Culture Doesnt Matter

All right, and we're recording, Greg. Good morning, and hello, everyone who is tuning in. Thanks so much for joining us on another episode of The Human Behavior Podcast. So, Greg, today, for this episode, we're going to talk a little bit about culture and how it relates to reading and understanding human behavior.

It's one of those things, and we've done a podcast about this a while ago, but this one's going to be a little bit different. We're not as concerned about things like culture and other things people bring up, like trait theory and psychology. All that stuff might be useful in some area, but it's not for us, and it's not for conducting predictive analysis. In fact, it can kind of muddy the waters in a sense. It can actually obfuscate the situation a little bit, and it makes it harder to determine intent, which is what we focus on.

One of the things we were involved with a couple of years ago was a program through DARPA. For everyone not familiar, it's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They do all kinds of cool stuff. They've built satellites, drone technology. They have a levitation and invisibility department. It's really, really cool stuff. They do a ton of research. One of the things they want to do is bring futuristic stuff, that is, take a technology that's 20 years away and produce a working model in five. They also study and research different theoretical concepts to see if there's work.

That's what a lot of people don't know about the Department of Defense; they study everything. That's why we see a lot of stuff, and people, if you're listening, you hear us complain about different studies or things that are coming out, like, "Look, this has already been thoroughly researched, and you're wasting your time." But anyway, that's a different, that's a side note there.

With this project, coming up, I'll send you links. It wasn't something that's classified, but it was called the URSA program: Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy. Basically, they're trying to look at bots and training different algorithms and machines to determine hostile intent. Obviously, when it came to intent stuff and looking at different behavioral-based programs, Greg's phone rang, and he got a phone call a couple of years back that said, "Hey, this is what's going on. Would you be interested?" And that's how we got involved.

Greg, I'll give you a chance to sort of set up and talk a little bit about what it was about. Then I want to bring up that we had to put something together for an after-action report of what we thought, and it really got into culture and human behavior, and what's important and what isn't. So I want to talk about that, and of course, the Patreon subscribers can read through that entire document on Patreon. But, yeah, I'll let you start by setting up the DARPA program, and then if it's okay, I'd pick apart some of the things that you talked about and ask you questions on it.

I love that. The first thing I want to leave our readers, viewers, with is that Brian and I were involved—Arcadia, Brian, and I—for 18 months with DARPA and with the Stanford Research Institute, working together on a complex problem. Why is that important? That's because they didn't just call and ask an opinion on something, and I gave opinion-based testimony. This was rigorous testing, evaluation, which means it's not peer evaluation. We didn't just write something and say, "Shelly, what do you think?" and she said, "Yeah." Eighteen months is enough to look at the underpinnings, look under the hood, and kick things around. A study was not only commissioned but then it ran its course, and then there were after-action reviews.

So, the Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) was to improve techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments. Let's just look at that very quickly. Rapidly: speed is of the essence in a hostile environment, specifically non-permissive or semi-permissive environments. Do your homework, read them, figure out what that means. Go to Patreon, read the entire study.

Rapidly discriminating hostile intent means that you're filtering out non-threatening behaviors because they flood the net; that's too much noise for your pure signal. Urban spaces: the reason that they chose those, and the subsequent one—the one right after that—was tunnels and underground spaces. But on this one, urban spaces mass threats, and while units are moving through there, it's easy for threats to be obscured in an urban environment.

The last caveat to that, Brian, was that civilians are in urban environments, and they must be protected. What happens is, we can't turn it into what every movie since there have been movies, and every book has been written about, where all of a sudden you have checkpoints for everybody, and walled compounds and forts, and everybody has to be searched every single time they hit the street. It's not sustainable, and that, I would argue—and we did argue—would draw more people to want to fight and resist and ambush.

So the idea was that URSA was an incredible program, 18 months. DARPA changed leadership, and the leadership that was incoming said, "We see that you've proven your point that your program can discriminate hostile intent." That's a huge takeaway, folks, read about it. The second part was that they said, "But we think culture is much more important, and therefore, our new leader on this program has a more philosophical approach. So we're going down that path." I think it's the first time in history that we can say that Arcadia said, "Thanks, DARPA, but no thanks, we're not going to continue."

Brian, we could have continued on that program for I don't know how long, and cashed the checks, but we wouldn't have been beholden to our principles and human behavior pattern recognition analysis. So that's the big picture of what the program is about, how we were involved, and then how that changed.

It's important to understand with this too, everyone is going, "Well, this is like a military thing, and that's different." It's not in a sense, because the complexity levels there can actually become a lot more complex, because you have a whole additional considerations that you wouldn't have, let's say, if this was just a city in the United States.

It's one important thing to mention on that part of that project: when they do this stuff, especially when it's bots and unmanned or autonomous systems interacting with humans, there are a lot of human factor studies, and they have a literal team called LME (Legal, Moral, and Ethical) that they sit there and go, "Well, is this legal? Is it moral? Is it ethical?" That's their whole job.

What we talked about, especially in determining intent, is, they asked us, "How do you, what are you using?" It's like, "Well, we're using, there's reasonable suspicion and probable cause, and there's a U.S. Constitution." That's actually a higher standard than the military would have to apply. So I just want to throw that in there.

But the big shift, and we get questions about this a lot, and people talk about things a lot about culture, and "Well, that's different because in their culture," and "That's different because I was part of this culture," and "Culturally this," and "It's about the culture of the organization." Culture is not difficult to define because there are different definitions of it. Literally meaning the arts, social institutions, achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. But there are things like language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, tools, techniques, rituals, ceremonies. There are all these different things that have to do with culture.

There are always new cultures, new ways to create it. You get to be part of many different cultures. So it's not very clear-cut necessarily, and that makes it a little bit more complicated. Plus, you can self-identify in a culture that technically you were never part of, but you can just raise your hand and say, "Well, I'm in this culture now." So it's like, "Wait a minute, where's the value in this?"

One of the things, as part of this, like you mentioned, and the reason why we're talking about this today, is we have to do after-action reviews and different types of write-ups, and talk about what we think went on in the program, where it was. During that process, folks, like I said, on the Patreon side, you can go read the whole thing. It's not that long, I think it's six or seven pages, just about what it was about, the questions it answered, and what our thoughts were. But in this, we really defined culture and why we don't think that's a good way. So that's what I really wanted to get into.

Sure. Greg, one of the things you wrote in there is you said, "Culture is of minimal significance in determining human intent. Humans rely on stimulus-based coding. Humans follow the same code when acting out rote, autonomic, sympathetic, or parasympathetic behaviors. Higher-function ideas, like those decisions with demonstrated intent, deviate from the code as to be measurable or readable as anomaly."

Right off the bat, that's a lot in there. There's a lot of meat on that bone. It's a great little paragraph. You started off by saying, "Humans rely on stimulus-based coding," and you kind of explained a little bit. I'd really like you to elaborate what you mean by this.

Thank you, by the way. Remember that we did not have an adversarial intent when we wrote this. What we were still trying to do is salvage the program from our standpoint, to make sure that it met the criterion on which it was built, because here's what they said: "These are the deliverables," and then in the middle, they changed the deliverables. That's why this was so important to us.

Look, everybody, we were designed with survival in mind. That means that we're always seeking out the MDCOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action) first, whether we know it or not. Critical thinking is essential, but it also includes cognition, which takes more effort and more time. So the whole reason for HBPRNA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis) is it increases your cognition in the same amount of time as you're given to make a decision. So now you're in essence making a better decision faster. You can manipulate time, but the rules of time have to be understood at the beginning.

The essence of advanced critical thinking, the essence of pattern recognition, which is an underlying element, is stimulus-based coding. We do great when we repeat behaviors. We don't do so well when the order of the external stimulus is mixed up, when we sense that it's seemingly unpredictable. That's why we love gaming. Brian, when we're together, I'm always talking about gaming and in Vegas. From the standpoint of human behavior, we're not exactly sure what will come next on the next pull of the slot machine or the next throw of the dice, and betting on that outcome only makes it more interesting and challenging to us. So we want to be there. We salivate; the brain's chemistry changes.

So we argue at HBPRNA that almost nothing's unpredictable. I go back to probably 15 years ago, I often cite now the work by the late Dr. Bill Harrison in "Slow the Game Down," and those folks are still out there, look him up.

His son continued that, didn't he?

Yeah, right. It's such a great program. But let me give you a baseball example: when we're at the mound, we can't tell what pitch is coming next. So we immediately MDCOA it and think it's unpredictable until and unless we study the physiology, distance, speed, last pitch, last series of pitches, and so on.

Now, I know this because my twin brothers are into the real baseball and the fantasy baseball, and all the stats and stuff, and they collect the cards. I've known them for 35 years, Brian. They can tell you the likelihood of the next batter hitting on this pitcher and how that would change if it was right or left-handed. Well, that's what we do. Even though we're concerned that the stimulus is too fast and has too many variables, the pitcher can change. They have free will. The gift of time and distance limit those variables. It only accounts for those that demonstrate artifacts and evidence that support reasonable conclusions. Because we don't come in with a conclusion, all we do is observe baseline activity. The conclusions manifest themselves. So intent becomes readable. Intent rises above or falls below a baseline, and therefore that anomaly can be detected.

If it wasn't possible to slow the game down, one, we wouldn't have baseball as our national sport. Two, some batters wouldn't be better than others. And three, some pitchers wouldn't be better than others.

So, I want you to elaborate on that because you brought up some great examples with the baseball one. You talk about even baseline knowledge. Let's say you're all the way at that pro level, those batters know they have a profile for the specific pitcher that they're facing.

And they know the weather and the humidity, Brian, and the dirt that they're standing on!

I know you didn't see this, but I want to mention because it just came out not long ago. A-Rod did a little social media video thing, and he explained. He's like, "Look, when I'm in that batter's box," and he had a mitt and he had his hand, and he said, "I want to show you what it looks like from my perspective and what I can tell what the pitcher is likely going to do. Because when you hold your, when you hold it for a changeup, you have to hold it this way, which means you have to put the ball deeper into your glove. So I'm looking at his wrist, is all the way up into that glove. Well, when you're doing a fastball, you can hold it down here and you have a certain amount of fingers that you have to use. Now his wrist is going to be below that mitt."

He went into everything, but that's all anticipation, conducted predictive analysis, knowing about that pitcher. Now, I like the sports analogies, but as you know, in the real world, especially in a combat or kinetic situation, you don't get all of that background information. There's still is that you can do, and baseline things. There's not as much complexity as people think that there is, but it's different because, well, if you're U.S. military or police or something, you have rules that you have to follow. The other side doesn't. In baseball, everyone's got to follow a certain set of rules agreed upon before the match. That's not true in real life. Only one side has to play by the rules. So it's a little bit different, but I just wanted to add that in there because that was all what you were talking about and how he did it as a high-level operator.

So training is the function of teaching your personnel that all of those variables exist. Because once you understand that, then you're not pedantic when you go into another culture and just assume that you'll be able to roll with everything. Now you will, because of your tacit and experiential knowledge, but to make an informed decision, there needs to be training beforehand. So that training will expose things like this: "Wait a minute, they eat with their mouths; they don't inhale the food through their nose or try to use eardrops to hydrate." Once you understand that, Brian, then you're on a path to accelerate learning because your brain assimilates all of those new and incoming changes based on the original file folders that you were given. We've been given the ability to do that. Read the Tower of Babylon, a Bible. If you're a biblical scholar, you'll get exactly what I'm talking about.

But let me give you a religious example. Let's look at, and Brian and I were made honorary Jews. We were lucky enough to work with a community in Monsey and other places to help them secure their synagogues and make them harder targets. I want you to take a look at not only the Jewish culture, but I want you to walk down the street and go, "Okay, in the United States, there are four major branches of Judaism: Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist." Now I want you to walk down and point out a person and tell me which they are. Now, I also want you to understand that the person may be a non-practicing Jew, not a Jew, a Hasidic Jew. So now what I have is I have this ball of information that I'm trying to consider as I'm on patrol. None of that helps me determine intent, threat potential, or that an ambush is imminent.

So what we did is, we came in with the idea that while all this information is critical in establishing a culture, culture is merely context. So at the very end of the process, I can, like for example, Brian, I need to understand that it's culturally significant to do A and B. For example, talk to the male in this environment rather than the female. Those types of things. But that's very limited in scope, and I can learn that almost immediately.

Right.

What they wanted to do is rapidly determine hostile intent, and culture has nothing to do with hostile intent. The music you listen to, the food that you eat, the manner of dress—those are all things that make you a unique little snowflake, and we love you for it, but none of that is going to help me determine that you may turn hostile. So that's where we changed, and our definitions changed, and what happened is, we wouldn't... Can I wax poetic for a minute?

Philosophy is wonderful, but I got into an argument with a Colonel that's now a doctor, that was saying that we need to use a Socratic method in training. Well, if we used a Socratic method in training, we wouldn't get paid because I would be asking the class deep questions about a topic they have no knowledge of. You can't introduce a topic without training folks in that topic and then doing Socratic. So at best, the very first time that you're exposed to it, it would be semi-Socratic. I would say something like, "Given this information, how is it going to change our upcoming meeting?" You get it. Now that I would do. Brian, if they asked us to do that, I would do that. But what they did in essence is they said, "Well, we have to understand the meaning of life and how that impacts on the daily shoe tread wear of this person." Brian, none of that is going to make a quick decision on, "I have to escalate or de-escalate with this person."

And that maybe helps later for some purpose, or for after contacting or whatever, to establish communication. We'll kind of get to that point.

Of course, of course.

But one of the other things you kind of, leading into, is one of the things you said in here, and I'll read it: "Additionally, the increased use and availability of social media has allowed humans to belong to many cultures at once, whether they are born into these cultures—gender, race, national origin, class, religion—or choose to be associated with them. Borders no longer limit humans' cultural identities. People can opt out of familial religion and choose a new one, or choose to be recognized as belonging to none, and all free will shall continue to stupefy machine learning."

That was obviously directed at that. But the whole point you brought in there was one of the biggest, I feel, one of the biggest arguments, because now, especially like you said, social media, globalization, there are no borders like that anymore. You have interaction with different people. It's like, "Well, I want to belong to this group now. I'm a fan of this team, and I've never been to one of their games. I've actually never been to the city that they're from, but I really like their uniforms and all their players. So now I'm part of that culture." It's so odd because that's not how it used to be. You used to come from a culture, and you could tell a little bit about that. Even the culture of the neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago is different than the culture one neighborhood over, I mean, vastly different. But that came from historical precedent of different immigrant groups bringing in their different rites and rituals and things that they did from their country into a new one.

So this is, I think, one of the biggest arguments about it. So could you sort of explain what you mean about that?

Yeah, so social media and the speed of information, in essence, has broken down all borders. So borders no longer limit humans' cultural identities, and culture is a choice. It's framed by shared values and beliefs of a unit. Now we're going to get arguments about that, but look, culture is intentional, but the intent it demonstrates has nothing to do with predicting hostility or ambushes. What I mean by that is that you can opt in or out of the family religion. You can choose a new religion, back to my religion, back to my food, back to my music. You can choose to be recognized as belonging to a group or to no group at all. And that's odd because that wouldn't have gone a good long time ago, because the earth and the world and survival was different.

So let me give you an example. There's, and I countered them this morning because I'm taking notes to make sure that I can counter what I know is going to be good arguments brought by you. There's Food Network, which I watch a lot because I love food, but I love the preparation of food, but more, I like the history behind food. So Zimmer has a great show that includes history. Alton Brown, I believe it is, is another one that loves the history. So there are probably 2,500 unique shows on Food Network, and many of those shows have people challenging somebody with the food from their culture. So food is culture. Food has been influenced by history, by historical events, by customs, by tradition, mostly geography and what's available.

So let's talk about geography. Italy and China, both known for noodles. But origin stories, fables, urban legends, modern legend, urban myth, folklore, those stories are generally wrong, but we believe them to be true, so they shape our culture. You get what I'm trying to say?

There's always certain elements of some of those passed down oral traditions or something that happened, and then depending on how far off that the new story is, it becomes part of who we are.

You're exactly right. So understanding culture may allow a U.S. or coalition force commander to overcome or prevent intentional or unintentional racial or ethnic divisions, or prevent the loss of critical information gathering opportunities, but it is not going to stop an ambush or demonstrate hostility. So a dangerous misunderstanding could lead to violence or death. That's where I have no problem with, for example, kaffiyeh. Look it up, folks. Made a big thing about not touching with your left hand and not showing the...

You're talking about culture, like a military member is going to the Middle East, and different stuff they taught beforehand. I remember that. How much, Brian, how much of that proved absolutely significant?

Could you tell?

The classic. That's why I was saying, you knew I was going there. The classic example is when George Bush, when he was president, went and visited Iraq, and he had that press conference. The one Iraqi reporter, one of them that was in there, he threw his shoe at him. W, you know, ducked it, and he threw another one and he ducked it, missed. And then every cable news channel and every news agency had on their subject matter experts about the Middle East going, "Well, in that culture, that's very disrespectful." It's like, I don't care where you're at, if you're up speaking to a group of people and someone throws a shoe at you, they're not saying, "Hey, I noticed you, you could use a new pair of shoes." You know what I'm saying? Like, it's, you, you, there's, there's, that's the dumbest comment I've ever heard.

I would have loved, Brian, I would have loved them bringing on a subject matter expert from the shoe-sharing league that would say, "No, it's a misunderstanding. He actually wanted to share." It's just like breaking bread with somebody. No, come on. That's what we mean by normalizing. Again, when we talk about that, look folks, don't jump on a bandwagon. We're talking clinically. We're talking these are things that are standards that are proven. You know why I like what we do, rather than, and why I argue with Andre all the time, philosophy is wonderful, but philosophy is not like math, and it's not like entropy, and it's not like gravity. I can look at those things and I can understand how they're going to affect a future encounter, but I can't do that. I can't do that with the lens of philosophy.

So you can fool somebody easily by adopting a manner of dress, or being a person that speaks the language like an insider. But you know what? You'll still be found out when it comes to your intent. That's what we're talking about. Intentionality rises above or falls below a baseline. There are things that you have to do before you shoot somebody, before you take a swing at somebody, before you steal a car, before you lie or cheat on a test. And those things are non-culture dependent. Those things are universal, and we look for those universalities in all of the baselines, which means I can adopt it much quicker.

Here's where I kind of want to bring something up where I'm sort of pushing back a little bit, and what I mean is, one of the things that we talk about and then teach people how to do, which is very difficult, is taking another person's perspective. Everyone's heard the saying, and I kind of go back and forth on this because I have sort of a semantic issue with saying that, because you can't really ever take someone's perspective fully. But you can in the moment. Like, I agree with us the way we do it, because it's contextualized. But I can't, I can't then take that and analyze something through Greg's eyes. No, I can take his perspective right now on the situation because I'm in it as well, and I can draw reasonable conclusions. But I don't know what you're going to do next week. I don't know what your thoughts are on some economic policy or something. I can't fully understand that.

But one of the things, and you wrote it in here, you said, "Understanding culture may allow U.S. Coalition Force commanders to overcome and prevent intentional and unintentional racial or ethnic divisions, or prevent the loss of critical information gathering opportunities and dangerous misunderstandings that can lead to violence or death. But knowing these factors in the short term would add no value to the hostility index or prediction of awaiting ambush."

So my thing is, why I brought up perspective, is like, what about perspective? Doesn't understanding something about that culture or maybe give me additional perspective, and in having that, you get what I'm saying? Some of it's obvious, but will some of it give me some sort of insight that will help in these rapid decision-making or determining threat levels or determining intent?

So let's think of a decaying orbit. Let's think larger. Let's think really big. What I want you to think of is just for a minute that culture can help us determine certain factors of likelihood, none of which predict hostility or danger. So what we have to do is we have to discard those things that are just messing with my signal. So my signal out has to be pure, which means I can't be biased, which we have all kinds of shows about, take a look at it.

What we want to do is we want to read the information that is coming in, and you made a great point, and it's the reason that we argue that that makes it a healthy point. Look, if I want to be a better Christian, there's a book that's out there, and I can actually read about the footsteps of another, and I can try to follow in them. So "What would Jesus do?" becomes a lifestyle choice. Now I can likely predict what Greg is going to do faced with this information. Now, what's he going to do right now when I turn on the red and blues? What's he likely going to do if his car crashes? Because he's done this, and I can base that on a number of articulable factors. But I can't project that space-time, I can't project that to some ordinate in the future and determine what Greg's likely to do with this new and incoming information and then draft a proposal.

I can say that you're more likely to stop at a Starbucks than you are a Dunkin'. You know that I'm more likely to stop at a Dunkin' or a Starbucks, but when you're buying, Starbucks sounds pretty good. You see what I'm trying to say?

That green tea. I really like that. It's absolutely wonderful, and it doesn't hype us up when we're teaching.

Yeah. So certain factors are much easier to predict, and violence, rage, danger are those that are the easiest to predict. Why? Because we were intentionally hardwired to be able to read those and to deal with the MDCOA first. The Most Dangerous Course of Action is how we're predicting our environment, how we're taking those time. Therefore, what is pattern recognition? Pattern recognition is understanding the non-dangerous because the idea is that you've already gone through the minefield. So I don't have to kneel down and probe for that mine. I just follow your path and I'm likely going to be okay.

So what we do though, as we turn that on its ear and go, "Yeah, but can I find the person that placed those mines? What was in their head at that time when they did it?" Look at this: they anticipated where your unit would stop and where you would take a knee, and that's where they built. Why? Because we're targeting. We're targeting that specific behavior so we can find that specific individual.

You actually, your Dunkin' versus Starbucks analogy works as a great one to show how people get things wrong as well. I grew up in Chicago; I was used to Dunkin'. Well, there's no Dunkin' out by me here on the West Coast, or there's very few, it's not prevalent. So there's a Starbucks every hundred yards or whatever there is. You can't draw any conclusions on the fact that I bought my coffee at Starbucks instead of Dunkin' Donuts unless you knew something about me.

It's the same thing with you. People go, "Oh, he must..." We draw and we attribute value to observations that you can't, based on meaningless. It's like they are meaningless. That's a great one on why people get. It's like the person who tells you what type of person someone is by the type of car they drive. It's like the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Right. That's a parlor trick. So let's add something into the equation for the folks that know us and have followed us for a good long time. Shelly drinks more coffee than any human being should, and pound-for-pound she could coffee-drink you under the table. Shelly's also a coffee snob. Shelly likes certain coffees and she doesn't like others, and she won't drink Starbucks. Stick around her for five minutes and you'll understand, because of Starbucks' past political views.

So Shelly is unique in that the more you know about Shelly, the more you understand her, because she wears all her emotions on her sleeves and has no fear of discussing with you why she won't drink Starbucks, because she doesn't want to pay into that machine. So now that helps. What did we just do? We didn't learn something culturally about Shelly. We learned something personally about Shelly. Now that helps us determine that this morning when you pull up to Starbucks, we're probably going to have to go another mile and a half and get her another coffee.

Exactly.

But that doesn't project forward that there's never going to be a time that Shelly is going to recant that and based on a number of other factors, choose Starbucks. That's what we're talking about. You can only prove what you can prove. Demonstrating likely intent tends to show, and guess what? Intent is the key.

So if there's no, if culture is intentional, that doesn't mean it demonstrates intent. What it means is that you chose to wear these clothes. You chose to learn that song, to eat a specific food on a day, and celebrate when the moon is in line with a brick. I mean, come on.

No, and you can't. Yes, I get what you're saying is the choices that I make because humans have free will—not as much as we think. A lot is driven by catecholamines and different hormones in the body, more so than we think. We think we're making these choices on our own, but a lot of times it's not. But when it comes to things like that about, especially cultural things, I don't necessarily even know much about that person anymore.

Music, which we use all the time, is such a great example because there was a song a few years back that became popular. They re-did it for a movie, and then they kind of re-did it for kids, and the line is, "I can't feel my face when I'm with you." Well, that's about cocaine and doing so much cocaine he can't feel his face. But these kids are singing along not knowing what that means, and enjoying it. You're enjoying it for two different reasons, and the interpretation is so vastly different that if I were to use just that piece of knowledge I know about that song as going like, "Well, this kid's holding a brick of dope."

Exactly. So there's your probable cause for the search warrant. Wait a minute, no. But look, ABBA, I have every ABBA song ever written or sung on my run mix. Why? Because it makes me feel good when I hear it. Come on, I can belt out all the words to it. It's like Journey, "Don't Stop." Everybody knows that song, and everybody can sing it. So those licks are what's important to us, but that doesn't determine our culture, and we can't look at that and determine that we're going to strike out during an ambush.

So what are those signals and why? Look, DARPA told us, "These are the exact signals that we want to look for." And then after 18 months, they said, "Okay, well, we're going to go in a different direction." So we went in a different direction because that's all we do. Brian, we don't help your company and their bottom line by increasing efficiency through dexterity management. You get what I'm trying to say? What we do is we increase your ability, your capacity for cognition and critical thinking, which means that you can pay lessons forward to anything that you do. That's what we do. We don't build socks. We don't create a better combustible fuel source. So we stick to what we know. And once that goes outside of the purview, and you start with, like, stoicism and philosophy, and I'm not against philosophy, but I'm trying to tell you, philosophy has never, ever, ever predicted a crime. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

And it's never won a war or a bar fight or gained you... It started a couple maybe. No, and that's why my, I always say my line is, my favorite philosophers are all physicists because they have such a deep, deep understanding of how the universe works and how the world works. And when they do it for a really long time, they know what we can prove, they know what they think, and they know what they don't know. So when they start thinking about those deeper questions, there's some really, really good insight in there, and that's why I always have that line.

But, to go back to this, one of the things you said sort of towards the end, "In current and future instances of cross-cultural psychology, human actors will be able to portray cultural alliances or non-hostility in attempt to fool U.S. or Coalition forces. Body bombers and snipers do it every day. Criminals, terrorists, insurgents, that's what they do. Con men, confidence men, same thing."

You said, "A cunning enemy will not be able to accomplish their mission without demonstrations of intent, proven by discoverable, measurable, and repeatable human behavior characteristics and atomic actions." This was referring to the program we were on. "From the Combat Hunter program principles, you said you can fool a bot when it comes to your culture, but you would have to sacrifice mission accomplishment to hide your intent." What do you mean by that, especially, you got into, of course, we talked about portraying belonging to different types of cultures, and using that to assimilate, using that to fool someone, urban masking, social camouflage, there's all kinds of different things you can do. But you kind of summed it with, "You'd have to sacrifice mission accomplishment to hide your intent." What can you elaborate on what that means?

I can. So first off, I'll give everybody a homework assignment because we're talking about Atomic actions and meaningful encounters. There's a subway train scene in the film Coming to America where Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd are with a female. I can't think of her name right now because we're on the show. They come in and they're trying to fool the guy that knows the orange futures, and he's the same guy that was in The Breakfast Club.

Wait, wait, is that, is that Bruce? Not Coming to America. Wait a minute, Dan Aykroyd.

Yeah, yeah. So Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and that's the scream queen. So they come in and she's Inga from Sweden, although she's supposed to be Austrian, and she messes it up. And Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, "Hey, hi, Caskey University!" and they're dancing and they're doing all that other stuff.

So the idea is, in current and future instances of cross-cultural psychology, human actors can portray cultural alliances that they don't have. What do I mean by that? So when we employed role players, the role players weren't cultural role players. They were role players that rode a bike or worked at a factory or worked at security. Why didn't we do the culture? Because you didn't speak the language anyway, and you were there when I had a bunch of generals together at Benning, and they all flew in just to see the demonstration. What I did is I had a bunch of soldiers that were not from any foreign country; they were just an amalgam of the soldiers that we were given, and they were wearing costumes as if they were in country. What I told them is, "Listen, no matter what they tell you, you don't speak English. Tell them you don't speak English in English, and we'll offer a translation." I did the translation in English to English, and after just a minute of doing that, the generals started asking me, "Hey, ask him about this. Do you remember that?"

So the idea was that we can fool somebody. I'll give you an example. When we went with DARPA to MSCT, the Military Operations in Urban Terrain Combat Training Center (MUTCC MSCT) Urban Training Center, they had role players that were acting out certain roles. The problem is, right back to your, "I can't walk in those shoes unless I know a little bit about it." The people were demonstrating what they witnessed when they went to a souk in a foreign country, and so therefore that and their personal identity came out to create that role. Well, that doesn't mean that they were sinister.

Look, to be a cad, to break a window and steal your computer doesn't take a bald guy with a white cat and a bunch of planning on a dry erase board. Those crimes aren't perpetrated by terrorism. It doesn't take a huge network of super geniuses looking for cracks. They look for opportunities. They look for people that are coming together. So what happens is, when we use cultural role players, we insist upon saying, "The smells and the sights and the tastes and sounds would be different." Yeah, they would be different if there was an ambush present, because everyone in that scene is going to know something is different, and they're constantly going to be looking over their shoulder or stepping, whether they knowingly or accidentally or incidentally, step behind cover. Those things happen in a crowd. Now we know we can prove that, but we don't know that we can prove the other one.

So we had a test where we determined, "Everybody tonight is going to wear blue jeans and a white shirt."

That's the thing, you know, that and that was our idea was, "Okay, here's what the test should be. Here's how to do it." Everyone is literally wearing blue jeans and a white shirt, and maybe if you want to, because you're talking about distance and autonomous vehicles of different types, like a ball cap on, because that overemphasizes their functional field of view and what they're looking at. So you can determine it easier from a distance, literally, because it's facing forward and the ball cap is pointing to what they're looking at. But using that as a descriptor, Brian, we're using that to further define. If everyone's wearing the same thing, then it's solely based on their behavior within that context and how they act, and nothing else.

You can do that. You can prove that the people working together will be walking through the crowd together. They're going to be looking at different things. It becomes, when you do that, it actually becomes a purer, easier signal. That was the whole thing, especially in the Middle East and stuff like that where a lot of people are dressed very, very similar. It's like, "Well, good!" Exactly. It's like, "Well, how do we...? Well, yeah, for a description, it's going to be tough if they run and take off. That's going to make your job a lot harder. But it's not. Now you're forced to look at how they're interacting with their environment, and that's a much more pure signal than the T-shirt they have on.

So let's do that. We were given a situation where there was a, we were in an area of Pakistan, let's say, and the food truck operator had an RPG and a number of nose cones concealed within his food truck. He was positioned so he could not only conduct surveillance on the intersection where the bots were going to come in and help the team on the ground conduct a snap ECP (Entry Control Point). Everybody follow me. Slow it down. Listen to what I'm saying. So this truck was overlooking this place where they knew the squad was going to slow down, and that the bots were going to be involved. This guy had an RPG and a couple of nose cones, and when the time was right, he was going to pop up from the food truck and he was going to shoot into that team. Now all the time he's concealing himself in a food truck that's serving food to people.

So what was he doing more of, Brian? Was he doing more watching? Was he interacting with the crowd? Imagine yourself in that situation. So imagine three situations: imagine the first situation that he's just a guy serving food, and what that would look like and feel like and smell like and taste like. Now the middle one, where the guy's got an RPG at his knees and he's doing the "should I stay or should I go." And the last one, where he doesn't give a damn about serving any food and all he's going to do is blow the guys up with the RPG. Would there be tangible cues to each of those, and could you pick that out against a baseline?

That was even before anything happened. I think that was one of the times on that one where it was like, "Why would anyone park a food truck right there?"

You wouldn't. You, but they had to for the purposes of the ambush. Otherwise it wasn't for the best place to park to get the most people.

That's the thing. It's like, "Well, that's unrealistic because you wouldn't park there, right?" If you, or I'm spotting this before anything even is happening a mile away because it's a hell in Keller, man. There's no reason to park a food truck there. You're not going to get any, you're not going to make any money.

You and I were in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we were in Iraq and somebody was firing off an RPD (Ruchnoy Pulemyot Degtyaryova, a Soviet-era light machine gun) into the sky and throwing a grenade, we knew that was a signal to attack or a final protective fire. But in Afghanistan, that was a signal that your daughter's getting married during an arranged marriage. You can't just wear that one lens. Arranged marriages is a great thing. You know that vaginal mutilation is a thing in a certain culture, and Brian, that's dying out, and now it's criminalized in some places. So why do cultures die out? With 15,000 cultures on the planet, why do they die out? Because dominant cultures are pervasive, and those cultures lack an immunity from the dominant cultures, from their disease, from their modern weapons, from their politics, from their technological advantages. So that's what creates what we have now, and going a step backwards is actually going to give us a better chance of being racial when we're profiling. I hated to say that, that's why I'm watching my words, but think about that.

No, and again, if you're going to do some sort of deep dive on culture and your comparison, it shouldn't be. It should be, "What elements do I see in every single one of these?" Because those are the key elements that are needed. One, for survival. They're needed for something. It's an idea, a thought, or something that has stood the test of time. So whatever major religion you're part of or group, everyone has the Golden Rule. You should treat others how you want to be treated. Everyone, because that's not particular to a certain sect of people.

So you get these different ones. Now there's a difference. There's, like, the one tribe in Africa where shaking your head left to right is yes and up and down is no. But that's learned. Guess what? There's three of them left! It's horseshit.

So let's throw Atomic actions at you. Atomic actions are a universal signal, and SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and DARPA and everybody else that studied us said, "Yes, that's valid. That's a valid point." And HBPR (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition) is full of examples of that. So if you as a sniper understand that a prone position is much more stable as a shooting platform than, for example, standing off-hand. So the atomic action of prone can be associated with a number of things. Prone can be, "I'm sleeping." Prone can be, "I'm injured." Prone plus something might be meaningful. Well, what things? If I'm prone and in the shade, I might be sleeping because it's cooler. But if I'm prone in the shade and I'm oriented to the approach of your squad, I might be a sniper. There are different values. Am I laying on my back or am I laying on my stomach?

Yes, and is either of those indicative of a culture? Well, no.

Kneeling? Well, I kneel to pray. Yeah, you also kneel to fire off a shoulder-mounted weapon system. So there's a certain amount of Atomic actions that we teach people that you should look for. Why do we try to, Dr. Bill, still thinking about you, why do we try to slow the game down? Because when we do, we make better choices. So if we're always running to the sound of gunfire, we're not always going to make the best choice because there's a certain inevitability that we create by running up on a person with a gun. Now we don't have cover and they don't have cover. Guess what? No time for that lesson, lethal or de-escalation. Hell, we're not even talking, what's the de-escalation? "Drop the gun, drop the gun, put away the machete."

So what we tried to do is build into these teams the ability to predict where it was more likely that they were going to encounter the hostility based on what, Brian? Based on a certain number of very simple physical rules that are in society. I can't shoot or see through a wall. So it'll be at a corner of a building. The squad is going to have to take a break, and where would that be? Where's the likely potty break going to be? Where's the likely water break going to be? Now, if we start putting those together very simply, that algorithm that we created for normalcy becomes a baseline, and therefore all we do is search for an anomaly within that baseline. Our program is so simple, it's elegant, and people still fight with it. Why do they fight with it? Because they go, "Well, there's got to be something else there. It can't be that simple." It is that simple. It really is. The sooner you realize that, the more you see.

That was a great one too, because we were actually able to show them. They had some idea of, "This is kind of ambush." I was able to find, remember we found the one where we had video, it was Taliban video. So they took the video of them hanging out waiting for the ambush. I'm like, "This is exactly that thing. Look, from a distance, you can tell they are at a geographically, this is where they're at. There's no reason to be behind that building. There's nothing there for them to be. Why are they hanging out there? Okay, they're under the shade, got it, but that also provides them with a little bit of screening and a little bit of movement right here. And where do they keep orienting towards?" Well, that major intersection right there where they're waiting for the ambush to happen, the convoy to come by. There is no other reason within this context to be there. They're clearly showing anticipation. Their functional field of view, simply where they are at in space and time. That's it. That's enough to determine likely intent.

You don't need anything more than that. Doesn't mean you have to kill them at that.

But then all of a sudden, then it's like, "Oh, there comes the machine gun!" It's like, "Well, yeah, of course, what if they didn't immediately start picking up some rakes and shovels and head out into that field and start a news camera and a microphone to record the event?" Brian, you're so spot on that I want to depose you very briefly. Can you give me an example? Listen, folks, when I wrote the seven-step terrorist planning cycle, I didn't write it from the standpoint of a checklist. I wrote it from psychological: "What would we likely see? What are the things that would happen during that phase that indicate how far out the attack is and an impending attack?" You can find one. So Brian, do me a favor, what's the difference between observing training and observing a rehearsal?

That's, training, you'd be training for anything. You'd be training for a marathon. You're training for something. You're developing skills. You're training shooting. You're training at whatever it is, doesn't matter. But a rehearsal implies that there's already some sort of intent. There's an objective already, because you're rehearsing something that you think you're either likely going to do or see or need to be prepared for. So it's very different. Training could be anything. But a rehearsal is you're going through the motions of something you're expecting to do, so there's an intent behind it. And there's, you've already, you already have a purpose, you already have a plan in mind. There's already an objective. I guess that would be my definition.

That's, and it's an exactly perfect definition for the uses. So if you're old enough to remember the M79, the bloop gun, or if you were brought up on the M203, the idea was that you were shooting a projectile that's going to have an arc, and it's going to go somewhere. So the very first time that you shot it, you shot it down range and you watched and you went, "Ooh, ah." Then the second time, they took engineer taping, big circle, and you just tried to get it in the circle. And then what they did is they created a window out of a target frame, and you had to get it through the window. That's all training. That's all training to make you better at a certain skill.

But you doing parkour up the side of a building, hand over hand across a gutter, and then using a circle cut to defeat the security on a specific window, that's a rehearsal. So the idea is each one of those demonstrations of intent presuppose something that's about to happen. And if I saw them in time—that's space-time, that's the gift of time and distance—then I would make a reasonable conclusion based on those artifacts and evidence. That's what we do. We say that with DARPA, the supervised autonomy is sort of like tongue-in-cheek. Why supervised autonomy? Because no machine learns on its own. And we talk about machine learning, but if a human probes that it's a human, it's a supervised autonomous program. We wanted to make sure that our troops were smarter and safer going in any urban environment on the face of the planet.

You can't do that with 15,000 cultures. You can't. Now listen, you can do it with noodles. Let's go back to Italy and China. Italy and China are the ones that came up with the noodles, and because of trade, because of war, because of need, all of those noodles are all over the place, and there's not a place on the face of the planet that you can't get a goddamn noodle. Brian and I were having an empanada in Colombia, and the next day we were up in Wisconsin and we were having a pasty. And a couple of weeks after that, we were in North Carolina and we were having whatever the Distinguished Savage calls them: meat cakes or something. It's all the same. It's all the same. So what you're looking for is a demonstration of intent where it's not the same.

I'm not talking about a person that has blue hair. I'm not talking about a person that's dressing provocatively. I'm talking about a signal that's so strong that it rises above or falls below a baseline, and it's unaccounted for. Once that's unaccounted for, then we do the explanatory storyline and go, "What else could it be?" That's how you find an ambush. That's how you find a sniper. Like, for example, a guy wrote on LinkedIn this morning, I was reading it at about 4:30 in the morning, and a Brit guy said, "Hey, congratulations to this Constable. Three days on the way home from work, he encountered burglars and tackled the burglar and arrested him and held him when cops came, and they said he's a hero." You know what I say? "What happened to that shift? Those guys that are working midnight, what are you doing? You need to be out there looking where this and that guy needs to share that tactic with them so they can find the burglar."

That's all we're doing is we're showing you how to open your brain to assimilate information and utilize that information, co-opt that information to help you support a reasonable conclusion. Don't start with a conclusion, because if you start with a conclusion, you already have your thumb on the scale, Brian. So when we go into these foreign countries and we're already warning ourselves about what is going to happen...

That's my problem with, you immediately start creating different biases when you start saying, "Well, what about this culture, that culture, this culture," or "cultural difference." You're automatically sort of skewing your observation in a sense because you're not then looking for some sort of pure signal about intent, about Atomic actions and functional field of view orientation, because those are physiological that you can't really control, even sometimes. If I'm sitting here and I've got my headphones on and I'm jamming out, they're cranked up, and I'm looking out the window, and I see people walking by. All of a sudden, someone stops and turns quickly and looks at something. I don't need to hear that it was an explosion over there. I don't need to know. I can tell, I can see that ripple go out through that crowd of people and see the basic Atomic actions to go, "Hey, something just went down. Something just happened over there." Now I'm at the point where I need to figure out what this is. I don't need to hear it. I don't need to smell it. I can see it from a distance and determine what's likely happening, and that informs, of course, my decision-making, my intervention, what I'm supposed to do.

But there's no, the other problem with culture, because cultural stuff is interesting to me. I love reading about different cultural anthropology stuff and how things change. I love how food is a great one, how it changes from one place to another. They go, "Man, I had this really cool thing when I was on this trip here. I'm going to try and make it here, but I don't have all of those same spices. I don't have that type of meat. I'm going to make it this way." And then, "Oh my God, that's really popular now!" And everyone's like, "Well, you stole that from..." It's food, all right? It's food. Every culture steals from everyone's stuff because it tastes good and they go, "I want to try some of that in this." That's actually when you get some of the best stuff. It's a mix of different diverse cultures in their food. So food's such a great example. Music's another one, because everyone steals from everyone when it comes to music, and everyone wants to say, "Well, we had that originally." It's like, "No, but you took that from somewhere else." Exactly. Nothing's original. Everything comes and goes.

So let's go back to the Combat Rule of Threes and the Cognitive Rule of Threes. Very simply, why did I write the Combat Rule of Threes? Because certain coalescing cues that come together definitely indicate certain things are going to happen. For example, "no" means "no" on a date. But when you know you're getting the third base coach waving you ahead, and the mood lighting is good, and the female or male that you're with, or both, is undressing in a provocative fashion and opening the door to the bedroom and giving you the thumbs up, that would likely indicate to a reasonable person that things are about to happen.

So when you see those environmental cues and baseline anomaly cues that start coming up like that, when they come together, they tend to show something. Now, what Koko and others kept trying to do to that is influence it. What I mean by that is we had very simple things. If it's the first day of school or the last day of school, expect an attack. I'll tell you right now, if you're a teacher, know that that's going on. If there's going to be a parade, expect an attack. Why? Because it's a bunch of people forced into a situation which makes it easy for me to be a body bomber.

So we would talk about those things from a psychological standpoint and necessity and inevitability. And then what they would do is they would go, "Okay, a recent shave and washing and wearing white closest to their body, holy hell, that's nine things I got to remember." So what I would say is a drastic sudden change. Now, drastic sudden change, Brian, that means something to me. All of a sudden, you were on your phone every day, and today you're not on your phone. And every other single day that you came in, you were wearing your hat and your Green Bay Packers jacket, and today you're not. And you know what? You had a full beard and you're not, and you were joking and you're not. That's what we need to look for. We need to look for the change against the baseline elements that we had created, and that's likely going to deter that something's going to go on.

Why do I look for an MDCOA? Because we're already pre-programmed to do that. So training for an MDCOA is much easier than training for an ML (Machine Learning). And so why do we have to focus our energy and time in class on doing that? Why did we get along with the DARPA program? Because they knew we were the best in the world at it. They auditioned a whole bunch of talent to bring them in for DARPA, and they brought us in because they knew that we were the closest to the answer. I think that's great, and I think you'll see that when you read the study and you read the reports.

Yeah, yeah, and I'll put that on the Patreon side for everyone, for those folks who subscribe, and they can read through that. We sort of had... Yeah, and we covered a lot, which is why you can go back and read this stuff, which some of those folks will. But this has kind of been our argument with folks a lot of times when they want to add in additional complexity that doesn't help. It doesn't help in most situations. It may help understand a certain talisman I find in your house, a certain artifact, a certain thing to go, "Oh, okay, yes, this Santeria is very popular among narcotraffickers." So maybe that adds weight to my search that otherwise wouldn't. Because you know that it's additional things afterwards. It's more, it's another example, the sprinkles on the cupcake, which may help sense-make later, but in the decision-making moments, it's unnecessary, especially in highly complex or highly stressful situations, because all that goes out the window. Everyone, it's who you are as a human and what you're going to do as a human, not what you're going to do as a member, as a Raiders fan. I don't care what culture or clique or set or group. It's what are you going to do within this context? And then you're going to repeat that behavior over time, and what you've done before in the past, you're likely going to do in the future. That's what I can go off of because it's a much more pure signal, and you're going to be right far more than you're wrong. That's, that's the only... No one's right all the time, so that's the standard. Are you right far more than you're wrong? Okay, then you're doing it correctly, because you're on something.

So think about it too, our gating mechanisms, Brian, are very simple. Look, it works in everything. It's going to make your relationships better. It's going to make your conversation with your kids or your significant other better. It's going to make your social engagements better. But that's not what it was designed for. That's an ancillary benefit. It was designed for semi- or non-permissive environments where actors within that would likely do you harm, and could you determine them from the population that doesn't mean anything?

That is just going about their day. Exactly. And let them go about their day.

So we didn't, you know what, nobody likes a DUI checkpoint, and we've created that inevitability. Nobody in a foreign country likes us searching their home or tossing their stuff or searching them every time we see them. So if we can avoid that, that's a form of long-term de-escalation in our gift of time and distance. The gift of time and distance allows for that cognition. It solves problems before problems become that dangerous.

You avoid the, "Well, you're doing this because I belong to this group," or "You're only doing this because I have color," or "You're only doing this because I..." It avoids that because it's a scientific way of looking at the actions and behaviors, not your God you worship or God you don't worship or whatever. Those things are great; they make you who you are as a human, but it doesn't tell me anything about your behavior. So I think, yeah, that's a lot that we covered.

We covered a lot, and there's a lot more we could unpack in future episodes, buddy. Seriously.

We'll get some feedback from the folks on Patreon because you can read through what we listed out too in the after-action. "Hey, these are the things we were attempting to show. This is what we were able to show. Here are what the research questions were. This is what we were trying to do, and this is how we covered that." If you're familiar with our work, then you'll appreciate it and go, "Oh, okay, I see what you did there." Of course, this had to do with, again, training machines and bots and creating algorithms, and that's not going away anytime soon.

Please add that we were pioneers in augmented reality and virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Look, there were people that did it before us, but when we were brought in, we were brought in as subject matter experts, not brought in to say what we thought and give a humble opinion. This is important stuff, and there has to be a science-based approach. A lot of the conjecture that's going on out there and a lot of the books that are being written are non-scientific or unscientific. Go to the science. The science will always determine which path that you should follow.

Yeah, well, I think that's a good point to end on, Greg. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate you going into detail about some of this stuff. If you're listening, you have questions, just please reach out to us. Obviously, on the Patreon side, you can find the links in there, but it's the Arcadia Cognera page, and you can sign up for a couple of different tiers there if you're interested. Then we also have The Human Behavior Podcast at gmail.com if you're looking to reach out to us. It's very, very simple to get a hold of us. Any other final thoughts on this, Greg?

I just reiterate, you can fool a bot when it comes to your culture, but you're going to have to sacrifice mission accomplishment to hide your intent. Intent always sticks out. You just got to be trained how to look for it.

Okay, well, I think that's a good spot to end on. And just reiterate, don't forget that training changes behavior.