If It Walks Like A Duck

All right, Greg. We're recording and we got a good one today. Today, everyone, we are talking about a few things: ducks and platypuses, headlights, and a whole bunch of other things. Let me just start off by explaining what I mean by this.

If you've ever heard the saying, "If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, acts like a duck, whatever, it's a duck." Well, there's also something that's very similar to a duck. If you're not familiar with this, you can go down the internet rabbit hole after this episode, but it's something called a platypus. A lot of people don't even know when you talk about it that it's a real actual animal. I think they've seen it in a cartoon or something and they're like, "Wait, a platypus is real?"

But the idea is the duck and the platypus have a lot of similarities. They both have broad, flat bills. They have webbed feet. They're semi-aquatic. They live in and around the water. They're excellent swimmers. They both lay eggs, which is actually extremely rare for mammals. They kind of look similar, they act similar, they talk similar.

But the key difference is that a platypus has venomous spurs on its hind legs. Yes, they can be used for defense and things like that. They're toxic. They're actually used for reproduction, almost like a date-rape drug type situation there. But there are other uses for it. If you get stung by those, it could really hurt you. If you're a little kid, it could probably kill you. So the point is, not everything is a duck that looks and walks and talks like a duck. That's my preface. I'll get into why we're talking about that in a minute.

We're also talking about headlights today. Sometimes we outrun our headlights, if you've ever heard that, meaning you're driving faster than what you can see. Other times, we completely forget to turn the headlights on and we're driving blind in the dark. What I'm getting at with these analogies, and we're going to jump into a couple cases and explain what we mean, is that people often mistake a duck, thinking it's a duck, and it's actually a platypus. Or the opposite, "Oh man, that's a platypus. It's going to sting us," and it's really just a duck.

Sometimes there are opposite ends of the spectrum where we're go, go, go, go, we're onto something and we start outrunning our headlights, we miss really important things. Other times, we forget to turn them on at night and we're driving blind in the dark, so we're going to hit something, we're going to run into something.

Those are the two main topics, Greg: the duck-platypus analogy and our headlights. I'll throw to you to set up the story and some of the examples we're going to use. This is something that's common all the time. This is everything we talk about, summed up in headlights, ducks, and platypuses. I'll let you be the one to set up the story and make sense of what the hell Brian is talking about today.

A couple of things. If we used the beginning of this, I think we could get an involuntary commitment for Brian if we gave no context and just had you blabbering about ducks and platypuses. That's hilarious.

Well, that's not hard to get involuntary commitment. Any time you just have me talk to a mental health professional, they're immediately hitting the red button to cancel my 'under the table' payments.

And our good friend, our ground branch guy from New Zealand, Jason Jones, if you're listening, spent a lot of time in Australia and New Zealand, says that platypus tastes just like chicken. Also, you brought up toxic reproduction, which in fact is under my photo in my high school yearbook.

I was going to say, there are a lot of people who are the product of toxic reproduction and we're out. The call's over.

For those of you who are listeners and were lucky enough to visit the Powder Horn Guest Ranch, and you came in on the road to the middle of nowhere, which was beautiful and primitive wilderness and everything, you remember passing Reese Tree. It was a huge old willow that grows by the Seavoya on a dirt road to nowhere. There are only a couple of ranches back there on that road. There's huge scarring on the tree from people hitting it. Based on my own research and the research of the people that lived in the valley, and why it was named after Ree, what happened is people at night would outrun their headlights. You're on a dirt road, you're getting to go real good at a clip, you know the road by heart, and then all of a sudden something steps out in front of the car, or you get into a little bit of a skid and overcorrect. You don't want to go into the river which is on your right side. You don't want to go into the mountain which is on your left side. You're prone to hit a tree.

What happens is we all do that. Think of the beginning of Star Trek. She was my favorite. The masturbatory fantasies. I want you to think of driving, and all of a sudden the snow is coming at you, and you make the mistake at night of turning on the high beams. When you turn on the high beams, it becomes overwhelming, and you can't see (expletive) through your front windshield because the snow is taking everything. That's what happens to your mind. Your mind gets clouded, and all of a sudden you're driving, and then you go a little bit faster and a little bit faster, and you think, "I have to get there. I have to get there right now. It's important." Here are two capers, Brian, that we can talk about today that both talk about outrunning your headlights, and it can be fatal. Both of them deal with a platypus.

The first one, briefly, and folks, do your homework. It's in the story details, and Brian will have all the links set up for you. The first one is very simple. There's a female going down the freeway that's bleeding. Somebody calls EMS. EMS shows up. Sure enough, a disoriented female is walking in the median. They know nothing about it, but it looks a lot like a duck, and the duck is bleeding. They get her into the back of the rig, and while she's in the back of the rig with the paramedic, she pulls out a knife and stabs the paramedic fatally. He ends up dying on the way to the hospital. Nothing they could do. Not only that, but she jumps out of the back of the rig and tries to steal the vehicle. She's overpowered by a couple of coppers and other firemen. That copper who saved the vehicle couldn't save that paramedic. Why? Because God, Buddha, Fish knew a lot. Put these things out in the open for us. They're covered. They look like a duck. It's just another call, Brian. It's just a female in distress. What they didn't know is that she had just bonded out for an assault on a copper a day before that, and that she had a violent and unpredictable history. Here, a guy doing his job encounters the platypus, and this sting was vital.

Now hold that in your mind for just a second. Then we can break these down. Second story: a copper's doing his job. It doesn't matter if it's male or female, I don't give a (expletive) about those things. Think about the story and the heart of the story, and you can always look it up and dig deeper on your own. A copper sees a sled go by and says, "Those windows are illegal tint." That's great because a copper is interested and wants to look at their environment, and being curious, picks this car out, and now it's a legitimate stop. It's a legal stop.

On the stop, he thinks, "This guy's acting squirrely, and I'm getting information through my five senses that there might be drugs on board." Based on my experience, that means at this point I call two people: the window tint guy to confirm the tint so I can write the ticket, and dog boy. Dog boy can bring the dog by and see if the dog hits on it. Sure enough, the dog hits on it. Long story short, do your homework. They captured the guy. He's got narcotic paraphernalia in the car. A further search determines that he's got two types of drugs on him. They get him back, and he makes some arrest statements. They get a search warrant based on his interview and interrogation. That street interview, arrest, "chest" statements, go a little deeper. Now he's in custody. He's not free to leave. He makes statements that are protected. And they execute a search warrant on his house.

Brian, they get gun components, more drugs, and all this other stuff. Great caper. This guy started out looking like a platypus. Once they had him in custody, he looked like a duck. No further information needed, buddy; he's fine. What do they do when they get to the jail? They pat him down, and he's got meth and some other drugs with him, and he's got a loaded gun. Headlights in both! Pump your brakes once in a while, because if you're outrunning your headlights and it looks too much like a duck, you're going to relax too soon, and that could be fatal. In both instances, you had people doing their job, and they were doing it well, Brian.

What happened is now, on this caper with the tinted windows, do you see how the entropy and the centripetal force and the third law of thermodynamics are starting to pull in the second and third on this one? All of a sudden, you're going (expletive) hitting a thousand, pardon my language, you're batting a thousand, and then what happens? Some guy up in a jail goes, "Hey, what about the bag of dope and the loaded gun?" That could have been a fatal sting, too. Simply put, and I apologize for the rant, we sometimes get into misadventure, and those misadventures can be fatal because we don't consider the entire picture of what we may be facing. These are two examples of one sort of outrunning the headlights.

Or you've already got a search warrant and are searching his place, and this guy hasn't even been properly searched yet. The other one being that you never even shined a light on it, never even thought of this. You never turned the headlights on to see what this could potentially be. So they're good cases for comparison, and here's why.

First of all, with the paramedic/fireman who shows up, they're coming from this perspective, and we've got plenty of folks who have reached out to us from different agencies. Shout out to the distinguished savage Walt, who has I think three decades in EMS and is a first responder. He's going in there thinking, "I'm here to care for someone. I'm here to do this." You're not coming in from the same perspective as the law enforcement case you mentioned, where it's, "Okay, I'm here to arrest this. I've got probable cause now. I've got this. This is good." This is everything laid out in front of me. That's when we miss it, and it goes back to the duck-platypus thing.

I don't see that right here is the threat. The similarity in those two situations is that the deadly threat was right there in front of your face, and they didn't see it. This is the crux of a lot of these problems where we get into and talk about errors in sensemaking. It's the "how to see" part; it's the recognition that this could be, yes, likely a duck, but it could be a platypus. So what elements would lead me to see that? Then the opposite: "Okay, we've got him, he's in custody, it's no longer a threat." That's not necessarily true. Balancing those two things out, I think, is important because if you go too far in one direction, you're going to be hypervigilant. If you go too far in the other direction, you're just going to be completely oblivious to your surroundings. So, how do I go back and forth or stay in that middle area where I can see and handle those things? That's the heart of what the whole duck-platypus analogy is. It's a comparison. It's an MLMD COA (Most Likely, Most Dangerous Course of Action). Is this everything that I expected it to be, or is it not everything I expected to be?

The overarching reason why these things happen is because we are wired this way for it to happen. I get a hit of dopamine when I do this, and I'm correct over and over again. My brain goes, "Aha, I know this." It just gets rid of all that minutiae. "Don't worry about that. I already know where this is going." It's now pulling you along rather than you determining the path of where this is going. Your unconscious brain, that thing that's meant to keep you alive and can make all these great decisions and do all these amazing things, is leading you to your death or leading you to a place that isn't good, unknowingly, unwittingly in a sense. And so we're just... Yeah. The hook gets set, and I follow that. "Ooh, a piece of candy. Ooh, a piece of candy. Ooh, a piece of candy." And that's why we fall into those traps. What we're trying to get people to do is rather than just following along with what your brain, your own self, your own unconscious mind is telling you to do, what's the path you want to create? How do you explore that? Because I may have to poke my head around this corner to see what's up, and then poke my head around this corner to see what's up. And they go, "Yeah, you know what? We're good on this one." That's the essence of time and distance.

But you have a lot of people that say, "Well, you're not always going to have the time." And I say, "Yeah, you (expletive) do." You always have the time. You actually do. You always have the time. The simple ones are the obvious ones, where it's obvious that you don't have time. That means it's such a significant threat, or so obvious, or it's so obvious that this is just benign, that those are simple problems that anyone can figure out; you don't even need a lot of training or experience to see those. It's all the ones in between that are a little bit more complex where everyone wants to have these different attitudes about it. They never want to say, "Oh, this could happen. That could." It's like, "Well, no, that couldn't." But you guys are saying, "Well, this could be the platypus." Show me. Prove to me that it is. Prove to me that this is different than the one that you're typically used to seeing. And what measures have you put in place to regulate your own response to the situation, to regulate your own thinking? I don't mean a response like, "Okay, step back, do this, draw your weapon," or tactics, techniques, procedure. I mean, how are you thinking about this? How are you approaching this? Because you're jamming in solutions, and you haven't clearly defined the problem yet. That's the biggest thing I see with these situations, Greg.

It makes too much sense. I'll tell you this: Brian and I have already had three or four Zoom calls on a Teams call this morning. We jump into this with very little or no thought. We exchange a couple of emails and say, "Hey, here's the topic for today." I wrote down, if you're a trainer, if you're HR, if you're a copper, courts, corrections, a lawyer, if you work anywhere in any job, get out your yellow pad because I wrote down in just the last 5 minutes and 30 seconds, seven things that you talked about that are huge that you could turn into training.

First things first, go out and buy yourself a Life game. Go to the secondhand store. You don't have to buy the most expensive one. Open it up, throw everything away except that little spinner thing in the center. Break that off the game and take it with you to work. No matter what you do at work, I want you to spin that. Whatever number lands on corresponds to a card that you've created with a conundrum, a problem, a situation, a mental health issue at work, at home, a sucking chest wound while you're driving down the freeway—whatever it is that you're likely to encounter in your job. Write down some of those things and have basic, intermediate, and advanced things. Every once in a while, just spin that dial. If you have an answer to those things that are coming up and it's just theoretical, you've got to work a little harder.

I bought Shel a gun for Christmas, let's say. You know what else I bought with her? The proper holster, some range time, and a first aid kit for her and the person that she shoots. Maybe that's the way I think, because that's a plan, and plans work. If I do the Life game, that offsets what I have to talk about. Probable cause never diminishes. We have boobs that are still out there in our industry, and I love some of them, but they're boobs because they're saying, "Well, you can't control time." Yeah, you can. If you don't go, you're controlling time. If you put it in reverse, you're controlling time. If you make a mistake and shoot first and kill an unarmed guy, you're controlling the time.

The idea is, do you want to control time, or do you want to have time control you? Stop it for a minute, because what you're doing is you're teaching coppers the wrong way. You're teaching people that, "Oh, in some instances, you just got to flip the tire and climb the rope and just gun it out." But those are so few and far between as to be remarkable, and you're shooting nine times out of ten and not thinking one time out of ten. That balance, Greg Prim did a good LinkedIn post on it. Look up Greg Prim on LinkedIn this week. He did a great story on that.

What does that lead us to? I'm in an ambush in Iraq, Brian. The idea is that I think through the ambush, and I write down some things because a person died in the ambush. It was so stupid because we were teaching probably 600 feet away, maybe a thousand feet away from where the ambush attack occurred. We heard the gunfire go out. A soldier doing gate guard with a trusted partner said, "Hey, I want to get a photo." The guy goes, "Yeah, we could get a photo." He goes, "Hey, step back." "No, step back further. No, we want to get the gate." Then the coalition member shoots the American soldier and kills him by getting him to pull away from his partners far enough that after he shot him, he could run away.

What is that? Duck-platypus 101. What is that? Outrunning our headlights. I felt the same way when I read the story, back to your point on dopamine, about the medical call. That paramedic had done 10 calls that day, 15 calls that day. He had the dopamine dump every single time he went out to help somebody. He wanted to be Hippocratic: "first do no harm" and help. He didn't want to think, "Hey, this is the lady that might stab me to death." But that's on that life spin. You've got to spin that son of a (expletive). Every once in a while, picture yourself surrounded by goddamn yellow evidence tape, the tape that says "police line, don't cross." This would have been a perfect situation where, based on the situation, perhaps something was different. We never know. We can't interview him, and the woman's not going to tell us.

What was in his head at that time and place is, "Woman on the freeway needs our help. I'm here, and she's bleeding." We have to slow the clock down, Brian. In this instance, if it's drugs or mental health, do I need to do a cursory search for offensive weapons before I begin? Should I have somebody else with me? Somebody right now is thinking, "Well, you would have never known that." If he worked on the (expletive) job for a day, he would have known that, heard that, saw it, or been trained in that. Am I blaming the death? Am I victim-blaming this? No. I feel shitty that he died, and she should go to the electric chair or the firing squad. But the idea is, I can't turn back time and imagine how important it would have been if that person had not outrun their headlights on that day. One thing could have changed everything, Brian.

Let's go to that final goddamn thing. When you talk about those guys getting safer the further they were in the police station, it's exactly what happened to their brain. We used to call that on the road "the happy end." The guy's in there; he's now booked in processing. Who's going to die? I'll tell you, the Warren police station in Warren, Michigan, is named after somebody that's going to die when at the last second somebody goes "Yahtzee!" and pulls a gun out of their crotch. You and I have both been on these same incidents. Both of us have been in a fire alarm in a hotel where nobody did (expletive). Both of us have been in a goddamn university setting where nobody did (expletive). Nobody even got up to check.

I was at a fire alarm in an airport that you'll remember that I recorded the entire thing on a phone now. I captured it. I captured that entire thing, and you saw everybody was saying, "Run for an exit! This is an actual fire! This is not a drill!" Nobody even got up from the Starbucks. Nobody got up from their chair. Brian, we fail to consider these. Then we go to training, and sometimes training goes over, "Oh my God, do the body drag, throw the flashbang, do the shooting." What we're talking about is an exercise in psychology, sociology, and pathology of an incident.

We cover that in other episodes about the more I'm exposed to something, the less likely I am to see it. Or, every time, who even looks when a car alarm goes off anymore? Because we hear that stuff, or there are sirens, like you said. But what fascinates and interests me, Brian, we go third person here, always, which is part of the reason why I'm in this line of work in a sense. The deepest thing that I am just so utterly fascinated by is how humans just completely arbitrarily attribute value to things and meaning, like this example, because this plays right into training, how we respond, and how things change.

We do a breakdown or an after-action of an incident, or a thing, and then we just randomly pick something in there that we're familiar with, that we think we can control, and say, "That's the problem. If only we had better optics on our weapons. If only we had better this, if we had that, or if we had this technology that could do this." We're just so entrenched in that way of thinking, but we do that with everything. "Oh, I didn't wash my underwear, and we won the big game. It's because I didn't wash my underwear again." I mean, that sounds stupid, but that's how everyone thinks. All of us, me, you, everyone. We just arbitrarily say, "Well, I think it's because of this," and then if we get enough people to agree with it, that's what we do. It's like, "Wait, what? How did you arrive at this point that this is the thing we need to address?" Because maybe there are a thousand issues or contributing factors to a situation, and you chose these to write this policy, to do that.

It's like, "Well, hang on. What were all the things that played into this? Why did this person get here?" Then we come up with a new term for something, and then it's because of that. We're conflating issues, and we're not going to the underlying issues with all of these, which are these errors in sensemaking. I didn't see something that I was supposed to see. I didn't recognize this when I should have. I failed here. But these are sort of cognitive problems. These are principles that you can align and follow to solve for X in any situation.

We get so hyperfocused on, "What's the best decision?" It's like, (expletive), it depends on the context. Each one is different. But even though each one of these things is different, there are underlying things that occur in all of them. It doesn't matter what it is. If it's a parent who misses their kid is suddenly changing behavior, because it's slowly over time, you miss this and you should have seen this coming, but you didn't. So, it's the school's fault, or it's the gun's fault, or it's... "No, no, no, hang on." I understand this is difficult, maybe you don't know how to do it, but these are all the things that went into this problem. So how do we want to address that now with a solution that's going to get really complicated sometimes, especially if you're talking about a policy, or a law, or something like that? That's going to get complex because that's the application of it, but just to determine what can and cannot be done, what's in your control and what's outside of your control. That's where you start, to me. This is just back to what I first started this part of the dialogue with. This is what fascinates and interests me so much, because that's why you did this to me. There are so many things that people just attribute value to, and I'm like, "That has (expletive) all nothing to do with anything," and you can't get them out. These are smart, reasonable people, and we all do this stuff. I do that too. "Oh, it must be because of that. Oh, it's because of this." It's like, "Well, how do you know that? Can you prove to me that if you had known that, or if you had this different tactic, it would have changed the outcome?" Because it would, if you had that already, it would have changed your approach. So, it would have been a different outcome, but maybe that outcome might be worse.

Brian, if you brought that up in court, they would say, "Cause for speculation, Your Honor." It would be an objection. If you can't use it in court, then you can't use it in the realm of science. So, I will make Brian's point, which he made very succinctly, but I'll make it by turning the Hoberman three-quarters of a turn and looking through the orange sight.

If you're a longtime listener, or if you did any research whatsoever, Brian and I used to take the time to break down videos, and we haven't done one in a long time, and we do it in class still. But the difference between us and everybody else out there that breaks down a video is they're all going to tell you what everybody did wrong and suggest tactics and training. What we do is we don't give a (expletive) about what happened at X on the bubble. We say, "Look at all these pre-event indications that went on that were missed, and look at how that could have informed what happens later." We don't show the stabbing or the shooting or the crash or anything because we don't care, frankly, about that. There's somebody out there making money selling you (expletive) to fix that.

What we do is we take the tape and we break down. Every day on LinkedIn I'm inundated, and I probably get, I would say, reasonably five or six requests where somebody says, "Hey, have you taken a look at this video? What do you think?" I won't even answer them anymore because what I see is frippery. I see somebody going, "When this agent steps up here, or when the cop moves this way to the left, notice the shadow on the back of the..." That's all horseshit. That's all speculation. You don't know. You weren't there. You don't have the eyewitness. But can we use it for training? Yes, we can say, "How was it that this person stood behind this planter with a gun for 40 minutes before you loaded up this guy in a limousine, and nobody saw him there? How did that happen?" That's called dead space, folks. That's called using a negative space. You're going to use a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), use thermal. There are answers to every one of these things. But what we do is we go there and we speculate on the moment of contact and say, "Look at how out of control this guy. This guy took a taser, then he took a spray, then he did this. This is why you need training." No, you need to anticipate, "This snowflake is somehow different than all the other snowflakes that fell on my tongue." Therefore, I'm going to have to ramp it up, ramp it down, back it up, get more people. The idea is, the gift of time and distance means outthinking a cunning opponent. If you don't, then you're going to be, look, if you're within arm's reach... I got sued by the White Aryan Resistance because I had a program called "Within Arm's Reach, Go to War," and it was for kids and females back in the day in Detroit. The Clan won that one, Brian.

But think about this. The idea was that if I can touch you, I can kill you. So you've got to stay outside of that span. If you think of nothing more today than that, if you think that road rage never ends well, if you think that if I don't check my fuel gauge, my car will run out of fuel, and if I don't check the air in my tires, I'm going to get a blowout when I need the car to flee the goddamn axe-wielding guy at the lake. Those are things that you should do. We're back to spinning that goddamn life wheel. Brian, how many people do you know do that? What we face is people that go, "When somebody's kneeling on your throat and got a knife to your eye, Brian, come on." We've had more car alarms and fire alarms than we've had people kneeling on our neck and trying to stab us. Yes, those things happen, but guess what? You're spending so much time preparing for this item that may never occur in your entire life, and none on saying, "What would happen just before that person knocked me down? What would happen to put me on the ground in that situation? How could I avoid those things?"

I side for that. I side for the gift of time and distance and everything. Is there going to be the one day you step on your porch and get hit by an asteroid? There are some things out of our control, but time and distance aren't out of our control. Cover is not out of control. Let me give you an example of how I think where the errors occur. Whether it's a police officer pulling someone over, or you look at an after-action review or a witness statement from a school shooting, whatever, someone goes, "I always thought that kid was this," or "I thought something seemed off, but I didn't want to say anything," or "Hey, I thought something was off, or I saw this."

What we would say is, you were picking up on these incongruent signals. You knew it didn't fit a baseline. You knew there was something there. You didn't know what it was. You'd never seen that before. You don't have experience or something. I think people don't spend enough time in that space of not knowing. I'm very comfortable not having all the information, not knowing. You sort of have to be uncomfortable going, "(expletive) I don't know." We got to the point where I don't know. What I mean is, it allows you to continue to gather information and hypothesis test. There's something off here clearly, right? Is there something we got, whether it's a traffic stop or whatever? But this is what I mean by just following along with your brain. That unconscious brain wants the answer. It's forcing you to an outcome, to something, and so it will fill things in to fit the answer that it already came up with. This is heuristics how it does. "Oh, cognitive close enough. This is what that means." That's the central issue: if I don't say, "Well, okay, this is incongruent. Let me go find out why." "Okay, this part is still incongruent. Let me find out why." "Hey, this hasn't fallen back down to the level of just another thing that I'm going to do yet." I'm still continuing to get these incongruent signals. Over time, as those continue to escalate and build, whether or not they escalate, you just continue to see them. It's like you are on the thing that is going to be bad; otherwise, it would have fallen back down. Because you have a lot of great intuitive decision-making skills, you have a lot of experience as a human. So when you got that gut instinct, people always say, "Okay, well, yeah, we wouldn't be alive." So it's like, I've had it where someone's like, "Well, so you're telling me, look, I know what this is. I trust my gut." It's like, yes, you should always trust your gut, but you can't be sure of what the answer is. You can't be sure of the solution. You can be absolutely sure that you are seeing something that's incongruent, and it doesn't make sense, and you might not be able to find out. You might not know why. That's my point: stay there, then figure out, "Why is this an incongruent signal? Why do I feel this way? What is it about the situation?" That goes back to us going, "What's typical?" Your brain says, "I know this is typical. I got a gut feeling that this isn't typical," because it knows it has a comparison that it's using. So it's going, "Okay, continue." If you don't know the incongruent part, then stick with what's typical. What should you expect to see? If everything is normal, and this is going to be a routine thing, and nothing is going to happen that's out of the ordinary, what else would you expect to see? Then you can compare your future observations. Get it?

We call that just updating the baseline of what that is. But that mental process is not calorie-intensive, especially when you practice it. It doesn't take much because it's great to know a lot, but the next best step is knowing what you don't know, which is a huge step forward.

Preaching to the choir on this one, Brian. Isn't that an aspect of being uncomfortable? When we talk about getting comfortable being uncomfortable, the idea is that I don't feel comfortable because I'm reading something incongruent in my baseline. Brian used the term "typical." What's the antithesis of typical? It's anomalous. It's something that sticks above or below the baseline, or a BOLO (Be On the Look Out). Your brain will make order out of chaos with or without you. Which would you rather it be? Think of that for just a second.

Let's talk Hangover Psych 101 because it's the timeline that Brian's talking about. Many of you, if you're still listening, are probably drinking once in a while. You get really shitfaced, and you shouldn't have. All of a sudden, you've got to be at the big business meeting, or the kids' soccer game, or whatever else—your divorce proceedings, sorry Brian, whatever else it's going to be. Then you know you've drank too much, and you know you're still drunk when you wake up, and you think, "Okay, this hangover is so bad, it's going to be with me all day, and I know that I'm going to vomit because my body can't process all of this alcohol. I'm just not sure when it's going to be." Then you've got to do the hard math. "Should I get up and do it right now so I get it out of the way? Or should I mope around all day long? Or should I take a homeopathic cure?" That's what we're doing in police work. That's what we're doing in HR. We're going, "Look, this is going to be a shitty outcome," and we all know it's going to be a shitty outcome, but how can we push it further down the line? Don't rip the band-aid off fast. If you get used to rehearsing and practicing and hypothesizing, I loved your term "hypothesis testing" again, what might happen in situations, then you'll simply come up to gating mechanisms. Most likely course of action: that person standing next to my car is just in the shade of my car and smoking or vaping. Or that person could be a violent, dangerous felon that's going to do a carjacking. What would I need to see to confirm my suspicion? By adding a few seconds from a position of cover and just maintaining your observation, you're going to know that, and you're saying, "Yeah, but I'm a cop. I've got to hurry to the scene. Why? We've got the red and blues. That's why we've got the siren." No, because what you're doing then is you're creating an inevitability because the slope gets slipperier, not easier, when you get to the scene, especially if it's something like a mental health issue.

The family's dealt with this person for years, and you're going to solve it in seconds when you get on the scene. They called you because it's out of their control. But what did you relegate it to, Brian? "Get out of the way. I'll handle it from here." What we do sometimes is we create a situation where we think we have all the answers. I'll go back thousands of years, all the way to yesterday, and tell you: the best scientists say, "Always question your hypothesis. Always come into the room saying that I'm the dumbest person here, and I don't know." You'll learn more, and you won't make those catastrophic errors.

Here, Brian, when we talk about law enforcement, we're talking about a catastrophic error that can kill you, or me, or a bus full of kids on their way to the museum. That's unacceptable.

Sorry, we got Bailey just joined me in the studio here. She's going to curl up in the corner there in her spot. Actually, I cut the door open because she's like, "It's been too long."

Speaking of being the dumbest person in the room, let me speak from that perspective. We're constantly being thrust into situations that are already in progress. That's not necessarily a police call. I walk into my daughter's room, and she's doing something. There's something going on here, and I'm the new thing that is entering the scene. So, I'm going to have an effect on that. Whether you want to be or not. Yes. It doesn't matter what the situation is. Everything interacts with each other. You change the outcome. You bump into something, a little bit of you stays on that, a little bit of that stays on you. This is basic physics. I walk in, and what did you call it—hostile reproduction? No, toxic. That's the one, toxic reproduction. Toxic is when it's consensual and still not a good thing. No other party. But back to what I was saying: if I look at everything as an interaction, and how I'm interacting with this event that is in motion, or a person that's in motion, it kind of helps me see, well, if that thing is in motion, it came from somewhere and it's going somewhere.

How did my interaction with this either change the outcome, change the direction of where it's going? I can't change where it came from. But getting an understanding, to know whether if I'm crossing a street and there are cars coming: is that vehicle coming at 20 miles an hour, and I've got time to cross the street, or is it coming at 75 and it's going to plow into me because it's going too fast? That's how it is. I can look at that and make a fair assessment or a judgment just based on my knowledge and experience and say, "Okay, this likely came from somewhere. I don't necessarily know where, but it has a start point, and then there's an end point somewhere with the situation, or a continuation, or a new place that it's going."

When I come in, how do I change that outcome, or just right off the bat, just me interacting with the situation? This gets back to why I always say you can influence the outcome of every situation you're in. No matter how dire it is, no matter how little control you have, you still influence the situation that you're in. So I think going into that, knowing about that with the right mindset of looking at it, and how to do that with the different tools like the stuff that we talk about, and know my limiting cognitive factors of what's going to get in my way, which are the same limiting cognitive factors of the person I'm interacting with. They're playing by the same set of human behavior rules that you are. Maybe not playing by the same laws, or values, or ethics, but physics is physics, and I know there's a lot we still don't understand about it, but there are rules that we do understand. And there's human behavior, and there's still a lot we don't understand about it, but there are rules, especially the more defined that context and situation is, the easier it is to determine likely outcomes and what's going to happen. So you don't have to go in thinking, "Anything could happen," or, "We don't have..."

Listen to what you just said, and everybody out there, write that down. The more extreme the circumstances, the easier it is to come to the outcome because it becomes inevitable or binary. It decides for you rather than you having to worry about those things. May I depose you for a minute because you brought up a couple of great points there, and I think people at home might not have caught up at your speed.

Brian, since we've worked together, do you know of, have you read about, or have I sent you articles on different people, paramedics being killed by the person they were treating? Yes. Much more than that, at least five or six times that I know that I've sent you those articles. I would say that I would testify to at least five or six above the one that we're talking about today. Would that be a fair assessment? Yes. In that same period of time, would it be a fair assessment to say that you and I have discussed train deaths where people got hit by a train, whether they were standing, or walking, or driving, and killed? About a thousand people die every year in the United States being hit by a train. I would say that you and I personally have talked about probably 35 to 50 of those incidents that I would swear to that's accurate. Would you agree? Yes.

Let's use the train example for just a second. Trains run on a track. Trains create turbulence and rely on friction. If you're not thinking, and you look, you can underestimate a train, and it immediately becomes a duck, and you go, "I got plenty of time to get across this chariot wheel track," the width of the chariot wheels, or where we got the distance between the two rails on the train. That's for the thinkers in the group. "I can get across that four feet in no time at all." Guess what happens, Brian? You're hooked. You're roped because it was a platypus the entire time, leading with its spurs. You're going to get hooked, and you're going to get bit. It's like a scorpion: not all of them will kill you, but one of them will. It's like a snake: not all of them will kill you, but one of them will. Guess what? When your luck runs out, then you're in an (expletive) trick bag, right back to spinning that life wheel.

If we use that train, which is always full of turbulence and friction, even when it's on a good heading, even when it's doing a good thing, then that's got to slow your roll when you're taking a look: "I don't want to outrun my headlights, so let me pump the brake once in a while to make sure I know what's going on here." I remember being on a shooting at the side of a freeway. Am I lying? A person looks at me and comes up and goes, "What can I do?" "Do you understand that this is a cop? It is a fatal shooting, and the suspect is down," because the young person didn't understand the gravity of the situation, Brian. They were ready to run in, but they weren't sure, and the house was already on fire.

With your train analogy, literally just the other day, I'm driving the Insurgent to school in the morning, and we're behind a school bus. It comes to a complete stop right before the train tracks and opens the door. The Insurgent had never seen that happen before. She's like, "Why is that? What's going on? Is a bus driver going to take off, or are they kicking someone off the bus or something?" It's hilarious. I'm like, "No. Do you know a lot of people get hit by trains?" She's like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, "No, we were just having this conversation this week. Like a thousand people in the United States get hit by a train." She's like, "Okay, well, yeah." I go, "Yeah, but think about it. The train is on a track. You know where it's going." She's like, "Oh, yeah, that's weird. How does that even happen?" I go, "Well, it does. But every school bus that is required by law, when they come to train tracks, they have to stop, come to a full complete stop. The driver has to open the door. He has to look down the tracks and look the other way to ensure." She's like, "Well, that seems like a lot." I'm like, "Yes, and as long as they do that every single time, they will never get hit by that train." She's like, "Wow, I had no idea." Your train analogy is perfect. She got it right away because I'm like, "Well, think about that. That's different than a car accident." She's like, "Well, why?" I'm like, "Well, car accidents, cars can hit each other. A train is on the track." I just saw this smile and the light bulb go on. She immediately got it. It was like, "How dumb would you have to be?" I was like, "It's not about being dumb. Certain things happen, and listen, science can be tricky."

Brian, you remember growing up as a kid, before stepping off the curb, the safety patrol would tell you, "Stop, look, listen." You also had to look both ways, remember? And you also want to do it more than one time. It's like a leadoff hitter at an intersection. When the light goes green, you don't hit the gas. You look around because that one person on the phone is still coming; they didn't notice the light turned red. Everybody listening to the sound of my voice, if we agree that "stop, look, listen" is a good thing, and that stopping before a railroad track and looking both ways, then why do we fight the urge to run straight to the scene with gay abandon and not even think about the situation that's going to be facing us, thinking that the faster we get there, the better it's going to be for us? No, you have to be.

Turbidity, and turbulence, and friction are in every meeting. Sometimes it can turn to good things, a home run off your bat, but sometimes it can turn to bad things, your skull getting crushed by a bat. You've got to consider that when you're doing your training. Any instructor out there going, "They oversimplify," first, kiss my ass, the fattest part, and second, take a look at what we're talking about. We're talking about from the beginning of the first time you think about becoming a cop, or HR, or a teacher, or any of this other stuff, you better be training, just like Brian is with the Insurgent, you better be training people to outthink a cunning opponent. Here, the cunning opponent is a giant, lumbering train that's moving so slow, but it still fools a thousand people a year. Think about that. Take a minute and think about that. There's your on-duty roll call for tomorrow, Brian.

So, the duck-platypus and headlight example is how many times you said, "Hey, when someone's like, 'Well, what do you guys do?' and you go, 'Oh, we're selling flashlights.'" We're looking around in the box of good ideas. We're not thinking outside the box; we're selling a flashlight for people to look around inside that box because there's a lot of good ideas in there. The duck-platypus is just that memory-emotion link. It's a way for me to recall or understand, "Hey, is it a duck or is it a platypus? And how can I prove it?" These aren't simple things. We talk about, if there were, people wouldn't die. Yeah, exactly. The duck-platypus one, you could go on and give all kinds of different analogies or use it for a number of different reasons. A duck and a platypus is actually a great example, Greg, of something called convergent evolution. That's where unrelated species evolve similar traits due to environmental pressures. So if now, who's the smartest guy and the dumbest guy in the room? But it goes back to if biology and Darwin said that this is how things evolve, and sometimes some unrelated species are going to evolve similar traits due to the environmental pressures, due to the situation that you're in over time.

It's just another way to look at it. The balance there is always, "Am I, is this what it seems to be? Is it not what it seems to be? Did I miss something?" That sort of questioning, I think some people overdo it. Those are the overthinkers, the people who can't make a decision, who are trying to come up with too much. What adds to that is the idea of, "Well, you don't have enough time," or, "You don't have all the information," or, "You've got to have this," or, "We've got to do something now." You rarely ever do, and when you do, it's obvious. I see that stuff out there, and someone literally wrote an article saying, "Well, sometimes you just don't have the time." It's like, well, yeah, if that's the way you think, if that's the way you look at things, you are going to fulfill that prophecy. Exactly. That leads to missing things that are all those pre-event indicators. That type of thinking leads to binary decision-making: "Well, it's him or me." There are a few options in between there, but you're going right to that. That's what forces that, and you're just following your brain along that track. You're following that unconscious roadmap when you can make your own roadmap. Maybe it's not going to work out exactly the route you want it to be, because it's going to change, and I'm going to update my hypothesis over time. I'm going to update based on, "Oh, there are new traffic conditions, I'm going to take this route instead." "Oh, there's construction going on over there, so I'm going to jump over to this street instead." That's what we're talking about: rather than just following the (expletive) GPS and following what Google Maps tells you, yes, it's right a lot of the time, but it doesn't know everything that you know. It doesn't have the conscious ability to process that incoming information and question it, so it just gives you the answer. That's what your brain does. It just goes, "Here, just go here, make a left, it's where you go." And the time and distance factor is where that changes the calculus a little bit, if that makes sense.

I think that if you are a copper on a call, and especially if you're a boss, think about the way NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) conducts investigations. Look back, and you'll see that there are trends, and if you follow the trends, you'll follow the danger signs. What we're talking about are pre-event indications that would show a reasonable person that (expletive)'s about to go sideways. The other thing is to take a page from Scott Mann's great book about "No One's Coming to Save You." Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, dear friend, great guy. I haven't seen you since Lewis McCord. I would ask Brian, what was the name of the pilot on the Hudson? What was that guy's name in a church down in Texas? We keep thinking, Brian, because we're humans, we keep thinking that's all we've got to do is have that guy there, or be that guy. What I'll do is I'll raise my stakes to be at the level of that. No one's coming to save you. You're all you've got. So you've got to outthink that cunning enemy. To do that, Brian, you've got to give yourself that gift of time and distance, buddy.

The NTSB one is a great one because they go through everything, they see how it happened, what were the contributing factors, and look at all the data. Even when it comes down to, "Oh, it was pilot error," they don't just go, "Okay, it was pilot error." They go, "Okay, what error did they make and why?" Then they find out, "Oh, it was, hey, that pilot actually was making the right choice, but he was making it based on incomplete information because of this other thing that occurred." So to them, it was the right decision. However, if they had known this thing, or if they had seen that, or if they had heard this radio transmission, they wouldn't have done that. But there was a hot mic at that time. This is how things are. Everything. Yeah, I totally agree. That's a whole episode. We should bring Sean on for that one.

I know you want to round the wagons. I've only got one more shout-out if I can throw it on this episode before we go out. Shout-out to Force Science. Bill Lewinsky, Dr. Bill, stepped aside, and Brian Baxter from Texas is the new CEO. Brian Marren and I both know Brian Baxter from his body of work. We've both commented on his LinkedIn posts before. Seems like a great, level-headed, experienced vet and former copper. So congratulations to Baxter. Good thinking for Bill to step aside and do other things. It looks to me like we've had a long relationship with Force Science—a love-hate relationship, maybe sometimes—but this is a great thing for them. Heartfelt congratulations to Brian Baxter.

Oh, yeah. I'm sure he'll appreciate that. Yeah, like they listen to us.

Brian, I listen to us, and I listen to them, but I spend a lot of time listening to us.

I don't know about that. We talked about a lot here: the duck-platypus—is it a duck? Is it a platypus? And prove it. And then the headlights, man. Are they on? Am I outrunning them? These are just simple ways to look at it.

I love that. That's why we use those simple analogies. Or I guess it would be a metaphor. No, it would be an analogy. I get mixed up sometimes. I just make it up when I don't know. It's not a simile. It's not another name for a monkey. All right. Well, don't start. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Don't forget that we do have more stuff on the Patreon site, and thank you. Shout out to our Patreon subscribers. Always reach out to us. Maybe we should do an episode on toxic reproduction. We do that on Patreon, that term "flooded."

Oh, yeah, that would be a good one.

Always reach out to us and give us anything you want us to cover or talk about, or some questions; we're more than happy to answer them. Of course, our Patreon subscribers, we answer you right away. If you're reaching out as a fan, it might take me a little bit to get back to you, depending on the workload during that week. But I will answer it. So workload, that's the weekend load, Greg. The drinking is the... Let's not start talking about load. All right. We appreciate everyone for tuning in. Thanks so much. And don't forget that training changes behavior.