbing or the shooting or the crash or anything because we don't care, frankly, about that. There's somebody out there making money selling you shit to fix that. But what we do is we take the tape and we break down. Like every day on LinkedIn, I'm inundated and I probably get, I would say, reasonably, five or six requests where somebody says, hey, have you taken a look at this video? What do you think? And I won't even answer them anymore, because what I see is frippery. I see somebody going. Well, when this agent steps up here, or when the cop moves this way to the left, notice the shadow on the back of it. That's all horse shit, that's all speculation. You don't know, you weren't there, you don't have the eyeball witness. But can we use it for training? Yes, we can say. How was it that this person stood behind this planter with a gun for 40 minutes before he loaded up this guy in a limousine and nobody saw him there? How did that happen? That's called dead space folks. That's called dead space folks. That's called, you know, using negative space. You're going to use a UAV, use a thermal. There's answers to every one of these things. But what we do is we go there and we speculate on the moment of contact and say, look at how, out of control, this guy Look, this guy took a taser, then he took a spray, then he did this. This is why you need training. No, you need to anticipate. This snowflake is somehow different than all the other snowflakes that fell on my tongue and therefore I'm going to have to ramp it up, ramp it down, back it up. Get more people.
Speaker 2:The idea is the gift of time, and distance means out thinking a cunning opponent, and if you don't, then you're going to be. Look, if you're within arm's reach. I got sued by the White Aryan Resistance because I had a program called Within Arm's Reach, go To War, and it was for kids and females back in the day in Detroit and the idea so the Klan won that one, brian. But think about this the idea was that if I can touch you, I can kill you. So you've got to stay outside of that span. If you think of nothing more today than that, if you think that road rage never ends, well, if you think that if I don't check my fuel gauge, my car will run out of fuel and if I don't check the air in my tires I'm going to get a blowout, when I need the car to flee the gosh damn ax wielding guy at the lake, okay, those are things that you should do, and we're back to spinning that gosh damn life wheel.
Speaker 2:Brian, how many people do you know do that? What we face is people that go. Well, I'll tell you what? When somebody's kneeling on your throat and got a knife to your eye? Brian, come on, we've had more car alarms and fire alarms than we've had people kneeling on our neck and trying to stab us. And, yes, those things happen. But guess what? You're spending so much time preparing for this item that may never occur in your entire life, and none on saying what would happen just before that person knocked me down. What would happen to put me on the ground in that situation, and how could I avoid those things? I'm telling you what I side for that. I side for the gift of time and distance and everything. Is there going to be the one day you step on your porch and get hit by an asteroid? Yeah, but you know what? There's some things out of our control, but time and distance aren't out of our control.
Speaker 1:Cover so it's not out of her, so one of let let me let me kind of sort of kind of give you example of how I think, where they, where the errors occur, in a sense, right so. So, whether it's a police officer pulling someone over, or you look at like the after action review or a witness statement or something when it could be a school shoot or whatever, when someone goes, you know, I always thought that kid was this, but I didn't. Or I thought something seemed off, but I didn't want to say anything, or hey, I thought something was off, or I saw this. So what? We would say, okay, you were picking up on these incongruent signals. You knew it didn't fit a baseline. You knew there was something there. You didn't know what it was, you'd never seen that before. You don't have experience or something.
Speaker 1:But I think people don't spend enough time in that space of not knowing, like, like what I? What I noticed too, is like, like I'm very comfortable not having all the information, not knowing, like you sort of have to be uncomfortable going fuck, I don't know. We got to the point where I don't know, and what I mean is it allows you to continue to gather information and hypothesis tests. Okay, there's something off here, clearly right, is there something? Something? We got this, whether it's a traffic stop, whatever, okay, but what? What are? And this is what I mean by just following along with your brain, that unconscious brain is it wants the answer. It's forcing you to an outcome, to to something, and so it will fill things in to fit the answer that it already came up with. I mean, this is just, I mean, it's heuristics, how it does. Oh, cognitively close enough, this is what that means.
Speaker 1:Right, well, that's, and that's the central issue is, if I don't say, well, okay, this is incongruent, let me go find out why, okay, this part is still incongruent, let me find out why. Hey, hey, this hasn't fallen back down into the to the level of just another thing that I'm going to do. Yet it's, I'm still continuing to get these incongruent signals and then, over time, as those continue to escalate and build, whether or not they escalate, you just continue to see them. It's like you are on. This is the thing that is going to be bad, like otherwise it would have fallen back down. Something. You're, you're, you're, you're because you have a lot of great, just intuitive, decision-making skills. You have a lot of experience as a human. So, when you got that gut instinct.
Speaker 1:always people go like okay, well, yeah, we wouldn't be, we wouldn't be alive, right? So it's like so you're telling, because I've had it where someone's like, well, so you're telling me, look, I know what this is, I trust my gut. It's like, yes, yes, you should always trust your gut, but you can't be sure of what the answer is, you can't be sure of the solution. You can be absolutely sure that you are seeing something that's incongruent and it doesn't make sense and and you might not be able to find out, you might not know why. So that's my point is like well, stay there, then Figure out. Well, why is this an incongruent signal? Why do I feel this way? What is it about the situation? And that goes back to us going well, what's typical, all right. So your brain says I know, this is typical. I got a gut feeling that this isn't typical because it knows it has a comparison that it's using. So it's going okay.
Speaker 1:Well, continue. If you don't know the incongruent part, then stick with what's typical. What should you expect to see If everything is normal and this is gonna be a routine thing and nothing is gonna happen that's out of the ordinary? What else would you expect to see, and then you can compare your future observations to get it. And then we call that just updating the baseline of what that is. But that mental process is not calorie intensive. You know what I'm saying, especially when you practice it. But it doesn't take much, because it's great to know a lot, but it's also the next best step is knowing what you don't know is a huge step forward. So go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, no, no no, listen, preaching to the choir on this one, brian, but I don't know Everybody at home, I don't know. I'm asking Brian rhetorically, of course. Isn't that an aspect of being uncomfortable? See? So when we talk about, you know, get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Speaker 2:The idea is that I don't feel comfortable because I'm reading something incongruent in my baseline, and so Brian used the term typical. Well, what's the antithesis of typical? It's anomalous, it's something that sticks above or below the baseline, or a bolo, and your brain will make order out of chaos, with or without you. Which would you rather it be? Think of that for just a second.
Speaker 2:So let's talk Hangover Psych 101, because it's the timeline that Brian's talking about, and many of you, if you're still listening, are probably drinking once in a while. So you get really shit-faced and you shouldn't have. And so all of a sudden you got to be at the big business meeting or the kid's soccer game or whatever else your divorce proceedings, sorry, brian, whatever else it's going to be. And then you know you've drunk, drank too much, and so you know you're drunk still when you wake up and you go okay, this hangover is so bad it's going to be with me all day and I know that I'm going to vomit because my body can't process all of this, metabolize all of this alcohol. I'm just not sure when it's going to be.
Speaker 2:So then you got to do the hard math. Should I get up and do it right now so I get it out of the way, or should I mope around all day long? Or should I take a homeopathic cure? That's what we're doing in police work. That's what we're doing in HR. We're going look, this is going to be a shitty outcome and we all know it's going to be a shitty outcome. But how can we push it further down the line? My thing is don't rip the band-aid off fast. The idea is that if you get used to rehearsing and practicing and hypothesizing I loved your term, hypothesis testing again what might happen in situations then you'll simply come up to gating mechanisms, most likely course of action. That person standing next to my car is just in the shade of my car and smoking or vaping.
Speaker 2:Or that person could be a violent, dangerous felon that's going to do a carjacking. What would I need to see to confirm my suspicion? By adding a few seconds from a position of cover and just maintaining your observation. Then you're going to know that and you're saying yeah, but I'm a cop, I got to hurry to the scene. Why we got the red and blues, that's why we got the siren.
Speaker 2:No, because what you're doing then is you're creating an inevitability, because the slope gets slipperier, not easier, when you get to the scene, especially if it's something like a mental health issue. Look, the family's dealt with this person for years and you're going to solve it in seconds when you get on the scene. Has dealt with this person for years and you're going to solve it in seconds when you get on the scene. No, they called you because it's out of their control. But what did you relegate it to, brian? Well, get out of the way, I'll handle it from here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, you see, what we do sometimes is is we create a situation where we think we have all the answers, and and I'll go back thousands of years, all the way to yesterday, and tell you the best scientists say always question your hypothesis, always come into the room saying that I'm the dumbest person here and I don't know. You'll learn more and you won't make those catastrophic errors. And here, brian, when we talk about law enforcement, we're talking about a catastrophic error can kill you or me, or a bus full of kids on their way to the museum, and that's unacceptable, right yeah, and you know, sorry I'm gonna get bailey just joined me in the in the studio here she's uh going to come up in the corner there in her spot.
Speaker 2:It's great dog here.
Speaker 1:That's why I kept the door open, so it's like it's been too long yeah, so you well speaking of being speaking of being the dumbest person in the room uh, let me speak from that perspective. No, that this is. We're. We're constantly being thrust into situations that are already in progress, and that's not necessarily a police call. I mean, that's like I, you know, walk into my daughter's room and she's doing something. Okay, there's something going on here and I'm the new thing that is entering the scene, so I'm going to have an effect on that.
Speaker 2:And if I don't have a Whether you want to be or not, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the situation is. You know everything interacts with each other. You change the outcome. You know you bump into something a little bit of you stays on. That little bit of that stays on you, right? This is basic physics, right? So if I walk in, and what did you call, sorry, hostile reproduction yeah, that's the one.
Speaker 2:I got a good reproduction toxic that's. That's sexual assault yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So toxic is.
Speaker 2:Toxic is some is when it's consensual, and still not a good thing so, but, uh, but but uh back to what I was saying so if I look at everything as an interaction, yes and how I'm interacting with this event that is in motion or a person that's in motion Like it.
Speaker 1:It kind of helps me see well, if that thing is in motion, it came from somewhere and it's going somewhere. So how did my interaction with this either change the outcome, change the direction of where it's going I can't change where it came from, right. But getting an understanding to know whether, if I'm crossing a street and there's cars coming right, is that vehicle coming at 20 miles an hour and I've got time to cross the street, or is it coming at 75 and it's going to plow into me because it's going too fast. Right, that's how it is. I can look at that and make a fair assessment or a judgment, just based on my knowledge and experience, and say, okay, this likely came from somewhere I don't necessarily know where, but it has a start point. And then there's an end point somewhere with the situation, or a continuation or a new place that it's going.
Speaker 1:So when I come in, how do I change that outcome? Just right off the bat, just me interacting with the situation. And this is gets back to why I always say like you can, you can, you know, influence the outcome of every situation you're in, no matter how dire it is like you, no matter how what little control you have, you still influence the situation that you're in. So I think, going into that, knowing about that with the right mindset of looking at it, and how to do that with the different tools, like the stuff that we talk about and know my limiting cognitive factors, what's going to get my and which are the same limiting cognitive factors of the person I'm interacting with they're playing by the same set of of human behavior rules that you are maybe not playing by the same laws or or values or ethics, but but the the physics is physics and and I know there's a lot we still don't understand about it.
Speaker 1:But but there's, there's rules that we do understand, right, and there's human behavior, and there's still a lot we don't understand about it. There are rules, especially especially the more defined that context and situation is, the easier it is to determine likely outcomes and what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:So you don't have to go in with well, anything could happen, or you know what we don't have the time, listen to what you just said and everybody that's out there write that down.
Speaker 2:The more extreme the circumstances, the easier it is to come to the outcome, because it becomes inevitable or binary, it decides for you, rather than you having to worry about those things, and that can. So may I depose you for a minute because you brought up a couple of great points there and I think people at home might not have caught up at your speed. So, brian, since we've worked together, do you know of, have you read about or have I sent you articles on different people paramedics being killed by the person they were treating? Yes, at least five or six times that I know that I've sent you those articles where coming out of much more than that, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but but I would say that I would testify to at least five or six above the one that that we're talking about today. Would that be a fair assessment?
Speaker 1:Yes, so in that same period of time.
Speaker 2:Would it be a fair assessment to say that you and I have discussed train deaths, where people got hit by a train, whether they were standing or walking or driving, and killed About a thousand people die every year in the United States being hit by a train, and I would say that you and I personally have talked about probably 35 to 50 of those incidents that I would swear to that that's accurate, would you agree? Yes, so let's use the train example for just a second. Trains run on a track and it immediately becomes a duck. And you've got, I got plenty of time to get across this chariot wheel track. You know the width of the chariot wheels, or where we get the distance between the two rails on the train. That's for the thinkers in the group. I can get across that four feet in no time at all.
Speaker 2:And guess what happens, brian? You're hooked, you're roped, because it was a platypus the entire time, with its leading, with its spurs, and you're going to get hooked and you're going to get bit. And it's like a scorpion Not all of them will kill you, but one of them will. It's like a snake Not all of them will kill you, but one of them will. And guess what? When your luck runs out, then you're in the effing trick bag, right back to spinning that life wheel. So if we use that train, which is always full of turbulence and friction, even when it's on a good heading, even when it's doing a good thing, then that's got to slow your roll when you're taking a look and go look, I don't want to outrun my headlights, so let me pump the brake once in a while to make sure I know what's going on here. I remember being on a shooting inside of a freeway Am I lying?
Speaker 2:And a person looks at me and comes up and goes what can I do? And I said, hey, do you understand that this is a cop? It is a fatal shooting and the suspect is down because the young person didn't. They didn't understand the gravity of the situation, brian. So therefore they were ready to run in, but they weren't sure and the house was already on fire. You get where I'm going.
Speaker 1:So, with your train analogy, literally just the other day. So I'm driving the insurgent to school in the morning and we're behind a school bus, right, and it comes to the complete stop right before the train tracks, and they open the door and the insurgent she'd never seen that happen before like that Like. And she's like, well, why is that? What? Like what's going on? Cause she says she's observant she's like what's this? Good, what is it Bus driver going to take off? Are they kicking someone off the bus? Or something Like what's going on here? That's hilarious, right? And I was like, no, we were just having this conversation this week.
Speaker 1:I was like like a thousand people in the United States get hit by a train. And she's like, okay, well, yeah, I go, yeah, but I go think about it. The train is on a track, you know where it's going. And she's like, oh, yeah, that's weird, required by law, when they come to train tracks, they have to stop, come to a full, complete stop. The driver has to open the door, he has to look down the tracks and look the other way to ensure. And she's like, well, that seems like a lot. I was like, yes, and as long as they do that every single time, they will never get hit by that train. And she's like, wow, I had no idea. And so this, your train analogy is perfect because she got it right away. Because I'm like, well, think about, think about that, that's different than a car accident. She's like, well, why? I was like, well, car accident, cars can hit each other. I go, a train is on the track and I just saw the smile on the light bulb going on.
Speaker 1:And she almost went like how could you possibly get hit by a train when it's on? She immediately got it. It was like how dumb would you? Have to be.
Speaker 2:And I have to be. And I was like. Well, I was like, it's not about being dumb, I go to certain things happen. There's, you know, listen, science can be tricky.
Speaker 2:So, brian, you remember growing up as a kid, before stepping off the curb, the safety patrol would tell you stop, look, listen. Okay, the idea was you also had to look both ways, remember, and you also want to do it more than one time. It's like lead-off hitter at an intersection when the light goes green, you don't hit the gas, you look around because that one person on the phone is still coming. They didn't notice the light turned red. If we everybody listening to the sound of my voice if we agree that stop, look, listen is a good thing, and that stop before a railroad track and look in both ways, then why do we fight the urge to run straight to the scene, you know, with gay abandon, and not even think about the situation that's going to be facing us, thinking that the faster we get there, the better it's going to be for us? No, you have to be. Look, turbidity and turbulence and friction are in every meeting and sometimes it can turn to good things, a home run off your bat but sometimes it can turn to bad things your skull getting crushed by a bat you got to consider that when you're doing your training.
Speaker 2:So any instructor that's out there going oh, they oversimplify One kiss my ass, the fattest part. And two, take a look at what we're talking about. We're talking about from the beginning of the first time you think about becoming a cop or HR teacher or any of those other stuff. You better be training, just like Brian is with the insurgent, you better be training people to outthink a cunning opponent. Here the cunning opponent is a giant lumbering train that's moving so slow but it still fools a thousand people a year. Think about that. Take a minute and think about that. There's your on-duty roll call for tomorrow, brian.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this is up to the duck platypus and headlight example is that's one. I mean, how many times you said hey, when someone's like, oh, what do you guys do? And you go, oh, we're selling flashlights. Right, we're looking around in the box of good ideas that we're not thinking outside the box. We're selling a flashlight for people. To look around inside that box. There's a lot of good ideas in there. And then the duck platypus is just that sort of memory, emotional link. It's a way for me to recall or understand, like, hey, is it a duck or is it a platypus and how can I prove it? And these aren't simple things. We talk about them in't simple things.
Speaker 2:We talk about them in a simple manner. If there were, people wouldn't die.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Well yeah, and the duck platypus one is. You could go on and give all kinds of different or use it for a number of different reasons. You know they're actually a duck and a platypus is a great example, greg, of something called convergent evolution. They're actually a duck and a platypus is a great example, greg, of something called convergent evolution, that's where unrelated species evolve similar traits due to environmental pressures.
Speaker 2:So if biology? Now, who's the smartest guy and the dumbest guy in the room?
Speaker 1:Well, but it goes back to if biology know, said that this is how things evolve and you know what? Sometimes some unrelated species are going to evolve similar traits due to the environmental pressures, due to the situation that you're in over time.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just, it's another way to look at it. But you know, the balance there is always. Am I, you know? Is this what it seems to be? Is it not what it seems to be? Did I miss something? And that sort of questioning. I think some people kind of overdo it. Right, those are the overthinkers, the people who can't make a decision, who are trying to come up with too much. And I think what adds to that is that idea of, well, you don't have enough time, or you don't have all the information, or you got to have this, or we got to do something now, and you rarely ever do, and when you do, it's obvious. And I see that stuff out there. Someone literally wrote an article saying well, sometimes you just don't have the time and it's like, well, yeah, if that's the way you think, if that's the way you look at things, then you're right yeah, you are going to fulfill that prophecy.
Speaker 1:Exactly and that leads to missing things that are all of those prevent indicators. And that type of thinking leads to one binary decision making Well, it's him or me. It's like, oh Well, there's a few options in between there, but you're going right to that. Okay, so that's what forces that, and you're just following your brain along that track. You're following that unconscious roadmap when you can make your own roadmap, and maybe it's not going to work out exactly the route you want it to be right, because it's going to change.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to update my hypothesis over time. And I'm going to update based on oh, there's new traffic conditions, I'm going to take this route instead. Oh, there's a construction going on over there. So you know what? I'm going to jump over to this street instead. Right, that's what we're talking about is, rather than just following the fucking GPS and following what the Google Maps tells you, like, yes, it's right a lot of the time, but it doesn't know everything that you know, it doesn't have the conscious ability to process that incoming information and question it, so it just gives you the answer and that's what your brain does. It just goes here. Just go here here, make a left. It's where you go and the time and distance factor is where that that gets. I don't know, it changes the calculus a little bit if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:I think that that coppers, if you're our copper on a call, and especially if you're a boss, think about the way ntsb conducts investigations and look back and you'll see that there's trends and if you follow the trends you'll follow the danger signs.
Speaker 2:So what we're talking about? Pre-event indications that would show a reasonable person that there's trends and if you follow the trends you'll follow the danger signs. So what we're talking about? Pre-event indications that would show a reasonable person that shit's about to go sideways. The other thing is to take a page from Scott Mann's great book about no one's coming to save you. Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, dear friend, great guy, I haven't seen you since Lewis McCourt. But I would ask Brian, what was the name of the pilot on the Hudson? What?
Speaker 2:was that guy's name in a church down in Texas. Okay, you know we keep thinking, brian, because we're humans. We keep thinking that's all we got to do is have that guy there or be that guy. What I'll do is I'll raise my stakes to be at the level of that. No one's coming to save you. You're all you got. So you've got to outthink that cunning enemy.
Speaker 1:And to do that, brian, you've got to give yourself that gift of time and distance, buddy. Yeah, and the NTSB one is a great one because they go through everything, they see how it happened, what were the contributing factors, and look at all the data and then they go, and even when it comes down to, oh, it was pilot error, they don't just go okay, it was pilot error.
Speaker 2:They go okay, well, what error did they make and why? And then they find out like oh, you know what?
Speaker 1:Or it was hey, that pilot actually was making the right choice, but he was making it based on incomplete information because of this other thing that occurred. So to them it was the right decision. However, if they had known this thing, or if they had seen that, or if they had heard this radio transmission, they wouldn't have done that, but they, there was a hot mic at that time, and so you know, I mean, this is how things are, everything. Yeah, yeah, uh, totally okay, well, that's a whole, that's a whole episode for that one.
Speaker 1:So I only got. Uh, let I only got.
Speaker 2:I know you want to round the wagons. I only got one more shout out, if I can throw it on this episode before people start turning out.
Speaker 2:Shout out to Force Science, bill Lewinsky, dr. Bill stepped aside and Brian Baxter, from Texas, is the new CEO. Brian Marin and I both know Brian Baxter from his body of work. We both commented on his LinkedIn post before. Seems like a great, level-headed, experienced vet and former copper. So congratulations to Baxter. Good thinking for Bill to step aside and do other things, and it looks to me, like you know, we've had a long relationship with 4Science Love-hate relationship maybe sometimes, but this is a great thing for them. So congratulations, heartfelt congratulations, to Brian Baxter.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure he'll appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like they look at us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we, we, we.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, I listen to us, Brian, and I listen to them, but I don't spend a lot of time listening to us.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know about that, but so we talked about a lot here in the duck, platypus, you know, is it a duck, is it a platypus? And improve it. And then the headlights, man, are they on? Am I outrunning?
Speaker 2:them. I mean, these are just simple ways to look at it. Yeah, I love that that's.
Speaker 1:that's why we use those simple analogies, or I guess it would be a metaphor. We know it'd be an analogy.
Speaker 2:The simile. It's mixed up sometimes. Just make it up. Well, it's not a simile. It's not a simile, all right.
Speaker 1:well, don't start, thanks everyone for for tuning in. Don't forget that we do have more stuff on the patreon site and thank you, shout out to our patreon subscribers always reach out to us. Maybe we should do an episode on toxic reproduction we do that on patreon, that term, oh yeah yeah, that would be, that would be a good one.
Speaker 1:But yeah, always reach out to us and and give us some some you know, anything you want us to cover or talk about or some questions. We're more than happy to answer them. Of course, our patreon subscribers you get. We answer you right away. Reaching out as a fan. It might take me a little bit to get back to you, uh, depending on the workload during that week, but but yeah, I will answer it.
Speaker 2:Workload that's the weekend load, greg, the drinking is the. Let's not start talking about load.
Speaker 1:Well, we, we, we appreciate everyone for tuning in. Thanks so much. And don't forget that training changes behavior.
