Your Internal Baseline

In today’s episode, we’re flipping the lens inward. You’ve heard us talk about reading the world around you — the external baseline — but what about reading yourself? 

What It Is (Street Definition)

Your internal baseline is your mental operating system. It’s the framework that shapes how you see, think, and react under stress. It’s built from everything you’ve lived, learned, and believed:

• Past Experiences: The lessons, scars, and memories that form your personal rulebook.
• Training & Conditioning: The shortcuts and instincts your brain relies on when there’s no time to think.
• Values & Beliefs: The unseen filters that shape what you think is right, wrong, or risky.
• Policies & Procedures: The internal and external rules you follow (often unconsciously).
• Cognitive Limits: The hard caps of being human: fatigue, stress, emotion, and biology. 

The core question: “Where do I think I am — and where am I actually?”
The gap between what you believe and what’s real determines how well you can sense, decide, and act.

Chapters

• 0:00 Flipping The Lens Inward
• 0:52 External Baseline Recap
• 2:35 Defining The Internal Baseline
• 4:22 Data, Tools, And Actors
• 6:47 Patterns, Survival, And Sensemaking
• 9:15 Why Internal Baseline Matters
• 12:16 Overwhelmed By Events Explained
• 15:02 Real-World OBE Scenarios
• 19:25 Building Functional Self-Awareness
• 23:10 Cognitive Labeling And Control
• 26:05 Recalibration Tools That Work
• 30:22 Orienting With External Cues
• 33:04 Time, Distance, And Feedback Loops
• 36:28 Slow Down To Go Fast
• 38:20 Key Takeaways And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. In today's episode, we're flipping the lens inward. You've heard us talk about reading the world around you, the external baseline, but what about reading yourself? Your internal baseline is everything that shapes how you see, think, and react under pressure. It's your experiences, your beliefs, your stress, your limits. And if you don't know where you are internally, you can't make sense of what's happening externally. So today, Greg and I break down how to check your own calibration and why the question, where do I think I am and where am I actually might just change the way you see the world. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber-only episodes. If you enjoyed 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, we're gonna go ahead and get started, Greg. Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning back in to the Human Behavior Podcast. So if you joined us last week or heard the previous episode, you remember we kind of did a deep deep dive into the external baseline and baseline plus anomaly was decision and all about the observable world around us. So the patterns, behaviors, environmental cues that tell us when something's off, right? So today what we're gonna do is we're flipping that perspective inward. So we're talking about your internal baseline. And the, you know, this episode's gonna be, I guess we're it's gonna get personal in a sense, right? Because when it comes to human performance, decision making, sense making under pressure, the biggest variable isn't the environment or the threat. It's you. It's your perception of where you are mentally and emotionally versus where you actually are mentally and emotionally or physically and cognitively, right? So the concept of the internal baseline is simple but powerful. It's the sum of everything inside you that shapes how you perceive, interpret, and respond to the world. So that's you know, your past experiences, your training, your values, beliefs, the policies and procedures you operate under, and most importantly, the limits of your cognitive performance, which there's certain limits for everyone, uh, especially when we get to in extremis or or you know very complex situations where there's an element of danger that that even limits our performance. And this is regardless of what your intellect, your training, your experience is, all human beings operate under the same conditions when it comes to some of the things we're talking about today. So when we teach this in class, like we kind of we we go into depth with it and really explain the concepts, but the the big thing is we kind of boil it down to one question, and it's where do I think I am and where am I at actually? So, like where where is there a disconnect here between where I think I'm at and where I'm really at? And this question is something that can, I mean, save your life, your career, and maybe sometimes just your sanity as well. But we got a lot to jump into here today. And Greg, I want to start off with defining the internal baseline. So before I kind of throw to you for that, I'll give sort of like some working definitions, some key components, and I'll let you kind of really get into the details here. But uh working definition, I guess, of defining an internal baseline would be it's just the sum of all of the internal factors that shape how you perceive, interpret, and respond to the world. So some of the key components of those internal factors are your past experiences, your training, your conditioning, your own personal values and beliefs, societal norms, policies and procedures, cognitive limits, like there's all of these things, we'll call them for lack of a better term, that are that are that are happening, you know, mostly, mostly unconsciously, that you are unaware of unless you sit back and reflect on it. But you're if you're trying to make a tough decision re-assituation, you can't do that and reflect on it sort of at the same time, right? But these things are happening in the background. We sort of take them for granted. We don't think about them, we don't really fully know how they influence how we perceive the world. And so the core question, like I said, is where do I think I am and where am I actually? So that's kind of just the basic working definition. Greg, I'll I'll I'll pass it off to you to go into this kind of internal and external baseline and and and what we mean by it.

SPEAKER_00: 4:22

Yeah, so I I'll start at an unconventional point. People that listen to us uh would know that if they do a little bit of moticama research into coppers, that a lot of the coppers they know are married or dating medical field folks, doctors, emergency room paramedics, that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 4:40

Other other cops.

SPEAKER_00: 4:41

Yeah, other cops. And and they wonder, okay, why is that? And it's because you have no idea what an internal and external baseline demands of you until you're in a profession where it's constantly being asked of you. So other like, like for example, and and and it sounds silly, but if you're a talking head on the news, you're reading a prompter. Unless you're a quiz show contestant, you know, and you have a variety of, you know, it's jeopardy that's up on the board. Uh, you you're not tasked with those things. And a comper generally driving around on the day on foot patrol, this or that, is answering radio runs, is seeing what's uh happening out the windshield, is worrying about their bills and all that other stuff that's going on. And you're going, yeah, that's a lot more like my life. Yeah, not really. And that's why the ER stuff comes in, is because lives hang in the balance. Rarely is a person that works as a florist or or a farmer, you know, in touch with the life and depth of the people around. So that's what I'm trying to say very simply is frame it the right way, and then you'll understand why Brian's core question is so essential. Where do I think I am and where am I actually? We're not talking about daydream. We're talking about you under being underwhelmed by your environment. There's a Gregism. And and when you're underwhelmed, you can stop short and get somebody killed. Or you can do what this copper did the other night, the the California copper in the the turn lane and kills a kid on a skateboard because he doesn't anticipate the likelihood. That's an internal baseline. Fail with an external baseline vividly exposed. So to get to Brian's question about that, when you establish a baseline, you set a standard. It's a fixed reference point, and you have to have one for future comparison. And everything you do, whether it's business or or standing up and walking through your life, and almost everything you do in your life is on impulse power. The old, the old uh, what was that Star Trek, you know, Scotty, you know, give me more power. And that's true whether it's an internal or external baseline. So we we talked about an external, but things you see and experience. The problem is that when you try to build a robust baseline, you really have to work for it and and you can't exclude stuff. So you get a lot of chaff with your wheat. And what do I mean by that? I mean your brain is like a vacuum. It's picking up stuff autonomically and and and whether you want to pick it up or not. Have you ever tried a vacuum and all of a sudden you go, oh crap, there's that you know, commencement ring or whatever, and it goes right up into the bag with all the other stuff? Well, you didn't intend on getting that, did you? When you're moving through your environment, your brain is taking all of these baseline elements and it's constantly creating and updating the baseline whether you want it to or not. So what does that mean? Well, it's a continual survival function, right?

SPEAKER_03: 7:21

Yeah, yeah. And let me just I uh cut you off right there, Greg, because that's that's perfect. And you the way you brought up is that it this is something that's happening autonomically, whether you recognize it or not. Exactly. And and and so it's it's gonna it's gonna happen. And if you're not aware of it and you're not influencing, you're not understanding it, you're gonna be caught behind. So and just to just to hit that, you you'll appreciate this because uh we got some feedback on our last episode, and you know, someone in the comments just go like, oh, th thanks already knew this, or something like that. And and which is even funnier because then I had a couple people reach out who are very much very, very good at what they do, and they were like, Oh man, I really appreciate you guys really just going back into the fundamentals and the basics and looking at what a baseline is like. We still, even though we know that's the most important thing, skip right over it and we go right to these things. So it's like here's a here's a top-tier operator person saying this was awesome, and then some jackass who's like, Oh, thanks. I already knew that. It's like, no, what we're saying is no, you don't. Like, you take it for granted. So and you just hit on that. So I just wanted to input that thought to cut you off.

SPEAKER_00: 8:26

Because no, no, and you didn't. You you just exemplified something that that we try to say in every class and every person that we meet. The continuous functions of the brain are all geared towards your survival in an environment. And because you can't always predict the environment, there's a couple of edges and seams and gaps, right? And and so the the master creator, God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah, whoever you believe in, understood that there had to be room for you to learn as you went. And that's why the internal baseline, when compared to the external baseline, demonstrates anomalies or incongruence. There's your warning signal. Okay, how do I get a warning signal? Well, I can get a warning signal from temperature, from the outside touching something hot or cold, or from my hum hypothalamus getting hot or cold. You see? So, so environment teaches me to teach myself that these things are important. So, so we jokingly go back to to to ooh, a piece of candy or the breadcrumbs that you're finding, you know. The idea is that, you know, where are you going? But where did you intend to go? And how did you calculate the known and the unknown to come up with uh the idea of a future point? And that's all depending on a baseline. And and that sounds really rough until you take a yellow pad and put those three things on. Here's my known, here's my unknown, the nebulous spot in between those two things. And what helps me get there? The baseline environment. Because the baseline is made up of everything. A baseline is made up of finance and temperature and weather and people and vehicles and events and all of these wonderful things that create that robust fidelity-filled baseline. Well, why does it have to be fidelity-filled? Because if not, then what you're looking at is a tabula rasa and you're skinning your knees as you're working through an environment. What does that mean? So you got a big white sheet and you're going, oh, okay, I'm going to stand up. Fuck, I don't have balance. You fall down. Then all of a sudden you stand up again and you hit the ceiling and go, shit, I don't have gravity. You get what I'm trying to say? So all of those things that we take for granted are in our internal baseline. Then they're compared constantly as I move through a baseline with not only the other internal factors, the unknowns, but with the knowns of my external baseline. And that's how I navigate things. I I combine those things together to create a reality. And so your question still stands there. I'm not trying to make this obtuse. I'm trying to say, where do you think you are? And where are you actually? Because the difference between those two things can be the difference between life and death.

SPEAKER_03: 11:00

And every time you say, I don't want to be obtuse, I think that family guy episode where you sit there and he's going to be sitting there like obtuse. I'm acute. Like sorry. But so well, that gets in the data about your brain combining patterns and different sources of data into consolidated baseline, right? So this is what you're talking about. And you're you're kind of talking about how a computer, you know, obviously it's built very similarly because it's built by humans, and they came up with this based on what do you think? You know, the okay, well, this is how something learns, this is how it now it can do certain automatic and autonomic functions very easily. But then as you're saying, which you know, now everyone even talking about like AI and all this stuff, and it's going to be general. Well, it can't sense make. Sorry, humans can sense make, but the the the this this you know, uh, your your chat GPT can't. It's giving you, you know, uh it's it's basing everything on probability and math, which is generally correct in a general circumstance, but it can't create, in a sense, that the way humans make and humans sense make. But that comes from all these different internal factors and how they affect the output. So you have this rigid operating system, however, that and that that's gonna happen, but you can influence it consciously, in a sense, is what you're saying. Like I have all this stuff going on inside me that I like I can't control how what the hormones are that my body makes and if there's more testosterone or more estrogen. I can't control any of that, but I can influence the factors and I can recognize some of those things, right? And and know how it how it affects my interpretation or perception of the world. Is that kind of what you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00: 12:34

Spot on. And so let's back that that flashlight off of the target just a little bit so it's wider rather than laser focus. So what Brian just gave you, too, is the definition of the data. So if we talk about three things that are going to influence your baseline specifically in this episode, your internal baseline, you have that data, your brain combining patterns and and other incoming information so that you can refine your baseline, assess where you are, and process the new incoming data to see if there's danger or opportunity. Okay, so then you have tools. You have those things, those environmentals that you use to move through your baseline. So a car could be a tool, but it's a rudimentary tool. A bino, a pair of binoculars or spotting scope, is a better tool because it enhances things. And hearing aid enhances your hearing. So those tools help me get disparate information and throw it into my data set. Because if I don't have uh a database, then I don't have a baseline for comparison. And then the final thing is the actors, the actors on the stage, people, events, and vehicles. I've said that my entire career. So you're populating the environment using artifacts and evidence. And people are always asking, okay, artifacts and evidence, why do you make that difference? Because fucking evidence is a legal standard. It's something you're testifying to. Artifacts are all of those pieces that are laying around. So the artifact would be the, hey, look at shell casing, and the evidence would be, hey, we match the extractor mark to that shell casing, to that suspect, to that handgun at that time in that place. So the granularity is necessary for survival. So, like I talked about heat and cold earlier, well, colors matter too. That's why we have the basic colors, Roy G. Biv, but that's why we have the full color palette, and we can add and subtract from them to make any color. But you know what? You can still see in black and white, hence the gosh name thermal or or the NVG, green and white, right? So the idea is the constant sense making is your internal baseline looking for danger or opportunity or patterns in your environment. Why patterns? Because patterns is the easy non-caloric lift. You're doing patterns all the time because you don't get up this morning and go, where the hell am I? Okay. You get up and you know that you're likely, well, Maren, there have been some nights with an old-fashioned that that I've done that, right? But what happens is it's not groundhog day. You don't wake up in a completely foreign environment constantly. Right. You wake up and you go, here's my cane, here are my shoes, here's uh, you know, where I'm gonna get breakfast. That person that's in the kitchen right now, that's one of my kids. I recognize them. Those things that we take for granted, Brian, are hugely important because they're a function of that data set. And if we had an incomplete data set, we would be walking through our environment petrified, or like that kid in uh what is that, 50 First Dates. You remember that uh that actor, that 10 second howl or whatever they call it?

SPEAKER_03: 15:24

I had I had a moment like that when I came in from a trip, and so it was real late at night and everyone's asleep. So I went to bed and then something woke me up you know early in the morning, and then I got up and was walking around, and then there was a kid in the house, and I'm like, that's not my kid.

SPEAKER_02: 15:40

That's great. Insurgent was having a sleepover, but I was literally like, huh? Who are you who are you? That's my phone. But I did the am I in the right house? That's what did I come into?

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

You open the door and look at the numbers real quick. That's so funny. But but you get what I'm trying to say. So, so look, we don't understand. Like, like we look at a phone and and we look at it and we go, oh my God, look at what a supercomputer was in the 60s compared to your phone now, okay? And microprocessors and all that other stuff. We don't understand that we take for granted what our brain is doing constantly. I'm too hot and I'm too cold. Do you know how vague that seems, but how important those standards are? I'm too close, I'm too far away, okay, I'm going too fast, I'm going too slow. All of those things fall into one of those. They're either part of the data set, they're part of the tools that we use in our environment, or they're part of the set dressing, the, the, the objects that that we come into contact with. And we only attend to them when they're foreign, when they're when they're different, when they're contrary, when they're anomalous, when they're you know unorthodox. All of those other things melt away and blend in from pattern recognition. And so the analysis only comes on when it's a new thing in my environment. And the best trigger that you have is your internal baseline. So if your internal baseline is saying something is wrong here, that's where you got to take the time and distance get behind cover and analyze what you're into.

SPEAKER_03: 17:06

So so yeah, let's uh kind of jump into sort of why the internal baseline matters and why we're even talking about this. Because you you actually brought up a good example with the there's this is an analogy in a sense that we could use for a lot of different things, but you brought up the visible light uh visible light spectrum, Riggy Biv and ruins with that red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and they go violet, right? But but right now there's there's things there's there's other light there, right? Like before red, infrared, and ultraviolet that we can't see with the naked eye, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, right? Just because I see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And this is like a lot of the things that we can name or see or feel like when it comes to the internal baseline and things that are affecting you. If I I can I can, you know, I I I heat up and start sweating, and I can recognize those things that my heart rate picks up or my hands are shaking or I'm getting nervous. Those are those are things I can experience and and and perceive and understand. But like that's scratching the surface in a sense of what the what's underneath here. So so let's get into kind of like why this internal baseline matters. Because we we start there, like I said at the beginning, it is it's not the external environment, it's not what's happening in the situation. A lot of that may be completely out of your control, but but it starts with you and internally, because although there are mostly autonomic functions and very primitive things that are happening, you can control you to a certain extent, even to the point your autonomic nervous system, which is everything that you know your mostly your you know your breathing, your respiration, all that stuff, like your heart rate, you just by doing a breathing exercise, you can influence your autonomic nervous system. So, so meaning you have some control, a little bit of agency over that, what happens. So, and and and it's important to understand this internal baseline because the internal baseline matters because we make sense-making errors, right, when when when our internal baseline is off. So we can misread someone's intent. We can be overconfident in a situation or underconfident in a situation that we don't need to be. We can get fixated on things that aren't don't matter or don't matter as much as we think we are, or the wrong thing to fixate on. And and then of course you can get that sort of you know, uh emotional hijack, what we would call like kind of the overwhelmed by events or overcome by emotion. And so your internal baseline also it shifts as you get to that point of being overwhelmed by events, right? It shifts like the it starts here, everything's normal, but then you what you want to avoid is obviously that leap to oh my god, now I'm reacting to everything, I'm overwhelmed. But you're on you're if you think of like sedentary on a couch, sitting on a wall, now think, oh my god, something just jumped out and scared me. That's a that's like a continuum there that you're going up and down, like, and you if you don't know where you're at on that timeline, it's easier to become overwhelmed. So like it's it's a it's a parallel to the external baseline. So just like we measure external shifts. Oh man, that's a man, that doesn't smell right. I don't typically smell that here. Or wait, I've never seen a car go that way down that street. Like we we we can measure those to detect threats. We can measure these internal shifts to detect like cognitive drift, to to detect where you're at, right? To detect maybe I'm off on this thing, not because of the thing that's in the environment, because of something inside of me. So can you kind of like explain a little bit of that?

SPEAKER_00: 20:37

Yeah, so you went you you you went deep without even thinking that you went deep when when you started saying like like the things you can control, like breathing exercises are great, but I would say dumb it down for for Greg to speak, because I'm not a bright person. So I do understand this. I do understand that by reading and exposing myself to certain things, external things, that I improve my internal baseline. So I don't sleep much, so I watch a lot of Turner Classic and I tape a lot of films, tape, yeah, what a term, so I can watch them later when nothing else is on, because I can't stand commercials and most of the Pablum that comes out of Hollywood is horrible. So the other night there was a Hitchcock film on The Man Who Knew Too Much, the Jimmy Stewart version, not the 1930s earlier version. And uh in it, they were eating, I believe it was Morocco, I might be wrong on that. And the guy was showing them culturally how to eat. You can only use the the two fingers and the thumb from your right hand. It's a group. You don't have utensils and all that other stuff. And I compared that to earlier in the evening, still not sleeping, when I watched The Wind in the Lion with Sean Connery, and he was trying to teach Candace Bergen how to eat in the same environment. And then all of a sudden it played in. Then I was there and I had a cultural attache that said, Yeah, well, back in the day when there wasn't a lot of paper and trees around, you know, we had to wipe our ass with our left hand and then rub it off in the sand. So our right hand was the one that we maintained clean for food. But that was so long ago that nobody even does that, but it's stuck around. So what does that mean? So that means that I was exposed to all of these things externally that then built a robust file folder for a cultural no-no inside of my internal baseline. So now I figure things out. I sense made why those things were important just from a couple of these cultural references. And guess what? Now in my mind, culture is context. So if I get into that situation, I can use that. Well, if you don't do that, if you're not exposed, if you're not pinballing around your universe, you're not going to be exposed to those. And therefore, you're going to have a less robust comparison. And a less robust comparison means that I undervalue you, and then I go, yeah, well, that's not that important. Just pick it up and fucking move on when I'm not understanding that that washing machine box at the side of the road is your home. You get what I'm trying to say? That that shopping cart I'm pushing with all of your worldly possessions in it are going to get you to stab me in the neck. You see where I mean, Brian? How how something seemingly innocuous in your environment becomes the single most important thing, but you didn't know it because your internal baseline didn't trigger you to danger warning, Will Robinson, something is in, you know, in progress here.

SPEAKER_03: 23:21

So so how does that shift? Like how does your how like how does your internal baseline shift? We'll say, you know, as you approach that point of being overwhelmed by events, that OB where where you're you're doing that. And and and we I know we've we've talked about it in every episode for people maybe new, like we say overwhelmed by events, don't think of like, oh my god, you're crashing out, you're bawling. Like overwhelmed by events means there's just so much anytime you've like repeated something someone said, even though you heard it clearly, or you've just said, like, wait, what, what, what was that? It means you're just overwhelmed. You're you're so you're you're not attending to the things in your environment, and then these things become overwhelming, you're not processing anything. So I just it's not always seemingly catastrophic. Like if you're if you're driving a hundred miles an hour and you're trying to text someone at the same time and do you're OBE, your your brain cannot process information that quickly, even though you might be have a resting heart rate of 30 beats a minute at while you're doing that, like you're cognitively you are you're OBE. So can you explain just kind of like how that shifts?

SPEAKER_00: 24:24

And that's a great question again. So so look, we're the ones that invented the term OBE, so we get to say what it means. And it means two things it means overwhelmed by events or overcome by emotion. Why do we make that distinction? Because sometimes the events whirling around you are too fast for your onboard processing systems to address, which means that the item went too fast, so I didn't get a clear look at it. When I was doing the flip, my vertigo got the best of me and I wasn't able to balance well. So I missed the license plate last number. Okay, that that's things that were out of my control. Or overcome by emotion, which, you know, like PTS is a perfect example, or or I just broke up with somebody and then I bumped into somebody in the hallway. I'm thinking on one thing, but now this other thing is in progress and I'm overreacting or underreacting because of the earlier emotional fixation, right? So so what happens is you don't know when you're approaching event horizon. And I use words when I can't fully uh grasp something. So look up event horizon. It's one of those things where you know there's a black hole without evidence of a black hole because all of a sudden light can't come out, right? Yeah. And and so that's exactly what a situation is where it's gonna be about to turn kinetic on your ass. And what happens is that is you don't know you're approaching it. So all of a sudden, now it's just the the trigger is there, all the situations are going on. I I should have predicted what was going on, and guess what? Now it's in progress. Here it comes, I can't control it. So I should be fighting, but my feet are like lead. I I I should be talking to you, but instead I'm punching you or on your chest choking you, and I'm wondering how I got there. So so my my trip into the unknown starts with my internal baseline reading things in my environment. And if it reads patterns and normalcy, I'm gonna be fine. If it reads anger or anxiety, things are changing, and I better be on top of those things. But most of the time what happens is we like give you a perfect example that just happened in Gunnison. So they closed the roads in Gunnison because at three o'clock on October 30th, the kids were all gonna celebrate downtown and go around and get candy in their their costumes. So they closed Main Street for three blocks. Now, Brian, I've never seen these orange and white, eight-foot-tall by probably eight-foot wide panels that they use, reflective panels, then cones, and a sign saying Main Street close. And it went curb to curb. So you can tell Gunnison is doing good. They went out and bought the best of the best, right? I couldn't walk through that. So the light is changing, and I see the light changing, and I'm gonna make a right turn because I cannot go forward on Main Street. And I see a woman in a Subaru that's right under the intersection, still trying to go down Main Street. So her car, she's literally touching the barricade with her car because she's going, Well, wait a minute, I've done this my entire life. What is this new thing? Why is it closed? And now the light changes. So now guess what? The cross traffic is going, hey, I got the green light. She's in the middle of the intersection trying to back up. And finally I had to get out and start directing traffic. And it was so stupid because everybody anticipated, based on the pattern, that this was going to be ending up the same way that when the light's green, you go. And guess what? This woman was trapped. She had no idea what to do at the time because she didn't have a file folder for what is this nuanced thing standing in front of me, Brian.

SPEAKER_03: 27:43

That's such a great example of what we mean by OBE. She's so overcome by this novelty in her environment. She literally freezes and doesn't know what to do. And is like, but but I it's still still trying to justify like, no, I always go down there.

SPEAKER_00: 27:58

But I'm basing it on my my old OODA loop, Brian. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm looking at it. Oh my God. And so now my question here again is where was she? But where did she think she was? There's your comparison inside of that funnel. But the most important thing, if you're an operator out there, I want you to think about this. Could she have gotten somebody other than herself injured or killed? Well, of course she could have. That was going to be a catastrophic accident waiting to happen. And so I'm laying on the horn going, hold on, hold on a minute. And she's looking at me like, oh my God, this is my threat. No, the threat is you. You didn't anticipate that you would become the threat to all these people. So I had to de-escalate the situation and get calm minds and go, hey, wait a minute. We might, you know, be waiting this gosh damn full cycle of the light, but we have to solve this problem. So now one of the intangibles. People in that process that were outside of the Subaru had their kids in the car, and where did they want to go? They wanted to get the main street. Hey, it's almost three o'clock. So now we have a temporal element, Brian, and that's counting down. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I'm back to the Hitchcock film, right? Hitchcock did his best film by scaring the shit out of you, not with special effects, but by having in a closet there was a bomb ticking away, and you're the only one that knew at home. Nobody else on the screen knew. You get it?

SPEAKER_03: 29:18

We we we watched the remake of uh what's the one with Vince Fallen does it with uh Ann Haish, the the Hitchcock um, oh my god, Bates Motel. Oh, Psycho. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen a remake, but the original was. It was great because it was funny because even the insurgent was like getting scared because you know Michaeli's like, well, is it okay for her to watch? I was like, I was like, Yeah, the it's not like some gory movies. Like, I've never seen it before. I was like, You haven't? And they were terrified, and it was so different than anything that's been ever out with horror films or that because I was like, Yeah, it's a suspense. You're captured in it. Like you're like, oh my god, this is and you don't have to show it. Don't open that door, turn on that light. You know, that that was that was a great one. But uh, so it just reminded me of that. But you you know. So if we're talking about this internal baseline and what we the goal of why we bring this up to is because you know you can be the best at seeing everything and doing it. And if that's your job is just to watch the environment and report, okay, cool. Like you don't really need to worry about this as much. You still do on how you draw reasonable conclusions. But meaning when you're involved in it, what's happening internally is greatly affecting that. So when we want to build a functional self-awareness tool. So a functional self-awareness tool is just this it's understanding that internal baseline. And so that's why we ask the question where do I think I am versus where am I actually at? Right. That's like your functional cognitive pause button because there are different cues and they may come across differently based on who you are and what the situation is. But there's like, you know, physiological ones, there's cognitive ones, there's emotional ones that you're kind of these cues that maybe it's some feedback from the environment, but like that, I don't I I don't feel right. Well, do you not feel right because of something going on or because you because you you ate some really at a really bad place the other night? You know what I mean? Like, what what is the reason for why you don't feel that way? What is it? Is it lack of sleep? Is it lack of proper nutrition? Is it you're hungover, you're whatever? Like, because those are the things that that are affecting it. So but I what I what I'm what I'll ask you to do is have some like what are some real world examples of like of that and and and how they can affect you and like almost when you had like a lack of a functional self-awareness tool experiences from you.

SPEAKER_00: 31:29

So let's do a shout out to Walt Settlmeyer and uh Darcy Lutzinger back when he was uh EMT before he was a copper.

SPEAKER_03: 31:36

And uh Okay, so real quick, I know you're gonna talk about Darcy and and and Walt, but like did you want to talk about tie-in from earlier conversation? You made an old-fashioned joke. So I just texted Walt the other night because he had sent me a bottle of bourbon a long time ago, and I just I it just went with the collection that people have given me, and I never opened it, and I just did, and I made an old-fashioned with it, and I sent it and was like, hey man, this stuff's really good. Oh, that's so cool. That's funny that you just brought that up.

SPEAKER_00: 32:02

But anyway, so so these these are people that we talk to uh often or respect their work. And the idea is that Walt's entire career was based on how about now? So, okay, do you feel better or worse than when I first showed up as an EMT? Okay, how about now? Five minutes later, it's still tightness in chest or is it eased up? What's the so what you're doing is you're measuring things against a baseline. You're contrasting those things against the knowns and the unknowns, and then the baseline becomes a deciding factor. Hey, this person needs oxygen, they're getting worse. We have to transport right away. So you do that autonomically all the time, and you don't slow down enough to make a comparison. So I'll give you a cop example. So you get these streaks as being a cop, like I was death car one time, you know, where every call that came out was unattended death, unattended death. Are you?

SPEAKER_03: 32:50

Are you legally allowed to say that now?

SPEAKER_00: 32:51

Yeah, I think now I think time is going by because I didn't cause most of those. And uh, so all of a sudden you're showing up on a scene, you got to write the report, you got to do all the stuff. And then the next call comes out and it's like, here's a you know, I I I'm begging for a right because I've been hit so many times with the left. So on this day, it was the okay, listen, first call, leaf blower guy was cutting his grass and he blew the cut grass out of the neighbor's lawn. And that neighbor, he was through, and he's in my face going, This cannot stand. This is enough. I want this to happen. You know, all these unreasonable demands. And the next door neighbor's going, dude, it's a leaf blower. It's grass, it'll be gone in an hour, right? Okay, so you're doing that one, and the very next call that goes out is an in progress. And what happened is the same identical situation happened. But the neighbor walked out into the neighbor's garden with a seven millimeter REM mag and fired one shot upstairs into the kitchen where the guy was standing testing the al dente pasta, and it hit him right in his filtrum, Brian. Just, you know, uh red mist effect all over the house and everything. And then that guy walked back to his house, sat down, and was having lunch. And so I'm talking to the guy, and it's like, hey, I told him, I told him, I told him not to leave, you know, the leaf blower when I'm sleeping and not to push it on my ground. And he never never listened to me, you know, because he was a factory worker, right? Okay, so now I'm leaving all of that in custody here, evidence and all that other stuff, but I'm on call until I get the call and it's like, okay, we got another neighbor trouble. Now, this is my third neighbor trouble in a row, and it all has to do with a nice day outside where people were mowing the lawn. So I have no fucking idea what I'm going into on the third one. Do I draw my gun and have everybody go throw them? Brian, is it nothing simple and tell the guys, hey, should I even bring up that? Look, uh, people die over calls like this. Do you do you understand? So my world was spinning left to right, and I was rolling front to back. And so now I have to use my tools. Now I have to use my Hoberman and go, okay, hold on a second. How am I perceiving the information as I'm rolling up? Then I got to say, okay, what are the pre-event indications that I'm seeing? Two people out there talking, nobody's carrying a weapon. I got to go through that over and over because I'll contrast that with an alarm call. Every copper that's that's listening right now has been on alarm calls. And you go on alarm calls so many times they make you stupid. So now all of a sudden, on that alarm call where you're walking around, you see a broken window. And now you're going but dead gut because it's a burglary. And guess what? You haven't had a burglary in 75 alarm calls. Or you see a person standing, that shadow ninja, and you see him move back as you're coming around checking the building. And now all of a sudden you shit yourself a little bit because you're going, oh man, there's going to be a foot chase, a shootout, what's going on here? Is it a drug deal? Is it an armed robbery? Is it a uh kidnapping? And and so few jobs in the world, other than military and cop work and and like I said, first line, first responders have those type of choices that are coming at you at full speed all the time. And then the back-to-back necessity. There's very few people at a call center that have to go through that range of emotions.

SPEAKER_03: 35:57

I and so I I I'll push back a little bit on that. I get where you're coming from, but and yes, the the frequency of it, but but even the day-to-day stuff, because you actually just gave the the example of the guy shooting his neighbor over the leaves. Like, okay, that's a guy whose internal baseline is so off and is so overwhelmed with whatever else is going on in their life. Well, you picture yourself as a neighbor going, like, yeah, dude, I'll be done in 10 minutes. What's the big deal? He he never he completely missed it because he didn't see it for what this person was because he didn't know all of that stuff. And it's the classic, like the everyone likes the movie the the what was it, Falling Down, Michael Douglas, right? Where he goes in and it's like 10:30, he tries to order breakfast, and like, oh, it doesn't serve breakfast after 10, and it's like 1001. And like that's what starts his whole like, you know, now he now he's off doing stuff. And well, one, if you're identifying with that character, you need to fix your internal baseline.

SPEAKER_02: 36:47

Exactly. So tell something right now.

SPEAKER_03: 36:50

Everyone loves to do that, but like it means you're the problem, probably not the rest of society. But that's a separate conversation. But it but again, these are examples of like, oh, that's that when we like we say we've said it plenty of times on the podcast, too. Like, when someone's cup is full, like you don't know that this person's cup is full, and now you just rear-ended them on accident or or bumped into them or whatever, and and that's it. Now, now they they're going on that killing spree, and you just happen to be the person that this when their cup spills over, you're just happened to get wet here because you're standing next to it. So that's a that's a that's a good example. I didn't mean to like push back, like I just meant like experience. Let me add one too. Part of that, part of that does two things. Remember, it does two things, right? That experience you say of doing that. So like you're talking about your decades of law and ex law enforcement experience. It helps you and hinders you at the same time, right? And and and like so, yeah, you get better at picking up on things, you get faster at reading this, but then like you said, like you you you almost get a little dumber too. I I don't know if you're gonna share this. I remember you were calling a story about a potential break-in, and it was the janitor, and you said, Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00: 37:53

So so that well and and let me let me uh give you that one. But but let me make sure that you understand what I meant completely by the early one if you're a listener. Yeah. What happens is you're driving too fast on that road, and your headlines, headlights aren't shining far enough down the road, so things are coming at you too quickly, and you're basing your experience level on it and going, Don't worry, I can handle this new speed of the events around me. And you can't because you're going to reach apogee. You're gonna reach a point where you can no longer defend yourself. And so then the things coming too fast are gonna make you make mistakes. So you gotta slow down. You gotta give yourself the gift of time and distance. You have to, as Brian would put it, recalibrate between those calls. Because if not, what happens is the more routine those calls become, the dumber and more endangered you get. So Brian's talking about Schofield Elementary School. Alarm goes off. The only time the alarm was good at Schofield Elementary was an airplane took off from the Detroit Metro airport and crashed into Schofield Elementary. That alarm was worth going to. It was a very interesting thing in the middle of the night, a lot of people dead, a lot of stuff glowing for miles around, right? But on this night, it was probably the seventh alarm because of the wind or whatever else at Schofield. And now it's 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning. It's that, you know, nobody's up, nobody's around, only bad guys or coppers are out there. And we get the alarm. And the other call is going, hey, I'll be right over. And I'm like, nah, it's the seventh call. Whenever you say no, don't show up or hey, dispatch, where's my record? You know you're screwed because you know they're going to show up and you sound like an idiot. So I'm walking around the external and I look inside and I see a dude. And so I shine my flashlight on the dude, and the dude is literally sweeping the floor. He's sweeping up, and he gives me the sign with his right hand and points one, like, give me a minute. Give me a minute. And I tap on the glass and he gives me the sign again, just give me a minute, and goes around the corner. So I'm waiting, I'm waiting. Finally, a cover car comes up and they go, What are you waiting for? I go, I'm waiting for the fucking janitor. He's going around to open the door. And the guy goes, Hey, it's 2 30 in the morning. There's no janitor working at this school. And we go around and the windows are flogged out, and here's the computers are set up. And you know what it was? Run to run to run. I underestimated. I didn't know where I was in my funnel, Brian. And all of a sudden I was overwhelmed by events. I and you know what? In that instance, bad guy got away. And of course, we ultimately caught him uh for the the sake of the story. We caught him. Yeah. Uh but the the reality of the situation is that could have ended poorly for me, right? Yeah. And so it's those mistakes.

SPEAKER_03: 40:30

That guy right now is listening to this podcast, laughing his name. You never got me.

SPEAKER_00: 40:38

And they're all fucking smoking meth. And he's going, that was me, kids. And the kids go, Who are you? Right?

SPEAKER_03: 40:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:44

Exactly. So but the idea. Exactly. Your earlier call. I don't know this girl. So the the thing is that any time that you do that, so so now we read a great one on LinkedIn the other day where the guy was saying, Hey, my son kept his composure. Hey, he just walked in a gas station, grabbed a Snickers bar, turned around to walk out, and the place is getting robbed. And the dad is thanking, you know, that everything went well. Well, what do you think he was like? You think he was a little overwhelmed by events? How many times you walk in, you get gas, you pay, you're going back out, or hey, my card reader, or I need the receipt for number three. You get what I'm saying? And the guy's going, no, this is a gun. And you're going, yeah, I still need the receipt for number three. And they're going, give up the cheese, and you're not there because you're not sure what's going on. Brian, that dissimilarity in your environment, that that that situation is screaming to you. And unless you're in touch with your internal baseline and you take it out for a ride once in a while, you're you're going to be stupid.

SPEAKER_03: 41:39

So that that's that, yeah. And and so let's talk about taking it out for a ride every once in a while and some tools to recalibrate, right? Okay. So so let's jump into that, like uh and how we approach it. And I I've got some like we want to slow down our thinking loop in a sense, right? We're always talking about time and distance, and I don't care what the situation is, right? I will argue with anyone who says, Yeah, but sometimes you don't have the time.

SPEAKER_02: 42:03

And I'm like, you said who is clocked.

SPEAKER_03: 42:07

Always do. Yeah. Who's controlling the time, who's controlling the narrative, right? Right, right. So we can the and there's different tools out there that I've seen, and we can talk about some of these, but but like like there's different methods we've seen, like I even brought it up, like the breathing and ways to do that and stop, or some people have like uh well, even like SILS from the military stop, look, listen, smell. That's the idea you're supposed to stop, look, listen, smell, wait, right? You know, that's different when you're doing like, all right, we're doing a covert insert, and you just got dropped off by a hilo, and you you literally lay there for an hour and you don't move. And you just you you baseline the environment, make sure those birds start chirping or whatever, like you know, you there's no one else there. But but that's that that reset. And I've learned like I've learned some great like breathing ones a long time ago. They talk about the box breathing, they call it tactical breathing, whatever. And those are great. But what I realized, what I learned from doing those, because I implemented them, where the power wasn't in that method or that tool. The power was what you were doing cognitively, like what how it reframed the situation. Because I've seen people go, like, hey, when I get like this, I pull out my lucky whatever, and I look at it and I put it away. And it's like, okay, or some people, or or I talk about like before I would ever step out on anywhere, whatever mission, whatever patrol before we're ever about to leave, because sometimes you know it's a mad dash to get things going and you're finishing up planning and dropping stuff in and getting everything together, and it's like, all right, ready to go. I always stopped, closed my eyes, you know, after I loaded my weapon, you know, touch my mags, touch my pistol, secondary mags, you know, where's my radio? Turn a kit, got it, first aid kit, boom. I would I would yeah, all that. So I would uh I would close my eyes and do that mentally. And what that did for me was like, now I know I'm now I'm going to do the thing. Now I'm cognitively engaged. And so so I'm actually the person where it's like, okay, if you come up with something and you think that works and it works, it might be total junk science. It's like when my wife's like, oh, what's going on, or I'm feeling all this, oh, you know, it's Mercury is in retrograde, and I'm like, oh my god, I want to punch myself in the head, but like that's so dumb. But you know what? If that works for her as a functional self-awareness tool to recalibrate, then fucking use it. Go, go, go, go to the go, you know, hey, read, read the whole, read your horoscope for the day. If that's what gets you to to think better and to do better and perform better and recognize certain things, then it's fine. It's so junk, but but if it works, it's not. Like it's your junk. Ultimately, this is why we call it functional tool to recalibrate. So, so I'll let you sorry, I'll let you know.

SPEAKER_00: 44:40

Oh, no, so I'm reaching into my yeah, I'm reaching into my right hand pocket right now while we're talking. And anybody that can see us, that's my stack of ID and credit cards, and that totem on the top is our Lord and Savior. Why? Because when I bring that out of my pocket, I can't. Me from the long hair. It really does. It looks like Jared Leto. But the idea is that that was given to me so many years ago, and I've kept it all these years, and when I see it, that recalibrates me. That with the first two questions, I go, do I have the time and do I have the distance? And and when I do that, the gift of time and distance is so important. The the way those uh ideas came up. I remember the very first time, like like some idiot wrote about proximics yesterday. Yeah, welcome to the party. There's some of us have been using proximics for a hundred years. You know what I mean? So one of the things that teaching a long time ago and airline that shall remain nameless, how to do the the martial arts moves that would save their lives in an instant, in an incident before 9-11. And the problem was they're thinking. And what do I mean by their thinking? So what I did is I measured out the size of an airline bathroom. I measured out the size of the distance between the seats and the aisle, and I measured that with that cart that comes up and down. And and this was a lot of work back then because you couldn't just look it up on the internet or have AI do it. And I taped all that stuff out and had the you know MRE boxes metaphorically stacked up and said, now do your spinning hook kick. Okay, do me a favor, do that Kodagashi on the inside with the flip and the takedown. And the people go, Well, we can't. And it's like, yeah, so you need to recalibrate. You need to go back to that internal baseline and adjust some shit. And when did that happen again, Brian? Happened a couple of days ago when the guy was stabbing all those people on the train, and and and the experts wrote in, well, when somebody's stabbing on a train, the first thing you need to do is increase your distance to give you more time to react. Okay, well, do you think you're new to this? Do you you get what I'm trying to say? So the idea, Brian, is that you can have a positive reaction feedback loop, a negative reaction feedback loop, or a neutral one. And you know what neutral is? Neutral is what most people do. They stand there until they're bowled over by the bad guy, the car, cut by the edge weapon, or do whatever else. So if you don't rehearse in a situation for a situation that's going to be creative, it's going to be interesting, then you're not doing yourself a service. All the flipping tires and climbing the rope in the world, all the tactical reloads and all that other stuff are going to be challenged when you all of a sudden turn a corner and there's somebody in your living room. And we don't recreate those things. And that's why when we are going to these companies that had all this great technology, Brian, to create these uh scenarios on the screen that you go through over and over. Hey, I didn't leave that light on. Nobody wants to do that scenario. Okay, we want to do that scenario. Why? Because all of a sudden pulling up in your driveway and seeing a light that you didn't anticipate to be on on your own could be the difference between life and death. And we discount that. That's what we're talking about internal baseline.

SPEAKER_03: 47:39

Yeah, and and and this is all about time and distance. And part of the reasons why we want to name these things or name anything, part of the reason why we use a specific lexicon and a language. One, it provides a common operating language, right? So I say something and I tell you, Greg, and in that information exchange or communication, you implicitly understand what that is, right? Because now you may have your own idea, but but it gets it's a meme. It gets the idea across in a very, very short burst transmission. And so this sort of cognitive labeling that we're talking about, right? It like naming the emotions. When you do that, you you're you're re-engaging your prefrontal cortex. And your prefrontal cortex is the first thing that gets shut down in any of these situations. And the more and the c more overwhelmed you get, the closer you get to that bang, the closer you get to being OBE, the less and less prefrontal cortex you have. We can all sit around, you know, on the couch, have the old-fashioned thanks, Walt Setemar, I forgot to mention it. Forgot to mention that when I brought him up. But we can talk about all this stuff all day long and be in our prefrontal cortex. But you're I I heard a great one by this professor. I want to share more of his work, but I don't want people to get the wrong idea, so I'm gonna frame it correctly. But he he said like the prefrontal cortex is very, very expensive. And I was like, Oh, that's a good way to look at it. Meaning it costs a lot to engage it, to maintain it, to continually operate there. It costs a lot of calories. Well, you know that's not expensive, you know it's cheap, your freaking limbic system and your amygdala taking over. So, what I can do in the my point of bringing this stuff up is this this cognitive labeling and giving names to emotions or feelings or perceptions, right? That now re-engages my prefrontal cortex to go, oh well, I've had those experiences before, or this could also be this. It kind of it like restarts a critical thinking process that otherwise would have gone out the window. Like, does that kind of make make sense on why we do that?

SPEAKER_00: 49:47

Absolutely. So the the idea of you against the world is language is a new thing to humans, but language has my least favorite thing. It's it's become uber important over time and and goober and gunnocide uber important. But the idea is that we misuse it. So you can use cognitive labeling and you can use uh naming emotions to recalibrate. What you're doing is you're creating with that totem, with that process, you're creating uh armor against the unknown. You're creating the cross or the the uh you know against a vampire, the garlic against the the the werewolf or whatever it is. But just like those stories, when you read the original Frankenstein, Frankenstein's the doctor, not the monster. And Frankenstein was an intelligent being that that you know uh knew what he wanted to do and was on a voyager. Yeah, yeah, self-discovery. And and what happens is over time now is the brains, the zombie, you know, we we change what it is. So that that change in linguistic framework creates us creating a word to build the hypothesis. And I'm guilty of this. I build words all the time to mean something. Everyone is. But the problem is when you do that and then you start buying into your own shit, then it can become dangerous. So if you do that and believe in your own stuff, Dunning Krueger, gosh damn, imposter syndrome, all the other, you know, yeah, exactly. If you do that and you're believing and it's stoicism, then you know, good on you if that's going to help you survive the day. But the idea is the stuff that truly matters in your environment has always been around. So those are the things that you should have as your grounding element. Gravity is a grounding element. When you get up and you don't have gravity, you hit the ceiling. When you get up and you don't have balance, you fall into the couch. So those are the type of things that we're talking about building in your internal baseline, so you know something's wrong. When I go in and I'm talking lawn chairs and the person's talking orangings, oranges, something is wrong. That incongruence means that there's danger or opportunity, which is it? And if you don't slow down then, then you're going to be too far past that that that that event horizon to hit the brakes, Brian. And that's what we're talking about. We're talking about if you're in a life and death encounter and almost everything is when you're a first responder, a soldier, DOJ, DOD, and and all of a sudden you like like what is the thinking that I'm going to stop you from arresting somebody by ramming your police car when I'm just a a citizen watching what's going on. Do you not think of the the gravity and the magnitude of all of those things that are going on? So you right now are going, where's he going with this? I'm telling you that all you're thinking about is driving to work, but you don't understand that there's a high speed pursuit at the next intersection that you'd never planned on. Okay. You didn't understand that the armed robbery bailed out a mile from your kid's school or church, and those two guys are escaping the cops, and they're looking at that open door and thinking that's where I'm going to go. So these games where you update your internal baseline based on new and incoming information or play games with yourself to anticipate that are crucial to survival in today's environment because things are going so much more fast. Before, when I went out of the cave to pick the berries, I had to worry, am I going to get an apple or a snake to eat for lunch today? And I only had to worry about the the warthog and the gosh damn cougar or that one crazy guy from the next village. Now look at how many things we have to worry about, Brian. So you have to recalibrate not only internally for you, but internally for your environment.

SPEAKER_03: 53:23

Well, they didn't have the crazy guy from the next village back then. They just killed them in the crib. They just said Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 53:28

Exactly. Something's wrong with that guy.

SPEAKER_03: 53:33

So yeah, they were absolutely. Oh, turns out they just have uh epilepsy. They're not, you know, possessed by the devil.

SPEAKER_00: 53:39

But uh so dissonance is is so important to you because if you don't continuously update your baseline, you're gonna fall pretty much.

SPEAKER_03: 53:46

This is what I what I'm gonna hit on because we're talking about like, okay, we're at the point, like some some tools to recalibrate, and we talked about you know different different methods, you know, like you even showed your picture that you carry with you, or it's a thing on your visor or whatever. Can I explain explain sort of how I can re-ant reorient myself, right? Because that's what we're talking about. It's an orienting exercise in a sense. Reorient my internal baseline. Can I do that using where I'm at, using external what I see going on, right? So cuc because like you know, you become down and in, you're focused on what you're doing. Can I can I look at external observations to help sort of like re-anchor my internal baseline?

SPEAKER_00: 54:24

So I'll give you, I'll give you a perfect example of one of those. So every once in a while we run into people that forgot the origin story of Combat Hunter or how some of this stuff worked and who the best at creating scenarios were. And and one happened not too long ago where somebody was using the term death sled and baby sled. And I go, hey, that's great. I go, do you know where that came from? And they were going, no, I don't. And I was like, well, we created that. Death sled came from all the calls that we went on where people showed up in mountain towns and rented a vehicle and drove too fast for conditions and died in that vehicle. So the death sled was always associated with bad stuff. So we picked that up when we were training for Iraq and Afghanistan, the vehicle that was carrying the insurgents became the death sled and the baby sled. Well, the baby sled is a smaller version of the death sled, and it was another rental vehicle. And they go, Well, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Brian, if you come to my town and you fly into Gunnison Airport, the airplane feels the same, the gravity feels the same, the leaves fall off of the trees the same, the people speak the same language you do, but you're gonna go to the Hertz or the budget or whatever counter Avis that you're gonna get your car and you're gonna drive away. And all of a sudden, as you're heading up to Crested Butte to go skiing, all these white crystals are gonna start falling down and the temperature is gonna change drastically. And guess what? Your ratio of brake fate, your uh distance, stopping distance is gonna decrease. Your ability to navigate using power steering is gonna change. Your tires now become the most important thing in the friction content of the ground and the road you're driving on. And how many people that you've seen rent cars? Brian, you and I, when we rent a car, we take photos all the way around. Next thing that we do is we go under the hood. We're looking at the fluid levels, all that other stuff. I've never seen another person at a rental place do that other than people that we work with all the time. So now that kid that landed in Gunnison or at another mountain town that's very similar, now they're driving past their headlights again. They're driving past their conditions. And you know what they need to do? They need to pull over and get out that totem. They need to take a look and go, where am I right now? Where do I think I am? And is that chasm, is that gap big enough that I'm going to drive too fast for conditions, or I'm I'm gonna get too close to that vehicle in front of me and I'm gonna create a crash. And if not for you, then for all those other people that aren't paying attention too. You don't want to turn your your gosh damn rental vehicle into the death sled. And I've seen it happen so many times, we created a name for it. So think of how serious that becomes. And right now, somebody's listening and we hit something in their mind and they're going, oh my God, I see that with blank. I see that with cooking. I see that with, you know, leaving a product in the pantry too long and now it's turned into cyanide or whatever. I don't know shit about cooking. I know a lot about eating, but there's a certain environmental things that if you don't take care of them, your blood pressure is another one. There's an internal baseline on them. If you don't take care of that, Brian, you could die from that, right? So the idea is you have to do those assessments. We don't come with a warning light like a cart. And and we have to measure those specifically when we get into high stress, low feedback loop environments. And in extremists, we get very little feedback. You get what I'm trying to say? Because we're running a gun and we're thinking past our headlights again.

SPEAKER_03: 57:34

Yeah, and and and and that's why I bring up even those kind of military examples of like the stop, look, listen, smell. So like the reorientation is kind of simple. It's like that taking that's to that minute or that second or whatever to go, all right, where where where am I right now? What are what am I doing here? Like, what's going on? What's really happening? And you're looking around, because that's helped me where I'm like, oh, I'm just I we we did I forget where we were. I think it was when we were down in Mexico or something. Like, like like almost like fainted in that remember that shopping mall originals exercises in Mexico City was fun. That's where it was. Like, and I was like, it's like standing up and like almost like fainted, and I'm like, God, what is wrong with me? Like, there's something seriously wrong. And then I'm like, it's two o'clock in the afternoon. We I have not eaten yet today. We've been on our feet all day and talking and moving, jet lag, jet lag this, like every and I'm like, oh my god, like my yeah, my internal baseline was so like I had to, all right. Well, I'm gonna go run, eat, go grab a quick, you know, taco over here and then grab a coffee, and I know I'll be back to you. But without that, I was just like immediately going, like, what's going on? There's something up, you know. But but it's just you can you can look at the external things to to recalibrate yourself internally to say, okay, I'm coming in a little hot right now, or maybe I need a little glass of water, or I need to chill the F out, or I need a little bit of time and distance just by that. So the and this is why we kind of broke up the these concepts into two different podcasts, and we get into very uh obviously a lot of detail in class. But the point is like they're they they're they go hand in glove, right? And some sometimes it's the OJ glove though. You know, if the if the duck if the glove don't fit, you know, you you must apply, right? Yes. So but but it that the so the so they go hand in hand and and they they apply across many different contexts, right? So there's this sort of internal, external loop of like this awareness, adjustment, make some observation, and then feedback. And so that's why we we when we create these sort of terms or names or things or or process or or or breathing exercise, whatever it is, that's you're what you're also doing is creating a feedback loop. You you're actually informing you're you're placing a point down and saying, okay, from here, I'm gonna measure, and then okay, now from here, and that's that's what you're doing with that. And that's that alone, that process, whatever it is that you do. You know, there's some people like, oh, I go outside and I do you know 15 push ups as fast as I can. I can. Like, okay, whatever it is. If it's 10, if it's 100, if it's zero, some people, hey, I'm gonna go out and smoke a cigarette. It's like, okay, and then I'm gonna come back in. You know, it's like, okay, maybe that's not healthy, but you're cognitively doing the same thing, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:13

You're you're recentering and you have to. So let me give you two quick things that can get in your way. One, being a douchebag. So if you're a fucking douchebag, then what happens is you're going into a situation and trying to solve other people's problems for them without looking at your own. And I'll give you an example of that Tennessee plane crash. So, how many videos now have you seen about the Tennessee plane crash? Okay, it's up to 13 dead. Okay. Somebody said 19, but I haven't confirmed. So let me tell you this if you saw that and immediately got on your social media and started saying, well, this is what it was. And then seven new videos came in yesterday and five more today, and now you see what it really is, you feel like a douchebag, right? Well, that's what your life is like. That's when you're shortcutting the internal process.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:07

That's the problem, is those people don't feel stupid when that happens. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:13

And I agree. But what I'm trying to say is learn from other people's stupidity. So what you have to do is when you see that, what you need to do is go, do I need to take cover right now? Do I need to slow my roll? Do I need to take a look at this and ask somebody else where I am and what's going on? Because if you don't, you're going to get over involved. And when you do, that's OBE. I'll give you the second example. There's a video that I saw yesterday, and it shows a guy going to an ATM. He's in shorts and flip-flop, so you know he's getting robbed. And there's nobody standing around until he starts getting this stuff out in the dark at what looks like a bus station. You know what I'm saying? And now all of a sudden a couple of guys come up and take his backpack, take his money, and he decides to fight back. And two turn into six, and everybody's beating his ass down. And guess what happens? Everybody writes in, well, if he would have had a weapon, if he would have had a weapon, they would have stolen it, stuck it up his ass, and killed him. If he would have done anything, you know what he needed to do? He needed to say, Where am I? Okay, where do I think I am and what's the difference? Then he would have said, it's nighttime. I'm in flip-flops. I had a couple of drinks, I'm going to an ATM in the place I don't know in a high crime area. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Your internal baseline is specifically designed as a comparison tool. And if you choose not to use it, or if you're OBE and you're deliberately not using it, but you don't know it, then you're gonna die. You're gonna be in a trick bag. You can avoid that by thinking through the situation before they happen.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:38

Yeah, and you know, you're when your body releases or when you feel those different emotions, what it doesn't matter whatever it is, it'd be fear or anger or intent. Technic technically, uh, it has been measured that you're that that takes your body releases that, and in 90 seconds it it dissipates. Meaning everything past that is because you're now thinking about it and reigniting that like it it it's it's 90 seconds, and that's it. And then like so I use that with the with the terrorist little guy, he's two years old, so he has obviously very little control of his emotions. Plus, he's my son, so he has even less control of his emotions. So he's really got the cards are are stacked, but what I'm saying. They're tarot cards, right? Right, right. Yeah, so so but same thing. It's like so if he crashes out and he and he throws a tantrum, I do I'm not gonna even respond for over a minute. Like it's just like cool, flow yourself on the ground, and I'm like, yeah, that sucks, huh man? I know I hate getting angry, and I hate when I don't get to get eat more goldfish, but you met your limit for the day. So let's uh go play with trucks over here.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:42

Like, you know, it's like it's over. And so it it if you think about it that way, we're kind of the same as the humans. But the the one of the the big one of the biggest reasons why we always talk about these kind of things is that humans are just horrible judges of our cognitive performance. I mean, we are really, really bad at it, and everyone is. We're we we get overconfident with with things that we think we're good at. Our emotional reasoning and and self-deception, uh one, it's it's it's a survival mechanism. So it's there. Like it's it's easier to blame others, it's easier to lash out, it's easier to be angry at this national level politicians, even though I don't know a single city council member's name or state rep's name, right in my own backyard, because I can look over there and see that they're the problem. We don't ever want to look in that mirror. And it's it's it's hard. It's it's really, really, really difficult to. And so when I see people do it, even if it's something small, like when you see it in course, and like, oh man, yeah, I should have seen it this way. And I'm like, hey man, like this reflection exercise you're doing right now, yeah, you're you're already at a level of of self-awareness that most people aren't at because we don't want to do that. So just understanding the different factors and labeling them and knowing how to interact, like that is for me, like that is if you can do that, then whatever way you want to deal with that, or you want to improve, or you want to talk to someone, or take the self-help, or you like Greg goes to goat yoga and whatever, sits it, sits in the drum circle naked with everyone. That's fine. I I'm all good with it. You know, it's just uh the it's the it's the cognitive process that's the important part.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:11

So I I would tell you this. Yeah, I would tell you you just need to slow down. You when you're a little kid, take a look at being a little kid. You run everywhere, and that's fun and it's wonderful. But all of your scars when you're a little kid are on your head. Do you get what I'm saying? Because you're leading with your head, but you're not leading with your thoughts. So the idea is just, you know, you keep thinking, hit that boop, whoop, whoop, whoop, get through that traffic faster because you got to be that first on the scene. And the next thing you know, it's a gosh damn homicide and you've videoed your own you know demise. I'm not saying think slowly. I'm not canumin. I'm saying that what you have to do is you have to move more slowly through your environment so your cognition catches up with your ass. And and once you get those two things calibrated, you can move quite quickly. The the best in the world. Watch the Olympics one time and see what it really looks like, you know? That's what we're talking about. That was you're fooling yourself.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:09

Well, that that's a great example. Like where I don't I forget some comedian or people made the joke before where like they said in every Olympic event they should have like one person. So you got the competitors, right? All the top people from different nations, right? Then you should have just one like random person who volunteers to go. Yeah, because to show to show like just how fast or just how amazing they are, or just like like that, that's what you need, but you're watching it against these ten people. So it's just the ten greatest people on the face of the earth right now. So the the you know, I mean, you can't you can't compare that, but you can that so the comparisons are like, oh, he was a quarter second or he was just this. But if you did it against a regular person, you'd be like, oh my god, dude, just orders of magnitude.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:48

So they'll be here tomorrow. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:50

So so big big takeaways, obviously, you know, you you can't you can't control the chaos and the environment around you. You can you can influence it, but you can't control it, you don't have to, but because you you have to focus on is all right, how do I control my calibration? How do I control this internal baseline and get better at that? Because that's gonna help me with everything that I do. And so I always like bring it back to the question and and just challenge anyone listening, you know, to do that. Well, where do I think I am? Where am I at actually? And and and that's where I can start to well, typically I'm that I go back to my your normal base on, well, how do I typically feel at this time of day? What usually happens after I eat that giant burrito or what the you know, it doesn't matter what it is. You can you can you're just you're asking those questions and it gets you better, it gets me better at having conversations with my wife, with the kids, and just in general, it's like okay, where where are we all at right now? Let's take the temperature of the room, let's take an internal temperature and figure it out from there. And I know too for for for other folks, I think I think we'll do for for Patreon follow-up on this one. Uh, we'll kind of do it I'll call it like when when internal and external baselines collide, like when those things go wrong. But Greg, I'll any any closing remarks from you?

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:01

You you said it and it was veiled. Uh so I'll I'll just bring it up again. Listen, uh, where do you you think you are and where are you really? And the chasm in between it is the measurement of how bad you're gonna get fucked. The second one is well, you can't control the chaos of the situation occurring around you. You can control you. So if you control you, then that's something esteemed. That's something that you can aspire to, and that's a really good thing. Because if you sit there walking around going, I have to change it, change every one of these assholes around me because I hate them, you're never gonna do that, and that's gonna be a lot of hate in your life. But if you sit there and go, wait a minute, I can slow my role, I can lower my voice, I can de-escalate the situation from my perspective. Brian, you got such a a much better chance of living to an old age and telling kids stories around a campfire.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:46

Yeah. And they'll be your kids, not like you're uh Many times.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:49

Many times they will.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:51

Many times.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:52

Right. I I met we appreciate everyone for listening in. Always reach out to us, you know, if you have any questions. Obviously, we got a lot more on the Patreon site. Go check out the Distinguished Savage podcast as well. Shout out to Walt. Appreciate the bourbon. Please please send more if you want. Um we always you can always reach out to us too at the human behavior podcast at gmail.com. Uh, we do appreciate everyone. If you enjoy it, just share it with a friend, send it to someone that helps us out immensely, and we've been getting some great feedback. So uh thank you so much for tuning in. And don't forget that training changes behavior.