Left Of Greg 024 What is Situational Awareness

Okay, so, let me tell you, it makes sense. So your situational awareness is just you've come up, you're putting in some type of planning process for likely contingencies, right? Like you said, "Okay, I'm going on a long car ride." But it's the first thing we're going to do on a road trip, yeah, you top off on gas, always, right? So we may need these things: "I got to make sure there's the spare tire is good, I got to make sure I have the jack in there, I got to make sure these certain things," or just basic planning. So you're saying that's kind of a good way to understand what situational awareness is?

It's precisely that. But what I got to tell you is it's not just a PACE plan, Brian, it's not just a beginning, middle, and an end. For example, you drive much more than you walk nowadays. When's the last time that you checked your valve stems on your tires? Checking the amount of ridge you have left on your tire, the tread that you have, is key in mountain terrain. You know that the first few seconds of rain bring up all those oils and everything on the roadway, so that's a dangerous time. Pulling out into an intersection when the light goes green—I see this all the time. I'm the guy that's not texting yet. So what I do is I do a three-count: 1,001, 1,002, 1,003 before I leave the light. And boy, does that hate the people behind me! But what I'm doing is I'm looking, listening, left and right, before I pull into that intersection. And guess what? I'm getting older, so my peripheral vision isn't as good as it once was. So I have to make sure that before I enter the intersection, the intersection is clear.

And you're saying, "Yeah, but the green light says it's clear!" No, it doesn't. It's just like that eyewitness that says, "Yeah, I saw the crash," and you ask him, "What did you see?" And they go, "Well, I heard the sound and then I looked. I didn't see anything." So, predictive analysis and situational awareness are both sides of that same coin, Brian. That means that you're anticipating likelihood in everything that you do. Some instantaneously. That means, like, as I assume a new baseline, I walk into a room that I haven't been. I have to shut up for a minute and see where the exits are. I have to be quiet for just a second, mentally, and make sure that I see who the key players are. Are any of them "waste aware"? Do I have anybody that's giving off the mission-focused or predatory looks?

Those are functions that you do all day long. By the time you get home, you can't be hyper-vigilant. You can't be hyper-alert. By the time you get home and you're turning on the alarm system, you're going to sit back and watch "Hogan's Heroes" or whatever the heck you do at night, Brian—it's kind of goofy that way. So I don't know what he does when he's at home. But when you do that, you should be exhausted, and you should be exhausted from constantly sampling the baseline. And situational awareness, or situation awareness, before you go out of the house means you're throwing a rock in a pond everywhere you go. When you go into that 7-Eleven, you're asking the counter clerk, "Hey man, how's business?" Why? Because you're measuring, "Is something different today outside of the baseline that wasn't there yesterday?" Just like an EMS is going to ask you, "Is the pain worse now or was it worse a few minutes ago? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse?" So that constant baseline sampling is a function of situation awareness and situational awareness.

So whether you're in the moment or whether you're about to go somewhere. Shawn Clemons, our dear friend, on a call all the time, just dropped Mac off at college. What's the first thing that they did? Walked the campus. They tried to look at the areas; they said, "Here's the exit." They rehearsed with her, and Mac hated that, right? But as a daughter going away for college, it was incumbent upon them. When you run Pendleton (Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton) or close to the flag (Naval Air Station Lemoore) on the East Coast, does the Marine Corps not have a list of places that you can't go when you go out for the weekend? It has places, "Hey, don't go here, there's a scam. Don't go there." Those were usually the places I immediately went to, "Hey, these bars are off-limits!" Oh, I'm going there. Those Tats to this day.

But think about that for a minute. Think about the logic behind that. Think about that moto meeting at the final formation just before you go on the weekend libo (Liberty, or authorized time off), where somebody's telling you, "Get your head out of your butt. Start thinking now. Engage your brain before you engage your feet. Look at the area, does it look safe?" All kinds of people died over Labor Day weekend, which it is. And be safe out there because they want to jump off the balcony into the pool. What did they fail to do? No situation awareness and poor situational awareness.

So when we talk about advanced critical thinking and advanced situational awareness, what we're talking about is being able to do it at the speed of trust with your own brain. You're actually trusting your brain to smell, taste, feel your environment, your visual field to bring in those chunks, and looking for danger constantly, whether you're driving, whether you're standing still, whether it's at Starbucks getting a coffee.

Yeah, and I think a lot of that's been lost. I mean, we talked about there's obviously no stopping technological advances and how reliant we become on those. But, you know, it's—because of those distractions in our environment constantly coming at us, especially from our phones that we're walking around with, most people are staring at them. What a lot of it comes down to, and it's a simplified term, is almost just you got to kind of live in the moment that you're in right now, right? So like you said, "I walk into a 7-Eleven." It's that look, listen, and smell, not staring at my phone. 7-Elevens or gas stations get robbed constantly in the U.S. You're going to walk right into a crime in progress and not even realize it until it's too late. And that's what happens in a lot of these different situations where now it's—people have, I think because of a lot of events that happen in the U.S., a lot of school shootings, church shootings, mass shootings at Walmart, at the Walmart we've been to in El Paso several times.

Yep. We bought all our gigs there.

Right, all our material for training. You know, people are starting to realize, "Okay, yes, I have to be more situationally aware. Put the phone down." And people are coming up with great, "Alright, these are good, easy ways to, 'Hey, look where you're parking. Take a look around before you get out of the vehicle and put it in park.' You know, put your phone down." But, you know, these are just basic skills, basic concepts that anyone can learn how to do.

So how do I take those—it comes intuitive, right? We realize, "Oh, you know what? I'm not really paying attention to my surroundings and the people around me. Okay, I need to do that." Alright, so now if I do that, now if that's just a basic understanding of situational awareness—of being in the moment that I'm in, recognizing people that I'm in, giving a few, "Hey, little eyebrow flash" to everyone that walks by just to say hello, because you're sampling your baseline, you're determining likely outcomes from those reactions off of people—then what is that next level? How do I take that knowledge, or how do I take those experiences of doing that and being in the moment and being more aware? Okay, I'm going to start with my—well now what, what do I look for, or how do I look? What am I supposed to do to get to the next level where now I can conduct predictive analysis, right? How do I go from just observing my environment, like, "Alright, I'm doing what these guys are telling me, I'm looking around at all these people, but what am I supposed to look for?" You just opened up Pandora's Box, yeah. So, let's try to put some corners on it for a second.

So I want to tell you very briefly two incidents from my previous life. So I was with one of the Jack Webb of Field Training Officers (FTOs) before there was an FTO in law enforcement a long time ago, and he'll remain nameless. But as we were driving up on the call, the call went out for a 1016, which is a domestic code, a domestic in progress. You never know what you're going to get into. And he casually looked at me and he said, "Yeah, I know this. It's an old Polish family outside of Detroit, Hamtramck," which is a very set, dyed-in-the-wool type of area where many people of Polish descent emigrated and immigrated, and they lived there. And luckily my FTO spoke some lingo, and so he spoke the language. And he just fires a burst message my way and says, "Yeah, I know the family, it's going to be the same type of thing. They get a little vodka, and they get a little drunk after he comes back from the auto plant." And, you know, he's giving me this stuff. And so I'm going through, trying to do the logs, trying to update on the radio, trying to do this, and still there's no level of danger anticipated because I'd been on thousands of domestics that were just people yelling. My mom and dad did domestics every night when I came home, so rarely did they rise to the level of cop involvement. But that did happen, and it usually happened around the holidays or something. So I was a kid who grew up with that.

As we pulled up, first thing that hit my mind is, we're going right to the driveway of the residence. And all this stuff about parked down the street, listen and smell the environment, and take a look, and make sure that you've got the right—all that stuff that you learned in the academy, all that stuff that's in some of the great texts that are out there, the great training that you'd go to, was abandoned because of complacency: "I've been here before. Don't worry about this. I've got the lead." And as the front of the car started rising up in the driveway, the woman came out onto the sidewalk side. There are little steps that went down, one towards the garage, one towards the street, with a little wrought iron railing. And she came out in a housecoat, nothing on but her housecoat, hair undone, older lady, older than I am right now. And she was just yelling this, that, and the other, all in a stream of Polish, so I had no idea. But from the body language, I could discern exactly that she wasn't happy, and whoever was right behind her coming out of the house wasn't happy. The man steps out on the porch. He has a double-barrel shotgun. Unloads both barrels into her back, and she collapses in front of us as we're not even in the driveway yet. He turns, walks through the garage, reaches back and pulls the garage door down, one of those big spring garage doors. And as we're now getting out of the car and trying to assess the situation, unloads both barrels on himself. The timing was critical, because the entire thing from pulling up into the driveway till having two dead people was under a minute. I would venture that first critical moment was 30 to 35 seconds.

That situation awareness—we knew better. Even though I was the rook, I should have said something, you know what I'm trying to say, right? But I sat and watched. Sometime later after that, in Macomb, not going to get any more specific than that. A great friend of ours and a couple of people went to do an involuntary commitment on a person to St. Joe's, which was a mental hospital. A couple of the officers talked to the officer that I know very well and said, "We're there all the time. Don't worry about this guy, he's not a fighter or anything." They went up on the porch, and they were executed when the subject became violent and was armed with a gun and didn't want to go.

You don't have to be in those situations. You might be returning a flipping book to your local public library. What you have to do is look, listen, feel, smell, sample, taste the environment. Does it seem like it always did? Am I being forced to walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk because of some obstruction? If there is an obstruction, how did that obstruction get there? Are these cars parked, and are these cars running? Why would that car be running, left wheeled to the curb as I approach this business? Could something be going on inside that haberdashery that I'm not paying attention to? Now, don't become overwhelmed by events. Simply slow time down and take a breath and listen and look. When people are shooting, when cars are revving, when people are running—those are obvious cues. You can't see them if you're so mission-focused that you're just on your normal routine. All those horrible words that we hear all the time.

Well, and you're just following what your brain does every day. That's where HBPNA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis) is pattern recognition and analysis. You're done when your pattern becomes any involvement. So you brought up a couple of good points. I just kind of want to hit first, is that now you obviously talk about that's a pretty chaotic situation, a homicide-suicide all happened, unfolded right in front of you as you're approaching. And you know, that's obviously something law enforcement might have to deal with. But just, you know, what's happening now is a lot of people are like, "Alright, we got to, you know, hey, it's all about situational awareness and this." And now because of these shootings, a lot of people have a reaction, "Okay, well, you know, I got to get, I got to get, I got to get, I can learn to fight," right? So it's whether that's personal defense, which I'm not knocking any of this, or "I got to get a gun. We got to arm some people in here, so now we're ready when that occurs." And I think they're missing the point of, "Well, no, it's all the pre-event indicators leading up to that, especially if you learn to identify those."

So I want to touch on it that you talked about you mentioned complacency, and that's a huge, huge topic, right? So why did these things happen? Why did that field training officer, with however many years on the job, and seen and done all kinds of things, and you even as a rookie in this specific situation, you know, you had that complacency set in? And it's kind of, "Well, what is complacency? Why do we get that way?"

Well, what happens is we're going right back to the brain, by the way. And if anybody's into the class, they know that's where it starts and ends. Your amygdala and many of the same places that are attacked by your catecholamines, in your neurochemical cocktails, are not only sensing danger constantly, constantly sampling your environment for you, but remember, we've outgrown our primitive triggers. Therefore, we don't pay attention to our primitive signatures. Sometimes the signals our brain is sending us are the same many times conduits for our arousal.

So, for example, to get Rugelach out of the cave to go and get something to eat, he had to be able to smell and hear something that he said, "Oh, that's a rabbit, and I know if I put a rabbit in a pot or a rock and a potato, that's really good for me." Okay, so those smells. Now, Rugelach, if he was walking outside of that cave, he also looked and he saw a pile of bones, and he smelled decay. Why do human beings decay and have an odiferous decay? So blowflies can find you immediately and start breaking down your body, or as you've got to go back to nature. So when you walk by that cave and you said, "Wow, that's a disgusting smell," there's certain parts of the body that smell in a horrible way because you're supposed to stay away from them. And the idea that just olfactory senses could trigger you to go towards something or stay away from something, or tell that something's infected by a look or a feel or a taste or a smell—those are brilliant things. The second chance that you get when you're trying something in your environment and it makes you violently ill, so you won't try it again. That's training your brain to have file folders ready for each one of those: "Who don't know about that red plant? That's the one that got me sick last. But that yellow one over there, that was pretty good and we can eat it when it's raw or when it's cooked."

Those types of things that we don't do anymore because we have more technology than the NASA astronauts had on the first moon launch. And so we're so focused internally that we're not paying attention to these external voices and stimuli and arousal factors that we should be sampling. And God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah—the lava lamp in your room is constantly bombarding you with clues to what's about to occur. And if we pay attention to those clues, life is easy, man. We'll have a good time. Hey, you might step out and get hit by a meteorite that you didn't anticipate. Right? Almost everything else is going to be taken care of. But if you follow patterns and you repeat behaviors and you're not tuned in, you're not aware of your surroundings—situational awareness—then what's going to happen is you're going to walk blindly into something, and now you're reacting.

I'm all for Krav Maga, baby. Go out there and get your "show" every other day. Go to the range and shoot them up. Do all those other things. But those make you feel good at "bang." What are you doing before the incident? That's why we're talking about up-armoring the brain. You train your brain to anticipate these situations so you can avoid them. Most human beings aren't police officers or EMS technicians or soldiers. Hell, we're vets, and there's not a lot of people that we run into in a normal day that's a veteran. So what chance do those people have other than being sheep, being cannon fodder, if they're not more aware of what they're getting into?

Well, and so that goes back again to the technology and our reliance on it, and how we're focused on, we're just distracted, right? So certainly we're distracted, and back to the brain: brain hates divided attention. So a lot of us, and I always like to equate this every time some new thing comes out, whether I see it on LinkedIn or on the news, or some little article, or some little psychology study that probably, you know, has zero peer review or whatever. But you see even these big, major CEOs of organizations, all these guys talking about it, going like, "Look, how do you accomplish so much in a day?" It's like, "I do one thing today." Like, you look at, "Why did some of these CEOs of these major companies, like that guy, wear the same exact clothes every day?" Because that's five minutes out of his day that he doesn't have to waste thinking about something other than running an organization, right?

And the bandwidth of his attention, it's seeming that he can't afford to use on clothing. He can afford to, he chooses not to.

Yes. Because that five minutes would cost him five million dollars or whatever it is, right? So, now he—and so that plays into the same thing that we're talking about with situational awareness and complacency and divided attention. These are big concepts that, one, we're somewhat hardwired to set patterns, right? Once you find the easiest way to accomplish what you need to for today, you're just going to keep doing it that way, unless there's some other reason—

To conserve calories, yes. Your brain immediately chooses the least objectionable option to do because it doesn't want to have to learn new things. It wants to vegetate, dude. A third of your life is spent sleeping so your brain can rewire. So any time that it can gain an advantage by not spending useless calories, it follows the program.

You're exactly right, Brian. And I think that's why, you know, we miss a lot of this. But the—so what's the positive of this though? Is that we're still all very hardwired to do this, meaning every person has the—and intuition, right? People like to talk about intuition. Well, and I know when we're in the class, we teach what we know the science of intuition, where there's an actual, "Here's what's going on." When people say, "Oh, I have a gut feeling," or "I had this feeling that something was going to happen." Remember, Goodfeather used to talk about the sixth sense. There is no sixth sense. It's your brain warning you by triggering different things. Hypothalamus very sensitive to heat triggers heat, that's a quick warning.

You're exactly right.

And yeah, so now we're just not used to, we don't exercise those parts of our brain as much anymore, but they're still there. They just, they got a little dust on them. They're a little rusty, right? We don't know how to articulate it yet because we haven't had to. We're so focused on all—we have so many distractions in our life. "Oh, I've got these 90 things I got to get done today, and then people are texting me, and I got to post a picture of my kid because it's their first day of school. I got to edit that on Instagram, and that takes me 20 minutes." And I'm trying to do three or four or five things at once. And you know, that's what I always laugh when a lot of people put it like in their resumes or you see stuff like, "I'm an excellent multitasker!" You're horrible. No one is. No one can multitask well. It's, you can do one. Your brain likes doing one thing. It only has 100% of attention. So if I start juggling more balls, something's got to go.

And I think that's what, but your ego system, yeah, it's so fragile that you can't address your ego system and say, "Well, something is less important," or "something is getting less of my attention." So you think you're juggling them, you're great. The guy driving behind you goes, "Holy crap, you're going to kill somebody!" Anybody else sees it, but you don't see it.

Yeah, well, I mean, your ego is very, very fragile. Mine's less, just through years of emotional abuse from you, so I don't have one anymore.

Part of the training, Brian.

Yeah, exactly. At some point, am I supposed to have a breakthrough? Because my therapist says I actually do. That's what it is. But we forget about that stuff. So I like it too. So we've got, you know, our seven-year-old just started second grade. And so she wants—she'd always wanted to have a phone because she sees everyone with phones. So it's like, "Alright, well, you're too young, obviously not going to have a phone." But there's this—this is not something you're going to stop, right? She's eventually going to have one. You know, so what we did, Kayleigh gave her one of her old phones that she doesn't have anymore that has nothing on it and it can't make phone calls, but it connects to the Wi-Fi. So she can text us and take pictures, right? So that's all she can do on it. So she just likes having it. But that one right now, because she's too young, doesn't leave the house. It's only for when she's inside the house. But what it is, we're now taking that as an opportunity to train her, "Hey, this is how you use a phone. This is when you use it. There are no phones at the kitchen table. When you're outside, you're not walking around on it." Right? You only use it when some—you just build in literally a training program.

Excellent.

So now we're eating dinner the other night. I set my phone down just to take it out of my pocket because I just walked in the door. And she picked it up, goes, "No phones at the table!" And I was like, "You are absolutely right!" So, so if you started young, I think with that process of avoiding that complacency and just playing those little "what if" games, like you were talking about, it builds on the file folders.

Or something. When we were on the East Coast, we went in to train the group DEVGRU (what some call SEAL Team Six). First thing was a cardboard box. Every phone goes under the cardboard box. Yeah, if we need you, we'll come into training and get you. Yeah, because this is more important. So I've allocated this much time and I'm going to take that much time. So you just said something that I think will be a good—I'll give it to—let's do a limited objective experiment. Let's make sure that today we're just talking about situation awareness today, and it's such a broad topic, I'm sure we're going to have future podcasts on it. But let's just talk about something our listeners can do today. So I'll give you one solo and one group event.

So, solo event: As you're walking around, whether you're shopping, whether you're driving, wherever you are, articulate everything. And do this for a couple of days. It's not going to work if you just do it for an hour. So plan in a week that these three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, everything I do. So visualize now, I'm walking into City Market, or I'm going to the local shopping center, and I'm going to say, "Okay, there's a parking spot. Oh, their parking spot is too close to the entrance and exit. Why? Why don't I want to park there? Because that's exactly where a bomb would be, or where a guy that's robbing the place would unload. So I don't want to be right up front. I don't want to be furthest away because if I'm way over there, that's near an alley." This is the talk that you're going to have while you're driving and finding the right parking space. Now, when you get out of the car, "Guy coming at me, blue shirt, looks fine. No hands by the waist." "Hey, there's a guy putting his cart back over there, doesn't even see me. Two women coming out with a cooler, wonder what's in the cooler." While you're going through your environment, see how many indices that you can pick out. How many different colors and different smells and things. What you're doing is you're triggering the parts of your brain that have gone dormant over time, that have been bombarded by all this other incoming fluff for the electronic equipment that we have. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to get a more laser focus of what's in your baseline. Now try that, and you'll be calling me and going, "Wow, that really works!" It really works because what you're doing is you're being more aware. And awareness, not hyper-vigilance, is the key.

So what's the group exercise? Going out with your friends or going out with your family, assign different roles. Brian, you're the only person that's allowed to get on their phone in case of an emergency, take photos and all that other stuff. You're "phone guy." I'm "driver guy." Okay, so, you're behind Brian, something happens to Brian, you take that over. Jimmy, you're behind me, something happens to me, you take over the driving. Now Jimmy, you're going to be the one that deals with all the doors, every door, entrance/exit, all that other stuff, you're going lead. Billy, you're riding drag, you're always going to be behind us, and you're going to be five, ten feet at our six, and you're going to be up and out. That means you, Bobby, you're down and in. You're actually, meaning maintenance, standing in front of us. And you're going, "Wow, isn't that sort of like creating your own team, your entourage?" Yes. Yep. Do that with your family. Do that with little kids that are in your group when you're going to Dairy Queen. One, it's fun as hell. The second thing is, you'll be amazed at how much you see. And you're going to go back and sit down and go, "Wow, all those things happen! Dude, I don't need to go to movies, I have life. Life is just simply showing the wonderful things, and I'm out there with the shoe phone recording all of it."

Brian, have our listeners, have our viewers just tried those two limited objective experiments one or two times this week, and see how it improves their SA of their surroundings. How it improves the granularity of their baseline. How it improves the fidelity of their critical thinking.

No, and those are all great, great examples you can do with anyone. I mean, I love pointing that stuff out. You know, some people naturally pick up on a "weird vibe" from someone. You know, Kayleigh is always good at that, and I have to sit there, "Well, now you have to articulate it. Well, this is what I mean." And then they always want to jump to some, "Well, it probably means this." "You don't know that! Here's what you can, here's what you can show." But simple things like that. Like I love the grocery store example. It was hilarious. We're walking with Kayleigh and Harper, and we're going in, and there's, you know, a guy walking out with a shopping cart. Alright. And so I said, "Hey, Timmy, real quick, hey, what's up with this guy?" "Like what? Nothing. I don't know, he looks kind of like maybe he's a bum or something like that." "Notice anything odd?" "No." "What? He's walking out of a grocery store with a shopping cart that is completely empty. No one walks out of the grocery store with an empty shopping cart. You go in with one."

So now the panacea comes up, "Okay, yeah, he's refilling his water for his home purification system." He's got a bunch of recycled. Now if he starts coming back in with a suitcase, that doesn't mesh. And now all of a sudden you go, "Hey, listen, we've got an anomaly on a grand concert approaching." That's how easy critical thinking really is when you increase your situation awareness even a little bit. And I think that's what I'm challenging, Brian. I think on this broadcast, I'm challenging every one of our viewers or listeners to increase their SA just a little bit. We don't have to just magnify huge, that'll come with time. Just increase it a little bit this week and see how much more you see.

And I'm an advocate of talking. When Shelley and I are walking around constantly, I'm going, "Dog on my six." Yeah, they'll be looking right away. So we, 12, 3, 6, 9 (clock face positions). The other thing is make it simple, like "blue shirt, blue shirt's mission-focused." And then she'll look and she'll go, "Copy." I know that she heard what I was saying. Then we'll orient for a second from position to cover and we'll say—and we've turned it into a game. It's a fun game. We're safe and safer, you know, instead of dumb and dumber. And we like moving through our environment that way. We're much more efficient as a team than we are singularly. And what we, luckily, knock on everything holy, haven't got into a bad situation that we didn't anticipate and have multiple ways out of.

And it comes up with back to the kind of term you used a little while ago, it's just, you know, if you have, it's somewhat, if you're looking down and in, you've got the kids, or you've got whatever you're focused on, use someone in that group, it's got to be looking up and out. So one person looks down and in, one person looks up and out. It can be that simple, you know. So it's just, it's really just dividing that workload, right? So you don't have that divided attention.

Did a guy in a bus, did a guy in a show, walk on and just with a mission focus and having just a little bit of social camouflage took everybody for a ride? Yeah. And then at the end, even the driver said, "Why?" Like, "I was so sure he gets on the bus." "Am I, 'Hey, you guys got to get off the bus, I got to take this.'" And people just started getting up and getting off. A guy, buddy, bus-jacked them from the airport. Which there was another one on Instagram—I don't do Instagram, but Nico and Shawn both said, "Hey, have you seen this where the hooded figures do the—what do they call it, flash mob—and go in and take everybody's iPads and phones and stuff, and get back out into a car and drive off?" Just happened. And it's all over the internet. Everybody's saying, "Look!" What I say is take a look at the background. There's people shopping that don't know a robbery is in progress, and they're steps away from the robbery in progress. Yeah, lack of SA, man. You're so in the moment, like you said, which was good. But you're so down and in that you're not up and out. So if you're alone, you have to consider all of those before I take the step out the door. "Where are my keys? Where are my glasses? Okay, everything looks good here, here I go." That extra nanoseconds, that few seconds that you take in your day is going to give you the gift of time and distance, and you need it. You really need it.

And that's, that's, again, what we talk about a lot, but that gift of time and distance, right? The more time you have to figure out a situation, the farther away you are from it, the more likely you are going to avoid a possibly dangerous situation, the more likely you're going to make it out alive if it is a serious—

They measure humans, Brian. You're so spot-on right there. And it's just a pity when the train horn comes through because your box moved, the wind blew the top. The top Olympic athletes, the top shooters in all the different categories, they compete for time in nanoseconds, you know, runners nanoseconds. Why? Because the gift of time and distance is what separates the most highly trained people in all of these events. When you think about it, the idea of knowing what's about to happen, if you're an MMA fighter, predictive analysis, right? It's how you undermine the technique of an opponent. You look at that and you size up, "Okay, this is where they're weak," and then you exploit that. So why wouldn't you do that in your daily life? One, it's fun. Two, it doesn't burn a lot more calories. Three, your awareness level is going to raise, and that's going to make you a harder target.

What it also does is it's fun because you are going to see so much more, and you are going to laugh so much more at how idiotic people can be, especially in, you know, just basic situations where it's so funny. You see so much. Yeah, you see so much more interaction. You'll be at the grocery store laughing at people asking the dumbest questions, walking around clueless. It makes you a better driver. You can start identifying those things: "Okay, this guy, he's going to run right up to everyone and then slam on the brakes every single time because they're not paying attention. So, you know, I'm going to take this lane right where I can maneuver a little bit easier. I have an out." "Hey, I know this guy's having fun..."

But I'm saying, Brian, I'm admonishing you by saying just having fun and poking fun at people, what you just talked about is predictive analysis, that "ask" road rage incident.

Yeah. So the benefit is it's fun, you're having a good time while you're doing this stuff, and you're not getting stressed out about it because you knew it was coming. Shocks and surprises, not fun, not a good time. You're exactly right.

Yeah.

You know, and then that goes into, yeah, there's a number of different, I know we've given plenty of examples of different limited objective experiments. The Walmart parking lot one is great, the one you were just talking about is great. But these are just simple things that anyone can do. And that's kind of, now there's, to get to that next level, to get up to, "Alright, how do I really conduct predictive analysis in this situation?" Now that, yeah, that's going to take a little bit more training because you got to learn what you're, to learn, "Alright, how do I articulate what it is that I'm seeing?" Because I'm picking up on all this stuff. And what a lot of people are looking for, of course, naturally we're looking for simple answers, right? So whether that's a school or a church, it's like, "Alright, I want to drop my 'tome' that'll make me stronger, smarter, faster, harder." But you know that. Or it's this, "Here, man, just write it down on this sheet of paper. Just write what are the ten things that I need to look for." And you're going, "Well, that's not how it works." "Yeah, where's my app? All I need is an app for it. The app will tell me what to do!"

Well, and that's what, like you said. And I always give, because one of the things that FBI is incredible at is collecting and analyzing data, right? They go through crime statistics, they have researchers, they just have mountains and mountains of information that they publish every year and come out, like, "Here are the trends we're seeing. Here are some things that are correlated with these incidents. Here are the ten things." And then people want to go, "Alright, so I just look for these ten things." It's like, "No, no, no, those each one of those indicators may be something, but it's not about 'here's what to look for.' It's just everything we've been talking about, which is 'here's how to look.'" Because just like that guy that I saw walking out of the grocery store with an empty shopping cart. Okay, well, I noticed that's an anomaly in my baseline. So I have to play the "what if" game, or "what is he likely going to do next?" There's only a certain few things he's going to do. Does he go back to a vehicle? And like you said, he's got to grab something that he's returning to that store.

Yep.

Does he go back to the vehicle and start loading that cart up with weapons and everything? Or is he just taking it? That's his new vehicle. And guess what it is? Hey, guess what it is out here? And that's exactly what it was. It was homeless Pete. "I got a new, I got a brand-new shopping cart." He went over to the back part of the parking lot where he had all his stuff next to the bushes, threw his stuff in there, and then pushed on down the street, right down to Oceanside Boulevard. It's so true. Shelley and I, we just had an incident just a couple of days ago, and we were trying to explain the absurdity to the person that was inside the store. So we witnessed—and you do it a lot when you're situationally aware—we witnessed the shoplifting in progress. And so Shelley's trying to break it down and analyze it for the guy, the guy's not catching on. And I stopped him and I said, "Hey, how many people bring a backpack into the store?" Yeah, he's going, "I don't get it, I don't get it." Well, at this store, okay, the guy's coming in with an empty backpack, and he's leaving looking like a Sherpa, you know what I'm trying to say? He's got all this other stuff on there, and he passes by the cash registers. You might have a problem, Houston! But guess what? If you're not looking for it, you're not an idiot. Not everybody's wrong, and not everything is going to turn out to be a bad thing. As a matter of fact, very few people are trying to kill you or victimize you. But guess what? You won't be the victim if you just tune into that frequency, and that's all we're advocating. We're advocating being more aware, giving yourself the gift of time and distance, giving yourself the tactical and technical advantage in every situation. What's wrong with that?

Right, and that's it. Just like we've—and it's free. And well, that's why with all these situations you've brought up, other than that first one when you're a rookie police officer, all these other situations, this is just everyday occurrences. So, if you don't have to be a human behavior profiler, you just have to be aware of your surroundings and take all this in and attribute value to things. Come up with most likely, most dangerous course of action for everything that you see. Because once you start doing it, and every single, you know, place you go to, every person you interact with, you just get better and better with it over time. And then when it is that dangerous situation, you're going to know it. You're going to know it so quickly, it's going to—your brain is going to tell you before your prefrontal cortex actually processes it and you have a conscious thought about it. That's the beauty of it. The red light switch goes on now, instead of—you can't turn it off. Yeah, once you know, instead of you trying to proactively look in your environment, that unconscious awareness is just running in the background like that operating system, and it goes, "Nope, it's right there!" And then you're oriented, paying attention to something before you even realize that it's the definition that you were looking for at the beginning of this broadcast.

And I'll finish my—did I define my own question first? Let me finish by saying this, Brian. The reason I brought that situation up, of being in that driveway, there was nothing we could have done to stop the demise of that female, right, or the suicide of her husband. But we could have easily been the next victim. You could have been killed, we could have been killed. And it was just the luck of the draw that day, because we did not have the advantage. We were both even. And it just happened to be her that day, because he could have said, "Not today, not going to jail," and killed us. And there was nothing we could have done about it because we gave up the time-distance gap. All we're trying to say is increasing your SA allows you to have a second chance.

No, and that's—that happens. And not to go down the rabbit hole of law enforcement or bash them at all, but that happens all the time to law enforcement where you'll see those situations where maybe that officer comes out just fine, and they go, "Damn, that training kicked in! You really did well on that." And you're like, "Wait a minute. Like, you almost died there!"

Exactly. You bundled it horribly, and the street guy came down and saved you. Yeah.

Yeah, and your ego system won't let you see your failures. No. If—and I wish, I wish, I wish I still had mine, but because I just, everything I point out right now. So they, like I always like to describe it as being your emotional punching bag. You've just actually worn me down over the years.

And your speed bag goes together like a Collier. Colliers used to have you back. He's a speed bag. You're not tired of hitting them with me, just keep going and going and going and going because, yeah, I got you. That makes sense, that's the perfect analogy right there. "I'm going to your car!" Did you pick on me? Yeah, it's going to get pissed at that.

But so, well, I think that's kind of a pretty good spot to kind of wrap it up in what we were talking about with situational awareness is just being, you know, observant in your environment.

And to add to this a little bit, but understand some training, Brian. I know you bring it up every time, but there's people out there that still think, "Hey, I got this! I can, yeah, in an app, watch a podcast." Now, be it in podcasts to get your head straight, or get dedicated training.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's a good point to end on, is just keep doing it every day until it becomes an operating system running in the background.

Precisely.

And that, that, that will get you to a true level of situational awareness where you can observe your environment, be safer. Well, I think that's probably a good point to end this one on. I know there's a lot of talk about this topic out there, and, you know, I might be a little biased, but I think we got a pretty good program.

And a lot of other people have also thought it was a good program, to the tune of it becoming institutionalized in several Department of Defense organizations like the Marine Corps and the Army, so like, they are using it. Well, then a bunch of traction inside, whether it's ICE or everywhere else that we've been, and people get it. I just think we have the best system of articulating exactly what it is and how to do it and getting people better at it. We're a little rough around the edges, but we're willing to share that knowledge with you.

Yeah, I've cleaned myself up quite a bit over the years, that's for sure. So if that's what you mean by rough around the edges, but changing your room—I've always had my same background. Your my thing is now you're getting into a smaller and smaller, I think you're like in one of those wardrobes where you change clothes, like, you know, JCPenney, and they just happen to have a dry-erase board.

No, it's, it's, it starts with me and Kayleigh sharing a home office, then it goes, "So why don't we move it up here?" "Well, why don't you take that corner over there?" I had no idea she was gone. And because my desk was over here, facing the wall, and this in a steamy corner of the third floor. And then I turned that—I turned the desk around. She came up here one time, she turned her desk around. What was wrong with where it was? Just like with me and Shelley. The real work Kayleigh is doing though, you know, she's making the money. Oh God, Shelley's buttering the bread. So yeah, all of this extra stuff that we're doing.

Yeah, by the way, by the way, we want to introduce a new segment, Brian. So let's—I'm excited about it! Let's go ahead. So we'll call these "Remo's Reviews," I guess we'll call it. I think that that works. And then there's a book review. But I want to do movie reviews, holy, raining kettle, other stuff. We'll keep those separate. Well, for everyone listening right now, we'll continue this on here, but then we'll also separate it. That's your call. And by the way, of course, oh, that's so, so set me up, right? So yeah, I'll go ahead and bring up what we have right here, and Greg then you can kind of talk us through it. So here we are, white screen with an overview.

Well, now, in future episodes, if this catches on—and the only way we're going to know if it catches on is if you, viewers and listeners, are going to hit up Brian and go, "Yeah, we like this!" If not, then it'll be "one with the desert," if you know what I'm saying. So today, the book that I want to review, slide please, is a new book out from Chaos Actual. So everybody knows our hero, Jim Mattis. And the actual title of the book is Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead.

Well, I think it's funny real quick that he had to call it that because everyone when he became Secretary of Defense and the press found out who this guy was, they started calling him "Mad Dog," which has never been his call sign. It was always—

Well, the entire idea of the IIT is the chaos, the first two letters of that. That's where Combat Hunter came from. So this guy has done it all, and he's been there, and Chuck Norris is his valet. So I absolutely love the book, and you're going to have a great time reading the book. But I just want to warn you a little bit, slide please.

First thing is that Call Sign Chaos. Chaos Actual wrote a book that was called Learning to Bleed, but he wrote it under one of his vast pseudonyms. Slide please. You'll notice that Mattis is also what the Austrians and Germans called Krampus, and he takes the children around Christmas. So with that warning, if you're going to order the book on Amazon today, which I highly recommend, the book, slide please, Brian, I've come up with just a couple of warnings for you, and there's only three.

First warning: You don't read the book, the book reads you. The second warning I think that you should have is if you don't finish the book, the book finishes you. Mattis actually calls you to come find out which chapters that you're on, and if you don't read a chapter fast enough, he's showing up at the house. And then finally, you got to remember that Chaos Actual will randomly show up at one of the readers' homes and quiz you on the chapters, and heaven help you if you didn't really read it. So if you're not reading the book, you're using it as a doorstop. I say pass it on. You'd rather sit with no jurors on an IEP than mess with this book. I highly recommend it. I think it's good. I give it a—I don't know what Remo would give. I guess we got too many rules of the Remo, "rule of thumb up." Rule of thumb would be, yeah, I guess you can only give a thumbs up or nothing, I guess. Because Jim Mattis has an incredible sense of humor. I won't be with you next week. It's my turn on the podcast, Greg got summoned. You're going to have, now that bourbon they're closing in the Rogue Manor West right now, going, "What do you know?" No stories from back in the day from Chaos Actual. Exactly.

Alright, well, I like that. That's a good first start today. Listen, anybody else going to read that book, you know, you know, they came out with the Norris as a fist in his beard and all that other stuff. Yeah, do me a favor, if you're clever, write what that book means to you in that same manner to Marren. We'll put it on the air next time. That's, that's perfect. Alright, well, I think, well, that's, that's a wrap for today, everyone. Stay, stay tuned. There's more. Always go to the website, arcadiacognero.com, follow us on Facebook at HBPNA. Go to The Human Behavior Podcast YouTube channel, you can watch these there. They're even more exciting to watch in person, you get to look at Greg's beautiful face.

Camera adds 20 pounds, or 50, or 80 something.

Alright, thanks everyone for joining us, and stay tuned for more. Don't forget, training changes behavior.