#169: Training To Make Better Decisions

What Greg is talking about is something that we kind of take for granted. A sense making is something you're constantly doing throughout your day, no matter whether or not you realize it or not, right? And so that sense making is just your brain trying to make order out of chaos. And it's so heavily influenced by your cognition, by your working memory, your hippocampus is informing of everything that you do. So you're arriving at conclusions before you even see everything. Well, why? You have to do that in order to survive. You can't possibly go through your environment. government and look at every little thing as some new novel thing that must be investigated so your brain doesn't like doing that burns too many calories right we just want to assume everything is what we see it to be we just have to slow that down

Welcome to the Left Gregg Podcast.

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the Left of Greg podcast. I'm Brian Marin, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. Here on the Left of Greg show, our goal is to increase your advanced critical thinking ability through a better understanding of what we call human behavior, pattern recognition, and analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, you can check the episode details. If you have any questions or would like us to cover a specific topic. Please reach out to us at leftofgregg at gmail.com. This week, we are publishing an episode that we originally recorded for the Excellence in Training podcast that our friend and colleague Brian Willis hosts as part of his Excellence in Training Academy. Brian originally reached out to us to talk about how to build decision-making into training scenarios, so we recorded an episode talking about sense-making and problem-solving, and how to implement decision points into current training scenarios. If you have a minute, check the episode details and follow the links to learn more about Brian Willis. I personally suggest following him on LinkedIn because he's one of the few people on that site who's putting out quality content with cogent messages and clear takeaways. Please don't forget to follow us on social media. You can find the links in the episode details. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends about it. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

Greg and Brian, welcome back to the Excellence at Training Academy.

Thank you so much for having us on, Brian.

Honestly, Brian, you've got to cut off that intro because you forgot EIEIO that I also trained. And I think on Brian's, just a correction, I think Brian was in a local bar, not Al and Bar. So there was a fire going.

Here we go.

The more important thing, Brian, is the winning mind training, the Excellence in Training Academy, and Dare to Be Great Leadership. We're honored to be on and happy that you had us back. Well, I appreciate that. And with Brian Haling from Chicago, a local bar is probably about the same as a land bar.

Yeah,

So, yeah. wow.

yeah, that's not

That's a great one.

that you're not far off on that one.

Never allowed again in Chicago for training either, I just so you know. don't That's good think anybody is actually. No, no, that's so true. Now, I reached out to you guys. I love the work that you're doing through your podcast. the Patreon Yeah. site and the other work that you're doing. And I reached out to talk about, I want to talk about a couple of concepts about how do we do a better job of, or in some cases, how do we start doing training people for decision-making and sense-making. And it seems to me, I would like to start with sense-making because it seems to me that it's critical to the analysis part of a human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. And then the effect of a capability to sense make will seems to me will enhance our decision making abilities so where do you so if we want to start by talking about sense making how do you guys define it describe it and then what are some of the things that we can do to help train it So let's start backwards. Brian, if it's okay, let me start with a couple of examples and both Brians actually, what sense making is from a street perspective. And then Brian, if you could go up and out and talk about the definition and how it characterizes what we do. So Brian Willis, how can trainers teach sense making to inform decision making? So I go back to Kim, Rudyard Kipling in the Kim's game. and a fight that I had with a Marine gunny that was trying to choke me out saying, Kim stood for keep in memory stupid instead of being a character in the book. And I said, yeah, okay, but let's go back to what Kim's game was with stones on the tray, right? And could you identify them after I covered them up and then brought them back? So I say to your trainers that are out there, have your pen ready, have your yellow pad ready, do a Kim's game, have them. go to a position where the grass is bent down from somebody laying in it and they find a half full canteen, some wire cutters, gloves, a knot or an NVG with no or low batteries in it, and then kneel down next to them and say, okay, what conclusions can we draw from the way that the foliage is dented? Which direction were they likely focusing? Can you see elbows, for example, if they had optics up or... a spotting scope or the butt plate of a weapon system. Look, just a half-filled canteen can tell me that maybe the person was there most of the night, or maybe it's an undisciplined person that came in with that water sloshing around. So then the next one, draw a line through your yellow pad, go to the next one. Take a simple cotton ball that costs almost nothing. Put some nail polish remover on it. Ask everybody at on-duty roll call, does everybody know what nail polish remover smells like? Okay, why is that important? Well, hide it in one of the rooms of the station before you

go to the station.

And before you do your on-duty roll call, have everybody have to walk by that on their way to on-duty roll call, hold up the cotton ball and say, this is acetone. Without this, bombs can't be made. So next time that you're in a house and you smell this and it's not our nail salon, Houston, you may have a problem. Let's go on to another one. You're in a room that you're using for testing and training and take a knee and you illuminate it with your flashlight and you see chore boy that's part of the carpet fibers. And then you read a significant AXE blog and you find out that certain things have been stolen off the older cars in the neighborhood. People were breaking the antennas off. Then you do a trash pull and you find, I mean, you stage it, of course, as a trainer and you find narcotics paraphernalia. Then you take a knee and you go, OK, do we have enough to get a warrant? What would the warrant be for? Is it possession or are we going for distribution? And how can we tell that this stuff came from that apartment? How do we tie it together? I give you one more. Go to the parking garage that's closest to your station. Have a few of your officers at off-duty roll call, and as you're walking from one to the other talking about the burglaries that may have happened out of the automobiles, you get to the second or third step, and there's broken glass, and you have to sort of leap over it or you'll crush the broken glass, and you go, hey, could this be a distant early warning method? What about a vehicle-borne sniper? What the idea is that you have to create within. The people that you train, the need for them to sense make. Because sense making has to occur before problem solving. And if you don't problem solve, meaning that's the phase where you go, Houston, we may have a problem, you're never going to inform decision making. So I just gave you four or five things that you could do easily for no money at a local agency out of the 15,000 agencies that are in the United States alone where you could have a good thing and on-duty or off-duty roll call just to get people thinking. So, Brian, I'll pass it to you, Brian Marin.

No, and it's just what Greg is talking about is something that we kind of take for granted. A sense making is something you're constantly doing throughout your day, no matter whether or not you realize it or not, right? And so that sense making is just your brain trying to make order out of chaos and

Yes

it's so heavily influenced by your cognition by your working memory your hippocampus is informing of everything that you do so you're arriving at conclusions before you even see everything well why you you have to do that in order to survive you can't possibly go through your environment and look at every little thing as some new novel thing that must be investigated so your brain doesn't like doing that burns too many calories right we just want to assume everything is what what we see it to be so we just have to slow that down a little bit and what greg is talking about with all those are kind of making that that memory emotion link to sense make so to the acetone one is an interesting one because that sense of smell is a very very very primal sense that is hardwired in humans for survival so something tying a lesson to that makes it more sticky and makes it more memorable right otherwise i'd walk right through the house and not notice not think anything of the overpowering smell of of nail polish remember if i didn't understand that it was made from you know i can i can you know there's ketones in that it's highly explosive i can use it to make bombs those type of things are what we mean by by sense making we the things that we take for granted those little things are what we have to pay attention to

Yeah, and let me throw one at you too, Brian Willis. We're in Baghdad, and there was a bunch of young Marines and each one of them was trying to fashion flies to fly fish in the Euphrates. So I was talking about them fly fishing at the ranch and the one said, what gave you the idea? And the other said, hey, look, we found all of these broken fly fishing rod sections and they're all about two or three feet long. And we're looking at them and going, wait a minute, these guys weren't fly fishing the Euphrates. These are low metallic signature pressure plates because the inside of the fly rod with some of the lamp wire that we found would make a good crush. component that would start the chain for an explosive we won't obviously give people at home ideas but the idea was that here these you know fly fishing rod sections plus the lamp wire plus the other thing if you didn't sense make you'd never problem solve and figure out what they were then we were in Afghanistan not too much later And we saw all the pieces of a double boiler and the person next to me said, well, so what, are they making chocolate? You know, any ideas like, no, they're not making chocolate. They're making bombs. They're making bootleg liquor or they're making explosive devices. So why is that important? Well, if you're a trainer and you take those things and you separate them and you force your students, whether they're vet cops or whether they're trainers or whether they're in the FTO program to. to redintegrate those, to put those back together, to come up with logical solutions. Every human brain wants to find Waldo. That's why no matter what we come up with, Sudoku or Where's Waldo, are so exciting. That's why people still love to do crossword puzzles on an airplane because our mind is fascinated with coming to a conclusion. So what we do in training is we give them pieces and bits and they have to fill in some of it. And then we put it in an environment so it's context relevant because not everything matters. Sometimes you throw some red herrings in there. These four items didn't matter, but these 11 items put together certainly matter. The harder it is, and again, you've got to re-estate it up. You can't start with the hardest, but the harder it is, the smarter your personnel will get. So sense make is the crucial key to the beginning of any fidelity-filled training program. Over.

It seems to me that especially for new officers, they find themselves in situations where they're watching something. dealing with some subject and something happens or there's something in the environment and they have that sense that that's strange but they don't know how to make sense of it so they tend to just discount it so when you talk about the brain filling in is is then I'm rationalizing that and saying well it's probably nothing or it's probably just this as opposed to an experienced officer would would experience that same thing and go Oh, crap. There's something bad about to happen.

Yeah

So the key is to, so you talked about kind of teaching this in small chunks and then putting in contextual relevance. Is that one of the keys to this, to teaching this on, say, over the course of an academy? So what would be some of the ways that you would recommend that you would teach some of this sense making over the course of an academy? So that when they find themselves in these scenarios, then all of a sudden they go, okay, now I recognize that.

That's a great question. And so I would sit down with all the instructors and I would have a bunch of index cards and I would say, okay, here's our terminal learning objective. We want them to understand this skill. Here's all of our enabling learning objectives and each one of you is going to take a part of them because you on the firearms range have to do this part. You in the lab and the fingerprint analysis have to do this part. You, the driving range instructor have to do this part. But the idea is that we We all wrote the concept together and each enabling objective must fit together those chunks to form the bigger puzzle. The enabling learning objectives must fit the terminal learning objective, what it is that we want to do. Now, you said chunking. The brain chunks information anyway. So that's the best way to get it. Little pieces over time where now I can say, hey, wait a minute, there's a pattern here. And once I understand. recognizing the pattern that leads to the analysis that this is either one of two things dangerous or benign if it's benign take it in stride add it to my log sheet if it's dangerous that means it's danger or opportunity because with danger always comes the opportunity to escalate or de-escalate a situation or radically spin into the sun so we want to we want to pay attention to that and the idea is that if each first of all think of how much fun the academy would be Second of all, you're learning critical skills for life. You said something, Brian, you were talking about that every photo that you see about a police academy or certainly a military academy, you have the instructors up in somebody's face with the, you know, the Phillips screwdriver hat and yelling at somebody. I remember learning at Pendleton that when we were humping those hills to get to the observation post for combat honor, the Marines would be yelling at the other Marines, hey, look. Look down, look at the trail, just keep pumping. One foot after the other, let's go. Here we go. One mile, no sweat, up the hill. The idea was, hey, how about if we take that same skill where you're just being a mule and carrying gear and say, okay, look, listen, smell, feel every once in a while, scan your horizon. Why is that there? What is this? You can turn everything into a teachable moment and you always have the time. And people think, well, the 15-week academy and the 18-week academy. Academy, and how am I going to fill these tasks in? sense-making is a function of every single component of that academy. Let's say that you're doing just driving and you're talking about traffic law and you're talking about civil infractions that one could put together to justify a traffic stop based on an equipment violation. Well, what else could have caused that equipment violation? You know, the flat tire on the side of the road could be because this is the vehicle that that next jurisdiction wanted and they used to stop. Stopstick. Do we ever do that? Do we ever take the time and have a spiral of options that come out of a central function? That's the essence of decision making. So if you just sat down. with your team and you just came up with those objectives and said this is what we want to learn some people will take the same one like the first aid guy will say hey i want that critical trauma care one well the range guy the person teaching firearms should say yeah i want that too and the entry guy in the swat team should go yeah we're going to cover that in mind is there a problem with covering the base skill in all those different areas no because that allows your brain to understand that each is relevant in that situation, and therefore I can draw from a wider, a panacea of my brain's file folders when making a decision. Sorry, Brian, I went long. I know you're jumping to chime in,

No,

Brian.

the other issue too is, you know, I call it we got to we got to get rid of our training hat, meaning, you know, we when we do training, it's okay, now we're training and then that training is over and now we're done with that. Well, then there's no I don't ever bridge that gap. app from here was my exercise to here was real life this the idea is training is continuous right there is no now we just do training especially when we're talking about sense making and problem solving perfect examples i was teaching a course this is years ago and a really high you know high functioning military special operations team and one guy in the class and he was amazing right he had the best answers and he was talking giving examples and always asking more questions right and we just talked about some vehicle born sniper platform platforms and some other things and now we're walking out at the end of the day and i stop and i'm looking at the parking lot and then all the way across the parking lot which is now empty which is unusual for that time parked underneath the shade of a tree is a vehicle with its rear end facing the direct entrance of this command element and i'm like okay and i go hey man perfect example what do we got right here i was like what are you talking about i was like dude you just gave the best answers in class take a look at this take a look at this vehicle parked off the natural line of drip a drip underneath inside negative space with a vehicle facing this and what did we just talk about oh my god it's a vehicle-borne sniper platform now in that situation it wasn't but prototypically it was exactly the same so so inside the class the guy was a stud but the second we walked out it was like that practical application now that was also early on the training we didn't get the exercise yet but the idea is i have to to get rid of this idea okay now we're training i just like greg talked about weaving those those those core set of competencies, those skills in every single thing that you do, well, that adds up over the whole academy. You don't need a special section. Now we're going to learn sense making and problem solving. No, it's continuous. So building those file folders right there in that moment, that student had got more from that 30 second explanation outside the classroom than he did from the four hours he just got inside the classroom because now it clicked in his brain.

You know what I would add, Brian? I would add that everybody around that student got

Yes.

the benefit of that as well. And so Brian Willis, I would tell you this, I would tell you from a strictly selfish standpoint, you know, hire us, we'll come and show you how to fix that in your training. That's what we do for agencies. But Brian Willis, I would tell you, you know, from being around these police agencies and these trainers all the time, you know that they always have an area where all the trainers congregate and they all sit around on the end of the. end of the desk and they talk about what's coming up and what they just did so one day i would say go in and change the coffee maker from the the mr coffee to one of the old grind ones you remember that have the handle on the side that looked like an organ grinder and put that there now have all the other components there but put that grinder uh that's on there and then say okay well uh here's the idea today to make the coffee you have to use this and you have to use this you know, these beans and grind it. Then at the end of it, say, okay, why did we do that exercise? If a person was taking pure cocaine hydrochloride and they wanted to break it down into powdered form, they're going to use something just like this because, you know, technology isn't available everywhere, nor is power. So what things did you have to do differently with it? And that's a thought exercise, right? Now, the next day they think, oh, we're ahead of Brian Willis. The next day, have the Mr. Coffee there, but don't have any filters and have only the unground bean. Now what do they have to do? Well, I've got to figure out a way to crush this, and what are we going to use for a filter? Again, we're doing a sense-making and a problem-solving exercise to create the decision-making function. What is that? That's advanced critical thinking. Listen, if I got shot in my gun hand, I have to be able to draw my weapon with my other hand. Okay, that's a great tangible skill. I can imagine that coming up. How do I get there? Well, I can either practice that one skill and hope that there's time in my life to practice six. six billion companion skills to that or i can learn how to sense make and problem solve and therefore no matter what nuanced confound or arousal comes up in my life that day i'm likely going to be able to see through it and fight my way through it that's the idea what do you think martial arts was that the entire idea behind akata was that all of these moves blended against an imaginary opponent would finally get into your brain that that, hey, listen, no matter what I'm facing, there's a skill that I'll be able to put together A plus 17 and orange to get a successful outcome. It's more important to have thinkers on the street than fighters on the street. It's more important to have thinkers on the street than shooters on the street. But are we there yet? I certainly don't see that in our academies right now. Over.

We just draw on the martial arts example that you just used, Greg. It seems to me that. that a lot of trainers do what some martial arts instructors do and they simply teach the kata is it's a series of moves and you need to memorize this to pass the test and there's no explanation of what the kata means whereas other instructors have people understand that every element of the kata there's there's something behind it there's a story behind it and and it seems to me that that's the way that we teach a lot of times we teach to the to the test memorize information as opposed to teaching them to think critically so

Yep.

if we look at something like videos because we have this tendency to use a lot of videos i think we use them very often inappropriately but if we were to take videos of an incident and instead of just focusing on the fight part look at the preamble and then stop it with a group of people and say okay based on what you're seeing and you're hearing what could this mean is that a way that we could start to develop these sense-making abilities as well so that they start to have to think about okay I saw this I heard this but what the heck could it mean is that another way to teach this on an ongoing basis that's that's a great example especially when it comes to video training we see a lot of really bad video training where it turns you know turns into see and don't let that happen to you and it's you know or you're gonna die it's like okay why i don't take away anything from that but fear and fear does not help you make good decisions But just like you said, pausing that stop in real time, whether it's a video or in the middle of a training scenario, you know, you got to sit there and go, stop. All right, what do you think is likely going to happen next? Okay, now the follow-up question to that is prove it. I want artifacts and evidence in support of a reasonable conclusion. Exactly. Then once they can do that and go, okay, knowing that now, how would you like to intervene in this situation based on our policies and procedures? What can you do? What should you do? How do we apply those prototypically right now in this situation given the specific context? That's sense making and problem solving.

Yep.

And then you can start to ramp it up however intense you want that to be. You start out simple. Good. You got it. Well, now I'm going to amp this up a little bit. Now we're going to move a little bit faster. Now I'm going to throw in another confound, something else for you to deal with, some other challenge. And that's the idea behind all this and what that instills it goes right back to the example Greg gave of the Marines, you know, humping a heavy rock over the over the hilltop. I was fortunate enough when I was a young Marine, you know, you guys are like, hey, you know, it gets really tough on those hikes just put your, you know, look down put one foot in front of the other. And I had someone say don't ever effing do that. That's JV that's junior varsity, right, you need to train yourself to look up and out so that when you get tired in real life. if you're going to remember, look up and out. Well, that brings back to exactly what we just talked about, those decision making during that scenario. Okay, what are you likely going to do next? What do you think is going to happen? You can continue the training scenario and bring up those questions and make them articulate them because you're building those file folders right there. You're building those experiences, you're creating memory emotional link. So now all they know is whatever situation they're in mentally, they're going to be, well, what do I think is going to happen next? Can I? and I prove that, what can I do right now? So if you just instill that in all those training scenarios, you know, you're going to get a better outcome. But as you kind of mentioned, measurement and assessment is much more complicated than we give it, you know, credit for, right? We always want to say like, hey, you got to learn this kata to pass this test. You have to shoot to this standard. Okay, so now what happens is that test. becomes everything and we train to that test but that test isn't what's going to happen in real life now we need some sort of measurement and assessment right but what is it at the end of the day what does a good trainer want out of a student or or fellow officer whoever it is right i want to at the end of the day it's hey thumbs up you did a good job you made the right decision greg and i might make two different decisions or have two different things happen but but if it was the right thing at the right time for the right reason We pass the situational test.

Yep. So situational judgment tests are a perfect example of training for that sense make. And Brian Willis, you're going to have a situation where somebody is going to write to or call you and say, yeah, but I'm a one person agency or a three person agency and I'm also the sheriff and our training officer. Well, then what do you got to do regional training? You got to get some other people. You got to get role players with the other officers in the community and call the state police and go, hey, we're doing our training Wednesday. Can you free up a couple of people because I need some people to act out these roles? Then you always sit down and you yellow pad everything and you have your index cards and Brian, I would write an index card for the mayor and I would have that in my pocket, an index card for the chief of police, index card for the interviewer on Channel 4, index card for the distraught mother and the child. And as we were going around through the training, I would point to the person that had the index card with the mother, have them pull it out and read it and say. I can't believe you did this or that or the other. Then the mayor comes up and goes, son, what are you thinking about? You can create these fidelity-filled situations with likely spiraled outcomes so a person can rehearse what it's likely going to be about before they go out there without having ever fired a shot, ran to car, booted the door, or done any of those physical skills. And I'll explain to you why we have to stop chasing things. Okay, you're old enough, Maren isn't, but Willis is, you're old enough to remember the old holsters. I got a holster collection in my house. And I've got the old pancake holster. I've got the swivel holsters. I've got the clam shell. I've got the button where you press the button and the gun jumps out of the holster. Why? Because a long time ago before there was Adam 12, there was the old west and the idea was we wanted to get it out fast. So then we did the tactical thigh holster in the 1860s well before a SWAT team did it. And then we figured out, wait a minute, we've got to tie it to our leg or we'll end up shooting ourselves. Or, you know, the flap of won't be available to us. Then we started saying, wow, the holster's got to be tighter. Then we had to build keepers for the gun belt. Then we said, wait a minute, somebody can get it out as fast as I can. So now we need security holsters. We've pendulumed everything in police work from one level to the next level without ever saying, does somebody need this? Is this improving the standard of care for my community or the safety of the officer? or the safety of the general public. We've got to start doing that with training because what we have is we have a series of checks in the box that we think are essential training. But when we look back at those modules, are we teaching rote memorization of dates Biden missing D-Day until 830 at night? Or are we saying we want this person to be able to think their way out of these nuanced situations? I would choose the latter, Brian. It is. So you talked about role players in creating these high fidelity situations, and it seems to me that one of the challenges is that when we do scenarios, people are wearing so much protective gear that you're missing a lot of the cues that you would get from another human being. They're wearing helmets and other things. So could we take and, say, employ actors from a local community college in the acting program, create some of these that branch in a multitude of ways? and then show a piece of that video so that we can use this with multiple people and say, okay, based on what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what's the likely course of action? What's the most likely course of action? Yeah. What's the most dangerous course of action? So I'm telling you what you did. Brian, thanks for bringing up the JD. What you did is you just went straight to the PhD. And Brian Willis, that's good, but I would say without having to spend all of those calories, I'm always looking for the lowest calorie intervention in my agency that I could do it on duty or off duty roll call. So Brian, you're the trainer. You sit down and you write the script. So here's the first index card. You're an 11-year-old at so-and-so school. You have this background and this upbringing. You're a four-year-old and you lost your stuffed animal. uh you're a 23 year old uh pre-law student and you've had a couple of drinks whatever the situation is you're setting up how the situation is about to go and don't tell anybody and have that card be in their pocket and it's just you the training officer and two fto's that you could find during lunch hour and you're sitting around the table having a cup of coffee and eating your lunch and you go okay uh this is the situation we've come up on a domestic and the The domestic is a well-known member of the community, and these are the situations, and you read off your card that you're facing in the living room. Now, each one of those people becomes a role player. So now instead of being the significant other, you're the six-year-old that's just lost her doll, and you have to assume that role. And the person that's talking to you has to figure out, okay, I'm not talking to a mature adult, I'm talking to a child, and now I've got to take a knee and get on the child's level. And then the next one is coming up with, well. I understand the law and you have what you've done is you've created this script with just the people around you and you've done the work beforehand to make sure that you've come up with these spirals and some engaging scripts and now you do it there in that room in that break room because why because if you're a cop or later that afternoon you're going to have a real domestic and now you can get done with that domestic and afterwards pull your scout car over and go hey see how they see how this works see how you got to figure out where they're going before they get there You don't have to make it elaborate.

Yeah.

You don't have to have smoke and sirens and police vehicles,

That

you know?

was, you know, the military answer to everything was, okay, we're going to rebuild this an Iraqi village to make it look as authentic as possible. We're going to get these Iraqi American, you know, or Iraqi immigrant role players to come in here. I'm like, okay, are all these Marines, do they speak Arabic? And this is part of the training that they're going to be talking with these people and finding out information. Well, no, none of them speak Arabic. okay so you just went out and found the right dialect of the right people and paying all this money to bring them in just to to simulate a language barrier you could they could be speaking klingon it doesn't matter like as They long could as

go they're to Du Bois, Iowa. They've never been there, right?

and and to to go with kind of what um sorry i lost my train of thought there oh what what greg was talking about uh was you know and what you brought up we don't need to go get the local drama club did to do that because someone in the drama club it's unlikely that they really know what a domestic violence situation looks like but your police officers do because they've seen it they touch it they taste it they smell it so they can act that stuff out as long as you keep it within a script because that's going to be far more realistic than an actor trying to do something we get people who have no acting or or even aren't even very uh you know outspoken people are outgoing and get them to do things and act a certain way and it's And it's always going to be far more realistic because we're giving them a specific task or thing to do. When you tell someone, hey, I want you to sneak this bag into the room, well, they're going to give off cues that they're trying to sneak a bag in the room, right? So I don't need to pay someone $1,000 a day to do that, right? I can just get someone that we already have.

And let me, Brian, I love that. Let me throw one Brian Willis to you that you could do today at off-duty roll call with your officers if there's three officers or if there's. There's 300. Doesn't matter. The idea is that you're the trainer. You have to think, how am I going to make the stickiest message that they're never going to forget? So have everybody stand out at the curb of your agency and set it up for safety and OSHA and everything else and have a flea vehicle go by very slowly. You can say, hey, that's the flea vehicle going seven miles an hour and have the pursuing vehicle come up with the lights and siren going. The fleeing vehicle stops and the guy runs, the police car stops and the cop runs and he leaves the siren on. How many times have you seen that in your career? And then you stop and you go. What's in that cop's mind? Everybody goes, he's chasing that bad guy. Yeah, but why didn't he shut off the siren? Because he don't even hear the siren. Well, why is that going to be dangerous when he chases that bad guy around the corner and all he's thinking about playing tag, you're it. Do you get how you could create that amazing scenario in just a couple of minutes for no money with the equipment you already have? And right now, everybody that's listening right now to this podcast, the neck hairs are tingling because they're thinking, wow, I've done that. that. I've been there. I've had so much mission focus that I missed shutting off the siren. It doesn't have to be a huge event. It doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to require live fire. What it has to do is it has to have you thinking what's important that I can bring out to this officer so they conclude correctly based on artifacts and evidence. If you can do that, one, your chief will love you because your training budget will go down and your officers will love

you.

Because they'll walk out and they'll be scratching their chin whiskers all afternoon trying to recreate a think rather than a think.

Excellent. Some great thoughts there. So talk about how this then flows into decision training, because it seems to me that once you work through that, okay, what could this mean and what are you thinking, then we can start having conversations about, okay, so based on that, where do you want to go with this or what decisions would you make or how do you, how does this now flow into the next piece where we're building that decision making? Make you peace it

So, Brian Marin, I'll let you, again, give the ground truth. But I'll tell you this, Brian Willis, in the United States, we have all the decisions we need. We have the U.S. Supreme Court decisions. We have the Constitution. We have the law. Okay, so the idea is stick with what's already there. Take a look at precedent. The answers are already in front of you. And somebody right now is going to say, yes, but each incident is nuanced. That's not nuanced. You're making it nuanced. The idea is don't shoot unless you've got these factors present. Don't chase unless it's safe for everybody, including the officer driving the vehicle and the citizens at large. So when it comes down to decision making, I'm the guy that's going to end the party soon because I'll always say stick with your departmental policy, stick with what the law is because it's there for a reason and understand. So I may play a game and go back. backwards and say here's the spiral of the decision that you made but i'm not going to crush you if you make a wrong decision either you know why because can you imagine stifling the creativity of the officer on the scene to be able to de-escalate in the moment by saying we're so rigid that you're only allowed this decision tree so uh what i did is i just created murky water for all your listeners but that's the challenge the challenge is follow the constitution and your local laws and your departmental policy, but make the training so realistic that you'll always come to the most logical conclusion over.

And it's kind of what we already talked about walking through those scenarios of sense making, problem solving than a decision, right? So it's why would you make that decision? Okay, what do you think is likely going to happen? Prove it. Okay, so then what is your decision at this point? What can you do based on your training, your experience and just what you know, how would you approach this? And those are the tabletop. top conversations that

Yep

should happen from these incidents because then what you get is different perspective so i'm the young new guy i'm going to say hey well i can do this and then i can arrest him right now for this and i'm going to position myself here and then maybe the sage gray beard is going hey that's great uh that's completely within departmental policy but what spirals could happen from that well i guess he could resist and then he this and then okay next you know we're on the news and i'm i'm arresting someone because i had a similar situation and let me tell you how i talked talk this person down let me tell you how i de-escalated and then that young uh guy or girl is gonna oh wow i didn't take it from that perspective i didn't see all of the implications of my actions i was only solely narrow focused on the tactical level thinking here that i never considered these other things those conversations are what make better decisions that's how i take someone brian willis with all of your experience and knowledge

Yep.

and i take your file folders and i get to import port them into my hard drive now not all of them and not with as much granularity but then when I show up I go hey you know what this is one of those situations that Brian was talking about I wonder if we should call so-and-so or try this So that's it. It doesn't have to be more complicated or complex than that. And you can't leave it open-ended. Well, why would you do that? Oh, you sure? You sure that's the right thing? I don't know. It's like if you do that, you just create doubt. You say, okay, prove it. And if they get it wrong, just walk it back and say, tell me why you got to that answer. Because then they'll give you the reason and you'll see where it goes off track and go, hey, did you consider this? Nine times out of 10, they're going to go, dude, I never thought of that. Holy crap, that makes so much sense. That's training. When you get those light bulb moments, that's when training occurs.

Real cop. First,

Mm

are

-hmm.

de-escalating as a matter of course, as a function of how they live their life, whether they're talking to a waiter or a waitress, or whether they're talking to their kids before they go on duty roll call, when they're dealing with their partners in roll call, de-escalation is always happening. Escalation is the key. Escalation, when to escalate. Well, you have intent, so training has to mimic intent, because if you don't have artifacts and evidence to support your conclusion, and you don't have intent, then you don't shoot. Listen, if I could have, if I would have shot every single gun-toting bad guy that was in my AO, you could follow me and find me by the trail of my debt. Okay, just because the person has a gun or an offensive weapon doesn't mean that you have to execute lethal force. Those decision makings come from sense making and problem solving that drive that decision. And you'll always get a legal, moral and ethical decision if your instructors and trainers are constantly reinforcing that. And it's part of the casual training that you do, the take a knee hip pocket training that you do every day. If that creates the culture in your organization, your organization will be strong. If you only bring out that book and dust it off and say, well, let's see what the rules say, you're going to have a presumed capability, not a real capability. And take a look at the last couple of months of situations that have occurred. where a presumed capability on record, we had the certificate proving we've had the training, but in reality, the training fell well short of the mark. Over.

So there's three things that jumped out at me as you were both talking about this is that number one is we need to micro doses training, do a little a lot as opposed to we just do big chunks and then we go long periods of time between training that we need to teach people what the law allows them to do and what policy allows them to do where historically what we've told them is if you do this, you're going to get fired, you do this, you're going to get sued, you do this, you're going to get. lose your job and so they're so overwhelmed that they don't know what policy and the law allows them to do and then the last piece is that we need to ask more and tell less we need to the key is questions historically we've tried to tell them all the time what the right answer is and there is no critical thinking that comes out of that are those some of the keys then to to putting all this into play

Absolutely the keys into your third point, Brian Willis. I had a contemporary that we fought all the time because he said you have to use the Socratic method and the Socratic method is the most important and we have to use look it's semi-Socratic at best because if it was a Socratic method we'd all come in and we'd sit down and somebody would say butterfly and I'd say shoe and then we'd drink some chai okay nothing gets done in the Socratic method we have to have a beginning and a middle and an end to our training we have to have the enabling learning objectives that meet the terminal learning objective. And the terminal learning objective must be exactly in line with state, federal, and local law and your department policies and procedures. And once we get that down, that we say, yeah, and now what would you do? Based on what? Yeah, okay, there's your artifact and there's your evidence, but did he demonstrate intent? Okay, well, give me the examples. That's the type of thing that we want. The person should constantly be being trained. should constantly be educated to the point where they can answer those tough questions in a moment. We should be able to stop, rewind our training, even if it's just us with role players, and go over it again and again until we get better at it. Listen, we do that with speech therapy. We do that with word training. Why wouldn't we do that with realistic training? If you make a mistake, I can rewind to the last objectionable, you know, least objectionable point of the training and start over until I get it better. And until I get a good – you train like that and your agency is not going to be in the trick bag every time somebody has to draw a weapon or use less than lethal force.

Now, when you talk about mistakes, is that where trainers sometimes go off course as well where I don't have your experience, I don't have your training, I don't have some of your things, so you're making sense of these things and you're making decisions based on a lot of factors. I have one outcome in mind where Greg or Brian has to do A and if you do B, C, D or E then that was a mistake, those were wrong. where in fact they may all be very effective just different ways to get to the same end point is do we sometimes pigeonhole that there's only one right answer as well You kind of brought it up, Brian, when you said, you know, when you have like almost a list, here's what you can do and here's what you can't do. Well, the problem is if we just train people that way, then what happens is they get to a situation they have not seen before and they don't have an answer, right? They don't know, well, I can't. can't do that because that's going to happen and again this goes into explaining why it makes decision or why you made that decision but you also have to let people make mistakes in training mistakes in training are so vitally important you don't you know if i come through and i nail the test on the first pass i didn't learn anything i learned nothing i did not get any better if i came in and it was the range day and i crushed that qualification course right out the bat at law i'm not going to learn it like that doesn't help me i have to be put into a position where i'm allowed to make mistakes and then correct them and you can correct them in real time you can correct them in a debrief but they need some way we need to both see you know what wrong looks like and what right looks like so i need to get a little bit of cortisol saying hey you really screwed that up oh my god that went horribly wrong because i made this decision i don't ever want to do that again but then i have to do it the right way so my brain goes ah i got it this time yay now i have now i know what i can't do in this situation what i can do in this situation so making mistakes in that training is vitally important to the learning process sorry And, go Brian, ahead I would add a step. I would add the step that.

at that having the expert model so the expert model is sometimes where you tell everybody okay everybody take a knee okay Jim and Mary you two are the best in the world at this skill get out there and show us again how to do it and then we break that down in kind and say okay now uh Tim and Rachel you're on because if I now have this range of likely responses and they're all correct then my personal style will shine through and I'll still be able to to do the skill and not feel afraid to have my special little things come through. Why do I say that? Because we're all individual human beings and we all react to external schema in a very different way. So you have to have a range of likely responses. You know, there's very few decisions. The more binary the decision, that means there's less input. A person just fired an RPG, they're reloading the RPG with the nose cone. Other than not a bunch of decision making there, it's time to execute deadly force. So you have to have those decisions, but why is it all training is always ramped up to that? You have to have non-kin as well. You have to take a step back. I'll give you a quick example. I've read guns and ammo magazines at my barber since I was six years old. And if I listen to guns and ammo, every single caliber that week that the magazine came out was the best self-defense caliber in the world. world. OK, so from 22 to 32 to 38 to 380 to what I could go on. OK, when what really matters is not the weapon choice, it's the environment within which you're going to utilize this weapon and the terminal ballistics of that baton baseball bat concrete block or weapon system. So if you allow me to understand the math and the science that goes into my decision and then I understand that I can only use it when intent has been demonstrated. then it doesn't matter what weapon I use. So we're approaching it by things rather than saying, once I give you the ability to think your way out, you're going to be able to think your way out of so many situations. We go to ground fighting. Why? Because an officer gets tackled. We go to pursuit training. Why? Because somebody slides through a red light on an intersection and kills a family. Got to stop doing that. What we got to say is, here are the benchmarks of police training that have provided the best. to all police agencies forever, and those are the critical skills that we're going to be best at. That's where we have to redefine what real training looks like.

And so when we're talking about redefining real training and, Brian, you talked about the fact that we need to – training needs to be a safe place to make mistakes. And so we're continually pushing ourselves. But a concern that I have, and I want to get your thoughts on this, is where I see this concept of stress inoculation training going off the railing, where people think that, you know, the way to – they need to function under stress. So we're just going to stress the crap. crap out of people with lots of screaming and yelling and punishing somehow thinking that that teaches sense making decision making critical thinking what are your guys thoughts on some of the the concerns that you have and some of the issues around what gets lumped into stress inoculation training So I'll kind of start off real quick, and I think it's important to understand, you've got to remember anything we see in training. A lot of what we see comes from processes that come from psychology and sociology and neuroscience and all this stuff. The problem with that is all of those concepts were developed typically for a clinical setting, meaning stress inoculation training. Do you know what that meant? Do you know why something like that was created? It's, okay, Brian, I'm your therapist, and you're terrified of elevators. You cannot get on an elevator, but you know you need to.

you too well we can do stress inoculation training so maybe we start off i just start showing you photos of an elevator and you go okay that's scary and then you get a little bit of physiological and psychological arousal right but not enough to overwhelm you just so that you can learn to process it okay and then from there i start ramping it up then we're going to go into building i'm going to show you an elevator in person right then i'm going to get you closer to it then i'm going to get on there with you and we're not going to let the doors close but we're just going to get on there with you okay then we're going to let the doors close then we're going to go up go up one floor then we're going to continue that then i'm going to start adding more people to the elevator that's stress inoculation training the problem with with something like law enforcement training the scenario you're going through isn't the exact scenario you're going to see and and so people are trying to replicate all of these scenarios when you don't have to or or i'm going to throw all this i'm going to start throwing flashbangs at you and i'm shooting at you and i get well if you're a tier one military unit doing hostage rescue yes you you need that, right? Because you have to be able to fight through those situations when that occurs, right? But it doesn't make you better at making decisions, okay? That's just those tier one units do that, but they do it so much that it works, right? Well, you don't have that if you're doing it once a quarter or once a year or once during the academy. It's going to have the opposite effect. So that's kind of where this stress inoculation idea comes from. But rather than just saying. saying i want to overwhelm you and you continue to do the job i i want to get you not stressed in the first place how do i reduce that physiological and psychological arousal well i'll tell you what being able to sense make and problem solve faster than the bad guy that gets me every time because what's going to happen if greg and i are driving around in a vehicle right and i see a guy pop out of a car pop between two houses and start running you i'm doors open and i'm out and i'm boom i'm gone i'm right after him when greg's doing the what All right. Taking a sip of coffee, throwing it in a gear, going to drive around the block because he knows there's only so many areas that this guy can run to and he's going to be sitting there with the door open waiting for the guy to get through. Okay. Well, I'm stressed out. I'm at the peak of my performance. I'm maxed out on my heart rate and my physiological and psychological arousal while Greg is still sitting there having a cigarette and a coffee going, dude, he's right here. So which one do you want better? I mean, you don't have to get yourself. That's the general. I think I'll pass it to you, Greg, because I know there's. And

If you want

I

to.

love where you're going, and you set up such a concrete foundation. Brian Willis, what we're talking about is not stress inoculation because I would point to the second word. We are misusing the word inoculation because inoculation is not what they're telling you. What you're talking about is cognition training. You're talking about cognition and behavioral therapy blended into chocolate and peanut butter. And I'm for that. I'm for that all day long. But if you're telling me that you can prepare me for upcoming stress by stressing the shit out of me. you're out of your mind. What you're going to do is you're going to make me want to avoid those situations, not go in that room because that's where the higher stress are. You'll get more benefit out of working out. And listen, your startled response is always on board. It's called a startled response. You get what I'm saying? So you're going to be startled by things that are in your environment. So go out and immerse yourself in your environment over and over and over and get get better at it. That's what they're talking about. Listen, preparing for a stressful situation means being so capable at your knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities that when it comes up, you go, okay, there's that file folder that I've been training for all my life. I'll give you an example. I was on a traffic accident one day. When same, by the way, nothing against Avon ladies, but both were Avon ladies in a neighborhood in the north end. Both of them pulled up and they were going down the street to a number of houses and kept putting the car in park, getting out there in the next house, doing it with the door open. Both had kids that were in the front seat of the car. In both instances, instead of putting it in park, they put it in reverse. They knocked themselves over and the car drove over the kid. So on the first incident, it was not a fun event. that i'll have night terrors about it my entire life uh which is squash kid on the second one it happened to pop up on the curb and go over the grass when the kid fell out and the kid was pushed down in the grass and it made a perfect grass angel you know like a snow angel and the kid popped up screaming and was fine okay how would i prepare for those instances that are going to come up you know what i do i eat right i sleep well i make sure that i'm running and doing some strength training exercise and i have have faith and I'm good at all my skills because if we're constantly going ah here it comes and oh there it's got and oh now this guy is going to shoot it's going to make us better for that individual file folder that we just built in detail and no future file folders now when we turn this on it the only way that it would work is this if you've suffered a traumatic pts sort of event We can walk you back from the edge using that cognitive behavioral therapy exactly like Brian was talking about. I'm afraid of this. When these situations happen, this occurs. But you can't get an inoculation that is going to prepare you for that. And you know what? Every time I hear that, ask Brian. We talk ourselves out of a job because we're doing something for East Coast Agency. I don't want to say anything for Tradoc or TECOM. uh we were doing it for them and they go well we're going to study stress inoculation it's like look been there done that look at all the studies that are out there cognitive behavioral therapy good thing stress inoculation when you when you're stressing people out for the sake of stressing them out uh show me the evidence if not stay in your lane over

Well, where I see this really going off the rails, in addition to everything you guys just talked about, it's a great explanation, is that what they're doing is they're just stressing the crap out of people. They're artificial stressors. They're not even stressors that would be in the actual environment that they're going to deal with. And so what they're doing is they're creating a sense of fear in those people. They're actually creating huge levels of stress, and so it seems to me that that's going to negatively impact their learning, their ability to learn, and that, as you said, is the best way because we're not going to get people to stop using the term stress inoculation, but is the best way to prepare people than to teach them sense-making and decision-making so that they are able to. perform what at the highest level when they find themselves in those situations because their brain say hey I've been here done this solve this problem before yes because because what you're talking about is is is how we do it is there's a sense making problem solving what that does is it builds your adaptability so i should say how do i want how do we get the most adaptable police officer for my agency that i can well it takes exposure to many different environments different forms of training everything we've been talking about but i want you to be as comfortable in new novel environments as you were and i can do that by by drawing on my own experiences meaning uh you know perfect example is before my first deployment they gave us some like cultural awareness hey you know you're not supposed to wave with this hand because your left hand because that's what they wiped their ass with and don't show people the bottom of your shoe and this and it was like this is complete junk right and everything was hey this is different and that's different you're not and you're never going to see this before, and you're going to have all this new. So when you keep telling me everything is different, it's like I have to take this all in and it becomes overwhelming, right? But if you go, hey, here's how these situations are very, very similar. Now my brain can take what I've already learned in life, my own knowledge, my training, my education, and I can draw from that. So if I say look for the similarities, that allows me to be more adaptable in my environment. Now the more adaptable I am in a new environment, okay, now I can figure things out. out, right? And that helps build resilience. That makes me mentally stronger. And that's what we're talking about, that resilient

Yep.

behavior, that adaptability and resilience is what you want because that allows you to make decisions better because I'm less affected. I'm not overwhelmed in this situation anymore because it's close enough to something I've experienced before.

And slow things down too. Look, we've all smelled the worst horrible DOA above Nono's pizza when it's 104 degrees and still had to be a cop. Okay, so start sensemaking and problem solving. Does a Scott AirPak work in this environment? And is a paramedic or a firefighter close enough by that I can borrow their Scott AirPak to go in and check the rest of the scene? We all know that if we buy our parents a dog or a cat, if our parent becomes a decedent, that the dog or cat's going to eat part of our parents. Those are things that a training officer can stress with a newer person or a less experienced officer. or first responder and say before we go in there understand this all decaying flesh smells so it's not going to be good so a couple of the things that i've done is put vicks in my nose or this or that or the other that's what we want our training officer to do not to jump out of the car and go i have a gun see you didn't draw fast enough that horse crap that's exactly the the same problem i take with the the binary shoot don't shoot training that everybody is coming out with with the real recoil and now it's going to shock your right knee and then You know, there's going to be six opponents all coming off the park bench. Look, my mind is not going to thank you for this when I'm in the real event unless you prompted me by saying I could sense make faster than the situation and problem solve before it became critical. If I can do those two things well, guess what? I'm going to have a great career and I'm not going to be in the trick bag and I'm not going to be in a mental hospital or sucking on the end of my gun.

Now, as part of this, you mentioned early on, Greg, in the conversation about contextual environment or contextual relevance. So that we're teaching these things and then we're putting them in contextual relevance. It seems to me that that's a piece that we miss is that we think it's all about the stress as opposed to them understanding the context of these events, that some of these things might, I might make sense of this differently in this environment than. then this environment, is that part of it is working towards so that there's some contextual relevance to the sense-making and the decision-making as well?

Yeah, of course. My first autopsy was with Werner Spitz in Detroit, and I will never forget the smell of the room before the theater, the operating theater, before the decedent or anything else was in there. And that changed because then I've been on countless blowtop, blowside with different weapons. weapons, different firearms and calibers, those all are file folders that now I have the ability to draw upon so I can operate under those external stressors and anticipate what this next situation will be like. So therefore, I don't have a lot of things that surprise me because I have these well-constructed file folders that I was able to decompress with an expert and say, what is that what caused this well the teeth exploded and that's what you see on this x-ray in their brain and you know when they put the gun in their mouth learning so so training changes your behavior and it also helps you anticipate the likelihood of being afraid or scared uh i know technically the same word but being afraid on the way and then being scared by an object on the scene listen the more training i have the less these novel and nuanced arousals are or confounds are going to surprise me so that's where i want to spend my money not on stress inoculation but on how to use sense making problem solving skills to cope with a difficult situation and and i can give you enough situations in training that it'll probably equate most of what you're going to get are we going to get a novel one yeah in our career in a 35 year career yeah you're going to get something the air balloon disaster or something right but the idea is but But good training is going to help me for potentially problematic interactions with other humans and with difficult situations and how to cope with them.

Excellent. Now, you guys, kind of the tagline for Arcadia Cognorati is that training changes behavior and your training is all designed to do that. You offer things in a multitude of platform with the podcast, the Patreon site, the live training. So if people want to find out more about the services that you offer and want to follow you and continue to learn from. From the two of you, what's the best way for people to do that? It would definitely be the website arcadiacognirati.com. We have everything on there and links to us. You can also look me or Greg up on LinkedIn is a great place to get a hold of us. But Arcadia is on social media as well, got like Facebook and Instagram and the less of Greg podcast, right? So this is where we have conversations like this, Brian, where we might pick a topic or a subject or an event and we kind of break it down in a sense through the lenses of human behavior. behavior pattern recognition and analysis right and talk all about prevent indicators and how that looks and how to set this stuff up so um we have all of that out there i mean you could just scroll through the podcast and find one that that you think sounds interesting and and give it a listen you'll get a feel for how we do things pretty quickly within the first few minutes so we and we try to do as much of that stuff as we can we've done all kinds of free webinars before in the past if you're an interested agency or person we get on it we get on calls calls all the time we go here here's here's who we are here's what we do uh it's a quick zoom meeting just like this where we go through and explain it and and by the end of that call we we know well you know you're going to get who we are and you're going to go yeah not for me or hey i want some more what do we do next and so so that we're willing to do that everyone just got to got to reach out to us

And we're not for everybody. Brian,

Right.

you know why? Because we're going to lay bare all the things that you do right, and we're going to say, here's where you're excelling, and here's a couple of friction points that if you fix these with training, you're going to be so much happier because it's going to reduce your liability. It's going to reduce your exposure. It's going to give you a better culture within your organization. And some people, frankly, don't want to hear that. Some people are so into the way they're doing their things that, hey, our training hasn't failed us yet. Yet, you know, so we're going to stick with it. So save your dime. You don't need to call us. But if you want to explore cognition and how you can be a precog by getting out there and sense making and problem solving very difficult situations, then give us a call. We'd love to talk to you.

And recently I was teaching in Virginia and there was one of the people came up to me after the lunch one day and said, hey, have you ever heard of this left and gray or left and bang thing? I wasn't sure where he's going. And then he started to talk about he had this amazing training experience with a couple of guys named Greg and Brian, this three day experience and what an absolutely amazing. amazing uh program that was can you just talk very briefly about the three-day live in-person training that you offer and is is the website again is the contact page there the best way to find out or to reach out to you to find out

So let

detail about

me start

that yeah

real quick by just throwing it out there. Hey, Left of Greg is a book. Left of Greg is a podcast. Left of Bang is a book. I came up with the term Left of Bang a long time ago to describe those. Those things that happen, pre-event indications, and a couple of students of mine wrote that book. And you know what? No harm, no foul. They did it while I was in Afghanistan, and still I'm in it, and the principles are great. They don't do any harm, the Hippocratic Oath. The idea, though, is that that's not where you're going to get the training. The real in-person training down on the ground, that's where you're going to get the benefit. Brian, I got to thank you. I have to go, folks, so

Yeah.

I'm going to drop off and know that I was honored. honored to be on the show today to all your listeners thanks very much i gotta go

Yeah.

thanks

And then just like Greg said, so that's the three-day type thing is something we do. It's an intensive one for law enforcement stuff. We always try to keep it to a minimum that for them to really get the full effect that they gravitate towards it very quickly and are big fans. But that's something we can definitely do. And we base everything off of sort of the needs of that agency. We make it specific to you. We don't typically have like, hey, here's our program. So it's here's what we think you might need and we start with like a pilot course and then build something bigger from there. But yeah, if you reach out to us, it starts with just getting on a call with us. It's real easy to do. Excellent. Well, I certainly appreciate that. And I encourage people to, if you haven't already, to check out the Arcadia Cognorati website and all the resources that you offer and all the great work that you do. So, Brian, I want to thank you and want to thank Greg. Although Greg had to run, he had another appointment. He's got an appointment, sorry. Oh, no, that's fine. Absolutely. He let us know that you guys were good enough to adjust the time so that Greg could be part of this. So I really appreciate the two of you making the time for this. But more important, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for all the important work that you do, all of the great resources that you provide through the podcast, through the Patreon site. And I would encourage people to check that out where you do a deeper dive into breaking down some of the content you talk about on the podcast. But you guys are doing so much important work to help us to raise the bar in our profession and understand some of these critical issues and to challenge. our thinking and to think differently about some of the training so for everything that you have done if you continue to thank you so much for your contributions and your commitment and your ongoing service Brian Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us on the show. We're huge fans of your work and everything that you do. We love it. And we got to get up to Canada here soon, hopefully by the end of summer, actually, we might if this works out. But no, we appreciate everything. And thank you so much. We're humbled and honored to be on here. every single time. Well, thank you for that. And so to the members of the Excellence Training Academy community, as always, I encourage you to let the information that Greg and Brian shared and as always, they shared a lot of great information. Let that information simmer percolate overnight and be intentional about sitting down tomorrow, writing out your greatest takeaways and then writing out your action steps. What actions are you going to take to start to implement some of the information that Greg and Brian shared? So as always, to the members of the Excellence Training Academy community, I thank you for your commitment to excellence both in and through training. Always. Always continue to train hard, train smart, train with passion and purpose, and always be willing to dare to be great. That's all for today, folks, but if you'd like even more content, you can head over to our Patreon page. The link can be found in the episode details. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, follow us on social media, and please tell your friends about the show. Thanks for tuning in, and thank you for your support.