When Technology Outpaces Human Performance with Alan Kearney

Night vision keeps getting smarter, but our brains do not update on the same schedule. We’re joined by defense expert Alan Kearney, a former Irish Defence Forces officer who now works in European defense industry, to explore a problem that reaches far beyond goggles and helmets: what happens when advanced soldier systems outpace human cognition in the exact moments stress is highest?

We start with the fundamentals of modern night vision and thermal fusion, then move into the messy reality of human performance. Under lethal threat, the sympathetic response and HPA axis change attention, memory, and perception. That’s where latency, digital overlays, AI cueing, and networked data can become more than “extra information” they can become friction. We talk human factors engineering, cognitive load, pattern recognition, and why an information feed is not the same thing as situational awareness.

From aviation lessons to procurement-room demo traps, we pressure-test the assumptions behind modernization. We also dig into mission command and the risks that come with total visibility, plus the long-term cost of over-reliance on tools that quietly erode core skills. The takeaway is not anti-tech. It’s a human-first approach: design systems that match neurobiology, and raise the baseline with realistic training and training to failure so warfighters are never learning the hard way.

If you care about military readiness, law enforcement performance, or how people make decisions under pressure, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with the biggest tradeoff you’ve seen between “more tech” and “better performance.”

Alans Article: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/night-vision-at-a-crossroads-when-technology-outpaces-the-neurobiology-of-close-combat/

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. Before we get into today's conversation, I want to give you a little context for what you're about to hear. In this episode, Greg and I sit down with the defense expert Alan Kearney, who specializes in advanced soldier systems to explore a question that matters far beyond military technology. What happens when innovation starts moving faster than human performance? Using the evolution of night vision and battlefield awareness systems as a starting point, we dig into situational awareness, stress physiology, training, and the limits of human cognition under pressure. This is not an anti-technology conversation. It's a conversation about making sure technology serves the human being using it, especially when the stakes are the highest. I think you'll find this one thought-provoking, practical, and highly relevant, whether you come from the military, law enforcement, or you're just interested in how people actually perform in complex high-risk environments. 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. 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. Hello, everyone, and thanks for tuning in to the Human Behavior Podcast. Just like you heard in the intro, we got an exciting episode here today. And for those longtime listeners of the show, uh, you're gonna be interested in this because we're kind of taking it in a little bit different direction than we have before in the past, but we we are still actually talking about many of the themes that we typically do on this podcast. And so, first, before we jump into anything, Greg, uh we do have to introduce our friend Alan Kearney. And Alan, thank you so much for for hopping on the show today. I'd like you to please, for our listeners and for those folks who don't know you, is kind of give us a uh, I know they heard a little bit about you in the intro, but but give us a little bit of background about yourself and kind of what your experience is.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Thanks for having me, Brian and Greg. It's it's great to be here. I would just say I spent 37 years in the Irish Defence Forces. And when you say that out loud, actually, that's that's a long time. And it's a small professional military with a lot of overseas engagement. In that time, I joined as a technician, an armor trained for four years. And being a small military, I served a lot overseas with the infantry as well, although I was a technician. And I had a very varied career, I was very lucky in ordinance. I went on to be involved in EOD and uh counter ID and the like over many years with uh many great people, thankfully. And served overseas a number of occasions in Lebanon and in Afghanistan. And I suppose the last work I was doing in the last number of years, I retired there last year, was involved in, I suppose I ended up in the logistics chain towards the end, looking at larger programs and seeing the problems with the run-out of various systems and management of them. And I was involved, as you know, with yourself, guys, a number of years ago in NATO's counter-moding terrorism program. So it's been particularly varied. And I was lucky enough in Ireland, as long as you're not bringing the service into disrepute, you can walk outside. And in that time, I was working with a lot of different groups over many years and various corporate entities. So I was supposed a mixed bag of experience, but uh I finished as a commissioned officer, having joined as an apprentice initially. So I've seen both sides of the defense as well. So it's been very broad and quite long, and I now work in the European defense industry.

Night Vision Basics And Fusion Explained

SPEAKER_01 3:24

All right. Well, thanks that interim for those who kind of like US-based listeners and and either current or former US military, which we have a lot of, you know, in in my experience too, working with you know different foreign militaries, like there's it's it's a very different approach. They don't have the budget that that the US spends on defense. So it it's a it's a very different approach. It's it's a little bit even sometimes more methodical and precise. And you really have to kind of you actually have to show your your where you're spending the money on. And there's more little oversight, I think. So it it it's it's interesting when you when you go compared to this behemoth U.S. military versus some of the smaller ones, like the differences in how they what how and what they procure and what they focus on and then what their mission on uh a lot of people don't know that the Irish Defense Forces, especially, do a lot of have done historically a lot of peacekeeping missions and have deployed to different places. So it just it just adds to a a great perspective, and which is one of the reasons why we wanted to have you on. But big reason that that we're and which is the subject of our our our talk today, is you recently wrote something, you wrote an article, it was published by the Modern War Institute at West Point, and and folks for listening to the the links to that'll all be in the episode details. But you know, the the title of it was Night Vision at a Crossroads when technology outpaces the neurobiology of close combat. So this is very, you know, uh near and dear to folks like myself and Greg, who who have been engaged in this kind of area of study and research, application, and what we just we know with human behavior and perception and cognition and how that relates to different technological solutions, because that's a big issue. And and even with, you know, if you think about your listeners and you have no background in this, like even just you interacting with your computer and an app and whatever it is, there's a lot of research and thought, well, sometimes there is, into how that interaction occurs between the human and and the the whatever the app is. And and it can go, it's not always well designed sometimes because typically the people designing it are are have one background or way of doing things. Now the user might be different. And I always use the, you know, you know, Greg, we were just even we've all been using the like Zoom or Teams or all these video conferencing solutions for years. There's rapid adoption of it after co during COVID, especially for even just general people, and still have yet to go on a call where there isn't an issue or someone's on mute when they're not, or we don't know how to use the future. I mean, we're think of all the big brain scientists, Greg. We were just on a call with the other day. Every single one of them was like, And it couldn't come off in mute when we all we all had a point. So it's it, I I I look at it from that perspective as well. But getting back to kind of what you wrote, and and I want to start with a couple quotes from there because I think it'll help frame our discussion. But right off the bat in the beginning, you said a few months ago, during a closed-door seminar involving senior officials in the United States defense community, I raised a concern about the direction of night vision modernization. I argued that fusion-driven visual systems and digital awareness ecosystems may be advancing faster than the human brain can reliably use them in moments of extreme danger. So that got my attention right away. And and just to kind of caveat this, one of one of the other quotes from that article you said is the issue is not that the technology is poor. On the contrary, it is extremely sophisticated. The problem is that it is increasingly misaligned with how the human brain functions under stress of lethal environments. So, what I took from that in a sense is like, and we've had a previous discussion about this, is it's almost like an inversion problem where we're going from adapting, you know, machines to humans to now adapting humans to machines. So historically, machines designed around human limitations, some of the best, you know, research and studies, yeah, comes from military and then really started, especially in aviation, right? Because you're flying a plane, which means you're already exceeding the limits of human cognition. You humans weren't designed to do that. And so you have certain systems that you have to run and measurements and things that you have to do. So if it's not aligned with how a human perceives and senses their environment, you're gonna get all sorts of problems. And and there's countless historical examples of that, right? So now we're increasingly designing systems that require humans to adapt to machine constraints. So this is this is a lot that was in there. And and you know, I want to frame this kind of conversation because there's a lot we can get into. So kind of Alan, I'll want to throw back to you to start this off, to see, you know, get these big picture points and themes that you were going with, and then we can jump into them from there.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Yeah, thanks, Brian. Well, there's two areas there. And first, I if it's okay with you, I'd like to set the ground really because it's important to understand the where I would be coming from, I suppose, in relation to this. And everyone has a different level of experience with night vision if you came from the military or the police. So baseline technology, most people are familiar with, I think, is the image intensifying tube. And they amplify available light, moonlight, starlight, or ambient urban glow. And the tube, what's there, it makes it into a usable image. So what you see through it, of course, is a direct continuous, it's an analog representation of the environment, and it has low latency, which in simple terms is there's no delay. So you have a single spectrum and immediate visual coherence, which is particularly important, and people are used to that. So what is there is what you see. Now, soldiers trained on these systems build their skills around that, and their pattern recognition, their detection, their spatial orientation, all of it developed through that lens where what is what you see is what is there. Now, fusion changes the nature of that image. Now, fusion embraces the thermal technology, and thermal, of course, is into detection where you can detect the heat signature. So you have the amplified light, and now you have this heat signature with it. So you have a single synthesized display of this. Now, the difference in adding that remarkable technology, I mean, it is a remarkable technology, you can see through conditions that will defeat an image-intensifying tube. But the image is no longer direct amplification of reality, it's a constructed representation, and that's where the problem begins, so to speak. So the brain is has to now interpret a synthesis and it's not reading the environment in the same way. So, yes, it is absolutely extraordinary, but it's added another problem. So let's examine that in some way where the problems start to develop, is that if you layer onto that processing required to produce that synthesis, you introduce latency or you introduce a level of delay in simple terms. So milliseconds of lag in real-time circumstances become an issue. Now, in many of the circumstances where these systems are displayed in a controlled environment, it's not an issue. And they're particularly impressive, I would say. They're remarkable technology. But when the brain is operating on pure pattern recognition and speed, and that's under stress, and that occurs in in military terms as we're talking here, or in law enforcement in, say, certain intervention teams, that lag is in the wrong place. So the direction of travel now is beyond that. So you've got persistent overlays, you've got network data, AI-assisted queuing, and digital symbology all fed into the operator and integrated in your visual field. So it's remarkable engineering, it really is. But that's precisely where the human factors question begins, because the technology is advanced faster than our understanding of what happens to the human brain at that particular moment. So the conversation I was having with the US people was along those lines in the vein as I've just expressed there. And it was particularly important to me to have it with the US officials because in my time and over many years, I spent a number of months, I suppose, various times of my life, training US law enforcement in various counterterrorism elements. But I got to witness their operator skills. And in America, it's particularly well developed. It's incredibly well developed. So what I put forward was the idea that this is maybe a problem. And what was said to me was well, our higher-tier operators still prefer the image-intensive uh intensifying tube. They still prefer no latency, and then they want because they need to operate and they need pattern recognition, they need to see what is there in front of them, and they can operate. And so they hadn't moved to these yet. And that was what put me of a mind then to write the the article.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

That all right, you brought up a number of great points. And I I kind of, Greg, before I go to you, want to wanna you you right there at the end when you said, Well, wait a minute, the highest trained people, the people who have the most level of experience in training, the toughest units and the biggest were, you know, are they still doing things this way because they look at that as superior to maybe this technology. And what what all of these technologies are, you know, you're talking about the image intensifiers or different, you know, there's different systems. They're they're all basic, you know, information awareness systems for for sort of situational awareness. So there's like this tactical situational awareness for that individual, you know, law enforcement officer, you know, soldier, whatever it is, to understand what's going on in their environment and allow them to carry out their mission and make decisions, right? But then, you know, there's a higher level operationally, like, hey, we want to know where our people are and I need to have situational awareness. And within this sort of category of situational awareness, there's limitations of the human cognition and perception. There's limitations of the machine you're using. And then now you're talking about the interface between them, which is where the latency can come in, meaning, well, if they're not communicating in real time with each other, there's a lag there. And now the human doesn't have the information they need, or the machine doesn't have the information it needs to give you the right output, in a sense. So you you're bringing in perception orientation, signal detection, and then pattern recognition. And then on top of that, in a complex, you know, stressful environment. So there's a lot of constraints in that and a lot of things you can and cannot do. So that's that's uh just to give everyone kind of an orientation here. There's a lot going on with that. And it's not as simple as like, oh, this is a great technology. We should use it because it it may get in the way. It may actually hinder your performance rather than help your performance, depending on how it's designed or what it was specifically designed for, what the use case is. So Greg, I want to throw to you. I don't have a question yet, but I know you want to get some initial comments.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Um I think I'd like to throw a couple across the bow. So, first of all, just so you know, this was a blank sheet of paper when Alan introduced himself. So and that's that's no joke and no lie whatsoever. I I shut my mouth and listen when guys like Alan speak. So here's why you should at home still be listening. One, you're looking at the screen if you have the screen, if this is even televised in that manner anymore. I use the word televised, how old am I? You got two absolute dinosaurs on this call, and you got the the newer guy who's not new anymore. Okay, he's like cheesy writing with tape. Okay. And so you're you're right now you're saying, okay, uh the condescending side of you is saying, why should I keep listening? Well, first of all, let's go back to counter-muroning or terrorism. And then even before that, I met Allen's, a friend of Allen's through the Irish Defense Force, Colonel Ray Lane, on the ground in Afghanistan. And I kept running into him in in odd places, and he was a fan at that time of my strategy for counter-ID, which was being used in at that time, both the Combat Hunter program and ASAT program. And Ray, being a fan, said, Hey, we need to talk about this. Put me in touch with Alan. And the great thing was the first time that I met Colonel Kearney was on a phone call, international phone call, and he was lukewarm. He was like, I need to know more. Not interested at this point, maybe interested at some point in the future, but I really need to dig into this deeply. And then once he did, we became fast friends, and then there was the trips in to train multiple countries during the the counter-marauding terrorism programs, which at Camp Curra were just phenomenal. And so that's a bit of history. The second part of it is fusion. We get mixed up sometimes uh with terms like fusion because we think of the different applications of the term throughout history. And then we also get mixed up when we talk about human in the loop and computer in the loop. Well, I can tell you this I can talk as it's me on the physiological, the human performance part, and I can also speak as it's me because I had 47 years of history using nods and night vision and and thermals. So I kind of get it. I kind of have seen that. And what I want to make sure that everybody that's still listening understands is this isn't about bashing tech. As a matter of fact, it's pro tech, it's absolutely in support. What it is is talking about when we approach the threshold of human limitations, what we have to understand is there are human limit limitations, and humans at this level of their evolution will default to historical standards rather than progress to the new bar that you set. You can't raise the bar and go, here's the new bar, everybody, go after it. It doesn't work that way. So if we're mindful and understand the potential limitations, like the brain loves chunking, for example, a physiological reference. And when you talk about inter interpretation with no latency, you lose control of that when your brain goes from the prefrontal cortex to the limbic system. So you're just you're there for the ride at that point. So if the functions of the technology aren't trained early on, then when it occurs, there could be a lapse, and that lapse in this instance could be fatal. So I'll stop now. I just wanted to make sure that I threw a couple of those ideas out there and that that Alan is a truce me in the very basic definition of the word. And and I think this is a great uh pending discussion. Over.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Well, I I think a good a couple of historical examples, you know, of of kind of what we're talking about. Uh there's a there's a few. Like, you know, you had what 40 plus years ago when you know the US with the developing you know the Apache helicopter and this integrated you know sighting system for the weapons officer where they're looking through one you know optic and it's a it's a you know night vision readout of the terrain and it's allowing them to engage targets. And it's like, man, this is like the coolest thing that any HELO pilot has ever seen in the history so far. However, a bunch of other things then come from that, right? There's some drawbacks. It's like, well, there's the this not quite working with how we do it. We're this is giving us headaches. So now I can't even use the technology to the, to the, to the to its potential. So there's like this physiological cost. I have to adapt to that. Now we have to make some changes. So some of those systems, especially in anything, you know, airline related or aviation related, I should say, is kind of tuned around human limits. So it starts with, okay, we do some testing, we figure out what these physiological and cognitive limitations are, even though those are already known, they're not always known how they affect or work with some new technology to what you said. It's now it now, me as a human, I'm put in under these extreme circumstances, uh a high level of psychological and even physiological arousal, right? Well, my my my ability to you know apply good decision making and my ability to engage in good situational awareness and understanding and sense making, it's just gets limited. I can't, as a human, no human being can, even with the greatest training or experience in the world, right? You have these cognitive limits that are going to develop. And like you said, Greg, we default to what? We go primitive. When we start to get overwhelmed as human beings, we kind of fall back on this. Well, our limbic system is going to take over and it's going to try and keep us alive. So I think that's a good place to start. Is like, what are you what where what were you seeing here, Alan, that caused you to write this paper to say, yes, okay, well, here's what needs to be addressed. And what do you think this first point is, or the big point is that that that it should start with?

Stress Physiology And Cognitive Limits

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Well, you have a lot of great points there, to be honest. And I'd I'm I would like to go back to the aviation one if we could in a moment because it's very strong. But perhaps, particularly for anyone listening, we better anchor the points about the systems that Greg has mentioned himself in relation to human physiology, because it's important to have that anchor point. So when contact happens, and of course we mean you're you're you're in a fire for it, and we're talking about ground pounders here, that's very important. I mean, we'll come back to that in aviation, that's a controlled environment. So two biological systems are going to fire simultaneously, and that changes everything, and that's the issue. So if your sympathetic adrenal medullary system is going to dump adrenaline and noradrenaline within seconds, your heart rate surges, attention arrows, and vision tunnels towards immediate threat, as Greg has referred to. So the body is doing what it's evolved to do, and it's prioritizing survival. So shortly after your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the HPA axis, is going to release cortisol, and that sustains the state. And because cortisol is so talked about these days, and stress, it's an issue, and you go, no, stress isn't an issue at time, neither is cortisol at the if it's appropriate at that time. It's there for a reason. So vigilance is maintained, energy is available, but walking memory drops significantly, and the brain shifts away from interpretation and rapid pattern recognition. And that's the problem. So the tech is doing one thing and the mind is doing another. And so in that state, the brain wants one thing the shortest possible path from perception to action. And it wants clean edges, it wants unambiguous motion and simple, fast, coherent information. So that's the problem. That's what your physiologically, your brain, everything is going to happen. So if you have a fuse display, and at that precise moment, thermal contours, intensified imagery, depth cues, symbology, root markers, overlays, whatever else is coming into that, because some of them are particularly complex. And I want to be fair here, it's extraordinary technology, it really is. But technically, while it's remarkable, physiologically, at that moment of contact, at the edge of consciousness, if you like, it's asking the brain to do something the brain has made biologically impossible. And I think That is as I would see is that we are risking designing something for a mine that doesn't exist in a Firefly.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Yeah, and it will, though, Alan. I would I would posit this. It will. In 1.3 billion years, we'll be able to catch up. Okay. And and I'm making a joke of it only because it's such a serious topic here that we got to take a step back and look at it. I want to street up what Alan just said, and it's wonderful. Read the article, folks. You'll really be amazed. Okay, Brian, we know this. We know that when the confounds intensify, your brain chooses survival over other options because that's what we're wired for. We're wired to be anxious. We're wired to have fear. We're wired for those things because it keeps us alive. When that reaches a certain threshold, the brain deals with confounds thusly. It says, no longer attending to you, don't have space. And it goes back to what it's used to doing in those survival environments, even if they're a million years old. So the idea that you have something that's going to assist you is wonderful. But is it going to be able to regulate your, for example, emotions inside of that event? Clearly not. Is it going to be able to supplant your surprise element in that? No, it's not. So training here, and people throw training at everything and they use it wrong many times. Training here can help to a certain level. But once you reach that threshold, you're going to surpass the limits of human cognition and human performance. And let me give you a very brief example. My first use of the antlers to drop down the A and PDF and walking through an environment as a team leader. I go, this is the greatest technology I've ever seen in my life. And I look down at my feet as I'm trying to be as silent as I can, and I see what looks like just a tread track from probably a tank that went through. So I go to step into it with zero depth perception and fall ass over tea kettle. Now I'm in the bottom trying to find the batteries, hook shit back up, wondering if I need to go to the aid station. You know what? Nobody ever told me that in training. Nobody ever prepared me for that. So here I had to learn through the scar tissue. And the idea with that is we can't afford that when we're talking about this type of high-tech intervention for a ground pounder. We can't afford time. We have to be mindful of distance and we have to train for the preparedness and then gradually go into and it's just me talking, Alan, of my observation. And that's why I was so drawn to your to your paper. Over.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

Yeah, I could I just perhaps uh I don't know, Brian, if you'd because a lot of what you've said there, Greg, perhaps if we could Brian, we've talked about this already, is maybe go into the aviation piece because it's a useful area in which the because some of what you've both hit there in terms of historically in time speaks of aviation. And I I think it's also fairer to the people who've built these systems, and I suppose we have to be fair, the engineering is genuinely extraordinary. But in aviation terms, they had to be fair, identical criticisms in the time period you're speaking of, Brian, as you know, that the pilots couldn't process all the information and it's so much coming into them. And the critique was correct at the time, but it's it became irrelevant 20 years later. So I suppose the argument now is are we at the same inflection point? It's a transition problem. Are we moving too fast? So not a destination problem that potentially this technology offers something, but are we moving too fast? So one of the things about aviation where they have this tremendous amount of information coming at them, is that they solve that with highly selected crews. And then they decades of iterative human factors research, and there's a very tight feedback between the pilots and the loop and the engineers, everything around that. So the ground combat systems perform across, and I'll be kind here, because I spent a lot of time with the infantry myself and served in it overseas, and it was a great time, with ability and experience and stress tolerance across, say, the Green Army, the regular army. We're talking about a huge transition here. And it's a far less controlled environment on the ground, be it the atmospheric conditions, the drain, the way there's so many different things and the type of enemy you're facing, so many things to factor in. So for the median soldier and not the median pilot, and these systems have to work across that medium. Like we've talked about top-tier operators and what you could say perhaps move towards with these systems with those people at that level of training. But what's being proposed now is across the wider military forces, there are these systems. And so you have to be interested in the medium. So it's not a fundamentally different engineering problem, but there's a fundamentally different solution, accord, and I would argue a different timeline.

Aviation Lessons And Transition Timelines

Skill Atrophy From Helpful Technology

SPEAKER_01 26:50

And you guys so far we're we're talking about this in sort of in a moment, in a situation, or when you know, during use. And you know, I look at it too, then it it sort of restructures our own perception when we start using these technologies, right? Or restructures how we think and see things in a sense that could be either detrimental or lead to some other sort of you know skill loss uh that that humans are actually naturally good at. And and an example is so last last summer, you know, me and my family moved across country. We were out in San Diego for a long time, moved back to the Midwest. I'm in I'm in Minnesota now. So that that you know, environmentally a little bit different challenge going from from San Diego to to uh Minneapolis area. But you know, so I get here and you you know, obviously I don't know where anything is, I gotta find everything. So wait, I got this great iPhone, you know, using Google Maps, doing all this stuff, and I can just plug in whatever I need, even just to go to the store or go there or pick up you know my kids and go back to the waivers that are temporary apartment we're staying in, you know, while we're house searching, you know, that kind of thing. And so it's great. And then I realized after being, you know, being here for a month or so, I was like, I have no idea where anything is at. I had literally, if you asked me to go somewhere or get, I would be like, I don't, I don't know a street name, I don't know where where to go. I think like if I get to certain intersections, you know, I'll terrain associate and remember. But anywhere in between those major points, I'm lost. And I was like, holy crap, this is I because I've never had that experience, right? I've always gone somewhere and like you know, I've grown up without it. So then I'm used to that. And then as I was introduced to Google Maps and all that stuff, I use it for when I needed it, right? Or or in Southern California, I would use it because I would plug it in wherever I was going because you know, if there's a traffic jam, it this might save me and reroute me somewhere else to do that. So it was great, and I used it to help me out, but now I'm coming into an air new area and I became reliant on this thing, and I'm like, I I actually have no idea where I'm at. And so so we don't it, but it took me a month to to over time, you know, which isn't that long, but over time I'm going, I'm completely I'm not using what I know. And being in the military and going through countless land navigation courses and all that stuff, like I know how to orient, I know how to get around in a city in a rural area, and I'm lost. I was like, and it was so powerful to me that just in that short amount of time, I wasn't relying on normal skills of just being a human, I was relying on this technology, and it was like steering me. And then if I keep doing that, then it's not gonna get any better. So it's almost like I could have taken this other track to never know anything, but you know, then I had to say, well, I gotta put this down and I gotta learn street names and I gotta know the directions of where I'm at. So I how does this is that problem that you see with what you're bringing up that that longitudinally it could be, you know, an exponential problem?

SPEAKER_02 29:52

You are absolutely spot on there. The I think one of the things to remember, and you'd understand this more than anybody, is an information feed is not situational awareness. Right. It's not the same thing. And that's I think the confusion for people. They think if they provide more information to somebody, that increases their situational awareness, but they're not the same thing. So when you're and that has happened to me many times, on if you're relying on the the say your map system to get you where you are, if you lose signal, you realize you've lost the skill, you've or you haven't used the skill. And that actual moment gives you a critical understanding. Your brain, as you know, is a repetitive monster. It doesn't like to use cognitive power because it uses up so much energy. And where you present something like that, and it's just you just follow and go, the brain will stay in that track. It doesn't have to do any other work, there's no less of a cognitive load, but you're not situationally aware because you're reliant on this technology. And when it's lost, you're in. I mean, I have been like you, lost on maps if if the say if the signal dropped, and I literally don't know where I am. And it's a remarkable ex uh experience. And I suppose if you were to put that across there are other aspects of technology as well. I suppose you could that uh help humans all the time. If you were if we stay in the vehicle, for example, you have ABS and traction control now where they're autonomous, you don't need to do anything with it, and they definitely have helped to save lives or and under poor conditions or with less awareness, you're able to it'll operate better. So what you've done there is it it hasn't made you a better driver, it makes it up for you not being one. And that's the difference with technology where you have to be particularly careful. Do we want ABS in cars? Yes, do we want traction control? But if I think if you asked anyone, say, would you rather be a very high-skilled driver or have this in your car? People would select the skills, the high set of skills. We don't all have time to train in them. Some people are never going to reach that level. We have to think about the medium. So we have autonomous systems that function. That's a very good example of a useful technology that works for a huge amount of people worldwide. And so, not anti-technology here at all. It's particularly useful. If you find the right points we're able to put it in, and you recognize the limitations that where it's working, it's fine. But if you lose it, where are you then?

Demos Procurement And Hidden Tradeoffs

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Well, and and and I would add this because you brought it up. Let's talk about the ABS, also known to every copper on the face of the planet as the anti-stop braking system. Okay, so here we are in the 80s to 90s, and you've got the switch from for cop coppers that are listening, the Chevy Caprice classic in the United States to the Crown Vic. That change happened first in the Detroit metropolitan area because of the you know big three automotive industry and everything else. So the Cap Classics, when they came out to comp work, they were just issued all white uh units put on their own graphics packages, whatever type of lighting bars that they used and everything. And so copers got in that that they had shift and were handed the key for a new vehicle that they hadn't ridden driven before. And in the environment I was in, you had a couple of pursuits a night, every night, sometimes on weekends, three or four or five, and they were all dangerous high-speed style pursuits. And what was happening is all of a sudden everybody in the Crown Vic was racking it up. And so I was rapidly going, We have a problem, Houston. What's going on here? So quick street interviews, what it was is when you press down on the ABS brake, it presses back to relieve detention. That's an autonomous function early on, as we were talking with the Apaches in the different helicopter sightings all the way back to the Cobra. And what would happen is the officer not prepared for that would not know and think it wasn't functioning. So he'd take both feet and mash down on the brake slide straight into whatever the obstruction was in front of them, uh, being out of the pursuit, rendering the vehicle useless, and many times injuring themselves. So I look at that comparison and I think that it's exactly what you, Brian, uh, you and Brian are talking about. For example, I hear all the time that a kid that plays video games is so much better when it comes to controlling a UAV on the front lines in combat. Okay, well, wait a minute. Are we conflating two skills that don't belong together? I need to see more of that. Why why would I need to see more? Because when I look at a PSO scope on an SVD, it's very simple. It's got a little human. You take the size of the human you're looking at and put them in the crosshairs and pull the trigger. Okay, I get that. That's iterative. You can teach a child how to do that. But then I look at the videos a while back, maybe years ago now, of Sky King. Remember the guy that uh grabbed the plane at the airport and went flying and they were trying to talk him down and did a barrel roll and everything else. And everybody goes, Oh, look, look how quickly from a video game he was able to step into that technology. Well, what was the outcome of that? Yeah, he's dead. Yeah, he crashed that plane, and they're going, oh, it was an intentional crash. It doesn't matter. What happens is the acceleration that you're talking about, Alan, from flash to bang, we're in progress right now. So that's a theme or a gap. And themes and gaps always form scars, and they're ugly scars. And what we have to do is we have to acknowledge the fact that while this technology is amazing and while we need it, that we have to make sure that the transition to the technology is paced for the human, not for the tech. And if we if we're cognizant of the fact that if we push too hard it'll fail, then I think we can get there together. If you guys understand my meaning.

SPEAKER_02 35:18

Yeah, absolutely. Because you've touched on something there. It's about demonstrations, and we all have to be careful of those. Because demonstrations, as you know, very much if you have a manufacturer setting up demonstration, they're going to uh exploit the very positive nature or the what the technology offers under controlled conditions. So some of the data I've seen from some of this technology being utilized, to be fair. And once again, we have to be fair to the people who put an awful lot of time and energy and effort into this technology. And said cases you'll see undertrained soldiers have outperformed, say, slightly better trained soldiers or whatever with this technology. Because if somebody detects something, say two or three seconds earlier with a thermal overlay, well, then the cognitive load becomes somewhat secondary because you've said, Well, look, they detected that they never would have, and this is the conditions. And that's not stupid logic. That's actually a reasonable point if you saw those conditions being demonstrated to you. And that's the logic of the procurement room. Because the more senior people are looking and go, well, this seems to be very obvious. I mean, under those conditions, this guy saw this, they performed better. And that that seems okay. That seems a rational choice to go this direction. The limit is that in a test environment is not the same as operating at the edge of consciousness and pushing to the edge of that to failure is difficult. So if fusion, if what we're doing is compensating for under training rather than enhancing training capability, that needs to be said out loud in procurement rooms, not buried in your capability narrative. Like you have to really be honest about what we're trying to do here. Are we recognizing that I don't know? We've a broader range of people joining us, the standards aren't the same, we're all this type of job. And we're we are going to use this, and this will enhance our soldiers faster, more rapidly through this use of technology. But the training that underpins it is critical. And if we are making up for that lack of training and we don't intend to fill that gap with training, well then it's a totally different initiative we're involved in. And I would say going to be less successful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:25

Yeah, and and you know, two points. One, obviously, with the the demonstration and oh, this is what the technology can do, and the testing, and people go, yeah, but it's gonna go through testing. And it's like, yeah, but you it's not the same as a real-world event because there's you can't replicate all of the factors. And that might just be something as simple as I remember this when I was working out at the infantry immersive trainer on Camp Pendleton with the Marine Corps, and you know, there was a lot of testing. It was part of this, you know, future immersive training environment, joint capabilities technology demonstration. I can't believe I still remember that acronym. But but it was, you know, uh in some DARPA projects, and so they were testing in in training environments. One, you know, what what technologies, what are the what are the constraints of these technologies? What do we need to focus on as we go forward? Because this was almost 20 years ago now. And so obviously, you know, a virtual reality system 20 years ago was nothing what it looks like today, right? And and what what I would see everyone do is they these, you know, scientist big brain scientists all came in, put millions or hundreds of millions of dollars into figuring out what we need to focus on. And they come 20 years ago said, all right, here's the constraints, here's what we need to focus on, here's the integration when we're going to couple a human with machine. This is what we know. So, you know, go here's all the results. And and what all these companies did was just, well, they they got less latency. There was a better frame rate, the the graphics were better, it looked more realistic, and none of them addressed the actual, you know, the the actual problems facing a human and machine interaction. And with that, too, we even had I had one company, they're like, oh, they had this technology that mounted on weapon systems. And they said, I said, well, this is gonna get banged up pretty bad. Like, you know, this is probably gonna break. And they're like, oh no, this is, and there's marines testing it. And the guy's like, oh, this is marine proof. And I said, hang on one second. Please, whatever you do, don't say that to the Marines because one, they're gonna take that as a challenge and they will break your stuff. And two, like, you you're just say you're testing it, you know. So just say, hey, use it how you normally would, right? So so there's different constraints there. And then, you know, an interesting one, Greg, you kind of reminded me of that actually I I thought was very, you know, intuitive and a very practical way to look at something when they were testing different drones, because right, we got these UAVs, and then you got to train people before how to use them. Just all right, here's how to fly it, right? Here's how to operate it, and then here's how to operate it in a realistic environment for your support of your mission, right? So there's there's steps involved there. And you know, there's having all these problems, people learn to fly and this. And then finally, one of the people in this project was like, Hey, uh, we need to do a different controller. And like he turned around to the group of soldiers and was like, Hey, raise your hand. There's probably like 50 of them in there. Raise your hand if you spent a lot of time playing Xbox as a kid, and like almost every single one raised their hand. So he said, Go get an Xbox controller, and that's what we're gonna use to fly this thing. And it was like so simple because they already had the past experience of literally putting their hands on this controller and what does what. So, so you just removed all of this additional training, you just removed all of this additional things you need to do. Just by going, well, if they already intuitively know how to use this thing, let's make it like that thing for this new thing that they have to learn very basically. And and and sometimes like those are the simple solutions that we're talking about because it's like, yeah, this is a great technology if we can use it properly. And and that was even with some of our law enforcement folks when they first started using the drones and those things. And it's like, I'm watching this footage and I'm talking to these guys about it, and they're like, I'm like, you're you're filming your SWAT raid. Like, are you gonna make like a video after this of highlights? Like, that's not what this is used for. Like, why don't we send it in beforehand? Why don't we have it do specific tasks? Why don't you ascend it's like, oh, like we it's a flying thing with a camera on it. There's our guys, hey, let's go capture it. It's like, wait a minute, you're you're implementing this expensive machinery that costs taxpayer money and time for you guys to train on, and you're just you're just throwing it into the situation, like that's gonna cause issues. So I I I see see that. Sorry, go ahead, Greg.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

No, no, let me make a comparison to that, Brian, because you bring up a absolutely valid point. And and being able to substitute thousands of hours of practical application is going to be a savings anywhere. So let's talk about that for a minute and police work on the ground again with less and lethal force. So let's take a taser and let's make it look like a gun, let's hold it like a gun, let's aim it like a gun, and let's put it in a thing called a holster. But to stop you from accidentally using that instead of your Glock, we're gonna make it yellow or green or whatever else. See, Brian, that technology gets to a limit, and once it crosses the threshold, your brain pushes back. That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about the tech advantage because the tech advantage is absolutely spot on clear, Brian. We're talking about the fear of going too far over.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

And that's actually a great way for people who've seen that, because I I know our listeners have uh or you know, of what everything Alan was talking about. Like, okay, you have a you're going, how did that police officer you get in a scuffle and accidentally shot the person with their Glock instead of tasing them like they were thought they were? It's like, well, look at what Greg just said. It looks like a gun, it acts like a gun, it's on your gun belt, it's here. Like you're in those high pressure situations, your brain just went, oh, close enough, and ah, you made the wrong selection.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

So let me add one more to that, Brian, because you're you're on a line, and and I think Alan uh alluded to this. So he didn't allude to it, he wrote it very simply. Read the piece. When you're talking about fight JCTD, Brian and I were both at different points in the fight JCTD. And the point that I was in, I got to see the actual Marines going through the test. And what I saw is because they had the goggles on in the virtual reality with the AI backing and these big engines that were going, that they were in it for a couple of minutes and the Marines had buckets next to them so they could vomit into the buckets because it was so much sensory overload and it and it attacked how they made sense of their environment that they had these these feelings of vertigo and motion sickness and all those other things that weld up in them. Well, if we can't master that, and granted, granted, this was 25 years ago, but if we can't master that, if we can't master a battery that's not going to burn a hole in your back because of the use rate, if we can't master the ABS, well, what are we talking about? We're talking about the fine line. Between the human in the loop and a computer in the loop where we make those mistakes. And that literally is the word fusion. When we fuse those things together and we just say these things will fall in line, we haven't done enough testing to be able to make a robust decision on that yet. So we just have to be timely.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Technology is absolutely amazing, but the integration piece is what I think the it is the main argument from my side over and and I'd like to get Alan's kind of perspective on that in a sense, like, all right, you know, you being around the defense industry internationally, you know, and here in the US, you know, is it just what like even though we have so many different historical examples of these things and so much research and study behind all the human facts, I mean that that's ongoing and and decision science and perception and situational awareness at a tactical level and at a sort of a command level and what that takes when when not only humans interacting with technology, but then humans working in a team together as part of a larger mission. There's just a lot of factors in there. So is it what what is what what in from your perspective, what is this that like the maybe the defense industry or what are people within it kind of get wrong? Is it is it just like being mesmerized by technology? Because I I can go on for hours about how that's kind of ingrained in humans as well. Like we we we have had throughout the course of human history had to innovate technologically in order to survive, but like we don't really have to do it in order to survive anymore, but you kind of do on the battlefield, you want to constantly innovate and constantly change things and update. And so what is it that that you see about about how people look at these problems or how people look at the technologies, and why why do you think we just glam onto them?

SPEAKER_02 45:43

Well, I think one thing to understand is that, and you'd appreciate this, militaries are generally particularly conservative bodies. And one of the hardest things to do is to approach a military with a fantastic idea if they don't have a capability requirement, no matter how good it is. And you could have this fantastic piece of technology and it could do loads of different things, but the military hasn't identified a need for it yet. And as you know, largely in Western militaries, uh for the most part, with probably the notable exception of the US, but it's still a large organization and depends on what time and its history it was. But they're largely peacetime militaries, and they have a different behavioural mechanism to wartime military, and we're seeing that in Ukraine, where the innovative rate is absolutely tremendous. And if something doesn't work, it's just thrown out. The leadership changes over time, because oftentimes people who would say prosper during the peacetime military and the political nature of it and the difficulties with it would thrive, would not necessarily do so under those conditions. So militaries of themselves are remarkable when it comes to their understanding of technology, and there's any amount of historical references to that. I do recall now, may have some details, Ron, but there was the adoption, I think, was it maybe the Spencer rifle or a carbine or something in the American military a long time ago, where I think the head of ordinance was concerned that a repeating rifle would fire more ammunition, would create logistical issues to bring it forward. It was around that idea. And he saw everything in a totally different light to somebody going, Yeah, but a repeating rifle up in contact would be great. If you follow the history of the machine gun, initially people weren't convinced of its use. So militaries are not often the best place to go to find out what do we really need. Somebody has to show it to them and dem it to them. So that is something that's interesting about it. Now, at the same time, people have been introduced to technology in their daily lives more so than they ever were. And I think a lot of people join the military and are surprised there's less tech than if you come from, say, a gaming world and kids are playing Halo since they're, I don't know, 10 or 8 or whatever, and these game systems with all this information and everything appears to be this tremendously intermeshed battle space, and then they join the military and they're coal-wet third and hungry and they don't really know what's going on at all. It's very tempting for everyone to say, well, if we have this system where everybody is receiving the same information, we can push it out to them, they'll send it back to us. Surely this has to be better. And of course, the gaming environment where you see these screens with overlays and information coming to you, you have maximum attention span. And it's very tempting to think, sure, surely we can carry that across the soldiers. But the problem is, of course, exactly as we've been the central thrust of this work, is that the designing equipment, like so the technology is advancing, but the physiology is not. And that's the problem. So the temptation is to push it out. Now, just briefly, I do appreciate you mentioned the Apache early or um Apache. I remember reading about Apache pilot training many, many years ago, and they had that binocular rivalry issue where I think with the slaved gun camera, and then you had your other eye, you had to look at instruments. And the pilots reported initially a lot of headaches and issues developing this skill because it was this cognitive load was incredible in the aircraft, and of course, then they'd be flying at night as well. So it took time to get past that, your body to adopt and get over it and move on. And maybe there's an element of understanding here or a necessary adjustment with a lot of training to put this on, but certainly not less training. And that's where we go back to that procurement argument the less trained soldier performing better. Under all those conditions, I would argue with that kind of feed coming in, you're going to need a lot of training to get that right.

SPEAKER_00 49:41

Brian, quick point to that, Alan spot on. And and how many times have we, collectively or or singularly, been in a room where we hear a contractor tell the Department of War, hey, listen, we'll write the RFP for this. We'll we'll we'll write the requirement for it. Why? Because we have something that we want you to use and buy rather than it going the other way, where you know the the unit says, here are our requirements, these are the things that we're investigating. If it goes that way, generally you're gonna come out with something good. And I agree with Alan Bryan as well on the point of the training curve. There is gonna be a learning curve that we identify over time that's gonna make this conversation and and Alan's paper moot. But we're not there yet. And and if we don't understand that, we might be fielding technology and we're gonna find out the hard way over.

Mission Command Risks With Full Visibility

SPEAKER_01 50:31

And there's also, you know, you talk about you brought up some good points too about about innovation and how like a military, whether it's peacetime or wartime, yeah, you're you're gonna try to rapidly innovate during war at a tactical level, but like there's there's certain rules that that always apply and have always applied to warfare throughout the history of the world. And like you kind of gotta have a good understanding of that. And you know, the the Ukraine conflict was so interesting to me because it's like, well, the Russians first invaded and then they got held up by muddy terrain and couldn't get their armor in, couldn't get their tanks. Because I mean, this is weather considerations, this is ground consideration. I mean, this is like 101 stuff. And then you've got this war going on where it's like, okay, we've got these drones being used constantly, but they're also fighting in trenches, and some of them are using weapon systems that were came out in 1947, and then it's being live streamed on Twitter, and it's like it no one when when when you're doing this forecast and you're thinking what's ahead in the future, like no one had that. No one had that on their bingo card saying this is what I think it's gonna be, right? It it's it's very difficult to see how that plays out. And so what we get up, we we do is we take this approach of like, you know, where what I call, you know, you're chasing TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures. You're just going, okay, they're doing this, so we're gonna do that. And then the enemy adapts to you, and then you adapt to them, and you're just going back and forth, but you're not really making any progress in a sense, or you're not getting ahead of the curve. And and part of that I see is with a lot of this tech stuff, there is just this isn't a bash on anything. This is how just how humans are. But like Silicon Valley is what? It's like go move fast, disrupt everything, scale it, let's go, put a bunch of money behind it. But like you just mentioned, you know, a di a defense agency for for a nation, uh, you know, they don't operate that way. They don't operate culturally or structurally that way. They're saying, well, hey, there's a lot of consequences here, and we only have so much. And then, like you brought up, well, then there's like logistics concerns, and then I I can't rely on this thing and not have something to back it up. So there's there's like a little bit more redundancy built in, there's human variability, there's there's things that that they have to account for. So like you've got these competing ways of looking at things, and they're either going one way or the other, and they're not really kind of there's no alignment there on on how to do it. And that's just kind of one of the one of the big things we see with any type of innovation cycle. Like, I mean, I saw this a day over a decade ago when the the US Department of Defense was coming out doing, all right, we want to establish more relationships with with Silicon Valley and create this defense initiative and engage the public sector. And it's like, why? You you need to you need to do some internal, like, what do we need? Let's work on redefining our requirements and what that would take. And then you can go to the private industry. Trust me, they'll they'll take that contract, they'll build what you want. Like, and if they don't do it, you the next company will like it's hyper competitive and it's a lot of money. So, like, use that to your advantage. The Silicon Valley part, they're great at creating value for shareholders and and you know, creating social media that gives 14-year-old girls depression, but like that that's not their technology might not help in this area. So it to me that that's that's part of this. Like, it's like this cultural and structural uh things that I see. And so I'm I'm kind of curious, Alan, like what you think of that or what you've seen before and how those things go wrong.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

That's a great point, and it is a concern. I suppose Silicon Valley have entered the chat, and on one hand, they've they've delivered phenomenal advances in in human knowledge. Yes. Uh how much that has advanced society, we're not really sure yet. I mean, for people who've embraced the technology, it has been fantastic. And for others who use it to amplify negativity, it's been rather unfortunate. And I don't think we fully understand that. But now they're in defense. And it means that the the development of Silicon Valley was around the idea that this is where we're going. And you're essentially a Luddite if you're if you're not going that direction. Now, that application to the military, you'd have to be, you'd have to have a level of of concern about it. Because the larger picture here, and it's it would be a separate podcast, just to deal with it briefly, is that you'd know from anyone who's uh dabbled in intelligence or completed intelligence courses or worked in it, knows that every one of you've sensors out there, but every asset you have is a sensor, is a resource. Now, when you put this digital tech on them, they're an incredible resource. So as much as you're feeding them information, they're feeding it back. But as we know, there's a mission command problem here. So when headquarters can see everything, the man on the ground or woman on the ground can't decide anything. And that's a major problem. Now, one of the things we witnessed on the marauding terrorism program, which was fascinating to observe, was the difference in the police and the military. Police, I found, were fantastic at the immediacy of decisions. They just go. You know, if they need to go somewhere, they're going to do it and action it. The military less preparation or training or courses of action. The military were fantastic at that because they've that's what the military do most of the time is train and so and prepare. But the military were always a bit slower in decision making and they wanted more information before they could get it. And this idea of mission command and pushing out the idea that the people on the ground have control has been something we have pushed for a long, long, long time. And now we're getting to it's not just your section, platoon, company, and knowledge. Everything you have is going way back, and people above you can have a better picture, and then of course they're going to enter that decision chain. And that is invariably going to cause issues. I mean, I've seen in basic training exercises across Europe and other countries now that there's a this problem with the say down to platoon level, section level, out in the ground or whatever, where people are reluctant, they're going back to tactical operations to make decisions or asking things. And it's unusual to see. I don't see that improving with this digital information feed. Now that it's a separate issue per se, but it just means that when people have so much access to what people are doing, they're going to try and second them. And we've spent an enormous amount of time trying to move away from that, and this system will bring us back towards it. I'd feel that's what appears to be. Now I know it's a it's a it's it's a whole discussion of itself, but it leadership is an issue for every organization, not just the military. But leadership of the military ultimately sits up at the top because so many lives can sit and so many commanders, and that becomes a pressure of itself. And we understand from military history there's a very small band of people who can control that feed of information and make great decisions all the time. And now we're going to give people so much information about a command level, I can't see it being anything other than problematic.

SPEAKER_01 57:31

That goes, yeah. I mean, I you you you the concept of that mission command and pushing decision making down to the lowest level has always been something that militaries have tried to do. And how do we develop our people so that they can here's my here's the mission, here's the commander's intent, go do it. Yet, like you said, all of these things now add to this, and that's what I meant by this situational awareness, sort of at the tactical level that I was talking about. And now you're at like that operational level. And like you said, if well, I've now got all this information coming in. You you're going to intervene more, you're going to change things, you're not going to let that person go out and do their job and just go, go, you know, handle what they're what they've been trained to handle. You're now creating more bottlenecks, you're creating other barriers in a sense, and which is to me, it's ironic because like now, like the US, I know one of the initiatives DOD is required to do now is give a definition for cognitive warfare. And people are talking about the cognitive domain and what that means today. And it's like, when has cognitive domain not been part of warfare? When in history has that like that's that's what Sun Tzu was talking about. Like exactly. It's like, wait, wait a minute. Like it's because we've gotten away from that in a sense, because now it's this reliance on technology, which might be great for right now, but over time, what does that degrade? What does that take away from us? And what are we now completely relying on? And and then now you have to introduce this other concept and say, well, now we got to train them to do this. It's like, well, you you know, like, do we, or maybe do we just need to get rid of some of these things and let them focus on doing it what they're doing? And that that organizationally over time has uh serious effects. And we we see that in some areas, you know, especially now everyone hyped up on different large language models and these AI things that it can do. And it's like then people start using it and they're like, well, like this is amazing. Look at all this information I have. And it's like, uh-huh. What did you do with it? What what changed? What what what process was improved because of this? It's like, what are the actual outputs you're getting from this within the big picture context of what your mission is, what your job is, what your role is, what your goal is. Like that's that's how this stuff needs to be looked at, in my opinion, and the way I look at it is like, how does this support you and what you're doing, not how do you support it? Right? It it's it's like this backwards way of looking at it sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 59:56

I would throw this in. And and I I think this is again a discussion that we're never gonna get to all the different fantastic points that we could discuss today. So I I I think everybody in the audience, you need to read Alan's work, you need to respond with some questions so we can set it up for a future discussion to dig down deep, maybe a Patreon. I've been saying since the late 1970s that the two most dangerous times in your life are gonna be the moments of sheer terror and the moments of sheer boredom. And what I mean by that is you're either gonna be overwhelmed by your environment and not be able to function, exceed your cognitive limit, or you're gonna be underwhelmed by your environment and it's gonna be so low arousal that you stop attending to those things that might be right in front of you. So if we acquiesce to that, if we agree to that lowest level of understanding of this topic, then we go in that we agree to the fact that information doesn't equate with intelligence. It's not the same. So a vast amount of information at your fingertips, we all love that. But then what do most people in, you know, with this immediacy of the social media do? They snipe other people or show pictures or they're dick. Okay. The idea is that that didn't make us any smarter having all of that stuff that was available to us. The idea here is that we're all pro-tech. We're saying that there's a certain physiological and cognitive function that we have to be aware of, and that just having, you know, a bigger magazine for our weapon or a better scope isn't going to solve the problems of our battle space, right? And and so I think that's why and and Alan, I I know your paper was picked up quite quickly by West Point. I think that's why it's getting such attention is people are going, wait a minute, I've been saying this for a long time. Well, I know Brian and I have been saying it for a long time. And the question I would ask the Alan is why aren't people listening? Is it simply financial? Why aren't people listening? Do they not know better? What do you feel?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:49

Uh this was something I actually gave a lot of thought to looking at it. And when I started at this, I came up with a term of augmented performance physiology. And it's the idea of understanding the neurobiology, understanding the technology, and getting them to work together to enhance human performance. And I found it quite strange that there was nowhere I could delve into immediately that covered that domain. And it's spread across a like it's in defense, it's where it's in the military. I'm sure it's in other aspects of other domains, of civilian domains as well, that we're less familiar with. But we are absolutely assured that technology is is everywhere. And the phone has made that even more so. I mean, I don't even like calling it the phone anymore, because it's far more than that. I mean, this thing you can sit in, I don't know, wherever you are, and I'm as guilty as anyone else's, you spend your time looking at this and you're losing your situational awareness. But I think what we've covered earlier about Silicon Valley, about the nature of combat, and what we're seeing, and we're seeing it currently in wars as well, particularly in the West, is the understanding that wars can be fought with minimal casualties. And anything that can feed into that to reduce that and to make the West particularly good at doing that is a good thing. I mean, I was always fascinated going back all the way to the AKM bayonet, you may remember, when the Russians developed that bayonet that matched their doctrine that they'd send the soldiers forward and that there would be wire everywhere and you could take it out and you had this wire cutters. Now, I you will recall the Western rifles at the time, or battle rifles as they call them, now all had a spiky type bayonet or whatever it was. And those bayonets entered the Western NATO armies in the 80s, and they were like a thing. Oh, look, you have a wire cutters, this is fantastic. And you go, the Soviets had this 30 years previously because they really thought about what they were doing, and a lot of their devices and their warfare, they really think about what's happening at the tip of the spear, and whereas the West tends to think about you know the ability to destroy things from as far away as possible and do as much damage as you can and do it as accurately as possible. So our whole picture, when you look at it, well, we have this tech, surely if we put it onto soldiers as well, that makes, to my mind, at the senior level, it makes perfect sense from everything that we have and the development of battle manuf battlefield management systems, etc. I mean, we're seeing entire mechanized brigades now with systems where if a laser is pointed at the vehicles, you know, all the gun turrets, everything will throw in that direction. Remarkable, fantastic. Anyone who's in the service would say, I wonder, will that work all the time? You know, I wonder. I saw a brilliant comment. I hope I don't offend anyone with it, but he said, How is this? I was looking at one of these very fancy helmets with all the tech on it, and the guy said, How is that gonna handle some 19-year-old soldier who has 20 vapes a day that is addicted to monster? You know, how's he going to manage this hundred thousandths uh euro helmet thrown on and off a truck? And it's very much a part of service equipment and service and soldiering that experiencing it, you understand on the ground that a lot of the things that may work in a laboratory are not going to work here. And it's not fair for soldiers to find that out. Now, I do appreciate again being fair to the senior people that listen to senior operators, perhaps saying to those USDOD senior officials, well, look, we like things the way they are. And someone could argue, look, that's just conservatism. That could be a senior Silicon Valley argument. Those guys are highly trained, highly skilled, but they're used to that and they like it. But if you're honest about it, that's real, genuine, honest data. Because those guys are more likely to be deployed, more likely to be at the tip of the spear, more likely to be in close contact where they need something to work. And they're still putting, and this is the most important more than all of this, they're putting their trust in the image intensifying tube, that refined old technology. They're not ready to trust the newer technology yet. Yes, they are tier one guys support. By a wide range of technology at the back to put them in into that position. But when they are there, they still trust these other systems. And that's where we are. And that's honest idea.

What Competitors Might Get Right

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

And that's that's a great point because with with all of this, and like you even said, with the way US does things, all right, how do we get from as far away with the most damage and you know, without trying to be very targeted and very specific and very deliberate, you know, without putting people on the ground. And then, but like you, I mean, well, look at look at what way look at the situation in Iran right now. It's like we you you can't there's 80 million people in that country. Like, what do you what are we doing here? Because like we someone still has to go, you know, knock on that door and grab that person out, or go after this person, or get that thing, or hold this terrain, like or what whatever it is, it there this this element in there. And even like the the US has uh special operations force's truths, like the soft truths. And the number one is humans are more important than hardware. And number two, quality is better than quantity. So it but yet, you know, when everything comes out from SOCOM for RFPs or new things, hey, we're looking at this thing, we want technology in this area, in this area, in this area, it's like, okay, but like the your your your truth number one says this, yet your your ask is all of these things. So it's not off in the line. But I I kind of want to like try to steel man sort of your argument a little bit here. And and what what would what would be the argument against with what you're saying, Alan, and what you wrote in the article, which again, everyone uh links in the episode details. I I'd highly suggest reading it because it's a it's very deliberate and succinct, and it's a really good, it's really well written. But what could I say against that? Like, what what would someone say, well, yeah, but is it the yeah, but you gotta do it because our our enemies are constantly, you know, you know, evolving new technology. China's doing this, uh, Russia's trying to do this, or whatever it is, is it like it what what's the what's the alternative argument? What's the one against you saying, like, no, if we don't do this, someone else will, or or or what is it?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:06

No, and that's an example and you you've hit the nail on the head there in something you said about uh, and just uh on if we were to suggest China for an example. So just the the summation of the arguments I've made are that are made for that technology, extraordinary technology, and some of the best brains behind it. The transition argument, which we talked about in aviation, it came under the inflection point where maybe we're at that and it'll take time. There was a lot of pilots didn't like it at the time, and we go on. But you'd have to accept, yeah, I know what you're saying here, but the environment is controlled. Your test environments, how controlled are they? Because when you're on the ground and uh fighting that kind of war where we have troops in contact with that different median, that's a very different enterprise to the aviation argument. So that doesn't really stand up. We've talked about is it about under-trained soldiers? And they can perform better than soldiers who are slightly better trained because they can detect things earlier. And then cognitive load is secondary. But if we're making up for under-training, what are we really doing here? You know, so that's like, okay, we've got the ABS, we've got the traction control, but somebody can barely drive the car. It doesn't make up for being not as good of a driver. And then the last argument we made, of course, was the the honesty element around, well, just because the soft wanted doesn't mean it's not for everybody else. Uh, and is that fair? But the main argument, say if you take all those three and you can you can play them either way, if the technology we're going to pursue it along this line that will have all these different synthetic or synthesized overlays and information going into you, and this is what we intend to do, and we'll try and develop situational awareness with it, but this is the way it's going to go. If another actor is developing different systems that are more attuned to human physiology, that are more attuned to autonomy and warning systems and walking with the human, particularly in contact or edge of consciousness, they have the edge. And that's the difficulty. You might be on the one line that's the wrong line, and somebody else who intends uh putting the human physiology forced, like we did with pilots, let's ask the pilots what they want, build it round them and gradually do it in time. They'll end up with a better system and they'll end up with a better warfighter. Now that alone should be of concern to people because these systems are cheap. You're not talking millions of dollars here, we're talking billions. And you're saying if we get this wrong and if somebody else gets it right, we really are in a bad place. And that's why we have to be it's not fair, as I've said, to develop things in a laboratory and let the soldier find out afterwards. We owe it to any individual who be given this system, put on their head and put into harm's way, that this works. And we have pushed this beyond the point of failure. We have really worked on this. Because if you haven't and somebody else has, it's not going to, it's not going to work.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:07

It this kind of discussion reminded me of I I think it's called the the the knowledge of London test for if you want to be a a black taxi driver, you know, those specific black taxis they have in London, even with all the advancements of you know, of all the different ways and you know, Google Maps and whatever else is out there for for you know getting around a city like like London, they have to pass a rigorous test that I believe it takes on average like three to four years before you even pass that test or or know, where like you have to have it's something like 20,000 landmarks and streets and and stuff memorized and known in order to be licensed to do that. And it's like I I mean that is a that's what we're kind of talking about here, so that it whatever technology or the things you have, you're gonna know is it helped me or not, because I have such a profound depth of knowledge in this area that that I don't need any of those things, or it's not necessarily gonna help me. And you know, it's just I it made me think of it as we were talking about it is because it's one of those examples of like it's all about the human, it's all about human performance, it's all about their skills as a driver and knowledge of a city. And you have to do that. You can't just plug in and go, well, we got this new tech now. And that's been going on for I don't know, maybe a hundred and something years. You know, I mean, I'm sure even before there were there were cars doing it, you know, it was a you're on a horse, but but you still had to know it. You know, it is that's something that people would say, yeah, but we don't have the time or we don't have this. And so it helps when I look at it as like the these things aren't just an augment or an addition, or this is going to enhance your capability. No matter what it is, there's a trade-off. So you're you're gaining something, but what are you giving up? And I think a lot of times we don't look at it in that way where it's like, well, what am I giving up? I never looked at it that way with Google Maps until I got here and was like, holy crap, I I'm completely lost. I have no idea what's happening around me. This is really bad, especially given the line of work that I'm in. I should probably know this stuff, especially in my own backyard. I mean, I can drop into anywhere in the world and have, and I gotta learn and figure stuff out, but like I'm not even doing it right here at home. It was just such a profound experience for me personally, because I went, wow, this is even it's I even though I know the the the you know, we're having this discussion about some of the problems with technology, even though I use it and I know the problems, it didn't occur to me until that happened. And and when you're talking about a combat situation or even like a law enforcement situation, like, well, now that means the the you know dead people. That means you know, we've we've screwed up the mission. That means the the the stakes are so much higher here, yet we're still human beings, so we still look at it one way. And and I I think that's that's you know, it's just what I see across the board. And again, like like you, like I'm anytime some new tech or new thing comes out, I always want to try it. I'm like, yeah, let's see this, let's do this, let's do that. And I remember, Greg, I remember not gonna say where we were, but it was it was the US Army, and and we were doing this night evolution, and it was about observation, they're using optics, and there was this one you know soldier doing the I'm not seeing any of that, or this thing's wrong, or this thing isn't messed up. And we walked over there and he was attempting to look through the wrong end of the uh of the optic, the thermal optic he was using, was like, okay, why don't we just go ahead and do it this way? He's like, Oh, now I get it. It's like, yeah, yeah. So here's this$25,000,$50,000 piece of equipment that's like, you know, the in for it's like night vision, pulsing thermal, like all this cool stuff, like stuff that we talk about, and it's like the guy's using it incorrectly, and it's a detriment to the mission. And you know, thankfully that was in a training scenario, right? Not a real situation. But but how often does this happen that we don't hear about? How often do these things go wrong that you don't hear about at the tactical level? Because we've already, well, we've already invested in the system. We've already bought this, we already did the billion dollar program. That's an IDIQ contract, and this is happening. So now we're scrambling to learn and adopt something before all of those those needs were really you know defined or or or the constraints were really defined. I I mean that that's what I see happening.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:27

Yeah, yeah. I think like ultimately, and you we've all lived through the definitions of warfare. I don't know if you remember for GW, remember fourth generation warfare. The current one is hybrid warfare, and there's always these different things around the different times or periods we live through, and and new ways of looking at old things. And I've always looked at warfare as essentially you're going to do things that the other side don't like, and you're going to find weaknesses and ways to defeat them and do stuff. So whenever you're going to introduce a system like this in particular, you're you have to think about how the enemy will consider it. I mean, I was involved many years ago with Ray, you may recall, Greg, it was a a route, a once name, there was a route clearance package. It was very uh well developed, and it was developed for six months in in another country, and there was a lot of support for etc. And that locals took out the lead vehicle inside 36 hours. And if you think of the brains that were behind that, and the people and the effort and the experience, and the locals could see it straight away. And it surprised people to go. Somebody asked me, How did they understand that distance? And I said, They probably looked it up the internet. And people were looking at me going, the internet, but we're out in the middle of the, you know, and yeah, but they they they have the internet. Uh I think underestimation is probably one of the greatest errors made everywhere. But we're we're in a i it's trying to remember that the only thing I know about fighting is the fight you get in and never be the one you want. And if we appreciate that and understand it, that if you're giving this load to soldiers, it's more of a thing. It needs, as you said rightly, Brian, about the logistics change behind it, the support, the amount of elements that have to go right in difficult conditions for it to work, it's a big ask. I am not against it by any shape or means. I'm a big fan of technology. I'm involved in RD tech at the moment and some areas that are quite exciting. And I'd be a fan of tech, but it just has to be the right technology that works with the human physiology that hasn't developed while the technology is kept advancing.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:34

And that's um even why I brought up at the beginning about how like, you know, different countries see this stuff. You know, we're in the US, we have this, you know, bottomless pit of money for anything defense related, basically. And and so it just creates a different way of looking at things, whereas something, someone with more constraints, you know, is going, well, I only got this and I only have that. I mean, that this is why we had so many problems even early days when I was deploying in Iraq and fighting the starting the insurgency. It's like, wait, we have the best tech, the best training, the best this, and they're a couple of guys in some, you know, Adidas track pants and running shoes and an AK are giving us a really hard time. Like, what's going on here? And and it's just uh we we don't you don't see it until you're in it a lot of times. And unfortunately, those are the the worst situations. But you know, Alan, I like to if if I what would be your your big takeaway with the article and what we're discussing and and kind of trying to sum this up as like, all right, if I just listen to these guys talk for an hour and a half or whatever it was, like what what do you really want people to like look at and understand or think about? I mean, uh how do I how do I summarize this? Because we went into all the different tactical, you know, i issues with this, the physiological, the cognitive ones, how we make decisions, all the and that then affects the operational level and you know, this in all these different information awareness services that we have. And that then feeds back into the tactical, like this is like how how do we how do we reflect on something, you know, in the middle of trying to come up with all these technological solutions, go back and go, this is how we need to approach it. Like what's what are you what's the big general point you're trying to try to make with what you wrote?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:15

Well, I think the main point is that it boils down to for me, and it's something I observed over a great many years. I was never soft for a special force or anything like that, but I walked with them a lot in different countries or trained them in different set special skills, and then walked with regular people as well, but in the police or military. And the one thing I've noticed, particularly in the last, I think really since global the GWOT, was that the the gap between the regular forces and the soft seems to be increasing or increased a lot. It seems to have expanded, to my mind anyway, what I viewed. And I think we need to invest more, be it in in regular police officers and regular soldiers, there needs to be more training. The base has to be much higher, right? That I mean, if you consider how often SOF further weapons to most militaries or most say SWAT units compared to police, comparatively they're so far apart. And I think we need to spend more time in training on that. That we don't want to have under skilled drivers in cars that have safety features. We want to have very good to well-skilled drivers in cars with safety features. And the same thing with the military, that the skills that underpin soldiers, more time and energy needs to be spent. I'm a big fan of simulation, the tactical triads, such as you know, the judgment wall kind of shoots, those kind of digital ranges, the uh man marking systems, laser, anything at all that will bring up the training. And of course, your program going back to Combat Hunter, was such a phenomenal development of the soldier in the field, and that's the level we should be looking for before we put anything on top of a soldier and on top of it. That the baseline is really high. It also allows those soldiers to integrate those pieces in a in a far more useful fashion. I just I don't believe technology will it it has brought so much, like we said, to life. And yes, ABS and traction control for a wide amount of the public is different. We're talking about an ever decreasing number of soldiers in society, as we know. The armies have never been as small, probably historically, as they were now, and we need to invest more in them, spend more time training them, and that's what will that's the basis before we put anything on top of them. Not coming in at this point with these levels of technology and expecting large, oh, this will be fantastic if we feed all this in. No, I think the baseline is far more like immersive exercises and training to failure. I mean, one of the recent exercises, there was a lot of criticism about it. I think there were NATO forces and UK forces up in an exercise that maybe in Estonia and there was drones, and they deliberately set it to fail, and they failed. And a lot of people criticized them for no knowledge, but they'd limited themselves. And the fact they pushed a failure and the fact that they allowed commanders to fail in that environment, and they weren't, that's what they set it up to do, to get the lessons, was very brave. And it's the right thing to do, because those lessons learned an environment where nobody loses their life, and we'll all move on, reflect, and be better for it. That's the model. Not running exercises and evolutions that everyone looks good, we're all happy, we know what's going to happen next. Developing that culture is far more wordy for starters, it's far more honest, and it'll pay higher dividends down the road to have a higher trained product. If we want to be brutally honest about it as a soldier, not the technology. Because if the technology doesn't work in whatever environment or fails, or like your Google Map, it knocks off, we still have an excellent product. And these systems eventually, as they develop in line with human physiology, should move away when the body comes under stress. And so you won't be reliant upon them anyway. We need that high-quality product. So it's training is the answer, training the human.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:58

Yeah, that's you know, not surprised that that kind of was was the basis of your answer. And that's that's I know the fight Greg has fought for a long time in his career, you know, when you know people were like, oh, well, we want you to come train these specialized units and do this. And it's like, no, this needs to go to everyone. And and it's the same thing. Like we have, hey, look, I say it as we even with what we're doing now and when some of the stuff we do with law enforcement, we call like detecting a cunning opponent and get into what that means. But it's like, hey, this is this is a very rigorous program, it's it's a lot of information, and we're gonna keep it to you know X amount of people in the room. There's 25 people, no more, because this is what we can do, and that, like, okay, I get it. But we have, can you come in for a day and and do it with 80 people? And it's like, yes, but it's not gonna have the same effect. We're only gonna do this one thing. And if we just get them to do that one thing, it's actually, I would rather take you know 80 people and raise your level of awareness and understanding by 10% than taking those, you know, 10 people and raising it by 80%. Because at scale, like that's where you're you're talking about you have this fundamental underpinning, this fundamental baseline of everything can be built on top of that. So if you just focus on the structure of a foundation, yeah, build whatever. Yeah, build a house, build a skyscraper, whatever. You you got a good strong foundation there, and and then you can pick and choose because because all of those things are going to change. I mean, you look at even American military right now. We went from 20 years of, oh, we'll just put a team in there, we bought Helos, we we own the area in a sense. Yeah, they're still enemy, but we can operate this way, and it's this global war on terror. And now what is it? It's like, oh, wait a minute. There's nation states fighting other nation states, and we've we've we've gotten away from that, and we we won't maybe do well if the Chinese decide to go into Taiwan, right? So it's like you're going back to what it is that you're supposed to be good at. And so we kind of get that sidetracked by those those those shiny objects sometimes. But you Greg, I know you had something that that you all did to.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:03

I I just want to epitomize what I'm hearing in two minutes or less and try to make sense of it for the ground pounders out there that aren't as brilliant as as you and Alan are when it comes to this stuff. I like to street it up. First thing, quick story. Brian was talking about one. I have I happened to be with Brian on then at an exercise. Brian, you were with me on a night exercise with Shelly, where the person with the NVG was supposed to be tracking the the uh funeral at the ville. And they go, This gosh damn thing doesn't work. And Shelly went up and grabbed their head and pushed it towards the eyepiece. And when the eyepiece opened, all of a sudden you saw the green glow, and Shelly goes, eh, and walked away. We laughed for 20 minutes after that. If you don't know the technology, well, that's a different story. So here's here's my start of my two minutes. One, don't just read Alan's paper, gosh damn, circulate it because it's that good, you'll understand quickly. I would say the same thing with this podcast, Brian. Don't just listen to it, share it with somebody else so they see what we're talking about and they chime in. That's what we want. We want some visibility, we want some accountability as well. Uh, second thing is when you're talking about UXO, which veiled in many instances, you were. I remember Shelley and I sitting here, and I was almost at the verge of tears because we had baby Z with us, the little insurgent, as Brian would call it on our side, is two years and and two months old. And the iPad that Shelly had that was playing a little video shut down the video. And we both panicked. Oh my God, what are we going to do? We're trying to get her to sleep. And she sat up two years and two months and looked over and touched the iPad and got it going again. So don't ever underestimate your opponent. Right to your story about looking that up on the internet and then and you know, 36 hours later of uh ending the the whole multi-billion dollar program. And then finally, okay, my second zombie reference, I guess. So I found out early in Combat Hunter uh something that was detrimental to the future of Combat Hunter, and that was that the sniper manual at that time had not been updated since the Vietnam War. And of course, there have been contributions, there have been addendums based on weapon systems, but the whole of the idea, that concept hadn't been updated. And you're saying, well, why would that matter? Well, one of the things I found on the ground in Iraq is when we went into the insurgent HQs there for Al-Qaeda and Joe Kaida and everything else, there were three docs that kept coming up. Number one was my work, the Combat Hunter stuff, where they had photographed and mimeographed it and were passing it around. The second was David Scott Donovan's work on tracking so they could hide their tracks. And the third was a book by Major John Plaster that was about sniper and counter-sniper. So if there's a need, your enemy will find and fill that need while you're vacillating over all of this technology. So let's not, and I hate to be that cautionary tale guy, but let's not let this sidetrack a very good robust technological. Sound uh program. Let's make minor adjustments in stride and keep it on the rails. And that's all I had to say, Brian.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:08

Yeah, I appreciate that, Greg. And and Ellen, uh, I'll kind of give you the the last words because I I really I appreciate you coming on here. And there's a there's a lot that we got into that we could literally just do an entire several episodes on, really. So it it's very, very, you know, dense in what we're talking about and some of the just some of the specific issues within the different things that we brought up and how we account for that. So, you know, I we don't want to say like, oh, this is this is the answer, you know, this is the solution. It's more like, hey, this is uh, you know, it's here's not what to think, here's how to think. So I appreciate you sharing your perspective because you know, you did uh we obviously love the article and we kind of see things in a similar manner, but I want to give you some of the last words and and and and kind of anything else you want to share with the listeners.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:55

Well, I have to say, Brian, it's been a very uh enjoyable engagement. I think we've covered everything, and I think it's particularly important whenever there's somebody who's not in the room to who might be involved in that technology. And I'm involved in levels of that technology myself, and they're not here to directly defend it. I I wanted to be fair there and explain the advantages of that. But having said that, you serve everyone better taking a position rather than avoiding one. And the position I would take is that at this point I have the concerns about the way human physiology works. I spent enough time as a soldier myself to have a level of concern looking at this. I've been very lucky to have walked with alongside and walked with or trained with or been and operated with some brilliant people, particularly from the US, I must say. In my own force, I have to say it's a a small force, but there's some tremendously professional people there and who, like all service members anywhere, they go above and beyond. It's a vocational piece to be in the service, and the same for the police. And I've seen guys, I recall one night people going out to develop their sniper skills. It was regular snipers going out with some of our shaft guys. It's fantastic, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:12

So I'm all good. We got the we got the the the dogs chiming in now too. I'm surprised mine thingfully came out. Yeah, sorry, all good. All good, yeah.

Final Takeaways And How To Connect

SPEAKER_02 1:30:25

No, he stopped there. So we may have to edit that. Uh right. Yeah. So basically, what we found, what I saw, these people going out at night to develop their sniping skills. And I remember it was a bitterly cold night, and there's nothing in it for you, as you know, in the service, there's no overtime, there's no extra pay. It was for the love of the service and personal development. And it all always sticks with me, is just I was duty officer that night watching the guys going out, and I've done it myself loads of time. When you're standing back from it, the service could be a great place, and because of that, it deserves a significant effort. As I've said, in an ever-decreasing service, there's less people attracted to the military, the numbers of the military are smaller. No matter what military you're in in the world, I mean you talk about US procurement issues, they exist everywhere because human traits are persistent. People adapt a line, they buy a piece of equipment that doesn't work. That's not unique to America, it happens everywhere else. Right. And I think everywhere where we can challenge what's coming in and make it better is good. We are fans of technology, we've all agreed on that. But it has to be the right technology for a very unique environment where your brain is selecting survival in close contact, and that's all we want.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:37

I think that's a that's a great point to to end on there, Alan. So I I really appreciate you uh having the conversation with us. And you know, if if if anyone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way for for someone who's listening going, hey, I gotta talk to this Alan guy because you know I gotta run a few things past him?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:55

Uh well, I suppose you'd probably find me on on LinkedIn, I suppose would perhaps be the easiest way. I have a limited profile there, but I'm sure you'll find me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:03

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I can yeah, I can direct people to LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:06

Uh and how about in person, Alan? If somebody uh disagrees with you. You go outside and show me what your house looks like right quick.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:16

You've heard you've heard that I have a very dangerous uh dog, of course. Yes, it'll alert. Yeah. Well, he identifies as a Belgian manually, I think. So he's uh that's yeah, nobody can pass them.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:30

I've I've I've got a half uh lab, half Australian shepherd that that does that too. I'm like, you're barking, you're gonna go up and you're gonna hug the guy that is at the door and lick him and want to play with him. But like when the door's close, you're barking real loud. And as soon as you open it, it's like, oh, I got a friend. But uh no, I I appreciate it, Alan. Thanks so much, and and thanks everyone for listening. We have all the contact info in in the uh the episode details, uh including links to Alan's article. We do appreciate everyone for for tuning in. And don't forget that training changes behavior.