Baseline

All right, Greg, we're going to go ahead and get started. We have a good one today. We're going to be talking about, well, we're going to be talking about normal, typical. I guess in a sense, we're going to start there. Today's going to be vanilla, in a sense, which is often overlooked as being the most important part.

And what I mean by that is when we start talking about behavior and people want to talk about things they've seen or things that are odd or different, or "this is unusual," they start with that, the thing that's unusual or the thing that's different, or "I don't like this." And there's a cultural obsession with that, with like, "Oh, that's a red flag," or "that's an anomaly," or "that's not, that's different," or "that's not." What you're not understanding when we do that is that you're missing the key important part.

This is why, you know, we have a very simple algorithm that we teach that has to do with everything we do with human behavior, but in decision-making and sense-making and problem-solving. And that one is the baseline plus anomaly equals decision. And this B+A=D is the most elegant way I've seen that you can use in any situation anywhere in life to kind of figure out what's going on and make an accurate comparison, right? Because every perception we make, everything we see, is sort of based on our own past experiences. And it's already a comparison.

So, the reason why I kind of wanted to jump into this today, because we've talked about baselines and anomalies and decisions in all kinds of different episodes, but we've never really broken down exactly where this algorithm came from, why it's significant, how to use it really effectively, and really focusing in on the most important part, that baseline or that context for the situation.

This all came from too, I mean, from your work a long time ago and then really started getting out there when you helped develop the Marine Corps Combat Hunter program. And so, you had to have a simple way to go, "All right, well, what do I do? All right, I've figured out the situation. This is what I think I see. I got to make a decision." And that's all based on other things that we're going to get into. But it's a very, and I use the term elegant algorithm in a way, elegant in a scientific term, meaning it's the most simple thing that you can use for this and then you can kind of go as far in detail as necessary.

So that's sort of the preview, Greg. But you know, the point of this episode, and we're going to get into all kinds of different examples, I'm going to explain everything what this means, but the point of this is that we all miss the most important part, or typically I see the most important thing. You know, everyone wants like this list of things. "What should I look out for?" Like, "Who's going to be the one that's a school shooter? Give me the list of things I need to look for. Give me the list of things I need to look for in this crowd of the person that's going to do something." And that just simply doesn't exist. It really, really doesn't exist because none of these behaviors are, they're all meaningless without some sort of context. Or they're so obvious that you don't need to name it. You don't need a list for it, right? It's like something that any layperson would go, "Well, that's a problem," you know what I mean, right there.

And so, it's almost like you're wasting your time trying to do that because depending on what you're looking for, it might change, and so in tactics and techniques and procedures and things change over time. So what we're really focusing on today is this baseline plus anomaly equals decision, explaining what it means, but really, really understanding how important baseline development is in no matter what situation before you make any type of comparison.

So, I want to throw to you real quick, but I forgot to mention before we got on too that I didn't get the alert. We've had, so thank you to everyone listening, because we've had now over 250,000 downloads of our podcast. So that's a big number. We appreciate it. So continue sharing it with friends. We really do appreciate that. That's the biggest thing you could do. There's always more on Patreon, but just sharing it and giving us thumbs up and a like and stuff, it goes a long way for getting this stuff out here. So, Greg, I want to throw to you, where to start, if you want to start with the historical, you know, 50,000 downloads and why we're not partying. Woohoo!

Does that translate to any money at all, Brian?

Uh, technically, loosely, you can draw some lines from here to there. Uh, but we're not at the point yet where we're, in a sense, heavily monetized from this. But it is—

Well, it's enough to pay for all this stuff, like the subscription and this stuff. Yeah. So that's why, and shout out to our Patreon members for that as well, because it allows us to keep doing this. But—

Um, so yeah, that was a big, huge 30,000-foot overview. So let's go ahead and jump in. Maybe give some historical context too, if you want.

So, and shout out to the 250,000 downloads. That's amazing. So, what I wrote down the first—first of all, incredible intro. It just, it nails it from so many different angles and gives us so much to do. You watch a person wearing their baseball cap backwards, and the first thing I want to do is slap it off their heads because it's like, do you understand what that brim is for? Do you understand what that's designed to do? Right.

(chuckles)

And so, that's the, that's the—remember Gunny Lenz, he said, "There's two people authorized to wear a hat backwards: snipers and catchers, and you're not one of them." Remember you said that, "Turn that thing around." So, and what I mean by that is like, Brian, you brought up such great points. But let's go back for a minute to the enhanced or the Combat Hunter program. And the first thing I wrote down is "enhanced optics and observation." That's a simple skill. That's, that's physics and science and prisms and distance and comparison. So, what you do is you go, "Wow, that's not a leaf or a tree. That's somehow different from the other things around it. So let's dig a little bit deeper." Okay, it's okay to say "different" there. That's okay.

Then all of a sudden you go, "All right, well tracking." Well, tracking is merely a protracted game of tag. It's transfer evidence awareness. "Okay, that piece of fiber isn't organic to this environment. So therefore, it must have been deposited there by somebody else. So if we follow up on that." Okay. So it's different from what I'm looking at. Now, I'm not afraid of the word "different." But what happens is when we look at the third leg, the third pillar, which I did, which is human behavior profiling, when you start saying "different" or "odd" or "unusual," you start walking back science and going with opinion-based testimony, and it's going to blow.

So what do I mean by that? So, there's a lady that Shell (Greg's wife) and I know that always has a different color hair, and it's not hair color found in a bottle that you would ever buy. It's a vivid purple. Okay. It's a bright blue, like Smurf blue, you know? And the idea is that people would look and go, "Man, that's an odd character. Better keep an eye on her." No, she's an individual. That, that's her way of coping with her environment. When—and no mega episodes, folks—when you look at somebody and you go, "They're unusual," that's an internal baseline. You're comparing that to what you do at home, how you view the world, the gosh-darn profile you set on your computer, what Instagram site you visit and everything. And that's no comparison at all. There's no science behind that. Unless what you want to do is go, "I don't want to spend the rest of the afternoon with this person." You know, that it's likely I'm not going to, you know, swipe right or left. I don't know what direction anymore because I go both ways, literally and figuratively.

But the idea here is that the idea behind baseline plus anomaly equals decision is if you have a robust enough baseline—what's clinically normal for the environment that you're observing—then anomalies will out themselves. And the idea behind that is that they're pushed out by the environment because they don't naturally fit. And a great way of thinking about that is if you look at the text on a page. So whether you print out like a Word doc or you're reading a book later or you're looking at a magazine, all those lines, you notice there's not real stadia lines there. There's not a black line under those words. They just follow a line. Okay? And they're all in an order that when you look at them, you go, "Wow, that, that's pretty neat. Look, left to right, it's perfect." If one of those letters was a quarter of an inch below the rest or a sixteenth of an inch, or it was bold or it was red and everything else was black, it would stick out, wouldn't it? And those things would make you wonder, make a reasonable person wonder, "Hey, I wonder what's up there."

So, an anomaly is something that isn't what we expected. It falls below our expectation. It isn't what we've seen the thousand times that we got up in the morning and went to that Starbucks or started our car or anything. Like, you ever go out and start the truck on a cold morning and go, "Wow, I don't know what that sound is, but that certainly isn't normal." It's not normal based on what, Brian? So, the idea is that you can use an internal baseline by comparing it to the external baseline for normality baseline and then determine anomalies. But what you can't do is you can't walk around through life going, "Well, that's different. That's odd. That's unusual. Therefore, there's anything associated with it. Danger, likelihood, opportunity." You can't do that. And science proves us out on that. That's why math is consistent. That's why science is consistent. If it falls outside of this normality for a mathematical equation, then guess what? Your answer is going to be wrong every time. And now that's what we are going for is a scientific scrutiny, a level of scientific scrutiny that can be repeated.

And if it can't be repeated, right? And you said something. Let me add this too. I'm going to go just a little deeper on the final comment. You said about schools. Look, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we're going to take a look at babies in the womb, follow him into the delivery room, go out to maternity, and at some point we're going to be able to pick out third row, second kid in, he's going to be our mass killer. He's going to be our shooter. He's going to be something else. Brian, those don't exist. One day maybe with genetics and DNA and tough blood profile, you might be able to tell a kid that's likely to have cancer later in life or likely to have, you know, a bad prostate or something. But the idea of saying "this person's going to split some wigs," you can't do that. But you know when you can do it? When you're glassing the parking lot and you see somebody back-dragging a heavy bag from their car. You get what I'm trying to say? So we stick to a very simple algorithm that's been proven for thousands of years in any enclave of humans, and it's repeatable. So if you are looking for a very simple program, just write down B+A=D. You don't even need us anymore. That alone will get you through your day.

And that, that's, that's, that's the point here about why I say it's so elegant. Like if I start looking at everything as a baseline plus anomaly equals decision, one, we'll get to everything, but just a baseline. Right? So if I define heavily the context of the situation that I'm in, the time of day, the location, the weather, the this, and then all of the typical or likely behavior I should expect to see there based on my experience, based on what I know, what's typical or normal. And we really mean that in a clinical sense. I like that you bring up the, you know, someone with the blue hair or the, "Oh, they've got this bumper sticker on their car." It's like, yeah, all humans are on transmit. They like to send their message out and let everyone know what they're thinking. That's not, that's not odd. That's not different. That's, that's normal. That's typical human behavior. The kid acting up in class. Okay, that's typical. Kids do that, right? So, so what you have to start with is really focusing on what that environment is and what you should really expect to see based on everything you know.

And so if you just focus on getting better and better and adding more and more information to that, like you said, you know, like a robust, fidelity-filled baseline. So what you mean, and by fidelity is, well actually, why don't you explain what you mean by like a fidelity-filled baseline.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so the amount of granularity, the amount of differentiation, the amount of comparable alternatives in various functions of what you're looking at, make it robust, meaning you put time into it and worked at it. And fidelity means that all of those components working together are what makes the Monet, what made the Mona Lisa, what, what makes this rich tapestry that you're looking at. And the more components that are in there that have to be there to create that vision that you're looking at, make it easier for you to say, "That's sticking out."

So if we go to the zoo and we're looking at everything, but we come to a cage that has a turnip, we're going to know that the turnip is somehow different because it's not a furbear environment like all the other ones that we wanted to touch at the petting zoo. Right? So, so the idea is that when we endeavor to go robust, we say that we're going to go with the scientific method. When we just look at a person and go, "Man, can she imag—look at those slacks, that doesn't go with that top? That person's a little odd," and now they're somehow different. No, because we're all individual snowflakes. We're all, like you said, always on transmit and we're always competing for some form of attention. Even if we're quiet, the quiet person, the wallflower in the room, are they not, you know, transmitting their intent, you know? So, so if we just go by that, if we go by like personality or a person's sense of humor or their manner of dress, what we're going to do is we're going to get into a binary: "I like it, I hate it." And then once we do that, now it's emotional-based testimony. And, and it's not going to be rigorous, right? We want something rigorous that we can shake and look at and hold.

Yeah, there's no rigor, and then there's no there when it's emotionally based or values-based or, you know, ideologically based. And that almost never matters unless it's something so incongruent with what a baseline should be. So like by fidelity-filled baseline, like I look at it this way: if you come up and say, "Well, I saw this weird thing in the parking lot." And in this parking lot, it's like, "Well, well, hang on. If you start with it was the parking lot of a Walmart in a small, in whatever outside of a major area next to the interstate at 10:00 in the morning on a Sunday." That, okay.

Now I—

Now I, yeah, I can build into it. Now I understand the relevance of your observation. Now I understand why that's different. But if I don't do any of that, and I'm just trying to focus on these individual things, well, that's that overemphasis on this anomaly part. That's that you're putting your finger on the scale. And you even said, like if you, if you're especially if you're trying to communicate that message, right? Well, now I'm already, if I, it's, it's like why, why we don't use the term "suspicious." "Hey, that's suspicious." It's like, okay, if I tell you something's suspicious, what do you automatically start doing? You're going to start looking for reasons why it's suspicious. If I go, "Hey, that's interesting to me," I have no idea why you find it interesting. So I have to figure it out too, and then maybe I'll come to the same conclusion that you did, and now that adds a little bit more rigor to it.

So it's this focus on, on this baseline, and we forget, and this is where, you know, people kind of forget how much they already know because, you know, most humans are so down and in because we go to the same places every single day. Like we don't attend to any of this stuff in our environment anymore because we're so technologically focused. You're just kind of on autopilot. It's like when you go somewhere and you're driving for a while and you're kind of out of it and then you get home and you're like, "Holy crap, I don't remember any part of that ride!" Right? Because your brain switched to to autopilot in a sense. So, but, but what you actually have—

Holy—

—is so many file folders, so much there that you see every day. You, you sort of take it for granted and you don't notice. It's not interesting. It's not new. It's not novel to you. So, your brain just throws it back. But what we're saying, it's like that's the most important part, right? So like it's not unlike a, you know, watching a movie or TV show. The set dressing, the background, that's all there to to give the relevance to what the main characters, the two of them are having a conversation about. Without all that stuff, it was just on a sound stage. It, it wouldn't have any meaning whatsoever. And it would not even, it would just, it'd be nonsense to you. You'd be like, "I don't understand anything that's going on." So that all provides a context. The better I get at developing that context, this baseline, like, like you said, and now you could kind of explain this a little bit. So what you said was if I get, I don't have to proactively, in a sense, look for anomalies. I just have to get really, really good at understanding what the baseline is, and then those anomalies sort of emerge or appear on their own, or they come from that. What do you, what do you, what do you mean by that?

So, so listen, if you're a copper, if you're in corrections, if you're law enforcement, court, fire, first responder, HR, teacher, all that other stuff, you have to actively hunt for anomalous behavior in your baseline every day or you're going to be surprised by it. There's the jack in a box. But the average human being going around their day, an anomaly is going to present itself because it's going to be outside of the norm and it's going to give you pause. You're going to pause for a minute and go, "Hey, wait a minute. There's an empty parking spot. My car was here." You're going to say, "Hey, listen. Uh, where is my phone?" I had to run Bailey's phone over last night. We had a whole bunch of different things that were going on. Nico's on a fire. Bailey's on surgery. Shell (Greg's wife) and I are watching the baby. We had to switch cars and stuff. So now the phone's missing. You can't be on call and not have a phone. Okay. So why is that important? Well, where's the last place that I, that I put the phone? That becomes the anomaly. "Well, I had your truck. I bet it's in the truck." That's likelihood.

So the idea is having a robust baseline even if that baseline is in progress, even if you're building it on the road, then guess what? Those anomalies will come up and they'll stick out. So, why do we, why is there an over-reliance from us at Arcadia and we start talking about observation methods? We talk about, you know, surveillance, and the more you watch something, the better you're going to learn. Well, you know, I, I had, four months ago into the doctor's office pretty gosh-darn regularly here. And one of the things I noticed about the doctor is in their office, they used a microscope and he had a light source to look in my mouth and in my ears, and he used X-rays to look inside of me, and then he had people analyze things with other scientific methodology. Why would we not want to put something on the glass and have sustained observation and compare things in our environment when the best of us does that all for a living? Why, why do we have a movie critic? Why do we, why do we compare what the best book is? Because we understand that there's a hierarchy, and it's not Maslow, you know? It's a hierarchy of how things make themselves aware to us, and some things become more important. The engine warning light, that's more important. Our kid not wanting to get out of bed and being mopey in the morning. Is there a problem at school, or does the kid have a fever? So all of those things would not be possible if it wasn't for the baseline, the beginning. The baseline is the thing with which we can compare. And so if we have a faulty baseline or we rely too much on an internal baseline, there's no comparison.

And that's what I mean like, like with tracking transfer evidence, it's very easy. "That shoe impression wasn't there. Let's take a moulage and walk around till we find somebody with the same shoe." Okay, that's pretty easy. Optics and observation, when you're scanning, go right to left. Why? Because you were born reading left to right. Reverse it if you're overseas. And the idea is that your brain will go, "That's anomalous for you." So, so you're already set up survival-wise for you to see these anomalies. If you add being trained to hunt for them and you learn a little each day to actively look for them and compare in your environment, imagine how good you're going to be in a short time. Imagine what you can do in a week or a month.

And, and that you, you bring up a, a number of good points, which is why we use this structured methodology on how to do this because like you said, technically—

Yeah.

—you know, unconsciously your, your brain is constantly trying to look for things in its environment that's going to hurt you, right? So, it's constantly going like, "Is that going to kill me? Can I eat that? Can I procreate with that?" And it's very, very simple. It's very, very primal. And so, because that's already happening, we have this, um, like we, we, we, we automatically want to go to sort of the worst-case scenario. We automatically want to think this. I mean, just look at every news story that comes out. It's just this breaking news and this is the end of the world and everything. Like, what the hell? Like, what's going on here, right? You're not giving me any context. Give me all this. This is why this is so different. But, but we're primed that way in a sense as human beings, right? That that's helps us in survival. And so it wants to put it in, and so, "This is different. I don't like it. There's something up here." And you kind of have to to take over that system in a sense. Say, "This is different. This is why I do it." It's like, so, "This seems odd," or "This seems different. This seems incongruent. It's interesting to me. Let me, let's make it normal. How do I make this normal?" Because if I then try to make it normal, it's likely going to be, "Oh, now I see the baseline. Now I get it." Or it's not. And like you said, it's going to stick out even more and go, "Well, hang on. This is something I really have to attend to."

So, like real, real quick example is like just the other day I go to pick up the terrorist (Brian's youngest child) from school and I'm leaving in the afternoon and a neighbor's garbage is out, but I'm, you know, people put their garbage out the night before or whatever, you know, and I'm like, "Okay, well, that's weird. Um, it's not garbage day tomorrow. Um, I wonder, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're going out of town. Sure."

(chuckles)

"So they put it out the night prior. You know, they're not going to be there to do that." Like, okay. Okay. And then I go pick them up and I come back and now a few more garbage cans are out. I'm going, "Wait a minute." And then I'm going, "Oh crap, it's Tuesday. I thought it was still Monday. That's right. Tomorrow is garbage day." So, so that, that, that anomaly was, "Hmm, I got to figure out what that is," or, "That's interesting to me."

Screaming at you, though.

It presented itself, right?

But that was because—

But that was because, and this is something you brought up, this is because my at that moment, sort of like I got the baseline wrong. I had the wrong day of the week. And so this is why this is so important because if you start off in the wrong baseline, everything that comes after that is going to be crap. Meaning, it's, it's not going to work. It's going to be bad math. It's not going to add up. Right? If I don't have that, that, the, the, the initial primary thing from which I'm comparing everything to. If that's not clear, that's a little off. That's a little, like, you know, you know, maybe I'm, I'm, I'm a little off on my, my dope on my scope. Well, yeah. Guess what? A thousand yards later, you're not hitting anything, right? And that's the idea. It's like, and this is why we focus on that so much, and a lot of our exercises do that.

Um, and, and, and how we do that, we, we, we have a whole bunch of different ways like our first principles and the domains and stuff that we talk about that how to make sense out of this. But as a, as just a very powerful tool, like I have to look at what is normal, what is typical in everywhere I go, and there's certain things that I know, you know, what a gas station is supposed to look, operate, feel, smell like at different times of the day in different neighborhoods, a parking lot, whether it's at the mall, or it's at a small strip mall, or it's the neighborhood, whatever. You already have these file folders, these experiences from which you can draw from and that comes from your just life experience. And so if I'm thinking about that and always trying to develop my baseline as I go through and what's typical, what should I expect to see when I get there? Like that's when you get the time and distance in a sense. That's when you get more time and distance because like you said, now I can see those anomalies way farther out. It's not, doesn't have to be right up my face anymore.

Yeah. And, and let's think about that for a minute. Let's just use a gas station, one of Brian's favorites, but any place would work.

Spend a lot of time.

If you, if you take a look at an urban versus a rural environment, if you take a look at a picnic that's at the, you know, community center in a rural environment and somebody going behind a building away from the crowd to urinate, that's not, you know, un-untoward. That's not something that you would be unexpected. It's, you know, pretty routine. There's only a couple of bathrooms. The bathrooms are full. We're outside. Hey, we're out in the woods. Nobody can see me. We're going to do that. Now, if you change that and that's somebody in a place where there's cubicles and they go down to the last cubicle and urinate, that's going to stick out. Why? Because you haven't seen that before. So, now the gas station, and instead of coming up to the counter to pay, the person comes up to the counter and defecates on the counter. That's going to stick out to you and you're going, "Well, you know, I, anybody would see that." No, people don't see that. And that's how a place right in front of you gets robbed and the do—people do gas drive-offs and all that other stuff.

All of the behavior that you've been conditioned to expect, that's the baseline. And what happens is it becomes normal over time, the gift of time. Okay? And distance means that distance in a linear sense, but distance in the spatial sense as well. I'm the fly in the wall observing this. Then I'm conducting the experiment. Then guess what? I'm the lab rat. And each time gives you a different perspective. And each one of those perspectives adds up to the fidelity of your perception. And so there now when you're standing at the counter, the person standing next to you is not joking, not doing anything else, got the hoodie up, looking down, all that other stuff. And you go, "Well, this is early signs of drive-by. You know, we're going to get robbed." Okay. What sends your hackles up? What gets your blood going is your brain and, and, and your electrochemical neurotransmitters are already there. They're already going survival situation. This is odd. Getting the rapey vibe, whatever. Okay. But who doesn't listen? We don't listen. Why? Because we don't give ourselves the gift of time and distance. And now I'm in a hurry now. I almost am going to be late if I don't do this right now. If these things don't line up. What we do is we go outside of nature and nurture and create a timeline that's unsupportable. And then our brain fights us all day long and we wonder why we have so much fatigue. Listen, we were stronger. We, we, we had to work harder. We had to run faster or our environment would kill us. Now our environment is every bit as dangerous. But we think that tech is going to take care of us. We know that ChatGPT will clean up my editing. We know that this, see Brian, so, so the more reliant we become on that, the less we have that granularity-filled, fidelity-filled baseline. Every once in a while, man, you got to stop and you got to smell the roses. You know where that comes from? You know, you know where that, those terms come from? It's because people didn't, and they got hit by the horseless carriage. The idea is that if you're not tuned into your environment, then guess what? Getting your baseline wrong could kill you. And that's exactly what you're talking about. You just had it off by a day. Imagine if you had it off by a person or, or, you know, some other factor that, that, that was much more dangerous and serious. Right.

And, and yeah, and you're, you're hitting on a number of things. Obviously, you know, a much more reliance on technology and just how we are today. And you're more likely to die from, from overeating than you're ever going to die from starvation. Um, so, so these sort of unconscious, uh, primal skills aren't, aren't honed, but they're, but they're there, meaning, like you, you can still use them and get better at them because even recently I was, I was just reading something where, you know, they thought because of the widespread use of all the GPS systems and navigation systems in cars and everything, like people's ability to critically think and to orient themselves and know where they are, it's like gone now basically. Just everyone's just like an automaton in a sense, and it's really showing in all of these other areas, you know, that, and so that's why you then have to, okay, we got to get sensors on the car now. It's going to stop automatically because, you know, so we, we keep coming up with the technological solutions because as humans we do that. But, but that, that, that's a, it's just a great analogy.

But one of the things you, you, you mentioned here, uh, not, not explicitly, but I want to make sure everyone understands it, is sort of the, the idea that this, when you, when you talk about a baseline, it's not something that is just, okay, here's, now here's the checklist for the baseline or here's, write it out. Meaning, it's, it's something that's dynamic and, and constantly in flux. So I have to constantly update the baseline, right? That is, that is the thing that's always kind of moving and eb and flowing, right? So, so what that is and what's typical is, is always dependent, and the more factors I can use in that: the geographic location, the people there, uh, uh, the time of day, the weather, the, you know, the recent current events in the area, um, whatever. Like the more I can add into that, the more sense I can make, the more, the, the easier it is for me to see things at a distance.

Then I'm going, "Wait a minute, that guy's did one too many laps around there." And you know what? "He's not looking over at the, oh crap, he's going right for the counter. He's going to rob this place." Right. And, and that's where those things stick out. And you can see that through the window before you ever walk into the gas station to pay. You get what I'm saying? It's, it's, it's knowing all of that stuff. And so being able to do that, um, is, is important, which is why we talk about some of the principles that we do about human behaviors and why we try to, we're not oversimplifying them, but we are for the sake of, of, of this for baseline development. Like when we say—

Exactly.

—people are the same all over the world. People are constantly on transmit. People set patterns. Like, there's take, take out this whole motive and the psychology behind it, and look at the physics and the neuroscience. Right? We look for familiarity. Right? So I'm going to find a place that's cognitively close enough that looks like something I've been to before, and that's where I'm going to go because that's where I'm comfortable. So I can, I can expect those things in certain environments. I can have a baseline for myself and, and, and do this. So—

So, so look at that for just a minute. The baseline for yourself. That's one of the only constructive and productive internal baselines. Okay. So, look at how we use that with a comparison. Always have to have a comparison or you don't know it. Not going to know heaven if you haven't been to hell, right? The idea is that all humans have the same core temperature: 98.6 degrees. Let's say I, I don't know if that's accurate because I—

It is. You got it. You're too horrible at numbers. Yeah.

Exactly. And I'm so afraid to say it wrong and people go, "He's an idiot." They'll say it anyway. Uh, but listen, 98.6. So, if you're one degree warmer than 98.6, you have a fever and you feel like crap all day long. If you're one degree cooler, you're sick and you might be dying. Okay? You feel horrible. So, 98.6 becomes the baseline. So, the internal baseline for all humans. But guess what? This morning, you're not all humans and you're not in society. You're not in community. You're in your bedroom and you're a degree and a half or two degrees warmer and you feel like crap. So the first thing you do is go, "I have inoperable brain cancer!" And you jump out the third-floor window. No, what you do is you go, "Hey, listen. I better, you know, look and see if there's any other symptoms." Well, that's what you're talking about by developing that robust baseline, Brian, because the fidelity comes from how much time you're applying to compare things and say, "Well, I wasn't this warm when I woke up to pee four hours ago." So maybe it just started. Maybe this is the beginning of influenza. I did. And those comparisons.

So, so when you're looking at Billy in the classroom or looking at, you know, Sally in the grocery store, you can't put undue things on them and go, "Well, that kid doesn't have a very high intellectual level," or, "I don't know what they're being taught at home." One, that crap doesn't matter. Because it's not scientific. So, take the non-science out of it and go, "Okay, that kid's clothes are clean compared to kids of that age that I've seen at this time during the day in a non-playground environment." You see what I did there? You see how that now becomes something and I can repeat that and I can check that. And so I'm conducting a social experiment or a physiological experiment. And you know what? The psychological experiment is okay, but only if you compare it against that person's baseline, not against your baseline. Because you're very different. You have different tastes. What you watch is different. "I'm a furry. I don't understand people that didn't want to do that kind of stuff." Right? So, automatically I'm going to be suspect of that person. And you said we don't want to be suspicious. We want to be interesting. So the idea is that I cannot adjust another person's baseline by imposing mine because that becomes a bias that is not supported over time. But if I watch and allow it to play out, now I can compare it against them. And guess what? If we were doing an interview, wouldn't that be called impeaching somebody's testimony? I bring you to a story, then I go back and you tell the story again, and none of the facts are the same. Well, wait a minute. I, I know what happened because I did the investigation baseline. Now, I'm listening to you. Okay. It's above or below the baseline or exactly what I'm looking for, and now I can make a determination. Does that make sense? I mean, if not for that comparison, I have nothing.

Yeah. And, and I, it's, um, we this is another kind of, um, natural part of humans is that we have to, we have to like come up with a definitive thing to point to and go, "That's the anomaly," in a sense, because it's, it's, it's much more difficult and much more complex to sit here and talk about, "Okay, like, the what's normal about this shopping center or this grocery store." Like, "What do you mean?" It's just like, no, there's so much there that you're taking for granted. But it's easy to say like, I, I heard someone was sharing a story with me and it's like, yeah, and they showed a video of this thing and, you know, then they're like, yeah, and "See, that's when I knew when he went into his waist, he was going to come out with a gun." And it's like, yeah, you are picking up on all that five minutes before that happened. So, at-bang thinking.

Thinking. Yes.

Yes. And so they go to, "But this point, when they turned and did this," it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are unconsciously aware of all of this other stuff going on. That's, that's why you knew at that point. But, but that's not the point to look at. It's everything after that. But we do that just as humans. Like, "I, oh, I forgot to wash my, you know, underwear and we won the championship game." Like, well, now I know if I don't wash my underwear, like we're going to win the championship. We, we, we have to point to something, but, but this is, this is for, for all humans do that. I mean, that was like a really, you know, the, the, the not washing the clothes is obviously a very, you know, very simple one, but, but we do this and we point to it and go, "Well, that's when they did this," because—

(chuckles)

—one, it's easier for me to articulate because that's the odd thing. It's hard for me to articulate the baseline. It's hard for me to articulate what's typical, what's normal. Yet that's where all the, that's where the power is. That's where everything is at. It's that building that, that, you know, just, and, and even, even like a baseline of knowledge about an environment or a thing or a, you know what I mean, like, like politics, everyone talks about politics and almost no one has a baseline understanding of, especially geopolitics, our political system, how the parties were formed, what our three branches of government do. It's like, you, you, you're, you're commenting on all this stuff, but you don't know these fundamental core things very well. So, how, what are you comparing this to? Like that's chaos to me. Like you, you have to start somewhere.

Yeah. And so, so two of our very good friends, Walt Settlemire, distinguished Savage, love him to death. Uh, my good old friend Darcy, you haven't met Darcy Ludinger yet, but you know of his work and some of the things he's done. Both of them spent a significant time as EMTs, paramedics in an urban environment that was very challenging. A lot of danger, a lot of bad things that happened. Now, Brian, they had to be dropped into a scene where they only know what they were dispatched to, assess the scene quickly, assess it so they don't get electrocuted or shot or burned up or fall through a hole. But then they have to look at a person they've never met before. They have to make an assessment on that person and then they continue to update their baseline. "Is the pain better now or is it worse now? Are you feeling, can you breathe better now?" Why am I bringing that one up of everything else? That's what we're talking about when we're saying comparisons against the baseline. If an EMT can do it nine times out of 10, much more than that, I'm sure, and come to a successful resolution that this is likely what's going on and these are the life-saving steps I have to take to transport you to somebody that's even better at it. If they do that, if not, then then every paramedic would be driving in a black vehicle called the "death sled" and they would go very slow. That's called a hearse, right? But instead, they're able to help.

You know, the, the idea is what do they do? They read signals coming from an environment, a rapidly changing environment that's in flux. They estimate and judge based on their experiences. This, and humans, right, and physiology and science and medicine, they judge these are likely the biometrics that I'm looking for. These are the things. Now, can somebody fake it? Yes. And most of them are experts at figuring out this guy's just a cry for help. It's a fake. Uh, so the idea is that there's so many of our jobs: motor vehicle diagnostics. I remember the days of pulling it in and a guy hearing it going, "Oh, you got a rod knock. We can fix that." Okay. Without ever hooking something up. Shelly (Greg's wife) still does that. Shelly's like, "Hey, your front right tire is about three pounds low." I'm like, "How do you do that?" "I can hear it!" What do you mean you can hear it? But listen, Brian, those sense mechanisms within us are comparisons and they're comparing to a known, and the known becomes a baseline. So means and extremes are ways of judging a baseline. And then an anomaly is something that falls outside or above or is absent during something. You get what I'm trying to say? I mean, and it's so like you say, it's so simple, it's elegant. I've heard that my entire life and it's accidental. You think I came to this on my own? I'm reading up on all these different things and it's all one thing. "Here's the normal." Okay. "And these things are, are somehow abnormal. And when I find these leukocytes, that means there's an infection here or there." So, medicine does it, you know, science does it, math does it. How do you figure out where you made the mistake? Well, you line this up and if it doesn't fit this formula, that's where your, you know, line of mistaken data is. Come on. And, and so, why wouldn't we want to use something this simple? Because it improves our everyday life.

Yeah. And, and you know, we, we also, you know, you have this baseline, right? You look for anomalies and you kind of got to determine this, you know, what's, what's likely because that's almost always going to be the answer. What could this likely mean? And yeah, what, what's the most dangerous thing this can be? Right? Meaning it continues this comparison process of, okay, if this guy's just pulling up to get gas, you know, what else should I expect to see? Okay, if this guy's pulling up to a gas station because he's going to rob the place, well, what else would I expect to see with that? Well, there, there's other indicators that I should get. So, you're, you're doing that hypothesis testing as you go along. And what you're doing is basically just constantly updating your baseline. And if something doesn't go down, you're, something doesn't fit the baseline. You're still watching more. Now we're going, "Oh crap, this is something different, right? This isn't typical, right? I have to make a decision."

And obviously when you get in decision, that's, you know, one, it's on you and it's on what your role is, what your goal is, what you're trying to do, the total, you know, the situation itself, right? It's going to be different for everyone. But, but that's less important than all of this stuff up front, all the stuff left on the timeline. This first part of it is like the bedrock principle, and I, I think it still continues and any analysis I see, right, that's, that's when I look for good analysis when someone says, "Hey, this is what I think has happened because of this. This is what I've typically seen. This is what they always do, but this time they did this. They said this, or they, they, they, you know, whatever. They, they changed the way they did things." Okay, because they're, and knowing what we know about human behavior, there has to be a reason for that. There's a catalyst for you to change something that you do. So whether, whether it's benign or whether it's something bad or whether it's serious, you don't necessarily know in that moment, but it has nothing to do with the psychology of that person.

And I mean, you, you brought up some, you brought up some great stuff kind of right at the beginning earlier because you were talking about like, you know, nature and nurture a little bit and, and how those things play out and you can predict who's likely. No, without a given context, you can't predict the person who's going to be a school shooter until they start taking steps to be the school shooter. Exactly. Because—

Exactly.

—because if they, if they, maybe if there was an—maybe they have a chemical imbalance and they had a bad upbringing and this was happening and then all, and everyone wants to blame those things. It's like, well, yeah, but like if one of those things had changed, then this person may have never done that. So you can't, that, that didn't cause this, right? It's correlated with it.

Correlated. It was a contributing factor.

It was a contributing factor.

Coraline was delayed a day because when they made their plan, they forgot to adjust for the next calendar year and school was closed on that day. That changed everything. And we don't know how many lives that took or saved. So, you can't make a blanket statement like that. And you're, you're absolutely correct.

So, how can we use it in a predictive analysis tool? Well, October is Domestic Violence Month, right? So, Domestic Violence Awareness Month is a very important thing. So, I would ask a cop, and we have, you and I, numerous times, "What's it feel like to be able to show up and go into anybody's house at anybody's time, just like the paramedic, you know, even if the person doesn't want you there?" You know, somebody called, you're showing up at a scene, you're walking in the house, you sit down, you shut up, it's their house. And then in that same breath, we talk about it and we go, "Hey, I wonder how a cop got shot on that domestic when the husband or wife pulled out a gun?" In the—Okay, Brian, your home is your castle. All right. And I'm not talking Castle Doctrine. I'm talking I know you. I know me. When we're in a rental car, that rental car becomes our home away from home for a while. Okay? So, anybody just, you know, the hobo Sam coming and sitting in the back seat and going, "Hey, nice car!" Okay. We, we would feel a different way against that. That would be contrary to our baseline. That would be anomalous. Anomalies always feel bad. I'm missing something. "Boy, I'm getting poked in this shirt." It's an anomaly because when I wore my T-shirt, I didn't have the same feeling. So, the idea is we have to remain sensitive to that fact.

So, if we're sensitive to the fact that, you know, now I'm on a domestic violence caper and the husband is being very protective of the home, and I don't predict that he may act out violently, then it's my problem, not that husband's problem, because motive is much less important than intent. So now that I'm going, "Wow, I forgot, you know, imminent domain. I'm in this guy's house. I'm moving stuff around, giving him orders and stuff, and I'm seeing that that's building up the stress." Building up the stress. It's no longer the original call I was on. Now it's him versus me or she versus me. And now it's going to spill, spill out of control. So I can use it as a predictive analysis tool. I can say, "It's not better now. It's actually worse now. And comms are getting worse." So, if I have a baseline for comms, if I have a baseline for cleanliness, if I have a baseline for smell, the more baselines that I have within that, that complicated central baseline, the more likely I'm going to have my sensors be activated further out. And you know, there would be a great thing if we called that something like the "gift of time and distance." That's all it is, Brian. The more sensors that we have, the more robust baselines that we have, the more likely they're going to get triggered like a smoke alarm before the fire starts.

You know, you just gave actually a perfect example just happened to me over the weekend because I had sort of divided attention. So, I was literally, we're all hanging out, kitchen, living room, like I was cooking, putting everything together, getting the grill going, putting the rub on the meat, like doing everything like that. And I'm down and in, and you know, the, the insurgent (Brian's middle child) is talking to my wife and she's talking about, because she, you know, we, she gets, she does some like babysitting for us and for other people and, and works, you know, in any way she can. She's always like, "Yeah, I want to work. I'm making money." Because we were like, "We're not buying you that." She's like, "Well, what if I use my own money?" We're like, "Okay." You know, try to build good habits about saving and this is what you have to keep this. But it, but it's good and it gives her like she feels empowered. Like, it's awesome. She's like, "Oh, I want to buy this thing." And my wife's like, "I'm not buying you that." She's like, "Well, I'm going to save up for it." Like, okay, like you want to work and do that, like, absolutely, right? You want to instill those good habits.

Well, she was saying, "Well, I, I buy this," and I, she started, I heard her like kind of arguing with my wife, but I didn't hear it as an argument because I was down and in and had divided attention. I was doing what I was doing. So I was throwing my comments in from the side thinking we were having a fun conversation, or just laugh.

(chuckles)

I had no idea she all of a sudden stands up, starts yelling, storms out, runs upstairs. And my wife is just staring at me, looking at me like, "Why did—" I was like, "What? What did I miss? I was, I thought we were, thought we were in the circle of trust there. I thought we were all laughing, joking, having a good time." She's like, "No, she was getting pissed the whole time. That's why I wasn't saying anything." That's what, and because I wasn't even attending to that, I, the meaning, I had completely misjudged the baseline. So, so what I should have seen as anomalies, I didn't because I was so far off on where the conversation had started that I came into that it exploded in my face like a freaking grenade and I never saw it coming. And I was like, "Oh man, I, I sit there apologizing. I'm so sorry. I thought we were just joking. I didn't really know she was getting upset." You know, and so it, it was just, but it's, it's the same thing. It's like, man, I'm, I, I totally misread the baseline. So everything after that point was a complete disaster and catastrophe and I started throwing gasoline on this fire because I didn't know there was a fire.

So think about how important what you just said. And Brian always comes up with these great anecdotes and folks, you got to start writing them down and searching for them in your own life. Brian, if I'm going to write a police report, I want to write exactly what happened, but I want to write it with the intent of the judge reading it and the jury hearing it and seeing, "Wow, I can put myself in that person's shoes at that time and place. I can feel what they felt. I can smell and see what they did." Most coppers that I know want to get through the report writing process as quickly as possible and they forget to put that fidelity in. They forget to put that, you know, "Hey, it was a foggy morning. I couldn't see very much. And, you know, my even my flashlight when I turned it on bright, you know, was reflecting more light back at me. I had to turn it on low beam and that complicated the going up the steps and, and then I heard something." And you're going, "Why would you go into that level of detail? You're not Stephen King." No, I've got to have that jury along with me. So, they saw what I saw. They felt what I felt, Brian, because then they'll understand what I'm saying.

And that's why clinically going back like, like, again, our friend Steve Pappy, when Pappis takes a look at something, what he does is very good. He doesn't just take a look at the, the white and the black on the paper and go, "Hey, look at line 83, you know, the verb that they use." What he does is he, he takes you back to the story that, that, that criminal case is reporting about and how the attorney made the jury feel in a specific way. How that caused an outcome. So Brian, that's baselining, and an effective baseline allows us to do that in everything. It allows us to relate a story, the allegory of the cave. It allows us to keep the attention of the class. I've heard "death by PowerPoint" since, uh, you know, the late 1970s, early 1980s. And I've seen it a bunch of times, but I use PowerPoint. You use PowerPoint. And you know what? That ain't "death by PowerPoint." So, guess what that is? That's the wrong baseline. That's coming in with an expectation of something that's already wrong before you get there.

So, if, if we go back to the, "Hey, I have a fever. I must have brain cancer." And, and that's me. You know that I have a headache in the morning. I go online and what do I do? I go to that doctor's website.

Yeah.

It says, "Well, you have heart fluttering." And I tell Brian all the time, I go, "I think I'm dying." And then all of a sudden he goes, "No, you got a cold, take an aspirin," or whatever. So, so the idea is the better our baseline, the better our ultimate decisions. And that seems like a big jump, but it can be borne out. It can be proven scientifically.

Yeah. So this is, um, what, what I kind of like to do, and I guess this would sort of be for, for the listeners in a sense, like a challenge or not, you know, just a thing that you can do to get better at this, is whenever you're going to go somewhere, let's say you're going to pick up the kids from school, you're going to the grocery store, you're going here to run out, do whatever errand you got to go do, it's literally before you go, you sit there and go, "Okay, what should I expect to see here? What's it going to typically look like? What's the parking lot going to look and feel like, right? Given this current weather conditions, what should I expect people to be driving like? How long will it take me?" Right? "What, what, what, you know, where's the construction at in my neighborhood and I know what to expect around that area?" What, and you just start asking all of those questions because then what you do is now you're playing a game and your brain likes that. Your brain's going, "Okay, well, well, let's see. Did, can I prove my hypothesis? Was I right about this? Was that, you know, person there at the exact same time every day, or was it different today?" You know, and so now you're actually attending to those things and now you're proving to yourself or you're finding new novel things that you otherwise wouldn't have found, right? And so it's, it's, it's all about those things. And I love doing that in every parking lot because parking lots are, you learn everything you ever need about humans, civilization in a parking lot.

Especially anywhere near Brian in the parking lot because it's a McDonald's parking lot where he's got his washing machine box. He can go in and wash up when he needs to. He's got the free Wi-Fi. He's got dumpster for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And guess what? If he needs to hit a ride, it's right there.

Right there.

Beg for money while people are waiting in the drive-through line. They're not, they can't go. They're waiting there for food, you know.

Make money, money, money, make money. So, the idea is that I would say that's an assignment that's practical and it's easy. So, what Brian has given you is given an idea of journaling or diary entries and not, "Dear diary, I saw a bee today." What you're trying to say is, look, just drive to work. Don't do anything different. Just drive to work. And then once you get to work, recount those things that happened. "I went on the 405. I did this. I took exit 213. I did this." Whatever. You know—

The Saturday Night Live sketch, "I took the 405 to La Cienega. Got off at," you know—

What are you doing here? Write those things down and then write them for your trip to the pharmacy. Then write them for your lunch, right? And it doesn't have to be as detailed the first couple of times you do it because you're not going to notice as much. Then after three or four days of journaling, now go back and compare them. Now yellow pad them and go, "Look at these trends. Look at these things that occurred." Then predict where you're going to be on that fifth day. And guess what? All of a sudden you say, "Wait a minute. I'm setting patterns." Well, patterns help me build a robust baseline. The more things that are repeated over time, and the more things that I can take away and they come back, entropy, the more likely that it's a true baseline comparison. And if I have a question about that and enlist the aid of others, I call Brian and I go, "Hey, I'm taking a look at, you know, third guy, second from left, wearing the blue shirt. Oh, the blue collared shirt. No, blue T-shirt. Yeah, I got him. Yeah, something's wrong here. What, what am I picking up? Why is this guy so interesting to me?" And now guess what we got? So, so if I'm the only officer on a traffic stop, if I'm the only person in the HR room conducting an interview, if I'm the only person seeing behavior that's interesting to me in a cafeteria, once I enlist the aid of others and that person has been trained in external baselines, guess what? Now we're going to nail it down. We're going to find those anomalies and make our decision much more quickly. And, and our brain is designed to do that. Myelination is exactly that process. We, we take those axons and dendrites and make them faster and stronger over time. And our memory and our recall is set up in such a way that if it's survival-based, it's going to come to us first. Fear is a great motivating factor. Anger is a great motivating factor. Those are things we forget. Those are simple lessons that we forget that can really help us make a better baseline.

Well, you have one being, you're, it's, it's, it's happening already. Like your brain's already doing this process.

Exactly.

So if you're not informing it with, with good information, meaning if you're not adding to that baseline, or your limbic system is going to make a decision for you and it could very well be the wrong decision. And, and that, that's, that's the thing. It's like if you're not understanding that this is a system, you know, we, we, people kind of talk about it like, "Oh, you got, you know, your limbic system hijacked you." It's like, no, no, no. Your limbic system is always driving the bus. You have to hijack it. Like you have to be the—

Knocking on the window, running alongside of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, "Open the door! Wait, hold the bus!"

Taking you down a path. So, so that, that's a good thing. But you, you also actually brought up a really good one is like sort of what you usually say, like "enlist the aid of others," of asking that person at the person working at the grocery store, "Hey, typically I see this. Is there a reason?" "Oh yeah, we're out of stock on that," or, "We got this new one in." And so you're already giving them a baseline. You're giving it to them.

I did it the other day at our local City Market. I, I went up to a person that was stocking shelves and go, "Hey, I hate to bother you, but this guy's high on the shoplifter list. Am I safe here?" And all I wanted to do is point out an anomaly. I wasn't sure what was going on. This could have been Old Homeless Pete. It could have been set up for a robbery, or this guy comes in every morning because he's walking his dog. I didn't know. So, guess what? I asked a question. I threw the rock. I threw the rock in the pond to see what would come back. And now that's enlisting the aid of others, too. Brian, did I really want to break down? Did I want him to call cops or search for this guy? I just wanted to bring his awareness level up to a general awareness level so things would stick out from that point forward. We do that all the time when you and I are driving together. It's an easy lift and anybody can do it.

And, and that, that interactive piece with another person is a good comparison. Um, I love, I, I tell you about my, my grocery store adventures because I have certain things that I like to do and I, I always like, one is my way of understanding the world because I just don't get it. So I have to go into a grocery store and I look for everything. I'm like, because I categorize things much differently in my brain. I'm like, "Oh, if I'm looking for this, that should probably be over here." And it's like, "Oh, no, that's over in this section." I'm like, "What the hell?" So I always have to ask and then I learn, I'm like, "Oh, okay. I, I get this new—"

Dewey Decimal System.

"—Dewey Decimal System that you guys are using here. It's different than Brian's, but, but okay, I can navigate the world." But hilarious because, you know, now that I'm in, I'm in Minnesota, right, right across the border from Wisconsin there. So now I was looking at, I was making something. I needed to get some cheese. And they got this whole huge display in the middle of all these different cheeses from all the different like local stuff and this, and I'm looking through there and I'm like, "Wow, this stuff looks good. This," and comes up to me. He's like, "You look a little like kind of, uh, you look a little lost. Are you, do, can I help you with anything?" And I was like, "No, I just had like this existential crisis moment right now realizing, uh, I'm getting much older now because I'm really this interested in freakin' cheese and not just drinking!" Like—

(laughs)

"This is now a cool thing to me because I'm, I'm like an old man now." You know what I mean? It's like, "Oh God!" But it, it was hilarious when—

You're looking at the cheese.

Yeah. So she's sitting there thinking like, "Oh, you're looking for some specific cheese." And I'm like, "No, I'm just, just, just, you know, death is knocking at the door and it's getting closer." And now I know like I'm looking at like, "Man, I remember my parents doing this. This is so embarrassing. I'm such an old man." Funny. But—

That's funny.

But, uh, but no, that, and listening to the others and then so, so those little things that you can do are, are fun. They make it exciting. I, that's what I've been always done with like, with the insurgent (Brian's middle child) and now with terrorists (Brian's youngest child), you know, it's like, "Where are we going? Okay, here. Oh, what do you, oh, who's typically there? Oh, do we have this, or there's a lot of teams at this volleyball tournament you're going to, or is it that?" Like, "Well, what else is there?" "Well, usually it's this."

Or, or when I see her look in the face like, "That's weird." I go, "What's wrong?" "Well, normally they do this." So you, you can do that because what your brain is already doing it. So the more consciously aware you are of it, the better you get at doing it. So I prime her with doing that all the time. So now you see her head, head tilt that little bit, I know she's picking up on something that's different. That's odd. So, I don't even have to, like I'm walking into her, you know, volleyball game for the first time and I'm going, "Okay, just taking all in." And she's got the head tilt. I know, "Oh, wait a minute. Something's different here today because she's picking up on it."

So, so let me throw one at you. So, Brian and I are at Liberty. Liberty's coming up in February, folks. Make sure that you write it on your calendar. So, we're at Liberty University. We always have an resoundingly positive experience there. Absolutely wonderful. So Brian and I are unloading out in the parking lot and it's a storm of the century. It's a Virginia storm, man. Clouds are dark, lightning crashing, rain pouring. It's just barely light in the morning and, and it's still just pushing off our day. Everything is different about our day, right? And so then we have to go to the door and the door is an electronic door and for whatever reason, it's morning, it's malfunctioning. So a person has to come from the counter, let us in. Then Brian and I get into the room and we notice that inside the room there's a bunch of people that are already sitting down. They're dripping wet setting up their stuff, but there's one table of geriatric folks and they're sitting around with their coolers and their gosh-darn, uh, you know, coffee mugs and everything and they're talking and having a good time and they just don't fit the demographic of anybody that's ever been in any of our classes ever. So immediately I walk over and look, we have folks from Liberty represented. We have professors and teachers that are already there and nobody's approached these folks. And I go, "Hey, what, what class are you guys here for?" And they go, "Oh, we're here for the Baking with Larry." And it was across the hall. Do you remember that? And we all laughed and they had to get up their knitting and take their dog and go across the hall. And I went to the other people that were there that 30 minutes probably before we were. And I go, "How come you guys didn't help those folks?" And they said, "Well, we thought they were here for the class." The reason it stuck out, Brian—

Yeah.

You and I had a robust, fidelity-filled baseline for what it's like being us. What it's like, and even though we were in a different part of the world having a class in a different room, guess what? We knew what was clinically normal for that setting and these things stuck out. So, that's all we're saying. And we're saying it can make you, uh, it allows you to reach conclusions that are better conclusions more quickly. And that's Left of Boom. That's Left of Opportunity. And that's where you want to be. You don't want to be ambushed. You don't want to be surprised. So, no. And, and I appreciate, uh, uh, stories like that because guess what? Was I absolutely 100% sure? No. Was I sure enough to go over and talk to them and save us both some time? Yep.

And we both, and, and, and rather than waiting for everything to get started and then interrupting everything. So it's, it's again, it's the time and distance. So now I can make decisions that are more informed and I can make them faster and I can mitigate some potential—

Uh—

—thing in the future. So that's a good assignment for kind of, yeah. Yeah. Get, get a—

Those old people get angry. You know, "Where's our croissant, you bastards?"

Or with you? "Where's our cheese?"

Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was a, it was a bad day.

Um, so we gave some, some assignments, some little things that you can do. Uh, I would also, you check out on Patreon. We'll, we'll do some more on there like kind of what we call like baseline development exercises, things that we do, how to make sense of it. We'll give some examples of that and things that you can do. And then also if you're, you're interested in learning more, there's also, I would go back and listen to like our first, we did podcast on first principles, uh, sensemake versus sensem, kind of how this, this stuff works and some more examples. But I, I also just encourage people like literally do baseline plus anomaly equals decision and, and figure it out from there. Just take that and go start with a baseline and get really, really, really, really good at it. And then those anomalies, they're just going to kind of start to pop up, uh, and you're going to, you're going to recognize them as anomalous before it, before it becomes obvious, right? And that's—

If you get a chance, go to Patreon because Brian and I are going to give some hints and, and hacks and ideas of different ways of making it fun and interesting. So when you graduate from one and think you've gone as far as you can go—

There's always more things you've never considered.

—there's always more things.

It's, it's, uh, it's, it's fractal, I guess. There's, there's, you're, you can get, keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and, and it really helps a lot of situations. So, um, any, any other last words? Uh—

Yeah, just a couple of saved rounds real quick. Look, every Monday I drop "It Happened on a Monday" on LinkedIn. If you guys like that or you want to look for it or look at the past episodes, do me a favor, share that with people. You can repost it without saying anything or give it a thumbs up. Those kind of things help us. Brian posts stuff too and it's very great stuff about upcoming courses, about different connections that we have. Do those things because look, you're part of a community. You are a cognard and we love that interaction because that interaction will help you grow professionally and personally.

If, especially if you're still listening at this point, an hour in, you know, definitely connect with us on social media, follow us on on Instagram and Facebook and everything and connect with us on LinkedIn. Um, you know, because you're, if you're listening now, you either enjoyed it or you, or you hate us. But either way, connect with us on Grinder (chuckles). It helps, it helps the algorithm even if you hate us.

Yeah. But what I'm saying is, look, a lot of people come to us and go, "What book do you want to read?" Brian, how, how much did we unpack in the last 59 minutes?

You know what I'm trying to say? Come on.

Yeah.

And it's free, folks. Get into it.

Yeah. And should, please, if you can, share this with a friend if you enjoyed it. Give us a like. Give us a thumbs up. All that stuff really does help get the message out there. So, we really appreciate it. We appreciate everyone for listening, and we're going to celebrate our 250,000 downloads. That's, uh, I just, just noticed that today. I think it happened actually a couple weeks ago. For some reason, I didn't get some alert, but whatever. All good.

We're here. You bastard. Brian's a CEO now. Things have changed with a lot of balloons and partying. Not a lot of money coming in, but—

Yeah, we're, we're switching that for a while. So, um, all right. Well, we, we appreciate everyone for tuning in. Uh, you know, we, thanks a lot and don't forget that training changes behavior.